Night 52: West Wing, South Hall 2-B

[dual_worlds]

((From here.))This corridor was empty as well, which was not surprising when one took into account the lack of activity in the previous area. They passed a door to their left, one that lacked a clear label on the maps Spock had seen. While there were several possibilities of what it entailed, Spock knew he would need to make some inquiries from

Comments

[slipperymagic]

"I'm afraid this is as far as you go, gentlemen," Howl corrected with the sigh of someone who was in the middle of his work day and was addressing the next task. Casually insincere exhaustion was evident in his posture. Meanwhile, the lack of shadows in the hallway didn't seem to have impeded Howl's ability to step out of them in any significant way. He didn't exactly appear out of nothingness, but skipped some space just to get close enough to hold a conversation (and no closer). The residual travel left a breeze in his hair, and he calmly brushed the escaped strands back in with the rest. They stayed there perfectly without a single objection. Even under the weak light that had been provided, Howl shone as though it were high noon, although he was unable to see that it highlighted the emptiness in his eyes.

The trio consisted of three men, two of which were only in their mid to late twenties. The third was a good deal older, a dignified sort, Howl supposed. He had overheard some of their chatter, although without context it was impossible to say anything too specific about them. They were intelligent, articulate, and cooperative amongst themselves. Howl could have compared the mood to any number of professional gatherings. The one with the light hair was more casual than the others, but it was apparent to Howl that beneath the clipped sentences he was keeping up with his associates. The one that looked ready to roll over and die without Howl even lifting a finger was rather stilted, and spoke in a light monotone. Still, Howl was not willing to write any of off as harmless or helpless or hapless. The Witch was more fond of deception than Howl personally cared for.

In the end, all Howl could say was that they were intelligent and an odd combination. Why did he even attempt to read people? It ended in frustration, inaccuracies, and disappointment. Not that it mattered. He had no reason to tolerate these strangers socially. The sooner he sent them back the other way, the better off he was.

He raised his hand in what he felt was a moderately threatening gesture if one in the group was familiar with magic. It was the precursor to a quick punishment if any thought to test him. "Off with all of you. Hurry now," he warned, but not too kindly.

[quarter_english]

Before L had the chance to say anything about Taylor's evidence-or, more to the point, to begin to deconstruct the details of how Taylor had processed any evidence he had collected, and what conclusions he might have come to-the radio crackled, and Marc began to speak. L paused and stood attentive, his head tilted to the side. The palm of his hand rested against the wall for support, but he didn't lean on it.

He isn't saying much, is he? L thought, and his frown deepened as he listened. We have little proof of Jill's ability apart from her word and his, and some inconsistent rumors. Also, nobody here needs to be told to be careful.

Something else stood out, though: Like Landel, Marc is using a computer, one which enables him to track "readings" about the Institute itself. The apparatus involved in taking independent readings would be complicated and cumbersome, so it's more likely that Marc has found a way to patch into the system itself, probably the same system Landel uses to control everything. Logically, I could do the same thing-if I can find the means and the opportunity.

However, it also implies that, with this broadcast, Marc has tipped his hand about this ability.... Landel is aware, then, that Marc has bypassed his security? He is... complicit?

It wouldn't be the first indication that he isn't surprised by the extent of their abilities. Maybe he incorporates it in his plans.

The broadcast ended. Still looking displeased, he began to move towards their destination again. He opened his mouth, intending to voice his thoughts about Landel to Lunge and Taylor, but before he could speak, Howell materialized in front of them, and L stopped in his tracks.

Materialized? No, he must have been in the next corridor, past the door... yet it was as if his initial appearance had been much closer than that, and he hadn't advanced on them at all. Could I have missed his approach? I didn't feel dizzy.... No. I should have noticed.

His insistence that we turn back... is this...?
In this hallway? Not the Sun Room or the balconies above it?
-Would he have any other motivation?

Howell had demonstrated some genuine magical ability, and had claimed that he should ordinarily possess more. How much that would be, L couldn't say; it was foolish to give credence to claims of any kind of supernatural power without observing tangible proof of its existence. If Howell's access to his abilities had been restored as part of Special Counseling, and if he had instructions to put those powers into play against anyone who tried to pass him, he could be very dangerous indeed-which meant that antagonizing him would just be stupid. L murmured to Lunge, in a rueful tone, "It's possible that we're about to have a repetition of Sunday night."

