damned_institute | Day 54: Sun Room

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Day 54: Sun Room

[From here. All your top posts shall be mine.]

Peter entered the Sun Room with a dour expression. Goody, he was the first one here. Fancy that. Pick of the couches was his then. Eeeny meeny miney...moe. Peter stalked over to what he knew from experience was the fluffiest couch in the room and eased himself into its downy soft embrace. Ordinarily he would have just pounced on that sucker, but yeah. His arm was in a sling for a reason. He sighed and wormed his way into a full body sprawl. He didn't care if it was irresponsible of him. This shift's only mission was to remain as still as possible.

Of course, being the first one in here had some stipulations. With great opportunity came great responsibility. Which today, came in the form of a soft meow from below. Then the sound of puncturing fabric, advancing upwards towards him. More meows, independent of one another and even more tiny punctures.

Peter Parker was now officially the cat sitter.

"...Oh hi... lonely kittens," he said uneasily as the first scrambled over the edge of the cushion. It padded towards his face. "No no, kittens don't belong near faces." He gently picked it up and put it on his chest. Two more crawled over the edge.

He had never really had a pet growing up. And he didn't hang out with a lot of people with cats or dogs, either. So of course, he didn't have a good idea of how to properly handle most animals without ticking them off. It looked like he was going to have to make up for lost time now, as the cats' numbers swelled to four. Two were exploring his legs, another batted at a fraying string on his sling, and the first stumbled back towards his face and mewed plaintively. Peter frowned and gave it a ginger pat on the head. That seemed to to the trick. He put it back on his chest again and scratched behind its ears.

"You guys had better not start doing that claw thing on my leg. I can't reach right now, but revenge will be mine if you do."

"Meeeeew!"

"I'm still petting you! Geez."

[For Elle Bishop.]

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Badd teased his lips with his thumb. "Scuttlebutt on the bulletin board is that he's been 'released'. Which I understand is code for an MIA or a bodybag." And good riddance. The bastard had needed 'releasing' for years.

Badd set his mind into detective mode. He'd trust Skye for now, there was a difference between caution and indiscriminate paranoia. Accept the amnesia as given. Work from there.

"Drugs?" he offered. "Someone messing with your head. I'm not a narcotics man but it's possible." December 12th, where would that put her? "So you don't remember a thing about the trial. That's mighty confusing...they blocked out yours but didn't bother covering mine or Gant's. What the hell's the pattern here?"

He refused to believe there was some sort of alien abduction or magic going on here. Once he started believing that nonsense he might as well resign himself to insanity and believe the lies completely.

"All entirely plausible. I'm beginning to think it's merely a distraction. Figuring out the missing pieces certainly consumed the greater part of my first few days here." Somehow, that was harder to admit than acknowledging her crimes. She'd let someone else call the shots, again, this time without even realizing it. That stung, as did the flat refusal on Badd's face. Would he believe her if she'd stayed a detective? Worked her way up to her position honestly?

No. No more than she'd have believed half of what she'd been told on her first day, except that she'd seen it.

"But enough of that. You must have questions. All I ask is that you at least listen to the answers. You'll have the evidence sooner than you'd like." Attacks, torture, or merely misbehaving doors; all of them would be explanation enough, but she hated leaving it to that.

Finally, someone willing to give him straight answers and Badd found himself unsure even where to start. It was so rare that he sat down with someone whose answers he could trust.

"I was in a car, being driven back from court. I blacked out and I woke up here with a different name and a stupid shirt, no memory of any time in between. Is that everyone's story?"

It occurred to him that if Lana really didn't remember anything from the last three and a half years, then she'd have absolutely no idea what had happened with the Yatagarasu investigation. Of all people she'd be one to understand breaking the law for a good cause but it might still lessen his credibility. And it would also make a good litmus test. If she exhibited any knowledge of events past her supposed amnesia...well, it would be very telling indeed.

"I was asleep. At home, in bed. But yes, the stories match. To an extent that could only come from some sort of orchestration." So far, so good. There wasn't much more Lana could say without entering the realm of science fiction, but they had to go there eventually.

