damned_institute | Day 50: Cafeteria (Brunch)

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Day 50: Cafeteria (Brunch)

Somehow, after their talk in the chapel, Elaine felt simultaneously more accepting of and more irritated by her future husband. On the one hand, seven years had clearly been good to him. He seemed more sincere and thoughtful than he had been before his disappearance, and he had a more mature (dare she say, handsome?) look to him. On the other hand, there were clearly some things that made even time throw up its hands in vain and say, "To hell with this!" Guybrush was still inexorably prone to disastrous accidents if the story about the Pox of LeChuck was anything to go by, and he was so obviously keeping something important from her that any passing dolt in the Institute would have been able to tell. In the end, that eternal underlying sweetness of his that won out, keeping her from punching him again, at least. That was only by a hairs width, though. Her snugglecakes was going to have to stay on his best behaviour if he knew what was good for him.

She left the Mighty Pirate™ alone for the time being when the announcement of the next shift went off. He would want some time to catch up with Morgan next, presumably. As much as the woman's attitude bothered her, she was a friend of Guybrush's, as she had claimed. Elaine could be strict, but she wasn't the kind of shrewish future wife/past fiancé who would keep her man from seeing his friends. Besides, she needed some more time to catch up on the goings-on of the Institute. Patients filled the building to the brim, now, it seemed; there would be a lot to investigate.

After a few quick trips back and forth to the bulletin and a few new leads to follow up on, the governor gave in to her nurse's persistent nagging and headed to the cafeteria for brunch. After the relatively light fare of the day before, Elaine took advantage of the Institute's admittedly scrumptious offerings and loaded up a full, balanced brunchfast of eggs, sausage links, waffles, and vegetable soup. As expected, the selection of drinks did not offer either root beer or grog. Grog she could live without, at least, she thought while making a face. Eugh. For now, she settled for a tall glass of water.

Elaine settled into a seat in the cafeteria and tucked into her meal. Her eyes didn't stay on her food, though, instead gazing around restlessly; she hadn't seen LeChuck so far this morning, and god forbid he wanted to invite himself to brunch with her if he chose now to show up. A certain horribly unpleasant dinner on Mêlée Island came to mind. She was prepared to either move at the first sign of the dread pirate or signal a random stranger to sit with her before he could.

[For Dean]

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In the end Carter had settled for a quick round of whatever scant prayers he could remember, followed by the usual bedtime petition for his parents and his grandmother and his dog and his country to all stay safe and sound. That almost counted as church, and he could flee to breakfast guilt-free.

Maybe he hadn't made it out last night, but tonight he definitely would do it. For sure. Until then there was all this delicious fresh fruit to help soothe his youthful frustration. Carter took his normal large portions of food from a selection that seemed to be a mix of breakfast food mixed with lunch food...oh! Brunch! Hey, that was pretty clever, he'd have to remember that. The future had the best ideas, you could get two kinds of food at once and save time eating it all.

Licking his lips, Carter slid in next to an older man who had enough grit about him to maybe be military. His tray was piled with little piles of nearly anything the layout had to offer, just to make sure he didn't miss out on anything good. "Good morning!" he said cheerfully.

Ratchet was a bot that valued his personal space, and so the humans here naturally invaded it at every opportunity. "Yeah? What's so slagging good about it?"

Picking at his own food, he couldn't help staring at his uninvited company's tray. There couldn't possibly be room inside a human for all that, could there? "Are they starving you, kid?" What would happen to a human if it overfilled its tanks, anyway? Ratchet would have to observe, just in case.

"Hm?" Carter asked through a mouthful of mixed fruit. "No, no. It's just so good that I want to have as much as possible of it. I'm not used to this much good food at all, especially all the fruit and sugar." LeBeau could do amazing things with quality but he wasn't a magician--there was never enough skillful French meddling to go around, and even before the stalags they'd had rationing.

Carter swallowed and extended his hand to his new friend, whose tray was looking woefully empty. The man must be a very fast eater, Carter had barely begun and he'd been in a hurry to get to the good stuff. "I'm Andrew Carter, sergeant. Are you a military kind of guy or just a tough guy? You look tough," he said, babbling with the cheer of someone who has no idea how much they're annoying the people around them. Now maybe those taco things next, what did one put in them?

