Day 50: Patient Library (3rd Shift)

[vstheworld]

Given a choice, as should have been implied by the whole "Free Choice Day" thing, Scott would have gone straight for the Game Room. Maybe it didn't have the greatest selection of games, but he was raring for another epic Tetris match with Indy or anyone else who cared to challenge him. Unfortunately for him, however, his nurse was already onto his line of thinking.

"Now Bryan, I know how much you love your games, but don't you think some more time away from them would be good for you?" the woman asked him in a soothing tone, gently taking his shoulder when he turned toward the Game Room.

"Uh, why would I think that?" he asked, blinking at her in honest confusion.

"Well, I know your family was worried about more than just your condition before you came here. They're hoping you can start to wean yourself down to a more healthy level of enjoyment with your games, too," the nurse explained with continuing gentleness.

"Yeah. And?" Scott raised an eyebrow. "It's Free Choice Day, isn't it? Don't I get to choose and stuff?"

"Of course, Bryan. But I'm still here to make suggestions, and I think you'd do well with a different activity today." The woman smiled at him, genuine care and concern in her expression. "You can always come here later in the week. It'll probably be more rewarding if you wait, too."

Scott was silent, considering the advice. He raised an index finger. "Well, I suppose... Uh, yeah no. Please to be going to the Game Room now, thanks."

The nurse frowned.

Five minutes of irritatingly gentle coaxing later, and Scott found himself in the patient library. "Stupid guilt tripping never even talked to my real mom and dad I bet I could be playing Tetris right now they don't even have any cool books in here..." he grumbled to himself under his breath as he lazily perused the shelves. He picked a book completely at random, The Oxford Book of English Verse. He was half-hoping that maybe pulling the book out would trigger something more exciting, like a secret item appearing, a bonus stage unlocking, or a new shortcut tunnel opening. But no, Landel's reality was boring as ever. "Maybe there'll be an awesome poem or something in here, at least," he told himself as he headed over to an empty seat with a short sigh.

[Unknowingly waiting for Sam]

Comments

[boyking]

As appealing as it sounded, watching a giant gorilla for two hours, Sam decided to pass. Seriously, he'd seen that damn movie more times than he could count—with Dean's commentary running in the background, no less. Hazard of insomnia and keeping weird hours. He could probably recite several infomercials by heart at this point.

That left...the library, the game room, the courtyard—library would do. It would be quiet and maybe he could find someone worth looking into. He hadn't spoken to very many people at the institute. Too wrapped up in that crap with Dean. Plus, a good chunk of the people he had met, Christ, he hadn't seen a couple of them in at least a week, had he? And there wasn't a lot he could do about it except talk to more people. Witnesses were notoriously unreliable, but if you pieced enough of them together, eventually something emerged. Or that was the theory.

Besides, according to his nurse, a visitor wasn't on his schedule. Whoever Michael was, he wasn't coming back. Not this time, anyway. Which was fine on one hand; Sam wasn't gonna deny that the guy unsettled him. By a large amount. But he was still better than nothing. A lead, however small. Maybe there'd be more in the files?

Anyway, whatever. He could talk about it with Dean tonight. The snatches of conversation over breakfast or lunch, that really wasn't gonna cut it. They kept getting interrupted or herded off, and it didn't help that half of the conversations always careened into that topic. The one they were always talking about, even when they weren't.

The library was pretty empty when he stepped inside. No surprise, of course; everyone was kinda scattered all over today. It meant it didn't take long before he spotted the guy looking less than satisfied by the volume before him. Dissatisfied folks tended to be a hit or miss. Sometimes they were really up to talking to you and sometimes they were really very much not, but, well. Might as well give it a shot. At the very least, the patients here were more willing to hold a conversation than your average stranger.

Sam plucked a book from the shelf to make sure he had something in hands since, a Stephen King title he probably shouldn't have been fond of given his own horror story of a life but somehow was. He sat down near the other patient, close enough to hold a low-key chat if he wanted, but not so close as to intrude.

"Not a poetry fan?" he said mildly.

