Day 54: Recreational Field
And thus concluded a perfect start to a perfect day. Making him explode from every facial orifice was a totally justified response to Peter not doing anything at all.
The nurses' hearts had defrosted just enough to permit them a change of clothes and a desperately needed wipe down. Nurse Joyce - Rachel had been apologizing the whole way back to ( Read more... )
The nurses' hearts had defrosted just enough to permit them a change of clothes and a desperately needed wipe down. Nurse Joyce - Rachel had been apologizing the whole way back to ( Read more... )
She stopped in the Sun Room, telling Guybrush to stay put while she saw to whatever the fuss was occurring in the cafeteria. After a quick scope of the bulletin board, a mental note to ask Morgan how she was doing, and a quick whine to himself about how his Snugglecakes was still missing and LeChuck was probably halfway across the Caribbean with her by now, he finally turned his attention to the darkly clad official who'd been watching his nurse like a hawk.
"So, I'm guessing there was something on the morning announcements about you guys," Guybrush started, putting on a casual smile. He was met with several seconds of unamused silence. "Ooor not. Mind telling me what's going on?"
And there was his second helping of silence. "Well, I'll just... stand here. Now."
After a few more moments of awkward waiting, the nurse returned, muffin in hand and sausage in hair. She crammed the muffin in his palm, pulling the bits of meat from her hair with an irritated sigh. "It's a mess in there, Mr. Moriarty. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to go and head outside for now."
"Outside?" Guybrush whined. "But I was hoping-"
"This is for your own good!" she interrupted, leading him along the corridors to the recreational field as the familiar voice of head nurse Lydia chirped through the intercom.
The field wasn't exactly the picture of "For Your Own Good" the nurse made it out to be: it was cold, the other patients took ages to emerge from the cafeteria (most looked like they'd been keelhauled during breakfast, which was something else sending up red flags), and the way the new guards were lining the patients up for a firing squad-style execution wasn't encouraging. Then one of them started calling out names.
Guybrush yawned as the guard made his way through the list, watching some of the patients head inside as soon as they were called. "Most days, I take pride in my last name," he said to himself, "but when we're going in alphabetical order, it doesn't pay to be a Threepwood." He crossed his arms, trying to keep his icy hook off his bare skin and his mind off the cold entirely. "Okay, so most likely situation: LeChuck has Elaine, is somehow behind this, and is messing things up with every second that he's out there and I'm in here. Elaine's capable of handling herself, no matter what time she's taken from. If she can hold out until I fix this, everything will be just fine."
"Moriarty, Brian!"
It took Guybrush as second to remember that he was supposedly Brian Moriarty. "You mean me, right?"
The guard looked him over, then at the list on his clipboard, then back again. "Are you or aren't you Brian Moriarty?" he asked, his tone a match for the weather.
"I'd rather be Brian Moriarty than Bobbin Threadbare," Guybrush answered with a smooth smile.
A minute later, the Mighty Pirate™ was halfway through one of his two assigned laps around the field. If nothing else, he did get a lot of exercise while running through hallways, from toilets, and as punishment for being a smart aleck.
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Even though Harvey still didn't know what to make of Grell, considering his (or her?) general demeanor, he still had to hand it to the guy (he'd go with that for now) for getting them out of the cafeteria before the gassing had started. Honestly, he wasn't as shocked as he should have been that they had decided to resort to that kind of method here. Crane had been using Arkham to flood Gotham with fear gas, after all; there were all sorts of shady things that could go down when only "insane" people were involved.
A lot of the people here were genuinely nuts, but the idea that that made them disposable was still something that didn't sit right with the man. It was true that his morals had been bent and twisted since his accident, but he still had them.
Granted, even though he could bothered by it on a basic level, Harvey didn't feel that much sympathy for the patients who had been caught in the gassing. He was more focused on how good it was that he hadn't, seeing how that stuff getting into his burn wounds would have end poorly.
When he was told that he needed to go to the recreational field, Harvey decided not to argue. The weather was probably overcast enough that he wouldn't have to worry about the sun bothering him, and with how tense the staff was now, he knew better than to ask to stay in the Sun Room. Besides, the Sun Room was so close to where that gas had been that he figured he was better off getting away from it.
What he walked into was the soldiers forcing all of the patients to line up, and it reminded him of both police force training and executions. Funny how those two could go hand in hand.
