damned_institute | Day 52: Sun Room

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Day 52: Sun Room

No better way to start the day than with a bucket full of sunshine, huh? Too bad that'd been the opposite.

In the end, Yuffie had been more than glad to escape. All the angst and sap and drama; it'd been too much, and way too personal. She'd done her best, for her friend's sake, but that Tomoe chick was gonna be hard work. Why couldn't Kenshin have asked for her help in something simple, like killing the big bad of the day?

… Oh, wait.

Groaning, the young ninja gave up on just walking through the sun room. What kind of a way to cheer herself up was that? No, she needed something interesting—she needed a distraction. Walking on her hands wasn't a whole lot better than walking on her feet, but it did get Plucky going.

"Hanna, stop that this instant! You'll break your neck."

"Oh, come on; only a moron'd kill themselves doin' a handstand. They're child's play!" Yuffie, after shifting her weight to her left hand, waggled a finger at her nurse. "It's a waste of my prodigious talent, actually. You really should be grateful." She hopped forward several more paces before dropping her hand back down.

"Be that as it may," Plucky replied, doubtfully. "I must insist."

"Insist away," said Yuffie, nonchalantly, pausing just long enough to let a cat stroll past her.

"You'll disturb the other patients!"

"Your face'll disturb the other patients." It was petty, and it was childish, but Yuffie didn't care; it was getting her what she wanted. And what she wanted was something to laugh at, something to poke at, something that, while it kept her wandering attention in the here and now, didn't really require her to think.

[For Kaito~]

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The morning had been going so well until Guybrush spotted that note on the bulletin board.

Elaine? Missing? Nuh uh. Noooo way. She was just... washing her hair. Again. She'd gone out last night, so she definitely needed a second shower in the morning, which they'd allowed her to take because...

She made a very convincing argument?
She was the Governor of the Tri-Island Area?
She'd been swallowed by a beast with breath bad enough to make a ship take a dirt road and needed to wash the stench off?

Whatever the reason, she wasn't gone. It was true that people disappeared all the time- sailed into the Bermuda Triangle, kidnapped as some part of a revenge quest, tied to a golden idol and dropped to the bottom of the sea, etc.- but this was Elaine. She didn't just vanish. And if she did, it was because someone had taken her, kidnapped her from her kidnapper in some kind of a double kidnapping that would ultimately result in her escaping of her own volition when the time was just right. She was a master at it, having done it her whole life... well, except for a few times, like when she ended up as a statue, which was coincidentally the point from which DeLandel had decided to pluck her from her life.

Okay, none of this was painting a comforting picture. After scanning the library for his Snookie-Wookums of the High Seas, he returned to the Sun Room, taking a seat on one of the chairs and watching the door. Her nurse had to bring her through sometime.

[Free]

The nurse had tried to take him to the library again. He seemed like such an intelligent young man... didn't he want to spend some time reading? He might have actually taken her up on the suggestion, but he had no interest in reading anything as old as what they had there, and it had been very hard not to laugh when she reminded him that they'd acquired some new science fiction books.

But after several polite refusals, she'd finally relented and escorted him to the sun room instead. There were a few other people around, but it didn't seem too busy.

He was slightly put off by the blond staring at the doorway until Gren realized he was probably just waiting for someone to arrive. He blinked. Wait. Did he have a hook for a hand? He'd seen some cut-rate prosthetics before but that took the cake. ...and he may have been staring at it a little. Woops. He covered it up with a friendly smile, and glanced from the man back to the door.

"Waiting on someone?" He'd just make some polite conversation and then move on if he was interrupting. Hopefully that would be enough to cover for any social faux pas he might have made.

Guybrush held his attention on the door, breaking only to return Morgan's nod. Maybe she hadn't heard the bad news yet- no wait, there wasn't bad news. Elaine was still around. She'd just moved rooms or was disguising herself. Maybe her roommate had been mistaken, and the person in her bed was actually a decoy Elaine. Yeah, that was it! The old two-monkeys-stacked-one-on-top-of-the-other trick. The nurses were sure to fall for it!

... Now where did she find a pair of monkeys in Landel's? A better question was how she managed to get those clothes on the monkeys in the first place.

Eyes on the door and attention elsewhere, Guybrush hadn't even noticed being approached or stared at until he was addressed. "Sort of. She might still be sleeping. Or making a daring escape. Or she's washing her hair."

Oh, man. Had this guy gotten stood up? That had to suck, especially in a place like this.

"You're probably right. I'm sure something just came up. Maybe she got dragged off to therapy?" He had no idea if anyone got any advanced warning for that, or if the nurses just hauled you off whenever it was your turn. Gren supposed he'd find out sooner or later, when his turn rolled around. "She'll probably turn up."

Unless, of course, she didn't, but saying that wouldn't be very encouraging, now would it? And he wasn't exactly the type to go spreading feelings of gloom and doom if he could at all avoid it.

