The intercom jingle was slightly different for this shift, almost as if it had gone up in quality. The Head Doctor gave a sigh of relief, his own voice clear as a bell despite the usual electronic buzz.

"Hello, everyone – from our new and improved intercom system! We've had electronics rehauling our circuitry, and you can hear the result quite nicely! A whole bunch of improvement! Right, anyway...

"As I'm sure you've noticed, we have a whole new bunch of patients that have joined us recently, and because of the changes in our roster, we've updated our roommate assignments, so some of you might be enjoying the company of someone entirely new tonight! Please be polite and friendly to anyone you might encounter!

"Which brings us to... dinner! Tonight, we'll be having a delicious 'bento box' meal consisting of fish and vegetable tempura along with chicken teriyaki, a bowl of steamed rice, miso soup, salad, and... green tea! Decaffeinated, of course. We can't have you bouncing from wall to wall when there's sleep to be had! Our usual assorted drinks and alternative meals are also available. Oh, and... dessert! Green tea ice cream, with a topping of red bean paste.

"I think that's all for now! I'll speak to you once more before bed time."

The intercom clicked off.

[ All room threads go in response to this post; please post your character's room number as the subject line of the initial post. Please refer to the updated room assignments before posting. Thank you! ]

Lunch had been good. It was amazing how far some decent pastrami could go toward mellowing Venkman out after a session. He wouldn't have called the round with Jimmy all bad, considering they hadn't ended things in a standoff or yelling at each other, but it hadn't exactly been a rip-roaring good time, either. Those bruises were a hard thing to ignore, and Jimmy's increase in attitude hadn't been fun to deal with. But damned if a full stomach and some fresh air couldn't work miracles on him when the planets were in line. Or something like that.

Now he got to deal with one of the new guys. "Okay, let's see who we're dealing with here," Venkman said to himself as he settled back into his office chair and pulled out the next file for the day. Langdon Caul, age 30, speaker of multiple languages, highly intelligent...

He had to put the file back down at that, tilting his head at it like it had just told him a bad joke. What was with all these super geniuses he kept getting? Did everyone in the whole damn institute break down because they couldn't stand the thought of an A-sans-plus on their school papers? Or did Landel just somehow figure that a disgraced former Ghostbuster would be the absolute perfect person to soothe the souls of people with embarrassingly high IQs? Was it because of his work with Ray and Egon? There was a difference between being friends with a couple of overachieving eggheads and wanting to spend every waking moment with those sorts of people.

"Here's hoping you're more Jimmy and less Danny or Ingram," Venkman sighed to himself as he started leafing through the file again.

[Abe]

[from here]

It was a race. A fight against patience and a Song's call. Still, the sedation's dredges churned through him. Two close at hand had a potent effect--much like the night that they were left in that town, and the morning after. Rubedo had came then. Came for them like something out of place, and wasn't that so ironic afterwards--when Albedo knew what he knew now? How many times would a twin appear to abandon him to harshly? How many times would Rubedo make promises only to break them--tear them to pieces like he did Albedo--in the perfectly precise way of those who knew how to break you down because they knew you so perfectly.

Was that how Rubedo had killed him? Or had Albedo forced him to it? His twin wouldn't say before, and asking now was too much like dead blood rotting in veins--he no longer cared, no longer needed to know how easily it was for his twin to rip him asunder. How joyous Rubedo must have been. If that night was any hint, his twin hated him with a passion to rival man's hatred toward god. And wasn't it the same. This. In ways it was the same. An existence meted out, for what it's worth, and then you were simply trapped in it. Trapped in it and stuck stagnant where you were, bound by that other, unless you forced your hatred forward to strike down the other.

To kill god? It seemed too quaint to entertain.

