DAY 55: Sun Room [2nd Shift]
[ from here ]Either she was the only unlucky person to experience a freezing shower, or she just hadn't built up the tolerance for it that the more seasoned patients had. Whichever it was, she was the first person into the sun room and while normally she wouldn't mind that, the soldiers were majorly creepy and she was kind of hoping for some kind
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The guy couldn't even say a simple no. It was like a petulant teenager, slowly turning his head back to glare at him before turning back around.
Great. Like he had ever had the desire to relive his high school days.
Once in what the soldier had grunted as "the sun room," Alaric zeroed in on a big flat bulletin board in the room. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't an announcement board or anything, but a board for patients to write notes to each other. Was this standard institutional fare? Not to mention some of the notes were... yeah. Questionable.
Either way, he left one just in case Damon happened to take two seconds out of his life to not be a dick in order to see if he was still alive. If this really was Damon from a month ago, he wasn't going to hold his breath for many feelings of camaraderie. It didn't mean Alaric wouldn't help him, it just meant it would be... more annoying.
From what he could see, he wasn't in the room - nor was Elena - so after the note was written, the teacher stood by the board, his eyes darting around the room randomly. There was a brief feeling of nostalgia, standing in front of a board like this with a pen in his hand, but no one was paying attention to him, mostly having conversations between themselves -
- nevermind. That was a lot of nostalgia, considering that was every Monday through Friday for him.
He did spot a familiar face though, and given his distinct lack of familiar faces and his even more distinct dislike of approaching random people for chitchat, he looped around the corner of a couch across the room to slowly sit down right next to Anise. His head was pounding and he was squinting against the light coming into the room, but at least he didn't look like a total headcase, holding it in both his hands.
He stared pointedly at her, his lips curling into an accusatory smile. "So... about that food not being poisoned."
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Right, this was Rick, the new guy she met yesterday. He hadn't been eating at lunch, so Anise assured him the food was fine, and then...
...
Ah!!
The girl's eyes grew even wider the moment it all came together, and her body stiffened. It had taken a few extra seconds to connect the events from yesterday to events that took place when her memory was gone, but she remembered now that the guy on the radio said there was something weird about the food... and then all that weird stuff happened to Anise and her friends. Did something happen to Rick, too? Ack... it was almost like it was her fault!
"I... I swear, I didn't know!" she stammered. "I've been here for weeks and the food was always safe! I ate it too!" The protests flew out of her mouth, one after another. Anise usually took pride in having lots of good information, so it was a bit of a shock for her advice to have turned out to be so horribly wrong.
Once she blurted out her defense, Anise calmed down almost immediately, her stiffened shoulders relaxing and her eyes returning to their normal sizes, though she continued to stare back at Rick. After a few moments of consideration, she asked, "... What happened?"
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At least she was acting like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. He didn't want to think someone her age was a good actor, but he knew better than to trust kids immediately just because they were kids. Sure, most were inherently good, but...
Okay, Alaric could admit he was maybe being really paranoid about a - what, thirteen, fourteen year old? - girl trying to intentionally poison him, if that's what that crap last night had been. Considering he could jump and run and not fall down or break his bed today (well, maybe less on the running and jumping since his head was killing him), Alaric was going to go with thinking it was a one-time deal. He wasn't the smoothest guy out there, but he was by no means clumsy. Last night had been ridiculous.
"Bad luck," he said, sighing. His gaze dropped from her to the shoes he was wearing now, which he could have definitely used last night. "I mean, a lot. I wouldn't have thought anything of it but there was this thing on the radio..."
Considering some of the buzz he'd seen about the radio once he reached the board, he figured it had to be important.
"You said you ate it too, right? Did anything happen?"
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"Bad luck how?" she asked, tilting her head to the side as she tried to imagine what he meant by it. Bad luck as in lots of bad things happening at once? That was pretty normal for Landel's. "I mean, you probably had to have a lot of bad luck to end up here in the first place, right?" Anise grinned at her own little joke, even if it sort of was a sad truth for both of them.
