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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What Tyler said left John feeling unsettled. Everyone had a secret here? Well, John could argue that no one felt particularly normal, even if they didn't have Terminators coming after them or know what their future held, sort of. Still, he didn't think that Tyler meant your run of the mill problems or secrets. There was something about this place that bothered him, something that made him feel as though it wasn't ordinary and that his mother wasn't planning some daring breakout.

"I'd really like to find a phone and talk to my Mom," he said, beginning to plot the easiest way to swipe a cellphone off someone. "It's 2006, right? The cellphones are small enough."

Tyler blinked at that odd phrasing. "Small enough? What do you mean? And oh, that's the other thing. If you can even reach your mom out there... she might not be the person you know or remember. Apparently we get visitors here from the outside occasionally. I... haven't had any myself, but I've heard about it. They remember things differently. They've been brainwashed by this place. They tell us we're here for our own good and that we've had mental breaks and that everything we think we remember about our old lives were delusions. That's the cover for why we're here, you see. Why no one here will believe us. They tell us all the same thing, and since most of us aren't from anywhere that's anything like this place, we do sound crazy."

He snorted and shook his head. "We all think it our first day here. We're all sure there's some mistake, and we'll be out of here in a snap. It's not that easy. Those of us that have... special abilities, they limit us, steal or seal or block whatever we can do. We're closely watched all day and there's monsters and horrific things to get through at night. There was a riot here one morning in the cafeteria. You'd think with all of us patients here working together, we'd stand a chance of overtaking a few nurses, but they had orderlies pouring in from everywhere and the whole patient group ended up sedated. We took people down with us, of course - just about everyone you'll meet in here is a fighter of some sort - but that doesn't mean we actually got anything accomplished with a show of power."

"Cellphones are small enough to slip into your pocket without anyone really noticing," John explained. "While if this was ten years ago it'd be harder to get away with. They were bigger and bulkier though a lot better to hack into but I'll see what I can do. It shouldn't be too difficult."

John wasn't worried that his mother wouldn't be the same here as she was anywhere else. What were 'they' going to do? Make it so the Terminators weren't after them and that Judgement Day wasn't going to happen? Hallelujah, John would throw whoever was in charge a damn parade and ask him how he managed that. Unless, like he had thought before, Judgement Day had already happened and he was pulled to some time after the fact.

He was pulled from his thoughts when Tyler mentioned the fight. If everyone had turned against the nurses then they should have been able to get a bit further then the cafeteria. "Was someone leading the fight?" he asked. "Telling everyone where to go or was it a free for all?"

"There wasn't even time, I don't think," Tyler answered with a shake of his head. "Or I could have missed part of it. I was trying to protect one of the girls in a wheelchair, but we both got taken down. I've heard it was started by a girl named River, and I know where I saw her fighting, there were these other big guys with her, but it happened so fast, and then there were just orderlies everywhere. I don't know where this place keeps them, I've never seen so many at once, they were everywhere."

He shot John a curious look. "I don't know if it's 2006 here. I haven't seen anything remotely resembling technology here yet, other than they have electricity. No computers, no phones - they do everything on paper still. It's hard to judge what year it is. How do you remember what cellphones ten years ago were like? You had to have been what, five or six? You were hacking cellphones as a six year old?"

River started it? Well, that was another thing she had similar to Cameron. The similarities were eerie and John really didn't want to think about that. Not right now. "That could be why it failed," John pointed out. "With everyone going all over the place there was no real point to the riot. There wasn't a common goal so it was every man for himself, generally speaking. It was only a matter of time before the orderlies gained control again."

John looked down at his hands, trying to think of an explanation. "My Mom still has some of her old phones," he said with a shrug. "I've played around with them, opening them up to see how they worked, stuff like that. That's how I hacked into the phones. Mom doesn't like me hacking, though. It gets me into trouble."

"Well, if there was a point, they didn't let us know beforehand. There could have been one, but it could have had an impromptu reason, too. It wasn't a planned one. People seem to think we'll have the most luck breaking out of this place at night. I guess the monsters and mutants are easier to deal with than the staff."

Tyler grinned at the explanation, understanding that. "I get you. I've never hacked phones, I admit, but I've played around online with stuff occasionally. Usually with a good reason, of course," he added with a sheepish laugh and a crooked grin, scraping his fingers through his hair. "I doubt my mom would approve, either."

"Moms don't usually approve of anything fun," John grinned back. "It's always 'Remember not to go to far' and 'What did I say about computers?' and 'I'm doing this for you, John'."

John sighed and shook his head. "I bet she's going crazy right now, thinking the worst. I hope she doesn't do something rash... but knowing my Mother she'll probably sneak into the police station looking for information. Or make Cameron do it. I just really hope she doesn't think I'm dead."

John didn't want to think about what that would cause his mother to do.

"You sound like you come from a pretty crazy family," Tyler admitted with a chuckle. "Most people would ask the cops for help."

"The Connors and the police don't mix," John said, the last name slipping out before he could catch himself. "I mean, we just don't have a good track record. My Mom was a bit rebellious in her day and I just sort of picked up the tradition. It's nothing too bad, though. Parking tickets, you know. Minor things."

"I'm sure there are other families who don't trust the cops," John said quickly, glancing around him to see who could have heard the last name. No one stood out as being entirely suspicious which was a good thing.

