damned_institute | Day 43: Intercom, Evening

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Day 43: Intercom, Evening

Hello! I.R.I.S. here once more to announce to you, our honored guests, that you have officially made it through a day of our typical Landel's treatment. Of course, it isn't quite over: we will now have you retire to our designated patient quarters with one of your agency partners to inspect their sleeping area and the tools that we provide them with for the true bulk of our behavioral testing. On an added note, we would like you to notice once again that the meals we provide to our subjects are of the highest quality.

For those of you feeling apprehensive about taking part in our more intensive methods, please be aware that we would never imagine putting all of you in any danger whatsoever. This last shift will be your last at our Institute; afterward, we will escort you to our Head Doctor's personal observation station to survey some of our test Next-Wave participants in the rigorous trials we put them through – all for their betterment, of course.

Once again, we hope that you are satisfied with what you find, and as always, direct any questions you may have to your console.

The nurses began to escort the patients to their rooms. They didn't even seem to be brought to awareness by words such as "testing" and "subjects."

[ All room threads go in response to this post; please post your character's room number as the subject line of the initial post. (Find all of the newly changed room assignments and shift introductions here.) If you are introducing your character during this shift, you may either choose for them character to wake up before their roommate gets back, or after. ]

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"Then that's fine." He didn't care what people called him. That had never mattered.

"Do you need any questions answered about this place? I've been here for..." his voice cracked just a little, but he tried to cover that up. "Long enough to be able to answer most questions that anyone here knows the answers to."

"Well..." Loz thought about it for a minute. He already knew about the monsters, the whole "other worlds" thing, and that Kadaj was here. He couldn't think of what else he'd need to know, except for one thing.

"What are the monsters here like?" Were they big? Small? Weak? Powerful? Loz figured he may as well know what he was up against.

"Some are known to be versions of the staff who work here, somehow mutated. The rest usually seem to be in various stages of decay, ranging from relatively small cats to birds twice the size of a human." He could get into more detail, but he wasn't sure if he gave sizes in meters if they'd be understood.

"There are also more powerful creatures that seem to only appear to guard one place at night, if at all. There is no known pattern to their deployment, but they can be very dangerous." He pulled the neck of his shirt to one side to show a large stab wound bisecting one of his collarbones. That bone was never the strongest, but it had snapped cleanly in two like it was nothing. "One of them, now terminated by another prisoner, nearly killed me." He'd been lucky that the night had ended so soon after he'd been hit, considering the artery that had been hit.

"There are also prisoners who are taken at night, brainwashed, given their kit and any special abilities they had before, and released to guard an area." He swallowed slightly before continuing on, tone almost dead. "There is also at least one prisoner who may go berserk and attack anyone in their path."

Loz listened intently to everything Tem said, nodding occassionally, like a kid being told a very entertaining story. He also raised both silver eyebrows when the man showed his scar and explained how he got it. "Well, I'm not scared. I'm strong and fast, and I don't get hurt so easily."

The 'brainwashing' part really got his intrest. "They can do that? My brother Kadaj can do that too."

"Just be careful. I used to have another cellmate, but he's obviously not here anymore. And one of my friends died last night." Kriff it. He couldn't keep his tone professional.

"Yes, they can. The brainwashing is only in effect for one night, after which the subjects regain their normal personalities." He really didn't feel like asking the obvious question raised by the last thing Loz said. It wasn't his business.

Loz could tell that Tem was hurt by the loss of his friend, but Loz wasn't exactly sure what to say. So, he just murmered, "I'm sorry." That was what people usually said in this type of situation, right?

"Neat," The Remnant said. "Well, my brother once brainwashed a bunch of children, so they could lead us to Mother." Loz could never resist talking about his brother or Mother, even though Tem hadn't asked about them. His face then fell, "But then, that didn't work, and..." And then the Turks tried to kill them, and then Kadaj and Mother... For the third time today, Loz sniffed a few times, and covered his face with his hands to hide his tears.

"It happened and it can't be changed. That's all." He had to accept that. But it was hard to force himself to do so.

Great. Now he had absolutely no idea what to do. "You don't have to talk about it unless you want to if it's upsetting." He didn't know how to handle people who were this emotional, especially when he didn't know them at all.

Loz quickly wiped his tears away, trying to gain control over himself again. Why did he have to get so emotional whenever he thought about Mother?

"I'm fine," He said, trying to sound adament. "My new friends are gonna help me find them." He couldn't wait to see Beelzemon again, and Alex would surely have nothing but good intentions.

"Are they going to be with you tonight? Even if you can fight, it's best to not go out alone." Like he might do tonight himself. It was a terrible idea, but he had to see if he could do as Armand had asked him. He had to try.

"Yeah, we're all gonna meet in that big room, with the chairs and couches, and the board," Loz explained. "Beelzemon and I can't wait to play with the monsters, and we might even play with each other. Alex is gonna be our leader." Alex wasn't Kadaj, but Loz would take him, for now.

'Playing.' That seemed to mean... 622 sighed slightly. "Then you should be fine. That room often has difficult hostiles in it that are dangerous to fight, even in a group. I'd advise caution." If he even knows what that means. He finished up the last of his food, scraping any crumbs up with his fork.

