Night 50: Women's Bathrooms (F01-F40)

[fangirlfatale]

[from here]The bathroom at night wasn't too much different from the bathroom during the day--tile floor, a bunch of stalls, sinks, et cetera--except that there was a faint weird smell to it, almost like something rotting. It sounded like the water might be dripping, too

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[selfrescuer]

Elaine nodded firmly. As expected, the pipes were thin enough that simple force would be enough to get them off, just like the closet rods. The only downside to the pipes being so thin was that they would likely have to collect a good number of them in order to get enough metal for both weapons. Not a huge drawback, at least; just annoying. Much like working with the hunter would be after an extended period of time, she expected. How fitting.

There was only one addition she was going to make to the plan of kicking the pipes down, and that was to make sure they didn't get needlessly wet while executing it. "Just one moment," she told the other woman, bending down beneath the sink with her torch shining on the piping. One of the perks of being Governor was that Governor's Mansions tended to pack all the bonus amenities that other quaint 17th-century dwellings sometimes lacked; one such bonus was indoor plumbing. Not only did it make dealing with certain bodily functions much more convenient and sanitary, but it also gave Elaine a general familiarity with how piping worked. Granted, being Governor, she didn't usually have to trifle with doing her own plumbing work if something broke, but she had at least learned enough to know what the basic parts were (it helped when describing problems to Ye Olde Sanitation Services). In any case, what that meant was that she knew where to find the valve to shut the water off. "Wouldn't want to get water that smells like this soaking the place, now would we?" she remarked, wrinkling her nose as she turned the valves on a few of the sinks.

After that bit of work, she moved out of Morgan's way, guessing that the woman would probably want to continue being destructive as soon as possible. In the meantime, she moved on to another subject she knew they were both interested in. "So, was it in your drawer?" she asked, moving over to one of the other sinks and preparing to go at it with some kicking of her own.

[fangirlfatale]

"Yeah, I don't think it would do much for business if people could smell me coming," Morgan agreed, aiming a disgusted look at the sink taps. Shutting the water off wasn't a bad idea, she had to admit. To herself. Elaine didn't need any more encouragement to feel like she was SOMETHING BLAH.

Once she was satisfied that breaking the pipe wasn't going to make her smell like the bottom of Davy Jones's locker, she backed up and rammed the heel of her boot into the same joint at full force. "Hya!" She followed that up with another swift kick--nice and easy, just like pummeling someone's spleen--and the pipe came apart. The free end (still dripping slightly) had a few inches of give on either side of it now. Morgan shifted her attention to the other side of the pipe and dispensed similar punishment until it cracked and clattered to the floor. "Hah!" she congratulated herself quietly as she snatched it up.

All that bought her a little time before she had to answer. She thought about playing dumb, but of course that wasn't likely to work on Elaine any better than it would on her. "Yeah," she admitted finally as she moved down to the next sink. "I don't know if I trust that jerk on the speaker enough to try it, though. I think I'll wait and see if it works for anyone else first. After all," Morgan couldn't resist adding as she landed another kick on the pipe, "you know how tricky those cursed rings can be."

[selfrescuer]

Morgan didn't seem to be up for answering her straight away. As expected, she was more interested in the opportunity to bash away at the pipe. Elaine took the delay in stride, though. While Morgan worked on the one pipe, the Governor started doing the same on the one in front of her (sans random exclamations). Elaine calculated angles quickly, aiming short but sharply directed kicks at what looked like the weakest points of connection between wall and metal. Her approach made for a slightly slower, but efficient (and less embarrassingly savage) process.

She was almost finished with her pipe by the time Morgan finally spoke up. Thank goodness the ring hadn't gone to LeChuck, she thought with a soft sigh of relief. And thankfully, Morgan's thoughts mirrored what she had predicted earlier; the hunter wasn't going to be running off anywhere alone with a purportedly powerful item just yet. Though, the point about waiting for some other hapless soul to be a guinea pig for the ring made Elaine frown a bit.

Her frown turned another notch down at the mention of cursed rings in particular. True, she had softened somewhat on Guybrush's blunder since the night before, but that didn't mean that direct reminders of it weren't going to frustrate her anymore. "Indeed. What a better world we would live in if more people would be so careful with potentially dangerous objects." With one last, uncharacteristically swift and hard kick, the pipe in front of Elaine came free, clattering loudly against the wall behind it and bouncing down onto the floor.

She fetched the pipe quickly, dropping it into her sack with a shake of her head. "I certainly don't think Landel would have handed something like that out unless there was some sort of catch. Either they don't work as advertised and their use leads to some horrible disaster for the user... or they work, and it just doesn't matter," she mused aloud as she forced herself to cool down, moving over to another sink as well. "One has to wonder how far away a patient would have to get in order to really make Landel sweat - if distance is even a factor."

[fangirlfatale]

Wait, what was that Guybrush had said about not making him look bad? Whoops. Well, Morgan reasoned, technically inadvertently reminding Elaine of something boneheaded he'd already done wasn't the same thing as mentioning something boneheaded he was going to do in the future. She stuck to her agreements, after all.

The second pipe took a little more work than the first, but it still came away easily enough. Morgan grabbed it and weighed the two pipes in her hand--a decent start, but not enough for a sword. Not the right kind of metal, either. She hoped that guy would be able to make them into a decent weapon. They'd probably have to find somewhere else to get more raw materials from, though.

She was way ahead of Elaine on the first points, but not on the last one. "If he could kidnap us--or steal our bodies or whatever--all the way from the Caribbean, and other people think they came from another planet or the future--" Morgan waved her arms in a gesture of spaciness to show what she thought about those fish stories, but secretly she wasn't quite as sure she disbelieved them as she made out, "--maybe it isn't." That had barely occurred to her before now: what if it really wasn't going to be as simple as getting armed and making a break for it? There was no reason whoever had brought them here couldn't just drag them back, unless they--by which Morgan meant she herself--showed them who was boss.

"Did Guybrush tell you about his theory?" she asked. "If this Landel guy really isn't connected to LeChuck, we think he might be this freaky doctor from Flotsam Island called the Marquis DeSinge. Or else someone working for him. Guybrush and I both had a run-in with him not long before we--died." God, that still felt so weird to say. "DeSinge is a prancing little panty-waisted pansy, but he's got a lot of silver and more than enough lampreys in his lighthouse to set up something crazy like this. Not to mention some kind of...unnatural finger-healing powers." Eww. Just thinking about that still grossed her out.