damned_institute | Nightshift 34: Main Hallway, 1-West

[From here.]

This was almost a nightly routine by now. Sora liked meeting by the stairs. They weren't too far from his room, and most people could find them without a problem. Even though they most likely wouldn't be heading up, it was a good starting point. If they ended up going outside, it would result in a little backtracking, but it wasn't a huge deal.

There was a man and a woman talking near him (he didn't know either of them, but they both looked familiar), and Sora was pretty sure there were some more patients hanging around a little further down the hall, but there was no one he needed to talk to here. He wanted to make sure he didn't move from his spot, since he needed to make it easy for Kaiji to find him.

Hopefully his hair would help him stand out, even if it wasn't a weird color or anything.

Sora leaned against the wall near the stairs, looking almost relaxed as he waited.

[ from here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/421626.html?thread=34808570#t34808570) ]

Calm and easy. Kaiji moved smoothly, as if he had done this a million times before. If he didn't screw anything up, he assured himself, the reward of whatever he would accomplish tonight would definitely outweigh the cost. Definitely. Even though he didn't know what either was. This was how all of his previous gambles worked: as long as he didn't screw anything up... He wasn't going to. Sora knew what he was doing, and Kaiji was usually pretty good with directions. He determined that the match was going to work as long as the two cooperated.

This was where things started to count. As Kaiji neared the staircase, he clasped his left hand over his flashlight and once again flicked it on to create a dull, orange-tinted glow that, without his notice, emphasized the seams around the bases of his fingers. A few small spikes of white light poked out of the gaps where his fingers didn't quite come together, but on the whole his hand did a passable job at subduing the light's intensity as he intended. He didn't want to blind anyone, and he didn't want to draw a great amount of attention to himself either. He just needed to be able to see.

Something about Kaiji was noticeably different from the way he was this morning (other than the new bruise on the side of his face.). There was a wickedly haughty look about him that was probably amplified by the strange lighting: whether he was afraid beyond fear or genuinely confident was a mystery even to him. What he did know for sure was that from the moment Kaiji met with Sora until the end of the night, their lives were in each other's hands.

Even with the relative traffic of the area, Kaiji managed to spot Sora in the dim light with little difficulty. At least, he was pretty sure that was Sora. "Hey," he greeted tentatively.

As Sora had waited for his nighttime companion to show up, he had watched quite a few patients pass through, and one had gone by much faster than should have been humanly possible, casting his flashlight around all over the place as he'd rushed by. Sora hadn't expected someone to still have that kind of power here, but maybe it was the man's only skill.

In any case, it had made waiting a little more interesting, though it wasn't too long before the boy had his attention drawn to an approaching, dimmed light, and heard a familiar voice.

"Kaiji," he greeted with a smile, pressing off the wall to meet the man. "I'm glad you could find it okay!" He hoped the man hadn't come across any monster attacks on the way here, though he looked to be doing a lot better than this morning, so Sora was guessing he hadn't.

Something was wrong, though, and as Sora drew closer, he noticed it. "What happened?" he asked, pointing out the bruise on the other's face.

Kaiji's pleased look peaked when he heard his name. Everything was going according to plan so far. Even if it was only the beginning, at least it was something. Although...

Sora's concern was hardly appreciated. That smug look Kaiji had plastered to his face faded into a misdirected glare when the boy pointed out the mark on his face. "This bleached bastard who saw me earlier decided that I looked too much like someone he didn't like," he mumbled quickly. By far not the most embarrassing of his marks, but it was still a sore subject for him.

Before he got too fired up or compelled to give more detail about the incident than he had to, Kaiji decided that a subject change was in order. The two of them were apparently on a mission, after all, and the sooner he figured out what the hell it was, the better. His expression turned from sour to mild-if-slightly-displeased and it was fairly obvious that it could switch to any extreme fairly easily. No matter how calm his exterior was, he was still on edge.

"So. Radio clues."

There seemed to be all sorts of misunderstandings that went on between the patients around here. That same thing had happened between him and Cid, after all, though that hadn't ended with a punch to the face, at least. Well, Sora had kicked a soccer ball into the older man's face the other day, but that had been an accident!

