When Josephine Wong came inside of the hospital building, she realized that it was actually more lively than she expected.
Maybe “lively” was not the right word - in fact, if anyone thought about it, it would be a terrible word for it. The proper word should be … crowded.
As Josephine Wong looked around, there were countless people in the hallway - nurses in scrubs, patients waiting and being treated in different rooms, a janitor cleaning up the ground near the elevator shaft, a doctor talking to some person in a suit.
But the problem with these “people”, was that they were not alive, they were not even there - they were like grey, old, dirty and sometimes broken mannequins moving like humans. Some of them even had huge strange gashes on their bodies from which ashes and crumbs of some sort were falling out. There were also no colors on these “people”, whether it was skin tones or colors on their clothes, only different shades of grey.
Josephine Wong floated slowly to one of the moving “people” with a gash on its face and caught a tiny bit of the ash and crumbs. It turned out, that the ash and crumbs were some kind of construct from the dark energy that filled this entire hospital building, not that dissimilar to the dark liquid that maintained the integrity of the building.
“Memories.” Josephine Wong frowned and turned around, trying to find some patterns in the scene before her eyes. This was something she learned and studied while she was in the Grant Academy, this was something clustered malice that had been present for a while could do: dream. The collective consciousness and its need to maintain the most basic of sanity in order not to implode meant that clustered malice needed constant sleep, and in said sleep, the collective memories would play, just like some sort of holographic movies. Normally these memories were invisible to the human eye and would only be revealed under special circumstances, but as a skilled sorceress and spell caster, Josephine Wong could easily see all that was being projected from memories.
The gashes on the “people” and the lack of details were just symptoms of memories fading and deteriorating. The more these memories faded and deteriorated, the less sane this instance of clustered malice became, and judging from the state of decay of these memories, Josephine Wong could tell that there was still some time before it would implode and consume itself.
The pattern was vague, but it was not that difficult to find: in the direction down the hallway and up a flight of stairs halfway across leading to the upper levels, the “people” seemed more lifelike and had less damage to their mannequin-like body. So she just floated in that direction.
When Josephine Wong made it to the second floor of the north wing, the “people” in the area had basic facial features, fingers and hair, some of which even had eyes with pupils. When Josephine Wong looked around and tried to find further patterns, a bald man in a suit walked down the stairs from the third floor with two men and a woman behind him. This bald man in a suit seemed to be the only one with detailed facial features, even his hair, his beard, his eyebrows and a small scar on his face were clearly visible.
This man turned around, and yelled at two men and a woman behind him, his angry face seemed to indicate that he was quite upset with something these two men and a woman had said or done. The two men and a woman, on the other hand, though without detailed facial features and therefore whose facial expressions were hard to tell, clearly seemed to be unfazed by the man’s angry reactions, instead, they each had a pen and a small notebook in their hands, and one of the men even seemed to be writing things on his notebook while being yelled at.
“Journalists.” Josephine Wong had a rough idea on who those two men and a woman were.
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The man saw that his anger did not serve him in any way, decided to go back upstairs and into his office, and before he did so he called on the security guards to have the three journalists removed from the premises of the hospital.
Josephine Wong followed him to the third floor, and saw that the third floor, aside from this man’s office room, only had a few rooms with “people” in it. And the other rooms, while under the effect of the memories, were clouded with shades of dark red, just like dried blood, which seemed to be another of these rare instances where something in this hospital had colors other than grey on them.
And amongst those rooms, there was one room with particularly vivid colors - the red marks around the room had layers, and even some particularly dark hand prints on its walls and dripping dark red liquid on its door.
The man in a suit picked up a phone and dialed a number, which was memorized by Josephine Wong. She also clearly memorized the appearance of this bald man by heart, and decided that she would look up the information on this man immediately when she got out.
Before she came here, she already ordered some of her most trusted team members to dig into the history of the Clearwater Municipal Hospital. The investigation was still incomplete when she came here, but from what she heard, there were some major gaps in public records about this place, apparently there was some cover up on the businesses that were going on in the hospital.
When the bald man hung up the phone, he seemed to have heard some disturbance from the hallway outside, so he rushed out of his office to check it out.
Josephine Wong followed the man outside, and the man ran to room 3-5-13, just when a nurse, whose face was somehow severely scratched, burnt and bashed to disfigurement was being dragged out of the room by a group of tall and buffed hospital staff.
The man then burst into the room, just in time to see a mess - three patients that were tied to their beds were dead. And there were traces of dark liquid flowing from their bodies onto the ground.
The faces of the three dead patients were seemingly intentionally blurred and only had the vague shapes of human faces. And as the streams of dark liquid from the dead patients’ bodies slowly continued their flow towards the corners of the room, the memories being replayed in the room started getting more and more blurry.
And without any sign or indication, the memories just stopped replaying.