Therapy? Oh right, therapy. Guybrush vaguely recalled the morning announcements saying something about certain patients having therapy shifts instead of the regular activities- he hoped he was not on the list for that. If Stan was his attorney, then his assigned doctor was probably De Singe himself. With the thought of his wife possibly missing on the brain, the last thing Guybrush wanted to deal with was a sadistic Frenchman telling him all about his alleged issues.

Then again, Elaine being in therapy did explain where she'd been hiding all morning. Knowing her, she was probably taking the diplomatic route and convincing them this whole institute thing was a bad idea. Or maybe she had the doctor tied to his own chair and was getting information out of him the hard way. Rrowr.

"Yeah, you're probably right," Guybrush said, getting to his feet as he felt better about the situation. "My Tucklebear isn't one to just disappear, trust me." Ahh, Elaine. He knew there was a reason he'd married her. Well, she'd technically married him. Or was going to be married to him. Time travel complicated everything. No matter what, Elaine would be all right- she always was. Usually.

"My name's Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™!" he said, remembering his manners. "And you are...?"

Gren nodded slightly, thinking that 'tucklebear' had to have been one of the strangest pet-names he'd ever heard. ...assuming, of course, that it really was a pet-name and not some indication that this guy thought he was involved with... a bear. Maybe it was a cultural thing. He was still getting used to the fact that not everyone was from the same time and place he was.

A... pirate? Well, that explained the hook, anyway. Out of everyone he'd met so far, though, Gren was inclined to think this man was the most likely to be actually crazy. "Grencia Eckener, run-of-the-mill saxophone player," he replied, figuring that after that introduction, the guy at least deserved the courtesy of his full first name. The rest of it he was content to continue leaving out for all of eternity.

"Colorful name," Guybrush remarked with a snap of his fingers. "I don't know a lot of musicians, but that has to be the best name I've heard for one yet. Haggis McMutton was pretty good, but Grencia is definitely better. The name the nurses call you must be such a letdown by comparison."

Guybrush stole another glance to the door, trying to keep his focus on both the entryway and the conversation. A master of being distracted by anything and everything that looked even remotely interesting, he realized with a sigh that he'd already lost track of whether or not Elaine had come into the room. She'd be fine until later, he told himself. He liked the thought that she was probably in therapy better than keeping an eye glued to the door. Besides, hadn't she told him to find something more productive to do than hang over her shoulder?

"So, Grencia," he said, returning his attention the other man, "How long have you been here? Long enough to find out exactly why you were supposedly committed?"

"You think so?" That amused him, for some reason. He'd never been embarrassed by his name, but it had been something of an inconvenience for him. "They think my name is Greg." His less-than-enthused tone was probably a god indication of just how much he liked it.

He shook his head. "Four days now, and I have no idea. I guess they think I'm delusional, but they think that about everyone." At least so far as he'd been able to ascertain so far. It was hard to tell if anyone around here was genuinely crazy or not. "I'll have to ask whenever they decide to drag me in front of one of their shrinks." Unless he could find some way to avoid that, but he doubted it would be easy. "You?"

[Sorry this is late! D:]

"I get to be Brian Moriarty, who apparently has some charges of stalking against him." Guybrush rolled his eyes- this was what happened when the highlight of your career involved a weaver with a musical stick. Whether the staff actually thought he was who they said he was or they were all just tricked with the same voodoo hijinks that De Landel had used to kidnap people through time, he couldn't guess. What mattered was that he was the one being stuck with the charges (and probably the legal fees, knowing Stanley).

"I got a visit from my attorney the other day," he continued with a shake of his head. "Well, he said he was Brian Moriarty's attorney, but I actually know him. He's a salesman from the Tri-Island area, but he acted like he'd never known me- as Guybrush, anyway. He was well aware of all the charges I'm stuck with though, thanks to this identity fiasco. According to him, I'd been stalking my wife and made her crazy enough to end up here, too."

He stole another look at the door. Still no Elaine- he'd gladly face prison for the rest of his natural life just to know if she was all right.

Gren blinked a bit as Guybrush relayed his ordeal. That was... quite the story. "Someone you knew showed up and corroborated all of that?" He knew there had been visitors for some of the patients, but that was all he'd really learned. "That's..." Really creepy. "Not very encouraging. Do you think he was being bribed or something?" There was a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach, which had nothing to do with Guybrush or breakfast from that morning, and everything to do with a horrible, sinking sense of deja vu.

He sincerely hoped he never got a visitor here. The last thing he needed was Vicious showing up and telling lies about him again.

"Why would they ever put a supposed stalker and their stalk-ee in the same place, anyway?" That just didn't seem like a very wise move at all.

"To be honest, I'd like to think Stan has more integrity than to pretend he doesn't know me and that I'm some other guy with a slew of crimes to his name for a quick buck." Guybrush paused, thinking. "Then again, this is the guy who, in the time I've known him, has sold previously-owned vessels and coffins, insurance, timeshares, and courtroom souvenirs. At least he had his real name on all of those businesses."

