[from here]

The room into which Morrigan stepped was no brighter than the hallway outside, and she stood still in the doorway for several moments as she made sense of the shapes of the furniture. Some sort of dining room? No, it looked more akin to a sitting room than anything used for meals. Used for meetings, perhaps, or lessons. It was hard to discern purpose.

She picked her way over to the tables to search for anything of use, either as a weapon or that might tell her where she was. She found books, first, thin ones with oddly slick pages that, on first contact, had her jerking her hand away to rub it clean on her trousers. It soon became clear that it wasn't any sort of residue left on the pages, however. It was just the nature of the things.

Slippery books. Revolting.

With a mutter of disgust, she continued her search. There had to be something worthwhile somewhere in this place.

Scott had barely gotten a few feet out the door of Tasty Burger when the nurses started blaring their megaphones and shuffling people back indoors. He was definitely getting just a little tired of this, not least due to the dazed and confused mood he had been in since breakfast. Would he get any chance to just walk down a street in a straight line again today? What if he liked the rain, huh? Did the nurses think about that? ...Okay, he didn't like the rain, but that was beside the point. The point was that seeing more of the town was turning into pretty much a non-option.

He was caught by a nurse in front of the door to a local toy shop, and before he could get out so much as a protesting yelp, he was hurried inside with a strong, encouraging shove.  Great, thought Scott, reluctantly peeling off his coat again as he wandered down one of the back aisles and resigned himself to staying. What am I gonna do in here? It's a toy store in Outer Bumblesticks. What are they going to have to keep my mind off things? Dolls? Tin soldiers? Teddy bears? This is gonna su— "HEY is that Godzilla?"

Sure enough, it was. Or rather, it was a large Godzilla action figure sitting on a shelf just ahead of him. The toy was wired into the box good and tight, but the front was open to allow kids to test out the toy's arms and sound before buying. Drawn inexorably to the blinding red "TRY ME!" written on it, Scott pulled the box down and pressed the button on the back of Godzilla's head. 

"AAEEEEEAAAAARRRR."

The roar was small and tinny, but it made Scott grin a little.

"Heheh."

"AAEEEEEAAAAARRRR."

"Heheheheh."

"AAEEEEEAAAAARRRR."

"Hee. Oh Godzilla, you wouldn't leave me, would you?"

"AAEEEEEAAAAARRRR."

[For Mothra Peter Parker. Stein can come too.]

[From here]

Who needed flashlights when you had mad ninja skills?

Yup, Yuffie was good. All senses primed and ready for action, just in case any action decided to come along and, y'know, happen. Which was about as likely as Barret turning up with a basket of posies and a bottle of blueberry wine.

She kicked back against the wall a few meters away from the door, shuriken half behind, half to the side. There were no shadows deeper than any of the others for her to dramatically skulk around in yet, so she shrugged off the reflexive urge to seek one out. She'd give it a couple of minutes, to see if John (or anybody else interesting) turned up, and then she'd move on. The night waited for no-one, least of all when you were under the thumb of a madman who thought regular, predictable wake-up calls were for lesser beings.

Which they kind of were, but that wasn't the point.

[From here]

Since Landel's idea of fun usually rivalled Hojo's, Yuffie tried really hard not to find the dull, monotonous, tedious stretch of hallway boring. Boring was good. Boring was… boring. Boring, boring, boring.

She had to wonder how people did it. Living in the same place, second after second, day after day, spiralling out into weeks and months and years. A while ago she might've gone totally psychonuts within a week or two. Now she was pushing on three, and wanderlust was threatening to choke her. Good thing she'd be getting out for a while tonight, especially after last night's fail-fest.

In a desperate bid to spice things up a little, Yuffie slipped into a playful not-routine. A ninja-y walk turned into a ninja-y skip n' hop, into an aerial cartwheel, into a back tuck-pike-layover set that brought her to the wall beside the door. "Not too shabby," she congratulated herself. She'd had years upon years of practice keeping her shuriken in hand during gymnastics routines, but with the Institute being what it was, a bit—okay, a lot—of practice was gonna come in handy.

With a twirl for flair and a bounce for fun, Yuffie slipped out of the women's block.

[To here]

[currently in M7]

The lights went out and the doors unlocked and Hanatarou bolted to his feet, hands moving to clutch nervously at the strap of his healer's bag. It was night which meant that people were supposed to be coming here at any minute and he had to pretend to know what he was doing or at least be able to offer some advice to anyone who knew what they were doing and might show up. Or something along those lines. But people were going to be here soon and he wasn't even ready.

