damned_institute | Day 38: Game Room

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Day 38: Game Room

She’d never been in the Game Room before.

It didn’t look spectacularly interesting, she had to admit… but it’d be more fun than just hanging out in the Sun Room, right? Yuffie idly thumbed through a deck of cards, walking around the room to examine various bits and pieces. Board games, video games, chess… No really awesome prank material that she could see, but maybe she could rope somebody into a game of poker? That could be fun, but… ah, then again, most of the patients were just like her -- they didn’t have anything really cool that she could swindle out of them. Not until Nightshift, anyway.

Still! She’d keep it in mind. It wasn’t like there was anybody else in the room yet anyway, so any potential swindling would have to wait a little while. What could she do in the meantime, huh? Pick- pocketing a nurse could be fun..! Wait -- no, not when it was quiet like this. She’d have to wait until there was more cover, unless she got distracted. Yuffie hadn’t stolen anything in days, not since that time in Doyleton, with the Kaito kid…

Yuffie smirked. That had been fun.

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"I think so?" Keman shrugged, taking a seat near where the man was sitting...but not too close. He accepted the "Game Boy" with a grateful nod and then attempted to play it...without any great success. Apparently he was out of practice. The GAME OVER screen flashed with alarming finality, and he put it down.

"I've only ever played it one other time, a week or two ago," he admitted. "And apparently I'm still not very good at it. How do you suppose they get the lines and dots to just appear on the screen like that? And I wonder how the player can manipulate them. I guess it's one thing to show pre-drawn images, but you'd think it'd be impossible to just change them like that..."

Indy had the sudden impulse to hug the kid. Someone just as mystified with this stuff as he was was welcome company in a place where the sense of being completely lost hit him every ten minutes. He was out of his element when he wasn't in control.

"I'm not sure," he admitted, wishing he had the answers. "If I had to guess, I'd say it's a little like a television set, but I'm not exactly up on the science behind that kind of thing." He quirked one side of his mouth up, the closest thing to a grin this topic was going to get out of him. "If you believe the guy I talked to this morning, it's some kind of technology from the future. No word yet on whether the future includes rocket ships and ray guns, or just Tetrises and lots of paperback books."

Indy picked up the machine--he would've figured that "Nintendo GAME BOY" would be the name, but it sounded like "Tetris" was the colloquial term for it--and started another round, but he was keeping half an eye on the boy. He wanted to see how a long-term resident reacted to the mention of time travel. Although teenagers probably weren't the most reliable of all possible sources on that one.

Keman leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling tiles. One of the lights was humming in a way that proper magical lighting never did. It was obnoxious.

"What's a rocket ship?" It sounded like the man had meant it as a joke, but Keman was always interested in learning new things about the various worlds, especially since this new patient seemed to be from the "past." He probably didn't yet grasp the whole situation, much less the existence of other worlds. It probably seemed ridiculous to him. "I'm still having trouble with practically all of the technology in this place," the dragon added casually, wondering what his companion's reaction would be. "Electric lights, voices coming out of boxes, 'buses' that move under their own power instead of being pulled by horses or oxen or grels..." He shrugged again. "But I've had time to get used to it, I suppose. My name's Keman, by the way. I'm sorry, I didn't catch yours...?"

Again Indy reminded himself to be careful what he wished for. The boy wasn't up on the latest and greatest in technology, but at least Indy was--if you believed that absurd theory, and he wanted it on the record that he still didn't--only a century behind. Having lived before electric lights would put this kid pre-1880s, unless he lived in a very remote area. Poor kid. If Indy was feeling a little out of his depth, this boy was probably drowning.

"It was a joke," he explained, inadvertently botching a couple of rows as he looked up. "A rocketship is a craft that flies through outer space. Y'know, visiting the moon, meeting little green men, that kind of thing. Nothing even close exists yet, obviously--okay, well, at least where I'm from. Around here, who knows." He paused, absorbing the rest of what Keman had said. "And grels?"

"I'm familiar with most of the technology here in one form or another, but their radios, for example, are a lot more advanced than the ones I'm used to." Indy discovered that pressing one of the thin buttons could make the game pause, and he set it down to extend his right hand. "I'm Dr. Indiana Jones. Nice to meet you."

Well, at least Keman had learned a few things about this man. He was still incredulous about the fact that there were people from different times (and possibly places), but at least he seemed welling to accept that it might be true.

"Oh, I think I might know what you're talking about!" Keman had met Wash a few days ago, and he'd mentioned traveling through the stars in ships. It was nice to finally get to use what he'd learned! "I met a man at lunch a little less than a week ago who says he pilots a ship that goes in space. Like that?" Maybe Keman was playing the part of the backwards country boy a little too much, but if this man was new to the Institute, the dragon needed a better way of gaging what he did and didn't already know so that he could try to fill in what else he could. If he had to pretend to be a bit dim to do that, so be it.

