Day 40: Sun Room

[emotionl4arobot]

The sound of the intercom jolted Brainiac 5 back to full awareness, and he realised he'd been starting to doze off over breakfast. He hoped he hadn't been boring Clark, but it wasn't easy for him to maintain conversation considering his current condition

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[blessedaccel]

As it turned out, it hadn't been that difficult to convince the nurse to let her spend the shift in the Sun Room rather than heading out to the Greenhouse. Daphne wasn't too disappointed to miss out on a chance to play around in the dirt. She'd had more than enough exposure to plants to last her a long time, and besides, potted ones hardly even counted.

She'd been a little worried about the prospect of picking one person out from the greater mass of patients, even if a large portion of them were going to be diverted to outside activities. Dark hair and eyes weren't uncommon, and without knowing if the name she'd been given was the one the staff used or the man's real name, she couldn't enlist one of the ever-present nurses to help her.

She was pleasantly surprised to see only a handful of people in the Sun Room when she entered, and only one of them suiting the brief description left on the noteboard. Young was her first thought, and after a second cursory glance around, she realized it applied to all three of the other patients there at the moment. It didn't mean much if they did all have abilities, but it was still more than a little unnerving. What were they doing, exactly, that required so many teenagers?

She shook the thought off and headed over towards the young man sitting by the board. She hoped he was the right person, but if not, it wasn't like patients arranging meetings was uncommon or particularly damning. "Hey," she greeted, smile bright as she came to a stop a couple feet away. "Are you Jaime?"

[blessedaccel]

Daphne's smile twitched just a little wider. She hadn't meant to sneak up, but it was nice to know some of the other patients weren't hyper-alert all of the time. Especially since the ability to be surprised meant Jaime, at least, was probably real, even if she wasn't sold on the physical reality of the rest of the hospital yet.

A small voice in the back of her mind piped up to inform her that this line of logic was a strange one, even by her recent standards. It quieted down again without much fuss, though. Even her common sense recognized she was flying almost blind.

"Yep. Daphne Millbrook," she replied, reaching over to give his hand a quick shake. "Nice to meet ya."

[blessedaccel]

"A couple, yeah." Daphne looked around quickly to spy an empty chair, then snagged one and dragged it up. She dropped into it with the sort of casual ease meant to project cheer and general frivolity. Not, certainly, anything conspiratorial. "Like I said, nothing all that easy to prove. They seem to be really good at that here."

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I think you're right about the drugs, though. I mean, even if it was something no one could detect or shrug off or anything, which is pretty much impossible, they've got people running around all over. Inside, outside, on the roof for all I know. Dropping them all at the same time...well, there might be a couple ways you can do it, but not many."

[blessedaccel]

"Might be," Daphne agreed. "I mean, I know the guy who was showing me the ropes last night said a lot of things are locked up. No one gets to them, no one finds anything out. No one finds anything out..." She trailed off, lifting both hands in a helpless shrug. "Or the people who do know something about what's going on are keeping it quiet. You know, information as currency, wanting to make sure they've got the upper hand, that kind of thing."

She folded her hands together, drumming the fingers of one against the back of the other idly. "Yeah. Pretty much the only way I can think of to do it reliably would be slipping something into the food. And then you get people eating different amounts of different things, and the whole body mass issue...it'd be a mess. Getting everyone to go down would be hard enough without trying to coordinate it."

She bit her lip, taking a glance out of the corner of her eye toward the rest of the room. Her voice was still at a conversational volume when she continued, but lowered enough to make it unlikely to carry over the rest of the chatter. "You, uh. Mentioned you have an ability, on the board. You know much about the kinds of things other people can do? Not, you know, anything specific, but in general."

[blessedaccel]

"Doctors offices probably have them," Daphne supplied, sounding almost offhand as her thoughts spun briefly off along familiar paths. Find the thing someone wouldn't want her to get to, and get to it; it was what she was good at. "Might be one in a nurse's station or something, too, but those're more likely to have people in them at night. At least if this place operates along anything that even resembles normal rules, which seems seriously unlikely."

She caught herself before she rambled too far, and flashed a quick grin, albeit one a little uneasy around the edges. "Yeah? So, what, is it some kind of chemical thing?"

[blessedaccel]

Daphne stared for a few seconds before catching herself, and even then it was more a matter of not wanting to attract the attention of the nurses than of bringing her surprise under control. "Seriously?" she replied. "An alien? To your...ow. That has to hurt. I mean...ow."

She fought the urge to wriggle in her chair in imagined discomfort. Instead, she studied Jaime closely. He seemed to be serious, not just tossing off a flippant reply. At the same time, the explanation sounded more like something out of science fiction than anything that could have happened in reality.

Then again, she reminded herself, so did time travel, telepathy, and shadowy conspiracies out to transform or destroy the world. And she knew those were real enough.

[blessedaccel]

The stress of the past two days (or, if she were being honest, the past several weeks) coupled with her uncertainty about the situation, and teetered in an uneasy balance with the absurdity of the statement. The result had her clapping her hands over her mouth to keep her sputtering laughter from attracting too much attention from either the nurses or the other patients.

She shook her head once she had her mirth under control again. "God. Yeah...yeah, that'd be a lot worse, all right." She smiled apologetically, though she was still a little shiny-eyed. "Sorry, aliens are just a little beyond the kind of thing I'm used to dealing with. Takes a little getting used to, I guess." More than a little, she admitted privately. If it weren't for how earnest he seemed, and if her weirdness meter hadn't been all but blown out by their current circumstances, she would have dismissed it out of hand. As it was, she found that wasn't quite so easy.

[blessedaccel]

Daphne grimaced as she recalled some of the information she'd heard, not to mention some of the notes she'd seen circulating around the bulletin board. "Yeah," she agreed. "If even half the stories flying around this place are true, that wouldn't surprise me at all."

She grinned, though there was a bit of a wince around her eyes at the recollection of how the doctors she was used to tended to deal with things they found out of the ordinary. "Yeah, it doesn't sound like something that'd come up often enough for anyone to have a standard procedure for dealing with it. I mean, unless they're really hiding something major in Area 51. But I guess that's sort of a parental thing. You know, contractual obligation to worry and all that."