Nightshift 49: Homeworld - Kira Investigation Headquarters, Tokyo

[ryuuzaki]

[From Bill's Hardware.]

As he followed Lunge through the door, L expected that one of two things would happen. There was a chance that the door would work as normal doors did, and they would be out on the street in the rain with hostile company. Alternatively, the wave of dizziness and confusion might hit him, and then they would be in an impossible place, one that shouldn't have connected to the hardware store. With no basis on which to calculate the probability except for Landel's comments about "renovations," he couldn't make a solid prediction in one direction or the other.

The disorientation was becoming familiar enough that he anticipated it. He would prefer not to vomit -- more than most people, he suspected, even at the best of times. In the current situation, it would be impossible to rid his mouth of the taste. He pressed his lips together in an attempt to ride out the vertigo; reeling, he reached out to steady himself, and realized that his hands were no longer full.

Impressions flooded in, overwhelming him. His feet were bare, and the surface under them was cool and smooth, some kind of glossy tile. The pungent scent of lumber and oil had vanished. In its place, there was a smell almost shocking in its familiarity: new construction, coffee, a distant metallic tang of the kind associated with electronic equipment. When his hand came back into focus, he saw that he was no longer wearing the grey Institute-issued sweatshirt; instead, fine white cotton jersey covered his forearm. He blinked, and began to be able to see more of the room beyond his hand, and made a soft noise of disbelief.

L and Lunge stood at one end of a large, high-ceilinged room. Dim illumination came from fixtures in the ceiling. Glass staircases nestled against the walls to the right and the left, seeming to float free, without support. Two leather sofas and a multi-level glass coffee table sat under the staircase on the right.

Other elements of the room commanded more attention, hinting at its function. A bank of video screens occupied the distant facing wall. One, quite large, took center stage; eight medium-size screens formed columns flanking the largest one; three smaller screens made a line below it. Under them, there was a long counter with three chairs, three monitors, three keyboards, and a complicated telephone. The video screens were turned off, but the computer monitors were the room's primary source of light. Each showed the same picture: a white background featuring a single black letter in an archaic typeface.

A third option. He found that he had been holding his breath, still too wary to feel elated. Without pausing to think, he made for the console at the far end of the room. Informing Watari of his whereabouts was the first order of business.

Glancing back, he saw that Lunge was still wearing an Institute uniform. His pace slowed, and he frowned. If I am back in my headquarters, why is Lunge here with me? Is it possible that --

"Only investigation will tell us whether or not this is an illusion." In spite of his suspicion that he would feel foolish about it later, he couldn't keep the hope out of his voice.

Comments

[herr-inspektor.livejournal.com]

The heady whirl that appeared to accompany any sort of travel through doorways that night felt somehow more intense to Lunge as they left the hardware store; perhaps it was the faint ball of nerves he could feel in the pit of his stomach, that distant fear that they'd hit a thousand-to-one chance and he had been wrong, that they were about to walk out into a street full of creatures they knew only the danger of. But a few moments later and they were still dry and still warm- in fact, he couldn't even hear the rain anymore, which rather implied that they had been transported back into a deeper part of the Institute.

Those thoughts ran through Lunge's mind almost instantaneously as he recovered. When he opened his eyes, however, he was met with something he could not have predicted.

The room was large, dimly lit and airy in the way of modern architecture; far too large to be in the Institute without it being on his map at all, a brief search confirmed, and besides which the feeling was entirely wrong. There were a pair of staircases-- glass, this can't be the Institute- and a small seating area, but Lunge's eye was immediately drawn to the only source of light. At the end of the room the wall was dominated by a dark grid of screens- security screens?- and under them a trio of computers. Computers displaying the same thing: L.

He froze, then. Slowly, he turned his stare to the man in front of him, still walking, now dressed in jeans and a white shirt. His feet were bare.

The implications were clear; somehow, against the odds, they had been taken out of the Institute and onto L's turf. Or a shadow of L's turf. Yes, he couldn't allow himself to forget that possibility. He couldn't get ahead of himself. But with the floor so firm under his feet and L so obviously taken with their surroundings, it was difficult not to be drawn into the moment.

