Day 53: Lunch

[buryyourdemons]

There was little to be said of the daily business that went on. He allowed himself to be shuffled, mind embedded too deeply in things he shouldn't be dwelling on. The night was over, the shadows had vanished, and there was little more than bad memories to be left in their stead. This was logic, pure and simple, and should have been reassuring but

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[tasteoftruth]

Gant had given Badd a lot to think about, and not just through his words. If he was right this wasn't just a randomly selected loony bin, but somewhere deliberately used to get rid of people. And if von Karma, a man who should have been hung years ago, was still here then something deeply nefarious and far larger than Badd was going on. Of course was always the option that Gant was insane, or pretending to be insane, or just flat-out lying for some hidden reason. That was why traitors went to the ninth level, they made the entire world untrustworthy after they were exposed.

But he'd flicked an idle glance across the mad ramblings on the message board on his way back to the cafeteria and his eyes stumbled across a symbol he'd hoped never to deal with again. He'd thought it was some kind of joke until he read the attached messages and felt his heart sink through his stomach.

Maybe it was still a joke, or a crazy girl with a Yatagarasu fixation who'd picked up the name. Maybe they were trying to mess with him. Maybe it was some kind of 'therepeutic' game no one had told him about. But Badd knew he was just thinking up any desperate excuse for the smuggling ring not to have found the one place in him that could still have knives twisted into it.

If they'd so much as laid a finger on Kay Faraday he'd tear this whole place apart.

Badd shoved his tray aside the moment he sat down and put both elbows on the table, glaring out at the amassed madmen and madwomen. And if this guy started asking him about the metaphysical nature of his meal, Badd was in a mood to forcefeed him the tray.

[scarletspeedstr]

Wally blinked as someone suddenly dropped into the chair opposite and shoved their tray aside.

"...uh, hi to you too?" he tried, not that he was really expecting much of an answer or a conversation at all with an opener like that. Still, he thought as his eyes drifted to the neglected tray, it wasn't like this sort of thing didn't have some benefits...

Shrugging casually and doing his best to look like this was totally normal, really, don't even bother asking questions about it, Wally started lifting the guy's lunch onto his own plate.

"So, bad day?"

[tasteoftruth]

Badd stared, mildly perplexed, as his lunch began to disappear. "I've had better," he commented dryly, pulling his soda close in case the man decided to commandeer it as well. He seemed more functional than the druggie kid from earlier, but that was no guarantee he'd be a good conversationalist. "So is taking people's food just your thing or are you worried about the government putting nanochips in your pizza?"

At least he didn't seem the dangerous kind of crazy. He'd seen a few people yelling at the nurses but little overt violence, so this didn't seem to be a ward for the criminally insane. And with the way the nurses kept a close eye on everything Kay probably wouldn't be in immediate physical danger unless they directly wanted her to be.

On the bulletin, if that had really been her, she'd sounded safe and reasonably happy. That was only the mildest of comforts.

[scarletspeedstr]

"Kinda just a thing," Wally answered, relaxing his guard a little since apparently the guy really didn't want to eat his lunch. "I've got this metabolism problem that I need to eat a lot for, that's all."

He grinned and added; "Why, you meet a lot of people talking about nanochips in pizza?"

He had a feeling that the guy might just be new and stuck on the whole 'monsters blah blah experiments blah nighttime death games blee' deal, which was sadly something Wally had a lot of experience in dealing with. Better to try and take things slow then and see how the guy reacted to his questions before saying anything that might paint him as just as crazy as he probably thought everyone else was.

[tasteoftruth]

"Kid this morning wasn't sure if his waffles were real or not and thought the capitol was drugging him." Badd sipped his soda and sucked on the lip of the glass. Metabolism, huh? With the buffet right there? Badd mentally downgraded the theft to 'quirk', but withheld judgment on the rest of the man's personality.

"So what's your personal brand of crazy, then?" he asked with a shrug. His eyes scanned the room again, looking for that unique topknot and hairpin key that marked the most important thing in his world. In the same outfit as the rest, with her hair down, she'd be lost in that mess of people...he really hoped Kay had gotten rid of that stupid pin. She didn't need to make herself any more of a walking target than she already was as a Faraday.

[scarletspeedstr]

"...huh. Okay, little weird, but I guess if you're new here, this place can take you like that," Wally answered, wondering a bit about what that kid's story was and who they were.

His new friend seemed a bit distracted for some reason as well, so Wally was still a little undecided about if the guy was new or had just run into some really weird people around the place. Maybe he should see about getting a better idea of where he stood...

"Oh, you know, same old. Bad dreams about monsters trying to kill me at night. You?"

[tasteoftruth]

"If bad dreams count as crazy, I deserve to be here," Badd said, taking back another piece of pizza. He'd been having nightmares for years, almost decades. The ones where Byrne had hunted him down with the Yatagarasu's Key hadn't even been the worst, he'd had some sense of satisfaction out of the punishment. The dreams that left him waking up in a cold sweat were the ones where Byrne just turned and stared at him with empty, accusing eyes, blood pouring from his chest.

No. Kay now, angst later.

Badd's eyes stopped prowling the room and he focused on the man across from him again. He seemed normal enough, or at least enough for conversation. "But me? Nothing special. What's your name?" Because saying 'I am not crazy at all and am in fact being held here against my will by an international smuggling ring out for revenge' wouldn't win him any credibility with a sane man.

[scarletspeedstr]

Okay, the dreams thing hadn't gotten anything, so the guy was probably new and hadn't spent the night here yet. Or else he was pretty boring and had just stayed in if he had. It was possible. Which meant Wally had to tread carefully around anything he said, unless he wanted to get labelled as 'another crazy guy'.

