Day 44: Sun Room (4th Shift)

[mizuhomaiden]

As soon as she had the chance, Sheena ninja'd herself out of the cafeteria and away from the conversation she'd been semi-forced to have. She probably could have just clammed up and told the boys to go away, but she'd kind of owed at least Endrance some kind of explanation. It wasn't everyday the embodiment of darkness pops up and delivers a

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[its_the_mileage]

Superhero masks and elastic polymers. Ye gods. "How old are you again?" Indy couldn't help asking. He tried to get his facial expression under control. "Don't you go to school or..." Play baseball? Learn Latin? "...or whatever it is boys do these days," he finished limply. Indy had no idea; most of what he knew about regular childhoods was secondhand. But he was fairly sure it didn't involve pretending to be a spider and stringing up criminals.

The more Indy thought about it, the more macabre it sounded. He pictured bodies swinging from streetlights in the early-morning fog of the city. Like a modern-day version of heads on pikes. How the hell did a kid like Peter Parker get into that kind of thing, instead of growing up to be a cop (or an archaeologist) like anyone else with an overactive sense of justice? Someone--Richter?--had dismissed as absurd the idea that everyone here but Indy was crazy, but the more time he spent here, the more plausible it started to sound.

"How did you even get started with all this?" he asked, really trying to keep his voice neutral. He wasn't sure how much good it was doing.

[its_the_mileage]

"I've got time," Indy assured him. Nothing but, in fact, especially during the day. But the way Peter was looking around made it obvious that he was nervous about someone overhearing them, so Indy added, "It doesn't have to be now, though. Unless you speak any other languages." Ancient Greek was probably out of the question, but they had to be teaching them something in school.

Getting bitten by a spider--what a motivation to become a crime-fighter who strung up bad guys. Who did that kind of thing? Sure, Indy'd had an unfortunate run-in of his own with some nasty wildlife when he was a couple years younger than Peter, but it hadn't led him to become a vigilante who made a habit of hissing at people or choking the life out of them or biting them over and over again with--

Jesus, how the hell had he gotten onto that? Indy swallowed and waited for Peter's answer.

[its_the_mileage]

Indy kept his mouth shut for a minute after this monologue and let it sink in.

If this were 1938, Peter's story would have been laughably ridiculous. Indy would have dismissed it without a second thought. The problem was that Peter was from 2009, or sometime pretty close to it. Indy had no idea what kind of technology existed then or anytime in the future--and, now that Pierson had vanished into thin air, no fairly reliable source to ask (Dent? Indy almost scoffed). The claims were ludicrous. But Indy had absolutely no way to dispute them, or even any real reason to believe they might not be true other than how absurd they sounded.

But he knew Landel was running a lab that could produce killer apes and giant cockroaches, bring back the dead, send people through time. Were spiders whose bites gave you superhuman powers really that much more absurd?

Thank God the Nazis had never gotten their hands on anything like this. They'd have a field day.

Indy let out a sigh and accepted--provisionally--yet another insane premise. "I'd ask why you don't use all that crazy, ridiculous super strength and speed to bust us out of here, but I suppose you're going to tell me you lost it all when you woke up here." That'd been Richter's story, hadn't it?

[its_the_mileage]

"Anybody with powers? How many of them are there?"

Indy tried to make a list of the patients he'd met directly who'd claimed to have some kind of special, superhuman ability: Peter, Richter, Keman, that Kratos Aurion guy. If there were others, they were escaping him right now. And unless you counted Peter's antics last night, none of them had been able to offer much of any evidence to support those claims. Peter was also the only one who'd been able to offer any kind of science-based explanation, and who claimed to be from the same world as Indy himself. Ergo, accepting this didn't mean buying into extra limbs and magic lanterns.

Then again, the question of whether all those things really existed somewhere didn't matter all that much--not in and of itself, at least. It mattered as potential support or refutation of Richter and Marcus Cole's multiple-dimensions theory, and it mattered whether anyone at Landel's actually had access to any useful powers. Other than that, maybe he needed to quit worrying about them. Get Landel, send everyone who wanted out home. Maybe Indy didn't need to solve the mysteries of the universe to do that.

But Jesus, he'd never stop wondering.

Indy turned his attention back to Peter's next comment, which actually did make him scoff. "Fine, someone liked your story and decided to write a comic book about it. You can't expect me to take secondhand reports of a work of fiction--almost certainly embellished--as any kind of proof that you can do what you say you can." He gave the boy a quick, wry grin. "Right now I'm prepared to believe you, so don't dig yourself into a hole."