2011-06-1 - The Facts of Unlife, Starring Dr. Samuel Hell

BARDOS ISLAND, THE SANCTUARY OF DOCTOR HELL

The Doctor Of Disaster strolls through the halls of Bardos Island with purpose, with a clear and present goal. His soldiers salute him at every turn as he makes his way through the island's underside, strolling through the island's corridors towards the room marked off as belonging to one of his beloved Generals: Marchionessa Idunn.

Doctor Hell was about to face his greatest challenge to world domination in the history of his time as a supervillain genius: dealing with the emotions of a teenaged girl.

Hell hesitates for a moment before he opens the door. "Marchionessa Idunn," Hell declares as he enters, making known his presence to the young woman. Time to find out what horrors lay in the room of a teenaged girl.

Marchionessa Idunn nee Darcy Weyland spends as much, if not more time on Bardos Island than she does at her home in Japan; accordingly, her room upon the island is actually furnished the way one might expect an honest to God bedroom to be with a bed, a few posters, a desk with a computer, even a closet with some clothes. The walls are an unblemished white, contrasting the brilliant blue of her bedsheets quite strongly.

As for Darcy herself - and without the robe and mask of her station, she couldn't possibly be anyone /but/ Darcy - she's too preoccupied with studying herself in the full-length mirror attached to her closet door to register Dr. Hell's presence, at least immediately--and were Dr. Hell just passing by aimlessly, it's at least marginally possible that he might not notice /her/, either.

The walls, after all, are painted a pristine white Darcy is currently adjusting the straps of a white and green 3G-branded bikini; her deathly pale complexion thus makes for impressive camoflage, even if her bright red hair would likely dampen the effect some.

"Ugh," she murmurs to herself while frowningly struggling to fix her top's fit by cupping her own bosom to make a few adjustments, "I just--it isn't /fair/, Mom and--and even /Cecilia/ probably /never/ have to worry about--ugh--"

Darcy turns, ostensibly to try getting a look at her back in the mirror.

She doesn't manage to complete the revolution, though, because she freezes upon seeing Dr. Hell in her doorway.

"--uh--" she exhales as her eyes slowly widen.

A beat passes.

And then another passes.

And then a third.

"... uh...." is still the best she can come up with, though.

Doctor Hell just sort of stares at her for a full instant, as if trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Perhaps some sort of arcane ritual? Perhaps she's planning for some sort of trap for Kouji Kabuto...? Doctor Hell considers the options for a moment before taking the direct and most simplistic method - the Scientific Approach.

The Doctor of Disaster closes the door behind him, standing against the door of the cavern room as he looks around at the posters. At the computer. At the painted walls and the blue bedsheets. At the...the...the walls, and the bikini, and...

"...is something the matter, Marchionessa Idunn?" Doctor Hell inquires as he regains his stride and sanity, standing straight to regain his sense of height and power. "Has something happened that disturbed you?"

There's an awkward pause as Doctor Hell stands against the door, looking right into her eyes, the yellow of his own flashing with a sudden burst of inspiration. "I hope that I am not interrupting anything. Your reactions to the...dragonasaurus...had me concerned. I have been meaning to check in on you, but with preparations as they are, I have not had time."

".../am/ I interrupting something? You seem...preoccupied."

Yes. That was a good word for it. /Preoccupied/.

"--wh--preocc--"

Darcy's eyes flick down, then up; down, up, down, up, down--finally her hands drop to clasp before herself, and once they do her eyes--well, they /stay/ down, but pointed more towards the floor. It's difficult to look one's surrogate father/lifegiver/mentor/ideological leader in the eye at a time like this, even if Baron Ashura does it like all the time without issue.

"--uh, no," she mumbles after clearing her throat. "No, uh, I was just--" A beat passes; the viewers at home are actually treated to a brief shot of gears visibly turning in Darcy's cranium.

"--you know, trying--on--this bikini. Uh. What--what about the Dragonsaurus?" she finally mumbles once she's sure that yes, there really /is/ no reasonable lie to be told in this situation. "I'm okay now, it was just kinda... weird... at the time."

