damned_institute | Day 44: Sun Room, Second Shift

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Day 44: Sun Room, Second Shift

[from here]

He really had beat the rush. Suzaku found a chair as close to the corner and as far from the bulletin as he could, and turned it to face the wall before curling up in it. His nurse frowned at him again, but she was still being cooperative, and frankly he didn't care what she had to say in the slightest. He didn't care even if he got sedated. All he cared about was finally having a few moments to himself, to sort out what Euphie's love meant and what the hell Lelouch's problem was.

It felt like he had all the pieces of a puzzle and was just too stupid to figure out how they fit together. What Lelouch had said about Shirley at breakfast and the tone he'd taken with Euphie on the board, Lelouch asking how Suzaku was, Lelouch dying. . . "All we can do is move forward and look out for the ones we care about." Euphie struggling to get out her last words, pain overtaking Suzaku's consciousness while he fought pathetically to carry out Lelouch's order. . . The last couple days, when he'd felt like he was finally figuring this out, seemed so far away now.

There were a couple things that were certain, at least: he hated what Lelouch had done, he always would. But he -- he didn't hate Lelouch, and he hadn't for a while now, and that wasn't going to change. And he didn't have much time, because everyone but Suzaku was terrifyingly mortal. And Lelouch was an idiot, but he still wasn't sure about the how and why of that one yet.

[for the Saucinator]

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The nurse that had fetched Endrance didn't seem to care, but Haseo was definitely on top of getting away and out of the cafeteria before anyone else from the staff fully realized what they had done. That is, if after all that the morons hadn't glitched or something and forgotten their own stories. Anyway, in line with his general level of mild disobedience, he had already decided full force that this 'Arts and Crafts' bullshit could shove it entirely and refused to even get near the room. The separation in the patients was bad enough- being grouped with the 'children' was absolutely humiliating to Haseo, considering how much he'd already been out on his own back home. Of course, the nurses still didn't bother to listen, and so Haseo left it shortly after initially expressing it.

He went to his room at first instead, and while the nurse that had more or less followed him lingered outside the door, he made sure to check up on his possessions under the cover of putting on a sweatshirt and obtaining his notebook- it would have really rubbed him the wrong way if his knives hadn't been there. And the boots, for that matter, even if he was less positive about their original source. In the process he noticed that none of his shirts were blood-stained, though... that probably went without saying. Endrance lacked the wounds he had sustained, and Haseo was fine in spite of almost disintegrating, so it wouldn't have fit. Unless they intended to upset him again, which he didn't exactly put past them.

After that, Haseo figured he might as well be somewhat productive, and went to the Sun Room with the express purpose of reading the bulletin board some more. Endrance was there, but he decided not to try his luck with approaching him again, and busied himself frowning at the board as he copied information. He passionately hated writing down things by hand.

[For Scott Pilgrim. Limit: ??]

Scott had never been one to linger long in showers, especially not after having to deal with his and Wallace's basement apartment showerhead of questionable working-ness. The only thing he had gotten from his shower was a clean head of hair and yet another cold jab of reality. He suddenly realized just how much he missed Ramona already.

After the shower, he headed out to the Sun Room with the intention of going straight for the bulletin board to re-read some of the messages there more closely than he had the previous day. As he approached it, however, he saw his second head of strange, spiky hair of the day. It took a moment, but miraculously, Scott remembered the other meeting he had arranged over the board. The guy had the right face tattoos, so Scott headed straight for him instead. "Hey, what's up?" he asked, able to keep himself relaxed and casual for the time being. It wouldn't do to start freaking out at a semi-random stranger, after all. "I'm Scott Pilgrim, from the board. You said we could meet today?"

The information on the board today was just fantastic, between the talk of monsters, a dumb-ass game or two, and talk of starting some... Evil League of Evil for Nymphomaniacs or something. And what was this about... er, "what's up--?"

Haseo looked up and over at being spontaneously greeted, his face blank save for the slightest hint of irritated confusion over having the little focus he'd managed to collect in the current situation broken so easily. He lowered his head automatically in acknowledgment, but then blinked as things then began to click into place. Right, "Scott Pilgrim," the one who thought he was still in some recreational game.

"Oh, you're the one who was trying to use cheat codes, right?" he said after a moment, "Yeah, sure." The Adept Rogue turned and closed his pens in the notebook for safe keeping, then put his freed hand on his hip as he glanced Scott over, internally struggling to gather up his thoughts and memories from the day before. There was a definite reason he'd asked the guy to meet him the next day instead of immediately, though he knew there was a heavy risk that he could have gotten himself hurt during his period of ignorance. But at the time that had seemed the best thing to do, and at least Haseo had tried, using the words he thought would get through... he knew from experience that sometimes it just took seeing or going through things yourself to get a hard-to-accept fact finally knocked into you. Hopefully this guy wasn't still thinking you could find power-ups in toilets or whatever.

"So, how'd your birthday night go?"

"Hey, don't knock the cheat codes. They're not just for lazy gamers," said Scott with a grin and chuckle. Even if he had accepted from the start that this wasn't really a game, he knew he still would have been at least tempted to try out some codes. One never knew, right? Maybe he might have found one that opened up a subspace portal out of their little hellhole.

Not detecting the non-amusement in the guy's tone, Scott responded cheerfully to the question. "Oh it was awesome! You know Indiana Jones is here, right? THE Indiana Jones? I got to go exploring with him, for real! We met the real Spider-man along the way too, and I got all this cool stuff from the supply closet, and it was . . . well it was awesome, like I said! Totally the best way ever to ring in Year 24!" he described with enthusiasm. Game or not, that had still been a pretty exciting night, unpleasant revelations about the nature of reality notwithstanding. "Wasn't so keen on the stinky bat corpses, but whatever. We went past those quick enough."

