damned_institute | Nightshift 20 - 2nd floor, stairs by Decontamination Room 2

Nowe trotted to keep up with Renji. His own legs were pretty long, but Renji was moving quickly. Nowe kept his eyes and ears alert for any abnormal movements or sounds within the shadows, though the flashlight that Sora had was helping. He was relieved to see the second set of steps, and hurried up after Renji, pausing now and then to make sure they hadn't lost Sora either, since the redheaded man had abruptly taken the lead.

He stopped just behind the other man at the top of the steps.

"So, where to next?" he whispered.

Sora was significantly shorter than his two companions so keeping up was a bit difficult. He ended up falling into a job (a quiet job) which caused the flashlight he was still holding to bounce all over the hallway... Which probably defeated the effort to be quiet in the first place.

It didn't end up mattering, anyway, since stairs were found and they made it upstairs without incident. Sora was shocked at how simple that had been. It made him feel as if they were going to get attacked any second. Wasn't that how it always worked?

"If we go left we'll probably run into that fight again," Sora said with a frown. They had taken that whole detour to avoid it, so heading back toward it seemed counter intuitive. "So how about right?"

"My thoughts, exactly," Renji whispered. "We'll take our time, now." He hesitated, considering the flashlight. He didn't like having it on, because it attracted attention. But there wasn't enough light up here to be able to detect much more than where the walls were. Which kind of defeated the purpose of exploring and trying to figure out what was around. There was nothing for it; the flashlight would have to stay on.

Better to let Sora keep the flashlight, though. Renji wanted his hands free, just in case. "Right it is. And I guess we'll start on our map." He smiled and started moving.

"It looks like there's a door there..." Nowe said softly, pointing to a closed door in front of them. "I wonder if everything's locked at night." He couldn't see much farther to their right. Deciding it was worth the risk since Sora had his flashlight on too, he clicked the light on and shined it down their path.

"Ah, there's some kind of hall down that way, too."

"Not all doors are locked," Sora explained. As for the one near them, there was only one way to know. The boy stepped forward, lowering his flashlight slightly. He wasn't completely unaware of how dangerous it was to be casting such a bright light in such a dark place.

He hoped someone else was going to take care of the mapping, since he hadn't volunteered in the first place. He'd rather lead their little excursion. Once he reached the door, he grabbed the knob and was pleased to see that it opened without a fuss.

"Wanna go in here, then?" he asked quietly over his shoulder.

Renji took out one of the myriad of pens he'd hidden in his clothing and hair and started working on notes. They were short notes, with rough sketches, because he wanted to focus as much attention as possible on what was going on around. But it would be enough to remind him of the details.

"Sure," Renji said. "We have to start somewhere." Sora seemed to want to take the lead, and Renji decided to let him. He wanted to protect these kids, but they weren't toddlers. He didn't want to run roughshod all over them, not when he didn't have to.

He found it vaguely worrying that the door opened so easily. Paranoia was a bitch.

Nowe hesitated as the door opened. The darkness that lay within was rather ominous. He was almost afraid to point the light into the shadows, afraid of what he'd find. After all, if a place could produce a giant, seemingly undead cat, who knew what else it could create?

He crept up to stand just behind Sora, trying to see into the shadows, but it proved to be near impossible. He could see a few more doors inside the darkness, but not much else.

"Well, we're not going to get anything accomplished just standing out here. Let's go."

"Got it," Sora said with a firm nod as he stepped into the room that turned out to be more of a hallway. There was a line of doors on either side. At least there was three of them, so it hopefully wouldn't take that long to check which ones opened and which ones didn't.

"Let's try all of these," he vocalized. "See which ones open and which don't." Without waiting for a confirmation, the boy drew forward and started on the right side of the hallway. He became a bit discouraged when all of them seemed to be locked, but hopefully at least one would open...

Renji made a note as door after door was locked. "Wonder what these are..." he said. "Is there any kind of label on them? I doubt this place would be that helpful, though..."

After ten doors, the next door Sora tried, while still locked, made a slightly different sound. "Hold on," Renji said. He moved forward and examined the doorknob and locked. Everything looked pretty messed up, but this seemed to be a special sort of decrepit. "We may be able to break this pretty easy," he said, then frowned. "But it'd make a lot of noise..."

"Check the rest of the hallway and see if there's anything in here with us first," Nowe suggested, glancing around, "if not, then we can close the door we came in through, and minimize the amount of noise we make. Hopefully that fight is still going on and distracts anything nearby."

He started heading back the way they'd come, shutting the door they'd entered through as softly as he could, and as he headed back to the other two he glanced at the locked doors they'd tried. There seemed to be a lot of them, and all of them similar. Were they more patients? Examination rooms? Nowe shuddered, not wanting to think about what they did to people here, if they were capable of brainwashing.

