. 001 .

[interspace]

Characters: OPEN; special guest appearance by Misha Hunt.
Setting: Dorm 1-17/dorm level 01; floors 101, 001, 003, 004. Late into the night of 03/07 (or is that early into the night?).
Format: Start with prose or brackets and I'll follow your lead.
Summary: Going down? Nah... let's go up instead. (Superhero is not impressed with this shit.)
Warnings: Misha might ~know your canon~ if you give permission for it! Spooky, right?

Of all the things to wake up to (without even remembering falling asleep in the first place), this was not one of the possible devious plots on Misha's list. She would give it several points for originality and style of those letters, but the fact of the matter was that, overall, she was not amused. Getting into her groove after that bout of paralysis upon wakening was difficult, but finding ALFRED in the chest at her bed's foot along with discovering the strange collar she couldn't phase away from got her into a right paranoid, heroic fit.

It was after a keen look around the room that she stepped outside, fitting the earbuds in and clicking her visor into place over their fittings. The armband making up ALFRED's hardware could go over her stupid jumpsuit for now, and her jacket would do to cover some of it. Getting her makeup on to cover the large, multipronged scarring over her face could wait. What interested her almost immediately was the elevator at the end of the floor (never mind how many other captives the depraved idiot of a supervillain may have taken, judging by all the names by the doors).

"Can't be that easy... can it?" she muttered.

I don't mean to alarm you, Misha, ALFRED's slightly-tinny tones cut in, but my external communication systems have been completely severed. Why, it's as if they never existed. Rather, the components never did, although the subroutines for them still appear to be in tact.

Misha grunted to herself. "Okay, so this guy is more competent than I thought. But an elevator? A staircase? Psht. Easy-peasy."
—
All right, so maybe getting out was not nearly as simple as Misha had first believed it might be. She couldn't phase outside the walls, nor did she seem able to get very far down the stairs. She was just supremely lucky that her balance didn't give out, else she might have fallen over the stairs entirely into some sort of horrible, gravity-induced death.

Which would suck.

Sure, the room was beautiful, but inspecting it in closer detail could wait once she figured out how to get her powers online fully on it, rather than taking a dive onto the floor and hope for a way out. She was definitely not in the mood to go experimenting without her power at hand — which certainly meant anyone hoping to drag her down... would probably have an easy time of it, actually.

"Well, cross this floor off, ol' buddy, ol' pal. Let's see what's around the elevator."

You've got it, bud.

"Now you're just being sarcastic."
—
Much better. Getting to the base of this crazily-gigantic skyscraper was stupidly easy, since it looked like whoever installed their Supers-B-Gone forgot to add a conduit to the elevator shaft. As much as she hated to admit it, hunger pains were gnawing at her already. Did she dare eat whatever gruel they were offering here despite the risks? None of the lunch ladies seemed really interested in answering her questions, which meant she would either have to flag someone down or continue on.

After some internal debate, Misha threw her hands into the air. "It's only a hop, skip and a jump away, right?" Never mind the fact that she probably looked crazy for apparently talking to herself. It helped soothe her nerves.
—
The infirmary, while useful to know where it was located, was of no help to Misha right now. They didn't actually seem to have a lot of heavy medical tools, which meant trying to cut the collar off would be useless. Up the floor Misha went, and lo and behold, a font of wisdom had made its home on the third floor.

Her next hour or two was spent searching the bookshelves, forgoing ladders to reach the higher tomes and chairs were forgotten as she simply settled into the air above to skim her current interest's contents. It went faster that way; her nerves were beginning to fray and the longer she looked, the less she liked the cut of the tower's jibe. Something was wrong here.
—
It was in the observatory-like level where Misha made her last stop for the night, hands pressed against the large glass to try and peek into the infinity beyond the borders.

"This is stupid," she muttered. "This isn't like... anything. Why am I the only one here? We're way past cute now."

Comments

[myblueskies]

"Really bad ones, miss." Romeo told her, "There's lots and lots of them and some of them you can run away from and fight but then there are others with magic that you can't get away from!"

[interspace]

Misha made a split-second decision, relinquishing the spoon to motion the boy over with her to a table where they could sit and speak more comfortably. Monsters themselves sounded, well, monstrous, but the idea that there were some who could block off escape routes and have their way with whatever victims they found was just sick.

Whether he chose to sit down with her or not, Misha didn't mind. If he stuck around, at the least, she said, "That sounds pretty serious, kiddo. How do they do that?"

[myblueskies]

Romeo did go over and sit down, happy to help someone new. "In lots of ways miss, sometimes there's just lots of them. So they all attack you, or some of them make you not move, or there's hands that can come from the walls and grab you."

