Day 28: Bus 3
What a waste of a trip.That was Anise's first thought as she was ushered onto one of the buses, taking a window seat along the left side. In the end, she hadn't been able to get any information besides rumors and conjecture. Among them, the only information worth considering was the doctor's suggestion of Doyleton being an extension of Landel's.
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Nami gave herself a mental pat on the back as the nurse let her pass with only a gentle frisking. Now the last step would be to hide her precious booty in her room. Ah, a successful heist always put her in a good mood!
But what put her in an even better mood was seeing that unmistakable long-nosed nakama of hers sitting alone on the bus she had chosen.
"Usopp!" Nami greeted him with a smile, then took a seat. Technically it had only been a day and a half since Nami had seen him, but she knew that the sniper had been here for longer. "Miss me?"
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"Nami! When did you get here?!" He'd been worried about not seeing any of the crew here, and now there was a new member of the crew arrived by surprise! Unless... "Have you seen the others yet? Zoro, Sanji and Luffy are here too. Is anyone else here that you know of?"
Nami, here! That was an unexpected--and very pleasant--surprise. The officially most responsible member of the crew was on the scene, which meant he was off the hook on any planning. Not that he'd done any planning. But if he'd thought of planning something...
Yeah, it was a good thing Nami was here. He added cheerfully, "Do you have a map of the institute yet? I have a sort of sketchy one!"
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She'd already known Usopp was present at Landel's, of course. Sanji had let her know about everything that was going on.. but then again, some of it she had to find out for herself. "Ehh, I've seen everyone now except Zoro. But we're going to try to arrange a meetup tonight in Luffy's hallway. I heard you were near..?"
When he mentioned maps, she shook her head. "So far I haven't written anything down, but I was planning on doing so at earliest convenience." She tapped her forehead, as if saying that all the necessary information was right there in her head. "I'd like to see what you have, though." No doubt it was poorly proportioned, but it would be a start.
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That aside, he pulled out the two 'map' pages he had copied, originally intended for the semi-responsible Sanji. "I didn't draw these, okay? I just copied them. So I'm not responsible for any mistakes!" Usopp also knew that Nami's standards on map-making were utterly out of Usopp's league.
"I'm here, in room M33. I've been meeting a lot with a ninja guy named Sai, we were talking about going exploring some more tonight to get me materials for... stuff. You know, my kind of stuff." He peered about the bus, abruptly paranoid that someone, perhaps a nurse, was listening in. "I haven't seen anyone else from our crew all day."
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Though, hearing about a bulletin board made her perk up a little bit. "A bulletin board? I - hadn't known." Something like that was definitely her style, and she'd be sure to check it out as soon as possible. "Such a thing will make communication a lot easier, especially if you know about it. As far as I know, Chopper and Robin have yet to arrive, but I'll let you know that way if I see a trace of either of them." She nodded, as if that sealed the deal.
Oh, how nice it was to have someone around who actually spoke some sense around her! Usopp was really a lifesaver.
The navigator slightly leaned in then, checking briefly to make sure no nurses were listening in directly, and lowering her voice to a murmur. "I've seen Sanji and Luffy just today. And speaking of 'stuff,' Luffy and I made a real killing at the hardware store, you know. I think you'd be interested..." Her voice had a little lilt in it, that musical tone that she gained whenever things were going her way. Her own plans for tonight would be ironed out with him a short time later.
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"Yeah, but be careful what you post there. The nurses read it. Sometimes really blatant stuff gets taken down, but sometimes it gets ignored entirely, so you never know. People use codewords like 'Cooking Club' or 'Arts and Crafts Club' to hide what they'd talking about doing at night. Plus any other patients can read it." But that was obvious--no need to explain that to Nami. Good old, sensible...
Stuff? He perked up, then murmured back in quiet glee. "Hardware store? Do I get presents?" He'd have to tell Nami about what equipment he already had, and while he was thinking of things he meant to tell her, added in a whisper, "Hey, did you try using the stick they hang your clothes off of in the closet as a bo weapon? I've seen other people doing that, and thought of you."
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Disgusting.
