Day 46: Intercom, Evening
The intercom jingle went off, mirroring the cheery voice that came out of the speakers soon after it.
"Hello, everyone, and I hope you found productive endeavors in both your music-making and your therapy sessions! Now, our nurses will be escorting all of you to your rooms and to your delicious dinners. Tonight, we're serving moist slices of ( Read more... )
"Hello, everyone, and I hope you found productive endeavors in both your music-making and your therapy sessions! Now, our nurses will be escorting all of you to your rooms and to your delicious dinners. Tonight, we're serving moist slices of ( Read more... )
It wasn't a bad thing, but it was frustrating. Now, Luke felt like he wasn't trying to make Master Van see him, but Asch. He didn't need his original's acknowledgment, but he knew that in order to work effectively here, Asch needed to acknowledge that Luke wasn't useless. Or rather: he needed to admit it. He wanted things to be better. He wanted to believe in the somewhat unrealistic ideal that things would be better once they left this place, and that even if it was horrible, they could make it out alive. Being stubborn, ignoring that, acting as if these possibilities didn't exist-it wasn't a good idea. It wasn't like Luke himself didn't know that there was a chance that things wouldn't work out, but it didn't matter. Why would he give up on his chance to exist like that? To live, and for Asch to live, too?
Luke stepped into his room and immediately took a turn toward his desk. After his long day, he didn't really feel that hungry. Despite his long talk with Anise at lunch, he managed to eat a bit of pizza, and his talk with Asch, while annoying to some degree, wasn't enough to draw that much energy out of him. Knowing that Guy was coming encouraged him to eat more. If he got tired while they were out, it would be a bit embarrassing. But he glanced in the direction of Cloud on his bed, and a new worry occurred to him. Why wasn't he eating? Had something happened? Not wanting to ask from way across the room, Luke grabbed up his tray and moved to his bed, setting it down before he sat on the edge of the bed beside it, his legs hanging off.
"Hey, Cloud," he said, and his voice wasn't loud or overly invasive, so if the other man decided to ignore him, he had that freedom. It was different from the day prior, when they had to go through awkward greetings and, from what Luke could perceive, both believed they were from the same world. His greeting given, he glanced down toward his food-all that gravy made it look unappetizing-and decided to throw in one extra part. "Not hungry?" Maybe that was a little more invasive, but Luke pointedly started picking at his food to make it seem like he wasn't waiting with bated breath.
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He wasn't truly all that hungry, but he knew that eating at least a little of what he was given would be better for him in the long run. Now that there were two trays of food in the room the smell was starting to get to him. The blond slid from his bed and walked over to his desk to retrieve the tray before returning to his bed. Luke was at his now, and sitting over in the chair would only make it look like he was trying to put some distance between them. That wasn't something he wanted. Everyone had to stick together in this place.
The urge to bombard the other young man with questions was still there, but he held back, starting with a generic conversation opener instead. "So how was your day?" Though the activities offered were fairly dull, Cloud didn't think it was possible to have a day where nothing worthwhile happened. Nevermind that he hadn't been in the Institute long at all.
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"It was ... interesting," he said, knowing that the word 'interesting' was pretty vague. Anise and Guy's visits were the good kind of interesting, while Sync's was bad. Asch's fell somewhere in the middle, but that wasn't surprising in the least, and so did his conversations on the bulletin with the other people from his world. "I managed to find most of my friends and I found out a lot about this place. Haha, I felt pretty stupid when I realized we probably weren't from the same world after all." He didn't want to mention that he found out that one of his friends had died, so he forced a smile and pressed on. "This place is pretty dangerous, and it sounds like they lead a lot of people into traps-and then make it impossible to speak about it."
That last bit was one of the things that was most pressing in Luke's mind. He wanted to tell anyone he could about it, just in case they made the same mistake of following that lead. "I found out more than that," he added, recalling his journal with the maps inside. Might as well get started on finally drawing those out, because it seemed more appetizing than the disguised meat. He rose up to grab a pencil and his journal-which had the maps from Anise inside of it-and returned to his bed.
"What about you?"
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And yes. What about his day? "Interesting is a good word to use." Cloud's hand went to the back of his neck in that same familiar gesture as he tried to figure out how to explain things without going into too much detail. In the end, it might be unavoidable. "My friend was better today. Anyone that was brainwashed seems to be, which begs the question of why they bothered in the first place. Testing things out, maybe. Powerplay." What next, what next... "I ran into two people who recognized me that I didn't recognize in return, one of which might be from my future, and found out that two people who should have been dead are alive here."
That might have been a bit much but, well, it was all sure to come up sooner or later anyway. "That about sums it up."
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Instead of scolding himself on the progress of the maps for long, he focused once more on Cloud's words. Dead. Finding out people were better. "I've been here before," he explained. "They have a theory that people who disappear from this place are only let out because they've been successfully brainwashed. That means ... there's a chance it's happened to me a couple times before, too. I just don't remember." Of course, it was a theory, but Guy wouldn't be the type to steer him wrong about these things. As for the rest, how to address the fact that he should be dead, when he and his friends were obviously avoiding the issue? He fell silent, noticeably considering his next words, before he went on. "One of my friends died a couple nights ago, but he woke up in the morgue. He was ... still in pain, but definitely alive. Another person-the one who actually contacted me last night-was dead, too." A pause, a beat, and he tilted his head. "I might be dead, as well, back home."
Providing an explanation about the future was a new one, but Luke took that in stride. Everything else here was so strange that it just seemed to make the perfect sense to be one confusing piece of the puzzle. "But," he continued, adding one last bit of words because he didn't want to end on that note. "It sounds like we've both been busy, huh?"
It occurred to Luke that dinner might be this way a lot, especially since he found that he didn't mind speaking with Cloud.
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"I heard that too - that I'd been here before, I mean." The tall man with the afro had said it, then Yuffie had said it. He had no reason not to believe either of them, though the latter especially. The materia thief had tricked them in the past, but her bluffs were easy to call. She shouldn't have any reason to try and pull the wool over his eyes while she was here, anyway. They were both in the same amount of trouble. The thought that he'd been brainwashed into forgetting he'd been there before was a disturbing one, and the additional thought that he wasn't alone in that scenario didn't make things any better.
He watched Luke work on the drawings, wanting to move closer and see what exactly the red-head was working on but not wanting to shove his way into his personal space. If his roommate wanted to share it, he would. "Yeah. Busy."
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Not letting on his relief at that, he noted Cloud's concise response, but decided not to say anything about it. However, he did see that Cloud was watching him, and decided to go into that. Safer, less complicated territory, and away from discussing his potential lack of existence. "Aside from finding out about brainwashing, my friend Anise gave me some maps. I guess they used to be shared on the bulletin, but they've changed their policy. It's ... a lot harder to get information now, I guess." Helpfully, he held up one of the maps of the institute and showed it to Cloud, to give him a scope of just how much Luke would have to copy down.
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"I'll have to see if my friend has one." Something told him Yuffie probably might. If the Turks did he wasn't going to ask for it. "If she doesn't, do you think I might be able to get a turn at that? Only after you're done, I mean." He didn't want to pressure Luke to copy things down too fast, though, as that could cause him to mislabel or make other errors in what would be very important material. "Don't worry about it tonight, either way. I have plans that wouldn't require it."
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"Yeah, I'll let you borrow it," he told Cloud. "But it might have to be my copies. I don't know how long Anise will let me keep them." Luke forced a reassuring smile. "I'll make sure to copy it all down as best as I can." Which meant making his handwriting completely legible, but he could do it.
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He poked around at his dinner, not much interested in the artichokes but figuring he should eat the meat at least. And the cake. That cake was starting to look really good. It would be saved for last, but he could already hear his friends laughing about his sudden eagerness to dig into it. "Did you make any progress last night? I didn't get all that far. This place is crazy."
That was an understatement if he'd ever spoken one.
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Actually, he realized he hadn't checked on the location on his pipe. Luke figured it was somewhere among his things, but he made a mental note to check it later. It wasn't that he needed it-he couldn't use it if he had an alternative-but the smell of the nasty stuff from the pipes made him want to keep it around. He worked hard to acquire it, after all. And embarrassed himself in the process.
"I didn't run into any monsters, though." That very fact didn't seem to be anything more than an afterthought. Given Luke's run in with Sync, he was beginning to believe that the real monsters here were the people trapped or the one orchestrating it all.
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"I met with the friend of my friend and he insisted on picking up his girlfriend before we went after our mutual friend." If the repetitiveness of that sentence bothered him, he didn't show it. "She hadn't gone too far. We ran into... something. Apparently it looked like a friend of hers, but those teeth didn't belong on anyone human. Kenshin and I (that's the guy next door) ran in to get him off her, but I woke up right as I got a hold on him."
It had been disturbing, to say the least - waking up and not knowing what had happened to her or to any of them. "Saw her again this morning, so she's fine like I said earlier. I've been warned a bit belatedly that this place is a total mindfuck."
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All the processing, thankfully, didn't take too long, but there was a moment in which Luke did stop and visibly went over it. "They want to make it as hard as possible on us," Luke said to the last statement. "So, I guess it makes sense that the monster she saw looked like a friend of hers. It adds up."
To what ends, though? Luke frowned, uncertain of what this Landel guy was trying to achieve. Hurting and weakening them made sense, but what was the point of making them give up who they were? Was there some satisfaction in it? What was the point? In some way, destroying all the people on Auldrant and creating a replica made more sense than this. If this was meant to throw everything out of order so that a new one could be started, Luke couldn't understand it. And he really had a feeling that wasn't it at all.
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