My impending arrival at the Pleasant Meadows Hospice was met with a level of fanfare that really didn't suit it. Either it.
There was, to be clear, nothing wrong with the place in a physical sense. There was actually a decent amount of well-tended greenery around, and though none of it was particularly exotic or exciting, that was very much on purpose. The decor was understated and obviously chosen with an eye for practicality as much as style, but there was a quiet dignity about it. And the building itself wasn't exactly an architectural or interior design masterpiece, but it did its job without just doing its job, and there were plenty of windows and open spaces.
All in all, Pleasant Meadows, as a physical location, lived up to the first part of its name reasonably well. There was a quiet, undisturbed, kind of grace to it that I honestly hadn't realised existed in Brockton Bay, for all that it was tremendously generic in a "here's where we keep the old people with a decent amount of money" sort of way.
Sadly, Pleasant Meadows wasn't a retirement home. In theory, it was a place of healing, a quiet sojourn where the sick and the injured could take some away from the hustle and bustle and everyday atrocities of Brockton Bay life to recover. For a fortunate few patients, that was what happened. Once upon a time, that had genuinely been the primary purpose of the facility.
But in this day and age, if you could afford Pleasant Meadows' prices and there was still hope you'd live through whatever it was you had, you wouldn't be at Pleasant Meadows. You'd be at home, or at an actual hospital, or out of the city entirely. Somewhere more familiar, or somewhere nicer still and farther away from Brockton Bay's many problems, or with considerably greater levels of medical treatment at least theoretically available.
In practice Pleasant Meadows was mostly just a place to die a little better than you otherwise would have. Quieter and more dignified than BBGH, conveniently located for relatives and loved ones to grab what time with the soon to be deceased they could, and with just enough medical expertise on hand to extend the timer a little longer or make sure somebody's passing was an easy one as needed or wanted.
A kind purpose, to be sure, but a somber one.
Pleasant Meadows served a worthy role, I have no doubt, and by all accounts they did it at least serviceably well. And when the city was rent asunder in a Tinkertech nightmare, they stepped up and provided what aid they could, free of charge. Even now, a considerable portion of their capacity was filled with Barracuda's victims. I won't judge them harshly.
But it was exactly the wrong sort of place for a media circus. There was a reason why it was picked to be the first place I visited on this tour, with the least amount of time for the information to potentially leak, and everyone on the PRT end had been told to keep this quiet until I was long done and gone. Presumably, Pleasant Meadows had done the same.
Clearly, though, the information had leaked somehow, because the media was here. Maybe it was on our end, maybe it was on theirs. The PRT ENE did have its problems in that regard, and while the Pleasant Meadows administration were the ones to request it be kept quiet in the first place there were an awful lot of people who they would have had to tell. Staff, patients, "surrogate decision makers", their lawyers, and I don't even know who else.
It might not even have been direct: I could think of at least one group that would like to see this go poorly in a very public fashion, and they were not to be underestimated in the spy game.
Not that the how of it really mattered. The secret was out, the media was here. The rest of us just had to live with it.
There weren't as many reporters as there were at my debut, fortunately. This crowd was smaller by roughly an order of magnitude. That was still more than enough to be a massive disturbance in a place like this, and judging by the looks on the staff's faces they weren't amenable to being turned away.
We weren't completely caught off guard, of course. It was a possibility that had been considered, albeit mostly on the hospice's end, and thanks to the marvels of modern communication devices we'd been warned en-route. There was a plan to deal with this, and it was working about as intended.
You see, in Pleasant Meadow's advertising, one feature held pride of place: a supposedly authentically Greek amphitheatre. In reality, it didn't serve much purpose a lot of the time: there wasn't much of a theatre scene in Brockton Bay even when the weather was nice enough to bring sick and dying people outside to see a play, and most of the patients weren't in a good state to enjoy one even when management managed to make it work. But it did make the place look a lot classier in the brochures.
More importantly, at least for my purposes, it was an open space that the staff were familiar with getting some of the patients to without disturbing the rest. It was far enough from the main building that the remaining patients shouldn't be bothered too much. And, crucially, it was a nice spring day in Brockton Bay, weather-wise.
The reporters could be sidelined to the area above the amphitheatre itself easily enough, while the patients could rest among the stands: there were plenty of places for beds and such among them. I could stand on the stage or walk among the rows as I saw fit. It was a good plan, for a backup, one that I will take exactly none of the credit for. That's all on the Pleasant Meadows people.
It still wasn't exactly ideal, of course, but "ideal" for this sort of thing is predicated on a certain level of privacy and considerably fewer interlopers. (And probably an entirely different paradigm in regards to patient concentration and the importance of mobility.)
It was as good as we were going to get at short notice.
The sun was shining, birds were singing, and the reporters were just out of earshot when Amy stopped me.
"Jacqueline," she whispered, "are you going to be okay? I know this has to be hard on you, especially after last time."
I smiled with more sincerity than I had before she asked: it was nice to see her show care.
"It's the patients I'm worried about, Amy. And maybe the staff. This was going to be hard enough for them before it became a media circus."
My smile took on a wry angle. "As long as we don't get interrupted by superpowered Nazis again, I'll be fine."
Somehow, that didn't seem anywhere near as funny as I hoped, but Amy accepted it nonetheless. She's nice like that. We walked not quite hand-in-hand, but still obviously close, into the arena and onto the stage as my aura flared and my skin turned to brass. Despite the intrusion of the press, it was a good start to my first deliberate, non-testing, non-emergency healing.
And then we got interrupted by superpowered Nazis again.
