<a class="username" data-user-id="2167" data-username="@Celeste" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/2167/">@Celeste</a><br/><br/>The collective of buildings protected by a well-kept fence were the very picture of order. White materials and clean glass which hosted a ballet of frocks and scrubs and agile gurneys. While the patrons of the rolling sickbeds were in an uproar, the masked and gloved personnel were calm and methodical in ushering them forward, both on the sanitary floor and toward their own mental health. A great many of success stories born from these healing halls.<br/><br/>There were courtyards too, and recreational areas populated by those who were here to get better as well as their families and friends. And the staff on break. Fluttering around the great towers of medicine, there was a society that took care of itself, hoping to send people back into the world with an appreciation for their own situation, or a full bill of health. There were doctors who took great pride in their toil, and there were diligent helping hands that were elated to aid.<br/><br/>But in this wellness oasis knitted together with stone walks and well placed greenery and - frankly - over the top attention to the baroque history of its scientific field, with iron garnish here and paintings of deep palled there, there were rumors too. In all of the penthouse suites for their sponsors, and the forgotten catacombs where older equipment was left to fill up on dust and meandering bacteria, there was no cure for gossip. The army of degree-holders and scholars could not cure the whispers that infected their reputation. Shrugged off, usually, as is easy to do in the daylight coming in from cleaned glass, and bright lighting overhead, in in-house boardrooms and vast cafeterias - but never dismissed. Like a chill that follows your shadow, it was unseen and inevitable. And faithful.<br/><br/>The Hollander Hospital ate the mind of its pretty patients.<br/><br/>While some with serious ailments were scrubbed clean of their troubles in record time, others who had smaller afflictions stayed longer. How odd, that the resources of this castle at the forefront of mind's medicine couldn't be effective with its wards if they were too beautiful. The happenstance of stunning maidens being kept longer here had been dubbed The Desire Disease, and the name had caught on. It was a stubborn legend meaning to indite the good doctors.<br/><br/>Leunan Varoe wasn't really bothered by the little stories that ran like undercurrents around his workplace. The nurses, like chambermaids and lower staff, would talk about anything when they met up. He'd not be a man of science if he put stock in half of the disproportionate outrage they entertained themselves with over minor events and complete hearsay. He was the subject of some of it himself - they liked his dark hair and eyes, and their contrast against his fair skin, which was broken again by starkly blushing lips - the eager tongues fitted him with particularly bizarre stories, like a tax on his beauty. He rarely apologized for his good looks. A healer should be healthy himself, yes? Sometimes he took to the asphalt around Hollander to run on his longer breaks, endless legs and forever arms. He was at once the paragon of their progressive thinking, lined by all their computers and new machines - deft bones and scalpel jaw - while drawing the mind to the days when their field had started, with dangerous elements in corked bottles and alchemy lore.<br/><br/>His rise was in part because he'd become media's golden boy after a few miraculously recovered patients. The board were in love with their new poster boy and were happy to see he did well in all the initial figurehead positions they assigned him. Eventually he took a place in the real politics of the place, and before anyone knew it, he'd become an integral cog in the complicated campaigns of Hollander Hospital. It was a trick he'd learned, somewhere, which would have made him a king if he'd been born earlier - to intimidate and please at the same time. A doctor of the mind should be able to handle such an hormonal, paradoxical spell.<br/><br/>He was out of his coat, in his office. His neck was two buttons deeper into the parted, white collar, where the loosened knot of a blood tie hung. His station demanded good tailoring and he'd obliged. Again he took on the image of a dapper thing, with spider limbs, from days when print meant iron letters and soaking ink. He was not playing with the beginnings of paper, though, he was making notes on a screen, clacking now and then on keys, lighting swift. Lithe framed, rounded glasses hung low on his nose, and he would have been a nordic design direction Narcissus, sighing into a digital pond if his breath hadn't been concerned rather than self-adoring. He rested his chin on his risen palm and planted that elbow by the mouse. The noticed warned him a particular thorn was coming to his side soon.