damned_institute | Day 43: Sun Room, 4th Shift

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Day 43: Sun Room, 4th Shift

The late-afternoon sun filled the large, open Sun Room. It was almost enough to make you sleepy, Euphemia thought, as she walked in, brushing a little glitter off her shirt. She didn't particularly feel like she was up to much - the worrying about everyone had drained her, as much as she'd tried not to think too much about it.

With that thought in the back of her mind, she walked over towards the bulletin board. It looked like it was cleared off at the end of the day, because now it was filled with information. She made a note of the 'primer' post, then began copying the maps onto some paper she'd taken with her from the Arts and Crafts Room.

One more thing struck her, though - the idea of visitors. Was this what all the announcements about graduates were? She thought of the others then, and frowned, hoping that neither of them were going through anything like that today.

[reserved for the tallmore.]

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Tim took the man's hand and shook it. "Alvin Draper," he said, not missing a beat. Maybe it wasn't the best option to keep using the alias, but for now, it was the best he could do. He hadn't been in the habit of telling people his actual name for a long time now, and with the nurse calling him "Timothy," no one was going to question that any time soon that he could see.

"We spoke on the board earlier, about the so-called sleep studies," he continued.

"I assumed that was the case." Javert gestured for the apparently younger man to take a seat. There seemed little point in wasting time now that the necessary introductions had been made.

"What do you want to know?" It was a much more general beginning than he liked, but there was no way of telling whether Alvin was merely interested in researching the subject or had a personal reason to do so, and there was no sense in alienating him immediately.

A smile crossed Tim's face for a minute, there and then gone again. Javert wasn't wasting time or words; Tim liked that about him immediately. Tim wasn't really one for small talk these days, anyway.

He took the seat, as offered, and said, "I want to know what goes on up there. I was told that the locations are well known, but they're not known to me. I have reason to believe that someone I know was subjected to one of these things, so I wanted to learn more before I tried to talk to him about it." Bart hadn't exactly been able to talk about it coherently, anyway. But with the way he'd been talking, and everything Tim had learned today, it seemed pretty likely that Bart had been a victim of these "studies." Tim still wanted more information, though.

This was new; nobody had ever come in search of information due to concern before. Still, he could hardly fault Alvin for wanting to find out, regardless of whether or not his reason was actually true. He would just have to remember to refrain from using names; that was a mistake he wouldn't make twice.

"Those chosen for experiments are taken shortly after dinner, before the doors unlock; at least, that seems to be the case for those to whom I've spoken and from personal experience. I can't recall the details exactly, but there were orderlies; escape was more or less impossible." He'd talked about this enough times that his voice was its usual calm, slightly dry tone, and he was grateful for that. "The experimental rooms are located on the second floor; I can show you on a map if you wish."

Personal experience. So Javert had been through this, too? How many people, exactly, had come through this place, either to leave, or to die, or to be subjected to some kind of awful experiments? How long had this place been operating, and how did it pull people in from various worlds and times? The more information he got, the more questions he found to be unanswered.

Tim was careful not to try to ask personal questions about the study. Not yet. He might get there, of course, because he wanted to have some basis for his theories about Bart. For now, though, he'd just go with this.

"I don't have a map with me, but if you show me, that would be good."

He absorbed the information easily enough. So they weren't medicating people during the day, but they were doing this shit at night? Well, yeah, that made tons of sense! As far as mental facilities went, they weren't really very realistic or believable, as far as Tim was concerned. But the inside didn't seem to matter as much as the outside world. If there really was a world out there beyond the zombie town, that was. He wasn't sure what he thought about that yet.

Javert turned the journal pages until he came to his map. He'd updated it recently, but he fancied he knew his way around most of the Institute by heart now.

"If you take the stairs at the end of the main hallway closest to the patient rooms," he said, tapping the indicated stairwell, "and head down the nearest hallway, it's the second door on your left. The door is locked but gives way if enough force is applied to it; the lock could probably be picked if you had the right tools. The individual rooms should be on your right after that."

So he'd need to be able to pick the lock, or find someone that could apply more force than he'd be able to manage on his own. He could probably manage that. It was a shame he hadn't been more focused on stealing useful items in the zombie town; they'd have come in useful now.

He looked at the map for a long minute, memorizing the location so he could draw it on his own map when he got back to his room.

"Thanks," he said, then paused. After a minute, he continued, "You wouldn't happen to know what goes on in these 'studies,' would you?"

Javert ran over the considerable list of cases in his mind, trying to think of something to say that wasn't entirely unhelpful. For all the information they had gathered, the fact remained that they genuinely knew very little.

"Anything and everything," he said at last. "The patients almost always find themselves strapped down to a table; a doctor then proceeds to taunt them in a manner that would be almost laughable if what they did to said patients wasn't so unmistakably real. They're called experimental sessions for a reason.

"I've all but given up trying to find some sort of discernible pattern in the patients I've managed to contact. At first we thought most of the experiments had some link to psychic abilities--several of the patients who've been here longer than most, myself included, received injections to the brain that affected us in differing ways. Recently, however, there seems to have been a trend toward pure mental torture and little else--though it's only a trend in the barest of senses."

He hesitated for a moment, then added, a little awkwardly, "No-one goes through it unchanged in some way or another. That's as specific as I can make it out to be."

That was...not the answer Tim had been hoping for. There was no trend? That didn't even seem possible. But then, there was no discernible trend in the people brought in here. He and Bruce, okay. But why not Nightwing? Why not Batgirl? And why were he and Bruce from different worlds? Earth One and Earth-who-even-knew? And then Kon and Bart were from the same place, but not the same time. That made no sense either. It didn't even rightly seem possible. And why only Superboy, and not Superman? Then there was Wally, from the same Earth-who-even-knew, except not from the same time as Bruce, and...

There was that headache again, pounding away just behind his temples. This place sucked. It seemed like there were no real rules, no leads, nothing concrete to follow. What a nightmare.

"That's frustrating," he said, sounding less annoyed than he was feeling. He thought about the changes that Javert mentioned, and wondered what they were. Bart wasn't really different, he was just...scared. Worried. Emoing all over the place.

Okay, he was different.

Tim looked up at Javert again. "I appreciate all your help. You don't know how they select people, do you? If there's any way to prevent it from happening to people I care about, I mean..." he trailed off. What was he going to do about it? He couldn't take on the orderlies with no help and no weaponry. He didn't want to use the stuff in his room, because then it could be confiscated. It was probably only a matter of time before it was all confiscated, anyway. Surely they did room searches or the like. He'd have to see about hiding things better, just in case.

"A little." Javert raised an eyebrow, darkly amused despite himself.

"There's no way of telling, and there's no way to prevent it from happening. The best we can do is recover the patients as quickly as possible and search for evidence in the experimental rooms after they unlock the doors." That reminded him; he'd have to check up on the results of the syringe he'd left with Sakura. "There's a team called Search and Rescue here that just started a few nights ago; we're most likely going to patrol the area tonight, if you're interested."

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Day 43: Sun Room, 4th Shift

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