damned_institute | Day 40: Recreational Field

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Day 40: Recreational Field

Kio's breakfast ended on a much happier note than it had started. However, for once the announcement truly surprised him. He blinked as his nurse came to pick him up. Recreational Field? But.. but if they had a greenhouse, he wanted to go there. The prospect of gardening was a truly liberating one, an island of joy in this hellhole. He thought about going to the Sun Room and lying down, but it occurred to him that he hadn't had proper fresh air since being here. With a cheery goodbye wave to Honey, he followed his torturer outside.

It was much better than he had expected. The sun wasn't too hot (what time of the year were they in, anyway?), so he walked slowly along the walls, fascinated by the size of the field. He wondered if Sou-chan was alright. He hadn't even checked the board. Well, if Soubi wanted to apologize, Kio would be willing to listen. The place was so crisp and clean. He had to think if anyone had ever gone over the walls. What was out there? Freedom? Or a different sort of monster?

Leaning against one of the walls, Kio took as much advantage of the sun as he could. He desperately wanted a lollipop. One was quietly nestled in his pocket, but he would need to wait until the nurses were busy with other patients before he tried anything. Soubi had gone to some trouble to get them, the least he could do was make sure they didn't get confiscated. So with bated breath, Kio waited for a shift in the mood. He was, for once, content. Not happy, but not going crazy either.

[Sou-chan! Team Loveless deploy!]

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It wasn't as though Hanatarou hadn't seen scary things before. He'd seen Hollows, after all, and had been on his way to Hueco Mundo of all places before waking up here. And yet, that? That had been disturbing beyond all reason, if only because he hadn't had any way to fight it - not even Kira had been able to do anything but run, and if a vice-captain was essentially helpless then what was a lowly healer going to do?

He just shuddered a little, clasping his hands tightly in his lap as he bobbed his head a little in response to the comment. "N-no, it's...been very strange here." Even if he hadn't personally had to fight any strange monsters so far, he rather thought last night had been more than enough for the time being. Or ever. "I can't even do very much. Um. Of what I could do before, that is."

Jamie suspected that "strange" was an understatement, and he hadn't even seen all that much of the institute. He'd seen enough to know he didn't especially want to see more, however.

Watching Hanatarou out of the corner of his eye, Jamie had to feel a little sorry for him - he looked shaken and overwhelmed and just generally not-well. Deservedly so, in Jamie's opinion, seeing as how he'd apparently just coughed up a clot of...ghost hair, or something. Geh, that ought to be enough to rattle anybody.

"What could you do before that you can't do here?" he asked - partly out of curiosity and partly to try to get his mind off the sheer freakishness of their environment.

Hanatarou recognized the change of subject for what it was and seized upon it eagerly. Anything to help him not think about the night before or what had just happened was welcome, even if he kind of felt like finding a nice dark corner in which to hide. At least the stranger seemed to be oddly nice about the whole thing, which was something to be thankful for.

"Oh, um. I...I'm a shinigami. A-and a healer. But here I don't have my zanpakutou and some of the stuff I could do before, it - well, some of it doesn't work. And the rest doesn't work as well as it should, and it's. Um." Hanatarou hesitated a moment, deciding it probably wasn't worth getting into a detailed explanation of just what using reiatsu did to him now, and settled for just, "It kinda hurts me to heal people now."

And there he paused again, cheeks flushing pink as he realized that he'd completely forgotten his manners because of that little...incident. "O-oh, I'm sorry, I'm Yamada Hanatarou. Nice to meet you."

Although Jamie got the gist of what he was being told, some of the terminology went right over his head, and he frowned a bit as he took it in. This must be part of that whole 'different worlds' thing, he supposed - more things and concepts he'd never imagined existed.

He blinked and ducked his head a little sheepishly at the introduction. "Oh, uh, yeah. I'm Jamie Hemeros. Nice to meet you." He hesitated briefly, chewing his lip for a moment before asking, "So - what's a, um...'shinigami'?"

One of these days, Hanatarou told himself, he would remember that humans didn't know about shinigami. And on that day he would just explain what he did, so he didn't confuse people and make them ask for clarification. Today, however, was clearly not that day.

"Oh. Er." He lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. "We're, um, the ones who make sure spirits go where they're supposed to after they die. Basically. There are a bunch of us here." For whatever reason, shinigami seemed to be kind of popular around here, even if they weren't necessarily the kind of shinigami that Hanatarou was used to.

And before the next question could be asked, he continued, "A-and a zanpakutou is like a...a special sword that all of us have. We can use them to, um, send souls on. Or fight bad spirits." It was an incredibly vague description of a complicated thing, but considering that Jamie probably didn't need to know about it, well.

If nothing else, Jamie was getting a lot of practice in suspending his disbelief while he was here; he probably wouldn't have believed what Hanatarou was saying if not for the other inexplicable things he'd already seen after dark at the institute. Upon hearing this explanation Jamie was assailed with several different trains of thought at once: in particular, he found it a little...absurd, somehow, that someone whose job involved dealing with the dead had been frightened by a ghost, but then Jamie didn't know what normal ghosts were like wherever Hanatarou came from; probably the guy had had good reason to be afraid of what he'd encountered last night.

Jamie was curious about the swords Hanatarou had mentioned and how they might be used to 'send souls on'; more than that, though, another comment had piqued his interest. "There's a lot of you here, huh? With all the, um...ghosts and...dead things. Why d'you think that is?" Jamie wasn't sure there was a connection, per se, but it was an interesting coincidence, if nothing else.

