Oktoberfest '08 Entry, "the dreams that pass unseen" by Sue

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Title: the dreams that pass unseen
Author: Sue
Beta (if applicable): Jen for bits and pieces
Word Count: 2061
Rating: PG (gore)
Character(s): Mikami, Nny, Edgeworth, GLaDOS
Pairing(s) (if applicable): none
Summary: nobody really  dreams at Landel's. officially. if they did, they still wouldn't get outside the institute.
Notes (if applicable):  4 interludes

There are rules to this place — they all know this. One of the rules is that they seldom, if ever, dream. There are voices and lost time, sudden disorientation and relocation that the staff never acknowledges. But there is no wandering, outside of the nightshift interludes of blood and terror. There are no dreams.

 

morgue

 

The voice at the speaker, that half-second click before the end of the announcement, and his hand drifts down to rest on the reassuring steel sterility of the lip of the industrial sink-

 

Cold, gone from resting contained and safe beneath his fingers to spread across the entirety of his naked back, down his thighs and calves to the hard bones of his heels. The gravity had flipped out from under him like a roller-coaster twisting and he swallowed against the way his stomach lurched into a chest that felt thin and hollow. He reached to feel the edges of whatever he was lying on, and his fingers dipped into a deep, wide gutter before finding the sloping edge of the table.

            Something rattled to his right, flimsy metal and plastic; he looked quickly but found nothing in the darkness. Thin, warm fluid trickled onto his cheek, steaming the smell of iron and salt and a musty underpinning he couldn’t quite place, and in a sudden glow of dull red light he saw outstretched fingertips dripping above his face. (Feather), the owner of the hand said, though the words were not sound so much as neat typewritten letters in his mind, ordered and crisp. He was curiously unafraid, despite the pitch-blackness of the room and the biting cold he felt no need to shiver against; the authority in that word was enough.

            The light flickered, and when it returned the hand was pulling back a black, ragged pinion the size of a peacock’s plume. Then the shadows shifted – he looked to his left, to the source of the light, and found a pair of lurid, wide-open eyes. A thin line began to stretch beneath it, like a terrible flower unfolding, revealing a crescent of sharp, uneven teeth.

            (Very nice), it said, words foreign chicken-scratch he shouldn’t have been able to read but did, and a long sharp claw traced up along his rib before dipping without resistance straight inward.

 

            For a few seconds Mikami cannot not hear the morning announcements over the keening, throaty giggling still ringing in his ears.

 

chapel

 

            There should be more here – he kicks the base of a table sullenly as the announcements begin to play, suddenly resentful of the room. All this well-arranged space to work in and nobody to work on and nothing to work with. It’s enough to-

 

            Well, that was new. Announcements, then another dark room. He found his flashlight on the bench-like seat next to him without thinking about it too much – some things in dreams just made sense – and turned it on. The half of the beam that did not hit polished wood glanced over it, illuminating the wall to one side of an altar. He scanned the chapel, then sat back with a sigh that would have been heavy if his ribcage hadn’t rivaled some soda bottles in diameter.

            “A Christian symbolism dream?” He squinted suspiciously at the windows of the chapel, waiting for them to do something more on-par with the pictures that usually came out of his head. Like, say, shattering under the weight of a small mob of baby gila monsters, all wearing little top-hats and waving meat cleavers. That at least would have been interesting.

            No such luck. He shut his eyes tightly, pressing a thin hand against the ridge of his brow. “Tell me you’re joking.” No answer, of course. God-is-dead dream. A lie and a boring one at that. He wrapped his fingers around the back of the pew in front of him, and had just begun to heave himself up when an odd, wet, plopping sound became noticeable behind him. He turned his light toward the noise and frowned at . . . some sort of fountain. Was it still called a fountain if whatever it was recirculating was goopy-looking and bright red?

            He hadn’t ambled halfway up before the smell of fruit-flavored chemicals and corn syrup hit his brain like a well-aimed, diabetes-inducing icepick. Brainfreezy. Sweet, glorious brainfreezy. He covered the rest of the distance quickly, and had snatched up one of the ever-so-convenient straws on the ever-so-convenient table beside it when a low, solemn voice spoke.

            “Yes, my child . . .”

            He might have actually exclaimed ‘gasp!’ rather than simply gasping, swinging his light up to illuminate the a face in the open doorway. “Father of LIES! You-“ His voice clicked off, like a vacuum unplugged while running, and he blinked at the half-familiar features. This was someone he was pretty sure he’d killed. Probably wouldn’t have recognized him without the exposed lungs hanging from the neatly-disembodied head, all suspended about six feet from the ground.

            “Yeah, sorry,” Mr. Head-and-Lungs replied without contrition, and the beam seemed to waver of its own accord to the spotless mitre stapled over his blood-matted hair. “We’re short-staffed today.”

            He cocked his head, putting a hand to his chin and squinting one eye. At length, he asked, “. . . is the hat a new thing?”

 

            Bed, spotless white and immaculate. Cheerful voice on the loudspeaker. Nny sits up gradually, and within a few seconds his consciousness registers the lack of the smell of cherry-flavored delight the way other peoples’ consciousnesses recognize their own mortality.

            The expletive, some say in the days afterward, is heard as far away as the Sun Room.

