damned_institute | Day 71: Arts and Crafts (4th Shift)

Entry tags:

edward elric,
lloyd

Day 71: Arts and Crafts (4th Shift)

When Kratos's nurse led him out of the Arts and Crafts room, Lloyd decided to hang back and stay in his seat. The conversation they'd had had left him feeling strung out and he didn't feel like seeking anyone out to talk about anything. Poking through the craft supplies appealed more to him now that his mind wasn't snarled in shock and denial over what the nurse had tried to tell him. Oh, his mind was still a mess of turmoil, but as aggravating as Kratos could be, the conversation had helped.

So did the fact that tonight they had a plan. Shoving everything else aside, Lloyd tried to focus on that. He'd need to move fast tonight, to find enough metal for Al to make into a sword, then meet back up with Kratos. As his hands absentmindedly played with the crafts, he let his mind work through the best places he could look for metal. Maybe that room where Tsurugi had found that crowbar...

At one point while Lloyd worked, someone came into the room and handed him a list of radio numbers, which Lloyd was more than happy to add his own name and number to. He passed it on to someone else after that, then went back to his plans.

[Free.]

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This shift, Ed's been dragged into the Arts and Crafts room, due to the nurse's reasoning that he should let his creative side produce some sort of artwork, which got an eyeroll from him.

He ignored all of the assorted supplies and headed over to Lloyd instead. "I wish they'd stop trying to get me to do shit I'm not interested in," he said as he plopped in a seat near him.

Lloyd glanced up from his work - a house of popcicle sticks, paper, and dried noodles - when Ed dropped down into a seat at his table. Ed looked about as happy to be in the crafts room as Lloyd had when his nurse had first brought him here, but that could just as easily be from something else that had happened during the day as from the prospect of being in this room. Under normal circumstances, Lloyd might have defended one of his few favorite subjects, but circumstances had stopped being normal the day he'd come to this place. Even if he liked arts and crafts himself, even he didn't like it so much when he was forced into it and when the reasons were entirely fake.

"It could be worse," he said as a halfhearted attempt to placate Ed. "At least they leave us alone if it looks like we're doing something." He was just glad his nurse hadn't tried to talk to him about how his conversation with his father had gone.

"Trying to push me into doing something is kind of the fastest way to get me to not do it," Ed said as he gave the supplies on the table the stinkeye.

"You'd be surprised how much doing some crafts would help you, David," his nurse said from her watching post nearby.

That got to result in Ed audibly grinding his teeth.

Lloyd grimaced when the nurse spoke, an all too clear and not so subtle reminder that the nurses weren't standing so far away that they couldn't hear what the two boys said. "You could draw instead," he said, loud enough for the nurses to hear. Then he lowered his voice, not so much because he had something secret to say as because he just plain didn't want the nurses listening in on him. "It doesn't have to be any good. Just do something so they don't feel like they have to talk to us."

Ed gritted his teeth and pulled over some paper and crayons to himself to start drawing alchemy arrays. "They can feel free to send everybody home any time now."

Then he paused for a moment, remembering Scar and Lust. "Although there's some that would need somewhere else to go."

Home. If only. Unfortunately, Lloyd knew how unlikely that was. No, if they wanted to go home, they'd have to find a way themselves.

Ignoring the approving smile on his nurse's face as he sprinkled green-dyed rice on the glue he'd spread on some paper (a "lawn" for the house he'd built), he cast a half-curious look at what Ed was drawing - then blinked in surprise. Wow, he didn't think he'd ever seen someone draw circles that perfectly without something to use as a guide.

"What do you mean, somewhere else?" he asked, scooping up some of the rice that had missed the glue on the paper.

"A couple of people here are dead back home. Going home isn't really an option," he explained as he worked on a simple array.

That one done, he pushed the paper to the side and then started a more complicated one.

"Wait, what?" Lloyd stopped what he was doing and stared, rice in his hands completely forgotten. "What do you mean, they're dead? How can they be dead and be here?!"

Ed shrugged a bit. "They got brought back to life. I was pulled from the same day as one of them, so I didn't know that she had died until I got here and she told me."

