Day 60: Music Room (Fourth Shift)

[stray_shinigami]

It wasn't often that Renji felt less like punching people in general as his day wore on. This was a new experience for him. A not unwelcome one, if he was being honest. And the fact that he felt less like punching Fai? Kind of mind-blowing. The sort of thing Zen masters would probably use as a kouan to reach an all-new level of non-punching

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[sheepwood]

Despite the regime change and the return of the nurses insisting the patients relax and recuperate, Guybrush couldn't settle down. His back ached from the cuts across it, the bandages around his torso keeping it stiff, the stitching on the wounds pulling at his skin when he moved too much; however, most prominent was his blood boiling and his mind turning, the night's events having played in his head all day.

Inspector Javert was dead. Really dead. Not "comedically fell off a cliff to make a triumphant, last-minute return" dead. There was no chance he'd reappear with a few scrapes or a wound that wasn't as fatal as it looked. He was far too dead for that, and as much as Guybrush thought about asking the Voodoo Doctor about bringing him back as a zombie, he knew that would require ingredients he didn't have, a skill with putting together bodies he wasn't sure he wanted to learn, a stomach he wasn't born with to endure using said skill, and a lack of morality even the Mighty Pirate™ didn't possess. Javert may have been an officer of the law, but he had an undeniable amount of respect for the late inspector. Tarnishing that would be below even his standards.

Having spent most of his day pacing around the Sun Room, Guybrush was fully prepared to head to the Music Room when the announcements said so; however, his nurse stopped him at the door. "Now now, Mr. Moriarty. Don't you think you should stay out here and relax?"

"Relax?" Guybrush asked incredulously. "I've been out here all day! Do you see me relaxing yet?"

"No, but I know how worked up you can get when you're in the Music Room. Don't you remember that argument you had in there?"

Guybrush blinked, vaguely recalling that event. "Barely?"

"I do, and I think it'd be best if you try to calm down out here for now. I'm only considering what's best for your health." She paused. "But... I suppose you have been pacing a lot out here today. Perhaps sitting down to one of the keyboards would help you relax. Or maybe you should try making friends with Mr. Quincy over there? I'll bet can help you find a tune to calm your nerves if you just ask."

With that, she turned him around and sent him into the Music Room. He pushed an irritable snort through him, giving his nurse a dirty look as he headed in, only to start pacing around the same way he'd been doing all day long. After receiving a sore glare from his nurse, he did wind up near the aforementioned Mr. Quincy.

"Got anything that calms the nerves and makes me not want to rebel against the nurses?" he asked.

[toxicspiderman]

They were back to forced social order by labcoated flunkies with phosphorescent smiles. Also known as nurses. They'd dropped off a guy drowning in bandages and frustration.

There were a few options. S.T's, choice, waves of sonic distortion, loud enough to drown out the clamor of panic. White noise played by white guys who wore all black and failed to see the irony in their heavy metal.

Kind of high on the rebellion scale, though. He could just ask. "Depends. Beer-and-metal or wine-and-opera?" Or option three, which was to ask S.T. what the fuck he was talking about. Option four, which was to get pissed off that he was talking about booze without being able to pull a flask out of his pockets. At least he could promise some and mean it. Just not here.

[sheepwood]

"I prefer grog-and-banjo, though I don't think I'll be finding either of those here," Guybrush said, resisting the urge to keep moving, his feet jittering as he stood. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurse again- she waved at him, a silent encouragement to continue what he was doing, which was standing awkwardly near some stranger moving his feet because he simply couldn't sit still.

"Just pick something that doesn't look like it'll start an argument between us," he added. "I have to avoid having one of those, or I get the feeling I'll be banned from this room forever due to an altercation with an old man I had in here once. Those nurses never forget a thing."

[toxicspiderman]

The possibility that weird shit happened at Landel's Institute had long since approached 1 closely enough that only an asshole would split hairs. But a sincere love of banjos and use of the word grog were both new ones on Sangamon.

He fished out a Metallica album that seemed to contain the correct tape. Then he took a look at the guy. Ponytail, goatee, hook for a hand. The first two could be any hippie, but put the third with the grog and that was a working theory.

"Guybrush?" He'd only talked to the guy on the bulletin, but how many people claiming to be pirates were there around here? The kind with boats, anyway, not software pirates. You never knew with hackers, though. "It's Sangamon. S.T."

[sheepwood]

Guybrush blinked, vaguely recalling the name. He'd never actually spoken to the guy, but had seen the signature on the board once or twice.

"That would be me," he said, his look of aggravation exchanged for a grin. "I guess I should've expected to meet you face-to-face eventually. There are only so many people here, even if the populace does rotate on a daily basis."

[toxicspiderman]

"Yeah." That came out a little heavier than he'd intended, as 'rotate' could mean disappear or it could mean splattered across a hallway. And dead didn't always mean dead. Sometimes it meant nothing. Or zombies.

