The nurse led him down the hallway, babbling away about how his friends must miss him, how Martin Landel was a gracious bastard, and other nonsensical meaningless social noise. He counted doors -- he hadn't been in the same room he'd woken up in last night -- and then traced out the route against his memories of the map. Everything matched up as they made their way through several other brightly-lit halls and into a cafeteria. It smelled heavenly. Acrylamides and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- two traditional breakfast carcinogens -- were battling for airspace dominance along with a cacophony of chatter bouncing off hard walls and floor.

He grabbed a tray and slid it into the line, clacking along the metal strips like a herd of ravenous railroad boxcars. Tall stack of French toast, generous pat of real butter (no artificially hydrogenated fats or toxic nickel additives here). Three strips of bacon, glass of orange juice, admonition that syrup was on the table. It all smelled (and looked) surprisingly edible. For cafeteria food, it was practically four-star. He glanced around for the nurse that had brought him there to ask about coffee, but she was nowhere to be seen, and the line was moving, spitting him out into the seating area of the cafeteria.

He found a table with several empty chairs and set his tray down at one of them.