Lunge took a few tentative steps towards him, still (thankfully) gripping his knife and flashlight ever so slightly in each hand. "It certainly seems real enough for the moment. Where are we?" he asked eventually, following L to the computer terminals once he was sure their surroundings weren't going to vanish.

[ryuuzaki]

L bit his lower lip and cast a sidelong glance in Lunge's direction.

"Tokyo -- maybe." He sounded grim, but Lunge's presence there, while not wholly unwelcome, implied that he couldn't trust his senses, that the essential familiarity of the room where he had spent most of the previous three months was a trick. But -- what would the purpose be?

Upon reaching the terminals, he chose the one in the center, perched in the chair, and hunched over the keyboard. His password gave him access to more functions than he had allowed to the rest of the task force. Where to contact Watari, then? Perhaps in his station, perhaps in his quarters. A few keystrokes brought up the right program, allowing Watari access to an audio feed from the work room.

L spoke in a clear, urgent tone. "Watari? Watari, it's me."

A few moments passed without a response. "Watari?" Still nothing.

The state of the room, empty and echoing, with the lights turned down, suggested to him that it was night in Tokyo just as it had been at the Institute. If Watari was still in the city after L had been missing for a week, he might be asleep in his room. L reached for a telephone which he kept near the keyboard, lifted the handset, and punched a few keys. He glanced at Lunge and made a vague gesture that included both a nearby chair and the sofas that were somewhat further away, and indicated that Lunge was free to help himself. He moved his mouth from the phone, and murmured, "I'm trying to contact my assistant."

After twenty rings, there was still no answer. A different number -- Watari's mobile contact -- also failed to yield any results. For the moment, Watari was unreachable by telephone.

The next thing, then, would be to call up the camera feeds from Watari's floor. L realized that his hands were shaking -- adrenaline, nothing to be done for it -- stretched them out in front of him, let them curl again, and entered the commands that would display the video feeds on the huge screens in front of him. It would be better to avoid frustration and panic for the time being. He wasn't yet sure of the nature of the situation, and when he knew more, he would have to confront it and work out the significance of what he knew.

As a matter of habit, he glanced at the datestamp in the bottom corner of the screen, to confirm that it was, as he expected, the ninth of November. Instead, the display read 2 NOV 2004 3:01 AM.

His hand slipped off of the keyboard, resting flat for a moment on the surface of the desk; then, he began to tap with his fingertips, soft and rapid and thoughtful. If what he saw was true, they had been returned to a time not long after his abduction.

The feeds from Watari's suite appeared on the four screens just above where L sat, and what he saw was what he could have predicted. The rooms were empty. He leaned back abruptly in his chair with a huff of breath, frowning, trying to ignore the knot of dismay that clutched at his lower abdomen.

All of the camera feeds, then, with night vision.

[herr-inspektor.livejournal.com]

Tokyo...? Lunge paused, thinking for a moment before remembering that both the name L had given him as his first alias and the name of the case he claimed to have been working on were Japanese. 'Ryuuzaki' and the 'Kira' case. The last case he'd been working on, if he recalled correctly. Did that mean that they'd been "returned" to around the time of L's abduction?

L, on the other hand, seemed to be thinking on far more practical terms. Straight away he'd commandeered one of the computers and begun keying in passcodes and running programmes with a swiftness that caught Lunge off guard; haste from someone so calm always felt deeply incongruous somehow, as though he were watching a river flow backwards. Counter-intuitive. And yet, hasty L was certainly being. He appeared to be bringing up some sort of program Lunge didn't recognise, but he was curious enough to stay hovering over his shoulder for just long enough to discover the heart of the matter.

... Watari. Not a name he recognised off the bat and not one that a brief search turned anything up on, but evidently it meant something to L. Enough that he went straight for the phone after a moment. Take a seat? Now? Of course not.

Even if listening in did leave an odd taste in his mouth. And even if watching L wait, silently, for an answer he was not to receive seemed wrong, somehow. Or how noting the way in which the man's hands seemed to shake as he turned to the computer again gave him a feeling he identified after a moment as one of intrusiveness- L was, he realised, of of the few people he did not entirely relish the idea of forcing information out of. There was a chance it would be necessary, of course-- but that would be a last resort. Perhaps he was losing his touch after all.

