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Post by assistant headmistress on Mar 13, 2011 21:52:04 GMT -5
The assistant headmistress had been making her way across the grounds towards the event on the school property when she witnessed the most surprising turn of events. Zahra drove a car into the stranger that had come onto the school property. The man, struck went rolling down a hill. She made her way to him, listening to him laugh at the pain.
She hated clean up. In her many years in her school, she had deal with a lot of sorted messes to fix. They were never pretty to deal with and equally frustrating. This mess looked like it was going to be particularly nasty. How many people had witnessed the incident? From her count, no less than three teachers and three students. It was possible that more had stumbled upon the event now.
She reached where the man had landed. He had dropped a sabre. She picked it up and tossed it into the nearby pond. She saw that he had also dropped a cellphone. she quickly scooped it up and slid it into her pocket. In her earlier days as a duelist and professional fencer, she had picked up a thing or two about medical care. This man, injured where he lay, would survive. This gave her some time to figure out how to fix this mess. For now, she decided she'd wait where she stood and see if Zahra would come to check on the injured man or leave him where he lay. Her decision would change the direction she would next take.
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Post by zahra payami on Mar 15, 2011 21:08:37 GMT -5
After she had been on the ground for a few seconds clouds of panic rose over her head, threatening to drench her in the beginnings of a panicky, nervous breakdown. Her throat was closing up and she was rasping louder than a sick patient using a breathing tube to force air in to her lungs. She took a deep breath and heard a hollow sound like a computer beeping emit from her throat. When she exhaled the sound lowered in volume. It made her feel like she was breathing underwater without an oxygen tank and water was slowly filling her lungs. The sound she made was just like the noise a deep sea swimmer emitted when she took a breath of air from an oxygen tank: it was barely audible and muffled like a trumpet with a mute stuck inside its horn. Zahra’s chest pulsed rapidly with pain from her lack of breathing. Her chest was on fire and she desperately needed her inhaler before she deflated like a balloon quickly losing air. It took her a few seconds to stop spasmodically jerking around long enough to push up her hoop skirt, further revealing her bloomers and her camisole, to unhook her bright yellow inhaler from inside her skirt. Zahra gratefully gulped two puffs of her medicine, which had a rather sweet taste. Two clouds of medicine dissipated inside her mouth and rushed down her throat, bringing with it the sweet, cold taste of fresh air. Her medicine pumped her full of energy until she stopped shaking and breathing erratically. It took a few more minutes until most of the symptoms of shock that had gripped her body and shaken it with fear flooded out of her. She was a waterlogged children’s toy streaming shock and nausea out of her body until the only two traces left of the shock she had experienced were a swelling, blue mound of bruises on her head and a slight rasp in her throat.
Zahra stood up and took stock of her surroundings. She was dismayed to note that the train of her purple skirt with the scallops she had lovingly stitched to look like a fence bordering a garden of flowers was nearly ruined. It took all of her self control to prevent herself from crying and screaming about the injustice of the day’s events. She instead gave in to a sudden bout of anger that had replaced her shock after she noticed the dismal condition of her dress. Since there wasn’t much she could do to save her train apart from completely replacing it she tore off the train with a satisfying, thunderously loud rip To hell with this train! She could always make another one!
Keeping the purple fabric tightly bunched in one hand she stepped past Constantine’s car and moved over to assess his condition. The man still had an ugly, inappropriate smile pasted on his face that made him look oddly accepting of what had just happened to him. She shook her head and closed her eyes to prevent a burst of nausea from rising out of her throat and pushing the food in her stomach on to the floor. Zahra took a deep breath to center her unstable emotions and leaned down over Constantine. She had been so worried about his general welfare and whether he would survive that now that she could assess his situation she was struck speechless by the enormity of the act she had committed. Zahra had hit Constantine with his car and had drawn blood from him. She was drawing Constantine’s life out of him and was standing by while he returned to his maker, the earth. What kind of woman was she to just let someone lie on the ground because of a mistake she had made? The least she could do was to offer Constantine some medical assistance before she took him to the hospital in Colchester. It would make no sense to take Constantine to Ludvig’s infirmary after he had attacked Ludvig. Zahra was too afraid Ludvig would deny Constantine medical help because Ludvig wouldn’t want Constantine to regain his strength and try to attack someone again. She herself knew that she had caused Constantine pain, which meant she had to watch over him and nurse him back to health. If Constantine attempted to hurt her again she could die knowing she had done the right thing for Constantine in his time of need.
