damned_institute | Day 32: Sun Room (2nd shift)

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Day 32: Sun Room (2nd shift)

After the couple glasses of water Leon managed to gulp down during breakfast, the mage felt immensely better. He was still a bit tired, but that was nothing a little lounging on one of the sofas wouldn't cure. Stretching his arms above his head, he couldn't help but wish he'd had the chance to grab one of his new doctor's coats before leaving his room that morning. Maybe they would have let him get away with wearing it. Maybe.

He grabbed an empty sofa, pulling out the journal he tried to keep on him at all times. It was nearly complete now. Just a couple more pages to go. It might not improve his spellcasting that much, but any improvement was better than none. It was getting to where it might be too dangerous for him to use spells at all, if it left him so worn out without even finishing a monster off.

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Last night had been a bit of a wake up call for her. Here she had been wandering around in the dark thinking she only had to worry about grumpy inmates and tightwad security guards. Now she knew she also had to worry about giant, white, hissing bugs of death on top of that. It sure would have been nice if someone had left her a memo or something. With things liekt hat crawling around, it was definitely going to be more difficult finding an escape route. At the very least, it ruled out the air vents.

Harley was going to have to rethink her breakout strategy later. For the moment, she was going to be meeting an old playmate of hers. At least, that was the impression she'd gotten from the bulletin board thing.

Someone who used to work in Arkham, hmm? That would make it either a nurse or a doctor. Orderlies wouldn't have asked to meet. Even so, she was interested in seeing a familiar face again. Whoever it was would surely know her as well. She was certain there wasn't a member of the Arkham staff who didn't know of her or her puddin'.

Though the room was supposed to be primarily for relaxation purposes, Harley sat on one of the softly colored couches, leaning back and kicking her feet restlessly. She was turning her head back and forth to inspect the occupants of the 'Sunny' Room, pigtails smacking her in the face every so often. It was almost like a guessing game. Which, oh, which one will it be?

[Patiently waiting for Crane]

The nurses had taken some time to clean and bandage his hand, but Crane knew he wouldn't be doing anything with it for a while. The shock of getting stabbed was going down, and it still hurt a lot, but he could deal with it. He'd opted out of taking pain medication, but he wanted to be able to think things through and at least seem decently capable of working things out when he met the person from the bulletin board.

What's more, though, was that this was the second time something had happened, and he had gotten physical wounds from it. The first had been the taser, which he was certain had been a dream, but he'd felt the pain, and there was still a scar on his face. And now he'd been stabbed through the hand by a woman claiming to be a computer.

Crane was very thoroughly confused by the whole thing. Even if this was a lucid dream, he still shouldn't have been able to feel pain like that. And it still begged to question if everything he'd dreamed up about Ra's al Ghul's plan being put into action was true. What's more, he wanted to know where his memories were in between that and arriving here.

Maybe the person he was meeting in the Sun Room could help explain this. What had they said their name was again? Harley? They'd also drawn the pig tails on one of their grinning faces. If he looked around for just women with pigtails...luckily, it didn't take him too long after looking around to find who he thought he was was looking for: a blonde woman who appeared to be looking around for someone.

Crane walked over to where she was, and smiled. Despite the throbbing pain in his hand, he still wanted to look semi-professional, in case this really was someone from Arkham and one of his former patients. "Hello there, I'm Jonathan Crane. Are you Harley?"

Even though she had been on the lookout for people approaching her, she was still surprised when the man regarded her. This was mainly due to the fact she had been searching for faces that looked familiar. And the man who had just introduced himself was most certainly not.

What's more, he had just introduced himself as Jonathan Crane, a name she knew all too well. In any other situation, she'd have probably yelped with glee upon seeing her old friend again. But...

She stared up blankly at the man for a few heartbeats, inspecting his face. No, his face was all wrong. Harley tilted her head to the side, as though changing the angle of her vision would magically make him more recognizable.

Still looking at him sideways, she was silent for a few more beats before finally blurting out, "Professor Crane? Did ya dye your hair or somethin'?"

No, that didn't make sense either. If this was a joke, it was a really good one.

Crane waited while she inspected him; trying to remember him, he assumed. When she asked if he'd dyed his hair, he assumed that to be a 'yes, I'm Harley' until he really thought about the content. "Professor?" he asked, hesitating for a moment. He hadn't mentioned anything like that over the board, much less to any of his old patients back at Arkham, as far as he could remember. So how did she know that? "I haven't worked as one in several years, and this has always been my hair color."

Now it was Crane's turn to stare at her, trying to see if her face rang any bells. Unfortunately, he came up with nothing, and he still wasn't sure if this was the right person. "You are from Arkham Asylum, correct? Or do I know you from one of my old courses?"

"Hmm? Yeah, I'm Harley..." she said, scratching her cheek in contemplation. She smiled a bit sheepishly. "Heh, I musta got ya mixed up with someone else. Ya got the same name an' all."

Nope, this couldn't be Professor Crane. He would have recognized her immediately if it were. The more he said, the more she was convinced this was someone else. Honestly, what were the chances of two people from Arkham with the same name? It was odd...

She continued to look at him curiously. "Never took no classes with ya, but I got transferred from Arkham a few days ago. Don't remember ever seein' you there though."

It was, of course, entirely possible he was some kind of new employee for the asylum. That made sense to a point. However, it wasn't hard to see Crane 2.0 was dressed exactly as she was: cute smiley face and all. She looked him up and down. Could it be he wasn't here as a doctor as she had thought?

