#onopen

Right cross over center, left cross over center...

If anyone were to guess what each of the remaining kids were doing after the emotional barrage that was the trial, most would say something like “staying in their room, crying” or “trying to keep some form of order” or something normal. 

But given as Mayumi Sawada was not, in fact, normal in the slightest, they were not sitting in their room crying or walking around making sure everyone was okay. What they were doing was sitting in the arcade, braiding their hair with almost instinctual movements, focusing surprisingly well on the task. Though it didn’t look that way since their facial expression was as blank as ever. How they managed to tune out the arcade’s many noises was anyone’s guess.

Piano music?

[♬♬♬]

It wafts out of the music room, a sad minor key, gentle at first but quickly becoming angry, with force behind the notes; it isn’t hard to imagine the player’s fingers tensed as they strike each key like they’re stabbing the piano.

Following the notes to their source reveals Apollo Brandt hunched over the piano, jaw clenched, paper-like skin dead pale, practically assaulting the instrument. He rocks back and forth ever so slightly, swaying with the rhythm of the music. His eyes are closed, and no sheet music in sight, and he doesn’t seem to realise that he now has an audience. Or maybe he doesn’t care.

He punches the last notes into the piano and the notes fade slowly, reverberating around the room. You can hear him breathing; it’s a quiet wheeze. He’s having trouble drawing air, just a little.

He doesn’t look up. “Can I help you?” he asks, and there’s something - pain - in his voice. He doesn’t bother to hide it, not now, not after so much. He takes care not to show vulnerability. He can’t be vulnerable. The world is out to get him, and a moment of weakness is the last moment of all. But hiding his pain, his anger, his fear altogether? A waste of energy.

Riley didn’t like arcades. She hadn’t stepped foot in the place until she’d been given a reason to.

There were only a few things within the facility that could offhandedly be described as “out of order,” as her clue had read – toilets, vending machines, and arcade games. Toilets were connected to individual bedrooms and would have been a terrible choice to hide something that was meant to be found. She couldn’t recall ever seeing a vending machine during her time here, so the only choice left had been the arcade.

The brief satisfaction of being the first to solve a riddle had been quickly washed away by the fact that the key and accompanying note had been completely and utterly useless. She could barely even manage to be annoyed at Leroy for the waste of time, at this point; it had been something to break the monotony, after all. If anything, it had ended too quickly – once again, they were all left with nothing to do. She was bored. As bored as she could be with the history and ongoing threat of death hanging over the facility and the new feathers that kept showing up every day as a reminder that neither she nor anyone else here was truly human. Whoopee.

So despite the dissonant cacophony of sound and the obnoxious carpeting that she found personally offensive, she returned to the arcade shortly after it became apparent that she had nothing more to gain from the riddle hunt, picked a machine at random, and was fully engrossed in a game of Galaga by the time someone else entered the room.

She still looked up from the game to watch them approach, because regardless of whether she was planning to lose herself in mindless video games until she was tired enough to sleep and think about things tomorrow, she did not intend to let her guard down – and she frowned as the machine beeped out a sound effect indicating that the distraction had sent her spaceship right into one of the alien bug bullet… things.

The chemicals are stuck in his brain, nagging at him. He’d been dumped with a whole lot of information and honestly he wasn’t sure how much he could make of it on his own. Memorization had never been his strong suit and big ole complicated words entered his head and then left it in no time at all. Instant death? Replaceable limbs? Some of this sounded downright medieval and real graphic. Sure, he was punched in the head more times than he could count but reading it and dealing with it were two different things. Especially since he didn’t feel it anyway.

He’d opted to hang out in one of the environmental rooms as it seemed as good a place as any to think things through. There’s a part of him that wants to talk it over with someone, maybe it’ll help make sense of things. But his feelings, while not quite the blazing anger they were, have barely cooled. The lava of his emotions may have solidified but that bitter taste in his mouth prevented him from forgiving some of them anytime soon.

Some of them.

Despite what he’d expected, he wasn’t alone here. Friends was a frightening word but... maybe he considered using it for real.

Rather than fishing for deep thoughts, Matthias was content to sit on the rocks, glancing vaguely up at that bird’s nest. For what purposes were these rooms made? Maybe it was to give them a taste of whatever their home was. As he recalled there were only ten of them, though... maybe they shared. Ahh, whatever. Screw it all! He could focus on other stuff but right now his mind was fizzling with too much data. With a rough hand, he ruffles the side of his hair before noticing the door open. He gazes upon the intruder with a dose of suspicion.

Truthfully he hadn’t expected the company. He wasn’t opposed in principle, but... well, one had to be careful, for a variety of reasons.

Well, Apollo had certainly learned a lot, but most of that was stuff he didn’t care about. The biological relatives of some of the other folks around here were dead, and presumably being tested by the facility. But what did he care? His biological monster family didn’t mean anything to him. His family, the only family that mattered, was a smoking, broken wreck. 

But it did imply that, whatever was going on here, the twenty or so people who’d been taken and forced to kill each other were part of something much larger. And that was interesting. Had they been running the same experiment, or different ones? Why? Lots of questions, but no answers, and no real way to answer them.

He figured he should share his findings with the others, but he was feeling pretty pissed off by being forced to traipse all over this stupid place for the sake of a dumbass riddle. He’d leave the doors open, they could go read the files themselves, if they cared. He just felt like burying himself in a book and ignoring everything for a while. Maybe with a nice cup of tea.

Not that he’d get the chance. Someone else was here, in the hallway leading toward the canteen. He held his tongue; hopefully they’d just pass him by.

“[Jesus fucking christ?]”

Puzzles were not their specialty at all; honestly what kind of Professor Layton riddle shit was this, anyway? They’d been sorely tempted to just ignore Leroy and keep on keeping on but then he’d threatened death or something stupid, so off they’d gone. Their riddle was...weird and confusing and honestly they’d hadn’t any idea of how to solve it or even any drive to do so. Running into Calico and finding out that they’d only had half of the riddle to go by should have helped...but it didn’t. Room after room after room...as much as kicking doors in was kind of fun, it got real boring after the seventh door or so. 

And once they’d actually gotten the right room, they’d gotten a key to another room and then in that room was a whole lot of shit fucking nothing. If there was any silver lining to this whole thing, it was that they’d gotten to kick the cabinets. And Calico had been nice enough to help them up onto the cabinets...even though they’d both fallen off about a minute later anyway. Which, in hindsight, was expected but no less humorous.

Now, in the aftermath of all that, they were sitting outside Room 3, since laying down was too much of a hassle. Because sitting deadass in the middle of a hallway was obviously better than laying down in the middle of it. Leroy was honestly an ass. What was the point of all this exercise and fun riddle time anyway? Was he just bored? A thought came to them that maybe he’d lost at Fantasy Football and was just being oddly petty. A dry laugh escaped them. God, wouldn’t that be something.

A movement at the corner of their eye cut their laughter short and they turned to who-or what, who knows what was going on in Monsterlandia anymore-it was and just stared at them with a bored look on their face.