damned_institute | Day 44: breakfast

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Day 44: breakfast

Yuffie had died.

No, really. Seriously. She had actually died. Bleeding all over the place, making a horrid, sticky mess and scaring the hell out of Suzaku; she remembered it clearly. Kind of. Sort of. Through the blood loss, the pain, and the visions. Through Aerith's voice whispering in her ear, Cloud's stricken eyes, and her own panic. As bad nights went, it had been Bad, capital B and all the trimmings, and oh, god. She sat, trembling on the edge of her bed, eyes closed and hands pressed hard over her racing heart. The by-play between Landel—Landel!—and Lydia barely even sunk in. There was nothing in the whole world, any world, that could prepare you for something like…

Had it all been some kind of hallucination?

Had she imagined the whole thing?

No… She didn't think so. Nightmarish or not, Yuffie knew reality. But if it had been real, how was she alive now? That kind of pain wasn't something you could just cook up, was it? She thought about it all the way to the cafeteria, drifting behind her nurse without focus or intent. Maybe if she tried to stay clinical, tried to step back… But she'd never been good at that when things got personal. And every time she closed her eyes or blinked, she swore that the scenes played back to her, like an overused commercial on a crappy channel on a crappy TV, in a run-down dump of an inn that smelled like mothballs and yesterday's breakfast.

The scent of blood and damp, rotted wood clogged her nose. Disgusted, Yuffie shoved her bowl of cereal—handed to her by a clucking Plucky—off to the side so that she could melt into her chair, palm heels scrubbing against her eyes. Too much. This was… Too much. She couldn't even paste a plastic smile on her face to make herself feel better. Her usual shield, the white noise of inane babble that could filter out almost any crisis, was in tatters all around her. Five minutes, she gave herself.

Five minutes (not) to think, five minutes to get her act together, because there was no way she could let herself shatter here. No way…

[Closed to Sheena]

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Obviously it wasn't just a broken arm, but Indy didn't want to pry--volunteering what help you could and forcing someone to confide in you were two very different things, and the latter wasn't on his agenda. "Don't mention it," he replied. "Sorry it happened." He kind of wanted to add something about how good it was of Keman to be the bigger man and accept Peter's apology, but he wasn't quite sure how to put it.

The dark-haired kid--or was he older? It was hard to tell--next to Keman was looking at him. Strange fellow, Indy thought. Had he never seen a fork before, or was he just playing around? Whatever the answer was, the guy's curiosity seemed to be inviting an introduction, so Indy bit. "I'm Dr. Indiana Jones," he said, as usual throwing Peter's warning about pseudonyms to the four winds. He offered his hand for a shake, although he wasn't sure it'd be accepted.

"Keman and I have run into each other a couple of times over the last week, so I thought I'd check in," he explained, then added, "Actually, he came up with an interesting theory the other day that I'm trying to look into. Haven't found anything yet, though."

Keman shook his head. "Positive," he said. "You were looking at an empty wall. Who did you see?" After what Ryuuzaki had--unintentionally, admittedly--put him through last night, he felt he deserved to have his curiosity satisfied at least a little bit.

He smiled up at Dr. Jones and indicated an empty chair with a wiggle of his cast. "It's all right, really," he said as brightly as he could manage given the circumstances. "Special counseling patients haven't got any control over what they do, and I don't blame the person at all. Plus, he seemed very remorseful. And he sounded quite young under that mask; younger than me. It's not his fault." As far as Keman was concerned, carrying a grudge against someone who obviously wasn't at fault for his actions was just wasted energy that could be much more productively spent elsewhere.

Keman ducked his head. "I haven't really had much time to investigate either, I'm afraid. It probably isn't a very good theory, anyway. How have you been, Dr. Jones?"

L nodded at Indy, then set down his fork and tentatively shook his hand. His own hand was dry, cool, and bony, and there was no force in the handshake at all. This was something he preferred to avoid if he could, but he had no authority here, and alliances would be valuable.

"Please call me Ryuuzaki," he supplied, in a tone that was both flat and polite. A few people here knew his real name -- well, part of it -- but in all the years he'd been using the please call me formula, it had rarely seemed to prompt anyone to pry. It's curious that so many people are so ready to accept something that is transparently an alias. "You are a doctor? Medical, or academic?"

Picking up the fork again, he began to poke at his french toast, then shot his gaze back to Keman.

"I saw my mother. Dying." He said this as though it had been an everyday occurrence which didn't bother him in the least. "My parents were killed in a car accident a long time ago." So long ago that I had almost forgotten what it was like... the cold air, the horn....

