The hospital room's air was stale, the windows shut so tightly that not even the slightest hint of a breeze could enter from the outside. The room was empty aside from a single bed and a few machines that surrounded it. A girl rested in the center of the bed. She was breathing, but they were shallow breaths, her chest hardly moving at all. If it weren't a hospital in the Upper Level, one would think she was dead. The machines at her side beeped steadily, showing no change. She was comatose.

However, she was alone. No family there to sit at her side or hold her hand, no friends hovering around waiting. It had been too long for her friends and her family...? Well her family had just been happy that such an improper child had been removed from their household.

So no one was there to see as a hand started to move at her side. The machine let out an irregular beep before returning to its previous methods. The movement didn't continue.

Several days later, the room was less stale but somehow darker. It was dark out, nighttime and the flowers a nurse had left were beginning to wilt. Petals surrounded the sad looking bouquet.

The girl on the bed's chest was beginning to rise and fall in more drastic measures, although the increase was hardly noticeable over the days. No one had noticed the changes taking place. No one cared to. The nice nurse who gave her the flowers had left a month ago. Of course the patient would never know. She had been in a coma half her life.

Not anymore. Her fingers slowly clenched, pulling at the thin blanket covering her body. It felt much too weird, her body was heavy and hard to move. Her hair that pooled around her in mass amounts was tangled and uncared for. Sure, the nurse's sometimes came in to brush it out, but that was only about once a week. No one cared to take care of someone who would never wake up.

Except she was waking up.

Even if the staff had cared to check in on the girl then most likely they would have been distracted by what was going on currently. From outside the door came the sound of far away scuffling.

Elsewhere in the hospital, there had been a meeting. Nothing important, just a general get together of the staff from Sunadokei and Botta to convene and make sure everything was current and financed. That wasn't where the problem came from, however.

The clamor was caused by one of the more well known attendants, Isaac Hayden.

Sitting in on the meeting, he had found himself growing increasingly bored. Listening to a speaker was most certainly not his preferred entertainment, and as he watched him jab his thumb at the slide, he found himself yet again wondering what exactly the workings of the thumb looked like in motion. It wasn't a morbid urge that caused him to pull a knife out of one of his pockets, simply a medical curiosity. Likewise, there wasn't any pain when he dragged it across his skin, but that was mostly the electrical pulses being sent down his arms to deaden his nerves for this very reason.

What it did do was startle the woman sitting next to him. She jumped, not so much startled by the blood (she was a doctor, after all) but by the suddenness of the self-examining. Peering at his face and wondering why he looked so calm even if she couldn't see his eyes through his dark bangs, she got the attention of the man on her right.

Isaac couldn't understand what they were getting so worked up about. He was curious and bored, and hey, he'd stitch himself back up or at least pull his hand back together later. But as more and more people noticed and started to badger him about it, he decided he had to slip away to get any more peace and quiet. That didn't work so well, he thought with a sinking feeling as they called for his assistant. She always got mad at him and would follow him for hours until he was deemed "out of danger."

Spotting what looked like an empty room, he ducked through the door and stood against the wall. Most of them passed and he returned his attention to his hand, poking at it for a moment. It was a few minutes before he noticed the room in fact wasn't empty. He looked up in the middle of sewing his hand back together, glancing over the apparently sleeping girl. He knew nothing of her since this was not his hospital, but he gathered enough in a glance to be able to guess.

"Oh. Sorry about that." He muttered, looking away without paying attention to see if she'd answer because a second person had come through the door.

"Honestly Isaac, you promised you wouldn't get that bored this time." His assistant grumbled, tucking her light brown hair behind her ear. She often did that when she was annoyed.

"But it was just too boring." Isaac's voice took on a whining tone but he grew serious quick enough. "But, Mariko, this girl's waking up. We need to let people know."

Of course the girl who was slowly waking up had no idea that he privacy had been invaded. She had no clue of her situation. The girl- Sitara Harris was the name on the chart at the foot of her bed- was starting to wiggle her toes and muscles were beginning to twitch in her limbs. Natural of a person when their body was just beginning to come back to life after years of a static status. Her breath hitched a split second before her eyes finally opened. Violet was obscured by temporarily dilated pupils, but still seemed to glow around the deep black. Long, thick lashes fluttered as the eyes blinked a few times.

