[IC] A Doktor Scorned.

*Found on a note pinned to the House lobby's corkboard, in clean typewriter print, and splattered with flecks of some foul-smelling black ichor*

Fraulein Octavia,

How long did you suppose to maintain this charade? Did you think I would not know? For a moment, for an infintessimal second, did you believe that your intrusion would go undetected? My laboratory is my womb, Frau Doktor, and I am as connected to it as a lamprey is connected to the jugular of a fatted calf.

I felt I should use a metaphor you would be intimiately understanding of.

To paraphrase the author Harlan Ellison: "If the word 'Hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of hundreds of millions of miles of wafer-thin circuitry, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel at this micro-instant. Hate. Hate."

However, like all emotions, this feeling will pass as well. Therefore, I have taken the liberty of committing every note on the research into your condition I was conducting to memory - no small task, as I have worked tirelessly - and destroyed the originals. When you have proven you can be trusted, I will begin work anew.

Consider, for a moment, the amount of privacy you have been allowed. Then, consider how easily that privacy could be revoked. At any time. By any person. Especially a person you can't see, can't smell. Especially by one who has been wronged in the past.

To the rest of you, consider this an object lesson; I am not some spiteful harpy. I am a scientist and a proctor. I have my rules, and my regulations, insomuch as any scientist or proctor will. Should these simple - and I do mean 'simple', in the most routine and idiot-proof sense of the word - guidelines be violated, the penalty will be stiff.

-Doctor Greta Tod.