"Some people wake up at night, some during the day, and arrivals appear to be clustered in groups. Sometimes they're announced on the intercom, but Doctor Landel is anything but reliable in his...pronouncements." He hadn't mentioned the nights, yet; had he managed to go an entire one without encountering anything out of the ordinary? Aside from a prison that did away with the physical bars and relied on teleportation?

"The differences in our last memories, though, are only a small part of the story. Many people's last memory doesn't include Earth, or the twenty-first century." She looked Badd dead in the eye, challenging him to deny that she was telling the unvarnished truth. The only thing she'd omitted was that she'd come to believe those memories to be fact, rather than well-entrenched fabrication.

Badd nodded, believing her but missing the point entirely. "The crazies, yeah? My guess is they're a smokescreen. They put in real psychos to make the place seem more authentic. Now, who they're trying to fool, that's another question."

He pondered, rubbing the stubble on his cheek. "Do you have any idea where we are? It was coming up on an L.A. summer when I fell asleep and now it's freezing outside." If they were messing with everyone else's heads that could easily mean that they'd messed with Badd's too...he might not even be when he thought he was and there was some huge chunk of his life that was missing. Badd found that thought unnerving to the point of nausea and put it aside. Basics first. Besides, it couldn't have been years, not with Kay as a benchmark.

Badd put a hand to his head. The effects of the gas were fading but putting this place together was really making his head hurt.

He didn't believe her. That was probably a good sign, all things considered. Anyone who could just accept this place -- well, they could be from a world where this sort of thing was normal, but that was beside the point. Badd wasn't, and it would take something more than a disgraced ex-Prosecutor to convince him. She would wait to point him in the direction of either Javert or Ratigan until he had. No sense in antagonizing potential allies, on either side.

"I'm not entirely sure. No one is. I've heard rumors putting us in the Eastern United States. New Jersey, although that might be entirely due to observer bias." Lana hadn't ever been to New Jersey, but Los Angeles wasn't much like it was on T.V., either. "The nearest town is called Doyleton, and it's been as thoroughly censored as this place. No newspapers, no addresses, no books dated after 2008 or so. I've been all over it."

She paused to let that sink in. Controlling the grounds of a small asylum was simple, but an entire town? Full of people ostensibly free to live their lives? It was like a Disney theme park writ large, and with zombies instead of singing mice.

Badd soaked up the information slowly.

"This is much bigger than us, isn't it?" he said. "There's no pattern to the population, we're not even all from the same country if Niikura was giving me the straight truth and there's kids here way too young to be worth anything criminally speaking. The cost of a gaslighting scheme this big must be immense." He'd thought the law enforcement route was a good tie, but they hadn't even worked the same cases and it wouldn't explain what Kay and Ema might be doing here. And while he hadn't gone and interviewed the entire patient population, a lot of them just didn't look like cop material and weren't old enough to be lawyers.

Paying off an entire town, reworking the world to be 2008, bringing in people from every life and then cleaning out their brains so they couldn't even remember significant chunks of their own lives. Maybe that was why they had real crazies here, they were the failed experiments. But who would ever have the power to pull this off, let alone the money and purpose?

Badd ran a firm hand over his face, dragging his wrinkled skin down his cheeks. "Damn," he said wearily. "I could really use a sucker right now. Are you sure you can't remember a single thing past 2016? Not even what happened with Gant?"

If she couldn't remember what happened with that he might still be pushing her around. And Badd didn't intend on letting the bastard have even a lick of his former power here.

"There's one born every minute," Lana quipped, her expression still habitually blank.

She was going to have to go through this every time, wasn't she. It wasn't so much that she resented it; she had done those things, after all. It was more that there were so many more important things to tell him. Gant was small fry, here. Martin Landel had done what the LA justice system could not, even after conviction; make the man insignificant.

"If you mean the part where he killed Detective Goodman, no, I don't remember that. The part where he blackmailed over Joe Darke's death into keeping quiet, yes. I assure you, that's all in the past."