"But- That's not possible!" Lloyd's voice rose as he protested, drawing a frown from his nurse he didn't see. "Once you're dead, that's it. You can't bring people back to life! She has to have it wrong. Maybe she just got knocked out."

Ed shook his head. "She betrayed the group she had been part of and the other one that was there didn't take it kindly. And the other from home died saving Al's life. Yet they're here anyway."

"But how?" That was the part Lloyd couldn't wrap his mind around. "How does someone just come back to life? Being dead is... being dead. The definition is that you can't come back."

Ed sighed and ran his left hand through his hair. "I don't know. But they wouldn't have come back at home."

"Is there any chance that they didn't completely die? Like, maybe their souls got stuck in something so they never completely left?" He'd seen Alicia's ghost, her soul trapped in her Exsphere until they'd broken it, and he knew Yggdrasill wanted to resurrect Martel by putting her soul in the body of a Chosen vessel. Maybe something like that was what was going on here.

"I know what happens to homunculii when they die because I've killed one. There's no coming back from that. And what the other did killed more than just him."

Ed pushed aside the current array and started another. "Anyway, he died again here to a monster and was back up and around a day or two later. Landel's figured out a way to bring people back."

A look of confusion flashed across Lloyd's face, and he eyed Ed for a moment, trying to guess if he'd make fun of Lloyd if Lloyd admitted that he didn't know what that word meant. Finally, he decided it was a risk he'd have to take. Maybe it would help this whole thing make sense, because nothing else was at this point.

"What's a hom- humancohli?" The unfamiliar word tripped off his tongue and landed awkwardly.

Then he finally spotted the look on his nurse's face, and he hastily reached for a crayon to draw on his paper with. Picking it up, though, was harder than he thought it would be - then it should have been. His fingers, tingling more now than they had been last shift, felt almost numb at the tips, making it hard to grip the crayon. It took him three tries before he was leaning forward and drawing with false earnestness. Damn, what was wrong with his hand?

"Are you serious?" he asked, lowering his voice again. "I mean, you know he died here? There's no way someone made a mistake?"

"Homunculii," Ed corrects. "That's the plural form. Singular is homunculus. They're created humans, basically. Takes a lot more to kill one than it does a human because they can heal a lot faster."

He frowns at Lloyd, noticing his problems. "Yeah. Everybody that knew him and knew about it were pretty damn certain and he was nowhere to be found my first day here, because he died the night before. And he confirmed it."

Lloyd couldn't help it. He stared at Ed again, crayon forgotten in his fingers for a moment. "How do you create a human?"

As the implications of Ed's certainty and what it meant sank in, Lloyd bit his lip, trying not to look at the nurses. Landel could bring them back from the dead? Was that good or bad? He'd always thought saving people from dying was a good thing, but... "Why would Landel do that?"

"I have no fucking clue," Ed said, answering the second question first. "As for the other, she isn't actually human, although she looks it."

"She's a... a human someone made, too?" It was still hard to wrap his mind around the concept. The idea of humans being made just felt against the order of the way things should be. Did someone stick a bunch of ingredients in a pot and... and bake them? Sew pieces together like a doll? Use magic to turn clay into human flesh? It felt like a story, one people only told little kids.

More seriously, though... He met Ed's eyes soberly. "If Landel can bring us back, does that mean we can't ever die?"

"Just because he can doesn't mean he will," Ed pointed out. "I'm not about to go testing that."

"I'm not going to either," Lloyd said. "But that means if Landel wanted, he could do whatever he wanted without worrying about killing us." And that was a terrifying thought. It meant their lives no longer had any kind of value to Landel, nothing to keep him from crossing a line and putting them through more than they could handle.

Ed shuddered at that. "Cheerful thought. Let's hope we didn't just give him ideas."

Ed mulled that over some more, his thoughts going along the same lines as Lloyd's. "I still want to know what the point of all this is."

It wasn't stated like a question, but Lloyd rolled it over in his thoughts anyway. He thought he had an idea, or at least a guess. "I think they might be trying to find ways to get stronger." He dragged the crayon across the paper, making a lopsided circle, then started filling it in to make a little blue lake. It was harder to do that than it should have been, too, his fingers barely registering the feel of the crayon. He tried not to let how much that worried him show. "They took me and... and everything they did was about the thing that makes me strong."

