[From here]

The pair emerged from the thicker patches of trees at the bank of the river a few minutes later. Utena was about ready to toss her skirt into it by this point, she thought with fingers clenched over the fabric as she kept it lifted over the last of the catching undergrowth. "So what all did you guys find in that mine if not anything of Marc's?" she asked Taura as they slowed along bank, following the river upstream. "Anything useful?"

[From here.]

But being outside was probably just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than it was being trapped inside the bus with that nurse.

Besides the many other deformed nurses that were roaming around here, Zero caught sight of numerous forms flying overhead, casting large shadows on the ground as they passed by. They looked like...eagles. But deformed and horrific-looking, just like the nurses. At first, they seemed content to simply circle overhead, screeching, like vultures swarming above a carcass. But then many of them suddenly swooped down and headed straight for some of the prisoners running in the street.

Kind of like the one flying at Zero right now.

"Kh--!" The once-Reploid barely managed to dodge the monster as it dived for him by falling to the ground and rolling back onto his feet. The bird flew upwards again, slowly flapping its wings, then circled around as if to try again, another eagle joining it. To avoid them, Zero quickly moved out of the open, where he was obviously a target, and circled around one of the buses, keeping his back to it for cover. But he knew he wasn't going to be safe here...not when there were nurses on the ground and so many eagles above.

Not since the night he had become temporarily stronger had there been so much visible chaos... And if that one prisoner hadn't started a riot, this wouldn't be happening right now...!

As he stood contemplating the best route for escape, Zero glanced around quickly, searching the fleeing prisoners for anyone familiar or anyone who might need help. He was defenseless, so protecting someone else would only get him so far (and he certainly didn't want a repeat of two nights ago), but they all might have a better chance of survival if they grouped up...

[Leanne, Lana, and Harvey, WHERE YOU AT.]

The wind was whipping hard enough that S.T. decided not to take his burger back outside. Eating dirt was all well and good on camping trips, but there was a roof and chairs that weren't too sticky right here. So he sat down at a table and started doctoring his burger with shelf-stable squeeze-packet mustard.

There weren't as many patients in here as he'd expected. How many of them were sick? A lot, if the number that had found their way to the bulletin in the grocery was only a sample. All of them trying to fake being O.K. until they lost control and ate their roommate. Their lack of appetite (for food, at least) was showing, though. People rarely thought about the things they did from day to day and what impact they had. These burgers had been trucked in, the ketchup had probably been grown in Mexico, shipped as tomatoes to China, processed and shipped back to the US. If this was Earth, yada yada. Maybe Landel just opened a portal and snagged stuff by the truckload. In which case they'd have to add how much damage interdimensional travel did to the ozone layer to his list of sins.

Either way, it was boring in here with no one to talk to. S.T. tried folding the aluminized paper from his burger into an origami boat, but it had absorbed too much grease, and sagged.

[free]

Utena knew exactly where she was headed first, no question. She really doubted Marc would be in the abandoned building still, but despite that, she still felt it was worth looking over just in case. Who knew? Maybe other rebels had been there and left traces behind. She wouldn't know until she checked.

And even if they hadn't, it just felt... well, natural to go back to that place. Thanks to Marc's temporary residence there, the building somehow felt more connected to the patient body than any other place in the area. Like it was theirs by right or something. She knew it was kind of silly to think that way, but that didn't stop her. So she walked from the unloading area down to South Street, a purpose in her step and pink fabric swishing around her legs as she walked.

Maybe I can burn this stupid skirt when I get there, if nothing else, she thought, cheeks flushing slightly.

[Leanne]

As soon as Anise achieved wakefulness, the Head Doctor's words from the previous night immediately came floating back into her mind. People were getting sick. They were going to turn into monsters. That thought alone was chilling enough, but it was nothing compared to the terror that struck her when she sat up and saw her own hand. A red blotch covered the back of it, extending upwards to the wrist. Where did that come from?

The signs are already showing. That was what Landel said.

It couldn't be. Not her. If it was really true, then her life was as good as over. No... it had to be a mistake. Maybe the Head Doctor's words had scared her to the point that she was attributing random things to his threats. She was being paranoid. That was all it was.

And yet, no matter how many times she told herself that, she feared what might happen.

A nurse came to her soon, bearing an outfit for her to wear on the field trip. The striped shirt and gray skirt weren't particularly appealing to Anise, but the purple coat she was given wasn't so bad. It was a little big on her, but it was a nice, feminine color... and the extra long sleeves served to cover most of the strange rash. Anise didn't want to look at it, and she sure as heck didn't want anyone else seeing it.

