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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A busy night, what was effectively a second night's sleep, and an hour or so of measuring the Sun Room with long strides all meant that by the time the cafeteria doors opened, Taura was ravenous. Not starving -- she knew what starving felt like. It was a big point in this place's favor, as prisons went.

She stacked a tray with some of almost everything. (Who ate soy protein by choice? That was reserved for rat bars that needed to be so vile that the soldiers didn't eat them before it was an emergency.). Then she found a friendly face in the crowd and dropped her loaded tray down across from him with a light thunk.

"Howdy, TK. How's life treating you?"

622 looked up from his rapidly disappearing food, giving Taura an acknowledging nod and a slight, awkward smile. It wasn't a facial expression he was really used to making.

"Apart from the obvious, quite well," he replied. "I'm uninjured and fit to fight. And you?"

"Same here. A little...well, a little weirded weirded out." She leaned in, her voice a low murmur. "We tried to go into the staff library, and ended up on another planet. Not one I recognized, but Cissnei did. Whatever they used to bring us here, it's in the building." We can go home! She'd almost said it out loud, but the fact that TK-622 might not want to be reminded of what had happened to his home had occurred to her.

She glanced down at her plate, as if a better topic might be lurking under a slice of pizza. Nothing sprang to mind, but her stomach had had enough of just looking at food, and contributed a growl. She grinned, and didn't reach for a fork. Sometimes she did, even for finger food; it made people less afraid, seeing a monster use silverware. But TK was a friend. Not to mention someone who liked food almost as much as she did. Around a mouthful, she continued. "They dragged us back in the morning, but we were free."

622 blinked, nearly dropping the food that had been on the way to his mouth. He tried to speak, but for a moment, nothing came out. The slight diversion to food gave him a moment to attempt to recover. No matter how much this place might have changed him, he was still an Imperial Stormtrooper. And it didn't matter how much he'd learned about the Empire's misdeeds, he still loved it as he had been taught to all throughout his training.

He finally found the voice to speak after a few moments. "...We can go home?" The words came out more quietly than he'd intended. He'd been at the point of resigning himself to the fact that he'd never return to the Empire. Never get the chance to try and save it from its failings. But now? Things were all back up in the air again.

[sorry about the HTML fail. Cellular posting = not my friend.]

"Yeah. And Cissnei didn't come back this morning. Rika and I did, but the medtechs said she'd left. Gone home." She stared at her half-eaten slice of pizza.

"Maybe she'll come back. With friends, yeah? She sounded like she'd picked the right side in...whatever was going on." Taura's smile was more optimistic than she really felt; a soldier's luck was what she made herself. Tore out of the universe kicking and screaming and didn't look back. Miles had come back for her. Against all reason. And she'd come back, if she had to steal her own warship to do it.

But first, she had to escape. With or without Cissnei and her "power company". "If we could find out how that happened..." she trailed off, punctuating it with an oversized mouthful. "No idea how they're generating pint-sized wormholes without a similarly sized solar system, but I don't know exactly how the big ones work, either."

That sounded promising, but 622 wasn't exactly the world's best optimist. "They say that whenever someone is removed from the prisoner population for any reason. The only two options I've seen so far are simply disappearing with no explanation, or death." And given what had been said by that droid over the intercom when things went crazy, he wasn't so sure that the disappearances could be counted on to be a good thing.

"I'd have no clue either. wormholes are unfeasible by Imperial tech standards, I wouldn't even have any idea how to begin to figure it out." The only equivalent he could think of was hyperspace, but even a blindingly short jump would still take you half-way across a star system, and without a ship you'd probably be ripped to pieces by the impossible physics of the place.

"But if she did get out, hopefully she can help us." There was a slight chance, but he didn't like trusting chance to someone he didn't know.

"Me too. But if she can't," or won't, "what happened once can happen again." Her lips curved up. "Better odds than we had yesterday."

The question was how? "You've never been to the library upstairs, have you?" Taura wasn't sure she'd seen a library that wasn't really a keepsake -- or a tactical declaration of wealth. Everyone else used a comconsole. And they had electronics, so why the library? The patient one made sense; if it had a power pack, it could be turned into any one of a number of less educational devices. (Or more educational, if one was being trained in the art of war. From a distance, mind.)

622 nodded. That was something, at least. Maybe he'd been in this place too long and was just breaking to their attempts at psychological warfare. Maybe, he still wasn't all that optimistic, but he did attempt to answer the smile with one of his own.

"No, I haven't." That reminded him of something, though. "I did end up somewhere unexpected, however. Have you ever found a maze in this place? high, blank walls, low visibility?" It was worth giving Taura what little of a map of the place he'd been able to work out, too. He'd done so for Commander Hayes, after all.

Taura shook her head. "A maze?" She probably shouldn't have been at all surprised. That did sound like the sort of thing an experimental psychologist would insist upon in his dungeons. Was that what was beyond the trap door they'd still not managed to get down at night?

Or maybe it wasn't at the Institute at all. If Cissnei hadn't recognized it, Costa del Sol would have been just another too-beautiful beach. Unexpected shore leave. "Where had you been heading?" She didn't have time tonight to go tracking down malfunctioning doorways, but someone should.

622 nodded. "I'll give you a map of how far we managed to get," He pulled out his notepad and started drawing careful lines across the page. "Proportions and direction might not be completely accurate, but it's the best I can do given the circumstances."

