Participants:
| Scene Title | Reasons to Fear |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Lynette Rowan discovers one when she makes an attempt to escape the Institute in the middle of… something else. |
| Date | July 28, 2010 |
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.
These measures of time help define our progress in the world. It tells us how old we are, how long we've been doing something, when we should be awake, when we should be asleep. It allows us to define our own existance and freely decide our own schedules. Time is one of the first things the Institute stole from Lynette Rowan when she became their captive. Windowless cells, no clocks, no calendars, nothing to tell how many days have passed, nothing to tell whether its day, night or if there's even a world outside any longer.
This disconnect, coupled with the exposure to psychotropic drugs and intense mental strain has left this captive of the Institute unhinged, damaged. They have taken a perfectly adjusted, perfectly capable young woman and broken her like a piece of cheap furniture.
Broken, but not destroyed.
Having little in the way of personal freedoms has left Lynette clinging to the one thing she can keep, her mind. Planning, stdying, plotting; these aspects typical of captivity have become her mental playground. Watching guard routines, measuring times of injection for the negation drugs, learning her captors and fraternizing with hospital staff. Her complience has become as much of a mas as her presumed sanity has.
Day or night doesn't matter, not right now. But tonight— today— whenever it is, she's going to escape to see the sky again and find out for herself.
Or die trying.
Within her cell, there are few creature comforts. A few books. A pillow that's actually fluffy. Or was. When she was sane, she might have actually read those books, but now their pages have become her system of notes. Each page marks a day, with a series of rips and missing pieces up the edges, symbolizing chunks of time. She's marked when the guards change shifts, when they come to take her for testing, when they come to keep her power negated, when that starts to wear off. How much of her power she can access at various times. Of course, to an observer, it just looks like a bunch of ripped up pages in a book. and who looks that close at one book in a stack?
No one, has been Lynette's hope.
She's sat through a lot. She sat while they took her dignity. While they poked and prodded. While they made her relive the past. While they created this addiction. Who knows what prompted her today, but it was the last straw. But she's been calm as ever. Compliant. Perfect little prisoner. So, when her drugs have started to wear off enough for access, she does start making a ruckus in her little room. Draw her guards this way.
It's been chaotic the last few days, she could hear a hellicopter's arrival and departure, arguments from hospital staff in the hall but no details of the raised voices, just their pitch and volume. There's been less guards, less hospital staff and different faces mixed in with familiar ones. Something is going on beneath the surface, but it's hard to tell exactly what.
Lynette doesn't have access to her full ability, it's sporadic, spotty. As the neuro-toxin wears off it comes and goes, sometimes little scraps of what the ability could be, other times nothing. But it's enough.
Footsteps outside of her door sound like the usual compliment of orderlies to deliver her medication. "Rowan," a familiar voice urges from outside the cell door, "calm down in there, you know we have to do this, don't make it any more difficult than it already is." There's keys jingling in the lock, and she knows there's always three. One man to come in and deliver the neurotoxin, one man to watch the door, and another outside to watch the hall.
Right now, in her state, she believes she can handle three. They always say crazy people seem to have more strength than the average person. Something about lack of inhibitors or some such? Whatever, she's not a psychiatrist. But she is pretty sure she's losing touch with her sanity and might be seeing that as a boon. Which probably means she right. At least about the insane part.
With her bed set up against the wall behind the door, Lynette lingers back there as well, halting her ruckus at their call. She's fine, see? But she does plan on cutting their third man off, using her bed to blockade the door once the first two are in. Then she'll see about tapping into her power. Hopefully.
The view-slot on the door opens, stares are afforded through the opening, "Rowan?" punctuated by a moment of silence before "Lynette?" is added. The slat slides shut and the door swings open. Baton first through the door, capped syringe in his other hand as he walks through the door, the orderly who's job it is to deliver her injection steps into the room with wide eyes and baton-hand tense. That the doors to these cells open into the room is a colossal blunder on the Institute's part. Though none of this was meant to be permanent, none of this was meant to be used as profusely as it is being used right now.
Better security was intended to be had, but never came.
The second man stays just outside the door, hand on his baton where it's stuck through his belt. A hand-taser hangs off of each of their belts beside where the batons are sheathed, typically last resorts.
Now or never. One is better than none trapped.
