Night 45: West Wing, South Hall 1-B

[hajike_tobiume]

[from here]

Momo really hoped Senna was going to just stay inside her room. She didn't want to worry about her but she couldn't help it. Hopefully, Hokuto would keep her safe. She would just have to place her faith in Hokuto.

The shinigami headed out into the main hallway.

[to here]

Comments

[timeleaper]

Ronixis was a little surprised when the young woman stepped out into the corridor in front of him, although he possibly shouldn't have been. The hallways were dark enough, the shadows deep enough, to hide people and she could have come from the doorway not too far down. He smiled warmly at her, seeing the fear on her face, the confusion. A new patient then? Like he had been only a few days ago. He couldn't quite decide which was crueler; waking up at night with no knowledge of the dangers, or waking up during the day with the nurses dripping their lies into your ear? At least if you saw the night first, then you knew the unvarnished truth and there was no chance for this place to get its claws into you.

He sighed softly. "You're most unfortunate to be here," he said apologetically. "It's called Landel's Institute. It claims to be a mental hospita dedicated to curing people of delusions, but as you can see..." he said, gesturing to the darkness, the damp, the odd sounds which occasionally met their ears. "It doesn't quite pull it off during the night."

[thatmaskedchick]

Most unfortunate? It took practically all Ruby had to keep in character and not raise an eyebrow. Bit...old fashioned, wasn't he? Still, if wanted to be a knight in shining armor, she wasn't going to stop him. He'd already provided her with information, and she hadn't even needed to fish for it. Now all she needed to do was get him to start making sense, and they'd be all squared away.

"A mental hospital? This doesn't look like a hospital. What do you mean, they don't pull it off at night?"

Normal in the daytime, haunted by night? It didn't make the most sense in the world, but it was better than nothing. Never mind that it didn't follow any of the usual signs of a haunting that she'd heard about. Spirits didn't usually change their surroundings like this. Sure, particularly violent ones could spew black goo, but that was about as far as it got.

[timeleaper]

Ronixis shrugged. "It doesn't tend to look like this during the day," he said grimly. "In the morning you'll wake up in a room which is all clean and white and hospital-like, and there will be perfectly nice nurses telling you that everything you know is a delusion. They keep the act up during the day, but as you can see, it kind of falls apart at night." It looked like something from the demon world, all twisted landscape and roaming monsters and that was a place that he could do without seeing again. But Asmodeus was gone now at least, Roak was safe, even if there was still niggling concern at the back of his mind that there was something else going on. It wasn't as though he could do anything about it now, was it?

[thatmaskedchick]

This time, Ruby didn't couldn't resist arching an eyebrow. "Any thoughts as to how they manage to pull that off?" she asked, incredulous. This definitely didn't sound like a normal haunting, but it also didn't seem like a demon's style. Demons tended to be more straightforward in their treatment of humans, and they couldn't alter reality--or the perception of reality--quite like an angel could.

It could be an angel's doing, she realized. Maybe this was their way of getting her out of the picture while they went after Sam, Dean, and Anna? It didn't seem terribly likely, but not much else really fit. Usually angels were all about just exorcising demons on the spot, but this could be just douchey enough to be them. It certainly explained why she'd "woken up."

[timeleaper]

Ronixis cracked a wry smile at that question before shrugging. "Not a clue," he admitted without any trace of embarrassment. "I assume either very advanced technology or very powerful magic, perhaps both, but those options don't exactly narrow things down very much." Could be aliens, could be demons from other dimensions, could be plain old human greed and stupidity. There were so many options in the universe and this place was good at hiding any clues.

"I don't think anyone else has a clue either so we're all fairly trapped until we can work something out. They did a good job of suppressing powers too."

[thatmaskedchick]

It wasn't often that you heard the words "technology" and "magic" uttered in the same breath. Ruby was instantly on her guard. Who was this guy, exactly? If he was a hunter she'd have to be careful, but she knew how to handle his type. Just as long as he didn't go around drawing salt lines or spraying holy water every which way, she'd be peachy keen.

"What do you mean, 'powers'?" she asked, not bothering to keep the incredulity out of her voice. Normal people would react the same way. The only powers she could think of fell into a few very specific categories. Did this guy mean powers in the 'demon-blood-fueled-psychic-kid' sense, or the Spiderman sense? Was he actually a hunter, or just a comic book nerd who'd played Resident Evil one too many times and wound up in a haunted asylum purely by chance?

At any rate, might as well give him a better name than this guy. "Oh, and, uh...my name's Sarah. By the way." It was a generic enough name, but not so generic that it would raise eyebrows (like Jane). "Nice to meet you, I guess."

[timeleaper]

Ronixis shrugged in response to the question. He knew what his own powers were, and the powers of his friends, but there seemed to be a lot more going on here than would be normal for his own world. Not that that was entirely unexpected. He hadn't even believed in magic until a few months ago. "Magic of varying types," he explained. "Psychic powers I've heard of people using too. People forging weapons without using tools or a forge. All kinds of things. Healers too." Iria would have had a field day with it all. She'd already been making noises about wanting to study his heraldry and how he'd been able to master it despite not being from Roak.

He smiled at her when she finally introduced herself, nodding respectfully. "I'm called Ronixis. Pleased to meet you too, even if it could definitely be under better circumstances." He felt a little out of place with his name, but well, he'd seen stranger on the bulletin.

[thatmaskedchick]

"Huh," was all Ruby could say in response to all that. Magic. Healing. Psychic powers. Making weapons out of nothing. It was like a who's-who of 'things a hunter would look out for/put an end to,' but this guy was treating it like an everyday, run-of-the-mill thing. So if he wasn't a hunter...

Psychic kids. It made sense, weirdly enough. Waking up in a strange place with no memory of how she got there, people with powers running around the halls...it did read quite a bit like Azazel's psychic kid Battle Royale. But ol' Yellow Eyes was dead, and he'd been that way for a while now. Was some other demon trying to step into his shoes, and she just hadn't heard about it? That didn't make sense, though. Even if she didn't have her finger quite on the pulse of the demon world, Ruby knew what was going on. In fact, she knew better than just about anyone, knew things that even Alastair didn't. If something this big had been going down, she would have at least noticed.

"Ronoxis? Uh...interesting name." His parents sure must have hated him. Or maybe it was his last name? Either way, it was nice to have a name to call him by other than 'this guy.'

"Anyway, this is probably a dumb question, but how do you go about getting out of here? I was in the middle of something pretty important--" Well, sort of. She would prefer to skip the rest of the torture session and get to the demon delivery part. "--and I need to get back."

[timeleaper]

Honestly, she seemed rather unsurprised by the idea of magic and the other things that Ronixis had mentioned, so he could only assume that either she was familiar with that kind of thing, or she was completely failing to make that work in her head and was suffering a minor mental breakdown. One or the other. Both seemed entirely plausible.

Although he did hope that the mental breakdown wasn't too large. That could be bad, especially if they ran into a monster and he had to cast something.

"Ronixis," he corrected lightly. "Ronixis J. Kenni." He was proud of his heritage after all. How many people could claim to be related to the first man to travel at light speed?

He looked a little embarrassed at her next question, giving a little laugh. "Well, that would be the problem, wouldn't it," he replied easily. "That's a little more difficult than it looks considering come morning you'll wake up back in your room no matter where you got to during the night. It's a little inconvenient."