"I did agree not to make too much of a fuss over the bulletin. He's a capable investigator, when he chooses to be." She looked Badd dead in the eye; it was the only proof of her sincerity she could provide. "And he has a vested interest in working with the team, as long as we're here. I've got people keeping an eye on him, though, and I suggest you do likewise."

She took a deep breath, and moved the conversation back to safer ground.

"As for patterns, there's a large group of law enforcement and military personnel, but it's not universal. High numbers of former members of those groups as well. And their families, as I'm sure you've noticed." She hadn't realized he was close to Faraday's daughter before, but obviously he was; it was good she had someone to look out for her.

"If it's people who've pissed off criminal groups, that'd explain why there's family members here too. And punks like Niikura who call themselves vigilantes." It was a scrap, but it was a pattern. Badd would take it, same as he took Lana's dead-on stare and met it with the same. "But I'm not trusting Gant. He can investigate as much as he wants, but he's as much a suspect as anyone else here."

Gant was not insignificant. Him being in a place this cozy, as confusing as it was, was not justice and Badd felt the Yatagarasu impulse rise up in him again. But what could he do? There wasn't anything he could steal besides his life and that was not a line he was going to cross until Gant forced his hand. Let him go, Badd, bigger issues.

"I'm not a detective anymore," he explained. Skye might as well know that much. "If I hadn't retired they'd have kicked me out anyway, I'm sixty now. And with Kay here my priorities are a bit more personal."

"Once a detective, always a detective. I'm not sure it's so easy to stop, hmm?" Two years of prosecution and she still missed it, some days. At least the way it had been. She hadn't expected to enjoy it; becoming a detective had been a means to an end, but there was something satisfying about assembling bits and pieces into a picture that never got old.

"I'm afraid Gant's crimes pale in comparison to what you'll see here. Watch her." Like I wasn't able to watch Ema. "Patients are taken at night for experiments, or brainwashed into attacking each other. Watch her, and keep her close. Do you know who her roommate is?"

"No idea. She won't hold still, I think she's avoiding me. I searched every room on the women's block last night and she'd run off." Probably because he hadn't believed her. He couldn't blame a girl her age for rebelling...especially after finding out he'd been lying to her all these years.

Damn. One of Badd's hands tightened into a fist, though his expression remained stony and emotionless. He wanted to say he wouldn't let that happen to her, but he couldn't. He'd failed her too much. He let her father die one room away from him by a woman he'd trusted and he'd let that same woman put a gun to her head and nearly walk off with her. "Who would do this?" he asked softly. "To kids. To old useless men. Why?"

"Answer that, and we'd be halfway to finding our way out." You could build a case with evidence and no motive, but they never quite made sense. Even Darke had made a horrible kind of sense. One thing had led to another, except where a normal person might have a nervous breakdown, Darke started killing people.

"Why does anyone do terrible things?" she said, but it wasn't a question. "We've both seen it. The question is -- what does Martin Landel see. What links us all together in his mind, besides our relationships with each other?" That could be enough, but then the obvious question was who had come first. Prosecutor Edgeworth, perhaps, but for all his ability he was no more interesting a test subject than any of the rest of them.

"Ema...well, she didn't have a perfect life, but she was a pretty ordinary teenager. There's nothing unusual to single her out for this at all, except that she's my sister." Unless Prosecutor Gavin knews something, but he knew Ema at Lana's age. And they'd both be chasing their tails something fierce if she tried bringing that up again.

Badd shook his head, a slight twitch that was barely a movement. "Revenge. Punish the families to hurt the people who tried to take you down. You heard about what happened with von Karma and Miles Edgeworth, right?" Shame he'd been 'released', Badd would have adored giving him a full piece of his mind as a side order of a punch to the face. The pompous rat been unbearable even when it was just rumors of forgeries and witness intimidation.

"Landel doesn't have anything against us personally. But there's a lot of crooks who'd pay to know that the detective who took them down or the prosecutor who got them sentenced is going to spend the rest of their lives locked up in a madhouse." Badd imagined himself on in chains on an auction block, standing in front of a crowd of corrupt businessmen and petty thugs all clamoring to be the one who dispensed brutal revenge on the ex-detective. Hell, if his memory was altered, it could have happened that way. "They pay to make sure we're the ones selected and it helps fund Landel's crazy experiments."