He paused for a few long moments. He was supposed to be talking to this Hasidic guy about something, right? "Uh . . . Anyway, so what was it you wanted to talk to me about?" he asked, unable to come up with much. "Was it about the codes, or something like that?"

Somewhere along the way Haseo had picked up a strong aversion to cheating, regardless of semi-magical Epitaphs and you-were-chosen-by-the-game-you-lucky-bastard circumstances, or whatever people like Sakaki and the uninformed internet masses following his claims believed of him and his friends. Well, even with numerous counter-measures in play, it wasn't like there was a complete lack of people using less-than-legal methods of play in 'The World', and if they weren't PKs of some kind, they tended to have attitudes not much better than them. As a wildly-feared PKK, it might be obvious that that would tend to bother Haseo by itself, but aside from preying on those weaker than you, there was also something not quite right about getting things you hadn't really worked for. Plus, back in the game, there was always the threat of AIDA's influence going along with anyone hanging outside the rules. Right here and now, with everything that had happened recently, Haseo was as on edge as it got, and any throwback to a previously-established irritation was hard to ignore- especially with someone he didn't know.

But before he could really respond, Scott was going on about stuff faster than Haseo could or was willing to follow. Indiana what? Spiderman? That sounded vaguely familiar, but...

"What the hell are you talking about?" he asked once the talking had ended, turning his head away slightly to re-evaluate the guy at an angle. But then the Rogue seemed to change his mind on receiving an answer to that and held up his hand dismissively, making something between a sigh and a scoff. Just then he caught sight of Alkaid in the room talking to two other guys- when did she get here? Maybe if he finished up here fast enough he could go talk to her.

-- Though what did he want to talk about with Scott Pilgrim, self-proclaimed hero of the story? He didn't think himself used to investigating completely alone, aside from kicking the crap out of other players and then asking questions like he used to. For a moment he drew a blank, but then the discussion he'd had the night before with Endrance and Tsukasa about not hiding their origin jumped to the front of his mind... as well as the temptation to act out something like Yes, because you tried to break the rules, it's now my duty to take you out. ... Great, now he was thinking of doing retarded things off the bulletin board too.

"You said something about playing a videogame before you showed up here," he finally replied, his annoyance starting to subside, "I was curious since I was in the same position." His gaze went up and down his companion once more. He wasn't too impressed, though to be fair the patient uniform was pretty disgracing. "Is this... your real body?"

"Unless I'm secretly a Transformer and no one told me, then yeah, what you see is 100% pure Pilgrim." That would actually be pretty sweet, thought Scott. He could just imagine himself having something cool hidden under his skin, like shoulder cannons, a chest-mounted tape deck, or a machine gun butt. Wait, no, that last one was Astro Boy. Oh well, either way, robots were cool.

"Anyway, like I said, I don't know if I was playing a game before or not. That kind of thing blurs together for me sometimes," he explained, making a gross understatement. "I'm betting now, though, that I wasn't. Last thing I think I remember before waking up here was going to sleep at my girlfriend's apartment. I could still have woken up to play something in the middle of the night and not remembered, but somehow I don't see Sleeping Me as being in the mood to make nice with Awake Me until, like, 11:00 in the morning at best."

He paused, recalling more of their bulletin exchange. "So you said you were playing a game for sure, though, right? The Earth or something like that?" That made Scott hopeful that he could still be wrong - that this could all still be just the most advanced game he had ever played and he just didn't remember picking it up. "What's the game you played like? Is it like this place in any way you can tell?"

This guy was a serious junkie. Haseo found himself annoyed at him all over again, though it showed only in the way his brows knit together just a little more as he listened. Why exactly was it him and the others from 'The World' who were stuck running around in weird bodies, while just about everyone else seemed fine? Sure, there were benefits to being a real-life Adept Rogue- like how otherwise here he'd probably stand as much chance defending himself as a house cat catching a fish on the open sea, but on the other hand... really.

He crossed his arms, shifted his weight, and thought really hard, but nothing significant seemed to come to him out of what Scott was saying and asking. "There are... some similarities," he said, "but this is definitely not the game." He laughed slightly, though his tone was dry and obviously lacked any real amusement for the situation.

"Uh, but yeah, this body is my character from the online game called 'The World'... and I was definitely in the middle of something before I just-- woke up here, like this. There's a few of us, actually... some that I knew from before I got here and at least one that I didn't." He felt utterly ridiculous explaining this, and again his eyes drifted from where they were trained down at the Institute-given callouses on his hands to his friends having their own discussions. Hopefully giving some information could get some reflected back to him though.

"I know I kind of asked this earlier, but it's been a while since then..." ...And you seem a little more reasonable now and/or in person-- "Have you noticed anything weird that would make you think this is a computer game or... simulation? Like the walls glitching up...?" Or a friend spontaneously dying and then being fine the next morning... the normal, really.

Now Scott was even more confused about the situation. Certain things shared between video games and the real world just went without saying - health meters, levels, power-ups, that sort of thing. Even a few of the more out-there things like the existence of save points and 1-Ups didn't faze him anymore. Waking up in the body of your game character in the real world, though? That was something he never would have thought possible. Maybe I should've been thinking harder about this maybe being a dream. Maybe? I don't even . . . Oh man, just go with it for now, he thought, scratching his head.

The next bit of what Hazmat said was a little easier to answer. "Now that you mention it, there were some weird things about last night, aside from the creatures and stuff. I think I remember, like, a flash of some pipes on the ceiling and some doors in the wall that were gone the next time I looked at them." He hadn't thought much of the occurrences at the time, more excited about traveling with Indy than anything else, but now that he thought about it, that had seemed weird. "You and your game world buddies think that something's up with that, maybe?"

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Day 44: Sun Room, Second Shift

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