The posters are pretty standard for a teenage girl: Lacus Clyne, 'Do You Remember Love?'. George de Sand, a digitally touched up, candid photograph of a blood and oil-caked Evangelion hip-deep in an LCL sea...

.....

.....

.....

Okay, well, three out of four is still pretty good.

"You, uh, don't need to /concern/ yourself with me, I mean--don't you have more important things to worry about?"

Baron Ashura is kind of a freak.

...for reasons beyond the obvious.

Doctor Hell remains locked on the place Darcy's eyes ought to be the entire time as she avoids his steely yellow-eyed supervillain gaze, peering at her with the subtle curiousity of a scientist and the entirely new and bizarre sensation of being a father-figure to a seventeen-year-old un-dead girl. It was somewhat surreal, or rather, would be for anyone who wasn't Doctor Hell - if only because Doctor Hell was used to surrealism being a replacement for regular, more normal life. Doctor Hell steps forward as she begins to stammer, a frown crossing his face beneath his bushy white beard. Idunn's stammering was bizarre. She didn't do that, normally. Normally, she was a confident general to his evil plans. Now, he was legiitmately /worried/. If something was going wrong with his creation...

"Yes...the insurgence of what you felt was very...'weird'," Doctor Hell replies, quietly choosing to keep the truth to himself. The fewer people who knew of the Mykene, the better...and they would hopefully never need to know, no matter what.

"But at the moment, I /am/ concerned with you - or about you, as the case may be. This behavior is worrisome; is something troubling you, Idunn? You may speak freely, if you please - Doctor Hell does not wish for his generals to be troubled by undue thoughts and worries."

Doctor Hell stops in front of her, setting his hands on her shoulders. "If there is something concerning you, that is important enough to worry me. The latest Machine Beast is infinitely less important than the well-being of my Generals."

Well, most of them. Ashura was currently being strung up by its thumbs for shouting at Doctor Hell about the Murata thing. But that's what happened when you yelled at Doctor Hell over his orders.

"I, uh, tapped into the collective unconscious memories of big ecological disasters and mankind's fear of sea monsters, so, I mean, that's not--that's not /normal/," Darcy murmurs, rattling off the explanation Viscount Pygman helpfully provided her in exchange for bringing him one of Brocken's eyepatches. "But I'm okay," she reinforces. After a beat she finally lifts her eyes just high enough to catch Dr. Hell's. "I mean, about that--it was months ago. I don't really /understand/ it, but I'm not--having seizures over it anymore, so it's okay."

Her cheeks puff out a little as she lets out a breath and folds her arms over her stomach. Pretty much every conversation she's ever had with Dr. Hell has been in the context of science, or conquest, or both; taking those things from the equation puts her in rather an odd place when it comes to trying to figure out what is or isn't appropriate. Does he want a real answer? Will he /understand/ a real ans--wait. Of course he will; he's Doctor Hell, Conquerer of Death. Doctor Hell, the world's foremost biologist.

There's nothing in the world a mind so sharp could fail to grasp.

"Well," she murmurs, making each sound as deliberately as she can just to procrastinate in baring her thoughts that much longer. "Well, if you're--if you're sure I wouldn't be /bothering/ you..."

"There's this, uh, this /boy/" named 'Koji Kabuto' "who I, uh, like, but he only seems to even notice me, like, sometimes?" Like that time he accidentally crashed the girl's locker room while she was changing. "And there's a big school beach trip, and I wanted to--to /make/ him notice me, I-I guess, but I don't, uh, I'm kind of, I don't--"

Darcy just kind of gesticulates at herself a bunch to try and make her point clear once words begin to fail her.

If anyone wanders by /now/, it should be easy to pick her out because she is /bright red/ with embarassment.

Oh dear. There's a /boy/.

It's important to know that Doctor Hell has never been a father, or much of a lover. Certainly he had girls chasing him in his youth (he was not, at the time, blue and frightening, and was much more attractive in his school days), but he had never paid them much mind - they had been idle things, chattering creatures who were more interesting biologically than mentally. Few people ever met Doctor Hell's tremendous ego's approval long enough to form a true connection with him. It was lonely at the top.