He mentioned the radio, though, so she was quick to chime in with, "Oh yeah, that guy did say something about the food and weird stuff happening. I'm still not too sure we can trust him... but he probably wasn't lying about that." Giving the patients information about something they couldn't do anything about wasn't going to help or hurt anyone, so maybe it was just a ploy to get people to trust him. Anise couldn't help but be suspicious, after what happened with the other two radio people.
As for her own experience... "Yeah, something really weird happened!" She turned and leaned forward a little, facing Rick more directly. "As soon as the night started, a huge chunk of my memories just disappeared! I couldn't remember anything from the past few weeks, so it was like my first night here all over again." As she spoke, she balled her hands into fists and shook them in front of her chest, just for emphasis. "And then this morning, everything was back to normal."
At least, she thought she was back to normal. If she was still missing memories, how would she tell? ... That was a scary thought, come to think of it.
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It... really sounded stupid in his head, trying to blame those sorts of things on food. But it just didn't happen to him. Sure, his life had kind of been sucked into a black hole for the last two years, but this was a whole new level. Hell, if he wasn't so intimate with a few members of the supernatural, he probably would have shrugged it off as one of those days. Except for the killing himself on a door, as he was starting to suspect had happened. The lingering confusion about his last moments last night were just like when he'd woken up with a giant hole in his lung. Also, the fact that the same thing was happening to Elena...
Plus, something was changing everyone. Damon with a limp was not something he'd ever expected to see.
"I'm willing to take some random guy's advice with a grain of salt as much as the next person, but it was pretty relevant at the time." If Anise was telling the truth, then Alaric had to assume the more recent alterations in the food had been the fault of the military force. He'd at least been in Landel's early enough yesterday to recognize that this whole take-over hadn't exactly been in the books.
The teacher tensed at the first mention of memories. He'd had enough talk about them in the last twenty-four hours to satisfy a good few years of his life. If anything, that definitely sounded like compelling, but what was the point of taking the memories away only to give them back? To see if she could survive her first night all over again? To have it happen the same night as Alaric and Elena's exciting adventures in breaking furniture seemed way too big a coincidence. "I'm assuming these kinds of things don't happen around here often?"
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It sounded like Rick had a pretty healthy level of skepticism, so Anise probably didn't need to elaborate on her feelings about the radio. So long as he wasn't going to blindly trust everything he heard, he would be okay.
With how complicated things could get at the institute, Rick's question was a little hard to answer, but Anise was going to try to be as helpful as she could be. "Well... the food thing was a first, but it's pretty common for really weird, scary things to happen at night... and the staff messes around with people's memories a lot, too." They'd never done it exactly like they did last night, though, which was probably why Anise's friends were so bothered by what happened. If Anise's memories had disappeared for good, then the friends she made here and everything they went through together would have been lost. Even if it was upsetting to have forgotten at all, at the moment she just felt immensely relieved that it was just a one-night deal.
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What a way to think of your friend, he thought sardonically. Of course, calling Damon his friend to his face right now might just get him laughed out of the room. Or given one of Damon's typical lectures. Something like I don't have friends, I don't need them, loner bad boy vampire, blah blah blah...
Alaric at least thought they had that back home. Even he had been surprised Damon had listened to him when he'd told him to stay home in order to avoid Jules "marked" thing. And after all of the saving Stefan operations and the sheer number of vervain darts he'd lost in the past couple of weeks -
"That's pretty weird," he said, rubbing his hands together between his knees. Every time his left hand rubbed over his right, he'd touch the ring. Good to know it still worked like a charm. (Or was it a charm?) "I guess it's a psychological thing, maybe. Flaunting their power or something."
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"Maybe!" she agreed, bringing a finger to her chin. "Some of us were kind of hoping things would be easier if the Head Doctor wasn't here, so maybe they're just trying to show that they mean business." If that was it, then they definitely made their point. Several times.
"But, anyway..." Anise shifted a little in her seat, trying to get more comfortable as she tried to ease the topic in a different direction. "Now that you've been here for a day, is there anything you want to know about? I've been here a pretty long time, so you can bring all your questions to cute little Anise here!" She smiled brightly at her self-advertisement, exuding confidence (and hopefully cuteness).