Be it that he woke as the last shift was ending, Albedo had been escorted to the cafeteria early. He took what was offered without a word, sat in the back without a sound, and sipped at the water put in front of him politely; a hand curled around the cup lightly, fingers loose. Eyes burned into the entrance--for Nigredo or Rubedo, either would suffice. The doubt that his twin would come to him was faulty--to ignore them for a week and then vanish as if they were nothing spoke of only distain, whatever Nigredo chose to believe. The eldest of them hated them both. This was truth. The only truth that Rubedo had shown Albedo, in thought, word, action, and deed, in the two weeks that they had shared here.

So Rubedo was to kill him. Well. Never say Albedo accepted his destiny. Yes, he would die by his twin's hand. But first he would rip Rubedo's throat out, claw out his eyes and press them into his beloved's mouth--see the lies you spew--lift his tenderly beating heart for all to see and then crush it.

This, Rubedo, is what you've done to me.

[...for the twin.]

Well, that put a damper on any swimming plans. Abe could hardly leave L to his fate, he had enough guilt for what had happened to Scarecrow and nobody deserved such tortures. He packed up quickly, slipping the ring onto his finger (if he made it outside again he'd need to mark the place as Landel had said) and snapping the BPRD-issue belt around his waist with a sense of urgency.

Of course he probably wouldn't do very much damage with a baseball bat (he really needed to get his hand on a better weapon, even a steel pipe would be more useful) but Landel had defenses up for pure brutes. A trained agent of the occult might be far more effective than a rocket launcher.

That was assuming he made it there in time.

[To here.]

[From here.]

After two consecutive nights of traveling with his roommate, Edgar found it strange to have left him behind; however, they could cover more ground apart, and Gren would probably be concerned if he knew he had his heart set on returning to the courtyard shed. While it was true he'd recover faster if he didn't spend his nights trekking the grounds, it seemed like a waste of time. It was apparent that those taken for torture sessions couldn't wait.

Now, deciding which path to take to the courtyard was the tricky part. The shortest route was to cross the wall as they had the night before, but a night wandering the hills with torn stitches had taught him a lesson he wasn't keen to repeat; the other option was to travel through the Sun Room and cafeteria- both large areas, one having had a monster looming above it in past nights. Ultimately, neither was going to be safe. It was just as likely something would be outside.

Edgar had chanced the wall once already, so it seemed only fair to give the other path a go.

[To here.]

[from here and waiting for the opposite one.~]

The hall was as empty as she had seen it. Silence glistened as severe as any palpable source. Voices echoed in the distance, but here there was nothing. No one. No sounds, but the dull creaks of a settling building and shifting ghosts. Last night gave rise to a new awareness. She did not take the emptiness at face value, did not trust the lack of others for what it was. The one on the board had offered the possibility of a monster, but Rei knew the feel of another body against her.

No, her assailant had been human. This remained fact. Over the edge of her plug suit, the bandage felt heavy. Weighted. A reminder to be productive if nothing else. She needed no other reason to devalue her own worth.

[down to here]

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]

[ From here! ]

Haseo let out a small breath once the now-familiar moment of disorientation had gone and he got a look around at his new surroundings. It might have been yet another room he didn't recognize, but if nothing else he was glad just to be out of the one with the caged monsters. What was irritating was how the more they explored the institute in this manner, the more Haseo realized just how little he'd managed to get around during the week he'd been there. It might have been a reasonably large building, but come on... most dungeons were bigger.

At least there wasn't any immediate danger to be seen, though he wasn't to be fooled again and made sure to shine his flashlight into the corners of the floor and ceiling in search of zombies or giant arthropods or-- whatever else might decide his party looked tastier than the dust they'd apparently been eating instead. Seeing the things in the previous room had definitely made his imagination a little more active.

"Well... now what?" he asked after that, leaning on the counter and throwing an exasperated look at the two accompanying him. As much as he wanted to have enough answers to be effective, the whole thing with the doors behaving like Chaos Gates gone random made his head hurt a little. If there was a pattern, it was lost on him.

[From here.]

And this was not the Sun Room. Or any room at Landel's that he'd seen. The odd twisting feeling made Abe's hand slip from the door handle against his will and it slammed shut, leaving him in a far more cramped room that smelled faintly of animal food and wood shavings. "What in the world?" he whispered as he reached for his flashlight.