[vstheworld]

The book seemed arranged in chronological order, leading Scott to flip to the end sections in the hopes of avoiding potentially fatal collisions with any "thee"s and "thou"s. For the most part, the tactic worked; a lot of what he saw wasn't bad. It couldn't be, he supposed, since it was all supposed to be classic. Nothing really grabbed his attention with a strong hold, though, and a lot of the language still went over his head. That was, until his eyes skimmed over one title in particular: "The Flowers." A swash of brightly-coloured hair flashed by in his mind at that, possibly on rollerblades. Scott stopped on the page, considering it. The poem looked short, at least, he thought; also, there were worse reasons to read something than a passing reminder of the girlfriend he missed with every fibre of his being.

When Love arose in heart and deed
To wake the world to greater joy,
'What can she give me now?' said Greed,
Who thought to win some costly toy.

He rose, he ran, he stoop'd, he clutch'd;
And soon the Flowers, that Love let fall,
In Greed's hot grasp were fray'd and smutch'd,
And Greed said, 'Flowers! Can this be all?'

The poem went on from there, but before he could continue reading, Scott was interrupted by a voice from a couple of seats over. He looked up, caught mildly off-guard. He hadn't exactly been engrossed, but he hadn't been expecting to hear a stranger talk to him, either. Definitely not someone so tall, either, he thought with a slight ulp. "Uh, yeah, not exactly my big thing," he answered, flipping pages again and pretending to look for a different poem out of some primal urge to look busy-and-totally-not-lazy-or-dumb in front of people he didn't know. "Kinda more of a comics guy if I'm gonna go for stuff on dead trees. X-Men, Spider-man - you know, the great masterworks of the modern age," he added with a bit of a knowing grin, biting back the urge to say that that he was friends with Wolverine and Spider-man and this random guy wasn't, nah-nahnah-nah-nah.

He stopped on a random page as he leaned over a bit to get a look at what the other guy was reading. Stephen King, huh? "Hey, you've got some balls reading that kind of stuff here. My invisible hat is off to you, sir" he commented, closing his book for the moment with a thumb keeping place over one of the poems on the page, "Lucifer in Starlight."

[boyking]

Okay, friendly and talkative. They were off to a good start. And a comic book fan, apparently, which Sam could also work with. Unconventional childhood or not, some things remained the same for all kids across the board.

He smiled. "I used to collect those. But they sort of, you know. Got lost along the way. We moved a lot."

Actually, it was more like there was no freaking room to carry all that much when you lived out of a goddamn car, and though they used to stay in one place for longer than a couple of weeks at a time back then—sometimes they made it several months even—eventually, they always packed up. He'd learned pretty early to ditch whatever wasn't needed. Which usually translated to everything but the guns.

When he'd moved in with Jess, he'd tried filling up the apartment for her sake; picture frames and books or whatever, but most of the clutter was never his. She'd commented on that once.

"Anyway, I just figured I could use this as a survival guide," he went on. He flipped the novel over in his hands. The Stand. The only title he'd refused to touch was It. For obvious reasons. He'd owned it once, for a period of about ten seconds, when Dean had given it to him as a birthday gift.

But that was awhile ago, back when they'd had time to pull crap like that, when it wasn't, Happy birthday, Sammy, I sold my soul for you! And hell, when was the last time he'd read something that wasn't the obit section of the newspaper or an ancient copy of demon folklore?

He really needed to stop asking himself questions he couldn't answer.

"I'm Sam, by the way."

[vstheworld]

Scott felt a sympathetic pang when Sam mentioned having lost the comics he had collected, and it showed on his face. Sure, all those little issues were hard things to hang onto, especially if there was a lot of moving around going on. Still, not having any of them left? If it had come to that for him, Scott would have considered ritual suicide if not for the existence of cheap trade collections on Amazon.ca. Well, and the existence of the Nintendo Entertainment System. And the Sega Genesis. And Playstation. Saturday morning cartoons. Garlic bread. The Smashing Pumpkins. Sex Bob-omb. Ramo— okay, maybe he wouldn't have committed ritual suicide. But he would've been upset. Maybe he would have banged his head against a wall or something.

There seemed to be something more under the surface of Sam's smile than he was putting across, but Scott couldn't quite tell what it was. For now, he didn't try to dwell much on it. The guy probably just had a lot on his mind, especially if he had gotten to the point of taking survival tips from Stephen King. "Scott. Scott Pilgrim," he answered, reaching over and extending a hand to shake. "You're the second Sam I've met, actually." The other one was a giant, wise-cracking Freelance Police dog in a human body. Think you can top that?