"I'm sure there are," Tyler agreed with an easy smile, recalling that he and his friends had avoided the cops more times than he could count.

Then the name sunk in and he blinked. "Wait, your name is John Connor?"

John was quiet for a moment and stared at Tyler intently. "Who wants to know?" he said softly, suddenly very afraid that he'd let it slip to the wrong person.

Tyler almost dismissed the coincidence as just that - a coincidence. But the fact that he'd met Clark Kent and Pyramid Head and knew that Harry Potter was wandering around in the flesh gave him pause. "Is your mom Sarah?" he asked, looking surprised and hesitant, unsure how to find out if he was talking to who he thought he might be talking to, without coming out and saying 'oh my god, I watched you in a movie' even though this John was way older than the one in T2.

There was a chance it was a coincidence, after all. Maybe his mom just liked Arnold Schwarzenegger...

John caught his breath and looked around him, trying to decide which was the best exit. Why did this always happen to him? He couldn't tell a Terminator in front of him if his life depended on it... and it did depend on it which made it even worse.

"No," he said, prepared to jump up and run if he had to. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Wait, wait!" Tyler held up his hands to show he didn't mean any harm. "Calm down, I didn't mean to startle you. You surprised me just as much. I'm not here to hurt you. It's not like I could in here even if I intended to. The lucky thing about this place in daylight is that you're safe. Unless, of course, you tick off a nurse, but they're not really scary, just armed with needles."

Safe? He could hear his mother's voice now. They were never safe and the moment they thought that it was all over. "How do you know her name?" he demanded, figuring that if Tyler was going to whip out a gun and shoot him he would have done it already. "There are only a handful of people who know that name and most of them want us dead so how do you know it?"

Tyler hesitated for a moment before sighing, realizing he had probably bungled this badly. "Uhh. You remember when I said I'd met Clark Kent? And other people that are purely fiction in my world, but they're walking around like they're perfectly normal and have no idea? And that to someone else I came across here, who knew about me because in her world, I was a work of fiction? Even though everything I experienced for me was reality?"

"So you're saying that you know me because I'm fiction?" John laughed harshly. "I wish that were true. You have no fucking idea how much I wish that were true. But it isn't. It's all real. I don't know how you know my name. Maybe it's after Judgement Day and I jumped time, or jumped to a different time where we failed the last time at stopping it, but whatever the case is, the Terminators are real, it's all real. And I need to find my Mother fast because if she thinks I'm dead there's no telling to what she'll do."

"Fuck, you really are..." Tyler trailed off, blinking at him. "Look, I'm not saying any of us are fiction. I know I sure as hell aren't, despite whatever anyone else might have seen in their own worlds. It seems pretty weird that all these... dimensions or something are connected this way, but maybe they are. I don't know. Maybe in your world, I'm fiction there, too. As fucked up as this sounds. This place screws with your head," Tyler replied apologetically, hoping he hadn't pissed the other boy off.

"I don't know anything about alternate dimensions," John shrugged, deciding that Tyler wasn't a Terminator and calmed down a bit. "I only know a bit about time travel and if we're all from different times maybe this is some weird holding place. Some wires were crossed somewhere and we all are pulled into this place."

That didn't explain all of this 'fiction' talk, however. "Do you really know about me because of a book?" John asked incredulously.

Tyler shook his head. "No, a movie. And not... you exactly. At least, I've never seen you look like this before. There's a trilogy of movies in my world about... Terminators. I've never seen the third one, but the first two I have. The first one was about a man coming back from the future to stop a robot from killing a woman named Sarah Connor, because her son was supposed to save the world. The second one was several years later when another robot came back and a robot was sent to save him."

Tyler felt hugely uncomfortable revealing this, considering how freaked out he'd been when he found out someone from somewhere else had watched his life as a movie.

"I'm sorry," he apologized a but weakly, biting his lip. "I know that sounds freaky."

It was very weird to hear that his life was caught on film somewhere. Would it be like watching a home movie? Or worse, seeing actors portray certain scenes from his life in a weird mockery for entertainment. It wasn't fun. It wasn't exciting. It was hell to have to run his entire life. The idea that people watched it for an hour and a half and then went about their days was frustrating and it pissed him off.

Still, if there was a movie about his mother and his father... "Do they have the movies here?" he asked, unable to hide the slight sound of hope in his voice. He always wanted to see his father. See the person he sent back. All he had were stories and a brief glance of Kyle Reese as a young boy. But if there was a movie... maybe it sounded perverse but he wanted to see him. Wanted to see how he acted. Perhaps he'd have a better idea of how to prevent the end of the world if he just saw his father, just once.

"I don't know," Tyler answered honestly, shrugging. "I haven't seen movies here, but maybe? I've heard there's a town they took everyone to last weekend, maybe there? If there's a movie of me somewhere, yours could be here as well, if this world has things like that."

"How often do they take us to this town?" John asked, already planning to see if he could get his hands on this movie. He wasn't in the first movie, Tyler had said. Just his mother and his father. It wouldn't be too weird to want to see it, would it?

"I don't know," Tyler answered again, apologetically. "I've only been here a couple days myself, so I'm not certain. Maybe you could find someone who's been here longer? I know there's a few that have been here for a few weeks."

"A few weeks? I hope I'm not here that long," John frowned. The thought of being stuck here was not a pleasant one.

"This is a lot to take in. Was it easy for you to hear this?"

Day 32: Sun Room (2nd shift)

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