It looked like some kind of storeroom or shop, with a counter and things sitting on shelves. A bag at Abe's feet was labeled as kitty litter (a substance that Abe was, unfortunately, fairly familiar with)

Tobias still held on his arm, Abe crept forward into the new place. "I don't suppose this is familiar to you?" he asked, holding his arm out slightly as if to give the hawk a better view. Doors that went to more than one place weren't unfamiliar to him, but he hadn't done anything unusual this time. Save carrying a bird, but the bird hadn't seemed to expect a change either.

Other than catch a glimpse of a few book spines and the first floor, McCoy hadn't gotten the chance check out the store fully. He'd still managed to uncover a few interesting things before he left. It wasn't exactly the answer, or even close to it, about how to get out of here, or what they had planned for them, or even who these people really were. What it did give them was just a little better picture of what they were dealing with. Venkman had been his usual self, complete with the sarcasm and sass, but he'd also said plenty.

It did tell him that the staff wasn't as unified as he'd thought. 'Course, Venkman could just be the odd man out. That fact wouldn't surprise him, considering that personality of his. But supposing that the other doctors weren't completely fooled by the whole charade, or if they weren't fully on-board...

It was raining more heavily by the time McCoy left the building. As much as he wanted to stay behind, where it was dry and he wasn't flirting with the flu, he had his orders. These grounds weren't going to cover themselves.


[For Jim]

Shinji was worried. He'd been waiting for a while - Kaworu still hadn't arrived. He didn't know why and as always his insecurities had begun to flare up. Maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe he didn't really want to see Shinji. Maybe he'd simply been hallucinating the whole thing. Shinji glanced down the darkened hallway, flashlight dangling from his hand. He didn't paticularly want to go out - what if he and Kaworu missed each other? On the other hand, what if something had happened to Kaworu?

He could not fathom the idea that Kaworu would simply turn away from him, despite his own insecurities. He'd been too focused on Shinji, too intent, too sincere for even Shinji's doubts to chase away. Shinji gnawed on his lower lip for a moment, internal debate raging. Should he go looking for him? Should he stay? Reluctantly and with a huge effort of will, he tugged away from the wall next to his door and clicked on his flashlight. He had to find Kaworu. He couldn't just spend the night wondering and worrying. If something had happened to him and Shinji did nothing, he'd never forgive himself. Not after Toji. Not after everything.

He set off into the darkness, still hoping that Kaworu would turn the corner at any minute.

_{[To here.]}

"I could tell you some stories," Yuffie suggested brightly, "of unquestionable legality." Illegality, that was. Petty little things like the law didn't usually mean very much to her, except for the times when she had to uphold it. Always fun for the breaking, though, the law, and messy for the clean-up. Just the way she liked it.

Her nurse looked like she wanted to rub her temples. With sandpaper. "No, thank you," she said instead. "Why don't you run along, now?" Please!, was the unspoken request. Before I spontaneously combust. Or commit various acts of violence that would have me arrested, or placed in a loony bin. Like this one. Yuffie had quite a bit of fun filling in the blanks other people left. Sometimes she did it outloud, just to see the reaction; sometimes she kept it to herself. It really, really depended.

"Don't mind if I do!"

She took off, bolting out into the Courtyard. The weather was dour, overcast and threatening rain, but Yuffie didn't care. She'd refused a coat on principle, and had found herself bargaining: Fine, fine, Plucky had conced she could go without a coat, but unless she had at least a sweatshirt on, there'd be no outside-time for her. She ran a little ways down the dirt path, then toppled herself into a series of cartwheels. Straighten, run. Cartwheel. Straighten, run, just for the sheer sake of movement, and the whip of the wind. She laughed a little giddily, checking her gait down to a jog. Gawd, Leviathan, she'd needed this. Right from the get-go, she'd needed this. Every day she spent cooped up in side, the more nervous energy she had.