"I was attempting to help another prisoner to get to the room where they keep the false items they say were confiscated on our arrival. We ended up in some sort of conference room, then it took several more jumps to get to the maze, which neither of us recognized." It certainly hadn't looked like Imperial architecture to him. Not enough bare metal.

"You jumped inside the Institute?" Her heavy brows knitted as she watched him draw. "Guess that explains how they put us back in our rooms during the night. Especially since the staff are more in a mood to tear us up rather than tuck us in."

A very irregular maze was taking shape on the paper. Inefficient. Hrm. The lines TK was drawing were confident and connected, so the design must be intentional. It almost looked like the beginnings of a picture -- there had been gardens like that on Rho Ceta, with tangled walls of bush and vine that had been engineered to grow that way -- no cutting required. Taura had been paying more attention to the ghem-lords chatting two hedges over. The conversation had had more false ends and swift turns by far, but they'd gotten what they needed; the date of a force reduction on the Marilac border due to securitty needs for an upcoming wedding/alliance. And the rest of her mind had been on on not bumping her head or poking it up over the top; it had been designed for the fashionable maximum height of six feet. More lacked finesse, and a Cetagandan ghem-lord (or lady) would sooner cut off his own feet than admit to a physiological faux pas.

"Was there anything else in there? Or anyone?"

Edited 2010-06-22 13:32 (UTC)

622 nodded again. "We only jumped inside the facility. I hadn't realized that it could lead to anywhere else." That added on new suspicions. "Either that's how they grab most people, or it was just... something new that they're managing to make look normal." The town had changed when night fell, after all.

"But that still wouldn't account for how they grabbed me. I was caught in a blast that destroyed a planetoid-sized space station. I should just be a cloud of atoms now." And why just him? why not others? Why not someone else, someone more important? They could have grabbed Grand Moff bloody Tarkin, for fek's sake.

TK had gone quiet, but Taura knew too much about survivor's guilt to miss that particular nuance. She'd watched Miles sleep -- or try to, after a drop. Quinn had packed sedatives in his kit with a note reading simply If he won't take them, sit on him. He hadn't. She had. It didn't stop him from having nightmares, though it did mean he fell asleep to have them.

"They made fifteen of us. One by one, we started dying." The only good thing about any of it had been that the process had been measured in weeks, not months. "Eventually, I was the only one left. None of the docs know why.". She pulled her braid over her shoulder, tracing one of the grey hairs with a pink fingernail. "To be fair, I was the only sample the had -- House Bharaputra doesn't give away anything, not even failures. So why me?" She shrugged. "Worrying about it won't bring them back, or give me more time. I'm glad you're here." She hesitated for a moment, then continued. "He was too." Armand had been the second person she'd met here, and the first to be taken away. Strange to think that had only been a week ago.

Edited 2010-06-22 22:54 (UTC)

[Ack sorry LJ didn't notify me!]

622 listened quietly, taking a moment before speaking. He didn't trust himself to come out with anything coherent, let alone relevant at the moment. "I'm one of millions, supplemented by recruits. We were what was called in when Ground Forces alone couldn't cut it, all of the nastier situations like jungle fighting, insurgencies, and heavy terrorist presence. Casualty rates could be pretty high, and... you generally just learned to accept that. You have terrorists in civvie clothes doing suicide bombings, then there's always going to be casualties. I've been the only survivor of a squad more than once. But..."

He sighed, shaking his head slightly. "First my Commander got killed by a terrorist infiltrator, then his friends find a way to crack the defenses of the biggest space station ever built. 2.4 million people were on board, a third of them civilians. I don't know how to handle that. I'm not even sure if it's sunk in yet. Especially not given civilian casualties here." It felt almost wrong to say it that way. One of the only friends he'd ever had died here.

"I know thinking about it won't help anyone, but something's different about this. There are people here who know about the Empire. They think it's just fiction, something from a vid. They..." he swallowed, taking the moment to make sure his voice came out steady. "They knew what happened with the space station, and told me what's going to happen in the future. If things turn out the way they said it would, the terrorists are going to win. They're going to hit another space station of comparable size, with the Emperor on it. If I can't get back, then I won't have a chance to try and get this information to someone who can do something about it." Despite all of his attempts to keep his composure, his voice had finally cracked. That was it. That was what had been eating him up for weeks, making him feel useless for not having figured out how to do something about his imprisonment yet. It was only made worse by the reminders that he was a failure in protecting the people he actually knew and cared about.

Admitting this sort of thing was supposed to make you feel better, but he wasn't feeling that at all.

Two point four million? Taura couldn't keep the surprise from her eyes -- but she could keep quiet and let him finish. Empire sounded too much like Cetaganda, or what the Barrayarans now, half-ironically, half-earnestly claimed with pride. Both sides would have torn her throat out halfway through voicing them in the same sentence, but that was war. History became stories became legend, while the real people either raised flowers or grandchildren, as luck allowed.

"You can't. Understand it, I mean. Part of the design they didn't have to build in. Keeps us going -- all we can do is fight for what we can see." Most people thought mercenaries were men (and women, and herms) with nothing left to lose; they weren't. Every moment became precious, every person, every meal.

She couldn't bring herself to insist they'd find a way for him to get back; she kept her promises, and even after last night, getting everyone home sounded impossible. Which takes slightly longer, and costs triple. Hah. She couldn't think of anything to say its place. Not when TK knew the odds as well as she did. So she chased a grape through her fruit salad with a fork. They were a little under-ripe, and not terribly filling, but calories weren't everything.

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Day 50: Cafeteria (Brunch)

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