damned_institute | Day 29: Sun Room

It was with some relief that Yuuhi awoke the next morning, in his own bed, sore and tired and achy. He would've slept more had they let him, his face down in the pillow, away from all the others and their questions and their concern. He didn't want to see them, but he managed a little smile when the nurse came in and didn't object when she lead him out into the open hallway that had been splattered with blood, plenty of it his, just last night.

The Chapel or the Sun Room? He felt he had good reason not to be terribly religious and had a feeling he wouldn't be very welcome there anyway. The Sun Room would be nice though. It was bright and cheery and he could always doodle or write notes on the community board if he'd nothing better to do. Besides, the nurse was kind enough to let him take a book with him.

He found a seat on one of the couches, far from the entrance and seated himself in the far corner, legs scrunched up against his chest so he only took up one of the cushions. He opened up where he'd left off, fingers carefully turning the worn pages of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.

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Clark managed a weak smile at the two of them. They meant well, he knew they were just trying to be helpful, but he didn't think they'd understand. And while it was tempting to just let it all spill out - let everything out - he couldn't. His parents had raised him to keep his powers his secret. He couldn't throw that aside just because someone offered to listen to him.

"I appreciate the offer, I really do," said Clark. He looked down at his hands. It was so tempting, but this was something he'd have to wrestle with on his own. Even if he could tell people about his powers, telling them that he'd used them to hurt and basically kill someone was another thing entirely. "I still don't understand what happened last night..."

That seemed safe enough. And it was the truth - Clark was sick of lying all the time and it was maybe that which made him a poor liar to begin with. Like he was almost hoping to be called out on it, like it'd happened with Pete. Talking about the nurses seemed safer than talking about him, at any rate, and maybe he could figure out what happened. The nurse he'd toasted last night hadn't looked very human, but he still thought of her as one. She'd been a person before the night came, even if he didn't know what made her change like that.

"Surprisingly enough, situations like this are within my field of knowledge. Granted, I haven't ever had this much close personal experience, but I was in a similar situation once. I would be more than happy to help... but 'last night' is a very broad thing... if you could lay out something more specific?" Wesker was onto something, he was fairly sure. Did Clark have powers too? There was an alarming percentage of people with unusual abilities here.

If he did, Wesker needed to know what they were. It was possible they would be powers that might actually be able to pose a threat to him or Claire, so he needed to find out.

...William was already bored, which was never a good thing for a genius who excelled at creating monstrosities. He had already done his part and contributed nicely, now he wanted to go back to his notes and perhaps figure out if it'd be possible to find yet another specimen for that night as well. Simple observation was tiresome, now he wanted to experiment. The only question was, did the specimen have to be alive in order to react?

...This would complicate matters if so. Far more importantly, if there was viral strains within the creatures that roamed the night's bloodstream then it would be only a matter of capturing something (a rat perhaps?) and gathering a sample.

Somehow, the doctor managed to keep a polite expression of interest on his face throughout the conversation, allowing nothing to belie his previous behavior... But this still did not mean the doctor was not seconds away from pulling his hair out. There was a reason William had avoided the other, hare-brained scientists back at the Research Facility.

Where to even start? Ignoring what he did, there was also the whole fact that that staff had somehow just mutated out of the blue. And while it could help that Mr. Wesker sounded like he knew a little bit something about all the weird stuff, that also gave Clark second thoughts. Why would he be familiar with it? A similar situation?

He'd have to watch just how he worded this because while he thought Mr. Wesker and Mr. Birkin seemed to be okay - for adults - he still didn't really know them. Better to be vague and edit the parts that involved him directly.

"Well, the nurses changing like that," Clark said. He neglected to mention the specific nurse he was thinking of.

"Yes... the transformation was very abrupt," Wesker cast a slight glance towards William. The change had been dramatic and all-encompassing, certainly not the work of a virus, even the bus had been changed slightly.

"I have encountered and been forced to destroy several of the nurses at night, but I have noticed no changes of personnel among the staff during the day. I don't think they are human... clever constructs, perhaps, since they seem to be replaced whenever patients take them out at night, and what we saw on the bus proved that they are in fact the same nurses that we see during the day, and not simply produced on the side," Clark was probably concerned about killing people.

"Over a long period of time such a rate of nurse turn-over would be unsustainable. They are either being revived each morning, or Landel has the ability to create copies of them to replace whichever nurses are killed during the night..." Wesker trailed off. Perhaps they were all replaced each night with unmutated versions? Perhaps they only lasted for twenty four hours.

"Whatever happens, the nurses are greatly degraded at the start of night, no longer able to communicate or behave intelligibly. I haven't really had the chance to closely examine one to determine exactly what they are," Perhaps he should have William help him with that. Drag a dead nurse to the lab and dissect it... but their body parts proved to contain toxic components, so Wesker would have to do it... Unless they could find appropriate protective gear for Birkin.

"They may appear to be nice enough during the day, but there is no mistaking a bio-engineered weapon," Wesker had a careful look of disgust and partial anger on his face as he spoke about the nurses. "This is almost certainly a testing and experiment facility, though they are much cleverer about it than any I have encountered before."

Day 29: Sun Room

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