|
Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2009 23:16:47 GMT -5
"Perhaps, but there would be less people willing to help you should you one day need their aid." he said evenly. His mind began to process the names he'd heard. The man with purple hair was called Zander and there was someone here called Able who seemed to have the same moral standards as Taliesin. Perhaps he should ask after him.
|
|
|
Post by Elcie on Mar 1, 2009 8:19:07 GMT -5
Zander snorted, obviously not worried. "Come now," he said to Cain, smirking, "you should know by now I'm really not that rational." He didn't add that he tended to try and avoid Cain anyway as the man was one of the few patients as volatile as himself, or more so. It was dangerously easy to get into trouble while talking to Cain.
He turned to the newcomer, sizing him up. "Another new patient today, then?" he said. "Seems to be a popular day for new arrivals. Well, you've just missed breakfast, but that's not really anything to be depressed about... I'm called Zander. That one-" he jerked his head at the other man - "is Cain right now."
|
|
|
Post by ♥ Azzie on Mar 1, 2009 13:05:16 GMT -5
Hope hurried along the narrow corridor, wanting to catch up with Fallon. She had broken out of her daydream just in time to see Fallon rushing ahead. She looked hurt, and Hope realized with a sinking heart that Fallon had likely been trying to talk to her. Hope owed her an explanation, at the very least. She reached the door to the courtyard and swung it open. Zander stood there, talking to a man Hope didn't recognize. Cable, as she liked to call the unstable man, stood some distance from them, having a conversation with himself. Hope darted around them, hoping she wouldn't be spoken to. Aside from a nod from the unfamiliar man, she slipped by unnoticed. She saw Fallon with her back turned, sitting over their garden. She tapped her gently on the shoulder, and Fallon whirled around. "Hope!" Fallon squealed. "Look!" Fallon moved aside to reveal a small plant, covered in thorns and buds. A solitary red flower sat on it. The edges were shriveling slightly, it wasn't very big, but it was the most beautiful thing she had seen for as long as she could remember. She fought back tears. "Hope?" Fallon said, her voice sounding garbled. She had seen this before, she was sure of it. But where? And what /was/ it? Hope broke off into another daydream, her eyes staring blankly through the lovely red flower.
|
|
|
Post by Shadaras on Mar 1, 2009 13:18:36 GMT -5
((Whee, fun. Catching up to all that you guys have done takes too long, sometimes. Or rather, figuring out what I actually need to care about for my post does. *messed with the timeline* ..hopefully you get when everything happened, yes?))
Despite Ender’s opinion of Zander, he couldn’t help but smile a little at what he said. “They’re as bad as you,” Ender said, his voice making it difficult to tell if he was joking and whether or not Zander should take that as a complement. He stayed silent about the whole thing about fearing the nurses. He didn’t like them, but he didn’t hate them nearly as much as some of the people in the asylum did. It came of being considered one of the more sensible people. He half-smiled. Though it had taken them years to start ignoring him again after he’d tried to kill himself. No point in trying that, he’d discovered. Not with what was available to them, anyway. Even if it was true that he didn’t really deserve to live, there still wasn’t anyway way the staff here was letting him get near anything potentially dangerous to himself.
Excepting the other people, of course. Ender smiled sourly as the clatter inside the dining hall as the nurses cleaned everything up drove Zander off. Nobody liked being near the nurses, though. Except the strange ones. But then, Ender thought, slipping into the bathroom to clean the oatmeal off his hand and avoid the nurses, everyone here is strange. Not bothering to dry his hands off, Ender headed for the courtyard. There would be people there, of course. Some people actually spent their free time there. Ender passed through it as quickly as he could, heading for the abandoned rooms on the other side.
Zander was in the courtyard, as were Fallon and Canable. He wasn’t too surprised about that, and might’ve actually stopped in the courtyard had Canable not been there. And despite the fact that Canable was talking to Zander (usually a recipe for disaster), Ender didn’t care about stopping the nearly inevitable fight. It wasn’t worth it. He’d be more likely to get beaten up than anything else, after all. In the abandoned hallway, Ender smiled, looking around. Someone was down at the end of the hallway, probably Nour, but that didn’t matter. The abandoned hallway was almost empty, nearly silent. So unlike the rest of the asylum.
