damned_institute | Day 58: Sun Room (Fourth Shift)

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Day 58: Sun Room (Fourth Shift)

Peter's lunch meeting with Tear had gone far better than he could have even expected. It was a good thing that he wasn't the sort of person who judged by age, seeing how the girl had proved herself to be very capable despite the fact that she was only a teenager. Not that Peter would ever admit it out loud, but Tear was a lot more mature than his own niece. He could only assume that Tear's circumstances had forced that onto her, though, which was the downside to the whole thing.

Or maybe it had something to do with her being a healer. She'd probably seen a lot of horrific things in her life already, things that some other people would never experience. Then again, Claire had seen her own body mutilated, so personality might have something to do with it too.

Either way, they had a basic plan. He was going to try and look into safe areas while Tear was going to work on their alliance with Search and Rescue. He wasn't too worried about the latter, but the former might be a pipe dream. Seeing how he had no interest in playing with beads and glitter, Peter chose to remain in the Sun Room.

It didn't take him long to draft up a message with his question, and once he'd posted it up (covering a few other replies in the process, but at the end of the day the board was low on real estate) he went ahead and found himself a seat. This way he could keep a careful eye on the replies that he got.

While he had already agreed to meet with Max tonight, Peter realized that the earliest this paramedic group could get going was the following night anyway. That was something to aim for, at least. Even if it was just him and Tear taking care of things at first, that was a start.

[For Haruno Sakura.]

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Badd started. "I-I..." The straightforward answer was 'yes'. The answer that wouldn't get him picked up by the authorities in a more sane setting was a different story. He hadn't been thinking about the outside implications of old men staring at little girls...hadn't been thinking about much of anything, really. Her existence had interrupted his day so sharply that he was having trouble getting his noirness back on track.

"Aren't you awfully young to be here, Anise?" he finally managed after a few false started and stutters. "Is someone looking out for you?" There were noble people in this wretched place, but there weren't very many useful noble people.

You had people following Javert, a man who was a few centuries out of date and still considered himself elite enough to hold on to all the weapons and leave Badd out of the information loop. That spoke paragraphs about the judgment of the prisoners.

As the man stammered, Anise tilted her head to the side, growing more and more curious about his reaction. Finally, he managed to speak, and it became clear that he was worried about her, mostly because of her age.

"Young?" she echoed, tapping her chin with her finger. "Maybe, but it's not really my choice, is it?" Her smile returned. It was kind of a funny question, even if she understood what he meant.

"Don't worry!" she assured him, brightening. "I have some really strong friends here. And I've been here a pretty long time myself, so I know what to do to stay safe." Not that there was any way to be completely safe, but Anise was good at surviving, at least.

Badd's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "How long?" Must be some damned strong friends if they could protect her from both the guards and the more malicious of the older inmates. And...he'd been trying to avoid pondering the Institute's motives, too. It just turned his brain in knots and wasted time that could have been better spent figuring out how to destroy them. Still, a little girl? What use was that?

Badd tugged his little notebook out of his coat pocket and scribbled his room number down on the edge of a page while he waited for her answer. Even if Javert was on his bad list at the moment for general incompetence and reckless timetraveling he trusted the man to protect a child.

How long? That was a pretty good question. Anise looked down at one of her hands and started counting the weeks on her fingers. The easy way was to think of how many field trips she'd been on, which was... five? Oh, wow. It really was a long time...

"... Almost five weeks now, I think," she answered once she was pretty sure she'd done her math right. "Wow... I didn't think it was that long. Um, how long have you been here?" She guessed he wasn't totally new if he understood that this was a horrible place for a young girl to be... but he probably hadn't been around that long if he could still be shocked to see someone like Anise among the patients. In her long stay, Anise had even met kids smaller and younger than her... but that was a fact best kept to herself, she decided.

Badd gaped. "Five weeks?" He'd been expecting five days. Her protectors must have been pretty strong, or she actually had that survival instinct that most children her age seemed ot lack. Wow.

A little girl lives here five weeks and others never made it past five days. Must like the real world, Landel's was a fickle and unpredictable place.

He tore off the numbered corner and handed it to Anise. "Well, if you need any more help, this is my room number. My roommate is Javert, he's not that bright and a little backwards but he's a good guy too. If you come here at the beginning of the night we can protect you." It would have been nice to offer her one of his lollipops, to try and make her stay more comfortable, but if staring at her looked bad giving her candy would have gotten him beaten up by the general population. Kind of a shame the same techniques could get used by well-meaning cops and dangerous freaks.

Besides, he was planning to give half his stash to Byrne tonight. He'd meant to hold a few back for bribe purposes and personal satisfaction, but his partner needed them far more than he did.

