29th of Winter, 513 AV
Two days after a terrible incident at his own apartment; one that turned better at the end of the night, Ollic found himself put back together, all of the broken pieces glued into the original piece of art. But Ollic was no art. He wasn’t a masterpiece. He was a foul attempt at creating something brilliant. He was practise or worse- he was scrap paper, something you pitch in the trash.
However, somehow Ollic managed to get himself out of bed two days after. The first day after he had slept in until the time most had supper, and he had stayed up last night because of doing so. Too much sleep was a bad thing, but in Ollic’s case, he could care less.
Most would argue that he wasn’t in a healthy state of mind to attend work, but to Ollic, doing so might just help him relieve himself of nasty thoughts. Distraction- that’s what he called it. He was going to distract himself by focusing his energy elsewhere. By helping others, he was in a way disposing of the bad that was inside of him.
Besides, he had a new kitten to cheer him up and as he woke and got dressed, he greeted her with a tentative hand.
She purred and moved the top of her head, nudging it against Ollic’s awaiting fingers. He petted her, stroking his hand down her dark grey back before glancing into her eyes. Her eyes were bright blue, much the same as the colour Ollic’s were whenever he was happy or mutually content. He couldn’t decipher whether the colour defined her happiness for him petting her or her love. He also didn’t know whether she was thankful or envious for more.
Slipping on his shoes, Spirit came to him again and urged for more.
“Sorry beautiful,” he told her, glancing from the corner of his eye to examine the response Hokato would make from him saying such a thing to the cat. Her expression remained stoic and she didn’t speak to him through his mind.
Things hadn’t been what Ollic would have thought when he had returned home with Spirit. He expected Hokato to be furious and outraged with thoughts of being replaced, but instead, she was simply immune and reclusive. Unpleased with her unsocial behaviour, he had made the two meet each other.
“Why?” was Hokato’s reply, but Ollic insisted.
That’s when things got rough. Hokato was cold and deliberately tried to shoo the cat away, nipping at her feet and showing Spirit her place in the house as if Hokato had high demands and her territory wasn’t going to be marred by a feline.
Things had settled down and were no longer hostile, but Ollic was still being given the silent treatment. However, he was a pro at such a game and knew he was going to win.
“Goodbye guys,” he said to the room, and then turning to face Hokato who laid on the bed with her head resting on the tops of her paws, “Goodbye Hokato.”
She simply looked the other way. Ollic grunted and left out the door, locking it behind him.
The stairs to the Catholicon, the very ones that he had through missed lucid thought hallucinated over with furious remarks when he had injured his right arm stared at him as he stared back. Such a stairs should be cursed, but the exercise, oh the exercise, it was the only thing that kept him motivated as he made his way to the doors of the large building.
“Good morning,” he greeted the receptionist at the front desk before directing his destination toward the hallway where all the other healer’s and doctor’s rushed in and out during the day.
“Rimesage,” came a stern voice from behind him, startling Ollic into spinning around and almost knocking into a rack of medical equipment.
“Y-yes, sir?” he stuttered in response.
“You’re late.”
He most certainly was not, but he remained reasonable and apologized. Since when had he ever been late besides his first day? Everyone could get lost in such a building at this and the first day he had ended up in a therapy room on the top floor. It was funny actually-
“You have a patient a few rooms down,” his superior told him, handing him a folder with a few papers stuffed inside it.
“Yes sir,” he said, taking the folder, his tone sounding more like a question.
“Her mother is complaining of her daughter having a fever,” he continued, either ignoring Ollic’s unsatisfying retaliation or not hearing it completely.
“Yes sir,” Ollic repeated, watching as the man before him sighed and turned the other way.
“Good luck,” he said over his shoulder, his grey hair a strange contrast to his dark skin tone.
“Yes sir,” Ollic mumbled as he made his way down the hall, dodging equipment and carts that were placed as obstacles randomly throughout the hallway.
During his first day, Ollic had run into more than he could count of multiple carts and people. All the while he was apologizing, aggravating the person who was touring him through the place. Once or twice his leader had actually told him to stop saying sorry, and like he always did, Ollic apologized.
