damned_institute | Day 43: Chapel

And just like that, the disorienting feeling of blacking out just to wake up in an unfamiliar bed came again. Alkaid had wondered if it would - everything about last night had been different, all the way from the zombies to the eerie emptiness of the Institute to the strange broadcast at the end of the night. Had the Head Doctor been shot? Damn, someone had gotten to it before her. And who was the voice at the end there? It was like she'd been allowed access to some kind of strange mystery that she could not understand, one that had been going on for a long time before she had arrived and would be going on for quite a while in the future, after she was gone. Had these strange sets of circumstances been bugs in this place's programming? Who could say?

The morning's intercom greeting was strange, as well. Federal training whatsit? It didn't seem like this happened very often, from the sound of it, but so much had happened since the last day she remembered that the former Demon Palace Emperor was ready to take pretty much anything at face value.

The room she woke up in was still empty. Wondering where to stick the half-cracked bat that she'd picked up last night, she shoved it under the mattress hastily when she heard footsteps in the hall.

The stupid nurse was the same as ever, though. Some things never changed. "Ahh, good morning, Eileen. It's so nice to see you awake."

Alkaid rolled her eyes at the nurse's chuckle, and shook her head. She didn't care that the NPC thought it was nice, she just wanted to see the rest of the institute already.. see what had changed! "Yeah, it's fantastic. Whatever! Just take me where I'm going and be done with it!"

It was just then that she realized that she was not wanting to devour the flesh of the nurse in front of her. And that the pain on her arm had kind of abated - she couldn't see through the thick bandages they had covered her arm with, but she wondered if her skin was still rotting off like a zombie. Had they somehow cured her infection overnight? Or was the nurse not human, like Alkaid had always thought?

There was only one thing for it: she had to go somewhere else.

"Chapel, sun room, or cafeteria, then?"

"Does it look like I care?"

The nurse sighed, then started walking Alkaid down the hall, up the stairs, and down another hall to the chapel. No one here yet, huh? That was weird. She couldn't imagine that no one else'd show up, but who could say? This place had been turned on its ass.

The chapel was empty so far, and kind of nondescript. She shooed the nurse away, and stood in the middle of the space between the pews, standing akimbo. What would happen today? What would she learn about herself... her situation? How long had she been sleeping? Was she really still going freaking undead, or had that been somehow taken care of?

All this would come to light really soon. She hoped. Geez, too many mysteries!!

[unwittingly awaiting Haseo]

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The sense of someone else in close proximity brought Daphne's head up. She'd been well on her way to developing a healthy sense of paranoia even while she was still back in her own world, without zombies or monsters that were anything other than human, and the last few days had firmly cemented the process.

The man she spotted nearby, more of a boy, really, wasn't anyone she recognized. She decided that was a relief. Most of them would probably want to talk and compare notes, and those who didn't...

She had very good reasons to avoid them, too.

She managed a reflexive sort of smile, though it was watery and far from convincing and slipped away almost as soon as it surfaced.

His companion-by-proximity was a lot older than he'd first thought, Keman realized. She was an adult, probably around Zed's age or older. Keman had just sort of assumed she was another teenager; so many of the patients here were, after all.

He returned her smile with a rather pale one of his own.

"Some night, huh?" he asked, laughing hollowly.

Daphne looked down at her feet, lowering one hand to pluck at an imaginary loose thread on the hem of her mental patient standard issue pants. The sight of them threw her a little; until then, she hadn't even realized she wasn't still in the jeans and shirt she'd worn into town. "Yeah," she agreed. "You could say that, all right."

She looked up and forced another smile, a little firmer, but still hollow. She reached for the scattered pieces of her sense of humor. "I haven't seen hordes this bad since the last Boxing Day sale at Macy's." The words tasted foul in her mouth, and she regretted them almost immediately. The situation wasn't one gallows jests could help.

"Did you make it out all right, at least?" Keman asked. "I mean you--you didn't get hurt, did you?" He and Valyn had been lucky, it looked like. There were a lot of fresh injuries among the chapel's congregants this morning.

The woman didn't seem to want to dwell on it, though, and frankly, neither did he. So he decided to steer their sort-of conversation in a slightly different direction. "What's a Boxing Day sale?" Or Macy's, for that matter. At any rate, it sounded normal enough for her to be talking about it offhandedly like that.

"I'm Keman, by the way."

Daphne winced, paling a little, and seized on to the question she could respond to without thinking too long and hard about what had happened the previous night. "Really? You've never heard of... Okay, it might be a little hard to explain. Boxing Day's the day after this really big holiday in my part of the world." My part of my world, she corrected herself internally, but opted for momentum over verbal repetition. "So all these stores put a whole bunch of stuff on really cheap, so they can get rid of it. Or so people will spend a whole crapload of money before they see their holiday credit card bill."

She uncoiled herself enough to free a hand, clenching and unclenching it before offering it to Keman in an attempt to keep it from shaking. "I'm Daphne."

Keman ducked his head, embarrassed. Yeah, she didn't want to talk about it. He shouldn't have even brought it up.

"Why would you buy things the day after a holiday?" he asked, almost apologetically. "Where I come from, most of the people are too busy nursing the after-effects of too much merriment to even think about going to the market." Not that they would anyway, he finished silently. They'd send their slaves to do it for them. But he didn't want to mention that bit. He was trying to cheer this woman up, at least a little, and starting off with 'hi, I'm from a place where your species have been enslaved by elves for centuries' probably wasn't a good idea. At all. "And what's a credit card, if you don't mind me asking?"

The boy gave her a crooked grin and shook her hand. "Nice to meet you, Daphne."

"Um." The question threw Daphne, and her expression screwed up in thought for a few seconds. "I guess...some people like to prepare in advance for the next holiday, y'know? Get things when the prices aren't so inflated. And sometimes you just don't get what you'd hoped for for gifts, so you want to treat yourself. Or you find out you're going to see that relative who wasn't going to show up after all, and you need to get something last-minute." She managed to reassemble her wobbly smile, and shrugged a little. "And sometimes people just really, really like to shop."

She plucked at the hem of her pants again, wracking her brain for some way to explain credit cards. They were something she took for granted, to the point where she hardly even bothered thinking about them any more. "Credit cards...okay. It's sort of like a short-term loan. The card works like an account, and if you want to buy something but you don't have the money, you use it instead. You have to pay it off eventually, but it means you don't have to carry a lot of cash around."

Daphne paused, then asked in a rush, "Where are you from, anyways?"

Day 43: Chapel

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