[interspace]

"What about everyone else?" She couldn't have possibly been the only one here with extraordinary abilities, not in a place filled with ghouls and goblins as the boy said. Then again, maybe she was overestimating the amount of people in the tower... Judging by the length of her journey down the elevator shaft to get down here, that would leave a ton of empty space. "The monsters can't be the only strong guys here. No dragonslayers? Wizards? Space marines?"

[myblueskies]

"There are lots of people and they got lots of powers or can fight really well." He told her, "There's some bad people with powers too but some of them are really good."

He rested his chin on his hands, "Some of the floors stop your magic though so you got to be careful if you got magic or powers."

[interspace]

"I noticed that," Misha grumbled, hiding the discontent by eating a spoonful of the oatmeal. It was just as gross as she had been expecting. To keep her mind off that, she asked, "You make friends with bad guys, or am I hearing you wrong?"

[myblueskies]

"Only the ones that are good really, or could be good. It's not nice to not be friends with people, especially if they are trying to change." He smiled at her softly.

[interspace]

She eyed him critically, cynicism warring with concern over the obviously-unattended child in front of her. "And you figure this all out by yourself?" she clarified. Far be it from her to decide that any sort of bad guy was irredeemable, but a child couldn't possibly have all the judgment necessary to make that sort of call.

[myblueskies]

Romeo nodded looking proud, "Well I didn't at first, miss. But really no one is born bad right? So even if people get badness in them they got to still have the goodness, right?. But then I got swapped. My soul," It made sense now with what they knew, "Got put in someone elses body and they were a bad person but they were trying so hard to be good, they just had done so many bad things that they could only do bad things." He sighed.

"So then I knew, and now they are good because they tried very hard. And then one of the really bad people, one of the ones that brought us here... he was actually good and trying to help us all and miss Ruana killed him because he wasn't bad anymore so he was really a hero and so I think that there really could be good things in everyone!"

[interspace]

Misha furrowed her brows at the explanation. Well, that certainly sounded like the crazy sort of thing that would happen in the life of someone in this tower (after she had constantly swapped bodies with her entire team for five days, this was really not actually that weird to hear about), but there was something to be said about a single sample not defining the entire subject pool.

(Wow, she really needed to get Hank out of her head at this rate.)

"There's two parts to that. You're kinda right, I agree, judging people by their covers can be totally—crappy," she quickly substituted. Her usual, fairly loose vocabulary just felt wrong around a little kid. "But then you also have to keep an eye out for the dudes who like being bad. Those sucks, 'cause it usually means they like making you think they want to be good to mess with you. Judgment calls are far more important than blanket decisions. Does that make sense?"

After a few more contemplative spoonfuls of oatmeal, she continued. "Ruana? She killed who why?"

[myblueskies]

She needn't have been worried, the kid was roommates with Gamzee, he heard his fair share of swearing. "Yes, the people that like being bad are... really horrible... miss Ruana is like that." He nodded.

"She killed mister Dax, he was a bad person who wasn't a bad person, he was trying to help us because he didn't like that we got experimented on and miss Ruana's games are cruel, and he helped some people find out that we are just souls that the bad people have stolen and so she killed him... because he wasn't bad and didn't work for her anymore." He sighed, "She's the boss."

[interspace]

Misha set the spoon back down, giving the boy even more of her attention now. Ruana was definitely on her wary list now, but there was so much more to what Romeo had just said that Misha couldn't let it rest there.

"Kid, I really need you to filter that through some extrapolation and run it by me again. It sounds really important, but half of that went right over my head." She lifted a brow, trying to look encouraging through the urge to just ask what the hell did that even mean. From the mouth of babes came endless frustration. "Can you do that?"

[myblueskies]

Romeo blinked at her, "I don't know what ex... extrapolation means miss."

[interspace]

Oh, of course. The biggest problem with kids wasn't that they were idiots (they usually weren't), but that their vocabulary was pretty limited. Having an adult conversation with a kid usually involved bigger mental hoops.

"Give more detail," she translated with a wave of her free hand. "It's like... pulling more out of it."

[myblueskies]

"Oh." Romeo nodded understanding. "Okay so miss Ruana is the boss of the bad people. She likes playing games and making people cry, like... she made us play hide and seak with teddy bears which killed us. And makes us summon ghosts and stuff. Mister Dax was also a bad person but he didn't make us do anything and when he was in charge we got nice food and it wasn't so scary. Mister Jason is another bad person and he likes experimenting on people, turning them into things and stuff. There's also Riki who builds stuff and Zo who is just a kid."

He took a breath, "Last month Dax helped some people go in the elevator, that's like a magic box that moves and they found something like a machine which took out peoples souls when they die because we can't die here we just wake up again and that's because they stole our souls from God and brought them here.

And then Ruana got really mad..." He swallowed because this was scary and sad and he didn't like thinking about it but the lady wanted more details that was what extrapolation meant. "She ate him, miss..."