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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[is a grouchy eco-activist okay?]

S.T. didn't feel any better for having done the tell-all thing. So much for a burden shared. And then the nurses descended and whisked them all towards the Sun Room.

He still wasn't moving very fast -- his body was flinging out one last goal-line stand against whatever vector they'd shot him up with, and it was effectively resulting in arthritis. He was walking like an old man, and he stopped in front of the bulletin board mostly to give his knees a chance to warm up. The usual deluge of personal ads and Shorty playing spider in the web had been replaced by a series of questions and then a series of fucking questionnaires-cum-manifestos. Something had kicked over the power structure and the ants were running around trying to pick up their dead comrades for tomorrow's lunch. And the Head Bastard had gone back to sounding competent at the supervillain gig. Peachy fucking keen.

He ignored the messages that sounded like power grabs, scrawled a couple of replies, and decided to get the hell out of the way. His nurse was trying to coax him towards a couch, which made his mind up for him. He was going outside, fever or no fever. Fresh air was a godsend -- wherever the fuck this place was, the air smelled cleaner than up in the Whites. He took the first deep breath he'd managed all day.

It was cold enough out that he was shivering as soon as he stepped through the doors. The sun was warm, but not warm enough. And there wasn't a badminton net to be seen. He'd meant to ask yesterday. Today, he wasn't sure he could hit the damn birdie even if they gave him a tennis racket. So he found a quiet patch of grass and sat down before his knees did something embarrassing like giving out beneath him.

The ground was damp, and there was still a residue of dew on the grass. Which was not helping with the plan where he avoided exposure on top of infection. Being cold didn't cause colds, whatever folk wisdom and a legion of overprotective mothers might swear by. But it did add another layer of stress, and he'd come out here to relax. He gave up on the idea of lying back in the grass and hugged his knees to his chest instead, resting his chin on them. Which was when he finally noticed that he'd sat down near another man. "Hi," he said, voice flat. "Nice day, isn't it?" Shit, now he was making small talk about the weather. Voluntarily. They really had fucked him up.

[Sounds good to me! :D]

The Scarecrow opened his eyes, noticing the other man who'd sat beside him. He smiled, always glad for company. His mind wandered far too much when he was alone. He greeted the man as he sat up, brushing loose grass from his hair.

"Hey!" he said, taking a deep breath. That grassy smell in the air sure felt great. He'd even stopped thinking about his legs (well, until that moment when he thought about not thinking about his legs. Curse his wandering mind!). "The weather is fantastic! I wish we could come out here every day. It's been good to clear my head." He took another breath. Beautiful!

The former man-of-straw leaned backward onto his hands, his legs stretched before him. "Doesn't sitting like that hurt?" he asked, thinking the cramped posture of his conversation partner looked terribly uncomfortable.

Great. He'd sat next to an overenthusiastic duck-squeezer who was about to try to teach him yoga. He rolled his head and stretched a little, producing a series of satisfying pops.

"Naah. I bike a lot. Keeps me flexible." In a previous life, he might have ended up needing to go to some meat-market treadmills and yuppie-water gym or get fat. But now he neither needed to nor could afford it.

"Do you know how often they let us out? This is the first time I've been out here during the day."

The Scarecrow raised an eyebrow has the man's joints made all sorts of strange noises. They didn't sound pleasant at all.

"Oh, same," said he said with an indistinct wave of his hand. "I've only been here a little over a full day. This is the first time I've been outside since I got here." Another breath in and out. "It's so different out here. It reminds me a lot of home." He closed his eyes. Home. He sure hoped everyone was all right. He didn't like that feeling that he'd left behind his obligations.

"Oh. I've been here, what, three days?" The question was rhetorical. Mostly. Give or take the yawning chasms in what passed for the normal passage of time here.

If the entire fucking Institute was on some faster-than-light Spaceship Earth hurtling around the galaxy at Warp 9, would they know it unless the Klingons attacked?

Would there be some quasi-mystical spider-sense that would tell the passengers that their loved ones were dropping like flies due to old age while they were eating pancakes and chasing phantoms in the dark? Some sort of trans-dimensional resonance bullshit involving quartz crystals or quantum entanglement?

It was coincidence, through and through. Memory cheated, and people forgot all the near misses and wild shots in the dark. The phone call to an ex-roommate you hadn't seen in a decade that turned out to be fifteen minutes before he wrapped his Volkswagen around a telephone pole but walked away from it because you'd made a crack comparing seatbelts and condoms and he remembered to buckle up. If you were mediagenic, you could convince Joe Public of a connection between anything and anything. The number of home games the Sox had lost and the monsoon season in Burma. Floor wax and sex appeal. Correlation is not causation, but people liked stories.

What it amounted to, as far as he could tell, was that he'd been there for about three days.

"Though I might have missed a shot due to the local narcolepsy pandemic." A nap sounded good, right about now, except for the part where it was a sign of giving up. Instead, he looked down at the grass. It was the sort of uniform monoculture green that was the Holy Grail of suburbanites everywhere, and kept chemical manufacturers in donuts and cologne. "Where's home?"