Either way, it looked like Kaiji didn't want to talk about it, and so Sora went with the flow and focused on the topic at hand.

"Yeah," he said, lifting the radio that he was holding in his left hand to show the man. "Did anyone explain the radios to you yet?" He knew he hadn't had the time to get into it, but hopefully Kaiji had gathered more information about this place throughout the day -- unless he had been trying to avoid the subject of nightshift after hearing about the monsters.

Kaiji had already seen a more or less identical radio just a short while ago, but he still held his dimmed light up to it as if trying to get a better look. It was definitely a radio. That was pretty much all he could say about the thing without guessing. Even if he had caught wind of what the deal with these things was, it was better to just say that he hadn't. This way, nothing important would get left out of the inevitable explanation.

Kaiji shook his head grimly after hardly looking the radio over, reluctantly speaking along for confirmation: "No, I haven't heard about them." Between lazing about, being attacked, and moping around after being attacked, he hadn't gotten around to doing his homework (It really was like high school all over again.).

Luckily, Kaiji hadn't pegged Sora as the type to judge. If that assessment was wrong, this probably wasn't going to end well.

It wasn't all that surprising that Kaiji hadn't heard about the radios, especially if he had been forced to deal with getting punched by someone just for resembling someone else. (Who did he resemble, Sora wondered? He found it kind of hard to believe that there would be another person who looked like Kaiji, but who knew?) The radios weren't the first thing people thought to mention in their explanations.

"Basically, announcements will come on over the radios a few times throughout the night. Well, sometimes it's only once, but anyway... A voice will come on giving clues on how to find helpful items and stuff like that. The guy who used to do it had some kind of history with Mr. Landel, but... he's not around anymore. Now this lady who calls herself Jill does it. I'm not sure if her clues are always right, though."

Then again, that bust with the pond might have just been because he didn't have enough time to search properly. He wasn't all that good at solving riddles, either, though Jill didn't make them quite as hard as Jack had. Though maybe that was the whole point: if they were just traps, then she didn't need to make them hard, did she?

But that was all a bit too in-depth for Sora. Hitsugaya had asked him to follow the clues, so that was what he was going to do. "Anyway, we need to wait for the broadcast, so..." As always, he had to wonder what they should do in the meantime. They could head for the outside just in case, but that would likely lead to getting attacked, whereas they would probably be safe here.

A multitude of thoughts and theories escorted Sora's words to Kaiji's brain. His expression accurately painted him as both thoughtful and unhappy with what he was hearing. That crazy son of a bitch over the intercom had mentioned a Jill messing around with the place's security, but somehow everything was working out perfectly on his end in a way that he could feign being worried about something that this woman may or may not have even done to give patients the idea that she was almost able to get the better of him. Almost, but not quite. It was a clever discouraging tactic any way one looked at it. Kaiji hated those.

It was exactly the opposite of the way that Kaiji wanted it to be. A complete success or even a complete failure would have been more appealing. This in-between sort-of win sort-of loss was too vague to be of any use. Not enough at stake for either side, it seemed. The way the Head Doctor put it, their supposed rivalry was more of a simple game than a full-on gamble. In other words, not worthy of he and Sora's participation.

"It's something that's been going on for a while," Kaiji pointed out. In other words, looking for radio clues was predictable and hadn't really done anyone a significant amount of good. Being predictable never ended well in Kaiji's experience: it once cost a friend's life and four of his fingers within the span of a few hours. Then again, unpredictability had also been costly and painful in that same period of time... "Shouldn't we be doing something that-" Kaiji stopped and closed his eyes uncomfortably as if stung by something: a sudden bad feeling that was probably his body's way of saying 'Don't even think about it.' He hastily turned his flashlight off and let his left hand wander over to give a gentle scratch to the back of his left ear. It was as if he was checking to make sure it was still there.

Maybe one traumatic night wasn't what he should have been basing his decisions on. Maybe it was exactly what he should have been basing his decisions on. Kaiji took a deep breath to steady himself, repositioned his left hand so that he could resume providing dull light for the two if needed, and restarted his question in a hushed but urgent way: "Isn't this too obvious?" The Head Doctor had to have known this place inside-out, so solving the clues had to have been a snap for him. Even if Jill was well-intentioned...