"Really?" He hoped what Tem said was true, so he and Beelzemon could start playing right away. "Well, even without my Duel Hound and Materia, I'm sure I'll be fine." Which reminded him. "Do you know anything about 'weaponsmiths' or the 'cooking club'?" While Loz could fight perfectly well with his bare hands, having a weapon probably wouldn't hurt either.

"I have absolutely no idea what those are, but you should at least take the glowrod they give us. It should be under your pillow," 622 pointed to illustrate. "It's got a fair amount of weight to it and you'll need it unless you can see in the dark- all the lights turn off."

"I haven't met anyone from the cooking club, but if you ask them they'll take any metal you can find and use it to make weapons. There are other people who offer their services, usually for a price."

Somehow, he'd only just noticed something... sort of important. Not only was Loz's hair gray, his pupils were slitted. "...Apologies if this is a bad question, but are you human?"

Loz reached under his pillow and pulled out the 'light rod' Tem mentioned. The Remnant weighed it in his hand and nodded approvingly. He pressed the button on the the handle, but with the lights on, he didn't get a good idea of how much light it gave. Well, he'd find out tonight.

Replacing the rod under his pillow, Loz said, "Metal shouldn't be too hard to find." He'd have to leave a note for the club tommorrow morning.

When Tem asked his question, Loz frowned slighly. "Well, I am human, but Kadaj once said that we're... different. Because of Mother. He told us that Mother wasn't really human." He didn't even know what Mother really looked like. He'd always pictured her as this beautiful being, who would bring happiness to Loz and his brothers.

"I haven't tried to look, but they'll take any metal, as far as I can tell." He didn't know what they did with it. Probably some of that 'magic' or whatever people called things that couldn't be explained here.

"Ah." Some sort of genetic cross, either natural or through the same sort of manipulation cloners did. "Do you know what she was?"

"Wait until Beelzemon hears about this," Loz said excitedly. He was sure Beelzemon would want something too, and maybe Alex too.

The Remnant then frowned and shook his head. "No. We... never met her. We don't even know what she looked like. Kadaj said that she came from the sky." He pointed upward for emphasis.

Well, at least someone here was happy. At least for the moment.

Planet-bound? He didn't know what level of technology it took to make genetic manipulation viable, so he still didn't know if Loz was talking about a real mother or not. If he even knew. "I didn't have parents, so these things are new to me anyway." Just brothers. Apart from the cloners, he hadn't seen anyone else for the entirety of his training.

"Yeah, all I ever had was my brothers," Loz said. He then sighed softly. He was really missing his brothers. Well, at least he had Beelzemon now. He was a real friend. Plus, there were those nice people on the bulletin, and that nice guy, Alex. Tem was actually pretty nice too. He hadn't made fun of Loz once.

"I had something similar. Squad brothers. They're all dead by now." The first deaths had been a shock to all of them, even with all of the training they'd had, drilling it into their minds that their lives were unimportant, that only the Empire and what they did for it mattered. After a while, it just became... Nothing. The last time his squad had been killed on Ralltiir, he'd just captured the rebels who were responsible, and then went back to guarding Commander Akobi.

He wished he could figure out how to make that state of mind come back. He needed it right now.

Loz could understand Tem's pain, and he gave the other man a sympathetic look. "I lost my brothers too, for a while. Kadaj died in Big Brother's arms. And I thought... I had died, along with Yazoo. But, since I survived, Yazoo must have too, and people keep telling me that Kadaj is alive here now. Although, I'm still not sure how that's possible."

"That's good then. You can find them," he said, trying to focus on something that wouldn't leave him a stupid wreck. "I died before I came here. There wasn't any way that I could have survived the explosion that I remember happening." It had been too fast to even think. Just a flash, almost too fast to see, and then he'd woken up here.

"Yazoo and I were in an explosion too. Two of them actually," Loz said. "The second one happened inside our bodies, and was the one that killed us." The first had been set up by those meanies, the Turks. All he remembered before the second one was chaging up his Materia with everything he had, while that rain hurt him and dissolved his body, before the big flash and bang.

Caught in an explosion some time before death, but didn't have any signs of it. It wasn't the most outlandish thing he'd heard here, but it still bothered him.

The bit about the second explosion was worth more of a reaction. "...How?" It sounded too much like the suicide bombers on Ralltiir, but they usually didn't have their bombs inside of them. Their body would absorb more of the explosion that way, and they were always concerned with doing as much damage as they could.

"We tried to use all our Materia at full force against Big Brother, but that made them explode," For the third time today, Loz launched into a discussion about Materia, since Tem had made it blatently obvious he didn't know what it was. "They're these glowing stone thingys you put in your body, and some people put them in armor and weapons too, so you can use magic."

That made absolutely no sense whatsoever to him. The explanation didn't really help him either. He knew things beyond what should be physically possible happened here, but that didn't mean he had to accept it beyond that, or understand it at all.

"None of those things are possible where I come from, so... I'm still confused," He said truthfully.

Day 43: Intercom, Evening

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