[From here.]

It might be quicker to check the stuff at the end of the hall first and work his way back. That way he wouldn't have to back track in order to get into the main hall. Yeah. Yeah - the morgue was marked on his map, but there were a few rooms around it that weren't labeled at all. Morbid as the thought was, it would be practical to keep the Sleep Studies close to somewhere where they could dispose...

Not thinking about that. No. That was not a possibility tonight. Nobody had said anything about people dying during the experimentation.

Yet his pulse was pounding all the more wildly for it. Peter gritted his teeth and sped even faster to the door square ahead of him, barely skidding to a stop before he ran into it. His free hand twisted the knob viciously.

Locked.

Peter glared. Deep breath. He took two steps back, then shot his foot like a canon ball into the middle of the door. It hit with a raucous bang and a snap - he'd broken the lock clean out of the frame. The door had swung wide open and collided with the other side of the wall. Not as satisfactory as snapping the whole thing in two, but he had his way through now. That was all that mattered.

Peter's figure disappeared into the hall.

Dinner with Bella had been not only informative, as far as catching up went, but relaxing. In fact, most of the second half of her day, save for the awkward group showers, had been pretty relaxing, which was good, considering how much stress was being put on what she and Peter were planning on accomplishing during the course of the night.

Claire was rather grim, thinking forward to what they'd planned. She wasn't sure she wanted to see what was going on in those experimentation rooms -- sometimes, ignorance was bliss. But, she knew she'd rather know than get driven mad wondering, letting it be this looming, unknown evil that acted to intimidate. Besides. They'd be able to help those who came stumbling out the doors, ideally and she'd have Peter there. If things got too bad, at least she'd have that support system.

With a final goodbye to her roommate, she grabbed her bat, her flashlight and the map and headed out the door of their room. The hallway was painfully empty and silent as the grave. Spooky.

Luckily, getting to the stairs wouldn't be much further than she'd gone on her own the previous night. She could only hope that no one worse than Elle jumped her on the way there. One eye in front of her, the other skimming the map that she was holding awkwardly between her fingers so she could still keep her bat readied in her hand, she proceeded down the dark hallway, flashlight casually scanning the darkness ahead of her.

[ to here ]

[from here]

In contrast to the main hallway in the block behind her, this section of hallway seemed to be completely quiet. Creepily so, and dark with the sort of darkness that scared children (and, okay, maybe some teenagers who were completely mature and rational otherwise, which group definitely didn't include her) and made them jump from the center of the floor to the bed rather than step too close to the thick shadows underneath it. Minako paused a moment to turn in a complete circle, shining her light around the hallway to make certain there wasn't anything lurking... at least, not within the range of her flashlight's beam.

...yeah, okay, thinking about it too much was just going to freak her out, wasn't it. Minako sniffed and flipped her hair back over her shoulder, looking the picture of absolute indifference just in case anything watching might care if she was worried or something, then flounced off down the hallway without a sideways nervous glance. She did, of course, remain entirely alert and listening for sounds of movement, but that was kind of habit by now.

[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]

[from here]

Sheena silently slipped into the hallway at the end of the block. Taking up a spot where she could be easily seen, and the gun-like weapon she was carrying, she waited for Aigis. She wanted to get this over with so she could00

What? So she could what? Go see to her summon, the one that left her with so many stitches in her neck, left her unable to just go back to her room and sleep because of the nightmares she knew were going to come?

Maybe she should just go check on Ritsuka instead. That was safer. Far safer. But then she'd be running away again...

"Well, that's it for today's activities and hygiene!" The Head Doctor said with a jovial tone just after the sound system's jingle. He seemed excited and maybe even giddy. "Our nurses will now be escorting everyone back to their rooms, and some of you might find that you have brand new roommates to share your dinner with! That's right: we've gotten a whole new batch of patients, and I hope you all are as well behaved with them as you have – ...well, as most of you have been with our staff. Because of this good behavior, I'd like to remind everyone that they may stop at the Arts & Crafts room to bring their origami figures back to their room and decorate as much as they like!

"In any case, our dinner tonight will be herb chicken – breast and wing or leg and thigh, whichever you prefer – served with hot – well, not too hot – vegetable soup, caesar salad, and lightly fried rose potatoes. Our usual drinks are available, as well as alternatives for special diets, and dessert will be a delicious caramel apple.

