"I would greatly appreciate it," she replied to his first statement, before moving on to considering the other facts. "Indeed, the higher-profiled disappearances are troubling, but it's the numbers themselves that bother me. I almost wonder if perhaps the disappearances and new arrivals are meant to keep the Institute itself at a certain occupancy level, but as you said, the numbers wouldn't match up.

"As for the reasoning behind it, I'm more than willing to believe that he's holding us here for an experiment of some sort. What that is, only he would know. Every experiment needs a decent-sized sample to use as a control group, while the rest are split into one or more variable groups.

"The disappearances could be related to a portion who were selected for a variable group, and were discarded once he collected the data he needed. The new arrivals could be a part of a new variable group, or brought in to test a separate portion of the hypothesis altogether." She paused, considering her own words. "It would explain why some of the patients who have been here longer have been the ones to vanish, while the newer patients are still around: the old ones weren't needed for this portion of the test, while the ones left could make up the control group and perhaps even another variable group."

Mitsuru paused again, and sighed after a moment. "Of course, this is all based off of second-hand information. I've also heard that the building itself changed one night several weeks ago, that the majority of the patient body was replaced when this occurred, and that prior to it, the former man over the radio and Landel seemed to have no real connection between them." She glanced down, underlining a phrase in her notes. "I wonder if perhaps the person over the radio is involved with the experiment, assuming that's why we're all here, and that the mass replacement of the population was the completion of a separate experiment and the beginning of a new one."