"Uh...huh." Ratchet was at a loss for words. He supposed it was only natural for a human to enjoy its own fuel, but that certainly didn't make it seem any less disgusting to him. "You know, they're going to let you refuel again. There's no rush."

Leaning slightly away from the man's hand, Ratchet stared at it in confusion until he remembered that humans liked to touch their hands together when they met for some weird reason. "Name's Ratchet. I guess you could say I'm military, for the moment. Retirement never seems to stick." And it never would, as long as the young bots kept stirring up trouble. Someone had to make sure they didn't get themselves slagged, after all.

He wasn't going to touch the 'tough' statement. How could anyone look tough when they were so small and frail? It was like calling water dry or Bumblebee smart.

"Heh, yeah. You know what they say, wars are like women. There's always another one coming around." Carter laughed, even though he wasn't completely sure what it meant. Women came around, yes, but men came around too so he wasn't sure what the difference was...

Carter assembled his taco to a mildly photogenic status and took a bite, only to have the front half fall apart and land back on his plate. He pouted at it, then took courage and ate the rest of the taco-like structure. Those Mexicans, their food was almost as complicated as the Japanese. But in this fantastic future of brotherhood and diversity and globalization, Carter was sure he'd learn the trick of it eventually.

Raising an eyebrow, Ratchet went back to picking at his food. "Are they? I didn't know that." Well, he supposed a human would know women better than he would. Not that he cared much; already he could feel the information being overwritten. "True, though. A few centuries go by, you're just getting your bearings again and then bang! The whole slagging mess starts up again." It was almost enough to make him wonder about how he'd spent his life, but in the end it didn't seem to make much difference. Fight or don't fight--either way you were adding to the chaos. Might as well make yourself useful, at least.

Now wasn't the time for introspection, though. He had an alien body to take care of, and so far he was making a turbofox's breakfast of it. Cautiously, he tried one of the little round things. It had a surprisingly strong mineral taste, and it irritated him that he couldn't identify which mineral it was. Still, it was a little better than the last round thing he'd tried, the ones that popped under pressure. Those hadn't been pleasant at all.

Out of the corner of his optic, Ratchet watched as Carter's fuel sort of collapsed. It had been ugly to start with, but seeing it fall apart like that, as though it was decaying... "That's revolting. You'd think you people would be able to manage your own fuel."

"It's not my fuel--I mean, food. It's Mexican and I'm American, so it's not mine." Carter finally put the taco down and licked his fingers clean. He wasn't at all put back by Ratchet's words, it was a bit disgusting, but he'd get it eventually. "Definitely better than what we used to get at the stalag, though. I mean, you want to talk about gross, you want to talk about saurkraut. And boiled cabbage and turnips. It's not stuff you should be feeding animals, let alone real life people." He made a repulsed face, thumb still in his mouth. LeBeau had made the place liveable, without him it might have actually felt like a prison.

Ratchet, being futurey, probably didn't understand the deep needs of someone stuck on rationed sugar and butter. The prisoners occasionally made a game of discussing their favorite foods, fantasizing over it the way someone less naive than Carter might fantasize over a beautiful naked woman. The abundence here completely blew his mind.

'Mexican' and 'American' held little meaning for Ratchet. Maybe they were sub-factions of some kind? "All you humans look alike to me," he said, shrugging. "Why are you using that fuel, if it's not optimized for your build, then?" Seemed stupid to him, like a lot of other things organics did.

Half of what the man said was unintelligible, but Ratchet made what effort he could. "What's the stalag?" For that matter, what was saurkraut?

That was fair, Carter had no idea what 'optimized' meant, or what it had to do with tacos. "A stalag is like a prison camp," he explained, chewing on a mouthful of bacon so meaty and greasy that it nearly made his eyes roll back in his head. "Actually it is a prison camp, for captured prisoners of war. Before I got here my plane was shot down and I got captured by the Germans--that's our opposite side. And they put me in a stalag with all the other captured Americans and our allies, and I was there for a while and then I came here."