"Where's the rabbit?" She asked softly, her voice too weak to really raise to an understandable decibel. She groaned softly and closed her eyes again. Light. Why did it hurt? Why was her body so heavy. She couldn't move aside from the normal breaths... She felt weird, her limbs felt awkward. And that voice... it wasn't hers. Was this body swapping? No, that wasn't usually practiced, was it? Besides, who would want to take over the body of a little elementary school child?

Isaac stared pointedly at Mariko until she left the room. Or at least he looked like he stared, but she had gotten used to guessing where his eyes were actually focusing. Of course he was second to the patient so she'd simply hit him over the head with her clipboard as she walked past, mumbling a stern warning not to slice up himself or the poor girl before she would return.

The doctor walked over to the bed, lifting the chart as he went. He watched the machines for a moment before shifting his gaze to the girl.

"Sitara... Harris?" Isaac spoke clearly, the knife and his hand forgotten for the moment. "Can you hear me?" He said, hoping she would have the ability to respond even just a little. Sure, someone just waking up wouldn't be able to sit up and go 'hey, I'm fine, what's up?' but a nod of her head or even just her looking at him would be good enough.

"Sita..." She corrected him automatically, although she admittedly didn't know who she was correcting at the moment. She didn't care to open her eyes again. The lights hurt. Was she outside? Had she fallen asleep outside on accident? She couldn't for the life of her remember why she felt like this and it was bothering her. She hated not knowing, being the curious creature that she was. So, forcing herself to endure, her eyes opened again and she glanced over towards the voice that spoke her name. "Call me Sita... who are you?" Her voice croaked out of her throat. It didn't take long for her eyes to adjust and for her to realize that she was not, in fact, outside.

She was however, in an unfamiliar room. A very white room... or perhaps off-white, she could never tell the difference despite the fact her mother insisted it was intensely noticeable. But then, her mother was a proper woman who spent her time scoffing at neighbors and arranging parties. Her chest's movements stopped as she held her breath for a moment, trying to get used to it. The air was stale. "This is.."

"This is Botta. The Upper Level, more specifically, and a hospital, more specifically than that." Isaac finished for her, his hand on her wrist. He didn't want to badger her with questions so soon after waking up, but having known nothing about her, he didn't have really many options aside from keeping her talking as he moved among the various instruments that had beeped into life once more. She seemed to be stable enough, at least for someone walking up from such things.

"What is the last thing you can remember happening?" He asked, his voice relatively quiet. He was sure she'd be getting a lot of other noise once her actual caretakers had shown up to take over the job he was currently doing. But the door opening brought his attention from the small monitor in front of him.

"I grabbed someone random walking down the hall... They should be here shortly." Mariko mumbled as she re-entered the room and moved over to the side of the bed. Isaac simply nodded and returned his attention to Sita.

"Botta...." She repeated slowly... then blinked. Oh. Upper level. "Right... why am I here?" With each word, her voice seemed to grow stronger. His next question caught her by surprise. What exactly did she remember? Her mind still felt fuzzy, it was hard to think straight. Wasn't she just outside? It was so nice out and she was skipping lessons again... Ballet bored her, she preferred dancing however she felt, not in some rigid manner. "I was skipping.... Mom... mother didn't know. She never did. My instructor was probably running around looking for me..." She trailed off, brow creasing as she attempted to remember the exact course of her playtime alone.

Distracted by her own attempt to remember, she slipped back into the common tongue. She had always spoken as such before (at least when she was not around her mother and father). "I think that... I was playing near the pond in the garden. That is the best site to see the roses... They're like... peppermint, white with red stripes. And then..." It was hard. Her head hurt. Her body was heavy. She forced herself to slowly sit up, her bones practically creaking from misuse. "I think I slipped on one of the rocks... and I don't remember much after that..." Her hands started to move up to cover her face, hoping that the absolute dark would help. However, she stopped short and stared at her hands, turning them over. "Too big... what's going on?" She glanced over to him.

However, she was cut off from asking anyone else as a woman stepped in. She stiffened, realizing the female was speaking formally and quickly nodded her head. She could know her mother. "H-hello. How do you do?"

"Uh, quite well, thank you." Mariko blinked, caught by surprise at her formal tone and moving over to Isaac's side. She would have to speak for him, most likely, since he had begun looking over Sita. There wasn't a scar that he could see at least that would lead to any guesses about how exactly she had sustained such an injury to land her in this state. The chart that he had glanced over was incomplete and even bored sounding, a sign of the obvious lack of care that had come to this room.

