Night 54: East Wing, Hall A [2nd Floor]
[From here.]So far, it seemed they were the only ones on that side of the main hall. Edgar wasn't about to complain- after all, that meant the storerooms would still be full, the wares there not yet picked clean by other resourceful patients. He shook his light as the beam wavered again, shining it down the corridor and into the corners. The
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"--No, nothing." His expression normalized, becoming a flat stare, and he continued, "It's hard to tell how much longer we have. If you'll allow me, I'll break the next lock. Just be sure to be ready for anything that might be behind the door." He would be breaking the lock regardless of what Edgar might allow; the point was to get ahead of him.
As he took the lead, he brushed against Edgar (impossible to think of him as "Figaro," now), and there it was again, immediate and unmistakeable: the sense of heavy responsibility, this time tinged with repulsion. Ambassadors. An alliance the young king hadn't wanted. One of the emissaries had been more repellent to Edgar than the others--but--the transference ended with that. L had no idea of the man's identity or the reason why Edgar felt particular loathing for him.
This time, because he was in the lead, his companion couldn't see his response to what had happened. L wondered again how likely it was that his sudden access to Edgar's memories and emotions might be a side effect of the sleep study, then discarded the idea: he hadn't experienced anything like this before tonight, and it was nothing like what he had been told to expect. He remembered how he had felt when the man, Archer, Gilgamesh, had accosted him the night before, the sharp, nauseating pain and the certainty that Archer didn't mean well. That must have been the work of the device. Nonetheless, food tampering was the only other explanation on offer, and it was hard to comprehend how food tampering could give him access to Edgar's inner thoughts. Maybe the intention was only to give him the illusion of it. But why? What's the point? What's the value to them? Only an idiot would look at the current circumstances and think that his new abilities had been bestowed in an altruistic act.
When he reached the door, he double-checked that it was locked, glanced at Edgar to be sure that he was standing ready, and stepped back and aimed a sharp kick at the area below the knob.
The door popped open.
[To here.]
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Aside from the silence now filling the hallway, the lack of voices indicating that the other patients had moved from the area, the corridor was unchanged. Edgar gave the hallway a cautionary sweep anyway, if simply out of habit.
As before, there was nothing, though not even the sound of their own conversation was there to fill the void this time. Though he didn't ask, Edgar could only assume the box of Daniel Laurier had given Ryuuzaki something to think about. His own certainly had. "Which way now?"
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"Back the way we came, down there." He indicated a door on the left with the beam of light, then another just next to it, and one across from the first. "A few doors are marked as locked on the maps that have circulated among the patients, with the rooms behind them left unlabeled, as if no one knows what's in them. It seems most likely that the doors really are impossible to open. It would be foolish to try to hide something by telling everyone that it's pointless to even attempt to get into the place where it's hidden, and I suspect that other people have made the same test... still, checking a few of them is the easiest way to be sure. That said, it's better if it's random."
He paused, moving towards the door on the left that was nearer to them. When he picked up the conversation again, it was with a shift in topic.
"Do you remember Landel's comment about Aguilar? He said that The Eagle can't tolerate insubordination. Is that what we're experiencing now... his intolerance?" He jiggled the handle of the door, then pressed against the panel. It didn't budge; it barely rattled. "These experiences we've had tonight... the announcement earlier suggested that they were punishment for the riot at breakfast. However, the abilities that each of us have been given are more advantageous than not."
He stood back from the door, then tentatively lifted his leg, preparing to kick. His gaze went back and forth as he gauged the approximate force and angle that would be most effective. "Does that make sense to you?"
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"They may have said that the riot was partly to blame for the events tonight- assuming these experiences are the events- but I have a feeling they would have subjected us to them eventually anyway," Edgar noted grimly, giving one of the doors a solid hit with the butt of his flashlight. Unlike the others he'd opened in the same fashion, this one didn't budge. Still no activity from the rest of the hallway- apparently, two men knocking in doors wasn't enough to merit attention from the nighttime guards. Edgar wasn't about to complain.
"The question is," he continued as he stood, "whether or not these are the only two effects. If not, maybe we were just lucky enough to get good ones. Or we used them well. Think of it this way: you could have ended up with someone who didn't want their secrets known and would do anything silence someone who learned them. In the same vein, I could have been alone and given in to my curiosity, wandering into a death trap to satisfy an itch."
Edgar crossed to the indicated door on the other wall, giving the handle a try before kneeling beside the lock, preparing to give it the same treatment as the last. He shook his head as he got the same results. "Locked and locked. It would be nice if we had someone here who was an expert at dealing with this sort of situation..." There was a light sigh at the end of his statement. Where was Locke when he was needed?
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Edgar was right in several respects. Aguilar had most likely used the riot as an excuse to do what he would eventually have done anyway, framed either as a punishment that he would have found some reason to apply sooner rather than later, or as "training." The two of them had been lucky, but that luck was mostly circumstantial, and there might have been as many different experiences of the "punishment" as there were people in the Institute.
Even so, it was ridiculous under the circumstances--unnecessary--for Aguilar to try to present what was most likely an experiment as a punishment.
Edgar was having no luck with the doors either; that meant that the maps were accurate, at least when it came to the three at hand. L gave up and stood back, leaning against the wall near the door he had tried to open. He glanced down at the open end of the corridor. Still nothing, which was a relief.
"The next thing would be an explosion, but that might be too dangerous to try under current conditions, especially when satisfying our curiosity is the only concrete goal." He still felt some temptation to let someone who was hypothetically expendable try, but when he had no way to shield them, and when the profit wasn't obvious, there wasn't much point. "Then again... locked doors must be locked for a reason, but I'd prefer to have more of an idea of which door is likely to lead somewhere useful before we--"
The intercom clicked on, a man with a faint Spanish accent began to speak, and if L said anything else, he had no memory of it.
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