Doctor Hell stands there awkwardly as he considers options to offer her. That remarkably sharp mind races through alternatives, through words, through concepts and ideas. Offer her body adjustment? No, that would insult her. There is probably nothing wrong with her body. Offer her a mind-control ray? No, that would demean her. She could get his attention herself, with her own charms. Perhaps...

Doctor Hell settles his arm around Darcy in an awkward hug, sitting down on the blue bed. His skirts flow around him as he sits down, his mouth opening and closing once as he formulates the words. An all new experience.

"Marchionessa Idunn, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Humans grow at their own rate - some are shaped differently than others through the complexities of biochemstry, and you are no different despite your rebirth. Your body is perfectly healthy for a girl of your age."

Doctor Hell holds out his hand, clenching it into a fist. "What you must do is grasp his attention in some way that he cannot possibly ignore. Make a statement that he understands, not simply to make him notice you, but to take hold of his heart and grab it in your fingers so that he cannot /help/ but pay you his mind. It is not something that merely the body can do - it must be attitude, personality, actions and words. You must do something that shouts how you feel at him as loudly as you can, in a way that he cannot possibly reject."

Doctor Hell pauses, turning his head to look her in the eyes. "...have you tried crushing his will beneath your foot and dominating him to your every whim?"

For some reason, Darcy's first instinct upon being embraced is to tense up in dread anticipation of death by constriction; perhaps because Dr. Hell is a mad blue giant, and also because he is Dr. Hell, who up until this point she assumed was physically incapable of performing hugs or being hugged, providing sympathy or showing non-terrifying emotions.

Although technically, the jury is still out on that last one.

Once they are seated on the bed and advice is being dispensed, it begins to dawn in Darcy that she's actually safe. Safer now than she was mere moments ago, at that. As he speaks, it dawns on her: terrifying demeanor aside, the Fanatical Physicial truly /is/ wise and intelligent enough to understand anything set before him--and capable of turning that understanding into sensitivity and support. Inch by barely perceptible inch, she draws closer as she listens until finally, towards the end, she's leaning in comfortably against his forearm. Give it a little more time and her head may well find its way to his shoulder.

Fleetingly, it occurs to her that the last time she saw her own father was the day she'd returned from her reawakening on Bardos Island; he was assuring her that there was no room for her at his palatial home and wishing her a happy 11th birthday.

She is broken from that realization by Dr. Hell's /final/ tidbit of advice, though.

"Wh--" As she snaps herself upright, her eyes rapidly flutter before focusing on the Doctor's penetrating golden gaze; all she can give him is a deer-in-headlights look that prior today was no doubt foreign.

"I--I couldn't--" she stammers. "That--I don't think I /could/ crush the will of just, uh, /one/ person."

The jury is definitely still out on that one.

Doctor Hell himself had had a decent relationship with his parents, in the ages past, when the new colony age was young and he was younger. His parents had, to their credit, never pushed him or attempted to manipulate or use his genius for their own gain, had nurtured him and befriended him and acted as genuinely decent human beings. So in turn, he could pass /some/ tiny bit of that on to the girl he saw as one of his responsibilities, much as he aided Viscount Pygman in his explorations of the arcane world or Brocken in his tactical plannings or Ashura in...well, he didn't help Ashura much, but he was still pretty decently close to Baron Ashura. As close as one can be to a hermaphrodite mummy, anyway.

"No?" Doctor Hell replies, stroking his magnificent white beard thoughtfully as she tells him that she couldn't possibly do that. Well, that was one idea down. He could lend her a Machine Beast, or let her use one of her own, but that was probably less going to get the boy to notice her and more going to get him to run away screaming in fear.

Or in this case in white-hot Mazinger-powered rage.

"Hmmm...no, I suppose that making one person hopeless and desperate to the point of being malleable is somewhat too difficult in a single day..." Doctor Hell agrees, nodding his head thoughtfully as he returns to his contemplation. Well, that was /one/ plan down. What had he been told all those years ago...?

