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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"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?"

Tyler snorted and shook his head. "When I arrived? It was night shift. I was lucky to run into someone who knew what was going on, else I might have gotten killed or eaten in my first few minutes here. We ran into a villain from a video game. I thought we were in some sort of weird freaky haunted house with people in very realistic costumes. Boy was I ever wrong."

"Is it really that bad at night?" John asked, shifting closer to Tyler. "What sort of monsters do they have here? Are they all from movies and video games like... like we are?"

The thought of having to out run a Terminator when there wasn't anywhere to escape to wasn't something John was looking forward to.

"Some of them are," Tyler answered. "The bulletin board over there is probably the best place to ask. So far I've seen Tyrant from Resident Evil and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. But this place also has its own monsters that seem to be from here. Things mutate after dark, just like the institute itself. There are cats and dogs and rats and insects and such that mutate into vicious monsters. They get bigger and nastier and way more deadly. And I think there's ghosts that also haunt the halls, my friend Reid and I ran into something the other night that we couldn't see, but we could hear it, and it made the air very hard to breathe."

"As if I didn't have enough things to worry about," John sighed, running his fingers through his hair in frustration. "At least this isn't any different from my normal say life. Running has become sort of an artform."

"Well, this is completely backwards for me," Tyler admitted, leaning back in his chair in a comfortable slouch. "Where I come from, we haver to be careful. There's a lot of secrets in my family. It's still a bit weird being around so many people who probably have bigger ones than we do."

"I think it all depends on how you look at it," John shrugged. "Every family has secrets and skeletons in the closet but I doubt you can compare secrets that I have to, say, Clark Kent's. Entirely different can of worms. So, whatever your secrets are I'm sure they're just as important as my own."

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Day 32: Sun Room (2nd shift)

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