Why else would the institute allow everyone to keep the radios when they could easily have been taken away?

This was definitely a change from what Sora was used to, seeing how he always worked with people who were loyal to Arts and Crafts and would carry out the assignment no matter what it was. Still, he couldn't exactly fault Kaiji for questioning it, since it seemed that a lot of people did that when first hearing about the radio.

Sora's brow furrowed and he lowered the radio back to his side, as if he was ashamed of it now that Kaiji had called it into question. "Yeah, it is," he agreed, though he gave a shrug soon after. "But it's all we have, and it has been helpful sometimes. Anyway, that's what Hitsugaya asked us to do. Though he said if we don't get any clues, then we should just try to go over the wall again."

Though Sora wasn't sure if he wanted to do that. This was Kaiji's first night, and if they went jumping the wall, there was a good chance they were going to get attacked by something pretty nasty. That wasn't a good way for the man to start off his stay at Landel's, was it? Then again, radio clues led to danger, too, but Sora could at least hope it wouldn't be as bad.

He wasn't sure if Kaiji was going to put up more of a fight or just go along with it, but it would put a damper on things if he didn't. If he was going to question everything, then Sora wondered if he was going to actually stick around in Arts and Crafts or look for his own way to do things. For now, Sora hoped they could just focus on what he had been asked to do tonight and cross their fingers that they found something.

"Sometimes," Kaiji echoed. It was always sometimes or maybe, never a clear yes or no. And people always faulted him for being unable to settle on decisions.

As much as Kaiji hated to admit it, Sora was probably right. What else were they going to do with next to no leads? Unless Sora was keeping things to himself, the only other thing they really had to go on was that noisy maniacal bastard jeering at them with his annoying laugh and his stupid- Right, radio clues.

A bad feeling wasn't a sufficient reason to ditch the only reasonably concrete plan they could come up with or, rather, that this Hitsugaya guy had given them. The alternative caught Kaiji's interest, but he couldn't work his way up to the point where he was comfortable asking about it. The 'again' tacked on the end of the 'go over the wall' statement didn't sit right with him, but at this point he was too afraid to try to figure out why it didn't work out last time.

So, radio clues it was.

Kaiji conceded miserably: "I guess you've been doing this a lot longer than I have, huh." That likely wouldn't be the end of his protests for the night, but it was a start. He just had to keep reminding himself that Sora knew what he was doing and that if they didn't cooperate with each other, they were both royally screwed.

"Sorry there's not a better option than that," Sora said with a sigh. The darkness of the hallway, the sound of what might be a fight going on nearby, and Kaiji's reluctance to go along with the assignment sure helped bring down his mood. He wasn't about to let that affect his determination, though.

At the other's question (or comment), Sora just shrugged. "I guess so, yeah." He was pretty sure he had told Kaiji how long he had been here already, so it had probably been rhetorical to start with.

For now, all they could do was wait. Sora glanced over his shoulder and then settled his upper back against the wall again, trying his best to drown out the sounds of nearby scuffles. He couldn't go leading Kaiji into random fights just because he was always eager to help everyone.

"So, do you have any experience with fighting?" he asked, figuring they should find something to talk about to pass the time. His guess was that Kaiji wasn't really used to this sort of thing, but it was best to check.

Kaiji waved off Sora's apology. "Don't be," he said passively. It wasn't the kid's fault that they were kind of backed into a corner here. It also wasn't his fault that they had to play the waiting game, which served as a decently sized root for the problem of his reluctance. The more time spent idling, the more time he had to come up with reasons why this was a bad idea. The more time he had for that nervous constricting feel to happen to his throat. The more time he had to get that sensation in the pit of his stomach as if everything had been shifted around to where it shouldn't have been. The latter two hadn't started to kick in yet, but hanging around like this for too long would put him at high risk for it.

Especially with the weird background noise. But if Sora wasn't going to respond to it, it meant that it was best not to. He knew better, he knew better, he knew better.

Why couldn't they have gotten a good running start?