Now it is! Lynette traps the orderly in the room with her, and lunges right for him, one hand going to his throat, the other grabbing for his wrist with the syringe. And with adrenalin making her pulse pound in her own head, she tries to send a jolt through him, just like the electric chair. No demands or even warnings. Just action.
Just when she needs it the most, Lynette finds nothing. No surge, no jolt, and that moment of hesitation where she expected to electrocute the guard after slamming the bed down in front of the door comes with a price. She's thrown to the floor, back slamming ont he tile and breath knocked out of her lungs. The baton is raised, placed across her throat o try and keep her down, even as the orderly pulls off the syringe cap with his teeth. Lynette's struggling knocks the needle from his hand, sends it skittering across the floor.
Scrambling to kick the bed out of the way, the other two orderlies are coming into the room, batons and tasers out, shouting. An alarm has already sounded inside the facility, a blaring klaxon noisily throbbing in the background. But when Lynette feels the guard on top of her press his taser to her ribs—
—she isn't electrocuted.
Electricity crackles through her body, the taser's battery drains, and crackling volts of blue lightning snap and pop over her body and crackle in her hair.
Now she's ready.
Well, fuck. It's an understated thought, but it's all she's got when she hits the floor. She needs a moment to get her breath back, but she doesn't really get it, with this guy trying to strangle her. When he gets that cap off, that's when she really freaks out, shoving and kicking and fighting to the last moment.
And hey, it doesn't actually come, the last moment. She looks down at that taser, then back up at the guards, a cruelly amused smile coming to her face. She doesn't waist time, she just grabs the guard on top of her by the face and starts pumping that electricity into him through her hand.
Whatever happened to that sweet woman they used to be guarding?
The smell of cooked flesh , singed hair and screams fills Lynette's senses as the guard atop her is flooded with electricity coursing thorugh his body. He kicks off of her, body twitching and spasming, smoke issuing out of his nostrils and slacked jaws. The second orderly in the room is struck by a stray arc of electricity coming off of Lynette, sends him flying backwards against the open door to Lynette's room with a crack and a snap, dropping him to the floor, legs and arms twitching.
The guard outside is making a very pointed attempt to get inside hte room and close the door. His shoes squeak over the tile, breath hitches in his throat and fingers curl around the handle of the metal door as he screams out to the hall. "She's unsuppressed! She's unsuppressed!"
Getting up from the floor, Lynette stalks over toward that door, letting her electricity fire off freely like she hasn't done she she was a kid trying to learn control. It does make her look a little crazy, as her hair frizzes up with that electricity and those arcs burn holes through her clothes. The guard outside will know when she gets there, as that metal gets to become her personal conductor. A foot shoves the bed out of the way, and she lets the door opens this time, ready to send those arcs into whoever is nearby on the other side, if anyone.
The guard at the door is fried by the electricity send through him, thrown back by the blast with a smoking burn mark on the center of his chest. He lands on the opposite-end of the white-painted hall, unmoving save for spastic twitches of a fried nervous system. When Lynette makes it out into the hall, she can hear the klaxons more clearly, hear other prisoners shouting in their locked rooms. There's no one else at the moment, no one else in the hall, just rows and rows of doors with card-reader locks and no windows to the outside.
Some of the ceiling lights are flickering from the power surge Lynette generated in her attack through the door, one fluorescent bulb has blown entirely. It won't be long before the security team gets here, or— it shouldn't be long. She has to decide; take the time to free more people, or try to find her way out.
There is a pause at those shouts. Hmm. She steps over to the guard in the hall, doing a quick search over him for a card she might be able to use for those readers. She does her best to keep the electricity out of her hands, but it's something of a challenge at the moment. She can't even seem to stop herself sucking at the electricity those lights produce. It's going to be a lot darker in here.
One plastic identification card with a magnetic strip that— is— probably not very useful after he was electrocuted. That's the one downside of Lynette's ability, because when the entire hall goes dark, when the lights of the mag-locks on the doors go dark, even a working card wouldn't be of help. The lights flicker occasionally, in the windowless halls, brown and half-illuminated little guttering candles of things, thanks to her constant and — thanks to her state of high adrenaline — difficult to control power.
Lynette herself produces some light, in the form of sputtering arcs of electricity. These intermittant blue flickers show up when the lights dim, reciprocal in their very nature. The alarms are going off, prisoners are banging on the doors of their cells— where is the security?
