DAY 45: Sun Room (Second Shift)

[violent-varmint.livejournal.com]

There was something fishy going on in the Institute today. All over the bulletin board, people were talking about having "woken up", having been "cured"... and it seemed as though ZEX was one of them. Tanaka wouldn't have recognized the note at all if it hadn't been signed - his wording, his handwriting, even his name had changed - and a part of him still wondered if it had been an imposter, trying to pull the wool over the Captain's allies.

But it'd be easy enough to find out the truth. Whoever it was had agreed to meet him, and Tanaka was waiting for him just outside the cafeteria doors, ready to catch him as he came from breakfast. If "Max" was an imposter, then he'd discover the identity of a hidden enemy. And if he was really ZEX...

...well, he'd have a whole new set of things to worry about.

[for a spoiled rich brat brainwashed Admiral]

Comments

[gald_digger]

Where they were? It took a second to realize what Claude meant by that. Their bodies.

That's right. Not only did the staff at Landel's Institute have a reputation for doing weird experiments to people, but there were the zombies, and a few monsters that looked like they were made using dead bodies... What if something like that happened to their friends? It was bad enough that they died so horribly, but to have their bodies left in the hands of these bastards...

"No... I'll go," Anise answered quietly yet firmly, with a small shake of her head. She owed those two at least that much. They came to save her, and she hadn't been able to do anything but watch as they died because of it. It was partly her fault, and while there probably wasn't anything she could do to make up for it, this was all she could do for them right now.

The thought of seeing Guy's lifeless, mangled body up close was honestly terrifying, but Anise wouldn't let that stop her from doing the only thing she could for him.

"But how are we going to look for them...?" She trailed off for a second as she thought. "Do you think they'd be in the morgue?"

[full-score.livejournal.com]

Claude watched Anise carefully for a moment. He didn't want her to feel pressured to go. No doubt searching for the bodies of their dead friends would be a painful task; actually finding a way to dispose of them even more so. But Anise sounded resolved to go, and so Claude decided it was best to just leave it at that.

"All right," he said with a small nod. It was settled then. He just hoped they were successful tonight, because the last thing he wanted to have to face was the possibility that he'd run into Guy and Dias' walking corpses one night in the future.

As for how they were going to go about all of this, Claude wasn't entirely sure. The morgue sounded as good a place to look as any, although there was no guarantee that they'd find them there. Regardless, that was probably going to have to be the first area to check.

"Maybe," Claude answered grimly. "I've never been there before, though. Do you know where it is?"

[gald_digger]

It felt weird to calmly talk about something so morbid like this. At the same time, though, Anise found it easier to keep herself together, having a new goal to focus on.

"Yeah, I think it's on my map." Anise turned Tokunaga over on its back, and opened the small sack on the doll's back. From it, she removed two folded up pieces of paper, unfolded them, and laid them in her lap to show. "Here it is, on the second floor."

She rested a finger on the room labeled 'morgue,' frowning when she noticed the rooms around it. The autopsy rooms, a laboratory... and not only that, but the same laboratory where she ran into that rotting patchwork monster on her first night.

Anise just hoped it wouldn't already be too late by the time night rolled around.

[full-score.livejournal.com]

Claude peered over Anise's shoulder to get a better look at the map, and his eyebrows faintly furrowed. Looked like the morgue was located on the same side of the building as the rooms where those terrible experiments happened. Was it a coincidence, or was this the part of the Institute where a lot of Landel's more unsavory practices take place? He'd never gotten a chance to investigate the second floor much, but now he didn't really have much of a choice.

Not if he didn't want to leave Dias and Guy in the hands of those doctors, at any rate.

Claude did his best to commit the room's location to memory before giving a small nod. "Okay." Since it was also on the same side of the building as the patient blocks, hopefully it wouldn't take too long to get up there. "In that case, maybe we should meet in the hallway next to those stairwells," he suggested. "Then we can head up to the second floor together and go from there."

[gald_digger]

At Claude's suggestion, Anise shuffled the maps so that the first floor map sat on top. She already knew which hall he was talking about, but it helped to actually look and see where the staircases were. "Okay, let's meet there," she agreed.

With that decided, she folded up the maps and put them back in the tiny sack. Tokunaga was propped back up into a sitting position on her lap. Anise felt around at her side and found the headband Claude had handed to her. There were some wet spots on it from the tears it had been used on, and Anise rubbed the cloth between her fingers, trying to make it dry faster.

She didn't look down as she did, not wanting to do anything to draw more attention to the fact that she had been crying just minutes ago. Instead, she looked around the room, her eyes following the nurses, who seemed to be preparing for the shift change. Once again, she'd fallen silent, though this silence didn't have half the tension her previous ones had. It was probably thanks to Claude, though Anise wasn't about to come out and thank him directly for helping her get through this. That would be way too weird.