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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"Yeah. Special diet." A special diet that involved the living flesh of other demons, possibly humans, and one that the nurses weren't willing to acknowledge he needed. Having spent a day believing himself to be a med school drop out, he knew what the staff believed him to be. That just made it all the more infuriating. Heat had no idea what diabetes or vampirism were, having retained only the basic shell of knowledge from that time, so those particular queries got Scott only another confused look.

His eyes strayed to the mark on his arm when the boy asked, and he held it up where it was more visible. "It's the fireball, my Atma." The demon was hungry enough that it didn't take much concentration for it to flare up red for a moment. How soon would it be, he wondered, before he lost control just like Roland had? As the only Embryon left in the facility, he refused to let that happen. That night was going to be dedicated to getting himself a meal.

He supposed he could devour his roommate, if it came to that, except Beelzemon apparently had a friend who might notice his absence.

Scott gave Heat a wary, also confused look at the very simple answer he got, but didn't question it. He had a feeling that doing so would likely earn him a bite on the neck at some point. And not the sexy kind, either.

Focus on the tattoo for now, he told himself. That, at least, was still pretty cool. It was even cooler when the guy managed to turn it red for a moment. Or would that be hotter, what with the red colour and the name Heat? Scott left that serious quandary be for the moment, instead just rolling with his initial reaction. "Oh, that is too cool! What's an Atma? Does it do anything else?" he asked, curiosity like a child's lighting up his face.

Yes, it was the symbol of his demon. The transformation started with the mark and spread. But once again, Heat wanted to avoid the details, especially since this looked like the sort of kid that might get too nosy and ask things he shouldn't. A lot of people were like that here, though in their defense there wasn't much else to do here at times aside from talking.

Especially when one didn't have their own meal to eat, like now. "It marks me as having certain abilities," he decided on finally. "And if it glows brighter than that, you're in trouble." If it spread, in other words, glowing lines like webbing moving outward from the mark. But yeah... details.

His other hand began tapping his leg, light and without rhythm. There was too much time left until nightfall.

"Ohhhh, so it's like a meter, kind of? When you push it to the max, you get a Limit Break or something?" That made enough sense, then.

Scott noticed the tapping. It was kind of hard to ignore, even as he ate. It wasn't even the noise or the impatience it conveyed that annoyed him, either. It was the fact that the tapping didn't really have rhythm that bothered him the most as it went on. Why make so much noise without putting a beat to it?

After about a minute of this, Scott couldn't take it anymore. To himself, he mouthed a silent, "One, two, three, four!", counting in for Sex Bob-omb's "Launchpad McQuack." With a free hand, he started tapping in time on his uninjured leg. Maybe Scott didn't do much on drums nowadays, but he had done his share of percussion playing with Kid Chameleon back in the day; he had that much rhythm, at least. The beat was easy enough to follow, and though Scott doubted anything would come of it, he wondered if Heat would pick up on it. At the very least, it distracted him enough from the lighter, more formless noise across from him. The reminder of home wasn't a bad touch, either.

It might have made sense to Scott, but it didn't make much sense to Heat. In a very confusing and roundabout way, perhaps. "...Huh?" The comment wasn't even really worth thinking about. He was already irritated that he looked as baffled as he did, since that could just prompt more questions.

As for the lack of rhythm, it wasn't Heat's fault, really. He just hadn't had the opportunity to listen to much music. There were those couple songs from the CD the other day, but he couldn't recall the actual beat well, given how little he'd been able to listen to, and he was having a difficult time focusing in his current mental state anyway. When Scott started up his own thing, he was fairly certain he was being mocked, and he glared at the boy accordingly. What did he think he was doing, exactly?

The demon glanced down toward the boy's hand, though he couldn't see it, and then back up again, his own hand now curling into a fist where it sat on his lap.

Oh hey, Heat had ceased his own tapping. Had he stopped to listen? That must have been it, Scott thought. Clearly, the power of Sex Bob-omb was unstoppable and irresistible, even when muffled through flimsy grey sweatpants and lacking his epic (okay, decent... okay, tolerable... okay, not ear-bleeding) bass.

Scott picked up the tempo a bit, starting to get a bit lost in the song within his own head. At some point, he had started humming the vocal parts, though he couldn't pin down exactly when that had started. He would have started in on the lyrics, but truth be told, he wasn't really sure he remembered the actual lyrics right now. Humming would have to work for now.

He had reached about the second verse by the time he looked up again. Heat was just staring, and though Scott was pretty sure that was a scowl he saw on the potential vampire (potentialpire?)'s face, the expression was too muted for him to tell for sure. Could just be tired, too, he thought. In any case, on the off-chance that he could still get the guy to join in, Scott grinned and asked him about just that: "Hey, why don't you join in, man? What's life in a balls-trippingly terrifying mental asylum without music?"

It was a little hard to believe, but the kid was actually serious. He didn't seem thrown off in the slightest by Heat's obvious displeasure, either. That just caused him to make the scowl more obvious, though he thought it had been obvious enough before. Maybe Scott just didn't care.

"I'm not gonna join in," Heat growled. He didn't know how, for one thing - couldn't sing or hold a tune for the life of him. Hell, he hardly knew how to hum. Music interested him, no doubt about it, especially because Sera had been so fond of it, but this boy was just ticking him off. "You look like an idiot."

His irritation had nothing to do with not wanting to admit his own lack of knowledge, of course. None at all.

Scott probably should have been more intimidated by Heat suddenly growling at him. Partly, he was. Red-eyed male Kim Pine vampires were nothing to be sneezed at, and a short tense in Scott's body showed that. Partly, though, Heat's reaction kind of struck him the way someone who just didn't want to admit to having a fun side would. "The lady doth protest too much," as a certain famous bald guy once put it.

Thus, Scott couldn't help but grin a bit more after his initial scare, this time with +1 to Cheekiness. "Oh do I? You sure you just aren't holding out on me, man? Afraid of looking like an idiot yourself?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "What are you, a chicken? A big ol' disgruntled chicken? Bawk bawk bawk bawwwwk!" Schoolyard taunts were maybe a bit overused in the world for the purposes of egging people on, but hey, Scott figured that was because they worked. No one wanted to be caught being a chicken.

While Heat wasn't sure why he was being compared to a small bird commonly eaten by humans, he did know he was being mocked. Even if he'd known how to sing, he wouldn't have done so for this boy. His best option was probably to just ignore him, but that required a certain amount of restraint that the demon didn't possess in these types of situations. No, no, the best method for getting Scott to shut up was pure, old-fashioned physical pain. He just needed to make sure not to do anything that would have one of the nurses or orderlies immediately heading their way.

One of the boy's hands was on the table. Heat reached out quickly and snatched it in one of his own, twisting the wrist in a manner that would be painful but not cause any lasting damage. Then he leaned closer, snarling through a forced smile. "I won't sing because I don't want to sing. Got it?"

He let go just as quickly, slamming Scott's arm back down on the table. Hopefully, that would be enough to get the boy to quit with the attitude.

Okay, now the lady doth protest way, way too much!

"Hghah!" Scott tried twisting his body and arm in the same direction his wrist was going in a feeble attempt to cut down on the pain. With the table in his way, doing this didn't get him far. Thankfully, he was released quickly enough. Un-thankfully, he was released with a rough slam back down onto the table. "Got it..." Scott croaked after a moment.

There was some silence between the two young men for a while after Scott pulled his arm back and returned to his brunch. The only thing that broke it after a time was one single mumbled utterance from Scott as he munched on the last of his pizza: "Jerk."

Edited 2010-07-05 21:23 (UTC)

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Day 50: Cafeteria (Brunch)

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