Once down the hall and to the right, Ollic found the room with the mother and daughter. He saw as soon as he had opened the door that her mother was worried and the young girl looked ill. She should have been bed-ridden, but first instinct or last depending on the family is to come to the Catholicon for help.
“Hello ma’am,” Ollic spoke softly, pinching himself through the shroud of the paper. He wasn’t going to clam up. He was going to help this poor woman and now that he was in his area of interest- his domain and true home, nothing could touch him. Not even social anxiety.
“Hello,” the mother said through a pained smile, outstretching her hand as if offering to shake. Ollic obligingly took her hand and showed her his consideration with a smile of his own.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, the obvious answer already on his mind, but he took pride in showing consideration and warm heartedness to all of his patients. His patients were like family and once he had helped them, he felt like he belonged. Some of the thanks he had gotten from a few of his patients were so nice that Ollic couldn’t help but want to hug a few.
The young woman put her hand on her daughter’s forehead and told him that she was abnormally warm.
Nodding his head in acknowledgment, Ollic sat down on a black chair and rolled it over to the side of the patient, feeling her forehead for the abnormal heat her mother had complained about in concern.
She was correct, for her daughter had a fever, however, upon closer examination, his eyes flickering down to her hands for a slight moment, he caught that the girl’s hands were unnaturally reddened in certain areas.
He hummed to himself an alternative diagnoses. His superior had gotten it wrong, but of course that wasn’t unusual. It was Ollic’s job to help treat patients with simple cases of illness, not his superiors. They were simply there to help aid him and teach him in case he needed it.
“Mrs-“ Ollic said to her, directing his attention away from the little girl who sat in the patient’s chair.
“You can call me Biena.”
“Biena,” he continued, “I believe that you daughter has an acute case of irritability.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, confused replacing her look of sympathetic concern. Her brunette hair matched her brown eyes, but her appearance didn’t match her daughters, for the daughter had light blonde hair and blue eyes.
Don’t get involved in the patient’s lives, he reminded himself. Perhaps she looks like her father rather than her mother. Of course they had to be related.
“It means that you daughter-“ he enunciated that word rather harshly and unpredictably- “has a rash, not a fever as I had initially assumed.”
“Is that bad?” The look of concern returned to her face and her eyebrows scrunched together, a crease occurring in the centre, right between her eyes.
“Not if we treat it right away,” he assured her, swiveling in his chair and rolling it over to the counters behind him.
He knew what to use in the case of a rash. Once when he was little, his mother had caught that his legs had strange red splotches on them and in the way that most mothers did, she asked him how he got them.
Of course, Ollic had no entire clue when they had gotten there, and although his mother didn’t believe him she observed them more closely only to gasp and tell him that he needed to lay down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, his face contorting into a similar expression as the patient Ollic had in present time.
“You have a rash,” she told him. No sympathy came from her voice, which wasn’t unusual. She wasn’t one to comfort or cuddle. She was all business and nothing else, which would appall many, but Ollic was used to it- had been all his life.
“Is that bad?” he asked, the exact same question as his patient’s mother had asked him just recently in real time.
“It shouldn’t be,” she told her, not hinting at what she would do next. He couldn’t see what she what she was doing until she came back with a few choice ingredients from her personal medicine bag she used for work.
“What are those?” he had asked.
“These are the things that are going to kill that rash.” Those words sent chills down his spine.
Would killing the rash also in turn kill him? Why did his mother use such unnecessary hostility in her tone of voice? Was he going to be alright? All of these thoughts had swarmed through his brain at the time, and as he watched his mother preform smashing up a grainy substance in a bowl and mix it with a pasty substance before she slathered the final product onto his legs.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“So?”
He shut his mouth right after her retaliation. At that moment in time, he had become fascinated with how his mother worked. She moved with such gracefulness and confidence that Ollic couldn’t help but look up to her as if she were an idol, and she was. Until this day, Ollic had been completing his role as a healer’s apprentice all from the teachings his mother had given him since he was a small boy.