Nanaki had helped, she realized. Sort of. He'd…helped. In a way. His presence and everything that was wrong with it weighed on her, for sure, but he was still Nanaki. He didn't deserve to be here, didn't deserve to be stuck in a body that he hated and couldn't use, but all the same, she found herself glad to have him.

Yuffie started to hum, as she jogged leisurely around the Courtyard. A cheery little tune, one of her favorites; no, it was her favorite. A Wutaian walking song, with the roughly translated title of Pathway After the Rain. The pace stayed even but the tune picked up, and she found herself half-singing snatches of the lyrics to herself. It felt like ages since she'd last said anything in her native tongue, at least outloud; she wrote in it all the time.

[The Doctor]

Shinji once again lingered on the threshold of his room, debating on whether he truly wanted to step out into the dark, uninviting hallways. The sense of claustrophobia, of being watched, of being enclosed were already starting to creep up on him. He rubbed at his arms, swallowing softly. He paused to pick up his flashlight, rolling it back and forth between his two hands before he finally stepped out.

Again, he felt hideously vulnerable. He wanted to find Kaworu and Asuka though. He wanted to make sure they were alright. The guilt and fear of letting them down overrode his own instincts to curl up and hide somewhere, to simply duck and cover until it was all over. If they left or rejected him, who would he have? Who could he turn to?

Nobody. He would be alone again. He didn't want that. He didn't think he could stand that, as much pain as there was involved with becoming close to others.

He pressed on into the darkness.

_{[Moving to here.]}

Yet another intercom jingle sounded, and the nurses, anticipating the Head Doctor's orders, already began grouping around the patients as he began to speak.

"Good evening, everyone and I trust you all enjoyed your fun day of physical activity! I sure wish I had! Aha! Anyway, our dinner tonight is some spaghetti with our ol' homemade Landel's marinara sauce, served with garlic bread and a Caesar salad. Our usual assortment of drinks and vegetarian alternatives is available, and our dessert for tonight is vanilla gelato ice cream with chocolate sauce.

"I do hope that sounds palatable to everyone! I will be speaking with you again shortly!"

The intercom clicked off.

[ All room threads go in response to this post; please post your character's room number as the subject line of the initial post. Find new room assignments here. This shift's intro group is here. ]

It had all been going so well!

Seeing Cloud and Aerith(!) again had brought a now unfamiliar lightness to her shoulders. Work would be harder from here on out, but she wasn't on her own anymore. She was getting a second chance she'd never thought was possible. And then, then they'd trekked outside, totally ready to face the fog and the unknown (privately, the ninja had been a little worried; it couldn't happen again, it just couldn't, but what if it did?)—only to wake up. In their beds. As usual. Gaaaaaawd—!

"I just want you to know," Yuffie informed her nurse, grabbing her journal from the desk on her way out, "that your hair looks spectacularly god-awful today. What did you do, stick your tongue in a socket? I'm not exactly hip on fashion, too busy badass for that fluffy stuff, but—"

Plucky looked ready to plant her face in her hands. Or to plant her hands somewhere else. To her credit, and much to Yuffie's eternal disappointment, she did—tried to do—neither. "One of those days, is it?" the nurse sighed, disapproval incarnate. "Well. You're just going to have to behave; the new batches of patients are due today. We don't want to make a bad impression."

"I am feeling so completely convinced of my wrongdoing," Yuffie confided. They stepped into the cafeteria, practically empty as of yet. The chocolate cake last night had worked a treat, whetting her appetite. Honestly, she was getting sick of pecking at scraps like a runt Chocobo in the snow plains—but not literally, of course. Ew. She got more than enough of that on those damn buses once a week. Now that AVALANCHE really was dropping onto her lap—and remind her to get the hell out of dodge if Barret ever took his turn—she couldn't afford not to keep her strength up. For one, she'd be a liability. For two, she'd get her spine chewed out.

