tofi's trail

Toijvo's still recuperating from his previous ''seduction'' when he's sent to a proper hospital. Not to rest up, but to seduce a tricky beast that's invaded the hospital and is terrorizing the patients.

He's displeased, still reconciling with the impossibility of getting out of his job. He'd hoped that he at least would get to heal in peace, but with an arm still broken and fractures in his ribs, he's the most convincing to send in, with a story that he fell from a tree. If only it was so easy to catch the creature running amok in the hospital that even an injured agent could catch it, but he was sure it wouldn't be.

It worked in the cover of darkness. Not just during nights, but in places with thick curtains covering the windows and lamps glitching. Toijvo was laying in his hospital bed, wondering how he would find the monster when he was ordered by doctors to stay in bed, when he noticed the lamps flicker and a barely noticeable shimmer. Had he not been trained, he wouldn't have noticed it. Nobody else did, and there were another three people in the same room.

The dip of one of the bed was barely noticeable, but Toijvo saw it because he knew to look for something invisible. It crawled into one of the other patients' bed. The woman was asleep, and had been doing so peacefully until then. But with the arrival of the monster, she started to whimper, as though it was hard for her to breathe. Her heart monitor started to beep, and it attracted the attention of nurses. Nobody seemed certain what was going, unaware as they were of the monster resting on the woman's chest.

Masked by the sound of the machine and human noises, hidden by his leg, Toijvo looked where he was sure the beast was, and scratched softly against the blanket draped over his lap. He observed the dents shift in the woman's bed, and heard her heartbeat calm down. The monster moved off of her, and only the brief shimmer of air, like it was boiling with heat, let Toijvo know that it was coming closer to his bed. The disappearance of it was the only warning he had before it was on his bed, making its way up his body.

The creature was heavy, though not comparable to the ant queen. Toijvo wasn't, unlike the woman, hooked up to a monitor, and the confused hospital personnel was unaware that Toijvo was the one with a monster sitting on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe.

It was an effort to keep from showing his discomfort, the longer time passed, but he couldn't do anything about the monster until things calmed down. After the evening's nurse shift, he was finally able to slip his hand under the mattress for the tranquilizer. He breathed a sigh of relief when he depressed the plunger and he started to hear the beast snore.

"I thought so," a voice said, just before a hand snatched Toijvo's special call-button. Toijvo looked up, and saw a doctor's coat for just the briefest moments , and a hand holding the little button box. "You people just don't want others to have fun, do you?"

In the darkness of the room Toijvo couldn't tell what the person looked like. He couldn't even tell if the person was a man or a woman, the voice too androgynous. The other hand held a syringe, and though Toijvo tried to move away, he was stuck under the still-invisible, unconscious beast.

"Be a good boy and go to sleep now, sweets," the doctor said softly, as Toijvo felt his lungs fully expand and his consciousness slipping.

Monster Corp. 4