She instantly felt less guilty about having hit Constantine; it seemed that her determination to help Constantine recover was pumping her sadness over the accident out of her soul and replacing it with hope for a more stable, peaceful feature. Zahra knew it was stupid to pin her stability on Costantine’s recovery. On the other hand, she felt that helping Constantine would lessen her chances of having to face him again in another battle. Offering Constantine her aid could form a friendship between them that would make him think twice before he tried to drive another saber through her skin. She wanted to cover all the possible outcomes of this situation because she didn’t know if she would get lucky enough to escape a second death threat.
With these thoughts in mind she tore the fabric of her train in to small, uneven pieces from where she had ripped it off her dress. She picked up one of the purple strips of fabric and made as if she was going to wrap it around the blood seeping out of one of Constantine’s arms. Zahra had just recently lost her first aid certification after having been certified for three years, and one of the few things she still remembered was how to tie a bandage and finish wrapping it in a triangle fold.
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Post by assistant headmistress on Mar 15, 2011 22:04:03 GMT -5
"I never thought you'd have it in you," the assistant headmistress said. She hadn't hidden herself, but given the state of Zahra, she was completely unsurprised that her presense had gone unnoticed. She shifted in her black flat collar doll dress as she stepped closer.
She looked at the torn strips of clothing from the teacher's dress. "Allow me," she said and kneeled down in front of the semi-conscious Constantine. She set down a small black bag she had carried with her and unclasped it. She pulled out a supply of bandages, more appropriate for the wounds the man had.
"While I'm dressing his wounds, perhaps you'll be so kind as to explain to me why you drove over a stranger on school property."
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Post by zahra payami on Mar 22, 2011 21:17:16 GMT -5
The Assistant headmistress’s demand, coupled with her sudden appearance in front of Zahra, caught her like a right hook to her face. She was so surprised that the headmistress was asking her about the accident that she froze mid action and let the strip of purple fabric she was holding fall to the ground. The fabric pirouetted down on to the grass, spinning and twisting like confetti. Once it touched the ground she couldn’t take her eyes off it because it looked so unnatural on top of the first shoots of brown grass that were stretching out from under the snowy landscape. She began feeling pangs of nervousness pound the walls of her stomach until she was so nervous that she wanted to flee the scene. Zahra was nervous because although she was caught off guard by the question she was being asked, she hadn’t expected the headmistress to be the first person to ask her about the accident. In addition, she had failed to account for the accident coming up this quickly in a conversation; the fact that not more than ten minutes had passed after the incident before the headmistress had cornered her had put her more on edge than she had been while she had just been thinking about the accident. She had barely had time to think about how she could respond to Constantine’s injuries before the headmistress had questioned her rash behavior. Zahra didn’t need to be reminded of how foolish she felt for letting herself go into shock behind the wheel of a car; she had already fallen asleep behind a car and gotten into an accident once, and she hadn’t intended to do so a second time. The shock she had experienced had mostly been because of the severity of the accident and how she had let herself drive a car a second time while she was emotionally unstable and flitting indecisively between anger and fear. She couldn’t believe she had been stupid enough to think that driving into Constantine would solve her problems. They had only made them worse and they had caused the headmistress to materialize out of nowhere and present herself to Zahra for the first time during Zahra’s time at Mille – Feuille Academy.
Zahra frowned. It was unclear to Zahra why the headmistress had chosen this moment to make her first appearance before her, but Zahra wouldn’t put it beyond the headmistress to have shown up because she was behaving strangely. Since Zahra only acted professionally and very politely toward the students and staff at this school, such a display of unrestrained emotion and anger was quite atypical of her. In this regard it made sense for the headmistress to show up and question Zahra’s sudden shift in behavior; under normal circumstances Zahra had proved to the headmistress time and time again that she could be trusted to make a rational decision and refrain from taking stupid actions like those she had taken earlier today. This incident made Zahra look like she had suffered a mental breakdown and lost all of her capacity to feel any kindness toward someone. The old Zahra would have scolded herself for harboring even the slightest ill will toward another human being. This Zahra had forgotten that she had ever been a kind person and just followed her raging emotions to their illogical conclusion. Looking at it from that angle the headmistress had every right to show up at the dining area to check on the situation.
