damned_institute | Day 51: Arts & Crafts (4th shift)

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Day 51: Arts & Crafts (4th shift)

There were very few activity shifts, Cloud was sure, that could possibly make him feel more like he was being treated like a child. He took a seat at one of the tables and blankly examined the materials set out before him. A pair of the dullest scissors he'd ever seen were labeled 'ages 3 and up'. It was good to know where the patients stood in this.

He wasn't much of an artist, and he ignored most of the paints and other drawing utensils in favor of a few sheets of colored paper and instructions on how to make origami. That sounded vaguely familiar. Didn't Yuffie have throwing weapons made out of paper at some point? It was something to do anyway, and thus Cloud began the process of crafting what ended up being very elaborate paper wads.

Sadly, his attempts to keep from dwelling on the subject of his missing friend failed when he realized this was something Aerith probably would have enjoyed greatly. Tonight, he and Yuffie would go out and try to accomplish... something. It was depressing to think there really might not be anything they could do, that they might all end up the same as the flower girl eventually.

[for a hopefully more optimistic materia thief]

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Gren was about as interested in arts and crafts today as he had been the first time he'd visited the room. Which was to say, not in the least. It really wasn't his preferred form of artistic expression, after all. But if he was going to be there, he could probably get something done, even if that something wasn't exactly what the staff might have had in mind.

So upon arrival, he grabbed a pencil, a ruler, and several sheets of blank paper. To anyone else observing, it probably looked like he really was a madman, meticulously measuring and drawing lines on the blank paper. Anyone a bit more musically inclined might recognize it for what it was, though. If he was going to be stuck in this place for any length of time, he needed a way to score his music, and the journals they'd been given, while offering a certain amount of convenience, were far from standard staff lines. He wasn't feeling very inspired at the moment, but it didn't hurt to be prepared.

[Free]

Art? Funny kinds of activities they got here, it looked like stuff kids would play with. Carter poked around in search of some sort of 'future art' device and found nothing to his satisfaction. There was yarn but even that was rather crude and not really satisfactory for wearing. Odd. Digging further in the box yielded no needles, which was also odd because really the best place to put things for dealing with yarn was right next to the yarn itself. There wasn't really any point in knitting when they gave you all the clothes for free and it wasn't cold enough to need anything more, but Carter found it a soothing activity when he couldn't put his hands to work on wires and explosives.

"Hey, you know where I can get some knitting needles?" he asked the back of someone's head. Peering over their shoulder showed that he was drawing some kind of strange lines all over the paper. Carter wondered why.

Gren glanced over his shoulder at the question and shook his head a little. "No, I'm afraid not. I'm not sure they'd actually let us have those," he admitted. It might have been arts and crafts, but given the sad state of the rest of the supplies available, he wouldn't be surprised to find that knitting needled were on the 'forbidden' list.

"You might be able to suggest it. They're probably worried someone will put an eye out." Not necessarily their own. "But if they're going to let people have sewing materials, they might be persuaded to include knitting supplies." If they all behaved, of course. As if they weren't spending their evenings fighting whatever this place decided to throw at them.

"Seems kinda funny to have yarn and nothing to knit it up with." Carter frowned, absently twisting the end strand around one of his scar-speckled fingers. You'd have to be pretty stupid to put your eye out with a knitting needle.

Carter hunched over Gren and looked at his mysterious lines. "So what are those for?" he asked, still toying with the yarn. "Is it a map?" Maps had lines. You used them to find things and then blow them up, so they were very useful.

Gren shrugged a little. "Maybe they've got it around for some other purpose." What, he wasn't sure, but there was probably other uses for the stuff. Beading or braiding or something. He didn't generally spend much time thinking about yarn.

"Not a map, no," he replied, although it wouldn't be a bad idea to draw up a few at some point. He drew a vertical line on the left side of one of the groups of lines and added in a swirling treble cleft. "Sheet music. I'm pretty sure they're not going to give me any, so I might as well make my own."

