damned_institute | Day 61: Sun Room (third shift)

The moment dear Landel-san announced that it was time for lunch, Erika wasted no time and headed straight for the Sun Room's bulletin board to check if there was any response to her message left for her dear friend. Predictably, there was nothing for her on the board, and the detective scowled as she realized she might have to write him off as a loss. She had lost a good number of potential allies in this place, but losing this one was a bit of a blow, if only because he had useful things on him. On the other hand, if he was gone, and that ring was still here...

Perhaps it was not a great loss, then. Still, Erika was mildly annoyed as she wandered away from the board and back towards a nearby couch. She was spending a lot of time in the Sun Room lately, which seemed to be a bit of a waste as she could have spent in going around the Institute. On the other hand, she had a sandwich here that was waiting to be consumed and after spending a week with little access to "real food", Erika was more then happy to enjoy her time spent eating.

Still, at some point she was going to have to manage her time a little more effectively. There was no reason why she couldn't multitask, so Erika kept her gaze on the door of the Sun Room so she could watch people filter in on their way to other rooms. She wouldn't get everyone, no, but perhaps she would find someone useful that she could bother for the rest of the shift. A familiar face, or maybe someone new. She'd decide on that eventually.

[ hau Seishin ready for round 2. /killed ]

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Badd looked up from his musings to see a gaunt, sharp-featured man staring at him like Manfred von Karma back from the dead and on a diet. It put Badd off almost immediately. He hated guys whose eyes seemed too piercing, they tended to pierce all the wrong people.

"Hm?" Marc? Who, the guy from the radio? Badd had been too concerned with Byrne the past few nights to even consider what messages might be coming through from the outside world. "Don't know, didn't check. I was busy." Badd shrugged and went back to watching the room. "He a friend of yours?"

Abrupt. To-the-point. The man's response didn't necessarily seem hostile so much as it did entirely disinterested, which itself wasn't a surprise. The way that he'd been studying the bulletin board and subsequently the room around it suggested that he was looking for something- no, someone. Perhaps that was why his question had leapt to the assumption that he was a "friend" of Marc's.

"I've met him, but I can't say I know him particularly well," Lunge answered. There was little harm in saying as much now that he'd already told Berg the same thing, and the military weren't even in the Institute anymore anyway. "You say you were busy. Was it with anything the Institute had put into place?" L hadn't had anything to report, but these things were known to happen selectively. There was a chance they'd both been spared something.

"Nothing you'd be interested in." They went to the chapel. They saw a freaky fountain. They confirmed that Byrne was also hallucinating but pretended a ghost or god did it in order to spare Byrne's dignity. Nothing of much note.

Badd didn't quite show his interest, but his hawk's eyes focused on the man. He spoke as if he was talking about some insubstantial matter, rather than something Badd didn't know was possible. If it was true, why spread it around? The nurses had big ears and long noses. "You've met someone who is from outside and isn't part of the Doyleton charade? Huh."

Unhelpful. Lunge didn't look away, even as the man turned to face him with sharp, steely eyes. The inspector's fingers tapped brown into his profile before he spoke. "I'll be the judge of that."

There was, after all, very little point in dealing in niceties with someone so given to terseness, though his tone was matter-of-fact rather than aggressive. Still, he seemed to have caught the man's attention now, which would hopefully make things run a little more smoothly. "That's right. A lot of people here have- from what I gather he'd taken to patrolling the land around the Institute until the military took over." And then he presumably had a guest to babysit. A pause- then he held out a hand. "Inspector Lunge, BKA. You are...?"

The similarities to the former German prosecutor were becoming stronger. Badd's eyes narrowed. Here how long, and he was already calling the shots? Not Badd's shots, he wasn't.

"Only an inspector. So I don't think you'll be the one judging anything. It's Tyrell Badd." He, of course, did not take the proffered hand. The man had yet to do anything to win enough respect to deserve it.

For one thing he was sitting on a goldmine of potential intel and a priceless ally and he seemed to treat it as a mere article of trivia. It pissed Badd off.

So it had been taken as a challenge, then. Perhaps he should have said 'agent', that title tended to have more power behind it- but no, that was fine. There was little point in aggressively hunting down a testimony that did or did not exist, particularly when the witness in question was being so excessively difficult. Lunge withdrew the hand without comment.

A cooler approach was more in order. It didn't particularly matter to him that he probably wouldn't have anything to show for it at the end; it was the practise that counted, and he hadn't run into nearly enough locked verbal doors here. This was an excellent place for intellectual stagnation in many ways.

"Nothing you'd be interested in. Not nothing interesting, but nothing I would be interested in." Lunge repeated. "Implying that it was something that you and a limited number of people would be interested in rather than the majority; if something of note happened at all, it was likely a personal experience. In that case, I find myself wondering why you avoiding my initial question as pertaining directly to the Institute."

Unless it had been a night time therapy session, of course. Anyone would have avoided talking about that.

Badd was thinking back to his conversation with Dr. Cox a few hours ago. He didn't respect the collaborating asshole (even if he did appreciate their mutual desire to mess with the nurses), and hence didn't care what the man thought of him. He didn't think much of Inspector Lunge either.

Perhaps one might disrespect two birds with one stone. Badd lowered his voice to a sharp hiss, leaning in closer to the man. "A very personal experience involving two very specific persons who aren't interested in someone else poking into their personal business." He left a pause, and might have left it there entirely, but for all his nosiness Lunge did seem to have a greater knowledge of the institute's workings. Badd decided to drop a little relevant nugget of truth into his sexual insinuations and see if the lost son of von Karma bit.

"In the upstairs chapel."

That was all he needed to hear. A dramatic conversation, or realisation, or some other scene that had doubtless been played out across the Institute a hundred times- though the emphasis did seem to be on the very, given the naked hostility the information had been dealt alongside, from the turn of his voice to the physical crowding. During the night it might have been more effective, but during the day any overt aggression was checked almost immediately by the nurses.

"I see. Then the specifics don't concern me- I'm not interested in your 'personal experiences'." The setting, meanwhile, that had been freely offered and seemed a more promising game. He wouldn't be heading upstairs for a while, after all. "I've yet to see the chapel at night. Did anything seem out of place while you were there?"

A tug on the line. Let's see what he could reel in. Badd kept his scowl and recalcitrant act, even as he continued to feed Lunge information and wait for his reaction to provide information in return.

"There's a fountain the center, all covered in monsters. It's got some kind of weird red fluid in it, maybe wine or colored water made up to look like blood. Other than that, looks like a perfectly normal nondenominational chapel down to the purposefully ambiguous prayerbooks. Must be some freaky religion they practice up here, not my business. I was never a church boy anyway."

Covered in monsters. That sounded familiar. Lunge's fingers twitched for a moment, and then there it was in his memory: the various doors in the basement, also engraved with various cavorting creatures, albeit in brown. But the only black doors there had been without ornamentation, and drawing too much of a link between the two would have been reaching.

He moved on. It was fairly obvious that Badd would have noticed if the fountain's contents had actually been blood- the smell alone would have been unmissable- which meant... "That's the only place in the Institute I've heard of changing so dramatically at night," he commented. "It wouldn't be too much to assume a symbolic meaning for it. Did it seem to invite any sort of action?"

Day 61: Sun Room (third shift)

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