"Well, I..." This wasn't a good question. A frequent (forced) player of mind games, Kaiji really hadn't been involved in too many physical battles. Being tortured and having his own body used against him, yes. Fighting in a traditional sense, no. There were a few, but they were hardly even worth mentioning: most of them had ended with him being pinned down by swarms of security personnel.

That couldn't have been the kind of answer the boy was looking for. Kaiji desperately wanted to say something reassuring, but that would require blatant lying. Not only was he a horrid liar, but in the long run it was better to be honest about this than to create unrealistic high expectations. "No, not really," he admitted, feeling more useless by the minute.

That was more or less what Sora had expected, so he was hardly disappointed. Instead, he shrugged and smiled up at the man. "Well, don't worry! I know I look young, but I've been in a lot of fights already." At first, he hadn't been quite used to the monsters employed here, but it hadn't taken him that long to get accustomed to all of it. He was sure that there were still some creatures out there that might take him by surprise if he ever ran into them, but he was pretty good at thinking on his feet, so he wasn't too worried.

It seemed to be the trade-off for not really knowing how to solve the radio clues all that well. Speaking of which, when was the announcement going to come on? Sora didn't want to spend the whole night standing around and waiting, and he doubted Kaiji did either (though maybe that would seem like the better option for someone who wasn't used to fighting), so if it took too long they were just going to have to cut their losses and head outside.

"You should probably see about getting a weapon anyway, though," the boy advised the older man, nodding almost sagely to show that his words shouldn't be taken lightly. "Even if it's just one of the baseball bats that we could find in the shed outside, it'll be a help." This could turn into a repeat of his night yesterday with Kairi, but Sora didn't mind helping the newcomer find his feet. And they might even get further than he had with his friend last night.

Sora's words about fighting experience somehow made Kaiji feel less comfortable. "That's..." -not reassuring at all! Horrible! Where the hell was this kid from? Kaiji bit his tongue.

A casual inspection of the bulletin board a few hours ago brought about the possibility of different 'worlds,' but Kaiji wasn't about to believe something that out there. The same went for superpowers and whatever else people had written about. It all had to have been code or some cop-out explanation for things that people didn't understand. He had been there before, and while it certainly didn't seem like the two of them were on the same wavelength here, Kaiji knew better than to attribute others' weirdness to supernatural workings and crazy shit along those lines. There had to be a rational explanation for everything, he (and they) just hadn't figured it out yet.

Either that or this place, everyone here, and the places they were from were all thirty-one flavors of fucked up.

"Probably, yeah," he answered blankly to the suggestion about finding a weapon. The only weapon Kaiji had ever used was himself. He had never gone for a kill either now that he thought about it, only sought to prove a point or accomplish a specific goal that would otherwise be unreachable. He could learn his way around these things, he guessed, and it really shouldn't require too much skill to bludgeon something if he got a hold of a simple means to do the job. He could probably even do a real number with this flashlight if he- god, why was he thinking about this? The idea alone made Kaiji disgusted with himself.

As if trying to disperse his bad feelings, Kaiji quickly shook his head much like a dog would dry himself off. His answer sounded less disinterested and robotic the second time: "If I see something that'll work, I'll grab it."

This was getting annoying. The lack of activity was irritating, and Kaiji was growing more and more impatient with every bit of background noise that took place. There were things happening that they weren't a part of. Everyone else was probably doing something useful while they were just standing there. Unsure of how much longer he could take it, Kaiji finally said what he was thinking:

"We should do something."

It wasn't a question, it wasn't a request, it was a fact, and the way Kaiji voiced it made this indisputable. He sounded like he could and would snap if even the smallest disagreement was made.

Glad to hear that Kaiji was willing to accept the idea of having to use a weapon (which might be intimidating to someone who wasn't used to fighting), Sora nodded to show his approval. He knew the other man wasn't really looking for it, but some support was never a bad thing, was it? Though Riku would have brushed that sort of thing off, so if Kaiji was like that, then maybe it wouldn't be appreciated.

"Yeah," he agreed, glowering down at the radio since it hadn't given any sort of message yet. Had there ever been a time when it hadn't come on? He wasn't sure since he didn't always take it with him, but it was something to consider. At least they had a back-up plan...