To distract himself from the pointless operation of dwelling on the sense memories, he loaded his fork with as much food as he could reasonably fit on it, then filled his mouth with breakfast. In his mind, thoughts began to form related to his earlier theory about Landel: it will be necessary to rework it to include the events of last night.

At the same time, it was his intent to seem utterly absorbed in both the food and the conversation.

"An archaeologist," Indy replied simply as he took the seat across from Keman. He still got the feeling he was interrupting something, but if the invitation was being offered, he might as well take it.

He waited to respond to Keman until after Ryuuzaki had said his piece and started eating in earnest (apparently he had just been toying with the fork earlier). In the meantime, Indy sampled his own French toast and deemed it edible--nothing to write home about, but there was only so much new you could do to a dish that had existed as far back as the fourth century. "He's fifteen or so, I'd say," he said when he'd finished chewing. "Good kid. You two might get along, under better circumstances." God knew Peter could use some friends who weren't Zombis.

"And I can't blame you for not investigating, with everything that's happened since the last time we talked. Maybe we should just be happy to be in one piece." Another bite. How had he been? Gnawed on, worried about Dad, feeling absurdly responsible for the fates of practically everyone he'd met here; it was easier to talk about what he'd been doing. "I'd been hoping to try to make it to the town at night, but now I'm not sure it'd do me any good, even if I could get that far. All I can do is keep doing field research and hope it turns up something useful."

Another bite. The toast was disappearing fast enough; maybe it was better than he'd thought. "How about you two?" Indy asked.

Keman paled slightly when Ryuuzaki described what he'd seen. "And...I'm sorry to keep asking, but did your mother die of internal bleeding? Because that's..." He trailed off. The shock would've killed Ryuuzaki anyway, but the internal bleeding hadn't helped any.

He grinned weakly at Dr. Jones. He didn't want to discuss what had happened last night anymore. Not in mixed company. "I don't doubt it. He seemed like a pretty nice person...for someone in a red and blue suit. I wonder what he looks like without that mask."

The young dragon poked at his food to give himself something to do. He wasn't terribly hungry.

"Staying in one piece is all we can really hope for, in this place. You seem to have managed it pretty well, and I'm glad for that."

Archaeology... not always the most useful science, but if Dr. Jones is truthful about his profession, then he is also erudite: accustomed to investigations, of a kind, handling evidence, following clues. In many ways, it is almost like being an investigator, except that the trails he pursues have been irrelevant for centuries. A contact that might be useful, then.

L suspected, based on yesterday's evidence, that breakfast might be the only meal in which he would be served food he would ordinarily choose to eat; apart from that, the french toast lightened his mood a little, made him feel less shaken. Bites of food disappeared into his mouth with a rapidity that might surprise anyone who judged his appetite by his frame, so spare that he almost appeared frail.

He paused, then sighed, answering Keman's question. "Yes. That is, I imagine she must have died of shock. It was a serious collision; I do not think her blood pressure could have sustained her organs." This understated his own knowledge of it -- the reports collected and destroyed years after it happened. He had made a point of vanishing from the public record early in his professional career. He could discuss his parents' injuries in a clinical way, even now, but had no desire to remember his own, or the way he had been able to see himself from his mother's point of view the previous night.

Maintaining an appearance of interest in the conversation -- his gaze moving to whoever was speaking, his ears absorbing what was being said -- he was still unable to keep his mind from wandering to focus on the question of what exactly had happened to him. The map made it apparent that the deaths were not dependent on location. What could the other linking elements be?

After the discussion returned to the boy who had intercepted them the night before, L turned his face to Keman, pushed a bite of french toast into his cheek, and said, "If you really wonder, it would be easy to arrange a meeting with him." He spoke with remarkable clarity and intelligence for a man with his mouth full. The topic was then discarded, and L picked up one that he considered more salient and useful. "Dr. Jones mentioned that you have a theory -- what precisely was it? And Dr. Jones, if you would not mind telling me more about your field research -- I am fascinated."

In many cases, his protestations of fascination were insincere; they had a variety of uses, most of them manipulative. This time, though, he had a genuine interest in what Dr. Jones might want to say, even if all he might manage to achieve with it would be to take the measure of the man. If he was lucky, though, there would be more.