But Sora hadn't left yet, so the healer swallowed hard and tried to keep his voice level as he turned blindly toward him (wishing yet again that he'd gotten around to fixing his flashlight). "Er, you're going to, um, be careful tonight...right?" Sora didn't really seem like the type to go charging blindly into trouble, but he hadn't met the "friend" who wanted to look for danger, so he didn't know for certain.

The world seemed to move more slowly in the showers. Kaworu believed it was the strange half-realized familiarity. He could remember the feeling from before. His mind reached for similarities, of which there were many, but each one was slightly inaccurate. The size was different, the tiles were not the same colors as either the facilities at SEELE, or those at NERV. The only two places he had bathed during his life.

He had spent years in the rooms SEELE had set aside for him, and so it would have been reasonable if that was what he remembered first. A small, practical room with very clean faucets, attached to the room where he slept. Beyond that, the laboratories. One of the spaces had been cleared out, and a piano had been moved in. That was years ago, but Kaworu wasn't precisely sure of the numbers. Ten years ago, possibly? But it was rare that he thought of these places now. Even when they had been the extent of his life, the very limits of his world, he had rarely looked at them. Now they only served as a comparison. Those memories seemed lifeless, and brought him no happiness, except in their passing.

NERV's showers had shown signs of rusting, hidden around the edges of the metal pipes. He had noticed it for a second, but he couldn't bring up any other specific images that didn't include Shinji. And when Shinji was present, he absorbed all of Kaworu's attention. Kaworu would only be passively aware of the setting then.

Kaworu shed his clothing when asked, stopping to fold them haphazardly in an imitation of what Lilim had often done for him in the past. The folds were lumpy, but he left them as they were and walked across the cool tiles. They were still dry, and the bare skin of his feet felt almost sticky on them, having been too warm in his slippers earlier. Soon the room would be heavy and damp with steam.

He reached to the first available faucet, and bowing his head and closing his eyes, he let the stream of cold water hit him. The same ritual as before. Kaworu felt awake for a second, and shuddered in the cold until it slowly climbed to higher temperatures.

[For Shinji, strict reserve.]

[from here]

Following Asuka into the dark shed, Junpei relied upon the girl to present the light and he took a better grip on the bat. Hopefully, there wouldn't be any creepy crawlies, but he was prepared as much as he could for some. The last time he'd been in the shed there wasn't anything, but the damn place was prime nesting grounds for things he never wanted to see.

"Bats are to the left," Junpei said in a quiet voice. "There are aluminum and wooden." His own was a genuine Louisville Slugger, if a little battered. He had a feeling Asuka was going to pick a metal one thinking it was better.

[from here]

The next hallway looked only marginally different from the first. Boy, it was easy to get all mixed up in this goofy hospital! And Naruto hadn't seen a single med-nin come along to try and convince him to get back to bed and rest. It wasn't that he was complaining or anything, but wasn't that weird? Where the hell were the med-nin, anyway? You'd think that in the middle of the night after a ton of people got hurt, they'd all be busy...

Oh. Well, okay. They were all busy with people who were actually hurt! That made the most sense, and Naruto accepted that and pressed on.

Still, something was bugging him. Something was seriously screwed up about this whole thing, but he couldn't figure out what the "something" was. Maybe he was imagining it, but he really didn't think he was.

Now where was the exit?

[to here]

( from here. )

So far, so good. Kairi tried to move as quietly as she could, not wanting to attract any kind of baddies that could be lurking in the shadows. ... And lest she forget actually crazy patients. Then again, she doubted she'd ever forget that incident.

Oh well, she was almost there. No time to think about past injuries.

( to here. )

( from here. )

One thing Kairi couldn't help but admit was that her room now was a lot closer to the door than her old one was. It was practically a hop, skip, and a jump away! Not bad at all.

... Not that she was lazy or anything. She wasn't the lazy one of the group. Certainly not.

Either way, Kairi continued down the hallway and out the door with ease, careful to watch her step.

( to here. )

[From here]

There were no lighted guard towers out here and no heavily-armed patrols, and Prussia again felt insulted by the lack of security. It was almost as if they wanted him to escape! Until now, hardly a day had gone by without the control council making its presence—and his position—known. The sudden change in tune disturbed him more than he cared to admit, and he couldn't help but wonder if he were walking straight into some kind of trap. But they'd already taken everything away from him— the feel of land beneath his feet was good, but it would have been better if it had been his land and felt in his very bones—so what else could they possibly do? He refused to die, and he'd refuse to let them kill him, no matter what they tried next.

Prussia finally decided to use the torch, clicking it on to survey the area. It was a field of some sort (for football, perhaps), with a shed at one corner and a wall surrounding its entirety. He took a few steps forward along the nearest wall before turning towards it and starting to scale it.

