damned_institute | DAY 45: Sun Room (Second Shift)

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DAY 45: Sun Room (Second Shift)

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]

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Nutritional needs deftly dealt with, Sho headed out into the Sun Room. Hearing about whatever weird experiments the higher ups were up to left him restless and wishing he could be the one reiterating the values of others and modifying their data to satisfy his curiosity. Unable to access this particular option, he settled for scanning the bulletin as his hands hastily folded and unfolded pieces of paper into polygons and polyhedrons.

So, some of the sick were feeling sicker? Sounded like a case of malfunctioning identity matrices.

[Free]

As he hurried towards the Sun Room, Raz's stomach started to growl embarrassingly loud. Was skipping out on breakfast a bad idea? Maybe... probably... yeah. But investigating this whole I'm-feeling-better-all-of-a-sudden phenomenon was higher up on his to-do list than anything else.

The first thing he did when he entered the room was to quickly scan the bulletin board, searching for any tidbits of information about what was going on. The situation was worse than he imagined: from what the boy gathered from the fresh new notes on the board, a bunch of people have started feeling 'sane' again, which was another way of saying both 'brainwashed' and 'vulnerable' in this place. "This doesn't look good..."

To his right, Raz noticed- oh hell. It was him. He juggled his options between 'testing to see if he was brainwashed' or 'running away and hiding just in case he wasn't...' For some reason, he decided to go with the former. Cautiously, the Psycadet approached the older teen and asked, "You feeling any different today?"

Sho's eyes were darting around the board but none of it was sinking in. All this noise and no value to it. His mind was more on the rapidly changing geometrics in his hands than on the board before him. It wasn't until a sound wave from a lower altitude reached his ears that he was made aware of his surroundings and turned an irritated face to the one addressing him.

"I've got fractioned ribs and a bandage around my head, you blind binomial!" he shouted angrily at the kid. "Of course I'm feeling different! Don't make me reassess the balance of remaining unsedated against the value of turning your face concave with my fist!"

"Yikes!" Raz jumped back in surprise - though why he was surprised at all was a mystery, really. "I meant if you were feeling 'sane' or whatever! Don't get so riled up, geez Mathman..."

He paused for a second. "Wait, you do have a name, right? What is it?"

"I am always sane!" Sho asserted, his face contorting in ways that suggested otherwise. "Anyone who thinks otherwise is too stupid to see my monumental genius!"

Folding up the piece of paper he was holding, he soon had it compacted down to a solid triangle which he summarily flicked at the nanobrat's forehead.

"It's Sho Minamimoto, monomial moniker of the youngest Officer in Reaper history!" he said with a sneer. "So remember that next time you think about challenging me!"

Raz was about to retort with "That's debatable," but thankfully common sense swooped in and saved the day. "I'm talking about the people going around and saying they've been cured, but whatever," he waved it off. "You sound fine to me, I think."

He raised an eyebrow at the mention of 'Reaper history.' "Reapers? Sounds like a secret government division. What do you do as a Reaper Officer?"

"Cured? Eh, if anyone's dumb enough to believe these quacks they deserve to be deleted," muttered Sho. He'd seen something about it on the board, like a veritable virus. Pretty soon they'd be chanting about what a wonderful world this was or something stupid like that.

"Hah! As if any government could deal with us! We're Reapers, the gods of death! We oversee the Reaper's Game, not any stupid government garbage. As an Officer, I help run the game and occasionally get to be Game Master," he explained with a grin. "So if your vector's intersected by a truck and you shuffle off your mortal coil, I may just be the one deciding your fate, huh?"

Had Raz held any doubts about Sho's insanity, they would have been blasted into smithereens by now.

"You're a death god?!" Raz asked incredulously. "Okay, that doesn't even begin to make sense! If you're a death god, then why are you here? Why don't you just use your psychic death powers or whatever to kill the doctor and leave?"

"Holy hectares, you are so zetta slow!" said the Reaper, gesticulating wildly. "What part of the equation 'powers = 0' can't you compute? That nanoliter noggin of yours come with a proportionally minimized brain too? The whole point of this damn Game is that the Game Master's divided our powers into a mere fraction of their original values, if even that! You think I'd still be here if I could shift wavelengths out or lay an Angel-class psyche upside his head? This hectopascal has even the frickin' Composer stuck here at even less power than when he normally hits the RG! This whole mental institute matrix is on a level you can't even comprehend, mortal! Now do you understand how insignificant you are in the face of the kind test subjects he's keeping!? You're all screwed!" This last part was yelled to the room in general, earning a few looks from the nurses, but when he didn't continue, they went back to their business.

Of course, this statement implied some kind of insignificantness on Sho's part also, but he knew he was an exception to it. No matter how badly outmatched he was at the moment, he'd reach his desired solution to this problem.