Well… she'll have to come back for them. With an army, maybe. Lynette gets to her feet, and picks the direction that's away from the labs they're always taking her to. Wherever the security is, she's just glad they're not here. Finding her ability impossible to turn off just now, Lynette just focuses on pushing it into her hands, keeping that charge ready just in case they do decide to show up. Or in case she finds a window.
Lynette's bare feet slap noisily against the tile floor as she turns and runs from the direction that she's always been brought. The opposite hallway has little in the realm of features to help her navigate in the near dark. Rows and rows of locked doors that crackle and pop from their metal handles when she tries them. A placard on one wall lists numbered rooms and which direction they're in. Behind Lynette, the direction she's coming from, indicates the neurology lab, and up ahead surgery.
The halls and corridors all look the same though, dark when she approaches them, lights dimming and flickering, the noise of the ward where some of the prisoners were kept even quieter now that she's put some distance on them. There should be more doctors in the halls, should be Stillwater Securities coming from somewhere to try and contain whatever's going on. Maybe her unintentional brown-out is slowing them down.
To her right, Lynette spies a stairwell access, listing her as being on B2, which implies a certain depth below the ground. Ahead there's further corridors and a pair of double doors that likely leads into the surgery wing.
Heading for that stairwell, Lynette tries to open it to start bolting up the stairs. She just needs floor one, is all! It is strange, no one being around, but she doesn't stop to investigate. She knows one thing, she does not want to end up in surgery. Anywhere but there.
Slamming into the door, Lynette pushes into the stairwell, finding herself on the bottom level of the hospital. Stairs wind up into flickering illumination, and as she starts rushing up the concrete steps, there's a sound that she can hear from up above. It sounds like screaming, or shouting. Maybe the security teams are already preparing to come after her. The truth is somewhat more unsettling, though Lynette won't realize it until she's rounded her way to the landing to B1.
Lynette can't hear the alarm being broadcast on this floor. For some reason the security alarms to the hospital seem to have been changed, or cut off on the first basement floor. Whatever it is, it means that no one on the level she'd come from was able to alert anyone else in the hospital as to what's happening. In fact, as she gets to that landing Lynette realizes that she's no longer sparking and sputtering with electricity, yet the lights— are still flickering in and out.
Just as she begins to have a dawning realization that she isn't the cause of the blackout, the door to floor B1 swings open, followed by a panicked scream as a white-jacketed doctor comes scrambling out of the darkened basement floor. One hand clutches his stomach where all of his clothing and the front of his coat are soaked through a dark shade of red. Blood drools from between his fingers, spattering down to the floor and running out of the corner of his mouth.
"No! No! No!" is panicked hissing breaths as the Doctor's footing slips in his own spilling blood and he falls to his knees, shoulder collising with the metal railing, laying halfway across the floor, only partially blocking Lynette from continuing up the stairwell. "Help me," the doctor wetly breathes out, his eyes wide, "please."
At the sight of the doctor, Lynette steps back a bit, eyeing him with suspicion. "Which way?" She asks, not approaching just yet. "Which way out?" Funny how there's very little sympathy in that voice. But, she does come closer, crouching down next to him. "I can't help if I can't get you out." As to what's going on around here, she doesn't ask just yet.
His answer doesn't come, just rattling breath and glassy eyes, a blood-soaked hand grasping at Lynette's forearm. Jaw trembling, he gurgles once in manner that might have been an attempt to speak, but nothing comes. It's only then that Lynette sees that it looks like a portion of his abdomen has been torn away, flesh and fat missing, his hand around his stomach had been keeping his insides from becoming his outsides.
It's on that horrible revelation that she sees movement in her periphery, a silhouette coming into view of the doorway. Hunched forward, light from the flickering stairwell reflecting off of round spectacles, a white labcoat soaked across the sleeves with dark blood, mouth smeared the same.
A light in the hallway to B1 flickers behind him, and Doctor Gregor's silhouette lurches forward, tracking a drizzling trail of syrupy red behind him across the floor.
"Sorry," Lynette whispers to the man as her fingers come to peel his bloody fingers off her arm. But there's no time to linger as that movement comes into her vision, and she flicks her gaze that way, eyes wide as she takes a moment to stare at that sight. Straight out of a horror movie.
When it starts to move, Lynette jumps to her feet and starts to run up those stairs, hunting for an open door she can duck into and possibly hide behind forever ohgod.