He looked down at his right hand, opening and closing a fist. "Great. I need to worry about them deciding to see how my limbs work. I don't think there's a way for them to work out how I do alchemy, since I'm perfectly willing to use it to attack and they probably know it."

Something about that threat made Lloyd's stomach turn uneasily. "You'd have to use it before they..." He trailed off, then scrubbed his free hand through his hair, frustrated because he didn't know what it was he was warning Ed about. "I don't know what they did, but they did something that made it so I couldn't do anything. It was like during the day here. Ed, I couldn't use my mana at all."

"Well, fuck." Now it's his turn for hair-scrubbing. "Are you okay after that?"

Was he okay? No, no he wasn't. Lloyd set the crayon down and flexed his hand, trying to work feeling back into the tips. It wasn't just that, though. It was the feeling of helplessness. He wasn't chained down, but he might as well be for all the fight he could put up right now. The nurses were there, monitoring him just as closely as the doctor had that night. His shoulders tensed.

"I'm... No." He couldn't bring himself to lie. "But I don't know how to fix what's wrong unless I can get my Key Crest back. I want my Exsphere, too, but I need my Key Crest the most." He glanced at Ed. Ed probably didn't know what those words meant. He held up his bandaged left hand for the other to see. "They took the metal plate and the stone I had on my hand the other night."

Edited 2013-06-26 00:57 (UTC)

Ed sucked in a breath. "Didn't you say that losing that shit is bad?"

No, he didn't know what those meant, but he does understand that not having them is Not Good.

Dammit, he'd been trying not to alarm Ed. He'd forgotten that he'd told Ed and Al about what happened when someone lost their Exsphere. Shaking his head, he reached to pull the bandage back, then thought better of it when his nurse caught his eye and gave him a worried, scolding motion. With a frustrated sigh, he let the bandage fall back into place.

"They gave me a different Exsphere. That's not the problem. The problem is that the Key Crest they gave me is a fake." And that thought still sent an anxious twist through his gut. "I'm not turning into a monster yet, but I don't know how long I've got. Or... or how long the other person has, either. The person whose Exsphere I have." Kratos. Another unpleasant flip in his gut. "They gave him something different, too."

"Do you know what's needed to make a real one?" Of course, given that Lloyd probably can't give him enough information on it, it's probably a useless question, but even still.

For what it was worth, Lloyd actually knew more about making a Key Crest than probably anyone who wasn't a dwarf or in Cruxis.

Unfortunately, Ed's right that it probably wasn't the kind of information an alchemist would need.

"You have to make it out of a kind of metal called inhibitor ore," Lloyd said. "If I even had a piece of that, and my tools, I could probably make a Crest that would at least do for now. I know enough about dwarven runes to carve the charm it needs." It would be a crude Key Crest, but something like that had been good enough for Presea. It had to be better than a fake Key Crest that didn't have the inhibiting properties it needed. "It would be better if a dwarf could make it, but I think it would be enough at least until we get out of here."

Edited 2013-06-26 13:03 (UTC)

Ed grimaced a bit. "Unfortunately, that's not really the information I need. That being the chemical make-up of the stuff so I can make some for you to use."

See what not studying chemistry gets you, Lloyd?

Lloyd frowned. "Chemical make-up?" he echoed, uncertain he fully understood what that even was. "How do you find something like that out?"

Makes that comment he once made to Genis about chemistry being the death of him a little more literal than he'd intended.

Ed debates if he really wants to answer that. "For me, through touching something so I can 'read' what it's made of. Makes my transmutations a lot faster and easier. And given that I often need to transmute on the fly during fights, that's a good thing.

"Anyway, there's chemistry involved for most normal people."

"So you couldn't figure it out unless we found some inhibitor ore first." At which point the problem would already be solved. He blew out a breath, scrubbing his face. "Damn."

He picked up the crayon, nearly dropping it again. Ugh, it was just as well he didn't really care about what he was drawing, or this would be really, really frustrating. "I don't know enough about chemistry to figure out anything like that. I'm..." He grimaced. "I'm not really good at science."