"I don't think I've seen him in a while, though," he added in a bit of a dejected tone, gaze shifting off to the side for a moment. "I'd say maybe he could've used a few survival tips of his own, but you know how this place is. Even some super awesome people just end up gone without a trace sometimes." Why was that, Scott had to wonder. What was it about the place that could take out people like Wolverine, who had apparently been around before and disappeared. He was back now, but it still stood that something had made him disappear the first time. That was a pretty dang hard thing to accomplish, getting the best of a man with an claws, an adamantium frame, and a healing factor.

[boyking]

Sam took the offered hand. His eyebrows lifted slightly, mild surprise, though he didn't comment on the whole second Sam thing. But it did bother him, how easily people drifted in and out of this place without his ever even realizing they'd existed. He had a long list of names to prove it.

"Yeah, seems that way," he replied, glancing down in sympathy. "There're some people I haven't seen in awhile, too."

Wolfram. That kid they'd mistaken for a demon. The reaper-in-a-wheelchair—though no great loss there, but he'd obviously known something, and Sam would've liked to have been able to dig deeper into it. The thing had basically cornered him just to...ask Dean's birthday, and seriously, that had been downright weird. He should ask Dean about it. Come to think of it, he should also check in with the few people who did remain. Like Teresa. It was hard to grab a hold of everyone when you were pretty much limited to scanning a crowd of a couple hundred and pulling them aside.

And hell, it was probably stupid, but little things like that were what irked him the most, far more than being trapped in a building full of monsters. Because really, even when he'd had a freaking werewolf on his tail, at least he'd had a gun and a goddamn phone so that he could, say. Make sure that Dean wasn't half-dead in a ditch somewhere. Minimal resources. He wasn't asking for much.

"I know they come back sometimes, but I haven't been able to figure out how they decide who does or doesn't. But this place isn't exactly on the predictable side, if last night was anything to go by."

Made him wonder how many people Scott had personally seen go missing, too. Depended on how long the man had been here, which did raise another question: what made Scott worth dragging to the institute in the first place? There had to be something. Most people here had something about them that made them a little less average. The few who hadn't admitted it outright, he suspected they were no different, just hid it better. It was pretty much the only pattern that'd held. He hadn't found a break in it yet.

[vstheworld]

Scott put a hand to his head, running his fingers through his hair awkwardly. "Yeah, know what'cha mean, definitely. I mean, other than Sam 1—" he borrowed the Peter Ennumeration System for lack of a last initial to use with Anthropomorphic Sam "—I've known maybe one or two others that have gone missing, but it still throws you."

He paused for a moment, dwelling on the part where Sam had mentioned last night. He still hadn't really gotten a chance to ask anybody about one of the specific things he had seen with Shinichi - namely, the whole thing with going to the apartment/office in Japan. Had they been the only ones to get to a place like that? No one else had mentioned anything like that to him so far, but something like that couldn't have just been random enough to happen once, right? He wondered. 

"Hey, uh, speaking of last night, I gotta ask: did you ever end up anywhere, uh, outside the Institute? Not like Doyleton, but, like, outside outside?" he asked, not quite sure how else to put it. "'cause I'm pretty sure we made it all the way to Japan before night ended. I mean, I didn't see Godzilla or a Hello Kitty factory or anything, but the guy I was with said that's where we were." He had to be careful not to mention anything about Conan while they talked about this. Again, Scott could see death by soccer ball in his near future should he let anything slip. A silent, involuntary "ulp" went through his throat at the thought. 

[boyking]

Japan, really? Why Japan? Though Japan was pretty average compared to Dean's thing about...time machines. Unless Scott, too, had stumbled upon a time machine in Japan. Anything was entirely possible. For a split second, Sam thought Scott'd said that he had, in fact, seen Godzilla during his detour to Japan. He blinked once before it clicked that no, that wasn't what Scott had said.

He cleared his throat, found that he was still holding the book, and put it on the table. "Actually, yeah, I did. Both of us, I was with my roommate. Not as far as Japan though, we landed—we ended up in Illinois."

Sam really wasn't gonna get more specific than that. Makeshift grave site, yeah, no.

Scott looked like there was something more he wanted to add, but maybe he just had no idea what else to say. Sam could sympathize. There were certain situations where the bare facts simply spoke for themselves. Not much embellishment to add to it. I walked through a door and found myself in Tokyo kind of fell under that category.