Not L, then. Something else to consider. There was a date in the corner of the screen, he noticed- the second of November... 2004. Hmm.

It would have been here that he felt his stomach curdle faintly, as though the floor had begun to move under his feet. Or so he imagined. This was what eight years felt like- no, would have felt like (semantics, Inspector, they're important). Eight years passing him in an instant, and suddenly he was- would have been- have been approaching sixty years old.

He did not think of this. Instead, he noted that the timestamp suggested that they were only a few hours past the date L had given during their first meeting as the last date he remembered, November first.

There was a sigh, and Lunge's train of thought was interrupted. He looked first to the screens, then down to where L sat. "It doesn't look like anyone's here," he said after a moment. His expression was unreadable, though he sounded thoughtful. "I take it that isn't normal. Who else should be here?"

[ryuuzaki]

L shook his head. "No, it isn't normal. Several officers should be here." Their rooms showed on the screens now: empty from every angle, no signs of heat signatures or light. "My suspect," he continued, in a more bitter tone. He was striking the keys harder, with longer pauses between the strokes, and when he entered the command to bring up the feed from Light's new room, he hit the key with an irritated flourish. Nothing — nothing — all empty. "Damn it."

The results from a motion-activated scan of the building's other rooms were the same. He and Lunge were the only ones there.

He sank against the back of his chair, resting for a few seconds before speaking again, and tried to ignore the queasy feelings of panic that clutched at him. Lunge's hovering was annoying. In the scope of things, though, it was the least of his concerns.

"I don't know what to think. If this is an illusion, its sophistication is... alarming. If it isn't —" he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and supported his face with his hands — "if it isn't, almost no time has passed since I was abducted, but everyone who was here at the time is gone." His fingertips pushed up past his hairline, holding his hair off of his face. He looked lost in thought.

"The question, then, is what happened to them. Were they also abducted? If so, why? Where are they being held? I have not seen them in the Institute, nor has there been any attempt to use them as leverage so far." His voice was quiet, and as calm as he could make it.

"Either way, two things are obvious. The reality of the current situation is debatable, so one possibility to be prepared for is that we will wake up back in the Institute again. That being said, I think it is imperative not to make too many assumptions. If there's a chance that what we're experiencing is real, I have to take advantage of it."

As he spoke, he lifted his head from his hands, then looked at the monitor in front of him again and began to type:

W — Am being held at Landel's Institute, a psychiatric facility, probably northeastern United States. Kira to move against me 5 November. — L

This might be effective... or... it is a ridiculous hope. There was no way to add that he was apparently also being held sometime in the late 1990s, that several children from Wammy's House claimed to have come from 2009, that he had walked through a door that led from a hardware store in a zombie-infested town back to a place where he would be dead in a matter of days, that he expected that he might not wake up there the next morning. Even if he wanted to tell Watari those things, doing so wouldn't be useful or productive. It was most important that he know where L was being held, and when Kira would make his move.

In order to distract Lunge, he kept talking as he typed the message. "There is also the matter of the BKA. Mr. Lunge, I do not think that you are where you should be. I was active in the 1990s; an inspector working for the BKA at that time should have known of me. I can call Herr Ziercke in the morning, assuming we're still here, but if you are displaced..." He trailed off, then bit at his lower lip. "Well, there will be the matter of deciding what to do with you."

[ryuuzaki]

He had not found it difficult to accept Lunge as a real investigator. Lunge's insights, his methods, his preferences for how best to handle a situation — they all supported his story in a way that made L doubt that it could be false. Apart from that, their predicament put L on footing that was just as unstable: among people who had no reason to believe that he was who he said he was (if, indeed, he thought it was wise to say it at all). Within the walls of the Institute, they both lacked reputation and history, and even under pressure, Lunge had never shown himself to be anything other than what he claimed to be.