For the moment, he decided not to reach for the gun that was strapped to his back. Howell probably wasn't acting on his own behalf; therefore, he couldn't be held responsible for his behavior. There was no point in delivering a serious wound to an ally who would be himself again in the morning. Also, if Howell felt as if any of them posed a danger to his life, his reaction might be unpredictable: L himself might not be able to take much of what he might throw at them. That, and the near-impossibility of replacing the Walther if it was lost or destroyed, made it the wrong weapon for this encounter.

L kept his hands loose at his sides, his expression neutral, trying to appear relaxed. He didn't step forward. He lacked the energy to muster much insincere friendliness, much cheerful enthusiasm for being accosted in a corridor by someone who was trying to dictate his movements. However, he could still test Howell to see if his suspicion about Special Counseling was correct, then decide what to do based on Howell's reaction.

"Howell. We'll just be needing to get by-but if you'd like to join us in the lab, we could use your help." L kept his tone light, but his look, under his dark hair and the halo of bandages, was appraising.

[toxicspiderman]

"Tell you later," he shot back at Lunge.  When they'd hit the lab and he was watching Mr. Hacker From The Future dick around with the PC in the lab.  S.T. would be worse than useless.  Twenty years or so back, a guy named Moore had made a prediction that sounded like pipe dream.  That for ten years, the number of transistors you could acid-etch into a chunk of silicon would double annually.  Transistors -- well, the math was complicated, but calling it a doubling in everything a computer could do was close enough.  The manufacturing guys practically pissed themselves in excitement, as it had been tough to sell people a new typewriter every year when all they needed was a new ribbon.  Now they could convince people to treat computers like annual planners with fancier guts -- by the time you'd worked out a system, the damn thing was obsolete.

After twice as long as postulated, the only thing he'd fucked up was the duration.  Moore's Law was still tracking so steady S.T. suspected collusion, but even if the curve eventually went flaccid, a desktop here could run a cut and paste word processor for every man, woman, child, and zombie in a five mile radius and not blow a capacitor.  Sangamon's knowledge belonged in a museum, as far as these computers were concerned.

Then the radio did its sympathetic resonance thing and produced sound of thin (and more importantly highly compressible) air out of a little radiation.   Or electromagnetic waves, when talking to people who heard "radiation" and started building bomb shelters out of canned processed meat food.  Never mind that they'd all die of scurvy before they ran out of SPAM.

Marc tried to one-up the Head Bastard in a contest of stating the obvious, threw in some cryptic bullshit for good measured, and switched off without even a sign-off.  The static alone could have told them there were electrical disturbances.  Even if they hadn't been able to see the lights.  Or maybe he meant the beam-me-down-Scotty trick some suit had just pulled.  L recognized him, which meant brainwashed patient rather than thrilling radio spy drama.  The guy looked absolutely confident, which S.T. was willing to take at face value.

"There's other PCs in the building, unless you two had your hearts set on inconclusive amateur forensics."  He stepped back a little, giving Howell an extra buffer of personal space to avoid backsplash in case Lunge lived up to his name or Howell got bored.

STILL LATE, but reposted now

[herr_inspektor]

The sound of a voice caught Lunge's attention immediately and his head jerked towards the speaker, thoughts of forensic science or those "electrical surges" immediately lost in the face of more immediate danger- quite literally the face, given that, in what he could have sworn was an empty space a second before, a young man had suddenly materialised. As for his identity- tall, lean, blond-haired, elegant features- even if the hair colour was different today and those eyes were even less human up close, the description matched to the Howell that the man had picked out for him in their first week. In very elegant clothing, no less, which indicated (had his warning not been enough) that they were looking at yet another brainwashed patient.

He held in a sigh and gave L a sideways glance. "Not a total repetition, I hope." Not that he'd come to any harm in the Sun Room, of course, but the last thing they needed now was to split the group- even with seven people it had been deeply inconvenient. And looking been the three of them, there didn't seem to be a single 'fighter' among them, unless Taylor had a better arm than he looked and had filled his toolbox with bricks.