"Hm, so you've not been here much longer than me," said the Scarecrow, wondering what a 'narcolepsy pandemic' was. It sure sounded nasty, but long names often did. Even his name sounded a bit imposing with all the titles and fanfare.

He did smile thinking of home. "Home to me is the land of Oz," he said, thinking the grass in Oz might have been a slightly brighter shade. He wasn't sure if the grass here felt better than the regular variety at home, since he'd never actually felt the grass before. Not having a basis for comparison was a little disappointing. Even more so was the thought that he might never feel the grass in Oz, especially if his body returned to normal, or he got his original form back, or whatever. His legs hurt, but he'd rather have the sense of feeling, pain and all, than not.

"I'm getting the feeling this place is very different from where I lived," he continued. "The people are different; the atmosphere is, well, a bit livelier on most days. And we really don't have any places like this institute."

He looked at the sky, deciding it was too bright and returning his eyes to the rest of the field. "What about you?"

"Oz? As in the Emerald City and the Yellow Brick Road?" And Judy Garland in Technicolor?.

"I, uh." Way to put your foot in it, Sangamon. "I've heard of it. It sounds -- nice." When he thought about it, it really did. Sure, the place was one big acid-trip, best accompanied by Pink Floyd and a room full of nitrous oxide, but unless you were Dorothy, it was peaceful. He'd probably be bored stiff after a day or two, but right now a vacation Over The Rainbow sounded like just what the -- never mind.

"I'm from Boston. Uh, in America. If you've heard of that." How the fuck did you explain Boston to someone from a place where the cities were made of enough gemstone to run the economy of several third-world nations. At least when the windows fall off our buildings, they're only made of glass?

"We do and we don't -- have places like this. The ones we have are for people who really need them, and you can go home." That was a vast oversimplification, and he knew it. But the places that weren't up to modern legal standards of mental health care tended to more along the lines of gulags and POW camps -- not high-priced headgames. "This is like their crazy evil twin."

Oz. It was one thing to see notes from superheroes on the bulletin board, and another to meet -- wait, who had he met? "I'm Sangamon Taylor." He leaned forward and extended a hand.

The Scarecrow brightened, shaking the other man's hand. "Nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Taylor," he said with a smile. "My full name is a little long and tiring, so it's just Scarecrow for short. It's nice to meet another person who has heard of Oz! I met a man yesterday who knew of it, but didn't know where it is in relation to his place, nor how to get back." His smile left as got a little homesick. "I'm not sure anyone knows how to get home from here, wherever home may be."

He shook those downing thoughts from his mind. He had to keep a positive outlook on this. He was going to get home, no matter what! "It is a very nice place, most of the time. Well, most of it is nice. The places I like are nice, I'll put it that way." He finished that thought with a nod.

"And believe it or not," he continued, "I have heard of America, thanks to the bulletin board." He pulled his journal from where he'd had it tucked into the waist of his pants, and pulled the slip of paper with the doodle of the United States he'd gotten from the board from between the pages. "This is it?" he asked as he showed it to Sangamon, deciding he should be sure.

By the time Scarecrow (should that be the Scarecrow?) had finished the standard homesick schtick, S.T. had managed to stop coming up with more lyrics to If I Only Had A Brain than he would ever have guessed he could remember, and had schooled his face into something hopefully vague.

Then a map, if he could call it that, was thrust under his face. It was a map of the United States, in the way that you could make anything a map of the US by drawing a vague rectangle and adding Florida's floppy dick. "Yeah, that's it. Boston's on the East Coast -- right around here." He pointed to about the right spot.

"Some people have said this shithole is in New Jersey," he continued, sliding his finger down the East Coast and then tapping, "which would put us here." But it's not the Jersey I know. For one, the air's too clean."

He took a deep sniff of the air, forcing air past clogged sinuses. It smelled like cut grass and damp earth and not a single chemical. "It is nice out here." Just a little too cold for it to be a good idea to track down a bag of charcoal and some grass-fed organic beef and overpriced hothouse tomatoes and throw a BBQ, but not too cold to try. And enough beer to have a nice buzz going before they even gave up on the Boy Scout tricks and just dumped lighter fluid on the grill.

"It really is nice out here," he agreed with a grin. "I wasn't aware that air could be too clean or too dirty." The thought of dirty air was hard to visualize. Maybe it would be darker and thicker? And harder to breathe? That didn't sound pleasant.

Pulling his pen from his journal, the Scarecrow took note of these new locations with his pen, adding little arrows and an X for New Jersey and another X for Boston. He never knew when he might need such information, after all. He was about to return it to its home between the pages of his journal when another question crossed his mind.

He continued with a new thought: "Now, where would Kansas be in relation to these two points?"