Anise couldn't blame the guy for his reaction. She nodded to confirm that he hadn't misheard, then started to braid the other half of her hair.

She had to stop for a moment to accept the scrap of paper, but when she saw the room number and heard the man's offer of protection, her face lit up with a bright smile. "You mean it? Thank you!" The paper was given another glance, then placed in her pocket so that she wouldn't lose it. "Don't be afraid to ask me for help too, okay? I've picked up a lot of stuff over the weeks! Like information and supplies. - Oh, I have some spare first aid supplies right now, actually. If you want some, you just have to ask!"

And speaking of asking, there was one little question that Anise wanted to ask. "Come to think of it, I don't think I got your name."

That was cute. A little kid offering him aid. On the other hand, little girls tended to have sharp eyes, big ears, and a tendency to have people ignore their presence.

"Tyrell Badd." It would be 'Detective' six months ago. A policeman, a symbol of protection and safety, someone to look up to. Now he was just as untrustworthy as any civilian. Badd hoped no one less savory tried Badd's technique. "The first aid's nice, but the information would be even more useful." He forced a paternal smile--being nice was hard, especially on a day like this. "You must be a pretty sharp kid to have lived this long. I'm a bit newer...anything you could give me would help."

Especially about the rooms upstairs. Badd had learned valuable information about them last night...he'd just learned it far too late.

"Badd? That's a pretty funny name," Anise commented with a small giggle. He really didn't seem like a bad guy to her, especially if he was offering to protect her. But people usually didn't get to choose their names, did they?

"I don't mind sharing! What kind of information are you interested in?" The nice thing about sharing information was that it was free on Anise's end, but it was hard to know where to begin with that kind of stuff. "Like, I could tell you about major stuff that's happened here, or about hard-to-reach places, or where to find things, or what to be careful of. All of that kind of stuff!" She was like a cute little encyclopedia, in a way - except that there were a few things she either wouldn't or couldn't talk about.

Badd flashed back to that bizarre discussion he'd read on the bulletin board regarding the basement. Supposedly a dangerous place...but you put the most danger in the place you wanted to keep people out of. If Aguilar had guards or monsters down there it was for a reason.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I've heard a little talk about a downstairs area, or a basement. Do you know anything about that?" A sane builder would put the stairs to one level at the same place as the stairs to another level. A builder wanting to hide something would put the stairs to the more important places somewhere the prisoners couldn't get at.

And yet someone had. Why wouldn't they share that information with the class? Probably the same paranoia that had kept Javert and his friends so quiet.

As soon as the basement was mentioned, Anise's smile faded. Of all the things to ask about... Maybe it made sense that lots of people were curious about the basement, but that worried Anise more than anything. She didn't want more people to go and experience what she'd been through... Going through those trials meant dying, or killing a friend, or watching a friend die! She wouldn't wish those things on anyone.

"Y, yeah, I know about it," she replied, her voice quieter and more cautious now. "I can't say a lot about it, but it's really dangerous and... horrible, in a lot of ways." She was being careful not to trigger that mental block that would stop her from relaying the most important details to Badd. It didn't hurt or anything, but it was kind of scary to be stopped mid-sentence by an unknown force, so she wanted to avoid it.

There was a bit of a pause as she hesitated to ask her next question. "Um... you weren't thinking of going there, were you?"

Couldn't say a lot about it, hm? Was someone threatening her? She'd been so eager to talk a few minutes ago. Aguilar might have been threatening them into silence, an easy trick to pull on a young girl with little ability to defend herself, but on everyone? It only aroused Badd's curiosity further.

He tried not to be overbearing in his demeanor, and to ask questions in a polite and friendly fashion. This wasn't a suspect he was trying to intimidate. "Maybe. Have you been down there? Where are the stairs? And what's in the basement that Aguilar wants to protect so badly?" He seemed happy to let everyone scamper where they pleased during the night. Badd had only rarely found doors locked or barred to him, and one was for an active torture session.

"You can't!" Anise blurted out, panic in her voice. Even if it was just a 'maybe', she didn't want Badd to even consider doing something that dangerous. It wasn't just a risk, it was certain death!

She calmed down after a moment, and tried to explain. "I've been there. It's... not like the rest of the institute." Damn it, how could she warn him when she couldn't tell him what she wanted to warn him about? "I'd tell you everything if I could, but I can't. Just believe me when I say you shouldn't try to go there, okay?"

She was worried that it sounded like she was holding back information on purpose, but Anise was doing her best to warn him. Aside from that, there was one other question he asked, one that Anise could partially answer.

"I don't think they're protecting anything... I think they want people to find what's down there. They want to make us jump through hoops just to show them that we can... That kind of thing." The Head Doctor had treated the whole thing like a show for his own pleasure, so that was the impression Anise had about the whole basement. Maybe her current struggles would turn out to be a big, twisted joke of his, too.