Coming back to the present, his mind wandered back to the night two days ago. His mother. That thought of her was the entire reason he had broken down in a fit of rage and sorrow. He wasn’t going to let his personal life affect his work, and just to prove it, he shook his head from side to side and continued to bring down what he needed to help his patient.
He put his gloves on and waited until his mind told him what to do. Memories were both wonderful and terrible, sometimes even at the exact same time.
The Myrian salt cure all started from crushed and dried leaves found in tropical regions of Mizahar. He didn’t know where exactly they were located in the world, but on the shelf, he knew right where to look.
Pulling down a canister, he pulled out a few leaves before putting it back. Placing the leaves in a bowl, he took the pestle that matched the mortar he had placed the leaves in and started to grind the leaves until they were small fragments of a whole plant.
He then scraped them into a basic formulated cream out of a bottle from the right of the counter and squeezed out a coin sized portion before swabbing the substance with his gloved hand.
Turning back to the young girl with gorgeous blue eyes- eyes that reminded Ollic of his oldest friend- he began to rub the cream onto the affected areas.
“What are you doing now?” asked the mother, her voice shrill as if scared Ollic might hurt her child, if the young girl was even her true child.
“I am simply rubbing an ointment onto your daughter’s-“ more absentminded hostility forced upon that word came from his mouth- “arms. This should help the rash go away.”
He turned to the girl who was eyeing him suspiciously as if what he was doing was magic.
“You should be all better soon, miss,” he told her with a boyish grin, his eyes changing from their dedicated and interested emerald green to their usual crystal blue.
She gasped and her mother let out a startled scream.
“Are you alright, baby?” she asked her daughter, putting her hand onto the little girl’s and squeezing it in the way that mother’s did whenever their family was feeling lonely or insecure. Ollic wished his mother was like that, and the mere energy that wavered off of the lady was enough to put Ollic’s unrelated suspicions to rest.
“How did your eyes do that?” she questioned him, her face showing puzzlement and mild interest. “They changed colours!”
He smiled, his bangs having grown long from lack of cutting them fell into his face. He brushed it back and looked her in the eyes, his irises changing their colour to a satisfying bright orange. He was curious about this girl and proved it by the shift.
“How?” she asked again, her mouth agape in astonishment.
“Magic,” he announced, both of his hands creating a rainbow shape over his head.
She gasped again and as Ollic checked the rest of her body for any other affected areas, he continued to smile. He found no more red splotches and knew that the heat from her forehead was the rash virus trying to fight off the young girl’s immune system.
“Are we all done? Will she get better?” the mother interrupted his thorough ending investigation of the young girl. He checked her nose, her ears and inside her mouth for anything out of the ordinary.
“Yes ma’am. I seem to have taken care of the rash in the way I can. It should clear up soon, but if you have any more troubles come back and see me, alright?”
She nodded her head and to her daughter, offered her hand to help her up and out of the patient’s seat that stood in the centre of the room.
The words ‘thank you so much’ were mouthed by the mother over her shoulder as she exited to go and pay at the receptionist desk.
It might not have been a fever, but Ollic was certainly glad that it wasn’t anything too severe for him to be able to take care of, and with the help of a personal memory he was able to recognize the symptoms and the procedure on how to help his patient.
Thanks mum, Ollic thought with a hint of truthful gratitude but meant in a snotty way.
Leaving the room and following the party he had just helped, he unfortunately happened to run into two men whom were talking to one another about their families and a small party that had taken place a few nights ago.
One of them caught Ollic evesdropping and turned to him with a sneer spread across his lips. It was frightening to see and Ollic knew it was not his place to have listened in on their conversation. So, turning to leave, he knew it was best to get out of there, but he wasn’t all that lucky.
“Hey you,” said the guy who caught him.
Ollic turned.
“Yeah, you.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t do that sir stuff with me, man,” said the other guy.
“I’m sorry,” Ollic instinctively apologized.
“You’re that new kid aren’t you?”