When it was time to board the buses, Anise quietly took the lunch bag, climbed aboard, and sat down. She didn't look anyone in the eye. Even after sitting down, she merely stared down at the contents of her bag. The muffin didn't look the least bit appetizing - not while her stomach was busy twisting itself into knots, anyway.

[free!]

Claude was glad to get his sack lunch and practically inhaled his food the second he received it from his nurse. Maybe he should have paced himself a little better, but the meal itself hadn't been that big, and he'd left a little bit of his breakfast on his plate this morning.

Once he was finished, he once again braved the cold and considered doing some laps around the field. If he hoped to make anymore progress with Guy and Anise, Claude knew he needed to be prepared for anything, which meant staying in shape. While he'd done a fair amount of fighting in Landel's, it wasn't as much as he was used to. Generally, he wasn't the sort who trained or exercised simply for the sake of doing so (he didn't have the patience for it), but that didn't mean he didn't at least try to make the effort from time to time.

But first, he should probably relax his muscles. It had been awhile since he'd taken the time to do something like that, and he could probably use the extra time to properly digest his food. With that in mind, Claude began to run through a series of stretches that he'd learned in school a long time ago.

[For Utena]

Now that one type of business had been more or less taken care of (for the moment), it was time for Rita to move on to her other business: magic research. She'd been so involved in her conversation with Taura that there hadn't been time to write down her latest discoveries. And besides that, she had an appointment.

Rita brought her notebook and a pen with her to the Greenhouse, where she quickly found a space to sit that was relatively near a few rows of flowers. The scent would at least make for some decent atmosphere, though she was a little concerned about how the humid air might affect her notebook pages.

The person she was meeting was apparently a blonde named Rapunzel. Since she hadn't arrived yet, Rita took the time to open her journal and start adding the information about Espers and related concepts she acquired the previous night. It was best to get that done while it was still fresh in her mind.

[Rapunzel!]

[From here]

Looked like she was the first one out this way. Utena stopped just short of the Sun Room, turning her light back to see if anyone she knew was coming up the hall behind her. No one so far.

Utena switched her light off as she leaned back against the wall. She was pretty sure everyone preferred not to be fighting hordes of rotting dogs and bigfoot monsters again tonight, so she figured the less attention she called to herself out here, the better. The only downside to doing that was that it made seeing down the hall a bit more difficult. She squinted a bit, eyes trying to adjust to the near-pitch darkness as she pictured what one of her silhouetted companions might look like.

It was kind of a weird group they had put together when she really looked at it. She and Aigis had been friends before, of course, but she never would have pegged the quiet Aigis being friends with someone as brash as Sechs. And neither of them really knew much about the redhead; Utena didn't even know if they knew his real name or not. They had worked together well enough the night before, though, both in combat and as a riddle-solving team. She had a good feeling about the group, despite them not all each other that well yet. Getting to know Sechs that afternoon had been an interesting and enlightening experience in contrast to the violence she had seen from him the night before, and she had to admit, the mysterious redhead at the very least intrigued her, even if he seemed to share some of Touga's or Landel's smugness. She was looking forward to seeing what they could all get done tonight — and beyond, for that matter.

She kept a careful eye out from her spot in the shadows, wondering who would show up first.

[from here]

Taura pondered the announcement she'd just heard as she jogged down another empty hallway. Who was she? Jill? Who he'd tortured himself, though that could have been an act on her part as well? Whose side had she been on? And what could have happened to her that would be permanent?

Death was usually pretty permanent, but even that had its exceptions around here. Taura didn't have to like it to know it was true; what had General Aguilar done that could change that? And why was Doctor Landel so angry?

It was an uneasy thought to stomach; revenge drove people like nothing else did, and being one of the people in between was a hell of a way to go.

[to here]

[Inside F16]

Now that Ilia had left, there was plenty of room to pace, and Lana took it. It would help keep her muscles loose, too. Ilia had been a help, but the most important point was getting the basics to Ema -- including the part about running away being the best thing to do if she couldn't help. She would hold onto that guilt; Lana knew her sister, and she could admit she would (and had) done the same herself.

But neither of them could let it freeze them up in the future. They had to try, that was the key to the whole thing. Two men were dead; one mourned, one not, and so were many others. This place ground through people, and Lana didn't intend to let their names be the next up.

[Ema and Renji]

It wasn't often that Renji felt less like punching people in general as his day wore on. This was a new experience for him. A not unwelcome one, if he was being honest. And the fact that he felt less like punching Fai? Kind of mind-blowing. The sort of thing Zen masters would probably use as a kouan to reach an all-new level of non-punching enlightenment.

So he was back from the dead, almost everyone he'd known was gone, and yet bizarrely his day felt like it was looking up. Kind of. Renji wasn't sure what to make of this. Maybe his grumpy meter was just nearing empty. That was as good an explanation as the next, considering how this place made him feel.

