Skulduggery Pleasant (
skeletonenigma) wrote in
damned_institute2012-05-30 04:42 pm
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DAY 64: CHAPEL
This time, when the darkness faded and the next thing Skulduggery became aware of was that same bed underneath him, he didn't take the time to absorb the jarring feeling and sort out what might be going on. He leaped off the bed immediately, almost stumbling in the process - damn balance - and took a moment to realize that his eyes were burning and he could barely see a thing.
The room was blinding. The light itself wasn't an issue; it was the fact that Skulduggery's eyes had to slowly adjust to it, a sensation he hadn't experienced in ages and had never expected to experience again. He had a hand pressed to his forehead and was blinking rapidly when a woman knocked on the door and came in.
She was... cheerful. Everything was cheerful, from the bright light and noises outside to the intercom announcement that interrupted the woman's sudden spiel. It was such a startling change from just a few minutes ago that Skulduggery found himself lost for words while the... nurse... nodded brightly at him. She'd said something about a mental hospital, something about a man called Erik, and something else about 'not real' and 'getting better.' With Skulduggery's mental prowess - even operating at less than its usual efficiency - it was easy to work out what she meant.
He studied her openly once the light wasn't so blinding. "You're either a very convincing liar, utterly insane, or a psychopath. Let me find out which one." His head tilted. "Would you believe me if I said there was a woman last night who had been mortally wounded, but who was still walking around?" He cut her off before she could answer. "No, obviously not. And I don't think you're a psychopath who murders people for fun. A convincing liar, then. That doesn't clear anything up in the slightest, but I suppose it's something."
"Mr. MacAuley, you were sleeping all of last night. Are you sure you didn't just have a nightmare?"
Skulduggery wanted to point out that as a skeleton, he didn't sleep, and he certainly didn't have nightmares. The blurriness at the edges of his vision, however, reminded him with a jolt of his mysterious transformation to human. Suddenly, annoyingly, the nurse was making much more sense.
Was it... real, then? Everything with Yomi and the chapel - had that all just been a vivid hallucination? Had his entire life just been a vivid hallucination, like the woman was insisting?
In a slight daze, Skulduggery asked to see the chapel. He was standing there alone now, examining the fountain carefully for any sign of its demonic visage from before. But now it was just a fountain, the water was just water, and despite Skulduggery's best efforts, the water didn't respond to his Elemental magic. It remained stubbornly in its basin without so much as a ripple, silently mocking him.
Skulduggery sat down heavily on one of the pews, mystified. He wasn't insane. He joked sometimes that he was, and it might partly be true, but he wasn't insane on a level like this. He didn't just make up his whole life as he pleased.
[Free! But be prepared for a barrage of questions.]
The room was blinding. The light itself wasn't an issue; it was the fact that Skulduggery's eyes had to slowly adjust to it, a sensation he hadn't experienced in ages and had never expected to experience again. He had a hand pressed to his forehead and was blinking rapidly when a woman knocked on the door and came in.
She was... cheerful. Everything was cheerful, from the bright light and noises outside to the intercom announcement that interrupted the woman's sudden spiel. It was such a startling change from just a few minutes ago that Skulduggery found himself lost for words while the... nurse... nodded brightly at him. She'd said something about a mental hospital, something about a man called Erik, and something else about 'not real' and 'getting better.' With Skulduggery's mental prowess - even operating at less than its usual efficiency - it was easy to work out what she meant.
He studied her openly once the light wasn't so blinding. "You're either a very convincing liar, utterly insane, or a psychopath. Let me find out which one." His head tilted. "Would you believe me if I said there was a woman last night who had been mortally wounded, but who was still walking around?" He cut her off before she could answer. "No, obviously not. And I don't think you're a psychopath who murders people for fun. A convincing liar, then. That doesn't clear anything up in the slightest, but I suppose it's something."
"Mr. MacAuley, you were sleeping all of last night. Are you sure you didn't just have a nightmare?"
Skulduggery wanted to point out that as a skeleton, he didn't sleep, and he certainly didn't have nightmares. The blurriness at the edges of his vision, however, reminded him with a jolt of his mysterious transformation to human. Suddenly, annoyingly, the nurse was making much more sense.
Was it... real, then? Everything with Yomi and the chapel - had that all just been a vivid hallucination? Had his entire life just been a vivid hallucination, like the woman was insisting?