She would have offered that yesterday, but most parts of the institute were too bizarre to believe without seeing a bit of it firsthand. If the first thing Rick heard when he met her was you're surrounded by aliens from different points in time, and the staff here brainwash people and sic monsters on you at night, he probably would have thought she was nuts. By now, she figured he could handle a few weird explanations. The whole food-causing-bad-luck thing was pretty high on the weird scale, and he seemed convinced of that, at least.
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Or she had no sense of empathy, which put her on the same level as about 60% of teenagers.
"Do you have some kind of newbie guide all set up and ready to go?" he asked, lifting his head to look at her with a raised eyebrow. It wasn't actually a sarcastic question; maybe he hadn't been too willing to go with this whole mental institution thing, but now he had his own little adventure as experience on how this place was Not Quite Right. There were monsters apparently (he trusted Damon enough to believe that special story) and he'd seen the limp, which was definitely something Damon would not have faked. Even the way the vampire barrier had affected Damon in the abandoned room was weird. Nothing seemed to fit with the rules that applied back home.
"I mean, I don't know much outside of this bad luck thing... and monsters, I guess. And screwing with memories. Is there a point in letting everyone out at night?"
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Unfortunately, while Rick's other question was a really common one, it was also a really hard one to answer.
"Mm... I don't think anyone really knows why they do all the weird stuff they do here. I mean, some people think they're running some big experiment on everyone, and some people think they're trying to make people into super-soldiers..." As she mulled over the different theories she'd heard over the weeks, Anise looked around at the other uniformed patients in the room. "... I guess that last one doesn't seem so weird, now that everything's like this."
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Listen to him, thinking like he'd been here a while. A whole day and a half was all he'd survived so far, and he was far from being settled in.
"Super soldiers?" Great, this was quickly gonna turn into a one-sided conversation with everything out of his mouth being questions. She'd offered, though. Either way, creating super soldiers just didn't mesh with what he knew. If that was the case, why was Damon so messed up compared to what he'd been able to do? As for himself... he was a history teacher. Sure, he'd killed one or two vampires in his time, but seriously. He didn't have powers. All he had was a stupid ring that brought him back to life so he could die again. Being a soldier was not even close.
"I guess... I dunno. It just doesn't sound right to me. Kind of like a bad sci-fi movie."
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"Well... fighting lots of monsters is a pretty good way to get stronger fast," she offered, playing devil's advocate for the weird theory. Anise was speaking from experience, though. It had certainly helped her and her friends get stronger during their journey. Maybe the staff here used monsters to weed out the weak, and make the survivors strong?
"But... I guess some things still don't make sense. Like why they kidnap little kids, or people who are frail and sickly..." If it was soldiers they wanted, why abduct someone like Ion, whose body was too weak for that kind of work? There was a part of Anise that was glad the Fon Master wasn't with her at the moment... if only so he wouldn't have to keep suffering through the torture and tricks the institute kept inflicting on everyone.
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Alaric didn't want to imagine it, but it was nice to see someone who was a lot more mature than their age, even if it was because the situation nearly made it necessary.
"Maybe," he acquiesced, unable to come up with a real agreement or disagreement. He didn't exactly have enough information to go on to decide one way or the other, so.
Now that he thought about it - since she'd brought up the monsters.
"Uh, I know this sounds weird and all but... do you know where to get a weapon? Since, uh. I kind of want to avoid being eaten."
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"If you want a good weapon, you might be out of luck. There used to be some people called alchemists around here, who could make ordinary hunks of metal into swords and stuff, but I think most of them are gone now. You could try asking on the bulletin board, but I wouldn't expect much," Anise explained. It was a shame that the Cooking Club seemed to have vanished... Anise even had a big bag of metal supplies to bring to them, and now they were just going to waste. Or... the military had them now, she guessed, since everything was confiscated.
"But if you just need something to clobber monsters with, you've got a few options!" she added cheerfully. "There's a shed in the field outside with some things you can use like clubs, or you can find metal pipes and tools in the janitor's closet upstairs." Those were just a few suggestions, but as far as Anise knew, they were the best places to go for makeshift weapons.
Just then, she heard the familiar jingle of the intercom. Anise paused to listen to the announcement, then looked back to Rick when it was over. "Eheh, guess we have to go now." The military probably wasn't going to let her linger as long as the nurses usually did, too. What a drag.
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