damned_institute | Day 56: Intercom, Late Evening

Despite the rough start and the heavier snowfall, the buses managed to stay on route and on schedule. With minutes to spare, they arrived at the gates of Landel's Institute, back to the waiting arms of the military. All pretenses seemed to drop at this point, and the soldiers again took on their patented gruff exteriors. Patients were filed out of the buses in an orderly manner, eventually being escorted to their rooms for dinner in much the same. There, as promised by the personnel, well-behaved patients found their purchases among their returned possessions. A few even found new faces, though whether they brought as much joy as bought goods remained unseen.

The woman manning the intercom seemed to have missed the notice about the day's trip as her announcement remained no different from the usual. "Attention all subjects and personnel," she said. "Lights Out will commence within the hour."

A pause.

"I repeat, Lights Out will commence within the hour. All personnel: please report to your stations. The General will begin his address once preparations are underway. Thank you."

The intercom clicked off.

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Rose blinked in surprise when another woman was escorted into the room without any explanation. Well. That explained the second bed, didn't it? She sat up, offering the woman a friendly smile and shrugged.

"Hello," she greeted back, tilting her head to the side as she studied the woman inquisitively. "No, I haven't seen anyone else here besides you and the guard who brought me in," she added, her tone apologetic. "Should I have?" She was pretty sure she would have noticed someone with blue hair.

"I'm Rose, by the way. New here, just to get that out of the way. I haven't seen many people yet." Luckily she'd known a few that she had seen, for all the good it did her when they didn't know her back. As for the strangers she'd encountered, it seemed to be hit or miss when it came to people willing to talk or those who'd prefer to snarl and snap at her.

Senna had mentioned that several of her friends had disappeared. Taken together with Maya's conversation with Gren this morning and Maya's inability to find Senna in the town, it was looking likely that Senna had gone missing as early as last night.

"It's okay," she answered, distracted, as she took a seat. "Simply clearing up a little mystery." Now where had Gren said he'd been taken? She'd neglected to ask. Quite the egregious misstep—but then, she hadn't wanted to provoke Gren into feeling worse, either. Had that been a mistake? She knew not.

The general's sense of humor, perhaps, to force such a dilemma. Especially as she learned her new roommate's name. Quite a coincidence otherwise, was it not? She must applaud his brilliance if she would be lucky enough to acquire an audience with him, and then stand back as the rest of the patients had at him.

Enough. That path of thinking lead her nowhere. She had no way of knowing that it was not, indeed, mere coincidence, or that he was responsible for anything other than taking Senna away. Paranoia was quite the thing they would like to sow, she'd imagine—especially taking their divisive tactics the morning yesterday into account. "I'm Maya," she responded. She hesitated a moment, then added, "Have you a weapon?"

Pushing herself up into a sitting position, Rose curled her legs under her and got more comfortable, though she looked a little caught off guard by the question.

"A weapon? For tonight, you mean? No. I don't. Is that a problem?" she asked, her brow furrowing slightly in thought. It wasn't as if she usually needed a weapon. She tended to take whatever was handy and use it - superior strength and speed made this the most handy, after all.

Although, considering their location, she wondered what everyone else did. And exactly how limited her strength and speed actually were now. She'd have to test that tonight.

"With how closely everyone's guarded and hauled around here, how do you even find and hide a weapon? I can't imagine the guards overlook things like that very often," she mused, glancing over at Maya curiously. This place just kept providing her more and more questions, and not nearly enough answers.

Is that a problem, indeed. In truth, someone who wasn't trained in the weapon in question likely wouldn't find it too useful—Maya only had one in case she couldn't dodge for whatever reason—but one hardly had to be skilled to swing something around to buy time, even if only for a few moments. And a pipe was hardly a 'skilled weapon.' "It depends," Maya answered. It depended on quite a number of things, but for now, the simple ones— "On your fighting style, and on what is attacking, yes?"

Whether or not it hurt to be slightly more prepared was not an easy question to surmise the answer to—Maya had not yet seen hide nor hair of the supposed monsters, unless that word was a euphemism for the patients getting taken away at night for experiments.

... That put a new spin on the matter. Easily confirmed, if she could but seek out someone in the morning, so, making a mental note to do that, Maya moved on to the next concern. "We receive them after dinner. —No, receive them back is more apt." Maya hadn't been given it, after all; she had taken it. "They are confiscated for the day. Nights are set apart for so-called testing by the good general, it seems." Hopefully, that news wasn't a shock. Maya stopped there, to let it sink in.

"When the... whatever they are, are set lose," Rose nodded in understanding, filing this information away thoughtfully. "I don't usually carry weapons, I've never really needed to in the past, but I've been warned rules are different here."

Maya's amendment had her piecing together more information, as well. "So the things we find, the things we need, we only have access to them after dark and during the day, everything goes back to... what, some weird mockery of normalcy? Not that anything about this place seems very normal," she countered herself, sighing. And she'd thought things back in Mystic Falls had been complicated...

Another thought occurred to her and she glanced up, looking puzzled for a moment. "Do people find actual weapons here? Somewhere? Or just things that can be used as weapons, if they stumble across something sturdy?"

"That's right," Maya answered. "Makes it easy to pretend you'd just dreamt the night, doesn't it? Recurring dream as a result of mental ill-health, perhaps?" Who would believe asylum patients if the asylum looked perfectly respectable? Most people wanted little enough to do with asylums as it was.

As for actual weapons... Senna had had at least one. "As far as I know, weapons can't simply be found. How weapons come to be, I do not know." Short of encountering someone at night who held a weapon, or asking all her interlocutors if they had one, Maya couldn't know, and Rose's confusion about what constituted a weapon made it apparent that uncovering this little mystery had more steps than it seemed to. However, there was no weapon Maya was skilled in to begin with. It would just be waste. "What are you thinking of? Perhaps we can find you one."

"Clever," Rose drawled softly, her fingers absently running over the ring on her finger as she thought for a moment. "They've certainly taken an impressive amount of precautions in what they're doing here, I'll give them that. Then again, I doubt I'll be as complimentary come morning, if tonight's all everyone's claimed it to be."

Rose shook her head at the question of weapons. "I'm honestly not used to any one in particular. I tend to, ah, use whatever's at hand usually. Not sure how that will work here, of course, with as careful as they are. It's hard to guess when I don't know exactly what's out there and what I'd need. I'll probably poke around a little tonight and see for myself. I admit, it's still a little hard to believe."

Although trying to imagine Stefan fighting off a giant vengeful squirrel was still rather amusing, no matter how she looked at it. She was a terrible person.

Day 56: Intercom, Late Evening

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