Night 49: F-A Block Hallway
[From here]
Where it was time to go, Yuffie wasn't exactly sure.
The weather warned against another attempt on the outside. Disappointing, but there'd always be another chance in the future; a chance that didn't involve hypothermia, pneumonia, and-or drowning in flood water. Yuffie was no coward, no way, but she could appreciate prudence.
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Where it was time to go, Yuffie wasn't exactly sure.
The weather warned against another attempt on the outside. Disappointing, but there'd always be another chance in the future; a chance that didn't involve hypothermia, pneumonia, and-or drowning in flood water. Yuffie was no coward, no way, but she could appreciate prudence.
[To ( Read more... )
Just a few steps and she was in the connecting hallway. Morgan took baby steps around the corner and paused as soon as she got around it, with her back pressed to the wall and the closet rod gripped firmly in her right hand. Nothing moving here either.
Now her problem--no, Morgan corrected herself, Mighty Pirate Hunter™ Morgan LeFlay didn't have problems so much as occasional extremely minor and temporary irritations--was that she had no idea where her stuff was being kept. She'd passed some pretty central-looking doors on the way to the room before dinner, and she could probably retrace her steps there, but she didn't want to leave without the Blade of Dragotta.
Plus whoever had kidnapped her had her 30,000 pieces of silver, and she was going to pole-beat it back out of them if she had to. Or heck, even if she didn't. That had been the hardest-earned bounty of her career!
She decided she might as well keep heading toward the rooms she'd been in during the daytime, and then keep exploring from there. With that resolved, she started moving again along the far wall, slowly and cautiously.
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Flicking her light on, she could see that other patients were already making good time in moving out for the night. Several of the women she saw were clearly veterans, either heading purposefully for the patient block door or meeting with other patients to discuss plans. She would have to ask somebody sometime how long most patients had been around for. Not now, though, Elaine thought as she moved into the main block hallway. Right now, she was much more curious to actually start exploring. She had had enough poking around and gathering little clues carefully for at least a little while.
However, before she could move out of the block herself, something, or rather, someone caught her attention. The beam from her torch crossed the now familiar figure of Morgan LeFlay, Mighty Pirate Hunter™, who looked like she was attempting to ninja her way down the hall. She didn't blame the woman for being cautious. Even with veterans around them giving examples of what kind of movement and noise level they could get away with, the whole situation was too much of an unknown to just throw oneself at headfirst. What surprised her was that Morgan, with her insistence earlier that time was of the essence, caution be damned, was being so careful. That and just the fact that Morgan seemed to be the only other Tri-Islander around was enough to make Elaine open to speaking with the woman again.
Elaine didn't bother to call Morgan's name or give a greeting; the light crossing over Morgan had probably caught her attention already. Instead, she simply moved toward the other woman and spoke directly to her, giving the woman a polite nod. "Perfect night for a stroll, isn't it?" she said wryly as she approached, placing one hand on her hip. Gesturing toward Morgan's closet bar and raising up her own a bit, she added, "Great minds think alike, I see."
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Anyway, Morgan wasn't going to throw professionalism to the four winds just because all the other girls were doing it. The moving people and wandering beams of light were good cover, and she kept going until one of the beams fell right on her.
Spotted! She froze instinctively, peering into the sudden harsh light to try to figure out who'd caught her and whether she should aim for their kneecaps or their nasal passages. A second later her pursuer came closer and started talking in a British accent and Morgan realized it was just Elaine, with what looked like half a pillowcase wrapped around her head. Morgan let out a small sigh of irritation. Elaine's fashion sense was questionable enough already (seriously, magenta and lavender?), but this had to take the crab cake.
On the other hand, meeting Elaine was probably not all bad, since a) Elaine also had a closet rod, which she hopefully wasn't going to use to go crazy and try to beat Morgan to death, and b) when Morgan got out of here, she'd need to bring Elaine with her. Seven-year memory gap or not, Guybrush would kill her if she left his wife to rot in some freaky mad scientist lab with stale tuna and inadequate weaponry. And since Morgan really didn't want to make things any worse on that front, she and Elaine were stuck with each other. Which meant she was going to have to play nice. Blecch.
Morgan sidestepped so the light wasn't in her eyes and lowered her closet rod. "Yeah. The thunder really adds to the atmosphere." Now what? After a pause, she ventured, "Hey, uh...so what was your plan for the night?" Honestly, she didn't expect Elaine to have much and Morgan doubted she'd be particularly interested either way, but consulting Elaine anyway seemed like a pretty solid conversational move. Morgan could feel her communication skills improving already.
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"Exploration, mainly," she answered, lowering her light. Morgan wasn't being immediately annoying, at least; she saw fit to return one straight, civil response with another. "I want to get a better sense for the lay of the land around here than we got during the day. If I'm going to be kept in the dark, I'd rather it only be literally rather than figuratively."
Her gaze drifted past the other woman to the patient block entrance for a few moments. "Also, if Guybrush is here, then I'd like to find him." A hesitation, then a shake of her head. "So he can get what's coming to him, I mean. The man's not going to punch himself in the face now, after all." Another, shorter pause. "Probably." One never could tell with Guybrush sometimes. Good lord knew there was probably some puzzle or another out there that involved tricking a sea lion into thinking he was injured, leading him to be pitied and cared for by said sea lion as one of its own pups until such time that he could get close enough to steal the sea lions' valuable Golden MacGuffin of the Atlantic. Or something of that sort.
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She wanted to defend Guybrush from his abusive crazyscarf she-beast here, but in the end she kept her mouth shut. Hey, it'd been his call to marry her; he could handle what was coming to him. And Morgan knew she really didn't have a lot of room to talk as far as not injuring Guybrush went. So all she said was, "Um, actually, I think I have seen him punch himself in the face." During the brief period of their acquaintance when he'd actually had a left hand, that was. "He's given it up since then, though," Morgan added quickly.
But Guybrush was not a subject she wanted to make small talk about with Elaine; too much potential for tension on either side. "This place just keeps getting weirder," she said, changing the subject. "The girl I talked to this afternoon was convinced we were on some other planet. She'd never even heard of the Caribbean!" Elaine had been talking to people too, and Morgan really hoped they were all based in familiar waters. Even if they were still in the Gulf of Melange (which Morgan was starting to doubt; she didn't think there were any buildings of this size on any of those islands), escaping wasn't going to be easy. They'd have to commandeer a ship, a pretty small one with just the two of them to sail it, and Morgan knew from experience that managing a craft that size in a storm like this was no walk in the water park.
If they weren't in the Caribbean.... Morgan gulped.
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Granted, if this future timeline was real and Elaine was still close to Guybrush during that time, it was more than likely that she had ultimately gone through with the engagement and married the damn fool after all. She suspected if that was the case, then she might well have softened on her policy of literally knocking sense into him.
That was another thing she was unsure about on top of the whole time-and-space-twisting Institute thing, now that it was on her mind again - how sure exactly was she about that proposal? At the moment, her feelings on that matter were decidedly vague. Of course, she could still feel the tingle of the voodoo curse running from her ring finger out through the rest of her body when she thought back to earlier that morning. That alone made Elaine grit her teeth and want to hit things. Hours and hours after the fact, however, it was hard to keep up that kind of anger, especially when she was still getting it through her head that Guybrush hadn't actually been killed all those months ago. She wouldn't admit it yet, but right now, she was starting to worry more again about whether that "alive" status was still the case; whether she broke his nose or not would come after she got an answer on that front.
The last of Morgan's statements puller her back into a present state of mind. She nodded, answering: "Indeed. I've talked to at least two so far who claim they're from the far future, too. Frankly, as much as it weirds me out, I'm not entirely sure I can discount their claims out of hand, either, what with the way this building is put together." That combined with the change in climate were enough to tell Elaine that they were most likely no longer in the Caribbean. Just how far away was the real question. If there was a person around who didn't even claim to be from the same planet, that threw a whole new monkey wrench into the mix.
"It'll be easiest to get a sense for where we really are from outside," she decided at that, taking a step off to the side and looking again at the door to the hallway. "I think I'm going to find a way out as quickly as possible and survey the grounds first. If there ends up being a way off the property out there, all the better."
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Going outside was definitely where Elaine's plan took a turn for the questionable--Morgan would be willing to bet they'd have guards out there (she would, if she were running this place), and the two of them were disoriented and armed only with embarrassingly wussy-looking wooden rods. (Not that that would stop her from kicking major butt, but it just wouldn't have the same heartwarming homicidal thrill without her sword.) But getting outside would tell them where they were, and knowing where the exit was might have other benefits too. If there was security set up where her stuff was, it'd be nice to have an escape route worked out ahead of time so she could just grab and go.
In the end the logic wasn't really important, though. If Elaine wanted to run around outside, Morgan would just have to play along for now. She reassured herself with the knowledge that the closet rod was probably hefty enough to knock out even the most hardheaded of politicians if it had to.
"Okay," Morgan said, ignoring all those "I"s. "Let's go." With that she started--still cautiously, but at a more normal pace this time--down the hall again, trusting that Elaine would come with her.
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