He tossed his flashlight, still on, on the bed and went back to the closet he'd pulled the shirt out of. There weren't any more shoes in there than there had been before. Maybe he should just go to bed and sleep this off.
At the words "mental hospital", he turned and started giving the conversation his full attention. Mr. Tour Guide was getting into the part. And hanging onto a baseball bat like it was a talisman against evil. Midnight pick-up games were presumably not on the agenda.
He had to give optimism one last college try, first. "This isn't some completely bizarre let's-pretend game for hopeless losers, is it? You don't know a guy named Dolmacher, do you?" He didn't really expect an answer to that, but a guy could dream. He closed the closet door and crossed over to the dresser, systematically going through the drawers until the last one yielded some hard-soled slippers. He put them on and grabbed his flashlight, weighing it in his hands. It wasn't one of the big Maglites, but it had some heft to it.
Enough dicking around. "What's so dangerous about night? And why the fuck hasn't someone leaked this to the press? You can't hold people without cause in our enlightened society. Amnesty International would have a field day."
"Never met a Dolmacher, and if this is a game I'm not in on it," he answered honestly, waiting for S.T. to finish before heading back out of the room and closing the door behind them. The time it took to get started down the hall gave him an opportunity to weigh his words, albeit a brief one.
The one mercy of this entire situation, oddly enough, was the relentlessness in S.T.'s attitude. Phoenix was used to focusing in the face of personal, immediate challenge, to putting aside his discomfort and driving forward full-steam because the only alternative was failure. In a bizzare way, pressure had become its own sort of reassurance.
"Okay. I'm going to start by saying that I'm going to sound absolutely crazy. Legally insane. But I just need you to give me fifteen minutes and not walk off right away once I start answering questions, because there's things that wander around here at night that will kill you, and . . ." He trailed off, unable to to think of a sufficiently tough-guy way to finish that. He knew that being the defense didn't mean he'd always be a good defender, but he couldn't help trying. He exhaled quietly, looking down the hall. There was something tense and discontent in the honesty of his tone when he continued. "And I don't want that on my conscience."
"If I say my piece and you still think that this is . . . whatever you think it is, a hallucination or dream or a setup or anything like that, then okay. But can you at least promise me that you'll give me fifteen minutes to make my case?"
Phoenix had put himself between S.T. and the open hall, a point guard shifting to man-to-man after a wild throw. He backed off on his walking speed, letting Phoenix lead him down the hall. He knew the look Phoenix had given him. The one that said you're an asshole, and you're not going to listen to a damn thing I say, are you? He gave people that impression a lot. Time to man up and show that he wasn't too attached to his own ego that he couldn't admit that he'd lose any information-based pissing contest they could get into.
He ignored the comment about Phoenix's conscience, or tried to. It was like every time he had tried to explain about toxin concentration in bottom-feeders. Even using small words, he'd come across as nuts, or at least such an ivory-tower duck-squeezer that the scientific explanations had been indistinguishable from tall tales. People had died, because he couldn't explain well enough.
"Fire away. Everything you know."
He put on his best lecture-hall listening face and shut the fuck up.
Okay. Time to make this the simplest crazy-person story that I can manage. Nothing too impossible. Now, which first? Monsters or defiance of time and space? In the end, he decided on monsters. There were probably places in South America that weren't strangers to super-sized arachnids. He couldn't say the same for time travel.
"Cliff's Notes version. In the day, this place is pretty nice. It's run by a guy named Martin Landel, who everyone calls the head doctor." He snorted under his breath, lifting unimpressed eyebrows at nothing in particular. "I haven't seen his license, so I can't tell you how accurate that title is."
"It's standard asylum fare as far as I can tell -- arts and crafts, nurses and orderlies, scheduled mealtimes, supervised everything. At night, Dr. Landel gets on the intercom, cackles at the populace in a really unprofessional way, and then most of the doors unlock. This is nighttime, which is dangerous because there are monsters everywhere. I haven't personally seen anything worse than a scorpion the size of a basset hound, but people with no reason to lie have run into much worse." He was aware that he was actually using a more casual version of his arguing-a-case voice, the tone of which, while tempered with straightforward professionalism, could still occasionally imply a certain amount of 'you're probably some kind of unbelievably self-important dick just waiting to cram the first mistake I make back down my throat.' He made a mental note to try to keep that under wraps, or at least curb it strongly. S.T. was within a standard deviation or two of reasonable, given the circumstances. That, and having whipcracks, hairpieces, and coffee mugs flung at him in a court of law had sufficiently broadened Phoenix's limits regarding how much he could tolerate from relative strangers before losing his cool.
