damned_institute | Day 62: Sun Room (Second Shift)

The line of questioning that Rita had begun at breakfast still plagued Loki, as did his own uncomfortable feelings about the entire concept of people being transformed into monsters. It wasn't a useful line of thought, and he needed a better direction to consider.

Hopefully, conversation with Soma would provide that. While she seemed quite stern at times, Loki found her presence oddly relaxing.

Though he had to wonder if perhaps he wouldn't end up seeing her this shift after all, since she might be included in the group that was being herded to the showers. (As much as the statement also was one he greeted with relief, since he was wondering when he'd get an opportunity to bathe. The thought of being trapped in a building with a great many mortals and no bathing facilities had been too horrifying to contemplate.) He'd always been a bit bad at guessing the ages of mortals, mostly because they were so ridiculously short-lived.

Having already established a neurotic fear of the cold with his nurse, there was no difficulty convincing her that he'd be much better off in the Sun Room. Loki settled into his habitual seat, taking a moment to coax one of the cats into his lap. All settled in, he propped his notebook on the arm of the chair and went back to writing.

[Soma?]

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Last night had been a pretty pleasant evening, all things considered, but the taunting at the end of the night had dredged up the same old fears and paranoias that had been haunting him ever since they'd dragged him off for one of their 'experiments.' He'd almost refused his medication that morning, but in the end, had simply been too mentally exhausted by it all to put up a fight. He'd spent breakfast sullenly, then expected to head out to the court yard, where at least he'd feel a little less cooped up.

His nurse, however, had other plans. After chiding him about how long he'd been out the previous day, and how, with that 'nasty bug' going around, he should take better care of his health, she'd towed him off to the Sun Room instead and left him there, seated on one of the couches.

It was so innocuous during the day. Whatever had been going on when they'd slipped through last night, there was no sign of it now. He might have wondered how they managed that, had he been in the mood to wonder about how anything here actually worked. As far as he was concerned, it was just one long nightmare. Which might, it seemed, be getting worse, if that ominous announcement was to be believed. He rubbed his arm a bit in a nervous gesture. The injection site was healed now, but the mental scar remained.

[Open]

The light shone bright in her eyes and she instinctively reached for a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. Finding them absent, she shielded her eyes and looked around her. Her surroundings had completely changed; she didn't recognize this place at all.

"Follow me, please."

Robin sat up and looked at the slender lady in the doorway. "To where are we headed?" Her tone was even and cautious.

"The Sun Room, of course, Miss Satanella. You missed breakfast, unfortunately."

"That is unfortunate indeed," Robin answered, playing along with the assumption that she was known as 'Miss Satanella' to this woman. Sliding her legs out of bed, she noticed that she was wearing very simple clothes. There had been nothing about her previous attire that she was completely attached to, but it was important to Robin to note all the same. Whoever had removed her from the Revolutionaries' ship had thought it necessary to strip her, but not put her in sea-stone shackles.

After following the woman and entering the Sun Room, she noticed that the woman left. There were others dressed like her in the vicinity, but the ratio of watchers to attendees had decreased significantly. Her gaze fell on a man reclining on a couch, who appeared to be unoccupied.

She approached him, a pleasant smile on her face despite the myriad of questions on her mind. "Languid sir, do you have some free time?"

Gren's hand dropped back to his side as he realized someone was approaching. He didn't recognize the woman, which meant she was probably fairly new. He'd been there long enough to get to know most of the regular population by now.

The phrasing of the question was a little odd, but given the way people were apparently pulled from all over, he didn't think a whole lot of it. "Yeah, sure," he replied after a moment. "I'm not busy." He could certainly use the distraction.

How to ask without raising suspicion...

"Thank you. It seems I am not busy either, in the foreseeable future." She was doing her utmost best to keep her expression neutral. Her eyes darted 'behind' her at her next question, though, as she chose not to take a seat. "These people not dressed like you or I... what is their motivation?"

An open-ended question, at least, and the most direct point from which to begin an analysis of their group structure.

She still had no reason to believe anything was out of the ordinary; she had not lived an ordinary life in over 20 years. So far, this was just another obstacle in her path.

Definitely new, then. Gren felt a pang of sympathy. When he'd been brought in, he had at least had past experience to fall back on. For many of the people here, he expected, this whole trial was confusing in the extreme.

"They'll tell you it's a hospital if you ask them," he replied after a moment to muse over the best approach. "That everyone of us," he gestured to the patients scattered around the room, "is ill. That what we think we know about ourselves is just and illness and that we have different lives they're trying to help us remember. But it's not that simple."

He smiled wryly. "It's hard to explain, but you'll see tonight. All of this is just a front for... some sort of experiment. No one's really quite sure what it is they're actually trying to do here."

"How very interesting an experiment... to challenge one's very identity."

She sounded engaged, but her heart stopped for a split second at the man's words. A government facility indeed. I can't remember how I was captured, but it matters little now.

"You might say that my profession is dedicated to understanding such matters." She smiled; that was barely the tip of the iceberg. "I look forward to this evening's festivities." She assumed that he meant a jailbreak of some sort had already been pre-set for this very night.

"Might you know who among the assembled has resisted the longest?" They would jump straight to the top of her list of 'people to make contact with.'

"Really? What profession is that?" He could think of a few that might fit the bill, but with the way things were, here, it could just as easily have been something he'd never heard of.

"I don't really know who's been here the longest," he admitted. "But you could probably ask around. There's a bulletin board," he added, gesturing to where it was mounted on the Sun Room's wall. "People put notes with those sorts of questions up there all the time."

She was finely tuned by this point in her life to ignore questions that would reveal her associations with Ohara, archaeologists, and The Void History.

Instead, she faced where he gestured. "Bulletin... Board?" She didn't have to say the words too slowly, but they were certainly foreign to her tongue. "An interesting communication system. Is it not censored by the experimenters?"

"It's not the most efficient, but that's all we've got," he replied with a shrug. "And they do, a bit. They don't like people cursing, for one. I suppose if you asked anything too specific, they might take it down. But asking how long people have been here should be okay."

He didn't think they cared about that sort of info, anyway. They'd certainly left more critical questions than that alone, in the past.

"Very good, then."

She was more than content to leave it at that; she remembered faces well enough and her name alone could set the whole facility on alert just like on Tequila Wolf.

"Thank you for your time."

Day 62: Sun Room (Second Shift)

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