damned_institute | Day 52: Game Room

Lunch had taken his mind from his worries, if only for a few minutes. But after the intercom sounded and the nurses began leading patients onto the next activity, one look at the bulletin board brought everything back in full force. No replies from Ashton, Dias or Dad. By now Claude felt like he was practically counting down until the end of the day, when he was going to have to finally grapple with the real possibility that most of his friends from before Landel's, as well as his own father, had fallen victim to the institute.

And now he was going to have to deal with his mother being here on top of that. It didn't seem like a coincidence that she'd show up right when his father's whereabouts were so up in the air. But what did it mean? Why couldn't Landel leave his family out of this?

Normally, the announcement about new video games would have made him perk up, but his eyebrows only knit together with concern as his nurse led him into the game room. That didn't seem to stop her from trying to get him to unwind, though.

"Oh, come now, Thomas, you've worn that expression for most of the day!" she told him with a frown. "Why don't you have a bit of fun now that your eyes are all better? I'm sure you could use it."

The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of his "sleep studies", he darkly thought to himself. But before he could protest, his nurse had sat him down in front of one of the television screens. There was an old gaming console, one Claude had never seen before, and he glanced at her with a confused expression. "Go on," she encouraged as she placed one of the controllers in his hands. "I know how much you enjoy these kinds of things. Someone will come play with you soon, too, I'm sure. Doesn't that sound nice?"

He didn't have time to answer her, because she'd soon bustled off to tend to some of the other patients. Claude watched her leave with a sigh. He realized the daytime staff meant well, which made knowing what they turned into at night even worse to think about. But now he was just being negative for the sake of it, wasn't he?

Taking in a small breath, he reached over to the console and turned it on. As long as he was waiting for some kind of answer from the bulletin, there probably wasn't much he could do except pass the time. Claude watched the title screen appear on the television, his expression growing more curious in spite of himself. Super Mario Bros....

[For Prussia!]

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Did he really not know how these things worked? Jo did a double take, and glanced over at him from the corner of her eye. This was enough time for a mushroom to run into her, and shrink Mario down to size. She whipped her head around and glared at the screen as it happened, and didn't take her eyes off the game any longer. But she did think over a proper response to his questions, and tried to answer them in a way she hoped he'd pick up on.

"The remote in my hands is called a controller, and it's hooked up to that box over on top of the TV." She nodded over to it, pausing in order to concentrate on jumping on a series of turtles. "You press a button and it moves the man on the screen. You just gotta learn how to play it right, and then you can beat this game in under ten minutes." She was a little proud of that, and was in every way bragging.

There was a second controller attached to the system, and she nodded down to it, and reached over to restart the system. "Go on, pick up the other one. You can be the Luigi to my Mario, and give it a try." She smiled, hoping to encourage him to do it. There wasn't any better way to learn how to do something than by hands on experience.

Carter gingerly picked up the controller, as if afraid that he'd break it if he pushed the wrong button. After a little experimentation with pushing the buttons in varying orders he finally grasped the purpose of the D-pad and Luigi was merrily wandering back and forth across the screen.

Unfortunately a Goomba happened.

"What's that mean?" he asked, distressed. "I didn't mean to make him do that, now he's not even on the screen anymore." Luigi'd made a little hop and then fallen down, and no amount of pushing of the up button would make him rise again.

"Don't worry, he'll come back. I go for a turn, and then you go again. You got three chances to live, then it's game over. " She pauses for a beat, "Unless you get extra men. You gotta get a hundred coins or find a green mushroom for that." She glanced over at him from the corner of her eye, and then pointed over at Mario on the screen.

"Just memorize what I do on my turn and you'll be doing okay for yourself."

She was surprised at herself for being able to actually play co-op with someone, since she usually was so competitive that she had to be the best at anything she touched, but this was just a good way to forget that she was currently locked up with no sign of being able to get out.

"I'm Jo, by the way." She finally thought to introduce herself, as she had Mario jump up on a moving platform and then jump over to scale the flag that signaled the end of the level.

Carter watched the TV and her hands carefully, noticing that A = jumping motions and that you were supposed to put the man on top of the other moving things to make them get squashed flat.

"Andrew Carter," he said with a wide grin as he picked up his controller. His attention was split between the screen and his hands as he tried to make sure he was pressing all the right buttons to keep from 'dying'. "This is really something, this game. What's it called?"

Luigi wandered back and forth uncertainly as Carter's game started up. He slowly approached a marching Goomba and waited until the very last second to jump on it, laughing as he did so. "I think I got that one!" he said happily as he went on to jump at a few coin blocks.

"Super Mario Brothers, I think. Or something like that, anyways." She watched him move Luigi across the screen and smiled, nodding when he did things right. Her eyes flickered back and forth from his hands on the controller to the TV screen, and she'd occasionally point out when he needed to jump, or when she thought there was a secret pipe that he needed to try and go down.

"How come you've never seen anything like this before?" She questioned casually, glancing up over at him briefly. She held her own remote in her hands and tossed it back and forth between them, eager to stay busy and focused on doing something. "These things have been around for going on thirty years where I'm from."

'Super' was right. Carter laughed gleefully as he managed to make Luigi go down the pipe, after figuring out you needed to press the down button instead of just jumping inside the little construct. It was so simple and yet so much fun?

"Nothing like it where I'm from." He did some quick math in his head. "They won't be going for forty years where I'm from. We're kinda primitive that way." Jump jump awwww. Carter frowned as a turtle shell came back to hit his poor Italian brother in the face. Jo's turn, he supposed.

"Good turn." She figured encouraging the guy was better than cheering for the fact that it was her turn again, which was what she actually wanted to do. But Jo was trying out the whole civilized manners thing, something her mom would have paid good money to see. She had a feeling that if she didn't play nice, the game would be taken away and she'd be escorted over to do something else.

She focused on the screen once again as she played, rushing through the level without hopping on all the turtles and mushrooms. "So this place not only brings in people from all over, but from all different times too? That's good to know." Real great to know. Maybe her mom would be able to show up, after all.

"Mhm. So all this stuff is all new to me." Carter studied her movements with a serious, dedicated expression, as if this was intense serious businses rather than a simple game. When it came his turn he grabbed up the controller gleefully, doing his best to jump on every single goomba and turtle with perfect timing.

"Do they have a lot of games like this around here?" he asked, after he'd fallen off a cliff and give the game another pout. At least he'd gone longer this time. Boy, it was kinda embarrassing to be shown up by a girl, but he at least had an excuse. Jo had probably grown up with...Super Maria Sisters or whatever the female version of the game was.

"At least it's a classic. Some of the new games where I'm from are total trash. Not things like this, though." She grinned, leaning over to rest her elbow on the arm of the chair she was in. Her chin rested in the palm of her hand,and she watched him up until he jumped off a cliff and killed himself.

"You're doing better, don't worry."

She was unable to help a triumphant little laugh as she took the controller back into her hands, and started playing another turn. She wasn't outright saying this was a competition, but in her head, it definitely was.

"I'm not too sure what they do and don't have around this place, I just woke up here this morning. It's all brand new to me." Which sucked, but there wasn't much she could do about it.

Day 52: Game Room

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