Edited 2009-09-22 19:59 (UTC)

"Keman's theory has to do with the local history I've been trying to piece together lately, so why don't I start the story and he can pick it up," Indy suggested. "Out in the woods to the east of the Institute are the ruins of a small town; the architecture and the artifacts I saw appear to date back to about the 1920s." Talking about the last decade as though it were ancient history was a little unsettling. Indy ignored the recurring sense of unease and kept going.

"It looks like the site of a massacre. Windows smashed, furniture demolished. The odd thing is that while the human damage is obvious, the buildings are in far better condition than they should be, especially given how damp and foggy it is out there at night. The church is filled with human skeletons, but they're in such perfect condition they practically look like lab specimens. They don't show any obvious signs of injury, either, which makes me wonder what the whole town gathered in there and died of. Apparently there are a lot of ghost stories floating around Doyleton, but I haven't been able to find any actual historical accounts to go on."

Indy realized a little belatedly that he was getting carried away, and made an apologetic "your turn" gesture to Keman. There was a lot to be said about the potential significance of the site, but maybe he should save some of it for his next lecture course. He didn't want to put Ryuuzaki to sleep at their first meeting, after all.

Keman laughed weakly. "I'm aware," he said. "I'll talk to him on the board, I guess, but I'm worried he might not even want to talk to me. He seemed mortified that he broke my arm; he may not want to be reminded about it." Keman could tell he felt guilty.

He didn't remark on Ryuuzaki's revelation. The man was being awfully clinical about how his own mother had died, but he'd just relived it in the most awful way possible: "dying" of her injuries. There was no way that he could be nearly as detached as he tried to seem. Keman didn't want to make it worse by prying.

"I haven't seen it myself, mind," he said, giving both men a rather shy smile, "but Dr. Jones says that someone wrote 'YOU WILL BOTH BURN' on one of the walls. This may not be at all relevant, especially considering this town's supposed age, but I can't help but think that it might be related to Martin Landel and Alec Doyle: the two founders of this place. Doyle and Landel had some sort of horrible falling-out a long time ago, before any of the current patients came to this place. Doyle became a sort of crusader for the patients, renaming himself 'Jack,' and speaking over the radio. Landel killed him a few nights after I came here. But I wondered if he could be the second person in that message." He laughed. "But I'm probably wrong. I've never gotten further outside this place at night than hopping the walls once."

"So the town is strangely preserved... do you have any indication that the skeletons date from the same period? I understand that, in these circumstances, tests would be difficult, but -- " L made an eloquent little gesture, trailing away into the air with his fork. His tone was thoughtful.

"If I had to guess from your story, Dr. Jones, I would suspect that the cause of death was some kind of poison gas, but again, it would be difficult for any of us to test the bodies under these circumstances; with the deterioration of soft tissue, I suspect that we would be looking for minute residues. We might have better luck with the church structure itself.

"There are also other possibilities. The timeline that Lamperouge posted on the bulletin board yesterday suggested that much of the patient population was replaced at a point in the recent past. It seems unlikely that perfectly preserved skeletons could have been placed in the church in the last few weeks if they were the bodies of those patients, but... have there been previous purges? Ones of which patients here might be unaware? What about the supposed walking dead of the night before last -- did anyone ever discern a particular source?"

He had to pause, shoving a fork full of fruit into his mouth, to stave off his irritation about the sort of "evidence" he was now forced to consider. Until now, he would have thought that any theory incorporating zombies in a serious way deserved his scorn. Now that fact itself had become so strange, so far outside of his experience, it would be necessary to consider even outlandish stories before discarding them.

"How far did you get when you hopped the walls, Keman? Also, the light that follows you -- what is it? If I was able to ask you last night, I cannot remember the answer." It rankled him to admit it, but at least he had a good excuse.

Indy raised his eyebrows, impressed. Obviously there was a lot more to this Ryuuzaki character than met the eye. "Not from the remains themselves," he replied. "The evidence was mostly circumstantial. The collection basket had been passed, for one, which I wouldn't expect from a patient purge. I'd say the most compelling indication was the damage to the buildings--man-made, systematic, and old. Someone--or more likely a group of someones--evidently had a purpose in mind when they did it, so our first instinct was to link the two incidents." And he and Pierson had been so hung up on time paradoxes that neither of them had thought to whip out Occam's Razor and read the remarkably good condition of the find as a potential set-up.