"Fruit," said Plucky, hovering as her charge picked out her choices for the day. Rolling her eyes, Yuffie grabbed an apple, slinging it onto the tray alongside an 'English' sandwich. "That'll do. I'll leave you to your breakfast, now." Somehow, that sounded about as comforting as 'My name is Don Corneo and I am raiding through your panty draw', and Yuffie was stopping that thought right there. Oh, god. Eurk. Bad, bad, bad! Bad, brain. Bad. That—yeah, no. Just, no. 'Sides, the guy was as dead as a doornail, splatted across Da Chao's feet. Dirtying them, really, but somehow Yuffie couldn't bring herself to be sorry about that.

(And it wasn't like the creep'd ever end up here, right? Right!)

She took to a seat, dropping her tray and her journal both onto the table. The book fell pages-down; Yuffie flipped it over, thumbing through to the middle as she worked through her apple. An almost finished map of Gaia stared back at her, neat as she could ever manage. Dots for major locations, squiggles for mountains. Stars for the materia caves, Chocobos for the tracks. All labelled in Wutaian. It was just a little piece of the home she absolutely had to get back to, 'cuz Leviathan knew what kind of trouble they'd be up to their necks in without her.

[For Donna]

Peter woke up suddenly, his body twisting in the bed and then forcing him to catch his breath in pain. Pain, which was coming from his middle because of the thing that had scratched him last night, and after that...

After that, Zach had jumped in front of him like some kind of martyr, like the exact opposite of everything Sylar stood for, to take the next hit for him. It got pretty fuzzy after that, so night must have ended right around then.

The man let out a pained grunt as he straightened himself up in bed. For some reason, he got the feeling that he'd slept in. There was no way for him to really tell without a window in the room, but he just knew. The fact that Sam's bed looked long since vacated was another clue.

Sam, but was he Sam again? Had the brainwashing worn off, as he and Roland had hoped, or was he going to have to go through this nightmare for even longer? He didn't know how long he could handle "Zach" and "Harrison" before he started going batty himself.

Pulling himself out of bed, Peter lifted his shirt and saw that he was tightly bandaged. The scratch most likely wasn't nearly as bad as the bite that "Zach" had received, but it still smarted. He let his shirt fall and then had to deal with a nurse chiding him for sleeping through the morning announcements. Not that Peter really cared at the moment. He was too busy thinking about last night and the fact that in a way, he now owed something to Sylar. Except it hadn't been Sylar. That was something he was sure of now.

Lost in his thoughts, Peter reached the Sun Room right as the rest of the patient populace was trickling in from breakfast. Sighing to himself, he headed over to the bulletin board and then saw a note written in familiar yet unpleasant handwriting. Holding his pen in a vice grip, Peter scribbled out a reply and then stalked over to an armchair and fell into it with a huff.

While Sylar was maddeningly frustrating, there was one good thing about the fact that he was himself again. It meant that Nathan was too.

[For Spock!]

[From here]

Oh, Sun Room. During the day, a place of boredom, lounging meatbags and... sun. But at night, it was a place where one moved quickly and quietly if keeping all your extremities was high on your list of things to do.

Also, one generally tried to be the second group into the room, so that what was left of the first group acted as a distraction to whatever brainwashed meatbag or misshapen monstrosity was stationed there that night.

Unfortunately, they were the first group. And they had someone along who wasn't taking this seriously. If 'Lance' kriffs this up for us, I'm offering him up as a sacrifice to tonight's hostile thing, HK thought grumpily as he scanned the surroundings for a heat signature. "Statement: Nothing yet," he whispered, moving carefully forward.

[from here.]

There seemed to be a lot more options here, Aerith noted as she passed a few doors along the way. Maybe she'd come to center of the building? It was hard to tell, and her sense of direction wasn't fantastic. She was lucky if she'd remember the path she'd taken so whimsically to get here. Stopping in front of a particularly large set of doors, the flower girl took a quick break from her exploration to try and commit to memory all the turns she'd taken to get here from her room.