"We're being experimented on, probably. Landel's called us subjects at least once during the nighttime announcements. The staff never finds and takes away our assortment of improvised weapons, which are impossible to hide very well. And they're pulling people for mindwashing and experimentation on a nightly basis."
He glanced at S.T. again as they neared the corner, trying to gauge his reaction and expecting the worst. Maybe not the screaming-and-hitting kind of worst -- he seemed too in control of himself for that -- but definitely The Look.
At the words "mental hospital", he turned and started giving the conversation his full attention. Mr. Tour Guide was getting into the part. And hanging onto a baseball bat like it was a talisman against evil. Midnight pick-up games were presumably not on the agenda.
He had to give optimism one last college try, first. "This isn't some completely bizarre let's-pretend game for hopeless losers, is it? You don't know a guy named Dolmacher, do you?" He didn't really expect an answer to that, but a guy could dream. He closed the closet door and crossed over to the dresser, systematically going through the drawers until the last one yielded some hard-soled slippers. He put them on and grabbed his flashlight, weighing it in his hands. It wasn't one of the big Maglites, but it had some heft to it.
Enough dicking around. "What's so dangerous about night? And why the fuck hasn't someone leaked this to the press? You can't hold people without cause in our enlightened society. Amnesty International would have a field day."
Reply
The one mercy of this entire situation, oddly enough, was the relentlessness in S.T.'s attitude. Phoenix was used to focusing in the face of personal, immediate challenge, to putting aside his discomfort and driving forward full-steam because the only alternative was failure. In a bizzare way, pressure had become its own sort of reassurance.
"Okay. I'm going to start by saying that I'm going to sound absolutely crazy. Legally insane. But I just need you to give me fifteen minutes and not walk off right away once I start answering questions, because there's things that wander around here at night that will kill you, and . . ." He trailed off, unable to to think of a sufficiently tough-guy way to finish that. He knew that being the defense didn't mean he'd always be a good defender, but he couldn't help trying. He exhaled quietly, looking down the hall. There was something tense and discontent in the honesty of his tone when he continued. "And I don't want that on my conscience."
"If I say my piece and you still think that this is . . . whatever you think it is, a hallucination or dream or a setup or anything like that, then okay. But can you at least promise me that you'll give me fifteen minutes to make my case?"
Reply
He ignored the comment about Phoenix's conscience, or tried to. It was like every time he had tried to explain about toxin concentration in bottom-feeders. Even using small words, he'd come across as nuts, or at least such an ivory-tower duck-squeezer that the scientific explanations had been indistinguishable from tall tales. People had died, because he couldn't explain well enough.
"Fire away. Everything you know."
He put on his best lecture-hall listening face and shut the fuck up.
Reply
"Cliff's Notes version. In the day, this place is pretty nice. It's run by a guy named Martin Landel, who everyone calls the head doctor." He snorted under his breath, lifting unimpressed eyebrows at nothing in particular. "I haven't seen his license, so I can't tell you how accurate that title is."
"It's standard asylum fare as far as I can tell -- arts and crafts, nurses and orderlies, scheduled mealtimes, supervised everything. At night, Dr. Landel gets on the intercom, cackles at the populace in a really unprofessional way, and then most of the doors unlock. This is nighttime, which is dangerous because there are monsters everywhere. I haven't personally seen anything worse than a scorpion the size of a basset hound, but people with no reason to lie have run into much worse." He was aware that he was actually using a more casual version of his arguing-a-case voice, the tone of which, while tempered with straightforward professionalism, could still occasionally imply a certain amount of 'you're probably some kind of unbelievably self-important dick just waiting to cram the first mistake I make back down my throat.' He made a mental note to try to keep that under wraps, or at least curb it strongly. S.T. was within a standard deviation or two of reasonable, given the circumstances. That, and having whipcracks, hairpieces, and coffee mugs flung at him in a court of law had sufficiently broadened Phoenix's limits regarding how much he could tolerate from relative strangers before losing his cool.
"We're being experimented on, probably. Landel's called us subjects at least once during the nighttime announcements. The staff never finds and takes away our assortment of improvised weapons, which are impossible to hide very well. And they're pulling people for mindwashing and experimentation on a nightly basis."
He glanced at S.T. again as they neared the corner, trying to gauge his reaction and expecting the worst. Maybe not the screaming-and-hitting kind of worst -- he seemed too in control of himself for that -- but definitely The Look.
[to here.]
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