Ender had claimed a tiny room as his own. It was one of the few that he was completely sure nothing else connected to, which was the main reason he’d taken it as his own. Slipping into it, Ender closed the door behind him. Little light entered the room naturally, but he’d managed to beg a battery-powered lamp off of a nurse years ago. It still worked, probably because of how little Ender used it. Reaching for it, Ender flicked it on, filling the room with a harsh white light.
Most of the room was filled by a sturdy box Ender used as a desk. It was filled with paper, neatly organized into sections. The stack Ender lifted out now was a listing of all the asylum inhabitants he could remember. Picking up a pencil, Ender took a blank piece of paper and carefully wrote down everything he knew so far about the twins. He’d add to it as time went on, of course, but memory was not something to be trusted in the asylum. He’d learned that lesson quite well.
There wasn’t much to write about the twins yet. Ender sighed, putting the papers back in the box. Glancing at the rest of them, he shook his head. Random scraps of information, all that he’d heard about the strange rift that cropped up in the stranger inmate’s talk occasionally, information about the inmates themselves. Memories that he’d been told about. Everything he’d collected over the years he’d been here, and yet, not enough to figure out how to get out of the asylum or to figure out what happened to those patients that disappeared behind the electric locks.
Replacing the box’s lid, Ender turned the lamp off, sitting in the quiet darkness. He could hear anything that happened in the hallway. The door wasn’t very thick. But it was rare for someone to be loud in this hallway. Almost everyone counted it as a sacred space of sorts, and tried to keep the nurses from remembering that it existed. They didn’t come into the hallway. Ender frowned slightly. He knew that. It kept slipping from his memory, though. A lot of things about the nurses were like that, honestly. Only rarely could he actually tell them apart. Not that he tried, of course. Sighing, Ender relaxed into the darkness. He may as well get all the peace he could now, since the twins were likely to make any time spent with them loud and annoying.
|
|
|
Post by Amneiger on Mar 2, 2009 16:17:28 GMT -5
Simon wasn't quite sure how to answer Harry. He knew the factual answer, but how did you explain it to someone who considered that a valid question?
"No, he's not a lady. He was probably just...joking." Simon had some time ago concluded that Zander was insane; there was no other word for someone who acted that erratically. Simon knew that he was sane, because he didn't act like Zander or Cain and Abel and because he was able to notice that somebody had been replacing people...but maybe he shouldn't tell anybody about that last one yet. In any case, he should probably make sure the kids didn't get into any more trouble. It still didn't seem...right somehow just to let them get depressed here.
"Want to see the courtyard? It's sunny there."
|
|
|
Post by ♥ Rain on Mar 3, 2009 12:26:04 GMT -5
Nour could hear voices wafting down the hallway. She glanced over and sighed when she saw Ender step into the hallway. She was just about to retreat into her room, when he disappeared into another one of the hall's rooms. She relaxed on the doorframe, turning her head to stare up at the ceiling. It was time to go. People were migrating into the hallway and it could only be a bastion of quiet for so long. She pushed off of the doorframe with a wrench of her back and headed into the room, slowly closing the door, trying to be as quiet as possible.
She had learned to navigate the rooms well even in their minimal lighting. The rooms were abandoned, it seemed. Some of the lights still did work, but many were flickering and dim and ready to give up the ghost at the slightest change in atmosphere. Nour stepped carefully around the cardboard boxes that littered the first room. They were all empty--she had checked them--and they lay around, trying to remember their original purpose, but failing, settling for sitting there silently. Nour had always wondered. If boxes could talk--if the building itself could talk, what would it say?
As they wound on, the rooms became darker and darker. At last, Nour came to the final room in the maze. She had wandered around it often, leaving the door to the previous room open so as to let in some light. Originally, she had come to this room to be alone. She would sit around and think to herself in the darkness.
