Night 49: Nurse Lounge

[vsyourface]

[From here]A slightly larger and comfier-looking room greeted the pair next. A couch and several cushy chairs littered the space, along with a table, chairs, and a large cabinet, among other things. Definitely wasn't the worst place they could have ended up in, Scott thought. They could have ended up in a fridge or something

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[fangirlfatale]

Morgan wasn't particularly interested in hauling around random objects (especially now that she had a specialist there to do it for her), so she got out of the way and let Elaine indulge her kleptomania to her heart's content. At least the pillowcase was getting put to less ridiculous use.

But Guybrush's answer stopped her in her tracks. "Day three?" she repeated incredulously. "But you were just--God, have I really been out for that long? I just woke up here this morning!" Three days could be a record recovery time for such a life-threatening injury (although if she'd actually been dead, LeChuck undoubtedly held the speed records for resurrection), and it was much better than the seven years Elaine had evidently been out, but it still galled her that she'd wasted that much time without even realizing it. Time was money, after all, and three days could translate to quite a stack of lost pieces of eight. Or nine.

Plus the stolen silver from the Marquis de Frou-Frou. Plus lost revenue for however long it took her to get out of here and travel back to somewhere clients could actually find her. Whoever's little game this was was going to pay. To sue or to carve out their organs and sell them on the secondhand market as recompense, that was the question.

In light of this new revelation, Morgan was only half-listening to what LeChuck had to say, especially since she didn't like it. She motioned impatiently for him to be quiet.

[selfrescuer]

Elaine didn't see how Guybrush being three days ahead of Morgan would be all that surprising, considering that gap would hardly be the most extreme or inexplicable in the room thus far. From what Elaine could tell thus far, a person could be brought in from any kind of blackout or death at any time in their lives, not requiring them to have been "out" for any particular length of time. Granted, though, that still didn't explain why the people running this crazy house had seen fit to bring Guybrush in a full three days before snagging the rest of them.

"Yes, same for me. I woke up about early to mid-day, and I take it LeChuck woke closer to the evening, since we didn't see him around earlier," she answered, turning away from the cabinet and back to facing Guybrush. LeChuck stayed as much in her sights as possible as well, and she noted his next observation. She had already figured that this wouldn't be any recognizable location in the Caribbean earlier in the day, but a little extra confirmation never hurt. "The only hugely divergent bit on my end would be, well..." She gestured at herself, though it felt odd to be doing so when Guybrush seemed the one she ought to be gesturing at for looking strange. "Don't you notice something a bit different about me, Guybrush?"

She waited for a reaction, wondering if he would pick up on what she was getting at. Just in case she didn't, she followed up with the straight-up explanation. "The last thing I remember before waking up here was you putting a cursed voodoo ring on my finger and turning me into a statue," she told him, crossing her arms and glaring sharply at him.

[sheepwood]

Guybrush had to bite his tongue to stop himself from repeating that he thought Elaine looked like she'd lost a few pounds (his tuckle-bear would probably be more bear than tuckle if he mentioned it again); however, he found himself dumbfounded and rendered completely speechless only a few seconds later. His face went through a world of emotions in those seconds, reflecting denial, confusion, acceptance, then a second helping of confusion: "Whoa, uh. Ah, huh?"

He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. Did she have amnesia? Or was this another product of time-travel Voodoo gobbledegook? Or some other side effect of his being dead, if he'd died at all? Or had LeChuck done something to her after all? With the whirlwind of theories about this place going on in his head, the only thing he could manage was, "But- but that was years ago! You don't remember our years of matrimonial piracy?"

[voodooanonymous]

LeChuck turned from the window to answer Elaine's assumption with an "Aye", but Guybrush once again monopolized her time. And of course, he was as usual the last horse to cross the finish line... or almost the last. With his precious Elaine focusing on Guybrush (but of course, unable to keep her eyes off LeChuck entirely, the darling) he turned to Morgan.

"O' course, lass, ain't it obvious?" She was the one that had been talking with this Elaine of the past, after all. "We've all been taken from different points in time, either just before ye died, or ye were revived shortly after, 'afore ye could experience the afterlife. As far as I knew, ye've been dead fer months, body and all. If we could show up missin' months or years, why couldn't Guybrush 'ave been sent here a few days earlier?" It wasn't that it made any sense to LeChuck either, but she didn't need to act to surprised. Besides, she was getting on his nerves between the denial and and the silent shushing.

[fangirlfatale]

"Months?" Morgan repeated to herself, quietly horrified. Oh, this was bad. If nothing else, it was bad because LeChuck had apparently been walking around for all that time, doing who-knew-what to the Caribbean, while she was just...dead, unavenged and unremembered. Or--wait. Elaine's statue thing was an exception, but if the other three of them had been dead (and both Guybrush and LeChuck looked the same as they had when she'd last seen them), then Guybrush must have killed LeChuck. No one else could have done that, she was sure.

Uuughff, but wasting time trying to figure all this out was probably exactly what whoever had taken them wanted them to do. They needed to find a way to get their stuff and get out of here! They could always just cut their answers out of whoever was responsible later.

She turned her attention back to Guybrush and Elaine just in time to catch Guybrush's question. Just great. This line of conversation had the potential to get equally bad--or if nothing else to bog them down in weird time-traveling marital drama, undoubtedly with more sickeningly cute nicknames than you could shake a closet rod at. Time to move things along.

"No, she doesn't," Morgan cut in. "I told her you'd fill her in later--say, after we get out of here." She started to make her way back over to the door to underscore that; it looked like they'd learned and/or looted about everything they were going to here. Before she could go through, though, she had a thought and stopped to add: "Uh, but I'm sure you won't want to bore her with every little detail, right?" Like the part where Elaine had this inexplicable burning desire to skewer innocent pirate hunters who were just minding their own business on ladies' night. She tried to emphasize her words without being too obvious about it, praying that Guybrush had somehow managed to learn the fine art of subtlety in the last three days.

[selfrescuer]

Elaine caught something from LeChuck and Morgan's conversation about Morgan having been dead for months, which raised her interest. She didn't know exactly when Guybrush would have died, but so far, that put LeChuck at the furthest down the timeline out of all of them. What that ultimately meant for them was still unclear, but it at least made the picture a little bit clearer.

Back to her original point of focus, she was about to answer Guybrush when Morgan cut in for her. Elaine shot the other woman a short glare of continued annoyance. Did the Mighty Pirate Hunter™ seriously think Elaine couldn't answer her own questions, or was she that desperate to make herself sound useful? She cleared her throat rather loudly, adding her own two pieces of eight: "We can discuss the details later, yes. The most important thing is that as far as I know, you just proposed to me this morning - mysteriously minus a beard, I might add - everything went gold and black, and then I woke up here. My only hope that this all turns out right in the end is that there are apparently seven more years of my life after this point that you've all witnessed, so hopefully that means we get out of this mess at some point and I get back into my proper timeline. For now, let's work as quickly as we can to make sure that happens."

She felt a headache coming on just trying to talk about all that, especially when not all of it was exactly concrete knowledge yet. All the items Elaine wanted for now were in hand, and it looked like the other three were pretty much finished as well. With that, she gestured back toward the door and lead them out into the next area.

[To here]