The intercom jingled on to its usual broadcast as the patients finished their lunches.

"Hello, everyone! Just another announcement about our next shift. Right now, our nurses will be escorting you to the Game Room, where we have an assortment of activities for all of you to take part in, including card games, board games, and even video games! Today, we even have a few televisions set up especially for co-player interaction, including Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System! We would like to encourage our patients to work together to solve problems, and in conjunction with some of the suggestions we found in our box, we felt this was a good way to go about it!

"And, like our last activity shift, some selected patients will be taken to their therapy sessions with their assigned doctor. Thank you, everyone, and I hope you continue to have a good day!"

While Mr. Rousseau (or Brook, as he liked to be called), had been a bit... eccentric ("kooky" was the more accurate, but less PC word), he had also been more or less harmless, and the session had gone as smoothly as could be expected. More than that, it had ended in a timely manner, giving Wilson the chance to have a leisurely lunch out on the patio. While he knew it might be better to befriend some of the other doctors (if he'd gotten to know Dr. Stein, maybe he could have figured out what Brook had been so spooked about), he ended up staying to himself.

Part of it was because he didn't want to get too attached to this place. He got fixated on people who needed to be fixed, and that was basically all of his patients here. While Wilson figured that his lack of experience and the terrible administration meant that he'd be jumping to return to Princeton-Plainsboro the second that Cuddy called him back, he did worry all the same. What if he couldn't disconnect?

So he tried to limit the people he met to his patients and he hoped for the best. Though for this afternoon, he was scheduled to meet two new people: one Oliver Queen and one Arthur Kirkland. Both of them appeared to have identity issues, judging from a quick glance over their files, but he was going to reserve his judgment until he met the two men for himself.

From his first session through lunch, Daedalus had kept to himself in his office, attention on his computer. It wasn’t just the patients who had questions, but the question was whether or not answers were forthcoming. He had his curiosities and even his doubts, to be sure, but now that he had come to see how the wheel turned here, but did he care? What didn’t affect his standing didn’t precisely affect him. He didn’t think prestige was as important an element as it was elsewhere.

As he typed, he thought, and as he thought, he watched the clock. Unless the second and final patient of the day failed to meet his expectations, Daedalus thought the day was going to end rather uneventfully. From the looks of things, there was nothing surprising in this latest patient’s file.

As the appointed time for the nurse to bring in her charge neared, he wrapped up his business and sat back from the computer.

Lunch had taken his mind from his worries, if only for a few minutes. But after the intercom sounded and the nurses began leading patients onto the next activity, one look at the bulletin board brought everything back in full force. No replies from Ashton, Dias or Dad. By now Claude felt like he was practically counting down until the end of the day, when he was going to have to finally grapple with the real possibility that most of his friends from before Landel's, as well as his own father, had fallen victim to the institute.

And now he was going to have to deal with his mother being here on top of that. It didn't seem like a coincidence that she'd show up right when his father's whereabouts were so up in the air. But what did it mean? Why couldn't Landel leave his family out of this?

Normally, the announcement about new video games would have made him perk up, but his eyebrows only knit together with concern as his nurse led him into the game room. That didn't seem to stop her from trying to get him to unwind, though.

"Oh, come now, Thomas, you've worn that expression for most of the day!" she told him with a frown. "Why don't you have a bit of fun now that your eyes are all better? I'm sure you could use it."

The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of his "sleep studies", he darkly thought to himself. But before he could protest, his nurse had sat him down in front of one of the television screens. There was an old gaming console, one Claude had never seen before, and he glanced at her with a confused expression. "Go on," she encouraged as she placed one of the controllers in his hands. "I know how much you enjoy these kinds of things. Someone will come play with you soon, too, I'm sure. Doesn't that sound nice?"

He didn't have time to answer her, because she'd soon bustled off to tend to some of the other patients. Claude watched her leave with a sigh. He realized the daytime staff meant well, which made knowing what they turned into at night even worse to think about. But now he was just being negative for the sake of it, wasn't he?

Taking in a small breath, he reached over to the console and turned it on. As long as he was waiting for some kind of answer from the bulletin, there probably wasn't much he could do except pass the time. Claude watched the title screen appear on the television, his expression growing more curious in spite of himself. Super Mario Bros....

[For Prussia!]