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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Celes understood quite well, and was thankful for it; the former subject paired with her mood was enough to make a lesser woman fall into doldrums. Celes kept her displeasure to herself, however, hiding it under her usual chilly expression. She raised an eyebrow at him, "Yesterday? I met again with him after taking care of some business." And they fought. Of course they fought, he was annoyed and she was already at a point where fighting would've proved cathartic. Which it hadn't, but, that was easily fixed when the monsters had appeared. "And then again during the night, we happened to be fighting the monsters on the same street." And he'd saved her. Twice.

Ooooh! The rankle! The nerve! The horrible shame!

She shrugged, and hoped she had answered his question the way he wanted. Perhaps some clarification was in order, "Unless you're speaking of some other instance?"

While she hadn't answered the question in the way that he'd meant to ask it, Guy didn't mind listening anyway. It would get them further and further away from the previous topic, which was what he was aiming for. It was a good thing that Celes and Dias had stayed together during the attack, and Guy only wished that he and Claude had been able to get out as unscathed as the other pair had.

"I actually meant about how you first met," he said with a small smile. It was a little embarrassing when someone misunderstood like this, but at least it gave them more to talk about. He was only curious because Dias and Celes already seemed to be rather close, which meant they might have met a while back -- although there was also that other man who had cut into their conversation yesterday, so who really knew?

Celes gaped at Guy in open-mouthed surprise, and closed her mouth with a quiet clack of teeth. "Oh," she murmured after a moment, and even managed to nearly blush. "My apologies, I misinterpreted."

She fingered the end of her braid to regain her composure. "We met at breakfast one day some time ago," she started, "and found we had similar interests." There wasn't really anything much to that initial meeting, to be fair. "Though he is rather obtuse." Which wasn't the half of it, as the two of them seemed to fight more than agree, but she did enjoy his company.

Guy wasn't sure what other kind of answer he had been expecting. How else did people meet here? Sometimes they ran into each other by chance at night, but it looked like in this case Celes and Dias had just hit it off for one reason or another. They didn't seem like the best of buddies, but the swordsman could definitely sense a certain amount of respect.

He laughed for a second or two at Celes' last comment, though. "That's an admirably courteous way of putting it," he remarked. It reminded him of the way he might have watched the things he said around the Duke or something. Then again, Celes was more polite than most... Maybe that was what Dias liked about her? "But yeah, he's given me a lecture or two," he admitted.

"I can hardly throw stones, myself," Celes smiled, pleased to see that Guy had appeared to relax a little. "Though, if he lectures me, he'd best bring a shield." She would spit the vitriol right back; Celes Chere would not stand to be lectured like some recalcitrant schoolgirl. Especially if she didn't deserve a lecture (which would only be served by a certain man in a yellow coat, thank you).

"And how did you meet our obtuse friend?" she said, turning the tables on to Guy. She wasn't much for keeping the interrogator's light on her, after all. Celes had quite enough of that for one lifetime.

As far as Guy could tell, Dias wasn't the sort to lecture unless he thought it was necessary, and he found it hard to imagine the man scolding someone like Celes. It seemed like the two would be peas in a pod, but maybe that wasn't the case, especially with how they had bickered over the healing a few nights ago.

Seeing how he was unsure of what was the best way to comment on that topic, he instead chose to respond to her return of the question. "Oh, I just met him through Claude. Me and Claude have been friends for a while, so I guess it's inevitable that I meet his friends from home eventually." They weren't really from Claude's home, strictly speaking, but they didn't need to get into that at the moment.

It looked like the shift was about to end, but at least they had managed to get some normal conversation in among all the zombie talk.

Day 43: Chapel

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