CHAPTER ONE: Cecilia: Checking In

[Kadael]

Cecilia yanks her fingers back from the door, hissing in pain. So that's the smell in this place.

How did it happen? She remembers going up the stairs to get here...

Cautious, she touches a small part of the coat's hem to the door.

[Laraqua]

The coat soaks up a little of it but doesn't instantly fray.

Cecilia knows far too little about Chemistry to identify it but she can tell one thing. It's not eating through the coat so it's not a strong acid but whatever it is it's active enough to sting. Maybe some kind of industrial strength cleaner or something similar? Whatever it is, getting covered in it most certainly wouldn't be a good idea. Her fingertips are still stinging.

The nurse reaches back against the wall and starts feeling her way along toward one of the hospital rooms. "...so lonely ... need their friends ... I'll get ... I'll get ... need their friends...."

Hide,Gave you a +15% for that tidbit as it's fairly easy knowledge.

[Kadael]

Cecilia tries following the nurse, curious to know if there's a method to her madness. She has trouble staying quiet, as her footsteps squeak a bit on the floor.

[Laraqua]

The nurse stumbles into Room 201 and staggers from place to place, bumping into the beds, upsetting equipment, tripping over an old suitcase that lays in the middle of the room. She whimpers with each step, searching around with her hands, fingers splayed, moving too quick to be safe considering her blindness, and yelping each time she trips and almost falls. There's something on the back of her neck, half-hidden beneath the folds of her red uniform.

[Kadael]

Cecilia leans closer and brings the flashlight's beam up, trying to see what's on the nurse's neck.

[Laraqua]

There's something weird, fleshy growth that lays limply against her spine.

It doesn't seem to be moving.

"Help me ... the children lost their ... need to find their ... give it back and they'll give me ... must be the right ones ... if it's wrong ... if it's wrong ..."

The fleshy growth twitches and she straightens and stares silently at the bed.

It twitches again.

"...heeeeeelp meeeeee..."

[Kadael]

What... is that? Some kind of tumor? She'd really rather not think about it, but it's hard to look away -

itjustmoved

Cecilia clears her throat, looking at the floor, the bed, anywhere but at her neck. "The children lost their... friends? Their stuffed animals, or..."

The children are mannequins.

"You mean the, uh, children in Intensive Care?" She scuffs at the floor with a foot.

[Laraqua]

"...help meeeeee..."

The nurse turned toward the grimy window glass and lurches forward, slamming her forehead down against the glass.

"...heeeeeelp meeeee..."

*thwack*

The thing on the back of her neck twitches, as do her finger tips, and she slowly, painfully, shuffles around, her expression twisting into one of purest hatred.

[Kadael]

Okay, bad idea. Don't help crazy people...

Cecilia puts her free hand up and takes a step back. "Don't hurt me! I'm trying to help - I just don't understand what you want!"

[Laraqua]

The madwoman swipes at the air in front of her, as though seeking Cecilia out.

[Kadael]

Cecilia makes a run for the door, slamming it behind her if she manages to get out. All of this is time wasted and she needs to be decisive, damn it. Shoot the nurse, don't shoot the nurse, talk to the nurse, don't talk to the nurse, pity the nurse, don't pity the nurse - she really ought to stop hanging around with the locals...

[Laraqua]

The door slams reassuringly behind her but the silence is broken as the nurse throws herself agains the door, battering on it and wailing from the other side.

There's something terrifyingly familiar about that desperation...

Something vaguely...

No, she has to find a way out. She has to find Katie.

The kitten mewls in her pocket as though in agreement.

[Kadael]

Cecilia enters Room 202 and grabs a sheet from the bed, then returns to the door to the stairs.

If she can't open the door without protection, that's fine. She has it now - hopefully, if she folds the sheet enough, she should be able to get the door open before the chemical soaks through.

[Laraqua]

The door knob shakes but doesn't fully turn.

Not only is the door caked with some harmful substance ... it also seems to be jammed.