Stuttering ever so slightly and feeling out of place, with the walls seeming to close in around him, Ollic told him that he had been working here for longer than he thought. It had been near close to two seasons since he had arrived in Lhavit and had gotten a job at the Catholicon.
“Perhaps you have repressed that fact.”
The taller one, the one who had caught Ollic snooping about, chuckled darkly. “Whatever. I hear your pretty smart.”
“With a smart mouth,” added the other guy. He had dark hair and was much shorter than the other one; not as short and Ollic but not too much taller than he was.
He didn’t know what to say, so he just stood there awkwardly and let the two men discourage him. Being so passive as he was took an emotional and mental toll on Ollic, and although he never made any attempt to break such a bad habit, he dealt with it the best he could.
The tall man walked up to him and knocked the folder of the previous patient out of his hands. It fell to the floor, all of the papers inside falling out.
“Oops,” he said instead of apologizing like any humane person would have done. “It looks like you dropped something.”
Ollic dropped to the floor to pick it up after eyeing the man through slit eyes. The colour of his eyes shifted from their natural blue to black and back to blue in a quick instant before he had gathered all of the papers and placed them back into the folder as they had been before.
“If you’ll excuse me,” said Ollic before rushing off, mock calls coming from the two men behind him.
Swallowing a small lump in his throat, Ollic kept back the tears. Bullying when he was little and now when he was mature enough to have a family? How cynical was this world he lived in?
While he was walking briskly back to the desk to drop off the folder with his most recent patient’s information, a diagnosis he had written briefly before exiting the room before scrawled across the lower portion of the paper, he ran into one of his superior’s again.
“Ollic,” he said to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“I have another patient in that room over there-“ he pointed to the room a few feet up the hallway to the left side- “who is complaining of a very bad headache. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Yes sir.”
“How did the last patient go?”
“She had a minor rash, sir,” Ollic said to him, starting to open the folder to show.
“No need for that son. I trust you. I’ll take that off your hands.” And he did just that, swapping him and giving him another folder. He then bidd Ollic good luck with the next patient he had on his list.
Here we go again, he told himself as he set off in the direction his superior had pointed to.
Two days after a terrible incident at his own apartment; one that turned better at the end of the night, Ollic found himself put back together, all of the broken pieces glued into the original piece of art. But Ollic was no art. He wasn’t a masterpiece. He was a foul attempt at creating something brilliant. He was practise or worse- he was scrap paper, something you pitch in the trash.
However, somehow Ollic managed to get himself out of bed two days after. The first day after he had slept in until the time most had supper, and he had stayed up last night because of doing so. Too much sleep was a bad thing, but in Ollic’s case, he could care less.
Most would argue that he wasn’t in a healthy state of mind to attend work, but to Ollic, doing so might just help him relieve himself of nasty thoughts. Distraction- that’s what he called it. He was going to distract himself by focusing his energy elsewhere. By helping others, he was in a way disposing of the bad that was inside of him.
Besides, he had a new kitten to cheer him up and as he woke and got dressed, he greeted her with a tentative hand.
She purred and moved the top of her head, nudging it against Ollic’s awaiting fingers. He petted her, stroking his hand down her dark grey back before glancing into her eyes. Her eyes were bright blue, much the same as the colour Ollic’s were whenever he was happy or mutually content. He couldn’t decipher whether the colour defined her happiness for him petting her or her love. He also didn’t know whether she was thankful or envious for more.
Slipping on his shoes, Spirit came to him again and urged for more.
“Sorry beautiful,” he told her, glancing from the corner of his eye to examine the response Hokato would make from him saying such a thing to the cat. Her expression remained stoic and she didn’t speak to him through his mind.
Things hadn’t been what Ollic would have thought when he had returned home with Spirit. He expected Hokato to be furious and outraged with thoughts of being replaced, but instead, she was simply immune and reclusive. Unpleased with her unsocial behaviour, he had made the two meet each other.
“Why?” was Hokato’s reply, but Ollic insisted.
That’s when things got rough. Hokato was cold and deliberately tried to shoo the cat away, nipping at her feet and showing Spirit her place in the house as if Hokato had high demands and her territory wasn’t going to be marred by a feline.
