damned_institute | Day 34: Breakfast

[starting off in M13]

The last part of the night was little more than a blur in Homura's mind. The men had rushed in, but not joined them, instead staying off to themselves. Before any of them had a chance to react, however, a voice sounded through the air, mocking some other person Homura had never heard of, and the patients themselves.

To Homura, whoever that man was, he sounded a great deal like a god.

But before he could ask questions, the demi-god found himself no longer in the chapel, but some strange room on a bed. Is that what Kenren had meant from his earlier warning? Homura sat up, glad at least that the world didn't spin when he did so. Then the same man from before began to speak again, with a completely different tone. It was confusing to hear him talk that way, calling them patients instead of prisoners as he had before. Homura listened quietly as the announcement was made, then got out of bed.

Maybe he wouldn't have to go anywhere yet. It wasn't like Homura knew where to go anyway, and that meant he had time. If this was his room, and if he had been here as long as Kenren had said, there was a chance he could find something with answers. The Taisho had even told him that Homura had seen Rinrei. Certainly he would've written something down, made a map, something that could let him find her again! He started with the desk at the end of his bed, first finding a small stack of notebooks. Picking up the first, he flipped through, turning the pages with quickening desperation as he found each one to be blank.

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Pancakes, sausage, eggs, juice. Thursday scowled briefly at the juice. What she wouldn't give, she thought, for a steaming mug of tea. Or coffee. Anything remotely caffeinated sounded lovely, really.

A motion up ahead attracted her attention - Dairine. Thursday grinned back, setting her tray down next to the girl. "Morning. How've you been?"

Dairine shrugged. "Surviving. What about you?" She brightened suddenly. "Listen, I got into the file room last night. It occurred to me while I was in there, I could have looked for yours. What do they call you here, so I can know in case I go back?"

She started to cut her pancakes. For all of the insanity and torture here, the food wasn't that bad.

"The same, I suppose." It was an awfully pessimistic way to look at things, to be honest, but then again Landel's didn't exactly encourage optimism.

The file room, though - that sounded promising. "They call me Emily Bellman here. Did you find yours? What sort of information's in those things?"

"I don't know, really," she said sheepishly. "Right after we got the files, we had to run, and then we were attacked by those birds outside, so I haven't had a chance to look through them. I think I'll check mine out over dinner. But yours ought to be in the same room as mine, so maybe we can go back tonight and see."

She jabbed at a piece of syruped breakfast food. "What about you? What did you get up to last night?"

"Outside?" Thursday frowned slightly. Dairine looked unharmed, so that was no cause for worry. "Is that what the blather on the radio was about last night, then? Did you get very far before you were attacked?"

If it turned out they were actually letting the patients outside...well, Thursday wasn't sure what to make of that. Either this Jill person really had succeeded in foiling Landel's plans for a night, or there was something worse waiting for them beyond the institute's walls.

"My team didn't get very far. We were assigned to explore more of the basement, but there was a creature in the kitchen - I think the other members of the team called it an 'Alien.' That held us up a bit." She looked down at her pancakes, suddenly sober. "It got a kid before we turned up."

"Not really. We only got out where the buses dropped us off last time." Dairine frowned, too, and ate a piece of pancake. The radio had squawked something just before dawn broke, but she'd been, to put it simply, preoccupied. "What did the radio say, then?"

Thursday's mention of the 'Alien' caused a little light to go on in Dairine's head. "An alien? What did it look like? It might be something I've fought against before." Like those nasty bug-eyed things that had chased her through the Crossings during her ordeal, or maybe the Yaldiv...her eyes darkened when Thursday mentioned the casualty. "That's...that's terrible," she said, looking down at her own pancakes with a mixture of sadness and anger. The Lone One was killing kids here, just like it did in her 'verse, and it made her positively sick.

"It was...staticky. There was a recording earlier on in the night - sounded like there had been some sort of shielding technology that had been preventing us from getting out to begin with, and...I think the woman on the radio managed to hack into it. I'm not an expert when it comes to computers, but it sounded like a pretty impressive feat. I do know the front doors have always been locked before, so she must've done something at least."

She pulled a pen out of her waistband and sketched the creature on her napkin. Art wasn't one of her strong points, but she managed a rough rendering nonetheless. "It looked like this - terrifyingly fast and nigh unstoppable, from what I saw last night. My companions mentioned seeing it in a movie."

The boy last night had been Friday's age - sixteen, seventeen at the oldest. It was sickening, but it reminded her that at least Friday wasn't here. No matter how much she missed her son, she could bear anything as long as he didn't have to go through it, too.

Dairine looked at the napkin sketch with a growing sense of dread. Oh, damn. "It is from a movie - at least, where I come from. I don't remember exactly what it's called, but the movie was called Alien, and it had Sigourney Weaver in it. You're right, it is nigh unstoppable. Do you know if it's laid eggs?" Oh, God, now that was a scary thought. A whole bunch of little face-hugger babies, bursting chests open all over the Institute...eurgh.

"If I remember correctly, the only way to stop it is through brute force." Or crisping it like a marshmallow...

"I don't know. What do the eggs look like?" Thursday definitely hadn't been looking for anything of the sort last night - not when the thing had been threatening to run them through with its tail at any moment - but maybe if they were distinctive enough...

"I checked the bulletin board before I came to breakfast this morning. Apparently someone managed to kill it - but I'm sure Landel has got plenty more where that came from, especially if it's capable of reproducing."

"About this tall," Dairine said, holding her hands roughly a foot apart. "Oval-ish. And really, really gooey. If you find one, don't get too close. The nasty little things tend to pop out once they find a host, and..." The wizard took a deep breath. "A little larva attaches itself to your face, implants more eggs in your stomach, and dies. A few hours later, another alien, er...bursts right out of your chest while you're still alive, killing you in a messy and probably very painful way." Dairine had seen that when she was six, and the terror had left a very deep impression on her. She did not relish meeting one of those big ol' nasty bugs face-to-face.

Thursday winced at that. "You're kidding me," she said, but her tone of voice said quite clearly that she believed Dairine.

From a movie, too. How the hell did they come up with this sort of thing? "I definitely didn't see anything of the sort last night. I guess I should be pretty damn thankful."

"I only wish I were," Dairine said. "But if you didn't see any eggs, it may not have laid any yet."

She had a sip of some of her juice. "I wonder what lovely surprises they're keeping for us outside..."

Day 34: Breakfast

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