"I believe that's all for now. Goodbye, everyone!"

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. ANY NEWLY ACCEPTED CHARACTERS MAY POST TO THIS SHIFT (but are not obligated to if you would like to wait for Nightshift or Dayshift); please refer to the new room assignments before posting. Thank you! ]

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]

Edward was glad to wake up to a period of respite. While he had been conscious during breakfast, he'd requested to remain in his room for extra "sleep", which had consisted waiting until the room was vacated to ingest the vial of Venom's blood. The vampire had lost his chance last night, but that might have been for the better; this way he wasn't in a rush to examine the flavor, as somewhat repulsive as that sounded. Even though he was primarily concerned with getting a meal instead of trying to divine what chemicals could be in the patient body as a whole - if any were at all - he was taking his job seriously, as he knew the risks Venom was already taking with him

He didn't like debts, after all. He was still trying to make up for his first transgression against the assassin.

The blood was familiar to him, but he could find no difference in it from the first time he had drank from Venom. Though his sense of taste was probably lacking compared to what it had once been, Edward couldn't sense any chemical that shouldn't have been a part of it. It was just... blood.

After the vial was emptied, he'd been sure to shove it back into the pillowcase stashed in the closet, as long as shoving the shotgun under his mattress. He was actually surprised the weapon was seemingly so easy to hide; unless the nurses never entered the rooms to search through them, there was no way it should still be here. In a way, he was beginning to think of the rooms as a safe haven.

Though that thought couldn't be necessarily true. After all, when he awoke, Bella's blood wasn't staining his fingertips, and the bandages on his face had been removed as the cuts slowly healed themselves. Someone was changing them, and if he assumed he hadn't gained the ability to sleepwalk as well as sleep, well...

Lunch had already passed for the vampire if Venom's blood was anything to show for it, so he took his usual route through the line, promptly pushing the tray of whatever-the-hell away from him as soon as he sat down. This time he'd brought his journal with him, and though his memory was perfection itself he wanted physical evidence of what he had found in the institute after all. Mostly he was making a note for Bella - a picture of the blond man, the not-Zato, and sketches showing the way its form had changed subtly to reveal the nature of the beast. Assuming it was a beast, of course.

[For his killer bff.]

Sakura had mentioned a library on the second floor, but there was one on the first floor, wasn't there? It was for the patients, sure, but that didn't mean there wouldn't be any useful books. Not that he knew for certain, since every time Hanatarou had been in there previously it hadn't been to pay a lot of attention to the reading material.

As he wandered into the shelves, however, he didn't find anything like medical texts or information on the medications that he'd found. All he found was-- what was this? The shinigami blinked at the cover of the book he'd pulled from the shelf, then shook his head and quickly shoved it back into place. Maybe something... somewhere else. He moved away from that shelf and over to another, frowning thoughtfully as he looked over the titles on the spines of the books, but didn't really find anything that looked useful.

[for paramedic!Peter]

Getting up before the 7-11s opened on Sunday was anathema to any right-thinking man. Sangamon Taylor was no exception. When he wasn't on a field trip to Nowheresville. Where the locals were unconvinced that the Pope was going to personally write them a strongly worded letter if they had fresh Coke with their pancakes. Moving from bed to couch was therefore a lofty achievement, one he was celebrating with a triumphant snore.

Until the couch started to lurch towards a giant screen. He squinted at the LaserDisc cover -- King Kong. Just because he'd voted for it, didn't mean he wanted to watch it. Like Jimmy Carter. Fake animal torture was only cool on MTV. He declined to assist the nurses aside from moving two hundred pounds of biomass off their hands under its own power, and cleared out.

The courtyard was quiet. He swung a leg over a bench, set his notebook down on the warm wood, and pulled out a half-drawn map. He pulled a pen out, uncapped it, and looked at the damn thing. What the fuck would it do? Get a rhythm going and they reprogrammed the fucking building. He laid back, put the map over his face, and worked on his skin cancer instead.