The little speech was punctuated by crunches as Carter worked his way through the delicious bacon. He wondered, again, if he ought to keep his mouth shut on the operation, then decided that they were so far ahead it probably didn't matter anyway.

It was clear that Ratchet wasn't going to get an answer about the fuel. Oh well, whatever explanation the human had was probably stupid, anyway.

"So, you were a prisoner of war before this?" he asked, gesturing at their surroundings. "Kind of a lateral move, if you ask me." Maybe that was why this human was acting more...out there than usual. Captivity was known to promote programming glitches. "Strange that they'd keep you all alive, though. Were you in an intelligence division?" There was a cutting remark he could easily have added, but for once Ratchet refrained.

Feeling a little more kindly disposed toward his companion now, he thought a bit more on what he'd been told. "I'm only familiar with the Detroit area," he said. "What does a German look like? Is it similar to a human at all?" If he was going to be stuck here for a while, he wanted to be able to recognize one of these new creatures if he saw one.

"Oh, you're another alien!" Carter nearly bounced in his seat, giddy at having found yet another visitor to his fair blue planet. It was so hard to tell, though, they should wear labels so Carter knew who wasn't really human. "No, no. A German's a kind of human who comes from Germany. I come from America, so I'm an American. Where I come from the Americans, and the French and the English and the Russians, are all at war with the Germans and their allies the Italians and Japanese." Take notes, Ratchet, there will be a test.

Carter finished the bacon and moved on to more fruit. He supposed he could call what he did intelligence work, but the Germans didn't know about it and he wasn't doing it before coming to Stalag 13. "Sometimes they shoot prisoners, or so I hear," he said, with only the slightest of frowns. "But the Geneva Convention says they have to at least keep us alive and fed and with rights, even if they break the little things most of the time." Heh. Hogan could get a lot out of Klink just by waving that little book around, but then Hogan could do most anything to Klink if he phrased it right. Carter wished he had that level of ability.

"I don't see what the fuss is all about. Most people aren't from this isolated little mudball." Ratchet didn't think he'd ever really get used to being called an alien, even with as much as the humans liked to throw that word around. And of course, as far as he was concerned it was humans that were the aliens. Who'd ever heard of a human before he and his crew stumbled across them? No one, that's who.

He couldn't even begin to process what this human's war was all about, the names of the major players sailing over his head as so much gibberish. "Why so many slagging factions? You can't possibly keep track of all that." Earth wasn't even that damn big! He'd had no idea the humans were so political.

"I guess your bodies probably don't take projectiles very well," he said in what he thought might have been a sympathetic way. His thoughts about humanity's intrinsic fragility were derailed by the bizarre ritual Carter brought up next. "The what convention?" The thought of opposing factions agreeing on a set of rules... Ratchet couldn't quite get his processor around it. "We don't have anything like that." He traced the edges of his scar absently. Rules for a war. What a concept.

"It's not factions, it's countries. Places where people live. The factions are the Allies, that's us, and the Axis, that's the bad guys. There's plenty of other countries like Africa that aren't fighting the war at all." Or so Carter thought. News was a bit scarce sometimes, between German propaganda and the need for secrecy in underground communications.

Sated with fruit (oh, he'd almost forgotten how sweet it tasted, he'd had dreams about bushels of apples and oranges), Carter went on to his next food item. He was working his way in a steady line across his tray, as methodical and intent as a scientist. "I don't know how the Geneva Convention works, but it means they can't do certain stuff even though they're technically fighting us. But they do nasty stuff anyway, at my first stalag they barely fed us and sometimes the guards beat people up, and it was just awful. Stalag 13 was much better, but that's because the kommandant--that means the head of the prison--was kind of a softy and not very bright." And Schultz, of course, Schultz was the best captain of the guard a prisoner could ask for. They'd never be able to get away with half of the stuff they did if Schultz wasn't there to be bribed or blackmailed or nudged into doing their bidding.

It didn't take much time at all for Ratchet to equate 'countries' with the various regions of Cybertron, although it didn't make sense for some regions to be involved in a war while others somehow weren't. But wait, it was some of the regions fighting a few other regions, wasn't it. But with only two factions. As well as the regions that were neutral.