He blinked. "You don't know grels?" That was actually understandable; hadn't the elves created them with their magical meddling, much the same way as the alicorns? "They're beasts of burden...like great, gray, warty-skinned oxen. Sort of a cross between a bull and a one-horn, with a bit of toad thrown in for good measure. Ugly, smelly things, but strong." Of all of the forms Keman had shifted into during his relatively short lifetime, he least enjoyed being a grel. They were to slow, too stupid, too...flatulent.

"Nice to meet you too." Keman took the hand and shook it firmly. He was familiar enough with many of this world's various social niceties, after spending nearly three weeks here. "May I ask what sort of doctor you are? Like the ones here, or...?"

"Yeah," Indy replied a little grimly, "like that." Great. Just great.

"Nope, never heard of 'em," he said to the grel question. A "one-horn" was probably Keman's word for "rhinoceros," or some similar animal. Indy tried to think of a region where that kind of creature would live, and came up dry. Nowhere he'd ever been, that was for sure. Although someplace remote enough that even he hadn't made it out there would be the best candidate for not having electric lights. Keman could still conceivably be from the 1930s, although even assuming that still left him with the problem of where. Where did you get a perfectly unobtrusive accent with no electric lights and animals no one else had ever heard of? Between the issue of time travel and the issue of translation, there wasn't a hell of a lot to choose from.

"Where did you say you were from again?" he asked. He knew for a fact that the kid hadn't said, but being as offhand as possible was likely to get him the most candid response. Offhand, he added, "I'm a professor, actually. An archaeologist. I go out and find artifacts that tell me about how people lived in the past." He also spent dozens of hours in the library for every one he spent in the field, but for once, Indy wasn't in the mood to get into all that. Let the kid think it was all fortune and glory, at least for now.

"I...didn't," Keman answered evasively. What was there to say? He came from a world without a name, where magically-created creatures that weren't supposed to exist ran around with impunity and where humans were enslaved by elves. And then there was the problem of his being a shape-shifting dragon currently stuck in the form of a teenage halfblood boy, thanks to this place, and...and this Dr. Indiana Jones fellow was going to think he was absolutely insane if he said even half of that.

But he needed to give something better than that. Jones was expecting something. "It doesn't really have a name, to be honest. I think that the people who lived there a long time ago had a name for it, but it was erased when they were conquered, along with the rest of their culture and civilization." He didn't say by whom. "Now it's just...where I live. I'm sorry that I can't give you a better answer than that. Towns and cities have names, as do geographic landmarks--I was born in the mountains on the edge of the Mehav Desert, for instance--but the land itself? If a name exists, I still haven't found it."

Keman perked up quite a bit when Jones started talking about his profession. "Really? I love history! I mean, I've only ever read about it, not looked for artifacts, but I've always been fascinated by the past."

Mojave Desert, Indy's brain automatically spat out, but that wasn't what Keman had said. Anyway, he couldn't think offhand of any civilizations that had been conquered there, unless perhaps if Keman was Native American. There was something off about all this, but pushing it directly probably wouldn't get him any more answers. At least not the kind he needed.

Later on he was going to have to sort out everything he'd heard today--magic, check; time travel, check; hyperadvanced leisure activities, check; bizarre animals, check; rocket ships...he sighed: check again. Ridiculous. Like most of his adventures, it would make a really great movie--if only he could get anyone to believe it.

He was slightly heartened by the kid's enthusiasm; give him a student with a genuine interest in history any day over thrill-seekers hoping archaeology was their ticket to getting rich quick. "That's a better background than plenty of people have going into it, believe me," Indy said. "There's a word in my field for an archaeologist who's not interested in reading and doing careful research: grave-robber." Okay, so he'd been called the same thing once or twice, but no one could accuse Dr. Indiana Jones of not doing his homework. Besides, most of those were just misunderstandings.

"Are you interested in anything in particular?" he asked. "Any specific region, time period, anything like that?" Whatever it was, he probably had a war story. More importantly, he wanted to figure out what the kid knew about the world. Please just say ancient Egypt or something else normal, he caught himself thinking.

"So it's not all intellectual, then," Keman said, smiling wryly. "It makes sense that there would be a few treasure hunters in the mix. I mean, there's got to be a quite bit of gold involved, right? It's unfortunate, but humans aren't often known for their selflessness and honor." That was true enough. Human nature was a fickle thing anyway, but after generations of slavery and conditioning, there were very few humans left in his world who were even capable of putting others before themselves. It was better here, of course. Meeting his fellow inmates had raised the dragon's opinion of the species quite a lot.

He started slightly when Jones asked about what "interested" him. Fewmets. That was another one of those probing questions that was going to get him into trouble. Well, maybe it was time to ease the older man into it. It was just going to get harder and harder to avoid it from here on out, after all, and Jones needed to know one way or another. Might as well. "Ah...well. About...oh, two thousand years or so ago, the halfblooded children of the conquered people and their conquerors revolted against their overlords and started what is now called the Wizard War. They ultimately lost, but there were heavy losses on both sides, and it's sort of...forbidden to even mention it. Because of this, books on the subject are few and far between, so you have to get a bit crafty if you want to find out anything about it. That's my particular area of study, I suppose. It's a little more personal to me than most, since my foster sister is halfblooded."