[Scarecrow]

Somehow, after their talk in the chapel, Elaine felt simultaneously more accepting of and more irritated by her future husband. On the one hand, seven years had clearly been good to him. He seemed more sincere and thoughtful than he had been before his disappearance, and he had a more mature (dare she say, handsome?) look to him. On the other hand, there were clearly some things that made even time throw up its hands in vain and say, "To hell with this!" Guybrush was still inexorably prone to disastrous accidents if the story about the Pox of LeChuck was anything to go by, and he was so obviously keeping something important from her that any passing dolt in the Institute would have been able to tell. In the end, that eternal underlying sweetness of his that won out, keeping her from punching him again, at least. That was only by a hairs width, though. Her snugglecakes was going to have to stay on his best behaviour if he knew what was good for him.

She left the Mighty Pirate™ alone for the time being when the announcement of the next shift went off. He would want some time to catch up with Morgan next, presumably. As much as the woman's attitude bothered her, she was a friend of Guybrush's, as she had claimed. Elaine could be strict, but she wasn't the kind of shrewish future wife/past fiancé who would keep her man from seeing his friends. Besides, she needed some more time to catch up on the goings-on of the Institute. Patients filled the building to the brim, now, it seemed; there would be a lot to investigate.

After a few quick trips back and forth to the bulletin and a few new leads to follow up on, the governor gave in to her nurse's persistent nagging and headed to the cafeteria for brunch. After the relatively light fare of the day before, Elaine took advantage of the Institute's admittedly scrumptious offerings and loaded up a full, balanced brunchfast of eggs, sausage links, waffles, and vegetable soup. As expected, the selection of drinks did not offer either root beer or grog. Grog she could live without, at least, she thought while making a face. Eugh. For now, she settled for a tall glass of water.

Elaine settled into a seat in the cafeteria and tucked into her meal. Her eyes didn't stay on her food, though, instead gazing around restlessly; she hadn't seen LeChuck so far this morning, and god forbid he wanted to invite himself to brunch with her if he chose now to show up. A certain horribly unpleasant dinner on Mêlée Island came to mind. She was prepared to either move at the first sign of the dread pirate or signal a random stranger to sit with her before he could.

[For Dean]

((From here.))

As soon as Claude stepped through, he reached out toward the side, half-expecting, half-hoping to find the same cabinet he'd bumped into earlier. When his fingers brushed against a shockingly cold, metal surface, however, Claude felt himself grow tense. Was this place...different? Gritting his teeth, he ran his hand along what he soon realized were rows of filing cabinets stacked on top of each other, their handles poking out from the metal at seemingly precise intervals. No simple storage cabinets, no plastic boxes, no bottles of pills. Before he'd realized it, he'd reach the end of the dark room, and he painfully smacked his forehead against another row of filing cabinets ahead.

Moisture stung at his eyes as he leaned against the wall. Using the heel of his palm, he rubbed at the place on his head, and was grateful to find he hadn't cut himself or anything. Not that it exactly mattered when he'd already gone through so much tonight, but he was already frustrated enough without any lasting proof of what he'd just done to himself.

As much as he didn't want to admit it, though, it definitely looked like he was getting tossed to different places in the building each time he stepped through a door. It almost reminded him of the Field of Intelligence back on Nede, except there were definite pads for him to step on before he got transported somewhere else, and he hadn't been on the verge of going blind. Back then, there'd been some logic behind where people got sent, but here? Claude wasn't so sure he could count on anything to be so cut and dry in Landel's.

Claude turned toward where he'd come from. Thankfully, this room was pretty small, which meant there was a lot less ground to cover to the door. At this rate, he wasn't sure how long he'd be able to hold out before he ran out of strength. Maybe his luck would pick up before it came to that point. He had to keep telling himself that, at any rate.

He closed his eyes when his sweaty palm reached the door's handle again, and he forced himself to open it once more.

((To here.))

[from here]

Meche had never been to the pharmacy, so she wasn't sure what to expect, but this wouldn't have been it. The room was sterile-looking, and the only real furniture was a table in the center, covered by a blue tarp. She didn't see any medicine cabinets--or anything else that looked like a pharmacy, for that matter.

Actually, the more she looked around, the more this room looked familiar. But she could be misremembering that, or maybe they just built a number of rooms based on the same plan.

"Are you sure this is the right room?" she asked Soma gently.

[From here]

622 risked a glance over the railing as they passed the Sun Room down below. Nothing there yet. Not even something guarding the area. "Hmm." That was odd. There was always a guard stationed there. Maybe he just couldn't see it, but shouldn't people be trying to head through there by now? There would be evidence if they had.