Eventually, the room became something more. In her musings, she had felt her way around the room. Gotten to know the place and make it personable. It was there that she found that there was a long crack in the floor. Or perhaps, no, not a crack, but a seam, because it was long and perfectly straight. She had felt around it and one day, to her surprise, it had moved. Oh, it had only budged a fraction, but she had felt it in the dimness, and had toyed around with it. And then it had moved some more and then some more until there was a hole even darker than the room had been and Nour had realized... there was a tunnel.
At first she had been afraid. It had taken her a while to not be afraid puttering about in these back rooms that few frequented. Spiders; ghosts; secret, insane prisoners. You couldn't tell what was around. But she had gotten used to them. And now with this black tunnel. What could she make of that? There had been nothing else to do but search it. If anything, she had reasoned, she would die and at least be free of the Asylum. When she had first let herself down into it, her feet had hit the bottom before her head had passed under the surface of the floor, so she was confident she would be able to get out.
Then Nour had explored the tunnel. Slowly, cautiously. That first day, she had gone back after a little bit and not returned until she had begged a flashlight off of one of the nurses. They understood her desperate need to read under the covers. Then she had come back and searched and gone deeper and deeper into the tunnel and eventually found what she now knew to be the basement.
The basement had become her refuge. After all, it was where Nour had stored her books. It was to the basement that Nour went now, gradually lifting the trap door up until she could push it back and carefully let herself in with a thump.
|
|
|
Post by ♥ Azzie on Mar 5, 2009 20:40:09 GMT -5
Hope couldn't tell what she was daydreaming about. She caught only hints of colours, the echoes of sounds, the suggestions of scents. No thoughts of the Asylum crossed her mind, which was perhaps why she felt so happy. The colours swirled in front of her eyes, and Hope felt like dancing. Suddenly, the colours faded and she was still staring at the rose, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Fallon." she said. "It's beautiful." The other girl was patting her back, quite used to Hope's daydreaming. "It'll grow. I know it," she said. Hope stood up. "I think I'm going to go for a walk by myself," she said. "Okay," Fallon said, confused. Hope went in the door, the door through which she'd seen Nour go through earlier. She knew Nour liked to hide in one of the empty rooms, and wouldn't attempt to stop her or talk to her. Hope was glad. She had a strange feeling left over from that daydream, and it had left her feeling inexplicably sad. She walked through the hallways quietly, hoping that none of the staff came through those particular hallways just then. She kicked off her ugly shoes and felt the cold linoleum tiling beneath her feet. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine something better. But try as she might, all she could imagine was the asylum. Suddenly, something collided with Hope, sending her falling backwards. She opened her eyes and realized that she had just run into somebody- a nurse, probably. The lady had managed to keep her footing, but her stack of papers had gone flying. "Hope," the nurse said. "It's you." "Just taking a walk," Hope said as she hurriedly gathered the papers that had fallen. The nurse smiled, but Hope could tell that she was angry. Hope handed the pile to her, then grabbed her shoes and sat down against the wall. But she couldn't escape into another daydream, no matter what she tried.
|
|
|
Post by Lizzie on Mar 5, 2009 20:46:01 GMT -5
Fallon watched Hope go. She slowly stroked a rose and watched a teardrop fall on it. "What? Why am I crying?"Fallon asked, confused. She jumped up and ran to the now deserted hallway. "Aiiek!" she screamed. There was a bug on the floor! Fallon hated bugs. She ran back to her room. She was safe from bugs there. Fallon dove under her bed and looked around. She saw: A piece of paper, a piece of metal, a pencil, and something that was orange. "What?"She asked, and pulled it all out from under her bed. Fallon started sketching the orange thing and the piece of metal. (Hey, Az? I would appreciate it if you told me before my charaacter speaks, but it doesnt matter...)
|
|
|
Post by Omni on Mar 5, 2009 23:01:24 GMT -5
The Artist suddenly found herself in the oatmeal-covered embrace of one of the children "I like you!" he told her, smiling.
