damned_institute | Night 49: Nurse Lounge

Entry tags:

Night 49: Nurse Lounge

[From here]

A slightly larger and comfier-looking room greeted the pair next. A couch and several cushy chairs littered the space, along with a table, chairs, and a large cabinet, among other things. Definitely wasn't the worst place they could have ended up in, Scott thought. They could have ended up in a fridge or something.

Speaking of fridges. "Anything you wanna grab from in here? I kinda want to see if there's anything in there," Scott said with a little grin, gravitating toward the side of the cabinet where a mini-fridge sat. If he knew mini-fridges, he knew they tended to contain at least one of two things: alcohol or pop. With the former, he didn't want any, but he could think of at least a few people who probably would. With the latter, he didn't really like the fizziness, but hey, there could be free power-ups in them, at least!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This room wasn't much more interesting than the last one. (Privately, Morgan had her fingers crossed for an armory.) The big windows seemed like the most important feature for their purposes, but LeChuck was already over there by the time she entered and shook off the weird disorientation. Keeping one eye on him, Morgan went over to the side wall and peeked into the cabinet. Just more plastic cutlery. Assuming you could even call it "cutlery" if the toughest thing it could cut was chocolate pudding.

Behind her, Guybrush sounded confident again, which was usually a good thing. Something struck her about what he had to say, though. "A new development? Usually? Guybrush, how long have you been here?" Morgan asked.

It couldn't have been long, since she'd just seen him last night. He probably meant what he'd seen coming from his room earlier tonight, and she was just overthinking it. Yes, that sounded right.

Well that was something, at least, Elaine thought when LeChuck pointed out the view from the windows. Though the fact that they could move up and down in space as well as across wasn't much of a revelation, it was new information, at least, and goodness knew they needed all they could get of that. Not that Elaine particularly felt like giving LeChuck the satisfaction of knowing he had pointed out something useful, though, so she kept her mouth shut on the matter for the moment.

Instead, she focused on the other important matter (other than the question of why on earth Guybrush had been in such a terrible hurry to get out of the bathroom). Namely, that of exactly how familiar her fiancé (???) already was with what was going on. "You've been here at least long enough to have been allowed on today's field trip, I take it?" she spoke after Morgan, taking a look into the cabinet for herself. Rather than limiting herself to checking for sharp objects, as Morgan seemed to be doing, she looked over some of the machinery present as well, including a coffee maker and what looked like a small oven but with a futuristic look. "Where exactly were the lot of you today?" she asked, hoping to hear the answer to both Morgan's question and her own.

A few thermoses sat next to the oven thing, she noticed. Elaine paused, considering them. If they were going to be continually transported to random rooms, she wanted to collect as many useful items along the way as possible (like someone else in the room she knew, only with a bit more discerning taste in what she chose). She could see tightly sealed containers coming in handy for something like, say, mixing homemade chemical concoctions or explosives. However, she wasn't exactly a fan of stuffing items down her pants, and she could see carrying items under her arms getting cumbersome very quickly. After a brief pause, she sighed to herself and pulled the sheet off her head, unwrapping it into the large rectangle of fabric she had ripped it into before. A few quick re-ties, and the thing now functioned as a small carrying sack. Note to self: find new head scarf, and soon, she thought, depositing the thermoses and a few of the plastic knives (they were better than nothing) into the sack.

This all seemed so backwards: instead of hopping to his usual ransacking ways, it was Guybrush who was standing and fielding questions while everyone else scattered around the room, heading for cabinets and counters and taking whatever they could find. He scratched his head idly, wondering if he'd really lost touch while he was dead- that was still if he'd been dead at all, though that really was starting to sound like a likely explanation for his current predicament.

"Today was day three," he answered both Morgan and Elaine at the same time. He kept his eyes on LeChuck as he wandered toward the cabinets himself, making sure he didn't Voodoo himself out the window somehow. Elaine mentioned the trip, so she'd been at the institute since at least earlier in the day. LeChuck, on the other hand, had said he'd arrived only a little bit before they met in the hallway.