Imagine no pollution. He wasn't sure he could. Where would he go, what would get him up in the mornings? What would pay the bills? Switching from corporate wage slave to non-profiteer had saved his sanity and his stomach lining while it blew holes in his finances, but he still had a job. Catch a bad Nor'easter to Oz and he'd end up passed out in the poppy fields until he fossilized. "Trust me, it can. They don't call Jersey the Armpit of America for nothing."

"Kansas is a state, and it covers from about here to here." With each location, he tapped a finger on the paper and waited to let Scarecrow make any marks he wanted. "And I met a couple of guys from L.A. -- Los Angeles, here, and there's a lot of people from Japan, which is another country on an island," here he paused, measured some air with his hands, and then pointed to a location in thin air. "Right about here. And Spider said 'The City' like it was the only one in the world, which means either the future is even stranger than he told me or the bastard's from New York City, which is here. Assholes. Win a few pennants and they think they're the only game in town."

He was getting off-topic. The ins-and-outs of the American League were boring to everyone but the die-hard, which Sangamon was not. "Is there more than one city in Oz?"

More notes were quickly added to his doodle as Sangamon pointed out these new locations. It looked like the Scarecrow was going to need a bigger map of this country. He figured he'd have time to redraw it a bit later- maybe during dinner. His artistic skills were definitely under-developed, but surely he could reproduce this small doodle for his own informational purposes.

"There are several cities in Oz," he answered as he added 'Lost Angelus' to the map. These names sure were strange. "The Emerald City is the capital of Oz, but Gillikin country as a couple of cities, and there's Bunnybury in the Quadlings to the South. Not that I've been to any of these places. The citizens of the Emerald City don't like it too much when their king wanders off for some thinking time." He spoke from experience on that one.

"I'm not sure how any of those places compare to the ones you described, though," he added. "I'm sure that deep down, they're not that fundamentally different, although you don't seem too fond of the people from 'New York.' Do Witches live there or something?"

S.T. grinned, and affected a broad, terribly fake Nu Yawk accent.

"Naah, New Yorker's aren't all bad. They just forget that other places exist -- even the rest of their home state." Not that Buffalo was worth remembering. He dropped the accent and continued. "We don't have witches. Not the kind you mean, at least. No magic, no witches."

He'd forgotten the Scarecrow ended up King. Put an idiot with a big smile on top as an anointed ruler. Sounds familar. "A king that thinks sounds like a good thing to me. Would have saved us from Reaganomics."

"Hm," he said indistinctly. There seemed to be a lot of places without magic around this institute. Maybe it was just that the people all came from a similar region of the world- one without the art. "A place without Witches, good or bad? But who looks over all the people? Or do you have a king for each region?"

"And 'Reaganomics'?" he added with a confused look. "I'm not familiar with that term in the least. I don't think they have those where I'm from."

Explain the history of western Democracy in a hundred words or less, Sangamon. Great.

"We have elections. Everyone decides who they want for a ruler, and the person with the most votes wins. It's supposed to be fair." Sometimes, when money lined up against money and canceled each other out, leaving the issues up for actual discussion, it even was. "Cities and towns have mayors, states have Governors, and the United States has a President. Some countries still have Kings. And England has both."

"Reaganomics is crap cooked, frosted, and served as cake by our current President. A man with a head full of straw and no brains would be a vast improvement. Ol' Ronnie Reagan was a fucking actor before someone decided he'd play a good President." S.T. was almost snarling, but there wasn't any real anger behind it. You just couldn't be a good activist without ragging on the Gipper. But taking down the Groveler had been his political good-deed for the decade, and Reagan was on his way to an Alzheimer's ward and having to actually spend time with his batshit wife. He was done with politics for the year.

Edited 2009-04-05 00:51 (UTC)

Maybe politics weren't so different here. Didn't the Munchkin City have a mayor? He'd never met the man, but Dorothy had mentioned him once. He was really going to have to meet all the heads of the different towns when he got back.

"So, he used his acting abilities to trick the people into voting for him?" the Scarecrow asked. "I suppose it's a good thing I was elected leader by the Wizard before he left instead of putting it to a vote. I highly doubt I'd be in my position. Then again, maybe they would've had someone who wouldn't end up in some sort of strange institution in a foreign land, or someone who wouldn't have lost their brains in said institution." He was still kicking himself for that.

"It'd be quite a stretch of the imagination to blame you for landing here." Political careers had foundered or been made on less, but he had the feeling Oz might stray closer to the ideal. "And you have to have at least most of a brain. Human bodies don't work without them. You're breathing, putting complete sentences together. It takes more than just the autonomous nervous system to do the latter. I.e. a brain."

The packs of nurses were starting to circle. Shit. He was just getting comfortable, and it was time to move again. Joints protested as he stood, and the entire world see-sawed around him briefly. Still, once he was upright and fairly confident he'd remain so, he extended a hand down to the Scarecrow. "Your Highness," he said, with a grin that was mostly genuine.

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Day 40: Recreational Field

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