Day 60: Music Room (Fourth Shift)

[norainu]

It wasn't often that Renji felt less like punching people in general as his day wore on. This was a new experience for him. A not unwelcome one, if he was being honest. And the fact that he felt less like punching Fai? Kind of mind-blowing. The sort of thing Zen masters would probably use as a kouan to reach an all-new level of non-punching enlightenment.

So he was back from the dead, almost everyone he'd known was gone, and yet bizarrely his day felt like it was looking up. Kind of. Renji wasn't sure what to make of this. Maybe his grumpy meter was just nearing empty. That was as good an explanation as the next, considering how this place made him feel.

Whatever the reason, he ended up in the music room. And he remembered oh yeah. He'd always kind of hated this damn shift. He grabbed a little book of music and a drum and retreated quickly to the far end of the room. He put the drum down in front of him just so he looked like he was doing something and opened the book. But he had no idea how to read music, and really, he was more interested in the ongoing puzzle of what the hell had happened in the last four weeks.

And brooding. Of course. There was always brooding to be done.

[Okay Tolten, let me lay it out for you. When there's a mommy and a daddy... or sometimes a daddy and a dadddy. Or, hell, sometimes a mommy and a mommy if you buy the right kind of wood cuts (and a third mommy if you go to just the right shop)... but anyway when they love each other very much, or at least a suitably large amount of money changes hands, there are some things that happen...]

Comments

[toxicspiderman]

"Yeah." That came out a little heavier than he'd intended, as 'rotate' could mean disappear or it could mean splattered across a hallway. And dead didn't always mean dead. Sometimes it meant nothing. Or zombies.

"You didn't mention that you'd been hit." Guybrush was more bandage than skin. With the way he was moving, that held for everything under the clothes too.

[threepwood]

"Compared to what else happened, I'm feeling lucky I got away with only a scratch." Scratch being a massive understatement, given the bandages that encompassed his back and the stitches he could feel in his skin there. The claws had barely grazed the backs of his arms- enough to have wrappings of their own, but nothing life-altering. That blow was taken by the inspector.

He looked over his shoulder again, the nurse giving him a nod. He finally had a seat in the floor, his legs still feeling as restless as his mind in spite of the pangs that ran up and down his back. A sigh pushed through him. So much for being a hero protagonist.

[toxicspiderman]

Enough depressing talk.  Time for an abrupt change in subject.  "What's it like, being a pirate?"  Idle chit-chat, but it had two advantages.  One, almost everyone would talk about work.  Bitching or lecturing, either would get them off the death-and-torture grind.  Two, he was curious.

Real pirates these days had machine guns and cocaine instead of gold coins.  Their historical versions had likely been just as ugly.  Guybrush, in contrast, talked like he'd walked off a Disney ride.  Though he hadn't started singing.  Not Disney.  

"I miss the water, man."  He usually found an excuse at least once a week to head down to the Harbor.  With Project Lobster in court rather than in the lab, he was sticking closer to shore, but the was always another corporate asshole opening its sphincter into water some people assumed was past saving.  Not so.  Sangamon Taylor said so, and word had gotten around at exactly who had taken Basco down.  

Sometimes just his name  was enough, and one company had clearly gotten their hands on those new phones that listed the caller.  He'd switched to pay phones, when he actually needed to get a message through beyond I know what you're doing, and I'm coming for you bastards.

[threepwood]

Given the feverish pacing and the event that had caused said pacing, Guybrush was happy for the topic change. The less he thought about Javert bleeding in front of him, the clawed tentacles having raked across his body, tearing into his torso like a—

He shook his head, cutting off his own thoughts. Okay, that overactive imagination wasn't helping.

"Ah, the ocean," he said, putting that imagination of his to a better use. "The smell of the seawater, the thrill of adventure, the feeling of the deck below my feet as my ship rocks on the waves. It didn't matter what boat I was on, what quest I was facing, or how unpredictable the plot twist was; the sea was always there. When you're a pirate, the sea is your mistress, one you can always depend on."

There was a very brief pause. "But don't tell your wife that, because she might threaten to throw you overboard with a statuette tied to your leg so you can have all the time you want with your 'other lady.'"

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. laughed outright at that. Knee-slapping, tears-in-the-eyes, laughed. He'd never been dumped explicitly for loving the water more than her, but it had been a complicating factor in several moribund relationships. Whatever. They'd been more toxic than the Harbor, in retrospect. Or at least that's what he told himself.

When he'd finally gotten his breath back, he agreed. "Yeah. Debbie likes calling me on the radio on the boat. Makes her feel important." The water had only tried to kill her once, but that had made it a personal grudge. So he could be her crusader rather than her wandering rogue.

"Too much of a poison swamp out there now to get that -- friendly -- with the water." Most of it wouldn't kill you quickly, but it'd wind its way into every cell of your body and then pull the plug whenever a strand of DNA decided to play circuit breaker and flip over to cancer shutdown. "The fresh air is the best thing about this shithole of an Institute."

[threepwood]

"I'm having a hard time finding anything good about this place," Guybrush admitted, setting his elbow to his knee and leaning on his hand. He sat up again almost immediately, feeling the stitches in his back pull against his skin painfully. Just as he was almost recovered from his previous injuries, he gained a whole set of new ones. These came with scars far worse than any of the others.

So instead of leaning on his hand, he used it to count up just how awful the institute was. "The nurses are no good for conversations, the layout is obnoxious, the items I've found aren't just seemingly useless- I'm pretty sure they're actually useless! People keep disappearing or dying, whichever comes first. Oh, and they don't believe porcelain is a legitimate phobia."

He paused. "At least the good food is back?"

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. had earned real food by virtue of sticking it out in this dive for three weeks. But pointing that out would be rubbing glaze onto newly-thrown wounds. Or something.

"Porcelain? As in toilets, or a general hatred of fine china?" There were legitimate reasons to shy away from table dressing of dubious origin. Radioactive Fiestaware. Dioxin-laden paper plates. Styrofoam wouldn't kill you directly, its production would just leech away the ozone layer until they all died of skin cancer.

Bizarre phobias he couldn't fix. And acting like he agreed with the nurses would shipwreck the conversation. (Was it acting if it was an honest reaction? O.K., call it not acting like he ran into ceramiphobes every day.) He couldn't change the layout, either, but it had never been very confusing to him. "I do have a map, if that helps."