It was certainly worth noting that she still hadn't heard even a whisper from the Planet. Aerith had always thought she would be thankful to not hear the screams and whispers for once in her life. Now that her wish had been granted, she honestly found it strange and more than a little unsettling. Even in Midgar, she'd had a place that she could always go to if she needed to hear the echo of her mother's voice. If anything Gaia had always given her direction and companionship. Clearly, she'd have to apologize when she got out of this place.

And Aerith Gainsborough would get out of here. One way or another. She had to believe that.

The young woman lifted her flashlight, scanning every inch of the wide hallway that she could. Maybe it would be best to take a moment and collect before she continued on her exploration.

Time to stretch his legs again. Abe set the white bishop aside--he'd spent most of dinner staring it down, in lieu of anything better to focus his attention on. His mind had never come down from that fluffy cloud land of speculation it had been hovering in ever since he got over being terrified of Beatrix, and he spoke only a food-muffled greeting to Statesman.

Scarecrow's suggestion that he find the third floor seemed to be a good one. The problem came in finding a way up there. As far as he could tell the path to the third floor never crossed that of the stairwells between the first and second floors. The area he had explored with Mr. Smith seemed fruitless even without that small creepy child making advances at them, and if the rest were that easy to find someone surely would have found the stairs by now.

Experience and training told Abe that if you were looking for something important it was probably hidden in a place you wouldn't expect. Putting stairs right next to stairs made too much sense, you had to apply some unhuman thinking to figure out where they'd put it. Somewhere people wouldn't go but disguised as somewhere completely normal--of course. The cafeteria. There were doors behind it but there was no reason for people to go into the cafeteria at night because there was nothing of use there. Abe wished he had the emotional energy to feel proud of himself for his cleverness.

He checked the closet before he left intending to see if anything had been put in there since last night. No weapons, no tools or notes, just a single dark wetsuit hanging forlornly from a clotheshanger.

His wetsuit.

Abe took the dark material in hesitant hands and turned it--Sapien was imprinted on the chest. The breathing apparatus was gone, as was the gun, but the belt had the familiar red and gold emblem on it that he'd seen so many times it had been burned onto his overlage retinas. How and why were futile questions to ask here even if it was real, Abe would find no answers from this mad place, but it was here now. Perhaps someone friendly had chosen to give it to him and remind him of what he used to be and of the frail human that he wasn't--for better or for worse, Abe's enthusiasm at being a normal human was severely flagging.

It made sense to take it. The wetsuit would give him a minimal amount of padding and wouldn't be nearly as heavy without the bulky breathing apparatus, the pouches on the belt would help holding anything useful he might find, the goggles might come in handy at some point...he'd be a fool just to leave it in the closet. But it still, in some twisted way, felt as if the BPRD had managed to suck him back in without him even knowing it. Abe donned the top part of his uniform but kept his lightweight pants, then carefully folded the goggles and tucked them into his belt pouch. Snapping the red sword-and-fist belt buckle around his midsection felt like donning a dog collar and he did it without looking down. Necessity only. They didn't own him anymore.

[To here.]

[from here]

Junpei found himself a spot not too far from the door leading out to the hallway. Seriously, if Yukari waned the damn Evoker, she needed to run her mini-skirted ass down here to get it since he wasn't going much farther. It was only fair since he'd trucked down to her block last night.

Setting the bag of stuff on the floor, he leaned against the wall after adjusting the Evoker in the waistband of his jeans. He was not happy with having lost the t-shirt he'd had last night, forced to wear the smiley one again, even if it was turned inside out. He sighed and looked down at the square bandage on his arm. Vampire. He'd been bitten by a vampire.

Just to make sure, the junior checked his teeth. No fangs. Good. He probably would have freaked out if he'd found any. Still... curiosity got the better of him and he peeled half the bandage off to look at the bite. Twin puncture wounds with some redness about them. He poked it.

"Ow." Poking it was not a good idea.

[Hey, Yuka-tan... got any garlic?]