Never mind. Ratchet had officially exceeded his capacity to puzzle out organic shenanigans.

"What keeps them breaking their word?" This convention whatsit was the first interesting thing he'd heard all solar cycle; it was irritating how poorly Carter was explaining himself. "Don't tell me your enemies enforce these rules on their own--it makes no sense." And a prisoner regarding his captor as a 'softy' was all wrong. Clearly, Carter had developed a few programming issues that would need to be worked out. Ratchet, for his part, had his expertise in hardware. Some other medic would have to straighten the human out.

Grimly fascinated by the way Carter just kept consuming that ridiculous amount of fuel, Ratchet turned the thought of human war rules over in his head, trying to make some sense of it. He couldn't. "You've lost me," he said, admitting defeat. Maybe one of the younger bots could have understood. "But then, the Decepticons rarely took prisoners, and from all I heard that was probably for the best." He certainly couldn't imagine a Decepticon 'stalag' providing fuel or any sort of basic comfort to an Autobot.

"I don't know. I mean, I'm just a sergeant, I don't know why the brass do what they do. My C.O. Colonel Hogan usually handled that stuff." Carter shrugged, reaching for his glass of milk. He gave the matter a bit of thought as he drank, wishing once more that one of the smarter members of the gang was here to explain things. Maybe Kinchloe. Kinchloe was always good at explaining.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smacking his lips with a satisfied noise. "I hear it was worse in other camps, so maybe only some people kept to the convention and the rest ignored it. Our kommandant wasn't really a cruel guy, even if he liked messing with us sometimes and wanted to make sure we didn't escape, but some of those Germans are just nasty customers. Gestapo especially." He hoped there were no space Gestapo, that just wouldn't be fair at all. Hochstetter was bad enough without a ray gun to back him up.

Talking to this man was frustrating. Carter had all the processing speed of one of Sari's toys. Sighing, Ratchet decided to let the matter rest for now. Perhaps some other human would be more helpful.

"That sounds more likely, kid." Two opposing armies making sure to be kind to their prisoners was a very nice idea, but who in the world would actually go through with it? This kommandant human must have been a rare exception. "Gestapo?" Maybe Carter would actually know something about his own topic of conversation this time. "Is that a person, or a subfaction?" Ratchet was beginning to learn. Without clarification, it was easy to make the wrong conclusions when it came to humans. It was hard not to; they acted to similar to Cybertronians in some ways.

And the attention span of Sari herself. Carter finally took a break from his constant gobbling and set his elbows casually on the table. "No, they're on land, not in subs," he said, chin on one fist. Although they could be on subs, in theory. "The Gestapo are the German secret police. They go around investigating things, and interrogating people--and that's the torturing kind of interrogating, not the asking questions kind like regular policemen." He made a face of disdain. A visit from the Gestapo usually mean the rest of the day was a total loss. "They're pretty nasty customers, hung my friend LeBeau up by his thumbs when they caught him working for the underground. This one guy, Major Hochstetter, he's always harassing us and our kommandant because he thinks we're with the underground." Which was entirely true, but it didn't make him less of a bother. Nobody in the camp liked the guy but Carter outright couldn't understand him...Schultz's cowardice and Klink's desperate need for validation made sense, but he just couldn't wrap his mind around a sadist. Hogan could, but that was why Hogan was in command.

"Now he's a Kraut I wouldn't mind exploding," Carter finished, expression slightly wistful. Maybe at the end of the war he'd get put in front of a firing squad. Maybe Carter could watch.

"Eh?" Ratchet was caught off guard by what seemed to him to be a random statement, and with a great effort kept himself from calling Carter on it. It would only make things worse.

The group Carter described, as well as their methods, were familiar enough. Both sides had tortured for information during the War; Ratchet had the feeling the Elite Guard were still capable of throwing basic ethics to the side when they thought they had reason to. "I've found over the stellar cycles that people like that generally get what's coming to them," he said, about as comforting as he was capable of being. "Even if it usually takes a long time." Too long, in some cases.

"You really think so?" Carter asked excitedly, all smiles and sunshine. "It's been sixty years, I bet it's already happened. I know we're gonna beat the Germans in a year or so--I mean, a year after I left--but I bet something really nasty happens to him. Yeah." Carter beamed and rubbed his hands gleefully. His mind ed with happy thoughts of mayhem and bloody death.