Guybrush was thinking of taking a jar he'd spotted when something struck him. "Wait, did you three all arrive today?" His wifey poo, his biggest fan, and his nemesis showing up in the same day? Triple whammy.

Ignoring Guybrush's question, having already answered for his part, LeChuck continued staring out the window. The visibility was too low to find out what he really wanted to know - whether they were on an island, and if he could recognize any landmarks. A volcano or a giant monkey head, for example, would be very convenient and not, at this point, surprising. It had been a while since he'd been to his old haunting ground, Monkey Island.

There were a few flashes of lighting through which he thought he could see mountains relatively close, so it would have to be a big island, and ruled out many possibilities. It didn't look like the Monkey Island skyline either, even looking up at the cliff-face from below.

"This ain't on any island I remember," he finally declared out loud, easily more concerned with his own discoveries that whatever Guybrush was trying to figure out.

Morgan wasn't particularly interested in hauling around random objects (especially now that she had a specialist there to do it for her), so she got out of the way and let Elaine indulge her kleptomania to her heart's content. At least the pillowcase was getting put to less ridiculous use.

But Guybrush's answer stopped her in her tracks. "Day three?" she repeated incredulously. "But you were just--God, have I really been out for that long? I just woke up here this morning!" Three days could be a record recovery time for such a life-threatening injury (although if she'd actually been dead, LeChuck undoubtedly held the speed records for resurrection), and it was much better than the seven years Elaine had evidently been out, but it still galled her that she'd wasted that much time without even realizing it. Time was money, after all, and three days could translate to quite a stack of lost pieces of eight. Or nine.

Plus the stolen silver from the Marquis de Frou-Frou. Plus lost revenue for however long it took her to get out of here and travel back to somewhere clients could actually find her. Whoever's little game this was was going to pay. To sue or to carve out their organs and sell them on the secondhand market as recompense, that was the question.

In light of this new revelation, Morgan was only half-listening to what LeChuck had to say, especially since she didn't like it. She motioned impatiently for him to be quiet.

Edited 2010-06-03 19:59 (UTC)

Elaine didn't see how Guybrush being three days ahead of Morgan would be all that surprising, considering that gap would hardly be the most extreme or inexplicable in the room thus far. From what Elaine could tell thus far, a person could be brought in from any kind of blackout or death at any time in their lives, not requiring them to have been "out" for any particular length of time. Granted, though, that still didn't explain why the people running this crazy house had seen fit to bring Guybrush in a full three days before snagging the rest of them.

"Yes, same for me. I woke up about early to mid-day, and I take it LeChuck woke closer to the evening, since we didn't see him around earlier," she answered, turning away from the cabinet and back to facing Guybrush. LeChuck stayed as much in her sights as possible as well, and she noted his next observation. She had already figured that this wouldn't be any recognizable location in the Caribbean earlier in the day, but a little extra confirmation never hurt. "The only hugely divergent bit on my end would be, well..." She gestured at herself, though it felt odd to be doing so when Guybrush seemed the one she ought to be gesturing at for looking strange. "Don't you notice something a bit different about me, Guybrush?"

She waited for a reaction, wondering if he would pick up on what she was getting at. Just in case she didn't, she followed up with the straight-up explanation. "The last thing I remember before waking up here was you putting a cursed voodoo ring on my finger and turning me into a statue," she told him, crossing her arms and glaring sharply at him.

Guybrush had to bite his tongue to stop himself from repeating that he thought Elaine looked like she'd lost a few pounds (his tuckle-bear would probably be more bear than tuckle if he mentioned it again); however, he found himself dumbfounded and rendered completely speechless only a few seconds later. His face went through a world of emotions in those seconds, reflecting denial, confusion, acceptance, then a second helping of confusion: "Whoa, uh. Ah, huh?"

