Nightshift 64: M21-M30 Hallway

[toxicspiderman]

Showtime. Two parties, one full of alcohol running the gamut from horse-piss to cleaning fluid, plus at least one woman, and one with a walking skeleton, sensory deprivation, and possible death. Together they were the beginnings of a beautiful music video. Unfortunately, Sangamon could only make one of them.

Harvey and Scott would appreciate the sacrifice. He grabbed two six-packs of shitty homemade beer by their polyethylene nooses, and headed out.

[to here]

Comments

M27

[corvus_veritas]

....Okay. Was that latest broadcast supposed to be reassuring or not? Mystery message claimed that there was a cure for this 'disease' and only some of the patients would 'change', while Landel once again threatened that someone would definitely become a monster tonight... And what was this about the X-Ray room in the Medical Wing? And Harrington?

Byrne didn't trust a word of it.

Someone else would go to that place, no doubt. But he wasn't going to. Too suspicious. What was he going to do instead? Well, he'd figure that out later. Maybe. Perhaps Badd had a plan? It was probably safer to stick with him, assuming Landel's threat was bogus.

In any case, Byrne made sure to grab that glass shard and then slip on his suit jacket and scarf before heading out the door. If he was going to see Badd, then it would be better if he had something to cover that rash with; otherwise, there was no time to bother with putting on the whole suit.

[To here.]

[M??]

[lovesthepain]

What's it like to die?

Harpuia had watched plenty of reploids sparking out their last under his blades. He'd lost people dear to him. He would have liked to think he was no stranger to death, but it was still a question whose answer he could only have guessed at.

At the very least, it was something he could answer now.

It had been swift, thankfully; the heat had come in a near-instantaneous rush. The actual act of dying had almost been too quick to even register, lingering in his mind as a confused jumble of sound, pain, and light. Brilliant, searing agony at his back, chewing through reinforced metal like he'd been made of little more than tissue paper, ripping his parts off his frame and fusing metal skin to the circuitry underneath. He couldn't possibly have survived that. Even if anything had remained of him after the fact, it was likely to be little more than mangled fragments of scrap metal. Anyone who attempted a salvage mission probably wouldn't have been able to tell where his remnants ended and Fefnir and Leviathan's began.

It went without saying, then, that even if he could describe the process of dying, he wouldn't have expected his narrative to end with "...and then you wake up."

And yet... here he was. Awake. Lying in a human bed in a darkened room. Someone had gone to the effort of building him a new body -- an effort he should have been grateful for, but only found... surprisingly unsettling. There was no trace of his armor. His whole body was soft, yielding flesh, without a single hint of a seam anywhere. The cooling system struck him as a little too lifelike: he was taking regular, even breaths, with no available method of shutting it off. It was true reploids were meant to be very humanlike machines, but this... this felt too human.

Harpuia remained where he was for a while. He needed some time to process this -- to get used to this unnerving body and to try and make sense of where he was. When he found that staying in place didn't do much more than waste time, however, he'd settled on a new plan. A search of the room had yielded a flashlight (positively ancient, with an incandescent bulb and batteries as a power source) -- certainly not much, but enough to serve as a makeshift weapon and compensate for the apparent weakness of his optic sensors. For want of a better idea, he settled for exploring his new surroundings.

[To here!]

M30

[ham_fisted]

Gumshoe slammed his notebook shut when the intercom came on, putting it in his right pocket and stuffing the empty pillowcase in his left as he listened to Dr. Landel's rant. Rather than stand there and huff at everything the man said, the detective stomped over to his closet and took out a scalpel. Just in case the medicine he was looking for turned out to be in one of those sealed boxes.

"What--? An error! But that can't--"

Gumshoe turned back to the intercom, his eyes widening. What was--

"THERE IS A WAY TO CURE YOU."

"...!"

He gaped for a few seconds after the broadcast had ended, then rushed out of the room. He doubted that had been a fake tip!

[ham_fisted]

[to here]