damned_institute | Day 30: Cafeteria, Breakfast

Hitsugaya woke with a start.

His entire body ached, but the pain was nowhere near as bad as it had been the night before. His injuries had been tended two with clean gauze and bandages, and he found every movement wasn't agony. He wasn't in the best of shape, but thanks to the miracle of landel's strange time distortion, he had mostly recovered from the vile poison without having to waste anyone else's talents.

And in his hand, still...there was the key.

He dressed quickly, sliding the key onto the key ring from his desk drawer and stuck it into his pocket. Whether the key stood to gain them anything or not, it stood as a vital reminder that they could succeed in this place. There was hope, as insignificant as it often seemed. They could beat this place.

That small shred of hope made getting up worth it.

The nurse who escorted him to breakfast was cheerful, and commented idly about how wonderful it was to see young Tommy Winters up and about again after his unfortunate run-in with a bad case of food poisoning. He smirked slightly, knowing that any lies the institute forced into their heads were only that: lies. He wouldn't buy it for a second. And on top of that, the concept of muffins sounded almost appetizing. While he still preferred his authentic Japanese cuisine, the food here was slowly becoming more and more bearable. He would have preferred a warm bowl of sweet nattou over rice over the mufffins, but they would do. The plain yogurt and fruit, on the other hand, was excellent. He piled his plate high with fruit as usual, and got several small bowls of yogurt as well.

Finding the most convenient table to the end of the food line, he took a seat and scanned for the new arrivals. New arrivals meant people who would be lost and confused. Renji did a good job of making a bulliten post last time...he should recommend abarai-fukutaicho do the same again this time.

[Waiting for Angel]

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"... Rinali?" Taken aback by Rinali's reaction, Ravi stared at her for a moment. Shit, it wasn't something he'd done that was making her cry, right? Unless she thought something bad had happened... He'd noticed that he'd missed some notices from Allen up on that bulletin board. It looked like Kanda hadn't seen them, either.

But that confirmed it, Ravi decided - something was up. Something had to have shaken Rinali up pretty badly.

He placed his hands on her shoulders. "Hey, 'course it's me," he said. "Pretty sure there're no Ravi impostors running round, either. What's going on here, Rinali?"

There was so much she wanted to tell him, but it hurt to talk about. She just hugged him tighter for a few seconds, then looked up at him. "I saw Komui..." she said, then bit her lip. "He...he's dead." The last words she whispered, struggling to fight back the sorrow to keep it from swallowing her whole.

That left Ravi speechless for a good couple of seconds. Komui? Since when had Komui been here? And now he was-- No way. That couldn't be right. Could it?

No wonder Rinali was this upset.

"Komui?" Ravi echoed, frowning. "Shit..." Without really meaning to, he tightened his grip on Rinali's shoulders. "What happened, Rinali?"

Rinali sniffled into his shirt. It was hard to talk about this, but talk she would.

"He visited me during the day," she said, swallowing hard to fight back the pain. "Told me everything wasn't real. But...but we found him last night. They did something to him, Ravi. They turned him into a disfigured monster. And when I went to go for help, he attacked Allen...he didn't mean to! It was what they had done to him...and Allen ki...ki...killed him."

New tears slid down the tracks left by the old tears on her cheeks, and she buried her face in Ravi's shirt. "He's dead, Ravi," she uttered through his shirt. "He's dead..."

Ravi's visible eye grew wide as Rinali explained just what had happened. Now it was starting to make a lot more sense; he wouldn't put it past this crazy place to do something like that. Something that sounded as messed up as what the Earl did.

"Bastards..." Ravi muttered under his breath. He gritted his teeth and shook his head and then, after a pause, he said, "So they got Komui that fast, huh. But if that's what they did to him for telling you not to believe these guys with their fake names and made-up everything for us, we gotta try even harder to find a way back out."

And Komui probably wouldn't have wanted to stay a disfigured monster attacking them, right? Maybe it was kind of like freeing the trapped souls of Akuma...

Ravi threw a glance past Rinali and around the cafeteria. Where was Allen, anyway? And Kanda, he'd been pretty quiet - of course, Kanda wasn't a teamwork kind of guy.

Rinali sniffled again. Ravi made a little sense in what he said, but it still hurt. "But...how?" she said, feeling more timid than normal. "How are we going to get out of here, Ravi? Oh, I'm just glad you're safe! Komui said...he said you were like he'd become..."

She wiped away the tears from her eyes, but didn't leave Ravi's side. She just wanted to be close to him for now, to be able to affirm through touch that he really was there and not some illusion...

Ravi's gaze returned to Rinali and he shook his head. "Well, I'm guessing it's still kinda hard to come up with a plan that's gonna do the trick for sure, but--" He'd been meaning to mention that he vaguely remembered getting his hammer back - the only problem was that he had no idea where it actually was now - but he stopped, frowning again as the meaning of what Rinali had said really sank in.

"Wait, Komui said that?" Ravi grimaced. "So they made him think some of us got turned into some kinda monster and then they actually did it to him and tried to get you to think the same thing?"

That was seriously messed up. And on top of that, the fact that Rinali was wearing a pretty obvious bandage hadn't escaped him.

If he didn't know better than to confront the so-called staff here, since that would just end up in getting sedated or who knows that, Ravi would have let them know just what he thought of this place.

"We're gonna figure out a way to leave," he said, looking away. "There's no way we're gonna let 'em keep us here forever." All these people working on a solution had to do at least some chipping away at all this, even if it was going slowly.

"... You talked to Allen and Yuu, Rinali?" Ravi turned his attention back to her.

Something in Ravi's confident assertations calmed her enough for her to pull herself away from her friend and take a nearby seat. She didn't feel like everything was going to be ok -- how could she when Komui was dead? -- but knowing he was here, knowing he was as confident as he was, made her feel a little better. She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. "Allen was there..." she said, refusing to think of the fact that he was the one who had killed her brother. "And...you're the first person I've talked to since."

Day 30: Cafeteria, Breakfast

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