damned_institute | Day 50: Chapel

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Day 50: Chapel

The last thing Claude heard was the Head Doctor's voice faintly filtering into the corridors of the ship before he found himself tucked beneath the sheets of his bed. It took a moment to register he'd even changed locations, but then he he abruptly sat up, fought the wave of nausea that washed over him, and felt the blankets beneath his fingers. The room. He was back in his room now. Under different circumstances, he might have wondered if last night had been some horrid dream, but the sharp pain in his eyes gave him a rude awakening. Hissing through his teeth, Claude buried the heels of his palms against his lids, only to discover two cold compresses had been taped over them.

"Good morning, Thomas," he heard the nurse's cheerful voice from beside his bed. Her sudden presence nearly made him jump out of his skin, and he sharply turned toward the source of the greeting, heart beating rapidly in his chest. "I'm sorry you're not feeling well today, but hopefully you can still enjoy some of the activities we have planned."

'Not feeling well' was a bit of an understatement. His hand hurt, his stomach kept turning with every movement, and it felt like someone had dumped a bunch of sand into both eye sockets. Right now, Claude just wanted the nurse to leave him be, but it didn't look like that was an option. Taking his uninjured hand, she gently tugged him out of bed, despite his protests that, no, really, he just wanted to stay in and sleep, please.

"I think getting out of your room a little bit will do you good," she told him. "I'm sorry your eyes are probably hurting, though. If you're ever feeling uncomfortable, don't hesitate to ask one of us for some pills."

"What about eye drops?" Claude asked tightly.

"Oh, no, too much of that could damage your eyes," she cautioned, and the sheer irony of the situation hit Claude so hard that it would have been laughable if he didn't already feel like crying right then. The nurse was as oblivious to it as always, however. "I know you usually go into the chapel during this shift. Would you like to go there again?" Claude didn't answered immediately, but that didn't deter the nurse. "Yes, I think that sounds best..."

In truth, he probably should have requested the sun room -- it was closer, for one, which meant the nurse didn't have to lead him as far of a distance. For another, lying down on one of their sofas sounded like a good option. But by the time Claude came to that conclusion, he was too stubborn to say anything, and he made his way up to the second floor, his footing slow, but steady.

The nurse deposited him on one of the central pews, next to the aisle, before leaving him to himself. Thankfully, it was still early in the shift. As he paused to listen, the room was mostly silent, save for the footsteps and hushed voices of the occasional staff member or patient who trickled in. But it was probably only a matter of time before others came. For some reason, the thought of being stuck in a crowded room made him tense, not necessarily because he thought anyone would pay him any mind, but because he simply didn't want it right then.

Somehow, the full implications of what happened last night hadn't sunken in: experiments, healing himself, the issue of whether he could actually go home after this, not being able to see, the ship, father. Instead, he just felt saturated with all of it, paralyzed by the horror of what they'd done to him, and the uncertainty of what it all meant beyond this moment. Claude took a shuddering breath, uninjured hand balling into a fist in his lap.

[For Guy.]

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The name caught him by surprise - yeah, Indiana Jones, that was another one, why was the guy mentioning it? - and then the rest of what he said didn't follow at all.

Logan stared at him suspiciously and turned that thought over in his head. A guy who looked like Indiana Jones had definitely just introduced himself as Indiana Jones. (Scott Pilgrim stood out only slightly less; he was learning to associate the kid with weirdness.) What the hell did you say to that? Dirty Harry, nice to meet you? Not that it would matter, since the guy - whoever he really was - already knew his name. Pilgrim had probably told anyone who'd listen about that night in the basement.

"Yeah, that's me," he said finally. "Indiana Jones, is that a joke?" It had to be, but you wanted to make sure where you stood with guys like this: was he calling himself that because this place was weird enough that he thought he could get away with it, or was he trying to be funny? As much as Logan hated a comedian, that was better than a guy who'd really pretend to be some kind of fictional tomb raider because he looked like an actor.

Indy suppressed a sign. Damn, it figured he'd run into another movie buff. "No," he answered patiently. "I'm the one you're thinking of." He considered adding something self-deprecating, maybe a joke about what an idiotic name for a film Temple of Doom was, but decided against it. The less said about that subject, the better.