"I don't think there's anything else in here with us." Then again, Sora didn't put it past the institute to have something pop up out of nowhere. Heartless did that, so he was used to being on edge all the time. Then again, an area tended to feel a certain way if there was darkness nearby. It always felt like that at night in Landel's, and yet there were no Heartless...

"If I can summon the Keyblade, I might be able to beat it until it opens," he suggested. That would take a lot of work when the blade should have just been able to unlock it easily, but there was no point in whining about his repressed powers. Some people had it much worse, after all.

Renji looked at Sora. "Summon..." He frowned. He'd never met Sora before, and it was probably a stupid question to ask, since if he hadn't met Sora, it was unlikely that he was a Shinigami. But you never knew. "Is 'Keyblade' the name of your zanpakuto?"

From the way Sora had put it, Renji wasn't sure if he meant he could summon it or not. If there was the possibility... yeah, it made him a little jealous. Which made him feel like a complete jerk for thinking that way, but that's how it was. He'd had Zabimaru around for years, and the absence left him eerily hollow.

He reached out and jiggled the doorknob. His fingers came away covered with rust. "If you can't summon 'Keyblade,'" he said, "I could just kick it down." He certainly had the height and weight advantage, in this group.

"Ah, you can just summon your weapon? I'm envious of you," Nowe said with a weak smile as he looked down at Sora. Nowe's own sword was just gone, taken away from him. Possibly destroyed. That last thought was a bit depressing, so he pushed it out of his mind. He didn't want to think about what this place had done with his weapons, and possibly his friends. Legna wasn't here... he'd know if Legna was here. Wouldn't he?

"Well, there's three of us and only one door. We can help kick it down too," he suggested, forcing away the more depressing thoughts. He certainly didn't have as much muscle as Renji did, but it might be enough to help make things easier for the red-haired man.

Zanpawhat?

Sora wasn't sure how to respond. He stared at the taller man with his mouth slightly open before clamping it shut and shaking his head. "It's... It's just the Keyblade," he said with a shrug, not sure he had it in him to launch into an explanation.

Besides, it would be easier to show them - provided he had the willpower to summon it. He hadn't done so for a while (since the scorpion incident, anyway), so he hoped it wouldn't give him trouble. He focused on how much he needed it, how helpful it would be (with perhaps a bit of exaggeration), and breathed a sigh of relief when he felt a warmth in his heart. It was responding.

A second or two later, he had the comfortable grip of his weapon resting in the palm of his hand. He held it out to show his two companions. "See? Keyblade." He smiled weakly, feeling a little drained from summoning it. He was supposed to feel empowered.

It would be best for him to use the blade and then get rid of it, since having it out for two long would wear him down. So without further ado, he swung in place to slash at the lock.

Renji stepped back, his eyebrows raised in surprise. He was impressed... and a little jealous. "Keyblade. I see." That was no zanpakuto, but it was something. He edged back a little further as Sora started swinging.

Maybe...

He looked down at his own hands, then closed his eyes, concentrating. He tried to go to that internal place, where Zabimaru and all of his own spirit energy dwelled... if he hadn't been standing in the hall, he would have sworn that he was chained, struggling against tight bonds. For just a moment, he felt like something would give, but then...

He closed his hands into fists and shuddered. Nothing. No sense of Zabimaru, no sense of himself. Then he had to reach out and put his hand against the wall, fighting against a strange wave of dizziness. It made him feel doubly hollow, now. And so very, very weak.

So he didn't help as Sora broke down the door. He didn't really notice it. Instead, he was fighting to center himself back down, and to make the dizziness go away. He was almost back to normal - as normal as this was - when the door broke down.

Almost.

Nowe watched Renji concentrate for a moment, and then went back to watching Sora swing the Keyblade at the door. He heard it open, but was distracted instantly by the sight of Renji bracing himself against the wall.

"Renji? Are you alright??" Startled by the sudden sight, Nowe stretched a hand out and touched the man's shoulder cautiously. "What happened?"

He shot a look at Sora. The ex-Knight wanted to know what was beyond the door, but if Renji was out of commission, it might not be wise to proceed much farther. It also looked like summoning that weapon had taken a lot out of Sora. He chewed on his lip. Damn. This was quite the predicament they'd gotten themselves into, and they hadn't even run into any monsters yet. Was it worth the risk to continue onward anyway? If he could just find his damn sword...

Since Sora had been focused on getting the door open, he hadn't noticed what Renji was going through until after the fact. When Nowe asked if the man was okay, the boy turned to face the other two, panting slightly as he let the Keyblade disappear back into his heart.

"Did I do something?" he asked, tone heavy with concern. He was usually very careful to make sure he didn't hit anyone when he was swinging the Keyblade around, but maybe he had screwed up. Then again, Renji didn't look like he was faltering from getting clobbered in the head, so...

