Day 37: Sun Room (4th Shift)

[secret-orchard.livejournal.com]

There were still too many things on Armand's mind for him to truly relax. The morning with Alec had been a help. And seeing that TK was going to be well helped him know that it was time to work out something else, but what? He'd already, without success again, tried to reach one of the club leaders about his sole idea of something new and different. Maybe it was hopeless.

There was no way he was going to play with paper and glue like a small child, and he glared at the nurse as best he could until she gave up on the idea. There was a free chair in the Sun Room--in fact, there were many free chairs--where he settled down to see what the new patients looked like. Prisoners, not patients. He felt bad that he had to remind himself. Even if he was crazy, he wasn't going to give in to Dr. Landel's game, not today. He nibbled on an overgrown cuticle and kept an eye on the room. No dozing today.

[for Citan]

Comments

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Obviously Indy had hit a nerve with that one. The kid seemed pretty steamed about something around here, although apparently that could mean anything from lousy lunches to rampaging nocturnal horrors. Indy himself was a little out of his field here--how much of what an insane person said to you could you trust?

"What do you mean by 'pain?'" he asked, still nonchalantly scanning the board to put the kid at his ease. The notes weren't doing much for Indy's comfort level, though. Speaking of pain, why would someone be running a clinic out of one of the patient rooms, anyway? Shouldn't a place like this have medical staff on site?

[multiweapon.livejournal.com]

If someone had to ask why the institution was a pain then it was a tell-tale sign that they hadn't been there long. Residents of Landel's didn't often refer to the place as a little slice of heaven--no one he new so far had called it that anyway. Haseo crossed his arms in thought, not because he had to think about what made the location worthy of the title 'pain' but he had to decide which of the things about it was the largest inconvenience. The rogue had meant 'pain' in a literal sense, mostly because thinking about how to try being here and factoring all the information about the place into some sort of sense gave him a giant headache; Not having any weapons or ability to defend oneself or others was another grave dislike that Haseo had for how Landels was operated; Getting escorted place to place and having activities decided for him wasn't on his list of things that he liked about the facility, either.

"Well," He gave a look to the nearby posting board and tried to think how to explain it all to someone new. Giving instructions to new people and pointing them in the right direction was the job of any Canard member. "You read some of the things on here didn't you?" A vague gesture was given to the notification of the Primer about the place that was tacked firmly into place along with many other of the institutes leaflets. "And how much of it do you actually buy into?"

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

"To be honest, not much," Indy admitted, crossing his arms. How much credence did your average scientist lend to reports of monsters and traveling to other worlds? Then again, he didn't want to come across as so skeptical that he shut the kid down. Indy uncrossed his arms.

"Look, I'm a professor," he added in a slightly more conciliatory tone. "I believe in fact. If this many people believe that something's going on at night, it probably is. But there's probably a more logical explanation than supernatural attacks."

Now his professional curiosity was up--what was the explanation, anyway?--but he suddenly remembered the most important point. What the hell was he doing here in the first place? Suddenly waking up in an insane asylum was all too reminiscent of being kidnapped by Donovan's men--or worse.

"You seem like you know your way around here. How can I find out who checked me in here and why?" He flashed a quick, conspiratorial mild-mannered-and-completely-sane-professor smile. "My memory's a little fuzzy."

[multiweapon.livejournal.com]

"Yeah. I know what you mean. I come from the real world where all of this stuff would just be a storyline in a bad Roleplaying game." It was a statement of agreement more than anything. Haseo had to maintain the same level of separation between the game and his online character that he portrayed otherwise. Despite his efforts to find out what the place actually was all he had come up with in the area of logic was that the institution was a jumble of misconducted stories and ideas, and he had no idea how the last battle against Cubia could have resulted in winding up here--that was after a week and a half of looking.

Haseo wasn't sure that anyone knew who had taken all of them there. "If you're looking for the guy in charge, This place isn't set up like a normal hospital; I don't think there's a designated person in charge." Not any efficient one that he had heard of anyway, even disregarding the monsters. "There is this one guy who announces the shift changes, but I'm not sure anyone has ever met him." Though Haseo never really paid attention to whatever the voice over the PA had to say, the person ordering the nurses around sounded like the one in charge.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Another reference to a different world--so this guy obviously bought that too. As for role playing game, must be some sort of local custom, Indy decided. Unless the kid meant literally playing a role in some kind of game, in which case he was either an actor or way too old for make-believe. That aside, he sounded rational enough--but Indy had learned from long-suffering experience that someone could sound sane and still be a few handfuls short of a full bag of sand. They just had to find a way to rationalize things for themselves. Exhibit A: the Nazis.

He didn't buy that there wasn't anyone in charge around here; the kid's lack of information just meant that whoever ran the place wasn't easily accessible. Hmm. "I was actually wondering more about who brought me here, what I'm doing here." Term paper time could get a little crazy, but Indy was pretty sure he hadn't gone off the deep end yet.

[multiweapon.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, good luck with finding that out." Every time he asked anyone about anything regarding a how or a why, he got the most ludicrous explanations that involved the use of phrases like 'in my world' or 'in the time that I live'. If this teacher was the logical kind that he claimed to be those kind of answers would only confirm the prelude of what the Landels claimed to be: an institution.

"You probably tried asking the nurse already and they called you by some name that you'd never even heard of before; Said that the life you remembered was just all in your head, right?" The rogue shifted his posture, "Those are the same kind of answers you're going to get from everyone else." Which just cemented his own thoughts in that this place was just a part of the game, and everyone in it could be some kind of scrap data like the NPCs back in Tartarga. Scrap data wasn't supposed to make sense as a whole and it would explain why everyone here claimed to be from somewhere else since junk data could be just about anything and come from anywhere.

This could be some kind of opportunity to try and help someone out that was in need, though. At this rate the teacher wasn't going to believe the whole 'monsters at night' thing-- he sure hadn't--and Haseo didn't want anyone to run into those things by surprise. "But I can get you a map of the place if you want to try some other way to find out why they brought you here. I'd just need a while to copy it down." Then he could just hand it over during the night.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Indy pulled the sheets of paper with the maps out of his pocket. "Got one. But thanks."

It was obvious that the kid didn't have a lot of information, at least not the kind he was looking for. Nothing that would help him figure out what he was doing there. All right, "Lucas" had been an alias of some kind, not just a slip of the tongue. But why? Whose big idea was it to give all the patients pseudonyms? Pretty lousy joke.

But while the boy wasn't particularly helpful informationwise, he did seem to know how things ran around here. Indy himself wasn't sure how they worked yet, but he did know that the nurses heading their way meant that their little chat was over. "Listen, I appreciate it," he added seriously. "If you ever need a hand..." He didn't usually throw around offers like that, but Indy had a good sense for the underdog. This kid didn't exactly look like the monster-fighting type.