Day 55: Cafeteria

[mustbethesuit]

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[herr_inspektor]

Lunge had heard a little about magic in his time here, first from the ninja woman in the upstairs kitchen, and more recently had experienced it all too closely for his liking; Howell's hallway monster and the woman in the Sun Room might have been able to produce creations he could go on assuming were purely illusory (a trick of the light, a trick of the mind, it isn't real), but the other night he'd felt it in full force. It had been, unfortunately, impossible to deny the existence of the hundreds of blades that had rained down on L, Marc and himself, impossible to believe that the nick he'd gotten as one barely skimmed his shoulder was all in his head.

Perhaps he resented it purely on the grounds of concept. As a seemingly limitless force it 'explained away' far too much of the Institute for his liking; it was the logical equivalent of papering over the cracks instead of searching for deeper reasons. It encouraged lazy thinking.

Even so, he couldn't help but feel a tug of interest at the mention of an information-granting spell; now there was one use he could certainly have appreciated. Learning his enemy's weaknesses at a glance was, as much as his colleagues liked to suppose, entirely beyond his abilities; being able to do so would have done so much for his investigation...

But his thoughts were digressing. Edgar seemed sure that this wasn't to do with that spell, which meant leaving it behind for the mean time. Lunge nodded. "That makes sense, taking into account the means of administration." Another pause. The man's body language had unmistakeably closed: head down, eyes to the floor, not even cleaning as a decoy. Even his language had ebbed into the painful, poison as a simile. For someone so outgoing-- well, it must have been unbearable, to know that the Institute could so easily work its way into his mind.

"It's a cruel tactic: suddenly giving an advantage, without explanation. Like a Trojan horse," he said quietly. Would Edgar know what a Trojan horse was? It didn't matter. "Designed to make any man doubt himself and his enemy. Intimidation tactics. Do you know if the information they planted was correct?"

[girlsandgadgets]

Lunge brought up a point Edgar had told himself more than once: the institute was full of tricks designed to make the patients doubt everything they knew, to push them closer to losing themselves to the identity they'd been assigned. But why? What purpose did it serve to rob someone in such a way? What was there to Landel, Aguilar, or anyone else to gain? Edgar found neither prospect- of being a mere shell of himself or being killed- acceptable in any way. As much as he liked to think others would do the same, he couldn't deny the thinning numbers. Patients disappeared daily, their spots filled with new arrivals. How many more would there be?

"I never got the chance to find out," he replied. While it would have satisfied his curiosity even more to see if his unfounded hunch was accurate, he felt that it was a safe bet, given what Ryuuzaki had been able to glean without any logical explanation aside from the reportedly tainted food. He decided to leave that unmentioned for now. Ryuuzaki seemed like a private person, and some of the information he'd discovered through his new-found insight had been of the sensitive variety. The inspector might push if any more was mentioned.

Edgar instead changed tactics, resuming his scrubbing. "I'm aware that this place is designed with deceit in mind, though I didn't know just how far it went until last night. Have you ever been to the room where they keep patient possessions?"