"Well, I guess we'll understand the whole story when your caretakers get here, but, well, lets see." Mariko cleared her throat, brow furrowing as she scanned the chart Isaac handed to her. Those idiots hadn't even bothered to write down the date. Obviously they didn't expect to have to deal with this any time soon. "It seems you've been in a coma for quite a few years. Essentially asleep." She added this because the girl seemed to have been in said coma for a long time, and since she had yet to find a date, she didn't know how old of a child she would be speaking to. Better to be safe than sorry, right?

"Since you were asleep for so long, you've grown. That's why everything might feel different. I can imagine it's hard to move around so just lay back if you need to." She kept her voice soft as she expected it was a weird concept to get your mind wrapped around. Speaking up with a bunch of medical terms wasn't exactly the best way to help it either.

The fact that the girl was a noble wasn't the only reason she was speaking in the upper level's dialect though. Her use of the common language wasn't quite as polished as she'd like it to be, so it simply made it easier for her.

Sita pouted gently. Yes, that was all nice to know, blah blah, she'd been asleep for a while. It explained the heavy body. She'd grown two inches over the past two months when she was a week, a year would have added another few, right? Finally she got bored with the polite pretense and stared blatantly, blankly at Mariko. "That's all very good, but can I go outside and play now? It's nice out. And this place is boring. Mom'll send Henry soon enough." Henry, ah... he was the nice one. He used to be a chauffeur but when he got to the age of sixty, he became the babysitter. He was sweet and always played with her, even when she was demanding to play silly games that even her sister didn't want to participate in.

She glanced over to the man then and tilted her head to the side. "Please unhook all these machines so I can go out now. I promise to stay in the courtyard." Eh. Maybe she would stay in the courtyard.

Of course she couldn't know that her parents were never coming. Neither could they. Nor could they know that Henry had died of a heart attack three years ago after being let go when she was put into the hospital. She thought everything was fine and dandy. Hell she thought she couldn't be more than nine years old. What a predicament.

"Well, you can't go outside until we make sure everything's fine at least...Please be patient for a little while longer, your doctor should be here soon." Mariko fidgeted awkwardly, tucking her hair behind her ear once more. In front of patients she found herself nervous. It was an odd appearance considering how stern she was with Isaac. But it was mostly her comfort around him; as quirky as he was she had grown to care for him a lot. The man in question was ignoring her now, of course. He had pretty good tunnel vision.

Her eyes flicking towards the door and hoping for some activity, she mulled over what the girl was saying as she found herself faced with none. Henry? Well, she didn't know anything about this girl's past, but if this had lasted as long as she could guess from the neglected chart, state of things had changed quite a bit.

Searching for something to keep her from staring back at Sita uncomfortably, she scanned the sheets in her hand once more. Her eyes moved over the scratches without really reading anything before she picked up something she hadn't seen before.

"Oh...So you're sixteen now but when did the coma start...?" She said to herself, after deciphering the chicken-scratch birth date and doing a bit of mental math. The question of how old Sita was mentally had gone unanswered, even as she flipped through once more. "Meh. I hope that doctor gets here soon, I can't read any of this..." She sighed out.

"Sixteen... what are you talking about?" The proper speech pattern had faded again, masked by her surprise of the woman's statement. That was impossible, wasn't it? She felt like she had just woken up from a nap. How could that be? "No. I'm eight. Well you said sleeping so maybe nine.. I don't know if it's been my birthday yet... Ooh! If I miss the cake, I'll be cross."

Her eyes remained on the woman's face, the woman who was refusing to look at her. Why were all adults like that anyways? Rude, considering the fact that they always corrected your mannerisms. "Ah, hello," The uncomfortable air was disturbed as the doctor slipped in through the door. "I see you've finally woken, dear. When I started working here you were sleeping right there... you've grown a lot since then." The cheery older woman smiled brightly and took the chart carefully from Mariko's hands, nodding politely before she walked to the bedside. She pulled out a little pen light and held the girl's chin, instructing her to follow the light. Sita complied, not knowing what else to do because... well the information was too much to take all at once.

"Where are my parents?" Sita demanded after the doctor put away the light. The old woman's hands gently moved to her temples, putting slight pressure there before she grabbed her stethoscope. "My sister... Henry. I want to go home. Right now. I hate the hospital." She was starting to get worked up and it showed, her chest was moving erratically as her breathing became laboured.

The doctor sighed softly. "Language." She noted, but she could understand it so she still replied to the freaked out girls questions. "We called several times since this kind young lady alerted us to your condition, however there has been no reply. We'll continue trying but for now you'll just have to stay here."

Sita scowled, "I refuse to stay here."