"Ooh! So you're a musician? That's really neato. What instruments do you play?" Now Carter could see what the lines were, it hadn't been as clear without the...swirly music thing at the beginning. Carter wasn't as good at music as he was at explosions.

Carter took a seat, the yarn in his hand forgotten, and pondered the concept of future musical instruments. They could be played by computers or robots or something and would have a hundred buttons and sound like...the future. Beeping, maybe.

If they sounded like rock and metal musics Carter wasn't sure he was fond of the idea.

'Neato?' Gren was pretty sure he'd never heard anyone use that word unironically. Well, who knew where this guy was from? Or when? It was better not to form too many judgments before he really knew him.

"Saxophone," he replied. "I played in a club for a living, back home." Well, the Rester House wasn't really a club so much as a bar that tried to draw in a few more customers with some live music, but it sounded better when he said it like that. "Piano, too, but only in my free time." He'd never had the desire to play that in front of an audience, though he probably could have.

Well, that wasn't helpful. "Oh, just regular stuff." Carter was slightly disappointed. No computers or hard music involved at all. "Where's back home for you? Is it now or is it in the past? Of now, I mean, not the past of where you used to be, which is the future now. I think."

Now he was confusing himself. His current expression could be likened to that of a dog who'd wrapped his leash around several trees and was now staring back in bewilderment because he didn't quite know how he'd gotten there. It made sense in his head, anyway. Possibly. He wasn't sure anymore.

"Yeah, I guess so." He wondered what the other man had been expecting. He supposed with all the different people in this place, there might be some interesting variety in musical instruments.

Gren arched an eyebrow. He was pretty sure they were both confused now. "The last place I was living was a town called Blue Crow. It's on Callisto." He paused. Maybe that needed further elaboration. "It's one of Jupiter's moons." If he didn't know Jupiter, there wasn't anything Gren was going to be able to elaborate on. "As for the when, it's 2071 back there. Are you from Earth?" He was taking a guess, but his roommate aside, everyone else he'd talked to so far was.

And we're back to perky and excited. Jupiter, wowie! "I'm only from 1943, we haven't even made it into space yet. What's Callisto like? Tell me about it!" He sat forward in his chair, hands pressed together and mouth open in a wide grin. Everything, give him all the things.

Blue Crow was a funny sort of name for a town, but many things were strange in the future. Gren would be well-versed in the use of the bizarre machines that were the Seedy Players, and the hard music in them, and in the movies that played in color.

"1943?" He paused for a moment, trying to dredge up the history lessons he'd had in school. "There was a war, right?" Or had it been over by then? He wasn't too sure of the dates anymore. As a teenager, it had seemed pretty pointless to study it when there wasn't much left of the earth anyway.

"It's... pretty cold there," he replied. "Snows a lot." He didn't think he wanted to get into just how depressing the whole place was, and kill the guy's enthusiasm. "I was born on Mars, though. It's the biggest colony."

"Mhm," Carter said to the first question, as if it wasn't very important. "I was a soldier in it until I got captured, I was in a POW camp before I got put here. But don't worry, I was an American." Because Americans are the good guys, dontchaknow.

The second subject was far more interesting. "Are there colonies on all the planets and all the moons?" Carter was better with science fiction than astronomy and wasn't aware that some of the planets in the solar system were not suited for people who disliked being crushed into compact pieces of squish by harsh gravity. Science could fix anything!

"Really? I served in the army for awhile." That was probably the best way to put it. He'd fought, he'd gone home, and everything after that didn't particularly matter, so far as this conversation went. "Sorry to hear you got captured, though." He did sort of wonder which was worse, a POW camp or this place?

"Not on all of them. There are still some people who live on Earth, and there are large colonies on Mars, Venus, Europa, and Ganymede. Callisto's pretty small population wise. Titan, too. That's were I fought. There are a few asteroids that have a population, but it's mainly mining." He wondered if that was too much information for someone from a time without so much as a space program.

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Day 51: Arts & Crafts (4th shift)

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