"I don't understand it, either." Really, Hanatarou didn't, nor did he understand why there were shinigami like himself and the others from Soul Society along with shinigami like Grell, who wasn't really...the same. Not that he understood why people had been dragged to this place to begin with, so. "There are others I know from home, and some who don't seem to work in quite the same way. But, um, I don't know...there are lots of people with strange powers, and..."

He trailed off there and gave a helpless-looking shrug. "The...the ghost last night, it, ah, didn't act like what. Er. I'm used to. Maybe it was from another world, too." It seemed like excusing everything he didn't understand as something from one of those bizarre 'other worlds' would work the best in these situations.

"I know there's a lotta stuff here that we don't have where I come from," Jamie said. "I wouldn't be surprised if the...things they have running around here at night come from different worlds." That lack of surprise kind of scared him, actually. He'd never imagined he might have to seriously contemplate the possibility of beings from other dimensions, or whatever was going on here; he liked to think he was a logical, well-grounded person, and logical people didn't waste time thinking about the existence of supernatural creatures.

Well, regardless of how unfathomably weird this all was, he still felt compelled to try to dissect and make sense of whatever information presented itself, even if he could only do so one little chunk at a time. He chewed his lip a bit and regarded Hanatarou with intent curiosity. "So there's other...shinigami...that're different from you? I mean - how're they different?"

That was a good question, and one that Hanatarou would likely have trouble actually putting into words. He wasn't exactly 12th Division, and didn't make a study of such things - he was just a simple healer who felt overwhelmed by an awful lot of things he'd encountered here. "Er. Well, they don't...work the same way?"

Hanatarou's shoulders hunched a little, as though he were halfway expecting his new acquaintance to get annoyed at him for not being able to answer the question. "I don't know if I can explain it, but, ah. Like, I talked to one who has kind of different powers and doesn't quite do...the same...I guess it's kind of complicated...?"

At least, without going into detail of how Soul Society and the Gotei 13 functioned, and he rather doubted Jamie wanted to hear all that. He was actually kind of surprised that Jamie was still talking to him, for that matter.

Jamie didn't doubt that it was complicated - the whole 'shinigami' concept was one he'd never even heard of before, so maybe he'd been jumping the gun a bit asking Hanatarou to elaborate on the differences between the shinigami he was familiar with and the other kinds that were here. He nodded and frowned slightly.

"Well, yeah, I guess it probably is. So...you think the other shinigami are from different worlds, or something? I mean, that'd be kinda - mm." His frown became more pronounced as he groped for words. "We don't even have shinigami where I'm from, so it's sort of...weird, to think there's a bunch of other places that do have them and they all work in different ways. Y'know?"

"Oh. I guess so." Of course, they might have shinigami where Jamie was from and he just didn't know about it - after all, most humans didn't realize they existed. But Hanatarou just shrugged a little and managed a somewhat hesitant smile in return.

After a second's pause he realized that he'd been spending entirely too much time talking about himself, and asked, "Where are you from? Er...if you don't mind me asking."

Jamie wasn't sure why Hanatarou thought he would mind being asked, though it was kind of...odd trying to describe his home in this particular context. It was what it was; he'd never assumed that there were other worlds to compare it to.

"I come from...uh, a planet called Zi. It's on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. And...I guess people - y'know, humans - came there from Earth centuries ago." He scratched his cheek and offered another uncertain half-grin. "Everyone I've talked to so far says they're from Earth and we're on Earth now, or something. That was a little hard to believe. At first, anyway."

Another planet. And one that Hanatarou certainly hadn't heard of. When compared to some of the other strange things he'd been told here that didn't exactly rank amongst the weirdest, so he only blinked a couple of times and finally nodded in response. "Oh. All right."

After a second more of awkward silence he glanced down again, absently picking at the grass on the ground immediately in front of him. Maybe the fact that Jamie was from another world was the reason he didn't seem to mind the healer's company. That didn't mean Hanatarou wasn't shy and awkward, though, and that was only made worse as he tried to figure out how to respond and failed utterly. What should he say, 'what's it like in space?'

Jamie shrugged and fidgeted a bit. "Guess it probably sounds pretty boring if you're, uh...used to dealing with ghosts and stuff everyday," he said, just a touch sheepishly. He found Hanatarou's nonplussed reaction mildly interesting in its own right; the couple of other times he'd actually gotten around to discussing where he came from in relation to the other people here, the conversation had gotten cut short by nurses hurrying them off to their next activity, so Jamie had never gotten to hear a proper description of the kind of places anyone else came from. Maybe Hanatarou'd had more luck in that area than Jamie, though, and the places he'd heard about were somewhat more...awe-inspiring.

"Um...so what other kinds of places have you heard about here?" he asked, watching Hanatarou fuss with the grass. "Besides the places the other shinigami come from, I mean."

"Wh-what? Oh, um. No, it's just...different." Hanatarou shifted a little, looking uncomfortable, and flicked the bits of grass off his fingers again. Different was okay, in this case. It was much better than familiar, when "familiar" meant a certain former 3rd Division captain.

"Most of the people I've met here were from Earth...or at least the human world I knew of. Um. Though one said something about being from a...a computer game?" It was something like that. He hadn't quite understood the explanation.

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Day 40: Recreational Field

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