"You didn't mention that you'd been hit." Guybrush was more bandage than skin. With the way he was moving, that held for everything under the clothes too.

[sheepwood]

"Compared to what else happened, I'm feeling lucky I got away with only a scratch." Scratch being a massive understatement, given the bandages that encompassed his back and the stitches he could feel in his skin there. The claws had barely grazed the backs of his arms- enough to have wrappings of their own, but nothing life-altering. That blow was taken by the inspector.

He looked over his shoulder again, the nurse giving him a nod. He finally had a seat in the floor, his legs still feeling as restless as his mind in spite of the pangs that ran up and down his back. A sigh pushed through him. So much for being a hero protagonist.

[toxicspiderman]

Enough depressing talk.  Time for an abrupt change in subject.  "What's it like, being a pirate?"  Idle chit-chat, but it had two advantages.  One, almost everyone would talk about work.  Bitching or lecturing, either would get them off the death-and-torture grind.  Two, he was curious.

Real pirates these days had machine guns and cocaine instead of gold coins.  Their historical versions had likely been just as ugly.  Guybrush, in contrast, talked like he'd walked off a Disney ride.  Though he hadn't started singing.  Not Disney.

"I miss the water, man."  He usually found an excuse at least once a week to head down to the Harbor.  With Project Lobster in court rather than in the lab, he was sticking closer to shore, but the was always another corporate asshole opening its sphincter into water some people assumed was past saving.  Not so.  Sangamon Taylor said so, and word had gotten around at exactly who had taken Basco down.

Sometimes just his name  was enough, and one company had clearly gotten their hands on those new phones that listed the caller.  He'd switched to pay phones, when he actually needed to get a message through beyond I know what you're doing, and I'm coming for you bastards.

[sheepwood]

Given the feverish pacing and the event that had caused said pacing, Guybrush was happy for the topic change. The less he thought about Javert bleeding in front of him, the clawed tentacles having raked across his body, tearing into his torso like a-

He shook his head, cutting off his own thoughts. Okay, that overactive imagination wasn't helping.

"Ah, the ocean," he said, putting that imagination of his to a better use. "The smell of the seawater, the thrill of adventure, the feeling of the deck below my feet as my ship rocks on the waves. It didn't matter what boat I was on, what quest I was facing, or how unpredictable the plot twist was; the sea was always there. When you're a pirate, the sea is your mistress, one you can always depend on."

There was a very brief pause. "But don't tell your wife that, because she might threaten to throw you overboard with a statuette tied to your leg so you can have all the time you want with your 'other lady.'"

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. laughed outright at that. Knee-slapping, tears-in-the-eyes, laughed. He'd never been dumped explicitly for loving the water more than her, but it had been a complicating factor in several moribund relationships. Whatever. They'd been more toxic than the Harbor, in retrospect. Or at least that's what he told himself.

When he'd finally gotten his breath back, he agreed. "Yeah. Debbie likes calling me on the radio on the boat. Makes her feel important." The water had only tried to kill her once, but that had made it a personal grudge. So he could be her crusader rather than her wandering rogue.

"Too much of a poison swamp out there now to get that -- friendly -- with the water." Most of it wouldn't kill you quickly, but it'd wind its way into every cell of your body and then pull the plug whenever a strand of DNA decided to play circuit breaker and flip over to cancer shutdown. "The fresh air is the best thing about this shithole of an Institute."

[sheepwood]

"I'm having a hard time finding anything good about this place," Guybrush admitted, setting his elbow to his knee and leaning on his hand. He sat up again almost immediately, feeling the stitches in his back pull against his skin painfully. Just as he was almost recovered from his previous injuries, he gained a whole set of new ones. These came with scars far worse than any of the others.

So instead of leaning on his hand, he used it to count up just how awful the institute was. "The nurses are no good for conversations, the layout is obnoxious, the items I've found aren't just seemingly useless- I'm pretty sure they're actually useless! People keep disappearing or dying, whichever comes first. Oh, and they don't believe porcelain is a legitimate phobia."

He paused. "At least the good food is back?"

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. had earned real food by virtue of sticking it out in this dive for three weeks. But pointing that out would be rubbing glaze onto newly-thrown wounds. Or something.

"Porcelain? As in toilets, or a general hatred of fine china?" There were legitimate reasons to shy away from table dressing of dubious origin. Radioactive Fiestaware. Dioxin-laden paper plates. Styrofoam wouldn't kill you directly, its production would just leech away the ozone layer until they all died of skin cancer.

Bizarre phobias he couldn't fix. And acting like he agreed with the nurses would shipwreck the conversation. (Was it acting if it was an honest reaction? O.K., call it not acting like he ran into ceramiphobes every day.) He couldn't change the layout, either, but it had never been very confusing to him. "I do have a map, if that helps."