Things had settled down and were no longer hostile, but Ollic was still being given the silent treatment. However, he was a pro at such a game and knew he was going to win.
“Goodbye guys,” he said to the room, and then turning to face Hokato who laid on the bed with her head resting on the tops of her paws, “Goodbye Hokato.”
She simply looked the other way. Ollic grunted and left out the door, locking it behind him.
The stairs to the Catholicon, the very ones that he had through missed lucid thought hallucinated over with furious remarks when he had injured his right arm stared at him as he stared back. Such a stairs should be cursed, but the exercise, oh the exercise, it was the only thing that kept him motivated as he made his way to the doors of the large building.
“Good morning,” he greeted the receptionist at the front desk before directing his destination toward the hallway where all the other healer’s and doctor’s rushed in and out during the day.
“Rimesage,” came a stern voice from behind him, startling Ollic into spinning around and almost knocking into a rack of medical equipment.
“Y-yes, sir?” he stuttered in response.
“You’re late.”
He most certainly was not, but he remained reasonable and apologized. Since when had he ever been late besides his first day? Everyone could get lost in such a building at this and the first day he had ended up in a therapy room on the top floor. It was funny actually-
“You have a patient a few rooms down,” his superior told him, handing him a folder with a few papers stuffed inside it.
“Yes sir,” he said, taking the folder, his tone sounding more like a question.
“Her mother is complaining of her daughter having a fever,” he continued, either ignoring Ollic’s unsatisfying retaliation or not hearing it completely.
“Yes sir,” Ollic repeated, watching as the man before him sighed and turned the other way.
“Good luck,” he said over his shoulder, his grey hair a strange contrast to his dark skin tone.
“Yes sir,” Ollic mumbled as he made his way down the hall, dodging equipment and carts that were placed as obstacles randomly throughout the hallway.
During his first day, Ollic had run into more than he could count of multiple carts and people. All the while he was apologizing, aggravating the person who was touring him through the place. Once or twice his leader had actually told him to stop saying sorry, and like he always did, Ollic apologized.
Once down the hall and to the right, Ollic found the room with the mother and daughter. He saw as soon as he had opened the door that her mother was worried and the young girl looked ill. She should have been bed-ridden, but first instinct or last depending on the family is to come to the Catholicon for help.
“Hello ma’am,” Ollic spoke softly, pinching himself through the shroud of the paper. He wasn’t going to clam up. He was going to help this poor woman and now that he was in his area of interest- his domain and true home, nothing could touch him. Not even social anxiety.
“Hello,” the mother said through a pained smile, outstretching her hand as if offering to shake. Ollic obligingly took her hand and showed her his consideration with a smile of his own.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, the obvious answer already on his mind, but he took pride in showing consideration and warm heartedness to all of his patients. His patients were like family and once he had helped them, he felt like he belonged. Some of the thanks he had gotten from a few of his patients were so nice that Ollic couldn’t help but want to hug a few.
The young woman put her hand on her daughter’s forehead and told him that she was abnormally warm.
Nodding his head in acknowledgment, Ollic sat down on a black chair and rolled it over to the side of the patient, feeling her forehead for the abnormal heat her mother had complained about in concern.
She was correct, for her daughter had a fever, however, upon closer examination, his eyes flickering down to her hands for a slight moment, he caught that the girl’s hands were unnaturally reddened in certain areas.
He hummed to himself an alternative diagnoses. His superior had gotten it wrong, but of course that wasn’t unusual. It was Ollic’s job to help treat patients with simple cases of illness, not his superiors. They were simply there to help aid him and teach him in case he needed it.
“Mrs-“ Ollic said to her, directing his attention away from the little girl who sat in the patient’s chair.
“You can call me Biena.”
“Biena,” he continued, “I believe that you daughter has an acute case of irritability.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, confused replacing her look of sympathetic concern. Her brunette hair matched her brown eyes, but her appearance didn’t match her daughters, for the daughter had light blonde hair and blue eyes.