"...Didn't ya say you used to work at Arkham? Ya tryin' to blend in or did ya go loopy?" It wouldn't be the first time a doctor exchanged places with their subjects. She would know.

So they really didn't know each other. Well, that made things somewhat easier. Crane had never seen her there before, either, but perhaps she'd just been another doctor's patient. It may have explained why she'd never seen him...although he'd been working there for a while, so he should have at least seen her.

"Yes, I used to work there." And if GLaDOS had been right, and it wasn't a dream, then that wasn't really the case anymore. If he was perfectly honest with himself, he had gone a bit crazy. But it was a useful kind of crazy, wasn't it? After the main effects of his gas had worn off, Crane had gotten the chance to act more as Scarecrow than he ever had in his life by scaring the masses of Gotham. It had been pure fun, while providing him with some interesting observations to add to his research.

"And I'm not trying to blend in. Let's just say that a certain masked vigilante didn't care for my experiments, and I wound up incarcerated there." Among other things, but that was the best way to explain it. And there was always the chance that she had been from a different Arkham, no matter how slim the chance seemed. If she knew who he was talking about, then she would have to have been from his Arkham, and it wouldn't have made a difference. But he'd rather keep as much about his private research and fear experiments as he could secret, in case he wished to further it while he was here.

"How long were you in Arkham before being transferred here?" he asked after a moment.

The small, curious smile on her face faded a volume with the mention of 'a certain masked vigilante.' There wasn't a question in her mind as to who the man was referring to.

"Ahhh. So Batsy gotcha, too, huh?" Her expression changed to one of exaggerated exasperation as she let out a heavy sigh. "He oughta keep his big, pointy ears outta other people's business already. Talk about a party pooper."

She had to pause to consider his other question. For those who spent a great deal of time within the asylum walls, it was usually difficult to gage time. The nurses would never be considerate enough to give the patients calendars.

Her eyes rose up to the ceiling, as though she'd find the answer up there, and she placed a finger to her bottom lip thoughtfully. "Hmmm. I'd say I was only there a little over a month this time. I was kinda scraped up, so I had to wait til I got better 'fore I could try bustin' out."

She crossed her arms and stuck her lip out in a pout. "Not like it matters. They ended up transferrin' me over here first. They didn't even tell me 'fore they did it. Just kinda decided to drag me over while I was sleepin', I guess. Heard it happened to a lotta people here, too."

Busting out? This time? Had he still been in Arkham, respected at Arkham, he would have had the orderlies scour the place for possible holes. As it was, he was tempted to laugh. Aside from Ra's al Ghul's men infiltrating the place and letting the inmates loose, Crane couldn't quite think of a time when anyone had escaped.

Despite her theatrics, Crane could relate to the feeling. "Yes, he really should. He just causes more trouble for everyone." Of course, if not the Bat, then who? There was always some idealist trying to play hero. They could kill the normal people, but the Batman was...horribly resilient. Especially to fire.

But while he agreed with the former statement, he found her last one odd. Really, it seemed almost like she was living in an alternate city called by the same name. It couldn't have taken them that short a time period to both catch him and transfer him somewhere else. Transfers, at least, took a few days. So why no mention of being let out of Arkham? She should have been around for it...

Perhaps it really didn't happen. It was difficult to tell anymore, and she'd even said it happened to a lot of people here. Of course, he was talking to someone in a mental institution. He had no prior knowledge of why she was here, simply that she was. Perhaps he was expecting to understand too much.

"But the last thing you remember was being in Arkham? You hadn't been let out by anyone?"

"Nope," she responded almost immediately. "They called lights out, an' I went to sleep. Next thing I know, I'm wakin' up here with some new nurse shovin' me around."

She remembered feeling outraged about this concept at first. Sure, she was a wanted nutso with a list of misdemeanors longer than her arm, but she had rights, dammit. They should have at least mentioned the fact they were planning to transfer her somewhere else. Though, this reminded her of something else she was told by one of the inmates here...

"Someone else said somethin' about the people here kidnappin' people from other asylums or somethin'. Don't make a whole lotta sense to me. Why would ya kidnap someone to put 'em in another asylum, ya know?" She shrugged. "But some people I talked to said they remember fallin' asleep somewhere and wakin' up here, too."

Considering the subject she was discussing, she didn't sound very alarmed. Perhaps she would have been if she were the type to sit down and mull over her situation... but that would have been crazy.

How strange. Well, at least he was reasonably certain that either everyone in this place had the similar delusions of what they were doing before they woke up, or he hadn't dreamed anything before he woke up.

"It wouldn't make much sense," Crane agreed. "You're lucky to at least have fallen asleep, though. I was in the midst of something when I woke up, and I don't remember how or when I fell asleep. I wasn't within the asylum's walls at that time, either." He paused for a moment, then considered it couldn't hurt to tell her what had gone on.

"That's why I was wondering what you remembered before waking up here. Before the Batman caught me, I had been in on some plans for Gotham. This involved setting the inmates of Arkham loose. I was caught before this was enacted, and set loose with the rest of them. That's as far as I remember before waking up here. I don't remember being caught again, much less falling asleep."

So really, they could have feasibly just sent him here instead of back to Arkham first. But kidnapping people from within an asylum and transferring them to another without so much as a 'this is what we're doing'? It was rather unusual. Then again, if he thought back to an idea he'd pushed out of his head during his talk with GLaDOS... "I suspect they don't want other institutions to know what goes on in here, and that this is all one large experiment."

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Day 32: Sun Room (2nd shift)

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