"Wally West, you?" he asked, letting the guy raid back some of his pizza as he continued to work his way steadily through the plate. After a moment he added, almost like it was just a second thought; "So, I'm guessing you don't know how you got here either, right? Since you said that if bad dreams counted, then you should be here. Kinda implies that you don't think you're really crazy."

[tasteoftruth]

"Tyrell Badd." Badd took a bite and chewed slowly to allow a legitimate pause in the conversation, watching for any sign of recognition. No one had picked him out of the crowd this morning but perhaps the name might garner some notice...or perhaps he was being too egotistical about the matter and nobody here even knew or cared about the Great Thief Yatagarasu. He really shouldn't be hoping that he was famous among crazy people, as a detective or as everything else.

"Would you believe me if I said I wasn't?" 'Either', now that was an interesting way of phrasing it. "No idea how I got here, either. I must have fallen asleep when they put me on the bus." He played it off as a little joke and against anticipated the response. Badd was used to pulling information out of suspects and witnesses. A man with a coarse look and just that tiny edge of aggression was far more trustworthy than a smiling snake.

[scarletspeedstr]

The name didn't mean anything to him, and neither was Wally really expecting it to. The whole alternate whatever thing kinda made that unlikely. He smiled at the question; at least Tyrell seemed like he picked stuff up pretty quick, so hopefully he'd get used to the whole 'hi, you've been kidnapped by crazy people into an institute of death, enjoy your stay!' deal pretty fast as well.

"Yeah, I'd believe you," he said honestly. "Because as far as I know, no one remembers how they got here, and a lot of people wouldn't be classed as crazy no matter how you look at it." Of course, some of them might be considered a little unbalanced by some people, since they might have a habit of dressing in spandex and hanging out with, among others, a guy who dressed as a giant bat and jumped out at criminals to scare them, but that was just one way of showing that not everyone's idea of 'crazy' was the same.

...or that possibly Bats wasn't exactly a shining example of sanity no matter how much of a great guy he was.

"I hate to break it to you," he said, shoving that thought aside into the pile of things he'd pretend never crossed his mind on the off chance a telepath with ties to Bats showed up. "But it seems like almost everyone here has been kidnapped. You'd just go to sleep or something and wake up here, no matter where you were before. And they're not that keen on letting you go either."

[tasteoftruth]

Damnit, where was a lollipop when a guy really needed to do some thinking?

"I heard something similar earlier this morning, from an old friend. It's not something I'd usually believe off a crazy person." Or a murderous traitor to his badge. With someone like Gant it wasn't that he worried about being lied to, it was figuring out where he might just be telling the truth. "He made it sound like it was some sort of giant conspiracy to grab a bunch of random people and put them in a loony bin for no good reason. It seems kind of hard to believe."

That last part Badd would buy. He'd made another petition for a phone call before lunch and the nurses had put him off again. They acted more like babysitters than wardens and he'd noticed several instances of telling people they'd been calling themselves the wrong name. All similar experiences but none connected...what was going on here?

[scarletspeedstr]

"Well," Wally said with a tired laugh. "If they've got a reason, they're not sharing it. Lots of people don't even know how they could have gotten here in the first place, from whole other states or countries--" Or planets and times, but he didn't want to get into that right now. "Even if you ignore the whole argument that there's nothing wrong with them, it doesn't explain why we weren't sent somewhere closer to home."

He rapidly finished off another slice of the pizza and shrugged. "I mean, even if the doors didn't unlock at night and everything, that'd be a pretty big tip off that something was weird, right?"

[tasteoftruth]

"With a population this big?" Badd gestured skeptically at the tables beside them. "It'd make more sense if there were only a few people hidden amoung the crazies than that this entire place being full of kidnap victims." Gant...and someone had called themselves 'Franziska von karma' and 'Dick Gumshoe', though he assumed those to be pranks to taunt him. If this guy was telling the truth the amount of connections and money the head of the scheme had to have was mindblowing. It was impossible.

Wait. "What do you mean?" he asked, eyes narrowing. The doors unlocking at night? That was when doors ought to be shut, not opened. Maybe he'd just spoken wrong...or he was revealing his true crazy, who knew.

[scarletspeedstr]

"It's not just the size of the population that bothers me," Wally commented, frowning at the number of people also eating their lunch, sharing quiet conversations on escape plans or checking up on friends or finding out where they were and what was going on.

"It's how quick they get new people coming in that really gets me. Every other day or so there's more people turning up, no one knowing how they got here or anything. Even if this were a normal facility, how many places can accept patients that fast?" He waved a slice of pizza to illustrate his point before taking a bite out of it. "Not to mention that people keep disappearing as well. You'd think getting so many people so fast they'd run out of room, but they seem to get rid of them just as quickly."

It was a depressing topic, and Wally's eyes dropped to his plate as he thought of exactly how many people he'd know that he wouldn't be seeing again in a hurry. Maybe never, if he was stuck here.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. The doors open at night. It's part of, I dunno, some crazy plan to let us think we can escape I guess. But you don't have to believe me, you'll find out on your own tonight."

[tasteoftruth]

Skepticism levels rising. "Huh," Badd said, eyebrow slightly raised. "I'll have to keep an eye out for that." Everyone here was obsessed with dreaming, if the bulletin board was any indication. That probably had something to do with it.

With such a high turnover rate the place sounded more like a holding facility than an outright prison. That worried Badd even more. This place was freakish but cozy, whatever was elsewhere was bound to be worse. "Do you know anything about Dr. Landel, or whoever's really in charge of this place?" he said, trying to keep the flow of the conversation going. Crazy, perhaps, but the crazy was dropping information and Badd needed everything he could get. "It's hard to get an audience with him."