damned_institute | Day 36: Intercom, Evening

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Day 36: Intercom, Evening

The intercom's jingle rang out and the somewhat uninhibited movement that was going on between the main activity rooms halted as the Head Doctor made one of his usual announcements.

"Good evening everyone, and I'm very pleased to see so many of you in such high spirits after meeting with your loved ones! However, like with all good things, it can't last forever, so I ask now for nurses to escort our patients in the waiting rooms and in the main areas back to their rooms, where they will be treated with a special Sunday... steak! That's right: today, we'll be serving juicy, delicious steak with fries and cooked vegetables on the side – simple enough for everyone to like and good enough for everyone to thoroughly enjoy! (Our patients with specialized diets will receive their alternate meals, of course.) Our usual beverages are available, and for dessert, we'll be serving warm slices of apple pie.

"After all, patients, t's always wonderful to see all of you cooperating with the staff even when given so much freedom, so I'd like to personally thank and congratulate all of you for helping us, your family, and more importantly, yourselves. Hopefully, we can help you to a speedy recovery so that you can see your loved ones more often, but first... dinner! I hope to speak with you all again soon."

The intercom clicked off.

[ All room threads go in response to this post; please post your character's room number as the subject line of the initial post. Thank you!

On an added note, just wanted to clarify to players of characters who are canonly vegetarians and the like that you get to decide (within reasonable and realistic limits) what kind of diet your character gets from the staff. :3 ]

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After dealing with Elle and her games, nicotine sounded wonderful. "I'd love one," the Bride said, getting up.

She didn't go over to Maki, though, but instead went to her bed and pulled the sheathed katana out from under the mattress. "The alchemy is real," she said, heading over to Maki to show her the blade.

Naomi looked at what Arlene held out, an eyebrow raising slightly in appreciation. She hadn't exactly doubted that it was real, she just...hadn't seen any proof. Enough people had testified that yes, there were people who could make weapons with some sort of magic that it was hard to discount it, and yet....

It was the rational mind. It continually rejected the bizarre and unexplainable or unknown. Even last night, after seeing monsters and zombies or whatever you wanted to call those things at night, Naomi's mind had tried to reject that creature as impossible. As a nightmare.

Because that was how the human mind worked. Most of them, anyway. Where she was from. The qualifiers kept adding up, the longer she was here. Even though she had mostly accepted all the strangeness in her conscious mind, that part of her mind she didn't control still tried to force everything into normalcy.

"Which one did you go to?" she asked, holding the pack of cigarettes out to her roommate.

Maki wasn't the only one in the room with the same issues concerning rationality, but the Bride had seen it with her own eyes.

She took one of the cigarettes out of the pack. "The Norn - Skuld," she stated. Maki was one of the few she might actually consider a friend if she was asked, so her hesitancy in revealing the goddess' identity wasn't present. "Un-fucking-believable sight to watch a bunch of pipes, wood and cloth meld into this very nice katana."

"I've seen her posting on the bulletin," Naomi said, nodding. She didn't have any need of weapons, but it was good to know, just in case. "She did it right in front of you? How did she do it?"

Were there words that were said? A...magic wand involved? Yes, because the woman would have a magic wand here in the institute. But alchemy was, as far as Naomi could tell, a form of magic. Which was one of those unknown things for her. She knew it from only books and movies and things like that.

"Hold on," Beatrix said, setting the sword on her bed and then finding the two pieces of paper she showed Light earlier. She handed them to Maki.

"She took those measurements and used some kind of really high level math formula to make that design - the array," Beatrix explained. "The raw materials were set on top of the array on the floor and then she said some stuff in a language I've never heard before. There was some light and the metal and all that just... melted and then reformed into the sword and its sheathe."

She shook her head. "I can't even really describe it properly."

Math and magic. Naomi frowned thoughtfully, thinking it over. The description had been enough, at least, for her to get an idea of what it had looked like. Not how it had been done, but at least what it had looked like to Arlene.

Part science and part magic. That was interesting. It at least indicated there were rules, laws, logic to the practice. But how was it done? Once the science stopped and the magic began, it was like a wall came down. She couldn't imagine the two things being compatible. It was like...like science and religion - which was, she supposed, a form of the supernatural or fantastical in its own right.

"It's hard to wrap the mind around," was all she managed to say.

"You've got that right," Beatrix replied, laying back on her bed to examine the ceiling while enjoying the nicotine.

"She claims her power is celestial in nature - that she's a goddess." She sighed. "All this shit we're coming across in this place is really fucking up my perception of the universe and how things worked. I'm not religious in the slightest, but I was raised Catholic."

"A lot of people claim a lot of things," Naomi said, shrugging. "I was apparently talking to elves earlier today." Or whatever the pair of siblings was. Hobbits? Something like that.

But Arlene was right. This place was able to unbalance a person's reality, just by letting them out of their rooms to interact socially on a daily basis.

"I wonder if that's part of it," she said, quietly, more just voicing the thought that actually talking to Arlene. It made a sort of sense, didn't it? If this place was all about shaking them, breaking them down, forcing them to face things that shouldn't be... couldn't even the collection of patients be skewed to that end?

"I apparently spent this morning in the chapel with a warlord from 4th century Greece that thinks Martin Landel may possibly be a god."

She looked over. "What's a possibility of what?" Maybe Maki had a decent train of thought going.

Whatever Martin Landel was, he was no god.

"This place..." Naomi started, leaning back as she worked out the thought properly. "The one common theme in everything they do seems to be to keep us unbalanced, weaken us mentally and emotionally as well as physically, to break us down to whatever it is they want to do to us. And maybe that's how choose people to take. Maybe it doesn't all have to do with our...lives, or who we are, or what we can do. Since there's no common theme, not even a good enough theme within smaller groups. Maybe it's all just to keep us confused and off balance during the day, since they're trying to keep up the semblance of a normal mental institute. What if there are the people they really want, and the rest are just to screw with us?"

It sounded insane, in a way, but insanely rational.

That was the thing about sociopaths. They were painfully logical, in their own way.

Being a sociopath herself, it was pretty logical. Not the way she would have done it, but it did hold an interesting shard of truth.

"The question to follow that, then, is who are the ones they really want?"

"I don't know." She really didn't. She didn't have enough information. It was a daunting task gathering detailed information on everyone in the institute. She didn't even know where she fit into it.

"I'd guess the best and the brightest. Or hell, maybe they do want the people who aren't anything special. Maybe we're...weaker, or something. To their brainwashing. It could go either way."

Without the proper data, there just wasn't any way to put it all together.

"..."

Beatrix didn't think it was the best and brightest they wanted, nor did she think it was anyone ordinary. There wasn't a need to go to such lengths to get someone ordinary but she wasn't sure about the other side.

"Perhaps it's not either face of the coin they wish, but the edge both balance on." She paused for a moment. "I had a visitor today."

"There isn't enough information," Naomi said, shaking her head. And while she was trained to think like a criminal and piece things together from the tiniest of clues, she'd never been taught to piece together something like this.

"Oh? Who was it?"

Of course there wasn't enough information and the Bride wasn't sure if she cared enough to help acquire that information. All she wanted was to kill Martin Landel and get her daughter back. That was it. And if she needed to help figure this shit out to accomplish that, she would.

"Elle Driver - an old colleague." She sighed. "I should have killed the fucking bitch when I had the chance." It had just seemed so fitting to pluck her eye out and leave her lying in that trailer. Apparently that had been a mistake.

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Day 36: Intercom, Evening

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