Once he was high enough to see over, Prussia propped himself up with his arms and shone the torch into the next area. It didn't look like a way away from the hospital's grounds—it was just a walled courtyard and more of the hospital—so he carefully dropped back to the ground.

He'd have to try his luck with the other two walls, and their corner seemed like the best option. He started across the field, heading in the direction of the shed.

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]

[from here]

It looked like Junpei was the first to arrive as there was no sign of a hot pink-haired flesh-eating babe. Leaning against the wall by the door that lead outside, he sighed and tilted his head back. What was he doing? Why were his senpai gone when he so very much needed them to tell him what he should really be doing?

This place sucked. Tartarus was easier to handle than this. It made sense in a twisted way that didn't have him eating vampire flesh or hunting with a bunch of Embryon. He really missed home - even that pathetic drunk.

[from here]

So far, so good; Junpei wasn't feeling any compulsion to go someplace he wasn't intending to. It was a relief to know that Evangeline wasn't going to vampire him to her side that night, despite the implications from earlier. Then again... what if where he was heading was where she wanted him to go all along, so it just didn't feel like a vampire compulsion?

Oh man, this whole vampire servant thing sucked. Junpei wasn't even sure if he'd be able to tell when Evangeline decided to call him to hold her hair while she prayed to the porcelain god or something worse - carrying her damn books.

[to here]

Sam wasn't gonna run off. Dean wasn't giving him the chance to get that far.

Dean threw on his real clothes, tugging them on impatiently as he tried to ignore all the scenarios he could easily come up with - Sam might try to find a way out tonight, maybe look for a car and just say screw the people here and then follow up that winner with I'm gonna kill myself breaking your deal. Not if Dean was gonna have a say about it and man, he had plenty to say about it, even if he was gonna have to slug some common sense back into his brother until he said uncle over the deal. Sam was gonna live, dammit. He wasn't gonna take a dump all over it 'cause he couldn't accept this was just how things needed to go down.

It felt like it took too long to lace up his shoes and make sure everything was squared away in the duffel bag. Dean made sure anyway. He wasn't gonna get his ass kicked just 'cause he couldn't tie his shoes right or he forgot to bring some salt along. There was doing things in a hurry and getting sloppy - maybe he hadn't been exactly at the top of his game since he got here but if he got ganked 'cause he tripped on his own shoelaces, then y'know what, he would've had that coming in a big way.

As soon as he was ready, Dean took off for Sam's room, shutting M2's door behind him and jogging down the hall, the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Hopefully he'd get to the room and the kid would still be there.

Pissed, maybe, but he'd take pissed over doing something real stupid.

[To here]

The intercom jingle went off, mirroring the cheery voice that came out of the speakers soon after it.

"Hello, everyone, and I hope you found productive endeavors in both your music-making and your therapy sessions! Now, our nurses will be escorting all of you to your rooms and to your delicious dinners. Tonight, we're serving moist slices of turkey breast covered in gravy and served with mashed potatoes and grilled artichoke. Also available are our usual salad and drink choices, as well as a to-die-for devil chocolate cake dessert!

"...Mm, yes, I do think I'll have to partake in some of that myself! I trust you'll all enjoy it as much as I do, and I'll speak 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. ]

The previous shifts had offered much in the way of her own personal curiosity, but little in understanding the place she was in. Still, Renamon's mind had quieted; the irritation shifted into the back of her mind. Was it simply children that accomplished that? Or the kind of people that maintained their differences, and sated something in her. She sought to understood, and that had increased in her new surroundings. Learning had become some kind of peace. And in this alone, she could maintain her ever-present calm.

Refreshed in a way by this, and looking forward to the night--if the one called Brainiac was what he said, he of all people should be able to help Renamon in this--the Digimon took a seat off to the side in the sun room, content to simply be alone with her thoughts. But thoughts were too often overrun, and she took efforts to move away from the more heavy items. Dairine disappearing. Toph, Toboe. Orihime. And Rika.... Should Renamon be glad she didn't see her this last visitor shift? Or should this be more of a concern?

She closed her eyes, calming her mind. One thing at a time. There were no moves to be had until night came. So she would wait.

[Digimon Tamers, represent!]

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!]

"Commentary: The comms meatbag shut up quickly tonight! What a relief," HK said, standing up and grabbing his weapons. Scalpels were hidden up his sleeves, and his axe and his shiny new knife were taken in each hand. "Suggestion: If you are leaving the room tonight, it would be best if you come with me. I have infrared capabilities and therefore do not need the glowrod that is likely still under your pillow, meaning that we can move covertly." Yes, sometimes HK was capable of moving covertly. He just didn't often feel the need to here.

He opened the door, standing in the doorway. "Query: Well?"

[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?]