But right as he was about to suggest that they suck it up and head outside despite the almost certain danger, the radio buzzed to life and Sora quickly tightened his grip on it, lifting it up toward his head so that they would both be able to hear better. The broadcast drowned out the other noise around them for the moment as well.

Sora focused on the message, though he put most of his energy into memorizing the clues when they were rattled off. It always went way too fast for him, but he did his best despite the fact that this really wasn't his area of expertise.

He had a few vague ideas and probably had a better chance of figuring out where to go than Kaiji did, but he wanted to wait for the other man's reaction before he said anything.

Kaiji basically ignored Sora's approving nod. He hadn't been totally honest in his agreement, and was becoming more and more annoyed with himself. Not only was he thinking about things that he felt that he shouldn't have, but he was also for a brief moment dishonest. He probably wouldn't pick up anything even remotely weapon-like unless talked into it or forced to in the spur of a moment.

When the radio began to produce sound, the whole world outside of it stopped. Kaiji leaned in a bit to catch the broadcast while completely emptying his head of any other thought. The first part was fine. Normal sounding. He committed it to memory as best he could since forgetting would defeat the whole purpose of their 'mission' that Sora was hell-bent on fulfilling before anything else.

The last part, however, elicited a small but unpleasant sound from somewhere in Kaiji's throat. Bodies getting taken apart and put back together. Getting taken apart and put back together. Oh yeah, he knew all about that. So good old Landel was into that kind of thing, huh? At this very moment the bastard was probably drooling over the idea of taking poor defenseless down-on-his-luck Kaiji and toying around with him, cutting off this and that, watching him cry and squirm.

He wouldn't be the first one.

Kaiji looked like he was about to rip the radio to shreds with his teeth just for mentioning such an atrocity. How did these people handle all of this so calmly? How many times had he asked himself that today? One of his questions sped off of his tongue just after the radio turned silent: "They really do that here?" He spoke quickly, angrily. All fired up again, ready to dash any which way, pass through any obstacle, do anything he had to do to get the better of the guy running this operation. The concern, the caution, the doubt, all of it was dropped in an instant. He was quivering now, yes, but it wasn't from fear. Kaiji was officially pissed off. No one deserved to get hacked apart, and they especially didn't deserve to get hacked apart and used to make some... thing.

Hadn't Sora already mentioned the experiments to Kaiji? Then again, he hadn't put it like that. Still, the boy was pretty sure it was part of the clue, and Jill wasn't just being gruesome for the heck of it.

The question was valid, though, and the boy let out a sigh and nodded. "Well, there is torture. And like she said, there are monsters here that are made up of different parts from different monsters and people..." Those had to get made somehow, right? The doctors who were behind the torture and experiments probably picked out random parts and sewed them all together in their spare time or something. It wasn't what Sora liked to spend time thinking about, though.

Which was why he quickly changed the subject. They had a job to do, after all! "So I think she was talking about one of those rooms attached to the morgue... Y'know, where they cut up people to check how they died? I don't know what it's called," he said with a frown. Hopefully Kaiji was a bit more knowledgeable on the subject - or would at least know what he meant even from the bad description.

"I'm not sure about the others. Where's the place we're all trying to get to?" Wouldn't that be out? But she had said the clues were for people who wanted to stay inside, so that didn't make much sense. He would rather stick with the one he was more sure about, but maybe the older man had some ideas.

Kaiji was still shaking a bit even through the subject change. Man, fuck torture and the sick excuses for people who did it. "Son of a bitch," he grumbled. This place really was like something out of a nightmare. He may as well have considered his worst dreams prophetic and touted himself as a psychic at the rate this was going. He wasn't going to go any further with that line of conversation, though - the sooner they figured out the clues, the sooner they could actually do anything at all, and it seemed like Sora was on to something here.

Checking how people died? There was only one kind of place he could associate with that description: "You mean where they do autopsies," Kaiji clarified. Where he would have been if he hadn't- "An autopsy room, I guess you'd call it." Finally, he got to do something useful. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe.