Whatever the reason, he ended up in the music room. And he remembered oh yeah. He'd always kind of hated this damn shift. He grabbed a little book of music and a drum and retreated quickly to the far end of the room. He put the drum down in front of him just so he looked like he was doing something and opened the book. But he had no idea how to read music, and really, he was more interested in the ongoing puzzle of what the hell had happened in the last four weeks.

And brooding. Of course. There was always brooding to be done.

[Okay Tolten, let me lay it out for you. When there's a mommy and a daddy... or sometimes a daddy and a dadddy. Or, hell, sometimes a mommy and a mommy if you buy the right kind of wood cuts (and a third mommy if you go to just the right shop)... but anyway when they love each other very much, or at least a suitably large amount of money changes hands, there are some things that happen...]

And so it seemed that everything had gone back to normal.

Guy had spent his breakfast filling in a new patient and now Landel was rambling over the intercom like he always did. It made sense that the man would want to act like everything with Aguilar had never happened, though Guy couldn't help but wonder how things would change when night finally came. Knowing Landel, he'd have a long-winded speech prepared for them.

That was something that he could worry about later, though. Guy filed away the information about the doctors, but it didn't matter too much to him. He'd only been forced through that once, and had apparently been deemed a lost cause after that session. Speaking with a doctor here would just be a waste of time as far as he could tell, so that was fine by him.

Being placed in the Sun Room gave him access to the bulletin board, and perusing it gave him some idea of what had gone on last night, at least to the point that he understood that they'd had some sort of outside help. People were being secretive, but that was nothing new. Guy went ahead and put up a note for his friends, wanting to keep it up as a routine (at this point Luke should have been the one doing it, but Guy could talk to him about that later).

With that taken care of, he had little else to do but find himself a place to sit, and before long he located a comfy armchair. He took as seat, but as usual Guy couldn't help but keep an eye out for any friends.

[For Tear!]

> Rose: Descend

Rose bounded off the stairs and down onto the floor of the ballroom as soon as she could, alighting on the floor in what was, on its own, a graceful maneuver. As she jumped, the flames on her wands extinguished, and her sylladex reset itself to the auto-balance modus, ejecting everything in it. Her possessions rained down on her head, the journal landing last of all, wide-open atop her pillow. She jumped on it, clutching it to her breast.

It was too late to hope any of that had gone unseen. Bluffing it was, which always worked best when one's stockpile of information was correct. "I seem to have been divested of my powers. Can you try yours?"

[from here]

Oh, how she missed this! Just like old times, riding atop Tokunaga without a care in the world. Anything that got in her way would be trampled with ease!

A little too much ease, as it turned out. Her attention elsewhere, she didn't notice when an oversized rat made the mistake of scurrying under Tokunaga's heavy foot... until she heard the sickening crunch of the creature's bones snapping.

She stopped, pointed her flashlight down at the mashed-up body, then let out a small sigh of relief. Just a rat. She'd have to be careful not to trample any people - or any monsters that looked like they'd put up a mean fight. Anyway, she probably just did her fellow patients a favor by taking out a monster (even if it was an accident). Hooray for Anise!

Satisfied, the girl continued onward to the next hallway. Her doll left a light trail of blood with its foot.

[to here]

[from here]

No, something was different. It wasn't until she reached the next hallway that Anise realized, but she could feel fonons - in the air, and in her body. It took a moment to process this, but as she thought about it, she quickly grew excited. Could this mean...!?

Tokunaga was retrieved from her back, and she held the doll in front of her in her arms. She focused her energy, and... to her delight, the doll began to grow. Its limbs stretched out, then thickened as the head and torso swelled to several times its original size. Once it was large enough, Anise tucked her weapon in the strap of the bag tied around its neck, then used her free hand to hold on to its head. When it finished growing, the doll was slightly taller than an average adult (and much wider), and Anise sat happily atop its big round head.

"Tokunaga! You're back!" she cried excitedly, wrapping her arms around the top of the doll's enormous head to give it a celebratory hug. "Let's go show the others!" This could only mean good things! Maybe they could finally escape!

The doll charged triumphantly through the hallway... then stopped at the door. The frame was too narrow for it to fit through. Anise had to shrink the doll down a bit, carefully squeeze through, make it grow again, and then they were off to find her friends!

[to here]

[from here]

Kirk ran into the main hallway and found nothing there except more pink light coating everything. His gut feeling said that if something was happening, it should've happened already, but he was a loss to explain what was going on. The system (if he could call it that, vague as it was to describe the whole Landel's torture/experimentation assembly line) had broken down at least once already, on that night when I.R.I.S. had first(?) appeared, and the whole of the building flickered like a malfunctioning hologram. Was that what the glowing cover was for? To prevent... he didn't know. Something. Something bad enough to warrant a Code Red.