"So this guy you were with, he was from Japan? As in, you were in a location familiar to him?"

Because the familiarity obviously wasn't coming from Scott. It had to be the person he'd been traveling with, then. And okay, Sam only had a couple of situations to work off of here, but he had a feeling he wasn't off track in presuming that at least one person had a personal connection to wherever the entire group warped to. It was true for him and Peter, for instance. For Dean and "the doctor," as his brother had referred to him, too.

So was it just one more way to screw with them all? Dean's grave site had been pretty frigging specific. Sam had buried Dean there with the intention that it wasn't a grave you could just stumble on or find easily. There was a reason you didn't leave a body intact if you help it. Sam knew the risk he was taking by burying Dean instead of cremating the body. Keeping it out of the way was the best he could do. The last thing he needed was a grieving parent or lover messing around in a cemetery to bring their beloved back to life and accidentally raising his brother as a zombie in the process. Most people toying with an occult text tended not to know the difference between a real resurrection and a mere reanimation of the corpse.

[vstheworld]

Scott nodded. "Yeah, he said it was his uncle's apartment or something. Looked kind of like an office too, but whatever. I don't think that part's important."

For once, Scott felt like he was onto something. He had actually made a guess and it had turned out to be right. He couldn't help but look a little more positive at that, and he scratched his chin in thought as he considered things further. Okay, so this wasn't just like a random glitch level or something that we got to. Other people went places too. And if it happened to other people too, then... that must mean..........................!

Scott had absolutely no idea.

Some of the air deflated out of him at that. Oh well. He had had his moment, even if it was short and possibly only in his own mind.

Maybe he would have better luck with some of the other details from the night, he thought. That much, at least, would probably still be interesting to mention. "Oh, one of the weirdest parts—" other than seeing a dude shrink down faster than Super Mario touching a Goomba "—was that there was no one else around. Like, in the whole world. No one in the apartment, no one in the building, no one on the streets, static on TV, and no internet. No one was answering phones, either, not even police or emergency lines. The ki— uh, the other guy found his cell and it had full bars and everything, but every number just kept ringing without ever picking up or going to voicemail."

Scott gave Sam a curious look, wondering what the other man might think of that. Something about the guy gave off the impression that he could think through situations like this. It might have been the fact that he was using Stephen King as a travel guide to Landel's, or maybe it was just something in his expression. Either way, he wondered whether Sam would think the same thing that he and Shinichi/Conan had thought - that they had ended up in some kind of empty illusion or parallel dimension made by Landel.

[boyking]

If the phrase gears turning was ever definitely applicable, it was now. Sam waited, eyeing Scott curiously as he watched the guy think things through. What came out of it was...

...information he already had. Okay.

Well, kind of. There was something new. The phones. Sam had outright lost any kind of outgoing communication, landlines disconnected, no cell reception. Apparently not Scott. The fact that the dialed numbers managed to ring...unless that in and of itself was an illusion, too, except he couldn't see any reason why it would be different between the two situations. Was it on purpose or merely a result of the constructed location?

Either way, it all led to the same conclusion: wherever they'd been, it was a contained area. Another room, only bigger.

"Like someone just shook out all the people, right? Guess adding in entire populations took too much effort." He frowned. "Did anything else happen while you were there, anything out of the ordinary? I mean, aside from the universe being deserted. Something you encountered, or a specific event."

Maybe not the most subtle way of going about the question, but there was far less of a need to be subtle here when giant birds and cats were bulldozing over people on a regular basis.

Besides, he needed to know. He and Peter had run over a demon and Dean had encountered robots. Given the otherwise stark emptiness of the area, those events each meant something. It'd happened for a reason, they hadn't just run into these things by accident or because there happened to be a demon wandering the highway because it was bored. Demons, especially, did not come in sets of one. Not when they decided to go after him, when they knew what he was capable of. There should've been at least two or three backing up that lone demon, but there wasn't.

And yeah, fine, a couple of cases wasn't enough to prove a pattern, but it was a start, and until Scott or someone else broke it, Sam was considering it as such. Wasn't like he had a hell of a lot else to go on. God, even if he managed to put together a pattern, figuring out what it could mean was worth another bottle of aspirin by itself.