Kaiji seemed fairly apathetic about the other unknown clue. It was the more mundane sounding of the two, and he could easily regurgitate it with a fair amount of accuracy. He shrugged it off, giving his best answer for now, "I'd be trying to get to wherever the guy who runs this place is." It probably wasn't the right answer, and he didn't even have any idea where that was. Did most of the patients want to get out, or did they want to beat the Head Doctor at his own game so that no one would have to endure something like this again? Hell if he knew.

"We don't have to do them in order, do we?" If they did, this was going to be a bitch and a half to accomplish.

It seemed to Sora that almost everyone (or at least those who were over twenty) in this place used bad words. It still made him pause whenever he heard one, but he wasn't quite as sensitive about it as he might have been in the past. Landel's gave people good reason to use bad language, after all.

When Kaiji came out with the right answer like it was nothing, Sora's expression brightened and he stood a little straighter. "Yeah, yeah, that's it!" He shouldn't have been so happy about something that was so gruesome in theory, but they might get something useful out of it. That had to be the place the clue was talking about, right? Nothing else made sense.

And while they could theorize about the others, Sora thought it was best to focus on the one he was almost certain about. At Kaiji's final question, Sora raised an eyebrow before giving a quick shake of his head. "No, you don't have to worry about all of them. We'll probably only have time for one, since other patients will have beat us to the others clues by then." He didn't want to think of it as a competition, necessarily, but that was basically what it was designed to be. And usually the prizes couldn't be shared equally.

"Anyway, I'm pretty sure I know how to get to the... autopsy room, so are you up for it?" They were even right by the stairs that would take them up, so it looked like this was going to be a successful night, provided they were actually right about the clue - and didn't run into anything too difficult on the way.

With Sora's excitement, Kaiji couldn't help but crack a bit of a smile. It wasn't a big victory, but he finally managed to know or figure out something that his guide here hadn't. Hopefully throughout the night and possibly beyond, he could work his way up to being able to serve some other use than just being Sora's walking dictionary and thesaurus. Still, it was their mutual little win for the moment and he was glad to have been helpful.

This was more of a matter of chance than he originally thought. Kaiji was under the impression that all hinted locations had to be visited, but judging from Sora's odd look, he was wrong. "Oh, right," Kaiji chimed back at the answer he received. He understood well enough now, he thought: the patients weren't necessarily working against each other, they were just working for themselves. Or their group, as it were. And of course this typically meant that someone else was going to get shafted. That's just the way it went, especially when there were too many and too different types of people to coordinate everyone. "I think I get it now."

Finally. It was a damn good thing that Sora seemed to know this place since even if Kaiji figured out the clue, he never would have been able to figure out where he was supposed to go on his own. Man, he had been 'up for it' since the moment the Head Doctor dropped that freaky laugh. It felt like it had been ages since then. "Ready when you are," he confirmed.

This was it.

It was good to see Kaiji smiling for once, and Sora could only assume that the other man enjoyed being a help. That was more or less normal, though, unless someone happened to be antagonistic (which Kaiji was not, as far as Sora could tell).

But they were going to have to get moving if they wanted to be the first to the autopsy room, so Sora didn't hesitate in turning toward the stairs with flashlight in hand. "Okay, let's go! Just stay close to me, okay?" Sora glanced over his shoulder at the other man with a small smile.

He clicked the flashlight on and directed the beam at the steps, not wanting to trip over them by accident. There were hardly ever monsters waiting in the stairwell, so he was able to have some confidence in his step as he made his way up.

[To here.]

Kaiji's face quickly snapped back to a serious expression. It was time for them to move forward, and he was fully aware that their night was only beginning. He had been screwed over too many times before by getting overconfident thanks to the little victories that he had earned or more often was given. False security was never a good thing. "Right with you all the way," he answered compliantly. As if he was going to wander off on his own and get himself killed. He wasn't like some people.

With that, Kaiji shoved his inactive flashlight under his left arm and began to follow Sora up the steps, moving slightly more slowly and using the feel and rhythm of the stairs to avoid tripping rather than relying on sight.

[ to here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/428265.html?thread=35339241#t35339241) ]

Nightshift 34: Main Hallway, 1-West

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