A compliment. An honest, sincere complement, and not an insulting one. You didn't hear those often in the asylum. But there was something else about it that made it special. Was it the smile? The Artist wasn't sure.
She gave the child a smile in return. "I like you, too," she told him, gently stroking the back of his hair. Taking care not to let the other get jealous, she turned to him and added "And you, I like you, too." Turning back to the first, she told him "You may have the rest of my oatmeal, if you like."
Thankfully, she didn't have to answer an odd question asked by one of the children. She wasn't sure how to answer that one.
"Want to see the courtyard? It's sunny there."
That was a good idea. "Yes, let's."
First things first, Artist, she told herself. Ask them. "What are your names?"
|
|
|
Post by Elcie on Mar 6, 2009 6:27:12 GMT -5
((Candy is right - Azzie, it is generally Not Good Form to control someone else's character. Post only about your own character, please. Nurses don't count as they are NPCs, but you should still be careful with them as we discussed in PMs. ^^; ))
|
|
|
Post by ♥ Azzie on Mar 6, 2009 11:17:28 GMT -5
((*winces*Sorry for mussing things up yet again.))
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2009 17:46:56 GMT -5
((Cyb, I'm waiting for you to post before I can move on))
|
|
|
Post by Cyborg on Mar 6, 2009 18:37:42 GMT -5
"The only thing I would need help with, is not beating the crap out of any annoyances. I seem to handle that most of the time." Cain said glaring daggers at both Zander and the other person he didn't recognise from before today. " And this isn't your business, so stay out of it, if you know what's good for you."
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2009 19:22:03 GMT -5
Taliesin shrugged, watching the two men, curious more then alarmed. "Alright, well my name is Taliesin," he paused, wondering if what he was about to say would make him a target of sorts but then decided that they must already know, "I'm new here and I have no memory of not being here. I do hope we can at least be civil with each other."
He nodded at Zander who had welcomed him, if not warmly, then with no hostility. He glanced once more at Cain who was, to Taliesin, a puzzle, and headed for the only other door in the courtyard.
He found himself in a dark hallway with man doors. The hall appeared to have been empty for a long while as many spider webs had been weaved in the angle between door frames and lintels. He made a mental note to explore some of the rooms and then walked back to the dining hall.
He chose an empty table and sat by himself, watching two golden haired young boys greet a woman who responded warmly by stroking the first boy's hair. So not everyone here is hostile.
This thought comforted him slightly but his lack of memory was still the foremost matter in his mind. He could remember how to talk and walk and do other basic things. He pondered for a while longer, gazing at the nurses who were cleaning up the oatmeal. One thought occured to him that was rather frightening. What if I have no memory of my past life because I didn't have a past life?
He began to feel sick inside and pushed that thought as far down as he could. He had to have existed. He would not accept that this was the first day of his life. He stood up abruptly and waked quickly to the nearest door, not caring where it went but wanting, in some small way, to leave that thought behind.
|
|
|
Post by Elcie on Mar 7, 2009 21:01:14 GMT -5
((They are in the garden/courtyard at the moment and there is no door from there into the dining hall, you have to get to it through either the residential hall or the empty hall. See floorplan on the first page. *nitpicky* ^_^))
Zander smirked at Cain's comment. "Yes, everyone in the asylum is thankful for your self-control," he murmured quietly, half to himself, a faint edge of sarcasm to his voice. He listened, apathetically, as the newcomer Taliesin introduced himself. The man looked, and sounded, as if he had absolutely no idea what he was in for here, and Zander rather pitied him for that.
Zander moved idly toward the door to the empty hall, away from Cain. He'd had enough of the aggressive man's presence. Quietly he slipped through the door and shut it behind him, leaning briefly on the wall with a sigh. There was Fallon, but aside from her there didn't seem to be anyone present, and the odds were any room he chose was going to be empty. There was enough space in this hall that it was easy to be alone. Pensively he stared at the row of doors, trying to remember which were unlocked, which he'd already explored.
|
|