And that was the weird part- no matter how ludicrous the venture, Stan always took pride in emblazoning his moniker on his establishments, sometimes making it larger on the sign than the name of the business itself. Further evidence: his name wasn't on any of the plaid cards he'd handed out! Though Stanley was close to Stan, Guybrush wasn't sold. The man was either being controlled somehow, crazy himself (crazier than normal, anyway), or not the Stan he knew in the first place.

"I'm still working on figuring this place out," Guybrush admitted, scratching the back of his head with his hook. "While it doesn't make much sense for them for them to put supposed stalker and supposed stalk-ee in the same place, neither does giving us a chance to escape by letting us out of our rooms at night. What's the point in kidnapping us if you're just going to let us walk out of here?"

There were also all the demon toads and teleporting doors and the fact that his wife was from the past, but all of those made more sense in his mind than his example.

Gren laughed a little wryly at that. "I guess you have better friends than I do." If stranger ones. previously-owned coffins? That sounded more than a little sketchy. Not to mention creepy. But maybe there was a market for that sort of thing back wherever Guybrush was from. Who could say?

"That's true. But they at least like to pretend this place is normal during the day." Or, mostly normal, anyway. Normal for an insane asylum. "I've been puzzling over the whole thing since I got here, and I just can't figure out what they're trying to do here." Other than practice a very convoluted form of sadism, anyway. What was the point? If they just wanted to torture them, why the facade? And if they really did want to convince them they were all crazy, why the horror show at night? And if the point was simply to break them, well. For what purpose? He refused to believe there wasn't some reason for all of this.

"Not really sure I'd count Stan as a friend," Guybrush said honestly. "We have gone back and forth from time to time. You know, I nail him in a coffin for a few months, he prosecutes me for all the crimes I've committed on a single island... I think our relationship is more professional than personal. That's the vibe I got from him when I was being hauled into a jail cell, anyway."

But even if Stan did keep it professional, he'd not pretend he was an entirely different person. That was just going too far.

"This place really isn't so bad during the day," he commented, "aside from them trying to convince us we're crazy and the broken clothes. We get food and beds and all the clean underpants we could ever want. It's the night that kills you. Hopefully not literally. I'm guessing we weren't brought here just to be maimed horribly and left for dead without any explanation, but I don't intend to stick around and find out what the real reason is."

Gren was starting to get the impression that this man's life had been nearly as strange as his own... if possibly in a less traumatic sort of way. "Ahhh. That kind of thing." He thought he understood that, at least in a vague sort of way. He was used to hanging out with other musicians, and they could be a temperamental sort, to say the least.

"I want to know," he admitted. "Even if I get out of here, I haven't got much to go back to." If anything. He still had the sinking suspicion that he'd been dead before they'd pulled him here. Or at least close enough to it that the distinction was trivial. "If I'm going to be put through all of this, I need to find out why." Even if it was a borderline suicide mission. That hadn't stopped him before, after all.

Not having much to go back to- that was something that had been in the back of Guybrush's mind for a while. There was the whole Elaine-from-the-Past issue, for starters: would everything remain the same now that she'd seen a glimpse of the man she'd spend the rest of her life with? Of course she'd still marry him, but how would their lives change? Or had they always been this way, her experiencing the institution while she was a statue and knowing the future and never telling him?

Ugh, time travel.

And Elaine aside, there was that tiny, little, itty-bitty part where he'd been run through with a sword. Morgan, too. She had a point- were they going to make it back to their own time, only to find themselves dying or worse?

"I know what you mean," Guybrush said with a groan. "The last thing I remember before being brought here was being run through with a sword and my nemesis sucking up all the voodoo from the giant sponge I went through all the trouble to find. If I get back and find he's trashed the Caribbean, wooed my wife, and I'm a zombie or a ghost, I'm going to be cranky."

That... sounded pretty strange. Then again, the man claimed to be a pirate, so Gren supposed that stabbings, voodoo, and zombies might not be that out of the ordinary.

Well, no. The zombie thing was still strange, but maybe he didn't mean it literally. "Sounds like a pretty tough situation to be stuck in," he replied. It was better to be diplomatic and non-judgmental with people, even when what they were saying sounded strange. After all, Gren was pretty sure that if he were to ramble on about his confrontation with Vicious and everything surrounding it, it would sound equally bizarre. "I hope everything works out for you."

"Thanks, and you too." Guybrush smiled, knowing that no matter how dead he was outside of De Landel's and how much trouble LeChuck could have caused in the months following his demise, it probably wasn't any worse than being trapped in a spooky asylum with the threats of torture and the ruination of his future looming over him. "Hopefully, we'll both have something left when we manage to escape- if we manage to escape, but I'm optimistic."

His Plunderbunny didn't enter the room, but his nurse did, giving Guybrush her usual sour look that meant he was to follow her to the next shift. "Ah, lunchtime. Gotta go, Grencia. Good luck finding those answers. I'll let you know if I ever figure out why we're really here."

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Day 52: Sun Room

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