It was only natural then, he supposed, that L would be the one to try and talk them out of this one, though what good that would do Lunge couldn't possibly say; Landel wouldn't have allowed his brainwashed guards to be simply 'talked' down by an acquaintance of one week, and he was sure L realised that. He could see it on his face. Which meant... a distraction? Any other purpose would be illogical, but it seemed a crude plan for L to devise, never mind that he hadn't seemed the self-sacrificing sort at all. Nonetheless, he was willing- just barely willing- to place his trust in the man. They'd catch his drift sooner or later.

This time he turned his head a fraction towards Taylor, now standing level with him, voice still lowered. "Not so much that I'd stake a fight on it." The whole time he kept his eyes on Howell, who, he was reminded, had some sort of 'magical' power. He'd leave the talking to L, yes, but that wasn't the body language of a bluff and he wasn't going to lower his guard for a single moment.

FINALLY. PLEASE FORGIVE ME.

[slipperymagic]

Howl was startled that the man had known his name. It was the second time that night where he had been forced to consider when he had so liberally given out his name to strangers. More than that, the slight difference in pronunciation hadn't escaped him. The frail one hadn't called him Horrible Howl, scourge of the countryside who preyed upon young women, but Howell. Howell of a world devoid of magic, and therefore the name of a man similarly lacking in importance. He surely would have recognized this man, no matter how much he had sought to distance himself from Wales.

"Wouldn't that be convenient for you? But no, I must decline," he responded with politeness that was cold and empty. It was certainly not born of any desire to protect this stranger's feelings. He could feel the irrational anger towards this man building in him, and it easily extended to the others as well. Of course, he knew it was not truly anger. It was a less useful emotion that he was intentionally misinterpreting. Lashing out was so much more productive than cowering.

"It doesn't seem as though any of you intend to listen to me without a practical application," he lamented, as though they were the ones standing in his way, rather than the other way around. Even as he spoke, the air around him rippled with his restraint. It was so much easier to simply accept destructiveness, but he wouldn't have them go and die on him. "Please remember that you could have avoided all of this," he added, a bit cheekily as he recovered from his earlier fright. It was then that the contents of the hallway before him were abruptly ripped backwards. Men, broken lights, and debris stripped from the walls and ceiling, giving Howl five or so yards of extra space. He quickly filled the newly born no man's land with a creature that was mostly composed of scales, sharp teeth and an implied ability to sunder men with ease.

[quarter_english]

The first time L had met up with Howell for the night, Howell had demonstrated his magical abilities by changing his own haircolor from brown to blond. Tonight, it was as if that transformation had gone a few steps further. His hair gleamed, and his eyes were bright, with a weird, glassy quality. It was hard for L to decide how much he should attribute to his own condition-were his perceptions off? He had the distinct impression that he had been seeing things out of the corner of his eye since leaving his room. The omnipresent threat of vertigo didn't help.

When the corridor expanded in length, he felt unsteady enough, or unsure of how steady he might or might not be, that he experienced a slight delay in processing what had happened. Being pushed about five meters backwards without the use of any pressure felt like being on a train, or maybe a boat: the sensation that the stability of the ground beneath their feet was illusory combined with the sensation of being in two places at once.

He reached out a hand to steady himself with the wall, again, and that was when he saw his shadow-even as a distressed female voice echoed out from the intercom, advising caution.

His shadow had moved with them, almost as if it was trying to keep up with them. That was normal; the remarkable part was its formlessness and the nature of its movement. The shadow was unusually soft at the edges, and it didn't seem to be as related to the source of light as it should be: the broken lights had stopped wavering, but the shadow hadn't. The darkness in it seemed to be pressing at its edges and leaking out.

He glanced at Lunge, but a shard of his attention was caught by Lunge's shadow, which was as weird as L's own. Another flicker of a glance showed L that Taylor's shadow was normal, stable, sharp, and located precisely where it should be.

It was obviously that the sudden appearance of empty space in the hall was Howell's work; so was the nasty-looking thing that now filled that space, watching and waiting. L always appreciated a practical demonstration, particularly if he could observe it unscathed and at a distance. This would have been too close and personal even on the best of days, and it took his attention away from the question of the shadows.

His suspicion of Special Counseling, at least, had been confirmed. That being the case, sticking around to see what Howell could do was pointless: Howell wouldn't be able to repeat the performance in any useful way some other night, when he was once again free to choose his own allegiances.