What happened with von Karma and Miles Edgeworth?

But Badd was still going on, spinning a theory that would be less far-fetched if she hadn't fought off a zombie herself with a damned candlestick, like this was all some kind of perverse game of Clue rather than their lives hanging in the balance. A nice theory, but the evidence had some gaping holes. Planet-sized, as it happened.

She'd take things in order, and start with the question he could answer.

"Hold it!" Her notebook came down on her knees with a sharp crack. "What do you mean about von Karma?" He hadn't been complicit in Gant's schemes, had he? True, his methods had raised a number of eyebrows, two of them hers, on occasion, but she'd never seen solid proof of anything. Or did he mean Franziska?

Badd didn't jump at the sudden noise, he was far too well-trained for it. All he did was twitch his fingers inward, towards where his gun would have been, and then settle again. "Well, I've heard two stories. One from Gant is that he was here until a few days ago and then just disappeared. 'Released', using their code."

Another twist of fingertips next to his lip, still teasing that invisible lollipop stick. "The other is that he was arrested about three years ago, mainly for murder but they racked up a lot more charges after the fact. And that's the story I got out of the papers, so pardon me if I trust them more than laughing boy. I was sure he'd done the hemp fandango months ago, but I suppose you can't get all the nice things in life."

If Manfred von Karma really had been here, amoung all these people who couldn't remember who he was, he'd have even more pull than Gant. Badd really hoped the prosecutor was down for good this time, there might have been some death penalty calls that made him feel uneasy but for von Karma he'd pay for the rope and tie the noose. It was the same as it had been with Gant--they'd betrayed their office for personal gain, not justice, and that was disgusting beyond measure.

Murder. First-degree, too, if Badd's estimation of the verdict held true, and she had no reason to doubt him.

A number of pieces fell into place. Manfred von Karma's careful questioning and general reticence; the man hadn't earned his position by being shy, after all. And Franziska's...well, really, everything about her, from what little Lana had witnessed. She sat quietly, pulling the different threads together.

The fact that Prosecutor Gavin -- and Ema -- even had a department left to hire him had gone from a small pittance to assuage her guilt to downright surprising. Maybe they'd be desperate enough to let an ex-Prosecutor, ex-Detective make the coffee and carry the files once in a while. Working with Ema had been something she'd promised just to get Ema to back off to something she couldn't help but want, as impossible as it might seem.

"Well, that is a surprise. How many of us are hiding skeletons in our closets, do you think?" It was phrased as an idle observation, but she was watching the line closely; Badd had never explicitly claimed his retirement as voluntary, after all.

Oh, she had no idea. Badd sat back idly, looking at the hand that would have held his trademark mirror. There was nothing behind him but the wall, or it was when he sat down, but reality seemed to be shifting on him a lot today. "We all have skeletons, Skye. First rule of being a detective is that everyone's hiding something nasty and the people pretending to uphold the law are never exceptions."

A brief pause.

"Except maybe Dick Gumshoe. I'm not sure he's even got his own skeleton in all that fluff and squish, let alone a spare for the closet." Even when he'd nearly arrested the big lug for Byrne's murder he hadn't really believed that Gumshoe had done it. He'd just wanted someone to blame for his own failings. If Edgeworth hadn't thrown his flashy logic around Badd would have eventually calmed down and turned him loose, both motive and opportunity were flimsier than wet tissue.

An honest, open smile spread across Lana's face at the mention of Detective Gumshoe. She hadn't thought much of the man, before coming here. Quite literally; aside from walking past him wearing out the carpet -- and the couches -- outside Edgeworth's office, she'd barely noticed his existence.

Then he'd given her a surprisingly professional rundown of her case, with details that meant he'd been intimately involved in seeing it through. She'd have to give him a raise, if she ever got a chance to finish her tenure. Even a hefty percentage wouldn't make a discernible difference in the budget, after all.