Harvey found a spot and even responded to his fake name when it was called, which all turned out to be rather painless. He was painting himself out to be the perfect patient at this rate, which might be able to benefit him in the future. Provided that the nurses forgot the few temper tantrums he'd had. He was getting better at holding it in.
With that taken care of, Harvey started to glance around the area, wondering what to do with himself. It was right at the moment that he watched another patient running by. It looked like he was finishing up a lap. Someone who'd gotten a little too smart with the soldiers, maybe?
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Guybrush huffed through his first lap, wondering if he was out of shape, if he'd traded in his running legs for sea legs, or if he'd ever had running legs at all. Come to think of it, he couldn't recall ever running so much at one time in his entire career as he had on more than one occasion at Landel's. Maybe De Landel or whoever was running the place was trying to send him a message.
At the start of lap two, more patients were arriving, most still looking like they'd sobbed themselves silly and choosing to head inside rather than stick to the cold. Guybrush kept running, despite his instinct to stop and talk: he could feel the eyes of Mr. Clipboard boring into the back of his skull as he slowed down. He sped up, catching a stern look in the guard's eye.
Even more eye-catching was one guy on the sidelines with half his face bandaged. Whatever happened at breakfast must have been really spectacular to end up like that. Had there been a daring escape attempt? A riot staged by overworked nurses? A rip in time and space that took only half the guy's face with it, leaving it stranded on a deserted island with a lonely hermit as its only company? Guybrush was going to kick himself if he missed a mass escape- it would be his luck.
He finally wound the last corner and made it back to the bandaged guy, leaning forward and wheezing as he came to a stop. He managed to form some words between breaths: "Hey... question... what... happened... breakfast?" It made enough sense in his mind; however, he waved his hook in a circle for clarification, vaguely indicating everything around them.
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It was hard to tell if the man was asking about that morning because he hadn't been there or because he was too stupid to have figured it out for himself. Harvey just hoped it was the first option; he didn't really like talking to idiots.
Unfortunately, they were pretty common in this place.
"I made sure to get the hell out before it got too bad, but the soldiers decided to act like riot police and beat up whoever put up a fuss. Then they let out some tear gas and... that was that." Watching it from afar meant he was able to give a pretty decent report, and for once Harvey was glad that he didn't have a first-hand account to relate.
However, it was at that point that he noticed the hook on the man's arm, and it made him pause and stare for a moment. It was the exact sort of behavior he hated to be on the receiving end of, but Harvey wasn't staring because he was bothered by it; it was just that this was one of the first times he'd come across someone who'd been maimed almost as badly as he had.
Also, a hook was a pretty crude prosthetic, wasn't it? How'd he ended up with that of all things?
Looking away, Harvey wondered why the guy had been made to run if he probably hadn't even been involved in the food fight in the first place, but... that was a question that could be easily answered, if the stranger was cooperative. "What did you do?" he asked.
He wouldn't ask about the hand (or lack thereof). He was better than that.
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"Sounds like I missed quite a party," Guybrush responded as he finally caught his breath, still grimacing from the thought of being gassed. "I ticked one of the new guys off during role call. They're not keen on being told a name is ridiculous, even if it really is."
He straightened, offering his hand. "Speaking of names, I'm Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate. And you are...?"
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So this stranger had just gotten into an argument about a name and that had been enough to earn some laps around the field, huh? Well, Harvey wasn't too shocked about that. Military men were known for being strict and unreasonable, so they were fitting that image -- along with the image of being completely ruthless, but that was neither here nor there.
Though speaking of ridiculous names, he'd just been offered one. He stared at the man's hand (not the hook) for a second and then looked him right in the face, confused. "That's not ridiculous?" And had he really just called himself a pirate? Well, that gave some more context to the hook, but...
To think he'd had the idea that this guy might actually be relatively normal. Harvey didn't even try to hold back a sigh.
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"Of course not!" Guybrush insisted with 100% sincerity. This wasn't the first time his introduction had been returned with an incredulous look, a sigh, or both in succession. "Not as ridiculous as Bobbin Threadbare or Mancomb Seepgood. Guybrush is a sophisticated name known throughout the Caribbean! Well, it used to be. These days, I try to pretend I didn't write that trilogy about where, how, and why I blew up my nemesis."
He paused for a second before continuing, his hand still offered to the air. "I missed the morning announcements. Do you know who these guys are, Mr...?"