[vstheworld]

Scott nodded with some vindication when Sam mentioned "adding in" a population. That meant he agreed the more exotic places had been made somehow, with Landel controlling what went into them and what stayed out. That was good! They were probably on the right track, then.

He was about to ask about what exactly the other guy thought was going on (illusion? pocket dimension? elaborate doll house?), but apparently, Sam wasn't finished talking yet. He stopped, taking in the next question. Anything out of the ordinary? A specific event? Scott tensed up involuntarily. Oh yeah. There was something else out of the ordinary, all right. Just a wee, little problem Shinichi had run into.

Shinichi had seemed very serious about the Conan thing not getting out. That wasn't Scott's secret to give out and he knew it. Still, Scott felt like he and Sam were getting somewhere in this discussion. It wasn't often Scott felt like he was really figuring out important stuff like this, and they weren't going to get much further if he didn't say something about what had happened. He had to get this across somehow.

"...Well. There was one other thing," he started, slowly and carefully shuffling words around in his brain before they got to his mouth (a very alien sensation to Scott Pilgrim). "Nothing happened to me, but the other guy, he, uh. He looked kinda different after we got there. Like really different. Like way more than just a haircut and a change of clothes." Maybe it would be all right if he didn't use Shinichi's name, he thought as he spoke. It would be fine if this information didn't get connected back to the detective, right? He licked his lips, which had become dry without his noticing. "He got... How do I put this? ...I guess you could say he 'leveled down.' It's kind of hard to describe." Without completely going out and saying "he turned into a small child," anyway.

[boyking]

Sam knew he'd touched on something after he'd asked that question, and while he wasn't certain what he'd been expecting, he knew it hadn't been leveling down, either. Whatever that meant.

He leaned forward and peered at Scott, tilting his head. "I'm sorry, he did what?"

Shapeshifting? It didn't sound like it, though; it was pretty obvious when someone shifted as opposed to simply changing, and no shapeshifter in their right mind shifted so blatantly, anyway. No, this sounded more as if...as if whoever this guy was, he'd changed the way Sam's possessions had changed. The cell phone and his gun, they'd both simply transformed for no reason.

Hadn't there been some talk of people who weren't supposed to look the way they were? Sam had dismissed most of it at the time—it'd been crazy, even to him—but these days, he wasn't so sure anymore. It would fit, at least.

Still didn't explain why Scott chose to describe it using that particular term, though. Had his friend...shrunk? Regressed in some way? Jesus, he didn't even know. It had to be pretty freaking weird since Scott seemed a little more hesitant to talk about this than he had been earlier—though Sam couldn't tell if it was just because it was so bizarre that Scott was having trouble putting it into words, or what.

Either way, Sam's initial interest had definitely slid up several notches.

[vstheworld]

Great, that analogy hadn't worked. Video games hadn't let him down (much) before, though. Maybe there was another description he could put together. Scott put some fingers to his temple, trying to think of something that would be suitably veiled but also descriptive. He could do this. There was an art to it. "You know, he, uh, turned back into Small Mario. Or, no. He took some of Milon's medicine! Oh, better! He put on the Minish Cap! Or, he lost his power-up! Oh, oh, best one: he turned into a small child!"

Scott paused. Scott realized. Scott's head dropped.

"Crap."

He looked back up after a moment, looking guilty. "I really shouldn't have said anything. Please don't tell him I told you, please? I don't wanna die by soccer ball! I have so many evil exes left to fight!" Scott begged.

[boyking]

For a split second, Sam wasn't sure what to say, not so much because of the information he'd received from Scott (although that was something to think about in itself), but because the guy looked like he was about to offer up his firstborn in return for a vow of silence.

Sam held up a placating hand, and managed to hide a smile. "Relax, I'm not gonna say anything, I promise. I don't even know who you're talking about."

Although that was a good question, wasn't it? Who was he talking about? But Sam did feel kind of bad that Scott had apparently...broken a promise to his friend, and it wasn't important enough for the time being to push it. He could always ask later if he needed to know.

So. Age regression, then. That fit the pattern. His injuries had disappeared when he'd traveled there, and he remembered the date he'd seen on the phone. The day he'd been brought here. Maybe the regression in the case of Scott's friend had simply been much more extreme. For what reason, Sam wasn't sure, but...well, it was something.