"I wanted to talk to you about what you two saw down there the night before last," he pressed on. "Pilgrim mentioned some sort of two-headed monster that breathed fire. I ended up in that ballroom last night and didn't run into it, but I'm thinking about going down there again soon." Tonight, it sounded like, if Pilgrim's enthusiasm held for more than ten minutes. Or maybe he should try to stall the kids for a night or two and take a look around by himself, possibly check the place for traps. Visions of Pilgrim charging straight through the nearest door only to be met with, say, a giant rolling boulder came painfully to mind.

Oh good, so he was crazy - or sarcastic, but it hadn't sounded like sarcasm. Of all the crap he'd left at home, the claws, the healing factor, the adamantium, and everything else, the one thing Logan wanted back badly was the means to smell a lie on somebody. There were a hundred little half-useful tells you could pick up on, but he didn't trust them as well. He let it go for now. At least wanting to be called Indiana Jones was a harmless eccentricity - until the guy tried to do something dangerous and got himself killed, but that was his problem.

"It was pretty big," he said, "definitely hostile, but it didn't mess with us until we got far enough down the stairs." He scratched his head and frowned. Of course Indiana Jones would want to go down the trap door to where the weird shit was. "Hope you're takin' a small army. It was holding off three other guys at once; kept us away with the fire."

Just to clarify, Indy asked, "And then you went back up into the freezer, is that right?" It sounded like they hadn't been there very long. In fact, he might've gotten a better look at the ballroom than they did. Still, the second opinion on the "monster" at least made the story slightly easier to buy. If he hadn't run into that minotaur in the church the other night, he wouldn't have believed it even this far. Indy wondered again what it was guarding down there.

"How many people, would you say?" he added, tallying up the list in his head. Him, Pilgrim, Peter, Keman, maybe Dent...it seemed like a project that might interest Ryuuzaki and Lunge, but neither of them was likely to be well-equipped to take on a flame-breathing lab rat. "And how much fire are we talking about here? Think an extinguisher would put a dent in it?"

"The kid was on crutches," said Logan defensively. A crutch, whatever. That would be his luck; Pilgrim would tell Cap or somebody that a couple of scrawny kids and some idiot with just a flashlight had been fighting a fire-breathing monster, and he, Wolverine, had gone back up the stairs and hid in the freezer.

"Anyway, I'd say..." he paused and looked at the ceiling. He could've handled it with one other person, if that person knew what he was doing; but it was hard to say 'take so many people' without knowing how tough they were. A kid like Scott Pilgrim wouldn't be much use, that was for sure. "I'd say have two guys armed or strong enough to bring the thing down otherwise, and at least four other people to go ahead while the thing's distracted. Resourceful people. You don't know what's on the other side of those doors." He shot the guy a look that said he didn't think it was anything good. "You can bring a fire extinguisher if you want, but I don't think it'd do much."

"I know. From what he told me, going back sounded like a smart move," Indy replied. It wasn't just placation; crutches or no crutches, Pilgrim would've been perfectly capable of getting himself killed if this guy hadn't been there to rein him in. Especially at the odds Logan went on to describe.

Resourceful people. Between the whip and the machete (makeshift both, but close enough), Indy figured he might be able to hold the thing off, but he'd also been anticipating being the first to go through the doors. Smart though those kids might be, none of them would have anything close to his years of experience with hidden deathtraps, surprise attacks, potentially fatal tests of character, bags of sand, etc. Ryuuzaki and Lunge might be careful enough to fit the bill of "resourceful people." Would Dent be willing to expend bullets on a monster?

The information about the fire extinguisher was helpful, though. Indy nodded his thanks, then continued, "He said it was armored. Where?"

Pilgrim had one up on him in the observation department, then, because he couldn't remember any armor. Logan leaned back and thought - he'd been watching those three kids, seeing how they moved, how they reacted, how they worked together (okay, like kids, and not too great, he recalled). The monster, or whatever it was, had been hard to see--

"Yeah I guess it might've been," he said, "maybe on the back. I had one eye on the kids down there and the other on the door, so Pilgrim probably knows more'n me." He tapped his fingers on the pew and shot the man a skeptical look. Asking a question like that made it sound like he was planning on taking it out himself, which implied that he thought he had the means to do it. On the other hand, this was a guy who was seriously asking people to call him Indiana Jones. "So, uh. Dr. Jones. You got some kind of a plan? Weapons? Anything?" Weapons would have been far-fetched a day ago, before he and Tifa had ended up in the auto shop. Now he had a pry bar in his closet (which he had to return - that was a detour he didn't want to make, if a plan to get through the basement was going down. Tifa might have to wait, he decided).