In a slight daze, Skulduggery asked to see the chapel. He was standing there alone now, examining the fountain carefully for any sign of its demonic visage from before. But now it was just a fountain, the water was just water, and despite Skulduggery's best efforts, the water didn't respond to his Elemental magic. It remained stubbornly in its basin without so much as a ripple, silently mocking him.
Skulduggery sat down heavily on one of the pews, mystified. He wasn't insane. He joked sometimes that he was, and it might partly be true, but he wasn't insane on a level like this. He didn't just make up his whole life as he pleased.
[Free! But be prepared for a barrage of questions.]
no subject
Good. That was one mystery solved.
As the edges of his vision grew slightly blurry once again, Skulduggery realized he hadn't blinked once this entire conversation. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears and pressed his palms up against them. He continued to blink rapidly for the next minute or so, trying to ignore how strange the sensation still felt.
"I got a sense of that last night," Skulduggery said, carrying on as if nothing was out of the ordinary. "At least, I think it might have been last night. Time hasn't been very kind. What sort of experiments?" He glanced at the nurses standing at the back of the chapel. "They're not going to start attacking us, are they?" He wouldn't be surprised. They were far too cheerful to be working in a mental hospital.
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The man didn't draw much attention to it, though, instead moving on to ask questions. Sora addressed the last one first, since it was the most urgent and the easiest one to answer. "No, they won't attack us," he said with a shake of his head. "Well, not unless we try to riot or something, but even then they'll just sedate us." The nurses had never resorted to the sorts of things that the military had done while they had been here. Sora wondered if he should mention that, but he didn't want to overload the man.
"I've never been experimented on myself, but every other night a group of us will be taken out of our rooms and up to the second floor, where the doctors torture and do all sorts of things." He wasn't being vague for any reason other than he didn't know the details most of the time. He knew what had happened to Kairi, for instance, but for most of the other patients he had no idea. It was usually better not to ask about that kind of stuff.
"What happened to you last night?" Sora asked, since that would give him a good idea of what the man needed to know.
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But torture, he could handle. He'd been introduced to all sorts of creative torture meant to hurt even a skeleton in the last few years alone. The idea of torture meant far, far less to Skulduggery right now than the idea of getting sedated. He'd never been sedated before, and he imagined it wasn't fun.
"Well," he answered the boy after a moment, "I met a woman who said she was killed, and she insisted on coming here. That fountain," he added with a brief wave of his hand, "was not angelic, and it wasn't spouting water. I'm guessing the rest of this place tends to follow that example come nightfall. Why the pretense during the day?"
Actually, mentioning Yomi out loud made Skulduggery remember that he had been looking for a mirror on the way to this chapel. He made a mental note to find one later; a quick few minutes of practice might help him remember to blink more often and smile without looking eerie.
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There was nothing he could do to bring them back, though, and that was maybe the worst part. That lack of control, of not being able to fix things with his Keyblade, had hit him hard here. When he couldn't even save his friends, what good was he?
"I... haven't ever been to this room at night," he admitted, trying to focus on the conversation rather than his churning thoughts. "But yeah, everything changes and becomes a lot more dangerous when it's night. The only good part is that we're able to wander around." Sometimes -- most of the time, actually -- that just led to more harm than good.
"I'm not really sure why they bother with acting like things are normal. Most everyone who wakes up here figures out pretty fast that it's all fake." As far as Sora knew, there wasn't anyone wandering around thinking they were actually crazy. So by now it all felt pretty pointless. He knew it was good to have a break from the constant danger, but at the same time it slowed down their progress.
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It explained why Yomi hadn't actively been trying to escape when he met her, perfectly calm about her situation. Skulduggery knew how multiple failed attempts at escape could completely shatter a person's desire to do anything but what they were told. The boy next to him sounded like he had been stuck here for a while, and he had said that getting home wasn't easy.
Of course, when Skulduggery did escape, where would he escape to? Back to his own reality, appearing out of thin air in front of Valkyrie? Or back to where he should be, in whatever dimension the Faceless Ones had been banished to? He didn't know, because he didn't understand the kind of power being used here, and that was more frustrating than he would have liked to admit.
"Where are you from?" Skulduggery asked, deciding that at this point, any information would be useful information. Maybe he could figure out what kind of reality this prison was in.
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"Well, not everyone is from a different place. Two of my friends are here and we're all from the same home." More or less, anyway. Kairi was technically a foreigner to the islands, but she had been there since they were kids, so she might as well have been a native.