Raz listened to the string of words he totally didn't understand. Composer? Angel-class psyche? What the hell was he going on about? But on the other hand... "So you think this is all a game?" he queried. "That's... actually not too bad of a theory coming from you. What's the goal then, to kill the head doctor?"

"Divide, derive, erase and eliminate," he confirmed with a vicious grin. "If I ever get my hands on that yoctogram," he slammed a fist into his palm, "Crunch! I'll add him to the heap!"

The mathematician chuckled evilly at the thought of what was (in his mind) Landel's imminent destruction. Still, he couldn't forget his own little game; he had to act while the inequality was still in his favor.

"I've got other things first in my order of operations though," said Sho. "Picked up some variables that should factor nicely into my formula just last night. Joshua won't know what hit him."

"Well, at least you're enthusiastic," Raz commented dryly. "But I'm not so sure if deleti- err, killing him is the right course of action, Sho." He observed a nurse not too far off, her eyes scanning the bulletin board for any suspicious-looking notes. "First, we gotta find out why this Landel guy is kidnapping people in the first place. There has to be a reason for all this..."

A few seconds pass by, and then he turned his attention back to Sho. "Then again, you seem like the kind of guy that wouldn't give a damn, huh?"

When the math fanatic mentioned a 'Joshua,' Raz couldn't help but ask, "Wait, does this 'Joshua' have gray wavy hair? I think I've met him before."

"Pfft, who cares about the Y value, as long as we get the X-ecution, he'll stop being in my way and the problem's solved!" Sho ranted, once more waving his arms about.

The Reaper completely froze in his gesturing when the nanobrat mentioned Joshua.

"Just a planck. You know Joshua?" he asked, taking a step towards Raz. "If you're in league with him, just know that your days are numbered."

'X-ecution?' Okay, I gotta admit, that's kinda clever, Raz thought to himself. But before he could voice his compliment, he noticed Sho freezing at the mention of the gray-haired kid. Oh great. They were enemies, weren't they?

"Hey look," Raz asserted as he took one step back to keep their distance. "I don't really know him, okay? We just met in the showers, that's all." He stopped it at there; it was probably best not to mention how this 'Joshua' also thanked him for destroying Sho's makeshift megaphone.

"And I'm sure he stayed real quiet then," said the Reaper sarcastically. The showers would have been after he had challenged Raz and fought him in the Sun Room and Sho was within a single confidence interval of being sure that Joshua meeting him hadn't been a coincidence.

Sho took another step towards the kid and almost reached over to grab him, but when he saw the nurses starting to move out of the corner of his eyes, he stopped and reversed processes a step.

"...just tell me what the factor he said, or tonight I'm gonna make you the basis of my latest artwork involving sharp pointy rods," he growled, flexing his fingers as he resisted the urge to throttle the kid.

The boy narrowed his eyes and kept his ground. "Look, I'm not afraid of you, okay?" Raz barked. "All I've seen you do is yell really loudly and get kicked around by some guy even crazier than you. Your threats mean nothing to me."

He glanced around the room, taking note of the rather large number of nurses roaming about. The Psycadet could probably take on Mathy McNumbersman (boy, he was really running low on good nicknames for this guy), but it wasn't worth getting sedated by the nurses over. And come nightfall, with all these brainwashed patients left vulnerable to their 'nightmares,' Raz needed to make sure that he'll be awake to protect as many people as he could.

Still, that was just Raz the Psychonaut speaking. Raz the Daredevil, on the other hand, totally wanted to see if Sho would be dumb enough to start a fight with him. And after all the verbal thrashing he's got from this 'reaper' guy, Raz the Daredevil was starting to sound a lot more convincing...

So out of spite and lack of good judgment, he firmly replied, "I'm not telling."

As much as this kid was pissing him off, the significance of the glance was not lost on him. They were both well aware of the security in effect during the day and Sho had no intentions of repeating his mistake at Doyleton. There was only one person here worth getting sedated for just for a chance to punch there face in and this puny little picometer wasn't him.

At the boy's reply, a grin suddenly broke out across Sho's face and within seconds he was laughing maniacally.

"Ha! Great! You'll just end up on the heap with all the rest of the trash then! You might as well off yourself now, your probability of survival is so slim!" he shouted. "Oh, it won't be now. But you better keep a lookout in 360 degrees; if we ever meet again at night, well..." He slammed a fist into his palm. "CRUNCH!"

Chuckling to himself, Sho turned and walked away, the rage boiling in his veins only contained by the thoughts of all the great tools he'd picked up so far and how he could apply each of them to the kid if the chance ever arose. Sho knew how to plan. He could wait.

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DAY 45: Sun Room (Second Shift)

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[haha, that's what I get for not checking people's current status orz]

[Don't worry; it made sense in the "asking about RL brainwashing" context]

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