Indy ignored the question about a plan. The best he'd come up with so far was the fire extinguisher thing, and it'd be difficult to put together something more viable with so little information to go on (how fast was that thing? how strong? did it have any obvious weaknesses? etc.). Plans made for this sort of situation fell through so often that Indy figured you might as well just collect as much intelligence as you could and then wing it. Which was good, because it didn't look like they had much of a choice.

Weapons he could answer, though. "A six-foot makeshift whip with a metal clip on the end of it, a two-foot metal pipe, and a machete," he answered honestly, although that last was actually more like a brush axe than a machete. Close enough for his purposes. "And I've got a friend--" another slight stretch there, "--with a gun, if I can convince him it's worth using."

He tried to remember if any of the others he was considering had any useful weapons. The resulting vision of Lunge and Ryuuzaki rushing at a two-headed monster armed only with kitchen knives almost made him wince.

And here Logan had been expecting a much shorter answer, like 'not really.' The metal pipe wasn't that out there. The machete and the whip (that was just kind of weird - makeshift implied that somebody had had it in mind beforehand) were, but the real kicker was the gun. Whoever was lucky enough to have that had to feel like king of the castle when night rolled around.

"Guessing he doesn't have much ammo," he said. "It might not be worth using, tell you the truth. If somebody who knows what he's doing gets in close with that machete, he'd have a decent chance. One of the kids the other night got a hit in that way. Thing's not gonna fry itself, so you're better off not givin' it room."

Indy nodded. "Probably only what he could grab where he found it." Dent had the same problem as Sanzo and anyone else with a gun--no way to replace the bullets. Which made guns, for all practical purposes, borderline useless as weapons here. He didn't know how good a shot Dent was, either. Hadn't he grabbed an axe or something last night?

"Anything else we should know?" Indy asked, just in case.

'We'. So it wasn't just him planning on running in like a big hero with a makeshift whip (whatever that was), Logan surmised; something was really coming together. There were a lot of things to do at night - find Tifa's room, go through the doors he'd meant to go through the night before, or try and find the good storage, where they kept things too dangerous for patients, but this was the best bet. There was a reason that thing had been in the basement, and there was a reason the door was hidden. Crazy guy and his crazy whip or no, nothing else seemed as important. He wanted in.

"Can't think of anything," he shrugged. "When are you goin' down there, tonight?"

"That's the plan," Indy answered. "It'll depend on who's ready." Most nights he still considered working alone a plausible option, but this was one instance where he wasn't going without backup. Pilgrim and Peter were definitely in, judging by their responses on the bulletin board, and it'd sounded like Pilgrim might have another person on board as well. He'd have to find out about the others.

He glanced again at Logan, evaluating. That question had sounded like it might be more than idle curiosity. Pilgrim had a good opinion of the guy, and he'd shared information readily enough. That made for the beginnings of a good recommendation, anyway. "Why, want to join?" he asked.

Logan gave him a sharp look. 'Join' was kind of an official word - you could head the same way as somebody, or end up where they ended up; but join implied something concrete. Join was a commitment you intended to honor.

He might have said yes and left it at that, if he was sure how things would pan out the rest of the day, but he wasn't. He still hadn't talked to Tifa, and as unlikely as it was that she'd be really desperate for the pry bar, he sure as hell wasn't going to give his word now and then have to break it later. Especially since if he said he'd meet up with them, they might wait for him, and every lost second was a ruined opportunity.

"I'm gonna head down there," he said, "no question. But I got somebody to find first. There's only gonna be two of us. We'll catch up." Maybe went unspoken, but it felt just as present. He was learning that anything could happen in the halls at night, and if this guy was right, there was a possibility that there'd be nothing waiting in the basement to slow his group down.

Indy acknowledged that with a nod. "Fair enough." Things happened at night here; you couldn't always count on being somewhere, even if your intentions were good. "We'll probably be hard to miss," he added a bit ruefully--if things went well, there'd be a bunch of them, and Pilgrim probably made enough noise for three on his own.

He didn't bother to ask whether Logan and his companion thought they were the bringing-the-monster-down types or the resourceful types. Better not to work them into the equation until they actually showed up and proved they were willing to help. "Thanks for the information," was the only other thing he really needed to say.

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Day 50: Chapel

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