 

 

library

 

            He’s just stepping into the chapel, flashlight beam bouncing off of the polished rows of the pews, when the voice begins to echo and bounce from the walls. He freezes. He glares at the place where he knows a speaker should be, and-

 

            The library. He tensed immediately – this wasn’t the end; he knew that, at least. It was never the end until there was bright light and white linens and the cheery, beneficent voice ringing in his ear. But now there was only darkness, and he stumbled forward until something solid came into being under his fingertips. Solid, even, bumpy row of curving shapes – the spines of books. He patted at his pocket, and was rewarded by the heavy lump of a flashlight. He fumbled it free, clicked it on, aimed it in front of him.

            He knew that he was in the library. He could tell that much. But the titles emblazoned on the spines might as well have been cuneiform. He ran a curious finger over embossed fabric and faux-leather spines – nothing. He had the vague feeling that he should have been familiar with the meanings of the sequences of lines, but he wasn’t. Together, they meant nothing more than a semi-orderly collection of shapes.

            Books, though – the shape of them was familiar. He pulled one free and opened it. Through the Looking-Glass. He only knew that by the picture he opened to by chance. The lines inside meant nothing. Nothing. This would not have been frightening, but he could still classify the pattern of the ink. It was Roman letters. He should have at least been able to recognize some pattern in them.

            He put the book back with a quick push and clunk, moving to another one. A book that must have been poetry, another that held illustrations of men in high-crested helmets and armor. The text still meant nothing. It was in halfway through paging through that book that he realized that the shapes of the faces, the clothing, also seemed irrelevant.

            (Greek,) a quiet voice reminded him, tone subdued and even. He turned to find the source, only to realize that it was within his own head. (That’s Odysseus and Athena.)

            Odysseus. Athena. The names sounded in his ear as vaguely familiar concepts, like a lesson half-read but once, and he nodded slowly. He turned to another chapter. By the time he had turned to another picture, the shapes emblazoned upon it bore no familiarity, apart from their humanity.

            (Poseidon,) it urged, stronger than before, even as he flipped frantically to another page, trying to find something familiar.

            “Please relax,” a voice suddenly announced over the intercom.

            “. . .what?” he turned toward it, despite the fact that the intercoms never responded. His voice halted out the word, lurching and unfamiliar, and it took much more effort than it should have to speak more. “What are you doing?”

            “You are in the process of being replaced. Please relax . This will be painful if you do not relax.”

            Replaced?

            He grasped a new book, though it was an effort to remember the concept of ‘book’. He pulled at the spine – it did not open. He parted the pages eventually, by process of elimination.

            “We repeat – the staff at Landel’s would appreciate it if you would remain still during this process.”

            I will not let you – do whatever you’re doing, he meant to say, but the protest came out as a dull, slurring noise, devoid of syllables. He clapped his hand to his mouth, staring in horror in the direction of the noise.

            “Now, if you would please-“

            Something surged in from the root of his brain, like being pistol-whipped, and he knew with an inevitable kind of dread that the protest that was already bubbling in his throat wasn’t his—

 

            The voice on the intercom doesn’t matter. Edgeworth curls against his mattress, fingers wound hard into his hair, eyes pressed tight and breaths carefully measured. The low, distracting muttering of the voice is probably meant to be soothing, but it doesn’t help.

 

Kitchen

 

            There should be something of merit in here, but there isn’t. She’s disassembled several of the things to be sure, just in case people were being literal, but now she’s certain that there’s nothing useful in books. The Head Doctor starts saying something and she looks up from tearing out the pages of Alice in Wonderland-

 

She studied the sink in front of her, a clear deviation from the second-to-last item in the now-expected pattern of [announcement – dark – announcement – night – announcement – bedroom – announcement]. Statistical outlier, possibly. She looked around the Institute kitchen. Food on the counter. Another statistical outlier, but possibly one of some advantage. Rectangular, of a low columnar shape, covered in a waxy yellow solid. Sweet-smelling, decorated with a small rosette. She picked the piece of seemingly-food up and opened it. Inside soft and porous, pale cream-colored, overwhelming smell of simple carbohydrate and lipid. It met the criteria that warranted further testing.

Null hypothesis: sample is cake.

Null hypothesis confirmed.

(HUGE SUCCESS.)

She smiled broadly, looking down the counter and finding another piece. It bore all of the superficial similarities, but she opened this one as well, though she did not inspect it for very long before eating this one as well. The emerging data line pointed to each of the samples arranged in a neat trail leading toward the door also being cake. She made her way along the row, and the data followed her projected estimates precisely. It was a beautiful thing.

Or it was beautiful, until she found a quadruped parked in the doorway. This was not consistent with the data. It was wooly, and possibly mammalian, and staring at her with flat dark eyes. Cake was none of these things.

Another possible outlier. She looked beyond it, and found the cafeteria tables polka-dotted with little cakes, a thousand little sugar-iced diodes in the half-light from the kitchen.

She kicked at the animal. Her heel clanged off of its flank, and it looked at her even as it wobbled on stiff legs. She kicked again, and it tipped over with a forelorn, mechanical bleat. Neatly stamped onto the shining, wool-free underbelly were the letters “MECHANICAL SHEEP: PROPERTY OF LANDEL’S INSTITUTE.”

“Well!” said Martin Landel brightly as he clapped his hands together, standing off to the side of the door in a spot where she was certain that there had been nothing before. “That’s one old question answered, eh?”

 

His voice continues on the loudspeaker, seamless. GLaDOS looks at the ceiling, smiles to herself, and for each of his vital organs imagines its color, weight, and his remaining lifespan devoid of it.

[11/1/08 edit: I was a dumb jerk and forgot to put in the right subject line initially. Fixed now, though. Sorry mods! ]