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He really had no idea what the other man was babbling on about, but it seemed clear that he thought he was from a time when pirates were all the rage on the Caribbean seas. It was a bit difficult to even keep a straight face when he knew that, but...
Right, the hand. Harvey took it because Guybrush was refusing to pull it back, giving it a brief yet firm shake. "It's Harvey Dent. And they didn't tell us too much, to be honest." He just had to try and forget that he was talking with a self-proclaimed pirate. Easy, right? "The head doctor just told us not to ask the nurses about it because they didn't know much anyway. And there's still no telling what that Eagle thing is." What, or who. There were a lot of possibilities, but they were being kept in the dark for the moment.
"But yeah, where they're from and why they're here is still up in the air. It would have been nice if they'd explained a few things before trying to gas all of us." Even if Harvey had dodged that bullet, it still bothered him.
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No more excuses! Elaine was gone, LeChuck was just as gone, and he wasn't getting anywhere without information. The nurse never answered any of his questions, and Darkly Clad Official #1 had ignored him, so both of them were off the list of people to question. Only every other nurse and guard to go. Or he could just wait until nightfall and go snooping. The find-a-nurse-and-get-answers-from-her-the-hard-way plan hadn't gone over so well, even with the unstoppable duo of Mighty Pirate™ and Mighty Pirate Hunter™.
"Well, that explains... not much," Guybrush admitted, ignoring another urge to ask about how his face got so mangled, "but it's good to know anyway. Here's hoping they don't stick around at night. If they're like this during the day, I'd hate to see what they're like lurking in the hallways at night. I've been trying to get a hold of either a nurse or a brainwashed patient for the past two nights to get some answers out of them, but I get the feeling these guys wouldn't talk no matter how many insults were thrown at them."
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The guy had a good point about the night, for one thing. Were the soldiers going to warp into some sort of monster, too, or would they just disappear? It seemed like the sort of thing that could go either way, but they wouldn't have to wait too long before they found out. How lucky for them.
Hearing about the man's plan to try and talk to someone at night just caused Harvey to hold back a laugh, though. Was this guy new? He should have known there was no chance in hell of that working. "I don't know as much about the nurses, but you're not going to have any luck with the brainwashed patients. All they're going to want to do is tell you to head back and then attack you." In a whole myriad of ways, at that.
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"Is that what happened to your face?" Guybrush asked immediately. Wait, he'd meant to assure Harvey he was an expert at negotiation and puzzle-solving, but it came out completely wrong. Whoops.
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If he was a weaker man, he might have winced at that.
Instead, he just frowned and shook his head. "No, it didn't happen here." How many times would he have to explain this? Maybe he should just write it on a piece of paper and tape it to his forehead.
Seeing how Guybrush had been so forward, Harvey really didn't feel guilty about doing the same. So he motioned to the hook and tilted his head. "What about you?"
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"Didn't happen here either," the pirate answered, waggling his hook a little. Before his kidnapping, he missed Lefty- now that he had possibly the world's most useless prosthetic, he took back all the bad things he'd thought about the hook. At least his first one had been sharp enough to act as a back scratcher.
"It got infected with a pox that can apparently be used to make some immortality juice," he continued, complete with dramatic hand motions representing the pox, "so this crazy doctor hired a Mighty Pirate Hunter™ to come take it from me. I bested her in an exciting sword fight on the deck of my ship, but she got away, taking my hand with her."
The mental image of someone hunting down Harvey and lopping off half his face floated through Guybrush's mind. Ugh. Now that was unpleasant. "Though I'm guessing you're not a pirate, so that's not what happened to you. There don't seem to be many of us here."
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And it was ridiculous. Was this guy one of those pathological liars who just came up with fantastical stories off the top of his head? Considering where they were, it was completely possible. (Still, who could even come up with something like that?)
"...Right, not so much," he said after a pause as he tried to gather his thoughts. But even if this man was insane, Harvey still didn't feel comfortable returning the favor and explaining his own injury in detail. "It was a bit more mundane than that." Being tied up to cans of gas and left up to the whim of a crazy clown wasn't actually that mundane, but compared to immortality juice and pirate hunters? Yeah, it was.
But maybe that's what had caused Guybrush to come up with this bizarre story; maybe he'd lost his hand in a really uninteresting way and he had wanted to make it more important than that. It seemed like the most likely option to Harvey at that moment.
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