Day 62: Sun Room (4th Shift)

[dividedby]

What an unproductive day this was so far. Doing nothing but sitting on a couch, watching the bulletin board and thinking too much about things...if only his injuries weren't keeping him from getting some decent exercise. (If only he hadn't let himself get injured, period, but...)

This shift, Zero was left with nothing to do but sit around, without the promise of a useful conversation like last shift with Nigredo. It wasn't like his other option was any better, though. Showers, already being a waste of time as they were, just sounded very uncomfortable, if not impossible, to do while wearing a sling and a cast. So when his chatty nurse came up to him at shift change and tried to get him to follow her to the showers, the once-Reploid refused to budge. She seemed surprised at his refusal, tossed a few 'why not's and 'we can do this and this to protect your bandages so they won't get wet's at him, but he stubbornly shook his head at everything she said. There was no way he was going in there in this condition. Too much effort for no gain. Why did getting clean matter so much, anyway? It had only been a few days since the last time he'd bathed. It didn't matter.

Thankfully, the nurse took pity on him (only because of his injuries, he was guessing) and gave up trying to persuade him to move. She left him alone with his thoughts, and the once-Reploid carefully reclined on the couch and lay his uninjured arm across his stomach, staring up at the ceiling.

... He supposed some quiet time to think wasn't all bad. He was feeling much better emotionally than he was this morning, mainly because he'd had time to let recent events sink in. Zex and Ema's fates had hurt at first, but by now he'd managed to channel most of that hurt into more resolve to fight. His conversation with Nigredo had helped keep his mind off of things and was enough to leave him wondering for awhile, even though figuring out what to do about Landel was more important than that right now. And, he had a new self-assigned mission for tomorrow via the bulletin board - to assist Ema's sister Lana in any way he could. Not to mention he'd learned about the existence of a town outside of this place....

...Alright. On second thought, the day was not as unproductive as he'd been thinking it was. Didn't mean Zero wanted to spend the rest of this shift just lying here, but at least he could say the times he was doing so earlier in the day weren't a total waste.

[free!]

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[notachick]

She was leaving his reasons well enough alone and Okita closed his eyes, dropping his head slightly. It was good to know that she would let him keep his terrible secret without prodding, but it also made him wish he could tell her. It would be the second time he died here. The first, apparently kept secret by Hijikata himself, and thus not something he could easily bring up, but the second time... He opened his eyes again, catching her as she leaned back into a more relaxed position. The second death would be one that could not be hidden.

"There have been many reasons for people to die lately," he said, with only the faintest trace of a smile on his lips. He wasn't sure what sort of emotion he should show in this situation, so he hovered somewhere between his usual mask and his actual feelings. "What is interesting to note is that our population is shrinking and yet more people are willing to face what lies below."

Recklessly, even. People were growing less afraid, more bold as time passed and the sensation of urgency took over. Everyone had this rushed feel about them now, as if they'd drawn their lines in the sands, found their groups, and were quickly and somewhat blindly rushing toward the unknown end. "I don't know what is beyond the basement, but I know there is something. My roommate goes somewhere at night, somewhere we can't talk about, and it seems important. Perhaps there is another challenge that lies ahead - something that has to do with why the military would be interested in this place, and why Martin Landel would use a curious word like 'multiverses.'"

He smiled fully now, looking down at her. "You wouldn't happen to know anything would you? It's such a peculiar word and he shouted it when he was dragged out of here the day the military came."

[ninelivesonce]

She hadn't been in the room when he'd shouted, but she'd heard the word. "Multiple universes. They have to be bringing all of us from somewhere, and our stories don't line up."

"The night the doors all turned into wormholes -- we ended up on Cissnei's planet, and the stars were all wrong. They're wrong here, too, if this is Earth." She was beginning to doubt that, even if the gravity was perfect. "There are aliens here. Magic. And I met a guy from Jupiter this morning. Cyborgs, but no wormhole drives." Human bodies were remarkably resistant to technological enhancement -- jump pilot's implants still killed a small percentage on installation, even if she'd never met a pilot who thought anything of the risk. She hadn't ever considered it; she didn't have the natural knack for it, and, while that wasn't strictly necessary, she'd always seen ships as a means to an end, rather than a goal in themself.

"It can't just be time that separates us. I don't know how he does it, but he's grabbing us across universes." The jumps didn't feel that different from wormholes, really. Nausea and disorientation and instantaneous transfer. "Why not just recruit an army, I don't know." Tech like that, and he could hire an army. Admiral Naismith might like him, if he didn't pretend to be too charming, and had a good reason for all of this. Which were probably both impossible, but Taura wasn't sure.

[notachick]

What a strange thing... Okita listened to Taura's explanation, trying to wrap his head around all the technical terms he'd never heard before. Wormholes to him meant insects crawling through wood and it took him a moment before he realized she was talking about the curious effect of the doors several days to a week ago. The day when the doors opened to rooms they should not have opened into - and Okita and Kenshin had been forced to run for their lives through a tunnel that dropped rocks onto them. He tucked all of Taura's information away as best he could, resolving to ask about some of these things later - cybords, wormhole drives, Jupiter. It all went mostly over his head up until the final bit.

It could have been a throwaway and yet the words struck him as particularly strange.

Why not just recruit an army.

Why not? Why?

He dropped his gaze, hand coming up to his chin as he thought. "Why not just recruit an army...." The military clearly had a hand in this. The people brought here were clearly extraordinary according to their worlds. The variety of recruits were enough to constitute an army indeed.

But why not recruit here, from this world? Why take all the time and effort to draw in others from different worlds, times and universes?

"...Perhaps there's no one left he can recruit," Okita mused to himself. "And the enemy that lies ahead is one that the people here, even with their technology and advancements, cannot conquer." It was certainly something to think about. Something important that Okita couldn't quite put his finger on.

[ninelivesonce]

"So it's just us?" Taura was good, and some of the other fighters here were in her league, but... "If we're it, that's a piss-poor excuse for an army." A few dozen fighters, a few dozen civilians. "Even before we start attacking each other." And General Aguilar and Landel at each other's throats, but that didn't surprise her; neither of them were men who shared power. It was far too like home for that.

Which brought her back to Okita's warning -- far too many death notices, in the last few days, and most of them hadn't sounded quite right. Like someone trying to hide friendly fire as an equipment malfunction, it was obvious and completely counter-productive, but it didn't quite tell her what was happening.

"Maybe it's resilience. Survival, not success." Her nose wrinkled. She'd equated the two, but success had gotten bigger than merely living. Even as the clock ticked down, her horizons got wider. "It would explain the illness."