Nightshift 62: Main Hallway, 1-West

[ninelivesonce]

[from here]

Taura took up station midway between the two halls leading back into the dormitories. Alone with her thoughts; the hall was quiet. Too quiet. Dead quiet, a little voice hissed in the back of her mind.

This was no time to be getting superstitious. It was unavoidable, really, in a profession with so much risk involved in daily operations, that those who survived found things to credit. Beyond their own skill, because they'd all seen better men/women/herms when their luck ran out, and skill only improved your odds.

Her luck was holding, tonight. Was Rita and Goku's?

[Rita and Goku]

Comments

[toxicspiderman]

[from here]

Sangamon Taylor was not a man to let little things stop him from doing what was right. Or what was funny. Bad news and escape attempts could wait. He slipped his flashlight through the door, arranged the fingers of his other hand over it, and flicked it on.

A lopsided bat-signal lit up the wall next to Harvey's head. He waggled his fingers, and it flopped like a dying fish. If a fish had wings, which wasn't actually possible. Two heads was -- trout were heavy-metal coal-mine canaries for rivers. But wings took effort. Forgery or a developing room. (Or gene-splicing or computer imagery, by now. Both had gotten good enough to make his skin crawl.)

Once he was sure Harvey had seen it, he stepped out of the gloom. "Peter's gone," he said. He didn't candy-coat it. Just held up the wrist with the web-slinger. "Seen anyone else?"

[dualistic]

Normally Harvey didn't take note of the other flashlight beams that went waving around the hallways, carried by irresponsible patients who didn't know how to not shine it in someone else's eyes, but in this case he couldn't just pass up the fact that there was a light pattern dancing on the nearby wall.

He stared at it for a moment, taking in the shape and feeling himself freeze up for a moment. Was that--

No, it didn't look all that much like a bat. He was just imagining things, overlaying what he knew onto something that was probably just mean to be some sort of mediocre shadow puppet. When he realized that Sangamon was the one behind it, he decided to dismiss it, taking in the news instead.

"Gone?" He frowned and eyed the device that Sangamon was holding onto, which really meant that there was no doubt that he was telling the truth. Harvey didn't know what to think. It was probably better for the kid if he wasn't stuck in this place anymore, but that all depended on where he'd gone, didn't it? "No, I haven't. Everyone's been slacking off lately, it seems like."

[toxicspiderman]

"Can you blame them? Death, maiming, skeletal ferrymen hacking our central nervous systems?" The Charon thing was weirder than the Sphinx. More badass, but freakier. There was plausible with future genetics and then there was just straight-up magic, and S.T. knew which one he was more comfortable.

"You wanna hang out here and see if anyone else shows, or go find trouble before it finds us?" Possibly this was a bad idea to ask a bored, crazy super-villain, but he'd hung out with Boone, and his press was worse. Way worse. Terrorism beat general scum and villainy. Boone hadn't, but who knew that? S.T. did, and so did Boone, but nuance wasn't the media's strong suit.

[dualistic]

While Sangamon had a point, it wasn't like the rest of the group to get cold feet most of the time. All of them were generally ready to keep pushing further down the rabbit hole, so what was the hold-up this time? Maybe news of Peter's disappearance had spread and it had set everyone back. That might be it.

But as far as he understood, it didn't really matter what they did. He'd gone and done something random the night before and it had still led to someone's death in the end. Not that he needed to bring that up with Sangamon. The guy was probably better off not knowing.

"What kind of trouble were you planning to look for?" Since their original plan was probably the most dangerous and unpredictable option, everything else was going to see uninteresting in comparison. But maybe Harvey just had weird priorities.

[toxicspiderman]

"Hadn't thought that far ahead. Figured I'd show up here and we'd go spelunking, but not with just two of us. No offense." Hey, it was the truth.

If they hadn't fucked with the schedule, it wasn't a torture night, so there wasn't any point in heading upstairs. "Maybe go cross-reference Javert's notes with the Institute's files, unless you've got an idea that involves fewer card catalogs and more action."

He'd never seen what notes the other side had on their little experiment -- had Javert looked and found nothing? Was there anything to find? Maybe it was all in there.

[dualistic]

No offense was taken, since Harvey hadn't really been planning on setting off with just one person either. Sangamon wasn't the worst person to end up on a two-person team with, although Harvey wasn't sure how well they would do with a fight. He always had his gun as a last resort, although that hadn't stopped Zex from being killed last night.

If he hadn't hesitated and had actually shot the dog instead of using his pipe, would Zex have lived? Was it even worth thinking about something like that, and in the end, did he even care?

"I'm not really interested in any action that doesn't have to do with heading down below, so comparing notes sounds fine to me. Which way?" He was guessing one of the file rooms, but he sent Sangamon a glance, waiting on his lead.

Though at that moment the intercom sounded, singing ring around the rosie in that computerized voice from that one night. What was Landel up to now? Harvey glared up at the closest intercom unit and then tensed up when it started spouting strings of ones and zeroes. Binary?

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. didn't have a photographic memory. Or a phonographic one. So once I.R.I.S. went from vague poetical allusions to binary, he stopped paying much attention. Why binary, anyway? Most hackers used hexadecimal, because computers were O.K. with ones and zeros, but humans did better with something less mind-numbing. Morse code almost had rhythm.

"It wasn't really about the plague, you know." He whistled a bit of the tune, off-key. Ring around the rosies, pocket full-- "Like rock and roll. Some people can't listen to anything without thinking it means something. Play it backwards and it summons the devil. Plague." He snorted. "Either Landel thinks we're idiots, or he thinks he's a genius."

He started walking as he pieced together tonight's theory du jour. Or whatever night was in French.

[to here]