If he wanted to, he could be a valuable subordinate in L's day-to-day operations, or he could be placed with one agency or another. He would not be allowed to operate as a competing investigator, but that probably wasn't a concern; he seemed like too much the policeman to ever want to turn himself into another Eraldo Coil. The few elements of L's systems that Lunge would see tonight were irrelevant. If they were not returned to the Institute, and if L could find out what had happened to Yagami, the Kira case would be over soon, and most of what Lunge had seen would be discarded or revamped.

With a few more keystrokes, L directed the message to several addresses, all reliable private channels, all leading, through one device or another, to Watari.

That done, he began to call up recorded camera feeds. It would be impracticable to devote too much time tonight to reviewing them -- there might be days to do that, and if there weren't, the information would hardly be applicable. In the event that they wound up back at Landel's in the morning, supplies were a more pressing concern. An attempt to bring something back with him would be an experiment that would cost him nothing, and if it happened to be successful, it would be more useful to him than knowing the exact time at which the video feeds had gone blank. However, if it was possible to establish everyone's time or method of disappearance with a few minutes of work, it was worth trying.

Yagami had gone up to bed a little after ten o'clock on the night of 1st November, and L had watched him arrive in his new room. A feed from around that time would be a good place to start.

[herr-inspektor.livejournal.com]

Officers, suspects, a personal assistant… Lunge remained silent, eyes trailing across the empty rooms flashing up on the screens overhead as it dawned on him that the entire building was L’s office. Just what sort of a detective was he, anyway? He had been under the impression until now that this building was some sort of general headquarters, but if it did entirely belong to L, if those initials on the computer screens truly were stamps of ownership- well, in that case, he had been underestimating him. Badly. It wasn’t as though he still doubted L’s abilities or his mind, but there had always been the niggling matter of how many of his claims were real. If this was real- by which he meant not simply a projection of any potential lies- then it put paid to those concerns. A lying partner was no good to him.

But while their surroundings provided Lunge with some form of relief, L seemed to be getting more perplexed by the second- that was the first time he’d heard the man sound so irritated. As psychological warfare went, it was a good move, and not only for the emotions it was bound to stir but the questions: why am I here? Is this it? If not, how do they know it so well? L was already firing them off himself, head almost in his hands in the way of a man lost at sea for a moment before he started to type again. Trying again. Good; losing his head now would be beyond problematic for the both of them (though no matter how irritated L got, Lunge wasn’t going to move- the most interesting part of the room was right here). “Of course. Even if this isn’t permanent, if this is real someone might at least be able to track you down once we return.”

Provided someone ever received the message. Provided this was real. Provided so many, many things were right. Assumptions need not apply; this wasn’t a situation either of them could guess about. The best they could do was to throw everything and hope something stuck- and that stung probably more than being taken here had in the first place. Still, Lunge felt rather more drawn to this being false- it was all too contrived, too convenient. Of course, given that this was new territory for him, he couldn’t be a fair judge of how real any of this was; L seemed to be buying into it well enough.

As for ‘what to do with you’- that sounded ominous. Beyond ominous- and just a touch like a child which had wandered too far from its parents, though he didn’t linger on that suggestion. Lunge hesitated, lapsing into a brooding silence while L typed, feeling that vertigo from before return. No matter what he felt ‘drawn’ to, there was still a chance that this was real and indeed permanent. And if that was the case, he was utterly trapped here, eight years out of joint and, as L had implied, perhaps out of his universe altogether- away not just from his place, but from the Tenma case as well, in which he was a key witness. While he didn’t suppose L would simply abandon him on the spot, it would be unacceptable to stay here, in Tokyo or Europe, or wherever L’s work took him as a colleague (though not equal, you’re far too individualistic to consider that for a second, L). And given that he didn’t speak more than German, that already limited his choices.

Wait.

Language.

Slowly, the man lowered his eyes from the screens and down the L. “If we are in your world, how is it that we can still understand each other?” It wasn’t a deal-breaker by any means, but the fact that L was still apparently speaking perfect German (not the rather clumsy schooled German of that first note) and he himself was apparently also still able to be understood was at least a sign. Distracting L from whatever it was he was doing with the cameras wouldn't earn him any points, but it was something. Evidence. Evidence he could work with.