The door was open, which meant that he wanted to get through it as soon as possible. If Renji was out of commission, maybe he could leave Nowe to watch him while he explored...

Renji hastily straightened up, and gave Sora and Nowe a grin. "Don't worry about it. Just had a weird moment there. It shouldn't happen again."

Yeah, it shouldn't. Because now he knew better. He still felt faintly ill, but he didn't show it. Concentrating on the task at hand would take his mind off of just how upsetting that little moment of internal struggle had been.

"Let's take a look," he said, letting his empty hands - so damn empty! - fall to his sides. He headed into the now-open room.

Nowe wasn't entirely convinced by Renji's explanation, but accepted it nonetheless. Renji could make judgements for himself, and while Nowe was still concerned about him after that little incident, he didn't press the matter any farther. Instead, he watched as Sora and Renji plunged into the darkness of the room they'd opened.

Taking a deep breath and hoping the three of them would be the only ones in the room, he hurried in after them.

With the Keyblade gone as quickly as it had come, Sora could focus on flashlight duty yet again. He was quick to shine it around the room, which was fairly small. There were lockers lining the walls and two wooden benches in the middle of the room.

Who was this for? He had never been in here before, so it couldn't be for the patients...

"Is this for the nurses?" he asked with a blink, lowering his flashlight suddenly in wonderment. It was weird to be faced with this; it gave the daytime antagonists a realer quality to them.

Moving the flashlight around, Sora located a shelf of cubbies that had nurse uniforms - for males nurses, it seemed - and a few towels. "We could take those for makeshift bandages, maybe..." That way people wouldn't be ripping up their clothing all the time.

The lockers were most likely, well, locked. It felt wrong to go rifling through a person's possessions, but what if they found something useful?

"Good idea, Sora," Renji said, his attention turning toward the lockers.

Renji didn't have anything approaching Sora's compunctions. This was war, and they were prisoners. Hell with their enemies. If they weren't there to stop them, it was on.

He tried a couple of lockers, and only succeeded in rattling the doors. He decided to go back and look at them again if they somehow ran out of things to do. But out of curiousity, he tried another at random. This one opened, revealing the normal sort of equipment one might find in a nurse's locker - some clothes, a sensible pair of shoes, a set of trauma sheers, and a roll of clear tape.

Well, better than nothing. And Kurosaki had said something about finding metal. Renji took the sheers and tucked them into the back of his pants. As an afterthought, he took the clear tape, too. He wasn't actually sure what it was, but it was small and portable, so he might as well take it.

"Anything else interesting in here?" he asked, reaching to try a couple more lockers at random before they moved on. Just in case.

Nowe, relieved that they appeared to be the only occupants of the room, (and also somewhat surprised at their luck) tugged at the doors to a few more of the lockers, but the rest of them appeared to be tightly closed and locked. He glanced into the locker Renji found. Just some clothes and shoes. He reached in and picked up the shoes.

"This could be useful, too," he said, and undid the laces on them, pocketing them and replacing the shoes in the locker. He wasn't sure how, but something string-like might come in handy for later. He also reached up and took some of the towels off the shelves, offering a few to Sora and Renji before taking two of them for himself, tucking them into the waistband of his pants. It looked silly, but it was the easiest way to carry them.

"Judging by the way the hallway was laid out, I'm willing to bet the room right across the hall is for the girl nurses," he said, but looked doubtfully at Sora, "so unless we think we can find anything super-useful in there, we might want to move on and not bother with that room." Who knew how much time they had left, after all? It was nearly impossible to tell in the oppressive darkness.

Noticing the way the other two had tucked things into their pants, Sora acknowledged how good of an idea that was (and wondered why he hadn't thought of it before), emulating them once he took the towels Nowe handed to him.

It seemed only one of the lockers had been left unlocked and Renji had already searched it. While they could force the others open, that would take too much time and there was most likely nothing of interest in any of them.

Nowe's observation earned a smile from Sora. That was the sort of thing he would have never thought of. "Sounds good to me." Usually he would have been a bit more enthusiastic with that statement, but both of his companions had seemed strict about keeping quiet.

The boy headed out of the room and waited patiently for once.

Renji, nodded at Nowe's statement; he was probably right. He finished rearranging his pants stowage space so he could move around and not lose everything, then followed Sora.

So, the opposite door was going to be useless, most likely. He moved up the hallway to try the next door. Unexpectedly, it wasn't locked. He opened it enough to catch the light from the flashlight.

A bathroom. Well, he doubted there would be anything there. He let the door fall shut on its own. "Bathroom," he said. "One more to go, then, and we're done with the hall." He made a couple more notes on his paper.

