"Hey there," she said, extending her hand. "M'name's Aster Bernard, Immunologist from Dallas," She offered the quiet man her widest smile, doing her best to make a good impression on the people here. The man hesitated, frowning before relenting and shaking her hand.
"I am Anselm Hartmann." His voice was smooth but obviously accented, falling harder over vowels than her own southern drawl would have. "I studied medicine at Greifswald, in Germany." Ah, so that was the accent. His s-sounds were sharp like z's, his w's turned into v's. Having never left her own state, his foreign vernacular was fascinating to her. He still remained cold to her and didn't offer a smile, instead pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Anselm." She pronounced it carefully, not wanting it to come out wrong on her own tongue, and seemed to do an okay job of it. "Medicine, huh? Did you work in a practice before?" she asked, curious about his field, even though it wasn't too far off from her own. Her work kept her confined to the lab most of the time, and she had little to go on in terms of how things went for med students beyond moving on from med school.
Anselm grinned now, a small grin but Aster was willing to count it. "Nein, I did my residence in an emergency room, actually. I could not imagine the monotony of a practice."
"Really?" she asked, genuinely interested. "What was it like? I've never met an ER doctor before. I can't imagine that kind of stress. Did you have to perform surgeries on the spot? Or... or autopsies?" Her voice dropped on the last note, remembering her own stay in med school and the way the work with real cadavers always made her uneasy. She was aware she was being overly chatty, a little bit from nerves, but she didn't particularly care, and it made him grin wider, exposing two rows of perfect white teeth framed by an elegant lip curvature.
"It was definitely stressful. But I did not mind it. The adrenaline rushes are like nothing I have ever felt." His smile seemed to relax, become more natural as he recalled night after night of his work. "And I did not perform many surgeries, the seasoned surgeons tended to take care of most of those, and it was too busy to argue over it for long, but I have been holding the scalpel on several occasions. As for the autopsies, the coroner in any hospital handles those." His tone was more than a little condescending, but Aster didn't mind; she should have known that. Before she could get another question in, he stopped her with a question of his own. "What is your work in immunology?"
"Research," she said gently, frowning gently. "Until now I've been assisting in research on tropical parasite illnesses. It's not that exciting. We've been trying to develop an effective agent to kill parasites in the host, but it's really very difficult." Despite not being demanding or exhausting or exhilarating in the way ER work was, she couldn't help the twinkle in her eye or the way she wanted to babble on about the fascinating little details of parasites that made them so resilient.
Anselm opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by a woman of average height with enough presence and attitude to make up for whatever height she lacked. She summoned the new researchers with a few short words and a toss of her dark curls, and turned on her black pump heels without waiting for the group.
"I suppose we should follow her," Anselm said, pushing himself off the wall. "I hope breakfast is first; air travel makes me so hungry."
---
First one done. I feel horrible about it, it's terrible and flawed and I realized something huge about three paragraphs from where I ended it that might just break my entire plot so now I have some srs thinking to do. Still, it was nice to exercise my characters, feel them out and see how they work. Even though I've already written these two quite a bit, still...
Next prompt will have different ones, though, I promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment