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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Rubbing the back of his neck and then abruptly stopping once he felt the bandage on the side of it, Junpei considered what to say. He probably shouldn't have even mentioned it. Damn, Mitsuru would be so pissed at him if she was still here.

"Umm... I'm not really supposed to talk about it, so say my senpai," he started out with. "Mostly because it sounds like something I made up and really hard to believe. I guess you could say me and a special group of my friends all have what's called the Potential. This means we're special and can stop this thing that's causing what the media calls Apathy Syndrome."

They'd all been brought to a place that connected different worlds and where monsters existed and the dead could be brought back to life. Needless to say, Rey was willing to believe far more than he would've been back in his world.

He nodded. He could take a guess as to what the 'Apathy Syndrome' might entail. However: "If you don't want to talk about it, you don't have to."

"No, I kinda like talking about it, sorta," Junpei replied. "Evangeline did say that in a place like this where demons and vampires were, there wasn't much point in keeping things secret. Well, unless they are things that really should stay secret."

He did want to tell Rey, just so that someone other than the vampire knew that wasn't one of his fellow SEES. "Okay, bear with me, dude. We all believe there are twenty four hours in a day, right? Well, that's actually really wrong. There's an extra hour that sits between each day at midnight that almost every single person, except those of us with the Potential, never ever experiences. We call it the Dark Hour."

He paused. "Following me so far?"

Rey nodded. He kept any questions he might've had to himself--if they were important, Junpei would probably get to them sooner or later. Besides, it wasn't as if he actually had a pressing need to know about Junpei's world. If he were to be entirely honest, he was just trying to kill time and keep the topic away from himself. The more Junpei talked about his world, the less Rey had to dwell on his own life.

So far, so good. Rey wasn't looking at him like he'd sprouted an extra head yet. That didn't mean it wasn't going to happen eventually.

"So, during the Dark Hour, normal people transmogrify into coffins - that's why they don't experience it. Kinda creepy if you ask me. Anyways, it's during the Dark Hour, which exists anywhere except apparently here, that the Shadows come out. Now, I'm not too sure what the Shadows are other than like manifestations of negative emotions and stuff like that. They are all associated with the Major Arcana of the Tarot, aspects of those."

Junpei briefly wondered if they had Tarot in Rey's world given the pilot seemed to think they didn't have Survivor. "The Shadows feed on the people, eating something out of their minds, I think, leaving them pretty much shells. That's Apathy Syndrome." He looked a little uneasy. "Believe me when I tell you the afflicted are really... disturbing to see."

It was a good thing for Junpei that Rey wasn't in the habit of giving people those looks, regardless of whether or not he felt like it. In any case, this wasn't one of those times, so he merely listened. Coffins, Dark Hour, Shadows--they all sounded like something from a fantasy or horror story. But so had the events of the Doyleton trip, but they'd happened, and thus he didn't see why this would be any less real.

"Then your job is to take care of these Shadows?" Rey asked.

"Pretty much," Junpei replied. "Most of them stay in Tartarus, which is this twisted tower that is actually my high school when it's not the Dark Hour." He still remembered that first night exploring Tartarus where they were before the gates when the Dark Hour hit. Seeing Gekkoukan High morph into Tartarus was almost enough to make him turn tail and run.

"So we head into Tartarus and kick Shadow ass. There are these thirteen really big-ass Shadows that are the real cause of Apathy Syndrome. They are never inside Tartarus and we can't ever find them until the full moon. Everytime we destroy one, the afflicted get better. And then when it gets closer to the next full moon, they get worse."

Tartarus, the abyss beneath the underworld. They certainly didn't spare any theatrics with the naming (though considering the names his own world had come up with...).

"I see." To be honest, he wouldn't have expected someone like Junpei to be involved in that kind of situation, but people were typically more than what they appeared to be. Rey knew that as well as anybody.

"How did you get caught up in that?" he asked after a pause.

At that question, Junpei gave a bit of a sheepish laugh and rubbed the back of his neck.

"Eh-heh. Kind of a funny story," Junpei replied. "I was out after curfew, avoiding my drunk-ass father, thinking that maybe some vandalism would make me feel better when it hit midnight." The way the sky had changed and his cell phone had frizzled out... mondo-creepy.

"I'd been around some others and then they were all a bunch of coffins instead of people. My cell phone was dead and I... kinda freaked out." He then laughed again. "My senpai was out on Shadow patrol and found me sobbing like a baby in front of the Mall."

Junpei shrugged. "Since I experienced the Dark Hour, he said I had the Potential and kind of explained things to me. So, I joined up since I wasn't good for anything else."

That was one similarity between them, then: they both felt that what they did was the only thing they could do. And, with any luck, it was what they should do--or should've done, in Rey's case. He was reminded of the Destiny Plan, but that thought brought up Gil and Rey didn't want to appear any more depressed in front of Junpei, so he dismissed it.

"... You seem to live in an interesting world."

"Why do you say that? 2009 is just kind of like any other year with nothing particularly cool going on," Junpei replied. "It's only interesting one hour a day, especially now that my girl's gone."

"Still, my world doesn't have anything remotely supernatural," Rey said. Not that he would ever want to switch worlds or considered his own to be boring, because war was hardly something to yawn at, neither was the point. "It's like how you find mobile suits far more fascinating than I do."

Junpei shrugged. "Maybe it does and you just don't know it. Remember, I said almost everyone doesn't even know the Dark Hour exists." He then grinned. "I hope we'll eventually get mobile suits when the technology advances enough. That'd be pretty sweet."

"True," Rey admitted. "Though I've never heard about anything resembling the Apathy Syndrome you mentioned."

And there Junpei went again. Once more, Rey held back the temptation to say that the existence of mobile suits was usually connected to large-scale conflict and that they were, well, tools of war. He figured Junpei would hold onto his opinion either way, so there was no point in wasting his breath.

Oh. Well, if there hasn't been any outbreaks of Apathy Syndrome where Rey's from, maybe the Dark Hour doesn't exist there, just like it didn't exist in the institute.

"Okay, maybe you have a point. So, other than the war thing, what's it like back home?"

The question should've been easy to answer, but it wasn't. One reason being that Rey spent most of his childhood isolated from public, which was definitely not something he cared to mention. The other reason was that tension between Coordinators and Naturals had existed long before Rey was even born. The war was simply an extreme example of what his world was like.

"Relatively normal," he ultimately said. "I imagine that it's probably not too different from your world, outside of the Dark Hour."

It was a boring answer and he knew it, but Junpei would just have to deal.

"Dude." Junpei stared for a long moment. What a crap answer that was.

"You have giant friggin' robots. There's got to be some other fun toys and things to do," he pointed out. "And,, hello, space? Come on, man..."

That was the problem: Rey was a soldier who'd never really known what it was like to live an ordinary civilian life, unlike Shinn or Lunamaria. Either could probably tell Junpei about whatever had been popular before they joined the military, but Rey couldn't. He hadn't bothered to keep track of that kind of thing.

"Then what do you want to know about? It's hard to see from my world from an objective view," he said, keeping his tone neutral. Inwardly, he was hoping the shift would end soon. The conversation was getting too close to his personal history for his liking.

"Well... how about what was the coolest electronic gadget you had as a kid? I've always been into video games, so I always had the best systems on the block," Junpei replied.

"And what are movies like? With the technology to create mobile suits, I can see movies being like total immersion where you stick a headset on and you're like right there." He grinned. "So what's it like?"

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DAY 45: Sun Room (Second Shift)

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