"Very well. Keep your skeletons, Badd, and I won't ask again." She leaned back, and recrossed her legs. "Just answer me one thing -- why is Byrne Faraday's daughter claiming to have taken the Yatagarasu's mantle, and what are you going to do about it?"

That was two questions, and she didn't expect a straight answer to either. That wasn't what she was aiming for. All she wanted was the assurance that Badd had the girl's best interest at heart; she clearly adored him, but she hadn't gotten a good read on his own feelings. There were some things she could forgive -- and some she couldn't.

No clear way of knowing how much Skye knew, or more importantly how much she suspected. Given Gant's reaction he doubted she knew what his skeleton was but it was entirely possible Kay, in her boundless enthusiasm, had mentioned who her father was.

Foolish little girl. Just because the Yatagarasu had justice on its side, didn't mean that everyone would see it that way. To corrupt businessmen and crooks they were a danger, to the law they were traitors. Kay aside the only person who really seemed to like them was the media and that was probably because the Yatagarasu kept feeding them the really juicy stories.

"I'm going to get her out of here, that's what I'm going to do," he said, eyes on the door and his voice a soft growl. "The rest doesn't matter." It was a complete nonanswer, but it was still the truth.

"Fair enough." He didn't trust her, that was clear, and she couldn't blame him. "Ema's taken quite a shine to her." It was obvious why; the girl was a fountain of youthful optimism, undaunted by anything. That could get her in serious trouble, here or back home, but it was infectious.

Lana did hope that the next time she saw the Yatagarasu symbol, it wasn't over a headline and a mugshot of the girl. Bending the law seemed like such an easy solution, when criminals evaded justice, but it only led to tragedy.

"Please, if there's anything I can do, don't hesitate to ask." An ambiguous offer for a non-answer; if he'd done his homework half as capably as his reputation assured her, he'd know that she wouldn't let a child come to harm as long as there was anything she could do about it.

From what little Badd knew of Ema, that wasn't surprising. They sounded like two giggly teenage peas in a pod.

"I'll keep it in mind. For now our best asset's information, so let's stay in touch." He could trust her to leave her eyes and ears open. She was a good detective.

Badd sat forward, voice quiet and conspiratorial. He was happy to spread Gant's reputation around, but Skye deserved some dignity. "For what it's worth," he murmured. "I never judged you for what you did. I know what it's like. If someone threatened Kay there's no law I wouldn't break to keep her safe. Maybe you didn't do the right thing by the courts, but you did what you had to."

He couldn't say that he'd have done the same in her place, because he was a different person. For the evidence he'd have pulled a Yatagarasu and stolen it, then thrown it in the lake or destroyed it. For the 'witness'...well. Maybe he'd lectured Niikura on how murder was not the answer, but with Kay in play it would have been a very different story. That wasn't justice. That was just personal.

"Thank you." Not many people would take that as a kindness, but Lana did. An open smile spread across her face.

"I was wrong, you know. It wasn't the right thing to do. If I'd stepped forward...well, who knows what would have happened. Remember that, if you will." She hadn't realized he and Kay were nearly that close, but it seemed he'd almost stepped in loco parentis for the absent Byrne.

He was old enough, and scarred enough, that all of these lessons were likely ones he'd learned, and judged the value of, long ago, but she couldn't help it. Some things only experience could bring, and if he had managed to dodge this lesson as well as he'd dodged bullets, she hoped he'd never need to learn it.

Badd shrugged. "You were boxed in. Even an accusation of manslaughter would have torpedoed her life and reputation and there's nothing saying he wouldn't have successfully framed her if you'd brought it to trial. That defense attorney got lucky."

Badd and Kay hadn't actually had a lot of contact after she moved in with her mom's family. They had a few phone calls and day trips to LA, but nothing huge. In a way he had been grateful that she was spending her time far, far away from the sole remaining member of the doomed Yatagarasu; it was safer that way. Not that it stopped her from getting into trouble on her own (god, if Lang hadn't been there...), but that was again the Yatagarasu's fault.

He'd failed her father and he'd very nearly failed her, he wasn't going to let history repeat itself in this horrible place.

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Day 54: Sun Room

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