Day 44: breakfast

[thatdamnedninja.livejournal.com]

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]

Comments

[ryuuzaki]

"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.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

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."

[adorkabledragon.livejournal.com]

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."

[ryuuzaki]

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.