Interesting. Badd had assumed conspiracy, since assuming the worst of people would do you well nine times out of ten, but with the way Anise was talking maybe they really were trying to warn people off.

Badd unconsciously set his teeth on the end of his pen, in lieu of lollipop. If she wasn't going to talk, he could extrapolate out loud and watch her face to see what statements managed a hit. "So what's down there...it's something more for his experiments. Something he wants us to find but not to know about before we find it, because then we wouldn't want anything to do with it. So it is dangerous. Is it Aguilar keeping you from talking about it?"

Which brought into the question of why Aguilar would even let them say that it was dangerous. With this many people doomsaying about the basement it would ensure that nobody would even go looking for the stairs...except him, Badd thought with some bitter amusement. But he was deliberately looking for where Aguilar had posted trouble. Hopefully the rest of the civilians would understand to keep themselves out of danger.

It looked like he wasn't going to accuse her of lying. That allowed Anise to relax a little, and she finished her last braid, tying it with her other ribbon. She nodded at Badd's statements, confirming that he basically had the right idea.

Her eyes widened a little when asked if it was Aguilar keeping her quiet, and she looked up at the glass ceiling as she thought. After a few moments, her gaze came back down to meet Badd's. "I don't really know," she answered honestly. "I just know that when I try to tell people about what happened, my head goes blank and my mouth won't move."

Anise hoped that didn't sound too crazy... but when she thought about what she just said, she realized it could sound like she was traumatized in a way that made her unable to talk. "And it's not just me," she abruptly added to clarify. "Everyone else who was there said they had the same problem."

"Interesting..." Badd curled his tongue around the lollipop surrogate that his pen had become and sucked it further into his mouth. Some kind of mental censor bar. That'd explain everything very neatly. If the Institute could brainwash patients into being subservient pawns it made sense he could alter them to prevent them talking. If that was how brainwashing worked, anything went in this damn place. If it also applied to writing it would explain why everyone was being so dodgy on the bulletin. Even if they desperately wanted to explain they'd just wind up getting spasming hands or limp fingers.

Badd was silent as he tried to formulate his question properly. When he'd finally put his edged question together he spoke slowly and clearly, making sure Anise would be able to catch any loopholes he might have left her. "If there was anything down there that might hurt the Institute or expose one of its secrets, something that would be useful if I was willing to put up with the danger, would you be able to tell me?"

If there was nothing, she would surely be able to tell him about what was not down there. And if there was something, she wouldn't be able to tell him about it...but she could tell him that she wasn't able to talk about it. And that itself would be a hint.

It sounded like he believed her. It had been easy to convince a good friend like Luke about her literal inability to talk on the subject, but Anise thought it might be harder for strangers to believe something like that. In any case, she was glad he wasn't arguing with her or anything.

She watched Badd as he asked his next question, one that he seemed to put a lot of thought into. Anise wasn't too sure if her answer would be helpful, but she'd give it a try. "I don't really know that, either. I didn't find anything like that down there... but if I did, they'd probably try to keep me quiet about it." Unless they wanted her to be able to give people incentive to put themselves in danger... That was possible too.

Badd had known of fourteen year old girls who were liars...worse than liars, if the sordid details of the Dahlia Hawthorne murders were to be believed. But he liked to think girls like that were rare and Anise seemed eager to please. Sharp and quick on her feet, if she'd survived over a month here, but still carried herself with childish sweetness. It was comforting to know that the Institute hadn't scarred her beyond the simple pleasures of braiding her hair.

The walls turned sickly cream. He was leaning on the wall of Cece's hotel room again, with blood streaming from the gunshot wound on his thigh. The other cops were still trying to get him to leave for the hospital but he shoved their hands away. Of course they couldn't handle it on their own. Look how they'd handled it now. The gunshots had just been a distraction to draw them away from her room and let the real assassin work. Idiots, idiots!

Badd limped around the corner to the bathroom. He knew he'd find her body there. The other cop's face had told him it was already over. It didn't make it any easier to see her splayed out on the floor like a discarded doll, her chest stained scarlet and the soft flesh of her throat torn open by a sharp blade. Badd tried to keep it together, to focus on the details of her wounds and positioning or what the setting might tell him about the case. He couldn't get caught up in the victim. He couldn't let the shock get to him. That wasn't what good detectives did.

Badd slowly slid down the wall as the pain from his leg forced him off his feet. Dimly, he could hear the sound of barked orders and crackling walkie-talkies around him as the other cops scrambled to cope. The whole world was fuzzy except for Cece, staring at him with unseeing eyes, her blood already congealing on the pale tile as his own blood continued to seep through his clenched fingers.