She pressed her lips together in a little grin-smirk at the mention of presents. "You could call them presents. After all, if you can't make use of this junk, I'm not entirely sure who can." Honestly, what would someone like Nami do with a wrench? The wire she had already planned to use as a garrote, but if there was something she could use as a bo staff, that'd be excellent.
Why hadn't she thought of that? Because she hadn't been aware she could take it out. But it made quite a bit of sense, after all. "I'll have to take the staff on our little expedition tonight. We're going 'down in the kitchen,' after all. I've a feeling it'll be a step in getting us out of here - if not getting us the answers we need."
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He took a long, deep breath. Rattling out his conspiracy theories about this place was a bit tiring. "Actually... I think they're totally building some kind of weird super soldiers or something."
At the mention of 'down in the kitchen,' Usopp's eyes widened and his jaw dropped. "You're going down there?! But we don't know anything about it yet! What if it's some kind of trap? Like--a giant meat grinder hidden under the kitchen tiles?!"
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"What's more likely, I think, is them turning us into entertainment. As much as that idea sickens me, I think someone gets entertainment out of all of this. As you said - it's a game. The monsters.. they're all a game.I don't think they want to kill us - maybe one or two every now and then, just to keep us scared. I don't know how often that happens, but.."
She shook her head. "The man on the radio and the evil doctor.. It's a mystery, isn't it? But I plan to be the one to solve it." She closed her eyes. "I.. think that both of them.. they might be underground." Then she sighed. The more she thought about it, the crazier this dilemma seemed to sound.
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But Nami raised a point he hadn't considered yet. "Entertainment? Entertainment for who?" He glanced around the bus, as though looking for his audience. "Aren't we a whole lot of people to gather, just for entertainment? Couldn't they be just as entertained with a handful of really entertaining guys?" Usopp had certainly met a few people in here that he thought would be 'entertaining' locked together in the same location. Although, thinking it over again, his ideas about supersoldiers or military ideas had been boosted by very vague comments from either the radio guy or the intercom guy (they blended together a bit in his memories) and he'd resolved not to trust them, outside of saying possibly where things might be...
Then there was another, even more unpleasant topic to discuss. "Yeah. Sometimes people disappear. And sometimes, they die. We're definitely not safe just because we're here being herded around for some purpose."
He leaned his head back against the window of the bus, as Nami closed her eyes. A resolved Nami was dangerous to disagree with, but he thought she was perhaps just thinking very hard about the possibilities. He was doing the same. "The overhead guy and the radio guy send mixed messages, but they're both actually kind of implying we should want to go down there. When I went where the radio guy said with Luffy, we got an item, so sometimes they're reliable. This is more complicated, though. Even if it's not a meat grinder, I don't think they'll be sitting down there with a sign reading 'Congratulations, You Solved The Maze.' Maybe we should wait until other groups have gone, and find out what they saw. Or maybe there's a reason nobody's reported going down there and then making it out again yet."
Her resolution to be the one to solve the mystery made him smile, a little bit; he remembered, when he was half-emptied of blood and sprawled out on Sai's bed, dizzily claiming he'd be the mouse who broke the maze. Not something he'd say in his right mind, and Nami was better suited to figuring stuff like this out. But it was nice to have someone to talk to about these questions; nobody else seemed to have anything beyond vague comments about beating up the 'Head Doctor.'
If there even existed a single man named Landel.
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Usopp had brought up a good point, though. No one was going to be waiting with a sign, but there had to be something gained from the entire experience. "Letting other groups go first? That I have to object to. If there really is something down there, and not just answers, you know I want it." Sure, the chances of there being a heap of gold coins at the bottom of the basement were pretty low. But Nami's first love was treasure, and if treasure was to be had then she was there.
"Entertainment, though... some people are really twisted," Nami added bitterly. "I wouldn't put it past someone who had gone to the trouble of collecting us here to be entertained by the whole ordeal, listening and laughing as we struggled with our new existence." She looked out the window, watching as the sky darkened.
Then she shifted. The copper wire she was planning on using as a garrote was itching, and she couldn't wait to get back into the building. This 'bus' thing wasn't exactly the most comfortable, either.
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