"Yeah. Which... yeah. Would provide something useful for me to know sometime in the future but the issue would have been solved. I'd still be useful for transmuting it into the proper shape if I knew what it was supposed to look like, though."

He rubbed at the back of his neck and looked down at the array that he started drawing but forgot about partway through. "Sounds like something you need to work on."

"Does it change anything when you, uh, read stuff like that?" It sounded weird to say it like that. Was it like reading a book for Ed? "I mean, if I found my Key Crest and let you look at it, you know, just in case, would it do any damage to it?" If it had been taken from him once, it could be taken again. It wouldn't hurt to have a backup plan.

He made a face at the suggestion, though. "You want me to study? Here?"

Ed shook his head. "Nah. It doesn't do anything to what I'm touching. Just as well, since it's something that's on all the time. Except for during the day here, obviously."

Now he raised an eyebrow at him. "What's wrong with studying?"

"Wait, so you're saying you know what everything's made of?" Lloyd gave him a startled look. "I mean, everything you've touched during the night or back in your own world?" He couldn't imagine knowing all that. Just the thought of it made his brain feel too full and he didn't actually know that stuff.

And speaking of knowing more stuff than he wanted... "Don't we have more important things to do? Besides, studying is boring."

Ed shrugged. "Kinda." Then he gave Lloyd a gimlet stare. "Guess how much use as an alchemist I'd be without studying?"

'Cause while the Gate stuffing a ton of stuff in his head helped a hell of a lot, he wouldn't have gotten to where he gave the Gate the chance without studying.

Somehow, in that moment, Lloyd felt like he was being glared at by his teacher. Cheeks turning slightly pink, he ducked his head defensively. "H-hey, it's not like I don't study at all. I just don't see what the point is to study here. I bet they don't give us any useful books anyway." Not that he'd actually set foot in the library even once since he'd been here.

Ed grimaced a bit. "I've been told that was the case, but I haven't had a chance to check for myself yet."

If there are useful books, he'll be all over them. But he intended to expect the worst.

That must have been the right thing to say, or at least not the wrong thing to say. But it looked like Ed was letting him off the hook. Lloyd released a silent sigh of relief.

"You could always ask, I guess," he said. "I can't think of any reason why the nurses wouldn't let you read."

"Yeah." He glanced back at where theirs was and looked back down at his forgotten drawing and starting working on it again. "I guess I'll do that tomorrow then, if nothing comes up."

"It's always good to expand your knowledge," Lloyd's nurse said, choosing that moment to approach the table. She smiled benignly, putting her hand on Lloyd's shoulder. "Just don't let it keep you boys from socializing with other people. Part of healing and overcoming your illness is having a healthy, balanced life.

"Now," she went on, "it's about time for dinner. I'm sure you two must be hungry! Why don't you start cleaning up your table so you'll be ready when it's time to go?"

Lloyd frowned, a mix of emotions rising up in response to the nurse's comment. On the one hand, he was just as glad no one was trying to push him into studying. On the other, her reasoning grated on him. He wasn't sick, and neither was Ed, he was sure about that. He didn't feel like arguing with the nurse right now, though. With a sigh, he started cleaning up his work.

"See you tomorrow, I guess?" He wanted to add that maybe he'd see Ed tonight, too, if he found enough metal for Al to work with, but it probably wasn't a good idea to say something like that in front of their nurses.

"Assuming we're even given the chance," Ed said as he tossed the crayon back in the direction of the bucket it came from and got the papers he drew on.

He was rather relieved that the nurse for him hadn't come over to touch him. He hated being touched by random strangers at the best of times, which this wasn't.

There was that. Lloyd glanced at the nurses, but neither one of them seemed inclined to reveal tomorrow's schedule. With a light shrug, he found a place to set his "house" aside to let it dry.

Then, even as his nurse started to usher him away, he lifted a hand toward Ed. "Good luck," he called out, figuring that was safe enough. The nurses didn't need to know that he was talking about the coming night.

"Yeah. You too," he said as he stood up and stretched. He's been sitting in one spot a tad bit too long.

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Day 71: Arts and Crafts (4th Shift)

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Now with correct journal!

I was wondering who that was in my inbox! XD

That was my Ed for Entranceway. I forgot I was still logged in as him.

Figured it was something like that.

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