DAY 64: CHAPEL

[skeletonenigma]

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.]

Comments

[skeletonenigma]

"Taking medicine from people holding you prisoner is never a good idea," Skulduggery agreed. Medicine was never something he'd had to deal with before, either - dead people didn't get sick. Suddenly, the threat of the illness being contagious took on greater meaning, and Skulduggery wondered if it would be a good idea to try and find some medicine at night. "Good to meet you, Sora. My name is Skulduggery Pleasant."

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.

[lighthearted]

It was good to hear that he wasn't alone in thinking that accepting the nurses' help was a bad idea. Not that Sora was going to believe the opinion of some stranger over his own, but having it reinforced was still nice. He got the feeling that Riku would have agreed with his decision, too. For now, it was better to just bear it.

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.

[skeletonenigma]

So then other people were sick, too, but Sora was right - it didn't sound contagious. Skulduggery was still wary for the first sign of the boy's nausea spinning out of control, but it sounded like that was all he had to worry about for now. The people who were sick probably weren't quite so lucky. "That's ominous," he said slowly. "If it's getting worse, it might be building towards something." Yomi and Sora had both mentioned experiments being done on the prisoners, and this certainly fit the profile.

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?"

[lighthearted]

Skulduggery was quick to pick up on things, if he'd already guessed that the illness was going to lead to something bad. It was obvious to anyone who'd been around for the past few days, based on what Landel had said, but Skulduggery was clearly brand new.

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.

[skeletonenigma]

"A skeleton?" Skulduggery hardly dared to believe that he was this lucky, striking gold with one of the first questions posed to one of the first people he met. It was such a rare occurrence that he remained silent for a few moments, struggling to think of what to say next. "That's interesting. I happened to be a skeleton before waking up here. I didn't specialize in scaring people, but it happened a lot regardless. You come from a place where living skeletons are normal?"

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.

[lighthearted]

Whoa! Another skeleton? For just a split second, Sora forgot how terrible he felt as he leaned closer to the man, staring into his face for a moment as he tried to picture what he would have looked like without all of the skin. It might have seemed morbid to some, but seeing how he'd befriended Jack, who was perfectly nice, he didn't think it was weird at all.

"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.

[skeletonenigma]

Jack Skellington, Halloween Town... was it just Skulduggery's imagination, or did that sound vaguely familiar?

...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."

[lighthearted]

It was good to see that Skulduggery didn't mind talking about this sort of thing openly. Sora knew that sometimes his curiosity got the best of him, and every now and then he ended up accidentally offending someone by asking a question he shouldn't, or by showing too much interest. But that wasn't the case right now.

"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.

[skeletonenigma]

"I know how I died," Skulduggery contradicted him. "I was there. It was painful. But I don't know why I managed to come back, no." Well, he had a vague idea, but that was hard to explain even to himself. "And I don't know how I became a skeleton." Well, unless one counted the ritualistic burning of his dead body, or the magic keeping his consciousness attached to the bones, but Skulduggery felt like that was cheating. The mystery of his existence was the only mystery to this day that Skulduggery still hadn't been able to solve.

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."

[lighthearted]

The subject switching to death and possibly coming back from it was something that Sora realized he would have rather avoided, if he'd known the conversation was going to go in that direction. He tried not to think about what Renji might look like if he was just bones and nothing else -- it was a pointless thought, seeing how this had happened to Skulduggery in his own world.

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."