(What had killed that creature?)

Waiting around here was already bad enough on normal nights, what with it being an open space with high traffic, but he'd picked it because it was the quickest and most obvious meeting place for all of them. Now with the whole area lit up like the inside of a strip club, Kirk was starting to feel like a lone piece of meat wrapped in a gold ribbon and tossed out for the wolves. He made a face for a second as he considered the unfortunate implication of mixing those similes, then decided that the dumb thoughts which crossed his mind ranked considerably lower in priority than, you know, paying attention to his surroundings and not getting himself killed.

Kirk swung the lead pipe in his hand once, just to focus, and shook his head as pain rippled out from the still-healing gunshot wound on his right arm. Take it easy, Jim, he admonished himself silently. It was still early in the night. Someone would be along shortly. And if not... he was giving his crew one minute. One minute, and then screw it, he was tracking down everyone himself.

[KIRK TO ENTERPRISE]

Anise had only just finished taking inventory of her collected medicine when she heard the telltale sound of the door unlocking. Since this wasn't the first time night had started without any words from the General, she didn't think much of it. She quickly grabbed her nighttime equipment: her meat tenderizer, flashlight, and Tokunaga. Her binoculars and the skeleton's velvet bag each went into one of the pockets of her leather jacket.

There was still no telling for sure whether Utena was going to take her warnings to heart, but... she did her best. Anise couldn't afford to stick around and try to physically stop her roommate when she had her own plans to take care of.

She stood, started for the door... then cringed as a loud screeching noise filled the building. An alarm?

"What's going on!?" she cried, then darted out to the hallway, as if she might see something there that would answer her question. She stepped out just in time to see some kind of soft pink light cover the walls. Anise was wary - there was no telling what that could mean. Maybe it was best to hurry to meet Guy and Claude...

Something did feel a little different, though.

[to here]

As the day began drawing to a close, the intercom flickered to life. Instead of Harrington's voice, however, Berg's calm tone filtered through the speakers.

"Attention all personnel: please escort subjects to their quarters for the duration of dinner shift. After that, you are expected to report to your stations -- no exceptions. Anyone caught away from his or her post without direct orders will have to personally answer to the general."

An odd tension hung in the air, but Berg didn't say anything more than that. Once the intercom clicked off, soldiers began to gather up the patients and bring them to their rooms. Most didn't know why Harrington wasn't handling the announcements, or why Berg sounded particularly serious this evening, though no one would admit that to the subjects themselves.

The few who did know had more pressing matters to contend with.

After an intercom broadcast like that, Kurogane felt somewhat better about the little information he'd gotten from Harrington the previous night. The man only sounded competent when he needed to but was an idiot otherwise. Unfortunately that was furthered proof of the General not employing the brightest of staff members, making another option for information closed to them.

Kurogane was again some steps ahead of his escort when he reached the Sun Room and ignored the soldier further as the ninja headed to look over the bulletin. Last time he'd missed something, and he wasn't about to have that happen a second time. With some searching he located Tsubaki's messages to others he didn't know but found nothing either written by the magician or addressed to him. That being the case, he left the board without any of his own writing and sought out a chair over a couch. If he didn't leave open a space by him, he had a better chance of being left alone. Or so he believed.

[free bird! bear]

By the time lunch rolled around, things still weren't getting any better. The voices hadn't gone away; instead, Firo was pretty sure they were getting more frequent. Ennis had been silent since last night, but Czes's voice had been an insistent buzz in his ear all morning.

He'd spent the morning alone, trying to ignore any cutting remarks from a boy who wasn't there as he puzzled through things. Were the drugs responsible after all? A note on the bulletin had confirmed that someone else who'd been forced into the trial had been hearing things too, but Hakkai...

The call for lunch had been welcome; the day was barely half over, and Firo was already feeling exhausted. At this rate, maybe it would be best to just wait it out instead of trying to figure out what was causing it. If it was the drug, it should wear off after a while.

He accepted his gruel quietly, looking it over as he headed across the cafeteria—Hakkai had said it looked spoiled, but he couldn't tell any difference from what they'd served morning, noon, and night every day. Maybe the man was still seeing things after all, or maybe he was the one seeing things. It could have been bad and only looked alright. Or maybe it was just the color after all...

As took a seat, a new voice called out to him: "There's no point in you trying to figure it out, Firo. You're a real idiot, you know?"

Firo scowled. "I don't want to hear that from you, Berga," he growled under his breath.

[For Peter Petrelli ;_;]