[Kadael]

"Does everything here just break for the hell of it?" Cecilia snaps, though there's no one to listen.

She drops the sheet on the floor and heads to the women's restroom. Paper towel dispensers, toilet tank lids, metal trash bins... there are heavy things aplenty in a restroom, and she'll take one and beat that damn door until it breaks.

[Laraqua]

One of the women's restroom doors is Engaged. The second from the doorway in the exact same position as the toilets on the Observation Deck. The others are open but the plastic sanitary disposers aren't tough enough, the wire paper bin isn't study enough, and the paper towel dispensers are held firmly against the wall. However, it's easy enough to get inside and start struggling with the toilet tank lids until she manages to wrench one of those free. Heading back toward the stairwell, she beats against the wooden door with the lid until her arms ache.

[Kadael]

Cecilia drops the lid on the floor with a dull CLUNK, then falls to her knees.

The door won't open. The elevators aren't safe. She's trapped here with a deranged, homicidal nurse and some mannequins.

She just sits there, staring at her hands as though she's searching for some key.

[Laraqua]

Possibilities flicker through her mind. It's almost as though this place were sentient, watching her every move, confounding her, and driving her toward some unknown end. The pole was there, allowing her to traverse the space, and while it was possible that a person had knocked it over, it wasn't all that likely. It looked like it'd been knocked down by some nonexistent gale that hadn't affected anything else, or hit by a car that couldn't possibly have reached it at the right angle, rather than knocked down with an axe. Then there were all the strange hints, the daughter replaced by a mannequin in her clothes, the pits in the road that had left her with no choice but to shelter in Annie's Bar where she met Jack.

But what was going on here? Why? A place couldn't be sentient. If it were, why wouldn't it just tell her what it wanted her to do, perhaps ransom her daughter back to her. It was almost like it was toying with her, watching her the way a child watches an ant farm, and collapsing tunnels to send her on the right path.

But then, it was also almost like a drug-induced hallucination that was surprisingly coherent at the same time. After all, there's a focus on the daughter she's looking for - like her own mind was inventing little clues for herself to find. Little tricks here and there as she explores a psychotropic nightmare that lays out breadcrumbs and whips her when she doesn't follow them -- or when she does, though why her mind would invent Jack or the so-called history with Ash is anyone's guess.

Maybe she's gone mad and this is just a puzzle she's designed to keep herself distracted from the padded cell and the absence of her daughter -- who is doubtless in her father's hands, by now.

Maybe she's looking at it wrong. Trying to treat an irrational world with her usual rationality. That approach hasn't worked so far and its unlikely to start. Maybe she has to treat it with the sort of irrational sense that treats 'light' as a sign of human habitation (though there are rational reasons for that, people light where they are because they can't see in darkness so maybe that doesn't fit) or which throws up a moat around the one place she needed to get inside and then tosses her a weak and terrifying drawbridge. Something that hides a kitten in a locker with a message not to eat it and to give it to Katie.

Because one thing's for sure. She can't sit here and wait. This place can hurt her. It can cause her pain. And if she assumes it's fake and she's wrong, then it'll kill her and Katie as sure as anything else. But maybe whatever makes this place tick is also setting up circumstances for Katie. Maybe she's locked away somewhere, unhurt, but scared, and waiting for her mother. If only she can use irrational reason to find her way to the center of the rat maze.

[Kadael]

Cecilia pulls herself upright. She shuts her eyes, sweeps her hair behind her ears, and takes a second to breathe.

This town wants to play by its own rules. All right. She just needs to figure them out.

Leaving the tank lid behind, she goes back to the women's restroom and knocks on the occupied stall.

"Hello," she says, her voice strangely tight. "Have you seen a little girl?"

This feels wrong.

[Laraqua]

The toilet echoes her words, a strange sensation in such a cluttered room, but there is otherwise no response.

Until she glances down and sees that the toilet door's lock has switched from Engaged to Vacant.