Blood is warm ont he bares soles of Lynette's feet when she runs from the dead doctor's side. She can hear the rustle of fabric from Gregor's jacket as he breaks into a sprint as well after her, his hard-soled dress shoes clacking against the concrete. Heart pounding in her chest, Lynette's legs ache as she races up the stairs towards flickering lights higher above. Sparks of electricity return, crackling between her fingers and sparking off her legs and feet on each slamming footfall.
Behind her, she can hear Gregor's wheezing breaths getting faster and closer until there's a grunt of effort and the doctor leaps up the stairs. Lynette can feel arms wrap around her shoulders as Gregor's weight falls onto her and sends her crashing down to the stairs. One knee slams on the corner of concrete, sending shooting pain up her leg and skinning her knee.
A spindly-fingered, bare hand grabs at the back of Lynette's hair, one arm wraps around her waist, trying to lift her up off the steps. She doesn't even realize that something is very wrong with what is happening, only that she can feel Gregor breathing against the back of her neck as he whispers, "Who let you out my little— //conductor?" in wheezing, halting cadence.
When she's grabbed, there's a scream birthed from fear, loud and sharp as Lynette struggles to try to get free. There may be a few tears rolling down her cheeks. So close. But instead of answering him, she just tries to send her electricity out of her whole body, hoping to get an opening to run again.
Tries and succeeds, at least partially.
The initial burst of electricity elicits a howling scream from Gregor that throws him off of her body, sending him slamming up against the stairwell wall and then slouching down the steps. As Lynette gets up to her hands and knees and starts running, however, Gregor is already moving again, smoke issuing from contact points on his body where she'd burned him.
A hand wraps around her ankle, yanks and pulls Lynette's weight out from beneath her. This time when she falls, her hands don't come up in time to break it, and her jaw cracks against the corner of one concrete step, splitting skin open and sending a shock of pain through the side of her face. Blood runs down the side of her throat as she feels fingers curl around her ankle and drag Lynette back. Flailing and struggling without an electrical charge to back it up has the blonde wind up on her back as she's being pulled towards Gregor by the ankle.
It's only then, in the flickering light, that she can see what she didn't feel was so wrong before. One hand on her ankle, two hands reaching out to grab her by the collar of her shirt, and one hand with a syringe.
Four hands.
Two purplish, mottled arms looking like they belong on a corpse extend at crooked angles from Gregor's midsection, one of them holding her ankle tightly, the other bringing a syringe forward. "You— should have stayed in your cell," Gregor breathes out wetly, blue eyes wide behind the cracked lenses of his glasses.
Lynette hits the stairs with a cry of pain, and she can only try to find some sort of hold to try and stop herself from getting yanked toward that syringe. To her credit, she's intelligent enough to know begging isn't going to get her anywhere, instead she tries to use her free foot to kick away that hand with the needles, horror and… well, revulsion, driving her to keep trying to get away.
Missing the syringe hand. square into Gregor's face is that kick's destination. Lynette's heel crunches his glasses and knocks them from his nose. There's a muffled noise of pain as his hand slacks around her ankle, letting her slams a foot into his knee with another kick as she tries to scramble up the stairs. Gregor is quick to move, loping like some sort of animal in the dark as he bounds up the stairs, wraps fingers around Lynette's throat and — even as electricity begins to crackle down his arm, manages to keep hold of her, another arm grabbing one leg at the calf, painfully. Another arm curls into her sleeve and—
— sharp pain lances at Lynette's abdomen where a syringe presses into her flesh. Gregor lets out a hissing noise as he leans forward, sharply depressing the plunger of whatever it is he's just dosed Lynette with. There's a growling, wheezing tone to his voice as he reminds her, "You are still my- patient," in his sickly voice.
The syringe had to have been a sedative, because Lynette's eyelids are already getting heavy. It's like being in a nightmare, the kind where you can't keep your eyes open, can feel your feet on the ground, despite being chased. The withdrawls from Refrain have given Lynette enough nightmares, but this— this— could be fuel for years of therapy.
Provided she lives that long.
Ineffectual as it is, Lynette struggles and flails until that sharp pain from the syringe. She looks up at him, those tears falling from the corners of her eyes as she tries to keep her body from trembling from the fear. Jesus.
"I'm not…" Oh damnit, sedatives. Shaking her head, she tries to refocus on him. "You're a monster…" It's all she manages to get out before those drugs take her out. It's too bad, really…
Lynette is afraid of monsters.