"Does that happen in your wars? I don't know where you're from, I don't know a lot about space."

Well, at least that seemed to have made the human feel better. "Sure, kid." This Hochstetter must have been a piece of work, if such a seemingly gentle human as Carter was so enthusiastic over the thought of his end.

"It may not work out that clean most of the time," Ratchet said, wondering where Carter got the idea that wars always ended up with the right side winning as some kind of moral imperative. "Our Great Wars started when our enemy faction tried to wipe out all of my kind, and they were run off the planet for their troubles. So, I guess you could say the Decepticons got what they deserved, for all the good it'll do. They'll never change." And it had taken far too many Autobot sparks and far too much of Cybertron to achieve even that much.

"Sounds like they'd get on great with the Nazis--that's the guys running Germany, the bad guys." Carter offered a comforting laugh, then cut himself off as he realized it might not be the best thing to do. "I'm glad you won, though. You seem like a pretty nice guy."

Nobody had ever bothered to tell him that wars were more than good side vs. bad side. There was the American Revolution, which they won, and the Civil War and the first World War, and the French had the French Revolution and the war against Napoleon. Newkirk had mentioned a few English wars but Carter hadn't been paying attention and if the good English were in control now they must have won. Seeing the world in black and white came easy to Carter--it was part of what made him such a good saboteur and assassin. The people who died just needed to die.

"Decepticons don't 'get on' with anyone." A shame, though, that there were humans who shared similarities with them. "There are a few of them here, in fact. I haven't run into them in the metal yet, so I can't tell you what they look like now." At least they weren't as dangerous in meatbag bodies. There was a lot to be said for the fact that they couldn't simply step on the other inmates.

When was the last time someone had called Ratchet 'nice'? Well, he supposed it beat most of the things people said about him, even if it was coming from a human simpleton. "Yeah, I'm glad we won, too." He couldn't muster up much humor about it. This was the most he'd talked about the wars in a few stellar cycles; it was a little tiring.

"I was only kidding. The Germans don't even get on well with their allies, let alone aliens. It's that whole master race thing they're tied up in, they think people with blond hair and blue eyes are better than anyone else just...cause." Carter ran a hand through his own thinning hair, far from an Aryan ideal but close enough to pass for a German officer, and grinned with half his mouth. The master race probably didn't even begin to consider befriending people who had tentacles on their head instead of any hair at all.

"I'll watch out for any evil aliens. So far I've just met Admiral ZEX, and he's a really really friendly guy." Carter was glad he'd stolen that animal book for him, the little guy would probably be over the moon at so many pictures of Earth animals.

"I don't see where coloration comes into it." The Decepticons, at least, based their superiority complex in actual capabilities. Not that this made their reasoning much less arbitrary than these humans'. "But then, you all look about the same to me."

Ratchet sipped at his water. "You won't know them when you see them, kid. Even before we ended up in these meatsacks," he said, gesturing to himself, "we were pretty gifted at blending in. Unless they out themselves, you can't 'watch out' for them." He never thought he'd be in a situation in which Lugnut, of all bots, was completely undetectable. The big oaf usually stood out like a bent rivet. "If they do happen to show themselves, though, just stay well out of their way. They're dangerous." Maybe not quite as dangerous as usual, but still outmatching a normal human.

Still, Carter would keep an eye on the matter. They'd dealt with spies before and sniffing them out had rarely proved an effort of more than a day.

"Oh, we're very different," he said, shaking his head firmly. "We have different eye shapes, different skin color, different hair color, everything. It's only the Germans that make a big deal about it, in America everyone is equal." The whole separate drinking fountains thing didn't really matter; if it had, Carter would surely have thought of it. And at Stalag 13 it didn't really matter, they only had one bathroom anyway.

The sergeant toyed thoughtfully with ihs fork. "The way I hear it, they're even trying to make sure people make babies so they turn out blue eyed and blond haired, because they think that's what makes someone part of the Master Race. It's all garbage, those Germans can be a bit crazy sometimes."

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