That didn’t mean Zahra felt any better about all the attention that was being focused on her. She had already been hyper focusing on Constantine’s well being, which had been making her stress out over what the potential ramifications of her actions would be. The stress had colored her face a permanent shade of distress, and she was in no mood for someone else to see her while she was looking so distraught. Her face was a minefield of exploded weaponry that had stretched her lips into a permanent grimace. Zahra’s face was also a sickening shade of sulfur yellow; this was because she had been thinking so intensely about what would happen to her after the accident that her intense rumination had doubled the shock she felt at the headmistress’s demand. Her eyes had opened wide upon the headmistress’s arrival and had frozen in place, two giant brown symbols of the shock that was reemerging and taking hold of her body once more. They remained fixed in that position in the headmistress’s presence. She wanted to curse the headmistress to hell for her bad timing and for freaking her out. There hadn’t been a single story Zahra had heard about the headmistress that made her seem like she cared about how she dealt with difficult issues. The way the headmistress was butting in to her private affairs with Constantine signaled to Zahra that the headmistress was living up to the impression she had of her as a harsh, uncaring, authoritarian figure of authority. Zahra had even heard the slightest hint of a warning in the headmistress’s tone when she first spoke to her. That immediately put Zahra on edge and made her wary. She pulled away from the headmistress and instead focused all of her attention on the adeptness with which the headmistress was bandaging Constantine’s wounds.
Zahra made a mental note of how the headmistress must have had some first aid training that was more up to date than hers was. If there was one thing she was glad of at the moment it was of how quickly the headmistress had taken over and helped Constantine. This eased Zahra’s fear of watching Constantine fade away into the earth. With the headmistress’s help it looked like Constantine would survive the incident. For that Zahra was glad, but that still didn’t answer the nagging questions the headmistress’s statement had conjured up within Zahra’s brain. If the headmistress had known how shocked Zahra had become while she was driving Constantine’s car she would have refrained from casually scolding Zahra. Then Zahra wouldn’t be leaning over an injured man trying to reassure herself as to why she thought stealing Constantine’s car had been the best action to take. In addition to that question she also started asking herself if she thought the headmistress was going to fire her for what she had done. She knew it was stupid to think such a thing could happen, given that her actions had been entirely spurred by self defense, but Zahra had heard some wacky stories about the measure the headmistress took to solve problems. Zahra wouldn’t put the headmistress above taking a drastic, dangerous measure to clean up the situation as quickly as possible. If Zahra judged the headmistress correctly she cared more about the speed with which she accomplished something than the efficiency with which it was done. And yes, this last thought was making Zahra afraid as to what measure the headmistress would take. Zahra really didn’t want to answer the headmistress’s question when Constantine’s life teetered on the edge before her dull, shock filled eyes. Although she couldn’t just leave the headmistress hanging to focus on Constantine, could she? Unfortunately, she knew that if she didn’t answer the headmistress Constantine wouldn’t be the only person teetering on the edge of something; in her case she would be walking a fine line between having a job and standing on the unemployment line once again.
“I didn’t have it in me, Mrs.” Zahra said, averting her eyes from the headmistress. She didn’t want the headmistress to see how much pain she was in and how her pain was fueling her fixation over Constantine’s well being. “I felt ill after Constantine said he wanted to kill Ludvig and Ludvig’s lover.” At the mention of Constantine’s name Zahra guestured to the man lying semi-consiously on the ground before them. “He came here to kill Ludvid and decided to kill me instead. He wanted to kill Ludvig’s lover and he decided since Ludvig was single that I was the best candidate to become Ludvig’s future lover. Seeing as how that may pan out, Constantine made a rather lucky assumption, I think. But in doing so Constantine decided to punish Ludvig by killing me, the person he thought Ludvig was closest to. In return I had to get away, so I took a car that just so happened to be Constantine’s, got sick, lost track of what I was doing, and I only stopped when I heard something crunch like leaves under the car’s wheels.
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Post by assistant headmistress on Mar 29, 2011 22:40:02 GMT -5
The Assistant Headmistress made no apparent reaction to Zahra as she explained in her own words what had happened. Instead, she worked on tending to the wounds of the injured Constantine. She checked over the wounded man from head to toe, letting the silence remain until the full examination was complete.
She stood and looked at Zahra squarely in the eyes, holding them. "It is admirable your loyalty and devotion to protecting your co-worker and friend. No doubt, it was for that same devotion that you protect the relationship between Dr. Ludvig and Vivian. Now, the real question is, how far are you willing to go to protect Dr. Ludvig von Bakken?"
Still holding her gaze, she went on. "What we have here is a very delicate situation. I will need to do something about our friend here. Each path has its own consequences. If we report this incident to the authorities, there will be an investigation. In all likelihood, you and possibly even Dr. Ludvig will be dismissed. If we quietly relocate him to a private hospital, when he comes to, he will report to his employer. I'm sure that when his employer learns that he has failed, Constantine will be in a far worse position than he now lies. And, I'm sure Dr. Ludvig will find himself facing another similar incident. The third option, is that you trust me to use my resources to a fix this mess. If this is the option you are willing to pick, you must promise me that this detail is mentioned to no one. Constantine will live a long, relatively normal life, but will never been seen by anyone here again."
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