Day 37: Men's Showers

[pleading-ngri.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't really call this a locker room. More like a bathroom with lockers. The place was uncomfortably crowded, with almost every adult male patient being hustled into the showers at once, but Phoenix wasn't as annoyed by the claustrophobic, milling throng of bodies as he might have otherwise been. Every extra person was one more person who might end up standing between himself and Edgeworth.

He knew that the prosecutor would have a fit if he found out about this. He'd known since he'd tacked that first response up on the bulletin board. And in a way, he couldn't blame him. Phoenix knew that he jumped into things all-or-nothing more often than most people. At the same time, he had some kind of reality testing. He wasn't going to learn the basics of how to defend himself and suddenly decide that he was Rambo.

He found an unoccupied locker in the southwest corner and glanced around, trying to gauge how long he could possibly stall in a locker room, looking as if he was expecting something, before people started looking at him strangely. It would have been easier if he'd known something of the description of the man he was supposed to be meeting. As it was, all he had was handwriting and a military rank, neither of which guaranteed any particular appearance.

It's not as if there was a better way to plan this, though. "Yeah, meet me by the lockers. I'll be wearing gray and a smiley face, just like about a hundred other guys."

[for Hughes]

Comments

[scarletspeedstr.livejournal.com]

Wally relaxed and even laughed lightly at the talk about the nurses. Actually being naked in the same room as others, even if it was Bats, didn't bother him so much - he wore bright red, skintight spandex for crying out loud, that kind of thing didn't leave much to the imagination - but touching put things in a whole different ballpark.

"Yeah, you try making some kind of joke or something with some of the nurses, and they look like they've been snacking on lemons in their spare time. Think they practice that look?" Sure, it was weird hearing Bats sound all upbeat and happy, but it made sense that he would try and keep his identity hidden. Wally was just going to have to get used to hearing Bruce talking as Bruce Wayne, rather than Batman.

"So anyway, this is your first day, right? Anything you need extra info on or something?" he offered. The more information Bats had, the better the chance he'd have a plan to get them out of here. One that would probably work a lot better than Wally's last attempt anyway. He finished drying off with no major problems, noticing that the dragonfly bites on his back and ankle seemed to be almost completely healed. About time, really. Normally his powers would have accelerated the healing and they'd have been gone days ago. His knee would have been healed by this too, but it looked as though he was going to have to put up with the crutch a little longer.

With a sigh, Wally awkwardly bent to retrieve his clothing and set about trying to figure out the mechanics of dressing himself without putting too much weight on or bending his leg more than necessary as he waited for Bruce's answer.

[gothamnight.livejournal.com]

“I think I’ve got the basics down,” he said as casually if he were learning to play a new card game. Bruce reached for his own clothes and pulled the underwear and pants on while watching Wally deal with his own situation. The other man still hadn’t finished when Bruce was fully dressed, and as he waited Bruce couldn’t help but try to identify the Flash’s injuries. The bite marks had an unusual shape—made by some kind of insect, and judging from their locations, it was a flying insect. The insect was probably not venomous, or else the wounds would’ve been much more serious; on the other hand, they were large and vicious. The source of the Flash’s leg injury was the extensive damage around the knee area: torn but healing flesh. Bruce made a mental note to see if there was any sort of information regarding the types of monsters at the Institute—perhaps the bats last night had not been so much as an ironical coincidence as he’d thought.

There was one more thing bothering Bruce. The wounds on the Flash looked old—like they’d been healing for about a day or two already. If Bruce could recall correctly, one of the side-benefits of the Flash’s super-speed was the accelerated rates of all cellular functions, including regeneration and repair. In that case...why was Wally injured at all? While the wounds looked nasty, they seemed to be flesh wounds—not so serious that the Flash couldn’t have them healed already.

Perhaps there was some sort of venom involved then—either that, or something was affecting the Flash’s super-abilities. Now that Bruce thought of it, he doubted the Institute would admit superpowered individuals without some sort of guarantee that those individuals wouldn’t just use their powers to destroy the place and its people. The chances that whoever was in charge had some sort of method to tamper with or alter powers was...highly probable, though Bruce couldn’t even begin to imagine the technology he or she’d have to possess in order to affect so many people in such a large range.

“Stuck in a mental institute, people from parallel universes, experiments, monsters trying to eat me. Still shaky on the actual mechanics and locations in this place and what kind of stuff people’ve tried to get out.”

He paused, then thought of what he’d seen on the Bulletin board.

“Knowing a little bit more about the people here’d help too, I think. I mean, all the club business and who’s in charge and knows this or whatever. Anything you could tell me would help, basically.”

Bruce disguised the urgency behind his words with a nonchalant tone, but the insincere look of apathy on his face stole away when Wally finished and looked up again. A more genuine look of dryness replaced it, and as Bruce offered the crutch back to Wally and the two started to move towards the Sun Room, he surprised himself by how much more comfortable he felt now as opposed to before.

[to here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/510510.html?thread=41519406#t41519406)]