In the meantime, the creature in front of them looked as it if would be more than happy to treat them as snacks or playthings. Special Counseling... it's possible for us to be injured, but the primary goal is to impede our progress, not to wound or kill us-isn't it? His experience with the affected patients had indicated as much. Jones's friend had displayed genuine concern over injuries he had caused, and the woman in the Sun Room Sunday night had been more playful than menacing. Therefore, it was likely that all the claws and teeth were for show. Likely-but not certain.

L's natural curiosity, along with his unwillingness to back down from a clear challenge, made him want to stay and taunt Howell, but his pragmatism wouldn't allow it; he concluded, with reluctance, that a test was a bad idea. Either the creature can't hurt us, or it will hurt us. Why provoke an attack when information would probably be available for the asking the next day? Even on a good day, it would be a stupid, self-indulgent decision: if they could avoid an intensive confrontation, they should. With his existing wounds, his weakness and his awareness of his own fragility, a gratuitous fight could be catastrophic for him, and he needed to save what energy he had for whatever it was that Landel planned to throw at them.

All of his surprise and discomfort showed on his face, in his frown and his wide eyes and the slight tremble in his hands. "Unfortunately similar," he murmured to Lunge. Addressing everyone in the hall, he added, "A change of plans, then."

Behind him, his shadow shifted and swirled.

[toxicspiderman]

There was a crazy man making threats in the hallway, torture porn on the airwaves, and the structural integrity of the building was suspect. Just another average night at Landel's Institute. There'd been masculine posturing all around. None of them had wanted to be the one to back down, even if three brains and no brawn made a lopsided attack squad. Then the glowing Ken doll had lost his sense of humor. The world bucked like a Zode taking a fifteen-foot swell -- hang on and wherever you ended up was fine, as long as it was upright. It was stranger on dry land. Usually it took a six-pack plus a decent share of a Hefty bag before his feet cut this loose from his neurons.

The other two guys were a little green around the gills, if their shadows were any indication. S.T. stared Howell down as Jill's gasps faded. Then something that ate two-headed fish for breakfast in the toxic mutation department teleported in. Fuck no. Sounded like Ryuzaki had (finally) turned up the same conclusion.

"Dodge, getting the hell out of?" Someone had to blink. He turned around, giving Howell a clear shot if he wanted to take S.T.'s fucking head off, which he probably could do to his face, and walked out.

[to here]

[herr_inspektor]

Lunge had barely recovered from the shift in space- don't think about how, you have other things to worry about, logistics are irrelevant- when several things happened at once. First of all the intercom switched on, and it was the woman's voice that caught his attention in full. Jill, sounding more broken and desperate than he'd ever heard from her, all gasps and moans and strangled words. But the content, that was what he needed, and it was as vague as ever. Other questions were already drumming away in his skull. How did she get to the microphone? Did he leave her unattended? Why would he do that, if, as thought, the controls are all in his office? What is he doing at this very moment?

But the man in front of them- this Howell- wasn't about to leave him room to think. When Lunge next looked up, there was a large, scaled, creature filling out the space. 'Unfortunately familiar' was right. Last time he'd found himself wondering how much of the woman in the Sun Room's power had been illusory between the butterfly and the lightshow, only to be given exactly the answer he didn't want to hear.

His hand kept on typing, even if his eyes remained fixed on the scaled thing in part-horror, part-fascination. He had never in his life been a stranger to risk, but now there was really only one option.

"It looks like it," he agreed, so L's face and Taylor's back as the latter beat a hasty retreat. He backed out of the hallway, only turning his back when he was sure he was out of reach.

[to here]

[quarter_english]

[Skipping Howl with permission.]

As Taylor and Lunge left, L gave Howell another narrow, calculating look. Howell's large new friend filled most of the space between them. It struck him, then, that Howell didn't appear to recognize him at all. He frowned, then exhaled on a soft "Hmph," his shoulders drooping more than usual.

Turning his back on Howell and his beast, even to leave, seemed like a bad idea, but staying was worse; L wanted to distance himself from this place, and he couldn't afford to let the others get too far ahead of him. Still supporting himself with a hand against the wall, he made a slow pivot. Then, he walked towards the open end of the corridor, glancing ahead and behind, on the lookout for danger. He let his hand fall from the wall to his pocket, the one that held the five bullets in their clip. The fact that he wouldn't be able to draw the gun quickly enough to protect himself, and that an attempt to do so might make things worse, made the exercise less reassuring than it might have been.

[To here.]