"Then I suppose you should approach him with confidence. Rather than stress about the size of your breasts, stride tall and approach him as though they were as large as you wish them to be. Take his arm and knock him off balance mentally, so that he cannot help but notice what you do have, and then guide him towards the activities you are best at so that you can impress him. Above all, be confident - your body is no less than the perfect machinations of Nature, given new life by the hand of Doctor Hell! You are Marchionessa Idunn, General of the Biobeast Army! What do you fear the rejection of a boy? You have faced death itself! Face him with that same confidence, and he will have no choice but to accept you!"

Doctor Hell pauses, resuming his beard-rub. "...failing that, perhaps attempt to engage him mentally. Do you know what sort of activities he finds interesting? You could study up on them and impress him with your boundless knowledge."

One can only hope that Mr. and Mrs. Hell didn't tell their teenage son to behave as if his breasts are as large as he'd like them to be.

"Well," she thoughtfully murmurs, "Uh, well--he really likes motorcycles..." Darcy actually tilts her head back a little and cups her chin in contemplation. Most of her conversations with Koji Kabuto have had to do with things like studying, or borrowing notes, or borrowing pens; most of what she has to go on here is extrapolation.

At least she knows with certainty that engaging Koji /mentally/ would be kind of a waste of time.

"... and I think video games? And astronomy--I saw him lugging this telescope with a Photon Power battery around, once, so I guess he must be /really/ into it, because it kind of looked like he customized it?"

After a short time longer spent in contemplation Darcy's head slowly begins to lower; the tail end of Dr. Hell's encouragement actually hits her, and as she mulls /that/ her bottom lip finds its way into her mouth for a short while.

"The thing is, I guess," she finally murmurs, eyes turning sideways towards the Professor of Predation, "I'm /not/ Marchionessa Idunn with him--I /can't/ be. I, I don't think a lot of guys would be into world conquest." Her eyes fall and she draws her hands into her lap, wringing them tightly together. Her voice dips to an uncertain whisper:

"With him, I'm just Darcy Weyland, and if he doesn't like me, I'll /really/ die.""

Hopefully.

"Motorcycles, Video Games, and astronomy," Doctor Hell repeats. He doesn't comment on the photonic power telescope - photonic power's spreading enough in that area that he can't simply pick it out to be Kouji Kabuto right there and then, though he probably could've if she'd mentioned a little more information. "And clearly he has some fondness for technical prowess and invention, if he has modified his own telescope, yes? So, there, you have common things to talk about - you both enjoy science and invention. That means that, when you talk to him, you can talk to him about his telescope. I am given to understand that men are fond of being talked about, and if you act interested in him, he should come around to become interested in you. It is the human ego to love itself and enjoy hearing about itself, after all - but be wary! For if you are too interested, he will think you are a brown-nosing fool!" Doctor Hell punctuates his words with the GRANDIOSE ARM GESTURES and SWEEPING FINGER MOTIONS that he does with literally everything else, moving his hands about to emphasize every single point he wishes to emphasize.

"Oh, Idunn," Doctor Hell shakes his head sadly, "You are never 'simply' Darcy Weyland, no more than you are 'simply' Marchionessa Idunn. You are both and neither, greater than the sum of your parts! In this situation, however, I do not mean wearing the mask and bringing with you your beasts. It is obvious that such a tactic could be traced back to me too easily, and that would give them a source to study my ways that I could not allow, as well as deprive me of one of my great Generals."

Doctor Hell shifts on the bed to look at her once again, yellow eyes sharp with the wisdom of age and the intelligence of one of the most brilliant human beings on the entire fucking planet. His hands settle onto her shoulders to finally make his point quite clear.

"You are always Marchionessa Idunn. The will that you have as Idunn, the indomitable drive to succeed and the courage to face death itself in pursuit of your goals...you have that same willpower and courage as Darcy Weyland! Reach into the potential you have been granted as a General, and draw it into your daily life! Do not be the quaking, shy girl I saw before the mirror - be Darcy Weyland, bolstered by Marchionessa Idunn, and rise to claim what you want with that newfound strength of confidence and courage!"