Don’t get involved in the patient’s lives, he reminded himself. Perhaps she looks like her father rather than her mother. Of course they had to be related.
“It means that you daughter-“ he enunciated that word rather harshly and unpredictably- “has a rash, not a fever as I had initially assumed.”
“Is that bad?” The look of concern returned to her face and her eyebrows scrunched together, a crease occurring in the centre, right between her eyes.
“Not if we treat it right away,” he assured her, swiveling in his chair and rolling it over to the counters behind him.
He knew what to use in the case of a rash. Once when he was little, his mother had caught that his legs had strange red splotches on them and in the way that most mothers did, she asked him how he got them.
Of course, Ollic had no entire clue when they had gotten there, and although his mother didn’t believe him she observed them more closely only to gasp and tell him that he needed to lay down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, his face contorting into a similar expression as the patient Ollic had in present time.
“You have a rash,” she told him. No sympathy came from her voice, which wasn’t unusual. She wasn’t one to comfort or cuddle. She was all business and nothing else, which would appall many, but Ollic was used to it- had been all his life.
“Is that bad?” he asked, the exact same question as his patient’s mother had asked him just recently in real time.
“It shouldn’t be,” she told her, not hinting at what she would do next. He couldn’t see what she what she was doing until she came back with a few choice ingredients from her personal medicine bag she used for work.
“What are those?” he had asked.
“These are the things that are going to kill that rash.” Those words sent chills down his spine.
Would killing the rash also in turn kill him? Why did his mother use such unnecessary hostility in her tone of voice? Was he going to be alright? All of these thoughts had swarmed through his brain at the time, and as he watched his mother preform smashing up a grainy substance in a bowl and mix it with a pasty substance before she slathered the final product onto his legs.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“So?”
He shut his mouth right after her retaliation. At that moment in time, he had become fascinated with how his mother worked. She moved with such gracefulness and confidence that Ollic couldn’t help but look up to her as if she were an idol, and she was. Until this day, Ollic had been completing his role as a healer’s apprentice all from the teachings his mother had given him since he was a small boy.
Coming back to the present, his mind wandered back to the night two days ago. His mother. That thought of her was the entire reason he had broken down in a fit of rage and sorrow. He wasn’t going to let his personal life affect his work, and just to prove it, he shook his head from side to side and continued to bring down what he needed to help his patient.
He put his gloves on and waited until his mind told him what to do. Memories were both wonderful and terrible, sometimes even at the exact same time.
The Myrian salt cure all started from crushed and dried leaves found in tropical regions of Mizahar. He didn’t know where exactly they were located in the world, but on the shelf, he knew right where to look.
Pulling down a canister, he pulled out a few leaves before putting it back. Placing the leaves in a bowl, he took the pestle that matched the mortar he had placed the leaves in and started to grind the leaves until they were small fragments of a whole plant.
He then scraped them into a basic formulated cream out of a bottle from the right of the counter and squeezed out a coin sized portion before swabbing the substance with his gloved hand.
Turning back to the young girl with gorgeous blue eyes- eyes that reminded Ollic of his oldest friend- he began to rub the cream onto the affected areas.
“What are you doing now?” asked the mother, her voice shrill as if scared Ollic might hurt her child, if the young girl was even her true child.
“I am simply rubbing an ointment onto your daughter’s-“ more absentminded hostility forced upon that word came from his mouth- “arms. This should help the rash go away.”
He turned to the girl who was eyeing him suspiciously as if what he was doing was magic.
“You should be all better soon, miss,” he told her with a boyish grin, his eyes changing from their dedicated and interested emerald green to their usual crystal blue.
She gasped and her mother let out a startled scream.
“Are you alright, baby?” she asked her daughter, putting her hand onto the little girl’s and squeezing it in the way that mother’s did whenever their family was feeling lonely or insecure. Ollic wished his mother was like that, and the mere energy that wavered off of the lady was enough to put Ollic’s unrelated suspicions to rest.
“How did your eyes do that?” she questioned him, her face showing puzzlement and mild interest. “They changed colours!”