It was possible that he'd been wrong, Indy thought. The town could've been abandoned, smashed shortly thereafter for some reason, and later become the site of a(n unrelated?) mass murder. That could explain the condition of artifacts like the Bible on the lectern, still in good enough shape to read (although it seemed unusually generous of Landel and his goons to offer anyone that kind of comfort). There was even a chance that the whole site was a much more recent fake, although Indy didn't think so. But the cash in the store was just as fragile as the Bible and should've decomposed long ago, which meant it was either a pretty new addition or part of the time thing. Why would Landel plant money? Just to taunt any patients who happened to stumble by?

Ryuuzaki's was an interesting theory--and, Indy had to hand it to him, a plausible one--but it raised as many questions as it answered. "A relatively recent purge is a possibility," he conceded. "And poison gas was my guess as well; the church is almost intact other than a smashed steeple, so it'd be possible to pipe gas in.

"As for the Zombis, I don't have a good answer to that yet. At least one of them was a former patient who was lucid enough to recognize his old friend, though not to keep from attacking him. The friend says he saw the guy's body in the morgue a few nights ago." Indy didn't mention that the "friend" was none other than Peter Parker, infamous masked arm-breaker. No need. "I'm not crazy about saying it, but I suppose it's possible that Landel's found a way to reanimate corpses and get them to attack people. It wouldn't be the first fantastic-sounding technology I've seen at work here."

Keman's face tightened when Ryuuzaki dangled the possibility of a patient purge. He'd lost too many people here, including his own sister, to want to even entertain the notion that her bones might be among the ones found in that chapel. "I'm going on my fourth week now," he said tersely. "And while I know that there don't seem to be any patients who've been around longer than three months or so, I don't think that Landel's IRIS machine would mention the fact that the visitors yesterday were former patients if they weren't. The skeletons could be anyone. They could actually belong to the town."

He'd been the first to notice that Shana was gone when she went missing. If something had happened to her, wouldn't he know? Somehow?

Ryuuzaki started to change the subject, though, and he was very grateful. "Not far at all; just made it to a stream. My friend was feeling rather, uh, ill," (after a fashion, though Valyn's admission of his feelings had been enough to make him look like he was about to decorate the ground outside the walls with his dinner) "and I caught my leg on a sharp branch on the way down, so I needed to find something to clean the wound. Night ended just as we were hobbling around looking for water clean enough to use."

As for the light? He gave Dr. Jones a slightly embarrassed look. The man hadn't taken the existence of magic very well the first time they'd met; how would he take it now that he'd been here a few days? "It's called a magelight. It's a very simple spell to cast; I just take a little of my power and externalize it in the form of a glowing ball. After that, the magic's pretty much self-sustaining. I can set it to be stationary or to follow me, like a...round floating version of those electric torches they give us here. Dead useful, really." Keman ducked his head. As if Dr. Jones didn't think he was insane enough already...

"Well, that seems like it's exactly what happened the night before last. The entire town went from perfectly normal human beings to rotting animated corpses. I...hate to say it, but I don't see why it shouldn't happen to those poor wretches here who don't make it through the night."

There was no point, right now, in questioning the magic, so L just nodded at Keman's explanation of the magelight. "Yes, it sounds convenient."

What else could he say? He had seen it with his own eyes; even if some kind of trick turned out to be at the heart of the "magical" acts performed by people he met here, the acts themselves had been essentially harmless, even beneficial. After taking a long sip of juice, he decided to turn back to the topic of the ruined town.

"That raises two questions in my mind, Dr. Jones. One: were you able to check the dates on the money in the collection plate, to be sure that they were commensurate with appearances? Although even a match would not necessarily prove that nothing had been staged. Two: you say that the structural damage was systematic. What do you mean?"

Before he continued to speak, his expression deepened into a frown. "We would need to know more about the nature of the association between the two men: their past together, and what caused the rift between them. It seemed possible to me that the situation with the 'zombies' was a diversion, some kind of messy performance meant to distract the majority of the patient population from whatever was happening here.

"In that case, we can't be sure who was responsible for it... though it's my impression that it is always possible to attain a large degree of accuracy by placing the blame squarely on Dr. Landel. Do both of you believe that to be true?"

Was that all that any of this was -- a series of performances? After his real and frightening experience the previous night, he was almost willing to discard the idea, but he suspected that it was one that he should always keep in mind as a possibility. As it stood, it seemed that he might be trapped here for a while. He could put his energy towards stripping away the layers of illusion and trying to learn what was beneath them.

No. It would be more accurate to say that I want to tear this place down brick by brick. His intent, thoughtful expression cleared, and he began to eat his breakfast again, serene.

In order to do that, it will be necessary to find loose bricks.

Edited 2009-09-23 23:48 (UTC)

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Day 44: breakfast

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