While Darcy's arms unconsciously rise to cross over her chest after a while, she still drinks in the advice she's so freely given, right up until the subject turns from interacting with boys to interacting with her own sense of self worth. She only barely lifts her head and eyes to meet the good Doctor's gaze at first, but as he continues her chin lifts; her eyes even brighten, almost as if she's actually talking what he's saying to heart.

By the time her shoulders are in his grasp, she's hooked. Transfixed. Her eyes do not move; they /can't/.

"You really..." she disbelievingly whispers once he finishes; her eyes practically sparkle. "You really see that--/all/ of that? Really? In /me/?"

"OF COURSE!" Doctor Hell declares, swinging his hand upwards as thunder echoes down from a particularly powerful sweep atop Bardos Island. It couldn't be punctuated any more perfectly.

"I chose you to be my servant and my general - not a simple soldier in my army but a leader of one of the Five Great Armies Of Hell, an honor that only three others have had! The master of mysticism, Viscount Pygman; the genius tactician from a bygone era, Count Brocken; the mighty mummy from pre-human history, Baron Ashura; and the brilliant little newtype girl who now commands the Biobeast Army, Marchionessa Idunn! This army - the men and women of the Armies of Hell salute you when you walk through the halls! You are peers to fellow geniuses of strength and intelligence, below only myself in the hierarchy of Hell and above most of the rest of the Divine Crusaders who cannot even begin to grasp the science you have soaked up in your mind!"

"You are one of the elite few, and to believe otherwise about yourself is wasting your limitless potential! You have piloted the Warrior Beast - you harnessed some tiny spark of that potential and brought forth an inferno! Now, bring that same inferno to this 'beach party'! With the fire of your willpower, no boy will be able to resist you! SO SAYS DOCTOR HELL!"

Another thunderclap shakes the room as Doctor Hell declares his name, sweeping his hands upwards as his robe suddenly roils with motion, his eyes flashing with yellow light. That that's just a coincidence is almost amazing, but an amazing coincidence that the showman in Doctor Hell knows how to use to the utmost. Hell's wild-eyed demeanor slowly ebbs, and his hands settle into his lap as he stares back at the girl who was in part his creation.

"You are Marchionessa Idunn. But before you were Idunn, you were Darcy Weyland - and that same potential that created Idunn was present within her. Can you deny that you have done things others cannot dream? Seen things that would frighten the hardiest man? Under my tutelage, you have grown so much, and still have so much to grow. Do not be intimidated by a boy's looks, or his mind, or his strength. Simply take hold of yourself, and he will bow to you!"

Doctor Hell pauses.

"But make certain, when you do finally reach the point of consumation, to practice safe sexual relations.../and USE A CONDOM!/"

SO SAYS DOCTOR HELL

THUNDERCRASH

Genuine encouragement tinged with megalomania is a language Darcy isn't well versed in but is coming to appreciate; the Weyland household mostly heaped on the latter without bothering with the former. So as soon as Dr. Hell's near-feral bolstering gives way to sobriety, Darcy forgets that he's one of the world's greatest villains and its greatest biologist and that she's in her room on an island of ancient and infernal machinery.

She darts forward to throw her arms around the Hateful Healer in a tight embrace.

He soon makes her regret this, though.

"Wait--when I reach--"

The sparkle in Darcy Weyland's eyes slowly ebbs too; instead they once more grow to more fully encompass her shock and embarrassment and abject horror.

"Practice--wh--use--uh--"

She doesn't pull away because she /can't/ pull away; she can't do much of /anything/ right now.

"... uh..."

It may /be/ a little while before she's in proper fighting form today.

Doctor Hell is hugged by a seventeen-year-old girl, awkwardly returning the hug with his strong blue arms...until she suddenly just kind of breaks down from sheer shock at hearing the old man mention the use of a condom.

Doctor Hell releases her, allowing her to settle on the bed as he stands. Well...er...

That could've gone better, he thinks as he retreats from the 'field of battle' that is the room of his seventeen-year-old general, a passing glance at the evangelion poster as he vanishes into the halls of Bardos.

...that was just weird.