Night 57: Front Desk (Medical Wing)

[purpletaint]

[from here]Unsurprisingly, the door opened with a twist of the handle and little pressure. The interior hidden behind a door long since locked--if they were to believe the blow-hard of a commander who had taken control--was quite large, dwarfing the sun room in comparison. Enclaves and doorways crept away from them, and Albedo was idly curious--

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[sixth_attack]

[From here.]

So this was the Medical Wing, huh? The door leading to this area had always been locked, and Sechs' copies of the institute map never detailed this section of the building. When it came to following his maps, Sechs felt completely in the dark this time. As he scanned the front lobby with his flashlight, Sechs considered updating his copy with whatever he found in the newly opened wing, but realized that he had no pens on him to write with. He would just have to update his maps with as much detail he can recall later.

Illuminated by his flashlight was what appeared to be a regular waiting room for a doctor's office. A gloomy vase of wilted flowers sat on the front desk and there was an assortment of computer monitors and other basic items suited to the room's usage. There didn't seem to be anything else special except for the institute's main symbol that was pasted to the wall. The aggravatingly large smiling face would have taunted Sechs with the fake innocence it represented, but someone had actually defaced it earlier! Sechs couldn't help but smirk a little at the silly graffiti, although he personally would have just chopped the whole face off the wall with his axe...

Meanwhile, Sechs could hear the voices of other patients discovering the area, and despite his competitive nature to get to the medicine first, he felt slightly comforted to not be greeted by foreboding silence or the screams of someone being attacked by an ambushing monster.

After taking a brief glance over his shoulder to check on Ritsuka, Sechs took a few cautious steps forward, his heavy boots dully echoing throughout the wing. Before walking further into the darkness, his flashlight caught a foreboding scrawl written on the corner of a whiteboard. Sechs approached it and scowled at what he saw.

"Are you a good patient?"

Sechs sneered hatefully at the message; he could practically hear the voice of the doctor who tortured him recite those same words in his head. He narrowed his eyes and growled softly to himself.

"'Good patient' my ass..." Sechs quietly grumbled before turning away from the board, too agitated to care if Ritsuka heard him or not.

Facing the other end of the Medical Wing, Sechs unsheathed his machete and impatiently tapped it on his shoulder guard. "Now where the heck is that Infirmary...?" he wondered out loud.

[forgot_it_all]

Ritsuka didn't go upstairs to be a good person. He did it out of necessity and because no one else was going to do it. After his outburst on the bulletin he couldn't well turn his back on it either. He'd gone and stuck himself with a job that was more frustrating than trying to uncover the identities of the Septimal Moons with no end in sight. Unless he could figure out how to get to the mechanisms that locked those doors, there was little he could do to stop the experiments. Still, he couldn't stop. He couldn't give up...

"If they're a cure...?" he echoed, following after Sechs. The man was moving quickly and Ritsuka had to double time it to keep up, but there was something familiar about it. Soubi had been tall, too. He tended to walk slower when Ritsuka was with him, but even so, Ritsuka was used to walking alongside people with longer legs. Didn't make it any tougher to keep up when one of them was rushing, but he managed. Catching up to the man as he stopped at the front desk, Ritsuka fished his own flashlight out, tapping it a few times to get the light to turn on. "What do you mean by cure?"

Was Sechs sick? Did he really think the Institute would give him something to save him? No...after his remarks about authority, something Ritsuka knew far too much about, he couldn't think that. It was hope, pure and simple. People clinging to the barest of threads to pull themselves out of a darkness he had no way of understanding.

"....Never mind. You don't have to answer that." Better not to pry. Ritsuka wouldn't want people to pry into his life either and he doubted Sechs wanted that with the way he was grumbling. "If you're looking for an Infirmary..."

[to here]