[from here]

As Mello walked toward the area overlooking the Sun Room, a tension he hadn't realized he was carrying eased off a little, not entirely. There'd be screaming in the rooms by that hallway, the one he deliberately hadn't let himself glance in the direction of, though he knew the sound wouldn't carry to the hall itself. Nothing he could do for them, he reminded himself, and finding out what Matt knew was more important. "Did we win yet?" he asked.

He fought to drown out the doubts trying to crowd in, the thought that even if they had for Matt, that didn't mean it would happen that way for Mello. Here L was with the answers to the case ready to act on, but Mello still remembered standing in Roger's office, hearing the unthinkable, as vividly as if it had been yesterday. The possible explanations were all equally horrible--L dead despite everything, or dead no matter what in Mello's timeline, or unable to escape soon enough--and though Matt hadn't had time to answer, Mello looked back at him and snapped, "Well?"

[from here]

Mello needed to replace his lost pipe, for starters, or find something better, if he could. As with many things he believed, he believed wholeheartedly in the existence of his Sig somewhere in the Institute, because to think otherwise would be to give in to despair. Someone had a gun; he'd heard it a couple of nights ago.

Trying to seem less lost than he felt, as if he actually had a plan he was confident of pulling off, he addressed Matt again. "I'll bust us all the fuck out of here before long. When was it, for you?" He snuck that last in, not as whip-fast as he would've wanted, but abruptly all the same, in hopes of surprising an honest answer out of Matt.

Meche really wasn't sure what to do with herself tonight. Hitsugaya hadn't left any messages for Arts and Crafts--or any messages at all, now that she thought about it. Shouldn't he at least have mentioned that he'd gotten her report? Even if she wasn't sure she trusted his judgment about assignments all the time, he was usually pretty good about things like that.

Maybe he hadn't come on the trip today and had put up something on the Institute's bulletin board instead. It might be a long shot, but Meche didn't have any other plans for the night, and if Special Counseling wasn't going on tonight, maybe the Sun Room would be relatively safe. She decided she might as well take a quick run over there just to check, and if there was nothing she was supposed to be doing, she could check in on Senna and Alita or come back to her room and practice her spear technique. As bad as she still felt about what had happened--no, what they'd done to Roland, she knew fighting wasn't a skill she could afford not to develop.

She pulled on her boots and sweatshirt just in case she ended up going outside again (Meche really hoped not, in this weather, but if one of the girls was set on going she'd probably cave pretty quickly), then picked up her spear, maps and flashlight and set off. Manny's sword she left untouched in the closet. She still wasn't ready to think about it.

[to here]

Sleep studies. Emergency reconstruction. The doctor's first message was just as ominous as his second, and once again Aigis felt herself dealing with a rush of sudden, burning emotions. She had to stay seated for a moment, biting her bottom lip, just trying to cool down. With her cooling jets missing, it wasn't quite as easy to filter in air to calm her. She had to rely on this model's version of human "breathing." Was this how real humans coped with the fluctuations in their systems? It was a tedious process.

Finally, she was relaxed again, but just as determined. Standing to her feet, Aigis retrieved the baseball bat Junpei had prepared for her and made for the door. She would find Landel tonight, and force him to release all the patients here in the institution. If he would not listen to her pleas, she was not opposed to using physical means.

[To here]

[from here]

When he rounded the corner into the larger hallway, Kurogane determined to put the thoughts of being the only patient there aside. Even if that were the case, it didn't change his final goal for the night. The magician would have been helpful, but he was confident enough in his own ability to get things done.

Finding the feather remained a difficult task though. The basement had been less than helpful when it had come to locating the source of this place's power. But the third floor... no one had ever been able to reach it, yet they all knew it existed. The outside of the building proved enough. They just had to find the way to get up. If that meant forcing a hole through the floor, then fine, because right now it was the last place to go.

[gone here]

[From here]

Maybe she should go snatch up her patient file? Possessions, too. Yuffie'd never say no to free stuff, even if it was a bunch of crap from a lie of a life. If she was lucky, she'd get somethin' handy. Handy like a cellphone, or, hell, even a laptop! Yuffie wasn't a technical genius at the best of times, preferring to leave all that stuff to Reeve and the guys in R&D, but if she could get 'em up and working, they'd be like a gift straight from Leviathan.

[To here]