Nowe opened the door to the bathroom and stuck his head inside anyway, looking for any razors or anything that might be used as a decent weapon. There didn't seem to be anything of the sort immediately around, so he stepped back and closed the door as quietly as he could. He shone his flashlight back down the hallway, checking to make sure nothing had managed to follow them inside.

Turning to face the last door in the hallway, Nowe waited, letting Sora do the honors since the boy seemed to naturally take the lead. He didn't mind, really, some people were just naturally inclined to do so. He just hoped nothing would come jumping out at them from behind that door.

The final door opened into what appeared to be a lounge for the nurses. It seemed that this was where the staff spent their breaks and most of their time when they weren't tending to the patients. If the nurses had most of their facilities on the second floor, then the really important stuff had to be farther up.

As for what was in the lounge, there were couches, tables, a water cooler and coffee maker, a television...

Sora examined the area, shining the flashlight all around so that he could get an idea of the entirety of the room. It was interesting to see electronic things as advanced as a television around and the boy was drawn to it for that reason. He pressed the power button, expecting that it wouldn't even turn on, and almost jumped back when it actually did.

It showed a middle-aged woman giving a basic news broadcast. "Today there was a small skirmish between two opposed forces near Old Los Angeles in the downtown area. Neither group is large enough to be considered a real threat to the US, but the armed forces were sent in to calm things down and everything seems to be stable at the moment. The two men identified as the leaders of either group have been taken into custody..."

Then the picture shifted, the color distorted, and it fell away into static, then replaced by a high whine and a blue screen that read: "Landel's Local Network--Please excuse our current technical difficulties!"

What had that been about? Sora had no idea what to think of it. He'd never heard of "Old Los Angeles" or "the US," but this could be a big clue as to where they were.

He hoped Renji or Nowe had a better idea of what all of that was...

Renji jumped back when the television turned on, almost colliding with a table. He had a pen in each hand, settling in to a defensive posture before he'd really figured out what was going on.

Then he surged forward and randomly pressed at the area he'd seen Sora hit until the TV turned off. He was most concerned about the noise.

"What the hell was that?" He moved back, feeling along the floor with his feet to find where he'd dropped his pens. He paused for a moment to listen, but didn't hear anything yet. Maybe this section really was as deserted as it seemed.

Only then did he really think about what he'd heard. "I don't know about a Los Angeles, but I think the US means the United States. I've heard Kurosaki and other kids mention it..."

He tucked the two pens back into this sleeves. "We should ask Kurosaki or maybe one of the other kids from Japan about it. The United States is some kind of modern thing, I think."

Nowe flinched as the television turned on and actually jumped back a foot or so. That hadn't been something he'd expected. He found himself gripping his flashlight, ready to fight and adrenaline pumping through his veins, but stopped when he saw that Sora didn't seem to be reacting. Renji had, but appeared to have calmed down quickly.

Slowly, Nowe relaxed as the woman appeared on the screen and began to speak. What weird technology these places had! She seemed to be explaining some situation elsewhere... was she some kind of oracle? A pact partner, perhaps? Did she have some beast that gave her the power to send visions to people?

As Renji switched the screen off and the droning noise vanished, Nowe found himself embarrassed by his utter fascination with the weird vision-box, since it didn't seem new at all to Sora. He decided to bother the boy about what it was later, now didn't seem like the appropriate time.

"I have no idea where those places are," he said, straightening up and trying to regain some of his composure, though his heart was still pounding, "maybe in the morning we can use the bulletin board anonymously and ask if anyone knows anything about it."

"We also might want to write down as much of what that woman said as we can remember. It might be important. About the fights and 'armed forces', whatever those might be."

He glanced at the now-blank screen again. Was it just coincedence that the oracle woman vanished just as they'd walked in? He had a feeling it wasn't, and that was unsettling.

Sora should have expected that Nowe and Renji might not be familiar with televisions. They weren't on all the worlds he'd traveled to. There weren't even any on Destiny Islands, so they had been new to him. Hollow Bastion's technology during its rebuilding had acquainted him with computers and heading into Tron's digital world meant that television no longer amazed him.

That wasn't the important part, though. Nowe was right. They needed to write down as much as they remembered of what had been said. He'd probably heard it with the most clarity since the other two had panicked, so he quickly set down the flashlight and went for his journal, scribbling down notes.

"The bulletin board might be a good idea. This isn't something we should keep to ourselves." He wasn't sure why it needed to be anonymous, though. Why would they be targeted for finding something out? Sora didn't enjoy being dishonest...

He would have continued a search of the room, but similar to the way that the news broadcast had suddenly switched to static and a blue screen, night suddenly left and they were all spirited away to their rooms.

Nightshift 20 - 2nd floor, stairs by Decontamination Room 2

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject