Day 46: Music Room
Kaworu immediately gravitated towards the keyboard. It was not a piano, not truly, but it was attractive in all of the same ways. Music freed the mind from conscious thought, and Kaworu was feeling exceptionally weighed down by exactly that. There was a heaviness, as well as a lightness. He did not know where to begin approaching the situation with
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His inability to put together a systematic theory of what was happening at the Institute was frustrating, particularly since he had been shown twice that his own mind could be affected with no apparent great effort. He would chalk this failure up both to the way he had been deprived of solitude and to the fact that this was necessarily a haphazard investigation, one beset by strictures and hazards, one which had chosen him rather than the other way around. He had no investigative materials, no reliable subordinates who felt that it was their business to do whatever he told them to do, no way to build a database that would reflect such a complex situation. The journal he carried with him all day was both insufficient and insecure; any chance that the staff might read it made it useless to him. For the most part, he had to rely on his intuition and his memory to decide which facts were relevant and which angles to pursue. He suspected that feigning illness might be the only way to achieve the few hours of isolated near-silence that he wanted, and he worried that if he went through with it, he would miss important connections.
After looking around the room, he asked to borrow a cd player and headphones, then browsed the cds.
His anger had grown as every aspect of his circumstances developed -- the imprisonment, the mind games, the physical attacks at night, all of it an attempt at torture of one kind or another -- but the fury had only one purpose, and that was to energize him. Losing his temper or sinking into despair would be pointless. As he selected a Bach cd, he wondered how long it would take, if it would be possible, to truly wear him down, then rejected the thought: No, it is impossible.
Or maybe it is possible, after all, and this is how I will die. There's no way to tell.
He took the cd, player, and headphones with him to one of the red couches. He sat as he had been sitting all day: favoring his right leg. His right foot was allowed to rest on the floor and he drew his left knee up to his chest. Once he was comfortable, he opened the cd case and, with care, put the cd into the player. But that was as far as it went; he delayed slipping the headphones on, watching to see who would enter the room, looking a little more weary than usual.
[Free.]
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Lockdown avoided the instruments this time around. He'd looked at them his first time in here and decided he hated the so-called "music" they made. Lockdown didn't care for even Cybertronian music, but at least it sounded better than the audio-scraping sounds that passed for music on this planet.
Instead, he just decided to sit the shift out on one of the couches. The couch just happened to have a meatbag who came off as weirder than normal. His optics looked blank and he looked really edgy. Or maybe he was just bored. Meatbags could be hard to read sometimes. Well, maybe they could just ignore each other until the shift ended. Without waiting for permission or an invitation, Lockdown sat on the other side of the couch.
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The man who had taken a seat near L was approaching middle age, and he had a distinctive, imposing appearance. He had facial tattoos of no recognizable origin. L concluded that he closely resembled an albino with dyed-black hair, but even that was inaccurate: his eyes were not the pale blue color shared by most albinos. Instead, they were a more intense red than could be accounted for by that condition. He was difficult not to notice around the Institute, but they hadn't spoken before.
The Music Room seemed to have been built to thwart any attempts at concentration on L's part, anyway, and the man had captured his interest. He put on his friendliest face (not very friendly, being more of a combination of a benign expression and an undisguised stare). He said the first thing he could think of to strike up a conversation.
"This room - does it get noisy? I have never been in it before." His voice was cool, edged with curiosity.
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He also couldn't help but feel like the kid was scanning him, analyzing him. That backed up his robot theory, in his processor.
In response to the question, Lockdown replied, "Sometimes. Just gotta learn to tune it out." That's what he and Starscream had done when they first met in here. That felt like so long ago.
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Nothing in L's demeanor changed, except for a subtle realignment of his expression and posture, one which suggested that he had absorbed and processed the information and was adjusting his plans accordingly.
"Noise is distracting. Do you have any suggestions for tuning it out, Mr...?" The leading tone in his voice suggested that his companion introduce himself.
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Again, he couldn't help but get a weird vibe from this kid. He kinda reminded Lockdown of those scientist bots who took time to process new information.
Deciding to just keep playing along, he replied, "Just try focusing on somethin' else." Talking with Starscream had been enough to mostly distract him from the noise in here. The seeker's voice had been enough to distract anyone, though.
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The interest showed in his expression, which became fractionally more intent, less benign. HK-47 had claimed that he and Lockdown had killed forty-two "meatbags" between them on Saturday night.
"Lockdown. It's good to meet you." With the goal of focusing on something that wasn't the room's ambient noise, and seeming to follow Lockdown's advice, he decided to put the conversation to good use.
"If you don't mind me asking, were you a victim of yesterday's incident? I am curious about it, about people who believed that they were patients, rather than prisoners, and whose memories of their lives matched what was in their patient files."
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"Yep. And if Landel tries it again, I'm gonna crush his neck with my bare hands," Lockdown growled. He really hated what they'd done to him yesterday. Expression taking on a more neutral look, he asked, "What're you, some kinda detective?"
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"Some kind?" A very specific kind. He frowned, as if to say that he didn't feel it would be fair to call himself a detective at all. "I am a student. I have an academic interest in what happened, because I was also a victim of those circumstances. Primarily, if you don't mind talking about it, I am curious about what you might have experienced last night."
His expression brightened, and he added, "I think there will be a line to crush Landel's neck -- if we can find him. You will be at the front of it?"
When L meditated on what he would like to do with Landel, he nurtured a small internal spark of anger and malice, but killing the doctor was low on the list. In his mind, there was a cell, small and unpleasant, with Landel's name on it; he amused himself in slow moments by imagining what the conditions of the doctor's ultimate imprisonment might be. Making sure that he was cared for well was a given: L wanted Landel to live a long, miserable life.
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"Same thing that happens every night. Went out, saw monsters, almost got scrapped," Well, more like he'd been kidnapped. While all of Lance's memories weren't all that clear, Lockdown definatly remembered the kid in the Sun Room and the Sphinx.
The bounty hunter smiled in his usual sadistic way, "You bet I'll be at the front, even if I have'ta fight every patient in line for it."
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L had seen nothing, nothing at all, and was at pains to understand why. Keman and Lockdown had both encountered monsters. Had L and Lunge just been lucky? If so, why had Lunge been able to see the ruins, when L had not? Dr. Jones had also seen them, though not last night.
He bobbed his head, once, indicating Lockdown's strong frame, and said, "I think you would have a good chance of achieving your goal. I know I wouldn't stand in your way."
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What was this kid getting at? Had some of the unlucky patients really not seen anything? Once again, Lockdown thought, What's that slagger, Landel, playing at? He'd temporarily reprogrammed some of them, but a few of them had also been reprogrammed to see monsters? Well, for now he'd leave it for someone else to figure out. Right now all he cared about was getting out and showing Landel what happened when you messed with Cybertron's greatest bounty hunter. Maybe he'd even let HK have some of the slagger.
The bounty hunter flexed his arm muscles smuggly at the compliment. These muscles were nothing compared to his real body, but they still came in handy when it came to fighting.
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"That's what I'm trying to determine: who saw what. I do not think that it is possible to use the bulletin board to make a general survey of the population anymore... not on this point, anyway. Regardless, I am certain that there are people who were affected who saw nothing at all last night. I would like to find more of them... to ask, for example, whether or not they had unaffected companions who could see things which they, themselves, could not."
Nothing in L's demeanor changed, even by a flicker, as Lockdown flexed his muscles.
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"Got a friend who thinks this whole thing's a virtual simulation," As long as he didn't mention Prowl by name, he figured there was no harm in telling this meatbag the ninjabot's theory, even if Lockdown wasn't convinced of it. If this meatbag was really as smart as he claimed, maybe he could make something of it. "Don't really believe him myself, but he does make an interestin' point."
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"It sounds absurd, but some of the circumstances of the other night -- Sunday -- support the idea, at least enough that it might be worth further consideration. There was some instability in the appearance of the walls; there were a few moments where they seemed to change. Is that the sort of thing your friend was discussing?"
In point of fact, the idea was ridiculous -- but so was their situation. Then again, if I entertain this possibility, there are a number of more or less absurd possibilities which must also be evaluated and discarded. It left him unsure of exactly where he should focus his energies.
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"Yeah, I know, I was there," the bounty hunter informed. Happened on the same night he and HK had their little spark-to-spark actually. "We talked about it. He was thinkin' the same thing you are."
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