He smiled, his bangs having grown long from lack of cutting them fell into his face. He brushed it back and looked her in the eyes, his irises changing their colour to a satisfying bright orange. He was curious about this girl and proved it by the shift.
“How?” she asked again, her mouth agape in astonishment.
“Magic,” he announced, both of his hands creating a rainbow shape over his head.
She gasped again and as Ollic checked the rest of her body for any other affected areas, he continued to smile. He found no more red splotches and knew that the heat from her forehead was the rash virus trying to fight off the young girl’s immune system.
“Are we all done? Will she get better?” the mother interrupted his thorough ending investigation of the young girl. He checked her nose, her ears and inside her mouth for anything out of the ordinary.
“Yes ma’am. I seem to have taken care of the rash in the way I can. It should clear up soon, but if you have any more troubles come back and see me, alright?”
She nodded her head and to her daughter, offered her hand to help her up and out of the patient’s seat that stood in the centre of the room.
The words ‘thank you so much’ were mouthed by the mother over her shoulder as she exited to go and pay at the receptionist desk.
It might not have been a fever, but Ollic was certainly glad that it wasn’t anything too severe for him to be able to take care of, and with the help of a personal memory he was able to recognize the symptoms and the procedure on how to help his patient.
Thanks mum, Ollic thought with a hint of truthful gratitude but meant in a snotty way.
Leaving the room and following the party he had just helped, he unfortunately happened to run into two men whom were talking to one another about their families and a small party that had taken place a few nights ago.
One of them caught Ollic evesdropping and turned to him with a sneer spread across his lips. It was frightening to see and Ollic knew it was not his place to have listened in on their conversation. So, turning to leave, he knew it was best to get out of there, but he wasn’t all that lucky.
“Hey you,” said the guy who caught him.
Ollic turned.
“Yeah, you.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t do that sir stuff with me, man,” said the other guy.
“I’m sorry,” Ollic instinctively apologized.
“You’re that new kid aren’t you?”
Stuttering ever so slightly and feeling out of place, with the walls seeming to close in around him, Ollic told him that he had been working here for longer than he thought. It had been near close to two seasons since he had arrived in Lhavit and had gotten a job at the Catholicon.
“Perhaps you have repressed that fact.”
The taller one, the one who had caught Ollic snooping about, chuckled darkly. “Whatever. I hear your pretty smart.”
“With a smart mouth,” added the other guy. He had dark hair and was much shorter than the other one; not as short and Ollic but not too much taller than he was.
He didn’t know what to say, so he just stood there awkwardly and let the two men discourage him. Being so passive as he was took an emotional and mental toll on Ollic, and although he never made any attempt to break such a bad habit, he dealt with it the best he could.
The tall man walked up to him and knocked the folder of the previous patient out of his hands. It fell to the floor, all of the papers inside falling out.
“Oops,” he said instead of apologizing like any humane person would have done. “It looks like you dropped something.”
Ollic dropped to the floor to pick it up after eyeing the man through slit eyes. The colour of his eyes shifted from their natural blue to black and back to blue in a quick instant before he had gathered all of the papers and placed them back into the folder as they had been before.
“If you’ll excuse me,” said Ollic before rushing off, mock calls coming from the two men behind him.
Swallowing a small lump in his throat, Ollic kept back the tears. Bullying when he was little and now when he was mature enough to have a family? How cynical was this world he lived in?
While he was walking briskly back to the desk to drop off the folder with his most recent patient’s information, a diagnosis he had written briefly before exiting the room before scrawled across the lower portion of the paper, he ran into one of his superior’s again.
“Ollic,” he said to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“I have another patient in that room over there-“ he pointed to the room a few feet up the hallway to the left side- “who is complaining of a very bad headache. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Yes sir.”
“How did the last patient go?”
“She had a minor rash, sir,” Ollic said to him, starting to open the folder to show.
“No need for that son. I trust you. I’ll take that off your hands.” And he did just that, swapping him and giving him another folder. He then bidd Ollic good luck with the next patient he had on his list.
Here we go again, he told himself as he set off in the direction his superior had pointed to.