He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. Did she have amnesia? Or was this another product of time-travel Voodoo gobbledegook? Or some other side effect of his being dead, if he'd died at all? Or had LeChuck done something to her after all? With the whirlwind of theories about this place going on in his head, the only thing he could manage was, "But- but that was years ago! You don't remember our years of matrimonial piracy?"

LeChuck turned from the window to answer Elaine's assumption with an "Aye", but Guybrush once again monopolized her time. And of course, he was as usual the last horse to cross the finish line... or almost the last. With his precious Elaine focusing on Guybrush (but of course, unable to keep her eyes off LeChuck entirely, the darling) he turned to Morgan.

"O' course, lass, ain't it obvious?" She was the one that had been talking with this Elaine of the past, after all. "We've all been taken from different points in time, either just before ye died, or ye were revived shortly after, 'afore ye could experience the afterlife. As far as I knew, ye've been dead fer months, body and all. If we could show up missin' months or years, why couldn't Guybrush 'ave been sent here a few days earlier?" It wasn't that it made any sense to LeChuck either, but she didn't need to act to surprised. Besides, she was getting on his nerves between the denial and and the silent shushing.

"Months?" Morgan repeated to herself, quietly horrified. Oh, this was bad. If nothing else, it was bad because LeChuck had apparently been walking around for all that time, doing who-knew-what to the Caribbean, while she was just...dead, unavenged and unremembered. Or--wait. Elaine's statue thing was an exception, but if the other three of them had been dead (and both Guybrush and LeChuck looked the same as they had when she'd last seen them), then Guybrush must have killed LeChuck. No one else could have done that, she was sure.

Uuughff, but wasting time trying to figure all this out was probably exactly what whoever had taken them wanted them to do. They needed to find a way to get their stuff and get out of here! They could always just cut their answers out of whoever was responsible later.

She turned her attention back to Guybrush and Elaine just in time to catch Guybrush's question. Just great. This line of conversation had the potential to get equally bad--or if nothing else to bog them down in weird time-traveling marital drama, undoubtedly with more sickeningly cute nicknames than you could shake a closet rod at. Time to move things along.

"No, she doesn't," Morgan cut in. "I told her you'd fill her in later--say, after we get out of here." She started to make her way back over to the door to underscore that; it looked like they'd learned and/or looted about everything they were going to here. Before she could go through, though, she had a thought and stopped to add: "Uh, but I'm sure you won't want to bore her with every little detail, right?" Like the part where Elaine had this inexplicable burning desire to skewer innocent pirate hunters who were just minding their own business on ladies' night. She tried to emphasize her words without being too obvious about it, praying that Guybrush had somehow managed to learn the fine art of subtlety in the last three days.

Elaine caught something from LeChuck and Morgan's conversation about Morgan having been dead for months, which raised her interest. She didn't know exactly when Guybrush would have died, but so far, that put LeChuck at the furthest down the timeline out of all of them. What that ultimately meant for them was still unclear, but it at least made the picture a little bit clearer.

Back to her original point of focus, she was about to answer Guybrush when Morgan cut in for her. Elaine shot the other woman a short glare of continued annoyance. Did the Mighty Pirate Hunter™ seriously think Elaine couldn't answer her own questions, or was she that desperate to make herself sound useful? She cleared her throat rather loudly, adding her own two pieces of eight: "We can discuss the details later, yes. The most important thing is that as far as I know, you just proposed to me this morning - mysteriously minus a beard, I might add - everything went gold and black, and then I woke up here. My only hope that this all turns out right in the end is that there are apparently seven more years of my life after this point that you've all witnessed, so hopefully that means we get out of this mess at some point and I get back into my proper timeline. For now, let's work as quickly as we can to make sure that happens."

She felt a headache coming on just trying to talk about all that, especially when not all of it was exactly concrete knowledge yet. All the items Elaine wanted for now were in hand, and it looked like the other three were pretty much finished as well. With that, she gestured back toward the door and lead them out into the next area.

[To here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/902177.html?thread=69992737#t69992737)]

Edited 2010-06-07 19:00 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Night 49: Nurse Lounge

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject