Night 49: Doctor's Office 9 [Dr. Weaver]

[for_a_song]

[From here]

"It wouldn't be much of a music room if they didn't," he agreed. Interesting to know that Edgar at least had those where he came from. A part of him was sure it would be interesting to sit down and compare what was similar and what was different between all the different places the people he'd talked to so far claimed to come from.

Comments

[allroadslead]

At this point, Sam wasn't even going to try to figure out how all of this was operating. He'd think about it later, when he wasn't dripping wet. In any case, they were indoors and there were no zombies or disturbing science experiments. This was about as good as it would get. He'd take it.

"That might be a good idea."

The office wasn't familiar to him, but it was similar enough to the one he'd been in: the desk, the chairs, the bookshelves. Only the computer looked out of place. The institute was hardly living in the fifties or something, but it wasn't anywhere near technologically caught up. The radios and the computers he'd come across were all fairly dated by the usual standards.

This one, though. This was one was so new and white it practically glowed in the dark. Curious, he reached over to boot it up.

Using forged credit cards to obtain new equipment was one of the first things he'd stopped feeling guilty about, he had to admit. Especially given the life. Things had a tendency to break and while Dean could rebuild a lot of things, he couldn't rebuild a laptop.

Sam pulled open a drawer, sifting through blank notepads and pens as he waited for the system to load. It was all empty, though. Neat, but empty. He'd been hoping for a drawer of files or something, but...

At Peter's remark, he looked up, hand resting on the handle of the lower drawer. He let out a short laugh. "Yeah, tell me about it. I think I prefer this over the living dead, though." Or that night he'd died. Him and half of the institute, apparently.

Of course, the zombies were actually more predictable, but it was the principle of the matter. Rotting corpses lurching after you were a big turn off. At least tonight, they seemed to be jumping from area to area too fast to be attacked. In fact, he realized that tonight was the first night in a long time where he hadn't had a spirit or some other creature to deal with. That was a nice change of pace.

He looked back down at the drawer, the second one. A phone and a photograph. He picked up the photo and flipped it over, but there was nothing written on it. Just an unexplained picture of a kid who couldn't have been older than ten, sitting on a hospital bed, though he didn't look particularly ill. Sam peered at it for a moment, distracted by the quiet way it unsettled him for a reason he couldn't place.

[human_sponge]

First one sock, then the other. No matter how much he tried to get all the water out, though, they still felt wet and clammy when he pulled them back onto his feet. It was enough to make him shudder uncomfortably, and there wasn't much he could do about the waterlogged shoes, either. Still, walking around barefoot sounded like a terrible idea, and so he started to lace the shoes back up as he watched Sam start up the computer and riffle through the drawers.

That computer looked pretty sleek and new, he had to admit. What model of Mac was it, even? He didn't recognize it straight off the bat, but it did make it clear that they weren't in the past or anything. In fact, it was one of the only things he'd seen that really made that for certain.

Then again, it was possible this doctor, whoever they were, had been pulled from the future -- and their computer had come with. It was a weird thought, but not completely impossible.

"Yeah," he agreed as he stood from his chair and started to head for the bookshelves. "This is confusing and uncomfortable, but at least there's not a huge chance of becoming undead." The words seemed awkward as they came out of his mouth, but it really wasn't a ridiculous thing to say. Not anymore.

Peter scanned over the books with his flashlight, lifting his hand to drag down his mouth in thought as he took in what there was. It quickly became clear that there was a bias toward diagnostic texts and books on infectious disease, which seemed out of place. These people were supposed to be seeing to their mental health, after all. On the other hand, it wasn't as if Mohinder was qualified for dealing with mental patients. Maybe Landel was more interested in bringing in people who some of the patients would recognize.

Once he was done looking, he paced over to the chair where Sam was sitting and then stopped a few feet behind him. "Find anything?" he asked, knowing that the answer was probably no. Even if that was the case, this place was still nonthreatening and quiet, and that was all that Peter had wanted.

[allroadslead]

Watching Peter try to wring himself dry, Sam felt kind of bad because while he was no less waterlogged, he was at least somewhat better clothed for running around in that kind of weather. Comparatively speaking, anyway.

Hopefully, nothing would interrupt them while they took ten minutes out to warm up. If nothing else, the institute was decently heated.

"Just this." Sam handed the picture off to Peter. "And a phone."

Which contained nothing, he quickly realized. He flipped it over and popped the battery cover. Missing SD card. That explained it. Though why anyone would leave their phone behind but take the memory card was beyond him. Why not just, you know. Take the whole damn phone with you? He'd thought at first the doctor had forgotten it, but that obviously wasn't the case.

He was about to toss it back into the drawer, but then...well, Dean might find some use for it. He pocketed it instead. His brother could pull apart anything and put it back together to make something else. Who knew, they could end up with a Blackberry EMF reader. Fashionable hunting.

He turned back to the computer, though he had a feeling this was as much of a waste of time as the rest. And for all he knew, the doctor kept its memory clear, too. Kept everything on a flash drive, maybe. He doubted the type of files doctors had required too much room in the first place.

"Hey, so," he began without looking up from the keyboard, "you mentioned earlier that you knew someone who could...bend time and space, you said?"

[human_sponge]

Carefully taking the picture frame, Peter looked it over. The boy in it didn't look like he needed medical attention, but there were some diseases that weren't immediately apparent just by glancing at someone. Was this an old patient of the doctor's, maybe? Someone who'd touched her for some reason? There was no real way to know, though, and so he set the frame down on the desk.

For a second, Peter wanted to say something about Sam deciding to take the phone, but he realized that there was no reason he should. Chances were that anything that was taken would somehow be replaced through what had to be some sort of item replication process. He wasn't sure how everything was fixed, but it was possible that it was done through a combination of different abilities.

Peter kept half of his attention on the computer screen, just in case Sam actually got somewhere, but dedicated the other half to answering his roommate's question. Hiro's ability was pretty special, so he wasn't surprised that Sam was curious about it.

"Yeah, I guess... well, I didn't get to know him that well, but... he could teleport from anywhere to anywhere else. I'm pretty sure he could even go back in time," he explained as he leaned himself against the desk while making sure not to crowd Sam while he worked. "I think he might have been able to stop time, too. I may have gotten more practice trying it out myself, but I ended up here pretty much right after I met him."

That whole night had been pretty chaotic. Peter had crossed paths with a lot of people then, though with half of them he hadn't even gotten their names. He'd been pretty focused on Claire, Sylar, and Nathan, anyway. And while it had all worked out in the end, it wasn't like everything had been picture perfect. Even though he knew that Nathan healed eventually, that image of his charred body would never leave him.

"But yeah," he continued suddenly, "it's definitely possible that Landel's using an ability like that. Or that he knows someone who can do it." Both options were bad, but it was a truth they'd have to face.

[allroadslead]

Seriously? Stopping the flow of time altogether? Even Sam hadn't seen the Trickster do that, though he had a feeling the thing could've if it'd wanted to.

He knew he had to shake the notion that his and Peter's...world, as it were, were identical given all the inconsistencies he kept coming up against. It wasn't as though it were unheard of. The Puranas assigned each universe its own god, he remembered. But he'd just never come across anything like it before. Dream worlds, yeah, but that wasn't the same thing.

And even then, surely the fundamental building blocks of a universe couldn't be so different as to allow someone to frigging absorb godlike powers the way Peter seemed to be suggesting. Could it?

There had to be a physicist somewhere in the institute. Someone who could give him another angle to work off of. There were all sorts of people, after all; maybe if he asked around, he'd find the resident Stephen Hawking.

"From what I know," he said, making a second attempt to boot the Mac from a partition, "anyone with that kind of power would almost be on the same level as a god."

For a moment, his fingers hovered over the keyboard. "Makes you wonder if he ever considered going back to fix things."

Now there was an idea, wasn't it? But it was a bad one. Even he knew that. It didn't mean he hadn't thought about it a hell of a lot. And what about Peter, given what'd happened here with Nathan? He apparently couldn't use it in this place, but...it sounded as if he could've back home. Time was dangerous. Once you could manipulate it, the temptation would never go away and if he had to admit, it wasn't really Peter he was concerned about.

He shook it off. He shouldn't even be contemplating this.

[human_sponge]

When Sam went ahead and compared Hiro to a god, Peter almost stumbled from his spot leaning at the desk. He raised his eyebrows at the other man incredulously. "You serious? I... believe me, he's not... he's an excitable Japanese guy who has a very slippery grasp on English."

Besides, if Hiro was a god, what the hell would that make him? Peter knew he was practically normal at this point, but if he ever got out of this place, he'd be back to worrying about whether or not he could even contain all the powers he'd be picking up. Claude had said that he was the example of "maximum potential," but Peter had never taken that to mean deity status.

It made him even more curious about what sorts of things Sam had run across during his travels, but he figured his roommate would share if he wanted to.

Of course, bringing up time travel was always going to invite that question that Sam put forth, and Peter nodded silently and crossed his arms over his chest as he thought it over. He'd certainly abused the knowledge he'd gotten of the future, but messing around with the past was a whole other issue, wasn't it? What was it called, the butterfly effect?

"I'm pretty sure he did," he said, figuring that he didn't have to keep that to himself when Hiro hadn't seemed too intent on keeping it a secret. He didn't know the details, really -- only what Ando had hinted at -- but it was pretty nuts to even think about.

He scoffed and shook his head. "Knowing the future is almost as bad, though." He knew how fixated he'd gotten, and how it had bitten him in the ass in the end. It was what made him nervous whenever he came across people here who were from his future, though that hadn't happened in a while. Daphne had fallen off the map before he'd really gotten to know too much about her other than that she was a speedster and maybe on his side.

[allroadslead]

That might've been a good point, but given the Trickster's unusual sense of humour...

"You'd be surprised." Sam glanced up, catching Peter's expression. "But I'm sure he's not, it's just-not something you hear about everyday."

He had a feeling he was leaving a hell of a lot unexplained, but there wasn't much more he could say without it getting complicated. He wasn't even sure he should've insinuated he had more than a passing knowledge of demigods in the first place. If it'd been anyone else-

Made him wonder what Dean would say. He pushed it aside a split second later. There were more important things to second-guess himself about, and either way, it shouldn't've had anything to do with Dean.

"Knowing more than you should tends to be bad in general," he replied wryly.

You'd think he'd have learned that by now. Apparently not. He probably never would.

When the computer spontaneously ceased to function halfway through what he was doing, Sam sighed and pushed the keyboard away. He could maybe keep going and see what happened from there, but they didn't have all night and Sam wasn't comfortable lingering in one place for too long. They'd gotten lucky so far, not running into anything, but he wasn't gonna push it. Both of them were kinda banged up from a couple nights ago; it'd be nice if they could skip out on the action where possible.

"We should take off if you're ready." He slid the chair back, careful not to bump into Peter as he did. "Unless you wanna place bets on how fast we end up in the rain again before we go."

[human_sponge]

It wasn't that Peter was going to argue with the fact that these gods existed. He might have, at one point, but any religious affiliation he had was pretty much kaput by now, and meeting Skuld had also changed his views on the whole thing. She'd said she was a goddess, and he really didn't think she had any reason to lie. It was the sort of thing that had seemed so unlikely that chances were it was true.

There was just no way that Hiro was one. He nodded in response to Sam, not wanting his roommate to think he considered the whole idea nuts -- it was just part of it.

Sam was right about there being certain things that you just shouldn't be curious about, that you were better off not knowing, but that innate need to know was hard to stamp out sometimes. He got the feeling that was the same for anyone. Most people would jump at the idea of getting to see their future, or of getting to go back and alter something about their past. Everyone had regrets about things they'd done and things they wanted to know about what was to come.

It looked like they were out of luck when it came to the computer. There was no real surprise there, but Peter gave Sam an apologetic look nonetheless. It had to get frustrating after a while.

When Sam suggested that they move on, Peter paused for a split second. He really didn't mind just hanging around in here. It was quiet, and it felt safe to him, though he realized that was probably just an illusion. As nice as it seemed now, it was a safe bet that they would be tempting fate if they stuck around for too long. That was probably why Sam wanted to get going, even though there was really nowhere to get to.

"I'd rather not," he said in response to Sam's last comment as he pushed off the desk, though his tone was lighthearted. "Don't wanna depress myself." He grabbed up his shovel and bag, as always, and then started for the door. After exchanging glances with his roommate, he opened it and stepped through.

[allroadslead]

[ going home, bitches.]