damned_institute | Day 59: Sun Room (4th Shift)

After an intercom broadcast like that, Kurogane felt somewhat better about the little information he'd gotten from Harrington the previous night. The man only sounded competent when he needed to but was an idiot otherwise. Unfortunately that was furthered proof of the General not employing the brightest of staff members, making another option for information closed to them.

Kurogane was again some steps ahead of his escort when he reached the Sun Room and ignored the soldier further as the ninja headed to look over the bulletin. Last time he'd missed something, and he wasn't about to have that happen a second time. With some searching he located Tsubaki's messages to others he didn't know but found nothing either written by the magician or addressed to him. That being the case, he left the board without any of his own writing and sought out a chair over a couch. If he didn't leave open a space by him, he had a better chance of being left alone. Or so he believed.

[free ~~bird!~~ bear]

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Indy nodded. "All right." He appreciated Dent's concern, but he knew enough to acknowledge it simply. Unlike Peter and Pilgrim, Dent wasn't the hugging type.

He'd been hoping Dent wouldn't have anything else to do, so he answered readily, "I went to the medical wing for the first time last night, but I got gassed before I could look around." Before it had opened, he'd been hoping they were keeping prisoners there (under the guise of "medical observation" or "treating injuries" or whatever Landel wanted to call it), but he didn't think so anymore--if there were something that major to find, everyone probably would've heard about it by now. "I don't know if there's anything worth our time there yet, but at least I can get there without too much trouble."

Even less trouble if someone who was actually armed was with him, unlike last night. How long would a wound like this take to heal, anyway? Outside, he couldn't even make a guess; in here, it might be...a week? Two? Longer than he could afford to spare. Indy fiddled with the edge of the bandage wrapped around his left hand, wondering what the burn looked like now. Probably still not pretty.

The medical wing, huh? Harvey was shocked to hear that Jones had made it anywhere last night, but he knew by now that the other man was tenacious. What stood out even more than any of that was the mention of gas, though, and Harvey dropped his chin into his hand as he thought it over. "Gas, huh? I think I may have gotten a small dose of that myself." The effects were completely gone by now -- they had been by the end of breakfast -- but that had all seemed surprisingly random.

"Hopefully we won't have to deal with it again." Most of things that tended to happen here were one-night deals, but it might also mean that they would have something worse to contend with this time around. Still, the medical wing was easy enough to get to (no stairs involved) and Harvey hadn't seen it before, so he saw no reason to reject the idea.

"But all right, that works for me. Where did you want to meet?" Outside of that block was usually the place, but just this once he was going to go with whatever Jones found easiest. Harvey was the one who had two strong legs to walk on, and he didn't mind being the one less injured for once. His permanent burn wounds usually had him starting at a disadvantage, but here was one time that someone was worse off. The reason behind Jones' injuries wasn't something he wanted to think too hard on, though.

"So did Peter and Scott. It must've been all over." Nice to know whoever was working the switches didn't just have it in for him personally. Indy hoped it wasn't going to become a trend. The pain, and the accompanying feeling of panic as his throat had closed up, were still fresh in his mind.

He was privately relieved that Dent had said yes. "Same as usual. The hall outside the men's block, right before you get to the main hall." He could get that far easily, but he'd be smart not to go much farther alone.

So he, Peter, Scott, and Jones had all had to deal with this gas. Was it possible that Sangamon and Depth Charge had been exposed to it as well, or had it just been a coincidence that four out of the six of them had come across it? Harvey usually wasn't a conspiracy theorist, but in this case he couldn't help but wonder. Their situation was basically begging for it, anyway.

But as expected, Harvey was just going to have to go a little south of his block (the same direction he needed to go anyway) to meet up with Jones. This whole thing felt so regular, except for the fact that Jones was possibly going to be a wheelchair (or maybe on crutches, if he was lucky) this time around. "Works for me," he said with a roll of his shoulders.

And now he had to ask the one question that had been plaguing him this whole time. "So where did you wake up, and how?" He found it hard to believe that the man had just come to in his room like normal.

Indy raised an eyebrow, wondering if Dent really wanted to know, but he barreled on anyway. "The morgue. Had to kick my way out of one of the cabinets." When he put it that way, he supposed it sounded sort of tough, like a feat that might make one of the movies. Having been through it, Indy had a harder time viewing it in a positive light. "The worst part was having to get back downstairs with just a bedsheet, though."

That was enough to answer the question, but he also felt that didn't really cover it. "It didn't feel like anything," he confessed after a minute, needing to talk about it to someone, even if only briefly. "I remember feeling cold, and then the pain came back. That was it. Waking up this morning wasn't much different."

That bothered him, on some fundamental level. If he had been dead--and everyone he talked to seemed as sure of it as Indy himself had been--then his coming back was...hell, he didn't even have the words for it. (Unholy, was what instinct suggested it was, because Indy certainly wouldn't accuse Landel's people of performing miracles.) It seemed wrong that something so momentous hadn't felt that way at all.

Suddenly Indy could empathize with Willie. As irritating as her wails of "I want to go hooome!" had been back there, this was one of the first times in his life when he could really relate to the desire to get the hell back to where you were from, where nothing inexplicable happened. Half the time he was hard-put even to get anyone to listen to his stories about how he'd recovered artifacts--no one would buy this one. If he ever made it back to tell it to them.

It was as he'd guessed, then. Jones had woken up in the morgue. Having seen the room himself, Harvey could conjure up a pretty good mental image of what that had been like. Not that he could even guess at how it felt to wake up from being dead, but just the thought of Jones having to kick one of those drawers open and pull himself out of it made him feel slightly cold.

At least Harvey knew now. If this somehow happened again -- to someone he gave a crap about, anyway -- he'd at least realize that he could go search for them up there and see if the whole thing had been a joke from the start.

But then Jones gave some insight into what it had been like to be dead, at least temporarily. Harvey wasn't surprised to hear that there had been nothing at all. Granted, getting confirmation that there was no afterlife probably should have counted as a big deal. Harvey was already pessimistic enough to have assumed it, though.

"Well, I guess I'll know what I'm in for when my time comes." The comment was morbid, but this whole discussion was, so he was just adhering to that. He sighed and glanced off, wondering if there was anything else he could say. Consoling people wasn't his forte at this point, and he didn't think that Jones particularly wanted it from him anyway.

"How'd Peter deal with seeing you again?" The question came out before he'd fully realized that he'd had the thought.

Day 59: Sun Room (4th Shift)

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