Not that Sora had seen either her or Riku in the past day or so. He'd been trying to force himself not to worry too much. With the combination of the Doyleton trip, the illness going around, and the chaos of last night, it made sense that they hadn't all been able to meet up with each other for a while.
"I'm from a place called Destiny Islands, but I was traveling to other worlds before I came here." To a lot of other worlds. That part wasn't strange to him. No, it was being stuck in one spot for so long that was hard for Sora to deal with, but it wasn't like he'd had much of a choice.
It was hard to think that he might not ever see those white beaches again, that he might turn into something horrible and never recover, but Sora tried to swallow all of that down. It wouldn't do him any good to get worked up over that.
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And that wasn't the part of the boy's response Skulduggery was focused on, anyway. "People from the same reality can end up here?" he asked, just to be sure he'd heard correctly. The last thing he wanted was to run into somebody he knew, snatched and dragged into this prison alongside him. Skulduggery deserved whatever was coming to him; none of his friends did. "Is there a way to stop that from happening? Or to find out if it already has?"
A light pain began twinging at his temples. Skulduggery realized, with some surprise, that it was a headache. A physical, painful headache that wasn't brought on by someone being annoying or a difficult puzzle. It was probably caused by the light, which was still obnoxiously bright. Skulduggery blinked hard a couple of times in an effort to clear the pain.
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Maybe it was selfish to keep hoping his friends would stick around, but he'd always figured that they were better off here than brainwashed.
"I don't think there's any way to stop it," he admitted, shifting around when a wave of nausea hit him again. Sora hoped it didn't get so bad that he needed to throw up. He hadn't done that since he was a little kid. "But if you want to ask around and see if any people you know are here, you can use the bulletin board in the Sun Room." It was the best way to get that sort of information, and sometimes it took new arrivals some time to even realize it was there.
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The headache was slowly growing worse, and now a strange feeling had settled somewhere down in Skulduggery's gut. The feeling was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. It felt a little like the stomach was starting to fold in on itself, demanding his attention in a somewhat cryptic manner. It wasn't exactly painful, so Skulduggery ignored it for now.
The poor kid, however, was growing paler by the minute, shifting uncomfortably on the pew. An image of him vomiting all over Skulduggery flew unbidden to mind, and Skulduggery pulled away slightly. "Are you sure you're alright?" he asked. "I don't mean to be rude, but I'd really prefer if you didn't throw up anywhere near me. What's your name?"
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"Umm, it's Sora." Normally he would have had the presence of mind to have mentioned that earlier, but he was a little slower with everything today. He had a pretty good excuse for that, if nothing else. "And I won't throw up on you, promise." He could always just turn in the other direction, after all.
"Before it was just a fever," he explained as he wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, "but now I feel more nauseous than anything. Taking medicine from the nurses would probably just make things worse, though." Feeling sick was something he could handle, at least. It was the sort of thing everyone had to deal with at some point in their lives. But if he took their medication, that might do things to him that he wasn't prepared for. The threat of turning into a monster was bad enough -- he didn't need to add in some other variable.
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Introducing himself here felt strangely like introducing himself to mortals back in his own reality, but without the disguise. No one would recognize the name, no one would see he was a skeleton, and most people would warily treat him like he might be dangerous. Which of course he was, but never intentionally. Well, occasionally intentionally.
The slippers were getting annoying. Skulduggery surreptitiously worked them off his feet underneath the pew, realizing that even barefoot there was still slightly too much weight. He shuddered at the reminder of just how much had changed, and how much he was going to have to get used to.
"It's not a natural illness, is it?" he asked as the thought occurred to him. The man over the intercom seemed able to control a lot here; it wasn't a stretch to assume he could control health as well.
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The name that the man gave certainly stood out. "Skulduggery Pleasant?" he repeated, tilting his head to the side. Though he was learning that the less he moved, the less he felt nauseous, which caused him to end the action early. "Sounds kind of like... Jack Skellington." Was it possible this was someone else from Halloween Town? Sora didn't remember seeing any other skeletons like Jack there, but this guy was tall and thin the same way Jack had been when he'd been in this place.
Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. There wasn't really an easy way to ask, and besides that, Skulduggery was asking something again. It wasn't too surprising that he was concerned about the illness, but thus far it hadn't scared him away from the conversation. Seeing how there was no way of hiding it now, Sora didn't mind talking about it.