He'd promised to keep her safe, and he'd failed.

Badd blinked again and the room was gone. Another flashback. The worst of them yet, but he knew what it had all been building to. He shut his eyes and drew in a deep, shuddering breath, willing his hand to unclench from his thigh and the pained expression to leave his face. She was dead, and her killer was dead, and the man who'd ordered her death would be executed soon if he hadn't already been sent swinging. The criminals she had given her life to expose had been brought to justice. No more tears for Cece Yew. Now he needed to fight for the living.

Anise fidgeted with her hair as she waited for Badd to reply, or to give a follow-up question... but the man was silent. Thinking he might have been deep in thought, Anise just continued to play with the ends of her braids... but then she saw the man's face contort as if in pain, and his hand clutch his leg. Anise quickly straightened her body, her feet sliding off the seat as she leaned in, watching the man with concern.

"H-hey, are you okay?" There was alarm in her voice, but she tried to keep from raising it too much. It was possible that he didn't want the soldiers' attention. He didn't seem as spaced out as he did a moment ago, but it was hard to tell if he was really okay or not. And he was grabbing his leg a moment ago... "Are you hurt somewhere?"

Damn, the kid had seen him trip out, hadn't she? At least he hadn't actually acted the memory out or he'd really have made a fool of himself. "No. I'm fine. It's fine," Badd said, shaking his head and raising a hand to stop her. "I'm not hurt anywhere. Just...thinking about a few things."

Hopefully it wouldn't happen again now that the little drama had hit its climax. Beyond that moment Badd himself wasn't that clear on what happened. There had been more bleeding, and an ambulance, and he'd woken up at the hospital, nothing he hadn't done before. It was all just memories anyway. Vivid and hallucinated ones, but he'd coped with them before.

"You didn't take any of those drugs last night, did you?" Badd asked, struck by a sudden concern. If he'd been stupid enough for it...

At Badd's reassurance, Anise's worried look softened, but didn't fully fade. She could maybe believe that he wasn't injured, but he really didn't look fine. Just thinking usually didn't make people react like that.

Her expression shifted into a more puzzled look when he asked her about the drugs. "Huh? No, I didn't..." A second passed as she tried to guess at why he'd ask that so suddenly, and when it hit her, her eyes widened. "Wait, did you...!?"

If it turned out that her suspicion was right, Anise wouldn't be able to scold the man or anything, though. Her exploration of the basement was just as dangerous, if not moreso. In the end, it was a choice between doing nothing, following the Head Doctor's lead, or following the military's lead. There wasn't a single good choice to be made.

Badd gave a short, jerky nod. "It wasn't the brightest thing I've ever done," he said, looking away sheepishly. He felt far more comfortable admitting his weaknesses to Anise than he would to a man nearer to his own age. Children saw you on pedestals, adults were always searching for the chinks in your armor. "But I didn't come off as bad as some. The guy with me...heh. If I hadn't thought I was hallucinating about him too, I might have tried to hurt him. He turned into one of the monsters."

You really had to pity the guy. There was no way to recover your dignity from turning into a gigantic sheep, even if the actual result had been genuinely horrific. At least he'd managed to keep his mind intact during the process. It was probably far more traumatic for him, but it meant he was able to keep himself under control. If he'd tried to attack Badd, Badd would have done what he had to and finally put his paper cutter to good use.

Since Anise wasn't really doing any better at keeping herself out of risky situations, she just nodded quietly as Badd confirmed her guess. She felt pretty bad for the guy. Whatever he was hallucinating, it looked seriously bad. All she could really do was hope that the effects would go away soon...

When he mentioned another guy who turned into a monster, Anise's lips tightened into a thin line, but she did her best not to react too dramatically. She'd seen people turn into monsters before, and... well, it wasn't something that got easier to watch after seeing it a few times. "I read something like that on the bulletin... It sounds pretty scary." Bringing up horrific past experiences would just be depressing for both of them, so she left that part out.

The intercom sounded then, but rather than the usual type of announcement, it sounded like some military code was being used. Code 1-8...? "They're probably up to something weird again," she suggested, an uncertain look on her face. "I think we have to go to dinner now, though. Take care, okay?"

Badd gave her a gentle, uncharacteristic smile. He stood, leaning on the chair arm despite the fact that the false pain in his leg had long faded. "You take care too, Miss Anise. Thanks for the information. You...really brightened up my day."

The night was going to be nasty no matter what happened, and the next day little better. Getting his hopes up that anything good existed in this place was foolishness. But...she was alive. That was enough to settle the homicidal impulses for a few minutes.

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Day 58: Sun Room (Fourth Shift)

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