Indy shrugged. "Sure there are treasure hunters, but a lot of people probably start out honest. It's easy to think of knowledge as the real treasure until you've got a 3,000-year-old amulet in your hands." Or the Cup of Christ. "Just like with anything else, sometimes people go too far in their pursuit of whatever they're after. But there are still plenty of good ones out there. Just look around a museum sometime and you'll see." He was careful to throw in the good with the bad before Keman got too down on the subject. The kid was too young to have given up on humanity already.

It sounded like he'd given up on reality, though, and there wasn't a damn thing Indy could do to try to fix that. He remembered Aurion at breakfast, that "this entire world is foreign to me" line. Oh, and here they were with wizards and magic again; just great.

"Let me cut to the chase here, Keman," he said, setting the Tetris down altogether and going for a mix of gentle but firm in his tone of voice. "I've never heard of this wizard war. I'm not exactly unfamiliar with that period in history--" far from it, in fact, "--and I can't think of anything you could possibly be referring to. So what you're getting at is that you're from another world, isn't it? One with magic?" He was leading the witness again, but right now he just wanted a little directness here.

Keman would have liked to go to a museum and see, since they sounded interesting, but he had no idea what one was. He'd have to ask Orihime later, the next time he saw her. Still, he smiled and said, "I'll be sure to do that." No need to make things any more complicated than they already were.

But maybe not quite as complicated as he'd originally thought. When Jones mentioned 'another world,' Keman relaxed visibly. Good. This was going to be a lot easier, then.

"Yes to both. I'm from another world, and magic is an important part of that world. I apologize if I seemed...like I was having you on or something. I just needed to see how much you knew so I could ease you into the idea of other worlds existing. I didn't want you to think I actually belong in this place or something."

Oh, for crying out loud. How the hell'd they manage to get this many types of crazy into one building, Indy wondered uncharitably. He was starting to think that his presence here was just some kind of accident; maybe they really were looking for a guy named Lucas and somehow ended up with a guy named Jones by mistake. He couldn't figure out how he fit into this collection of screwballs; at least his exploits were genuine. Other worlds, for God's sake!

But of course he couldn't say all that to the teenage boy in front of him. What he actually said was, "So does that make you an alien, or what?" He regretted this as soon as it was out of his mouth and added apologetically, "Sorry. You just look so much like an ordinary kid; I wasn't expecting to hear you say you're from Mars--" He checked himself. "Or wherever you come from."

He couldn't believe he was actually talking as though he were seriously entertaining all this. But there was no point in upsetting Keman. Wherever he was from, the poor kid had probably been through enough.

"You think I'm insane," Keman said. He wasn't hurt or offended, he was merely stating fact. Jones didn't sound like he believed him, and probably thought he was a raving lunatic.

"To answer your question, no I'm not an alien. Or, at least, I don't think I am. I'm unfamiliar with the term." The way that Jones had said it made it sound rather negative. "And I'm not from 'Mars.' There are different planes of reality in the universe...I just happen to be from one." He was ignoring the 'ordinary kid' comment for right now. If he wanted to convince Jones that he was, in fact, sane, suddenly coming out with 'oh, by the way, I'm a shape-shifting dragon' probably wouldn't help his cause any.

Indy chose his words carefully. "I think there are a lot of claims being made here that I don't understand, and I think holding off on accepting them until I have more evidence isn't a bad idea, speaking practically." Time for one of his many variations on the playing-cute, I'm-a-scientist-so-you-can-understand-why-it's-tough-for-me ploy. "It's nothing personal. But when the guy I talk to at breakfast tells me he's some kind of mystical healer, and the kid I talk to in the morning tells me he's from seventy years in the future, and next person I talk to comes out with other worlds and wizard wars..." He shook his head. "And they're all running from things that go bump in the night. All this in barely twenty-four hours--it's just a little much."

He might be digging himself in deeper here, but he did owe Keman an explanation. "An 'alien' is a word for someone who comes from another planet, somewhere that's not Earth. Your friend with the 'rocket ship' might visit other worlds in outer space like that." When he wasn't confusing children with his delusions. "But what you're saying sounds more like another dimension."

Keman couldn't really argue with that. He was a very logical person himself, and he could respect healthy skepticism. He still remembered his own first day here, how confused he'd been, especially since the first familiar face he'd seen belonged to someone who should have been dead. That had taken some getting used to. "All right, I can understand that," he said, nodding. "It does take some getting used to. I woke up in the middle of night, when I first came here. I'm sorry that I...added to that."

The dragon would have liked to ask Wash about 'aliens' later, but he hadn't seen him around lately. He'd probably disappeared...just like Shana. Keman frowned. "I think so, yes. I know that my ancestors came to our world through a 'gate,' constructed accidentally by another people, that linked the worlds." His voice was almost apologetic. Saying all this was almost...embarrassing, in a way, given the way Jones had received it so far.

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Day 38: Game Room

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