"No, it's not natural. With the way Landel -- the guy on the intercom -- was talking, it's like he planned all this. So I think only some of us are supposed to have it." People like him, and Snow, and who knew who else. Sora glanced around the room, but it was hard to pick out who was sick in a crowd like this.
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His attention, however, was invariably drawn back to Sora's earlier comment. "Jack Skellington?" An odd name, which made it much more similar to the names Skulduggery was used to. And the similarity to the word 'skeleton' wasn't lost on him. "Someone you knew?"
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The idea of having to explain it to someone who didn't already know was surprisingly hard to face. Sora had been able to talk around the issue until now -- or it had all been over the bulletin, where he hadn't had to sign his name. He glanced down at his hands, one which was covered in that red rash, and tried to figure out what to say.
Luckily, his attention was briefly drawn away when Skulduggery asked about Jack. "Yeah, he's a friend of mine. Uhh, I met him in a place called Halloween Town. He really is a skeleton -- his specialty is scaring people." Sora smiled, because he'd never seen Jack as particularly scary, but he also wasn't some little kid. He wondered what had ever happened to Jack, if he'd found his way back home or not. Unfortunately, there were way too many people he had to wonder that about.
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It was enough to make him forget the headache. Halloween Town, populated by skeletons who specialized in scaring people. And here Skulduggery thought that alternate realities were dominated by creatures like the Faceless Ones.
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"Uhh, not exactly!" he responded, leaning back soon after so as to not make Skulduggery feel uncomfortable. "Halloween Town was just one of the worlds I visited, and I'm pretty sure Jack was the only skeleton there..." Then again, it wasn't like Sora had spent so much time there that he'd gotten to meet of all of the town's residents. Still, Jack had never mentioned anything.
"I don't think most people would see that kind of thing as normal," he admitted, tapping his lip with his index finger. "But Jack was actually really nice." Sora didn't think Skulduggery was scary, either, so maybe the belief that skeletons were bad was completely wrong.
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...No, of course not. Skulduggery had never been to alternate realities before, not that he knew of. And he was distracted very quickly from that line of thought with Sora's face suddenly very close to his own, eyes wide and curious.
Skulduggery leaned back slightly in surprise, but the smile he felt actually made it onto his face a few seconds later. Hardly an original reaction, and likely one of the best ones he would get for a while, even in this bizarre place. Why was it that kids seemed to understand right away, even with little to no proof, whereas adults refused to believe what was staring them in the face?
"I was the only skeleton where I come from, too," he said. "And it wasn't normal there, either. Slightly more normal among the people I usually deal with, but still usually the first thing to come up in introductions. No one knows exactly how it happened."
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"So you don't even know how you ended up that way? Hmm..." Sora let his back hit the pew, frowning when he realized that his nausea was surging up again. He needed to keep himself distracted, although it looked like the nurses were getting ready to take them out of the chapel soon anyway.
With Jack, Sora had never really thought about how he'd become a skeleton. He assumed that he'd died a long time ago and lived on with just his bones, or that he'd just come into existence that way.
"So what's it like, having your skin and stuff back? Is it weird?" Sora wondered if Skulduggery saw the change as good or bad. It could really go either way, depending on how long he'd been a skeleton and how used to it he was.
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He briefly wondered if this was the sort of discussion to be having with someone so young, but then he thought of Valkyrie, and all of his doubts faded.
"It's..." Weird? Different? Complicated? "... certainly strange. The smaller things are weirder than skin, like breathing. And organs. I have the utmost confidence, however, that I will adjust accordingly."
The nurses at the back of the chapel were starting to come forward. Skulduggery kept a wary eye on them as he asked his next question. "Where are the doctors? Landel can't be the only one."
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Sora knew better than to ask more about how Skulduggery died, even though he was curious. It wasn't the sort of thing you came out and asked a complete stranger, even if Skulduggery was being pretty open about the whole thing.
"Oh yeah, organs... that has to be weird." Seeing how Sora's own body was doing a good job of torturing him at the moment, he almost wished that he was just bone right now -- that he didn't have a digestive system to be upset with him in the first place.
Before he could say anything more about it, though, some nurses started heading toward him, giving him just long enough to answer Skulduggery's last question. "There are doctors, but they see patients in their offices, and it's only every once in a while." He also wanted to mention that there were the nighttime doctors who kidnapped and tortured people, but he couldn't get into that now.
"Anyway, there's a lot more to this place," he said as he carefully stood up from the pew. "Good luck figuring it all out, okay? The bulletin board should help with that too."