[IC] Eldrich Asylum [FauxBot & AllOurPrettySongs]

[AllOurPrettySongs]

Yolanda gripped his other arm, forcing his attention towards her. "Look at me. Look at me, Daniel," She said firmly, shaking him slightly. "You need to calm down. We both need to relax. Otherwise one of those dumbass orderlies will come in and throw us in a padded cell." She lead him over to the bed and sat him down before taking a seat beside him. "You need to take a moment to think. When was the first time you saw them?"

[DELTED293y5gds]

Daniel sat down, breathing in, then out. In, then out. He was a little overwhelmed by everything. The creatures, the fact that she could see them, the shifting you need to calm down! No you need to calm down! feeling that kept shifting back and fourth throughout their conversations. But, he was calming down, focusing on a point in the past. A very particular time. Back. Back. Back. The day he first started seeing them. "It was about six months ago." he said, focusing hard on it, still calming himself down a bit. "Um... I was, uh... I was working in a grocery store. A corner store. In New York. I was living there because I didnt want to live with my family and I wanted to live by myself. So... I was stocking the shelves, okay? And I had to climb up on this ladder to stock the top of one of the shelves. I was really reaching for it. I was on the top step, on my tiptoes. And then, like, just as I'm about to put whatever the hell it was up on the shelf, these fucking kids come running around the corner and they smash into the ladder. And it wobbles, and it falls, and I fall. Right on my head." Daniel took that as a cue to lift up his hair on the side of his head, revealing a vicious looking scar near his temple. "And I was rushed to the hospital, right? And I was passed the fuck out, and I was getting stitched up, and... and I remember, waking up, during the operation--or, the stitching or whatever. And I looked up and I just... there was one of them. Just standing across the room. Watching me. And I passed out again. But I remember it so vividly happening." He took a moment, pausing, shaking his head a bit. "And so... yeah. Since then, I've been seeing them. I tried to get people to listen for three months, nobody would, and when my warnings became too much of a burden, they sent me here. And I've been seeing them here for the past three months, too." He shrugged a bit, his story finished. The same questions he always had still lingered in the air. Where did they come from? What were they? What did they want? He asked himself constantly, and he was never any closer to finding the answers he needed.

[AllOurPrettySongs]

Yolanda hadn't looked at Daniel for the duration of his story, only looking at him when he had revealed his scar. Her mind felt a little confused, a little disoriented, a little tired. It all combined to slowly eat away at her already thinning sanity. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be in an asylum, discussing what shouldn't be there. Then again, what else was there to do? She bit at her thumbnail, staring down at the floor. There was a faded stain on the linoleum and she wondered how it got there. The blonde glanced up at Daniel for a moment before returning her eyes to the floor. "When I was little, my parents would tell me this story," Yolanda murmured, her thumb falling away from her mouth and into her lap. "Death had grown tired over history. He was exhausted, growing more and more weary as the years wore on and the human population continued to grow." As she spoke, she moved her shoe against the stain, as if trying to erase it. "So, he hired help. Souls, those who didn't mind stealing away human life. He distributed them throughout the world. But he made a mistake. The souls, they were almost at the level of demons. They didn't want to help the dead to the other side as he had for so long, rather steal the souls for themselves." Yolanda turned to look at Daniel then, suddenly looking tired and continuing in a resigned tone. "He had already taught them how to harvest souls. He could never truly stop them. So, now they roam around, taking souls for themselves rather than showing them the light." The woman smiled thinly and it looked wrong, as if the corners of her mouth had been simply pulled up by invisible strings. "Isn't it funny what parents tell their kids?"

[DELTED293y5gds]

"Yeah." Daniel replied, standing up. "Really fuckin' funny." He ran a hand through his hair, calming himself down, slowly sinking back into the apathetic, tired looking man that he was, constantly. He stood with his back to her for a few moments, and then did an about face, looking directly at her. The side of her head, where she had been hit by the orderlies baton, was bleeding, dripping down the side of her skull slowly, starting just above her temple. He pointed at her. "Okay, first things first... you're bleeding everywhere. Might wanna mop that up or something." He walked across the hall, into his room, where he grabbed a rag out from underneath his bedding. He walked back, tossing it to her. She caught it with ease. He leaned against the bars of the doorway. He was thinking, processing what he wanted to say before he came out and said it. "Alright... so we can both... see these monsters. These... yeah, whatever the fuck they are. This has to mean something, right. There has to be a reason it's us, that it's the two of us, in this place, right now, that can see these things, right?"

[AllOurPrettySongs]

Yolanda held the rag to her head, pulling it back briefly to look at how heavily she was bleeding. Her own blood had always sort of fascinated her; she knew it only came about when there was an injury, and knew that pain should be there, too. Sometimes, ludicrously, she wished to experience pain, just once. Placing the rag back to her head, she contemplated Daniel's question. "I don't know if there's a reason, but you can see the connection, can't you?" She used her other hand to gesture to her head. "We both got hit on the head and we could suddenly see them. I don't know what that means, but it can't be just a coincidence."

[DELTED293y5gds]

Daniel felt at the scar on the side of his head, sighing loudly. He walked over to the corner of the room, sitting back against it, pulling his knees up to his chest. He leaned forwards as he spoke, resting his chin on his knee. "Well, yeah, obviously. But, we are definitely not the first people to just, like, take a hard hit. People have been hurt way worse before. People have been shot it the face and lived, yknow. Why are we so fuckin' special?"

[AllOurPrettySongs]

"Maybe because we're not crazy." Yolanda mused, taking the rag away from her head and looking down at it, seeing it was now brightly decorated with red. It was quite a pretty colour. She stood and walked over to Daniel, first discarding the rag onto the bed before crossing her arms. "How we can see them isn't the point. The point is, we have to find a way to get rid of them. Because I don't know about you, but I don't want them floating around here, just waiting to strike."

[DELTED293y5gds]

Daniel looked up at her as she spoke, relaxing back against the wall. For a moment, he thought of the fact that the two of them had been alone for almost thirty minutes, and were not interrupted by any orderlies. Probably because they didnt give a fuck about them. He didnt know if that was good or bad, but he didnt really think too much about it. "Well, yeah, of course." He said, nodding his head. "But... they're...fucking, like, supernatural creatures. What the hell can we do about it?" He saw a flash of one of them in his mind. He cringed. "I dont know if there really is anything we can do."

[AllOurPrettySongs]

"No, there's always something," Yolanda muttered, more to herself than Daniel. "It has to be something about the asylum itself." She had been pacing and suddenly whirled to him, her hand flat against her forehead and the other on her hip. She soon quirked a finger of the hand against her forehead at him. "Can you get us into the lower parts of this place? There's got to be a basement or something." Yolanda had no idea what she was talking about, honestly. She was working simply on a hunch and a fair amount of primal instinct. Wasn't it ingrained in humans to run away from danger? That's what she was feeling and that's what she was ignoring.

[DELTED293y5gds]

Daniel shrugged. Was that really something he could do? He didnt really have pull with any of the orderlies. He didnt have pull with any of the other patients either. What he did have was the fact that he could slip by unnoticed. He never said or did anything, so he was never harassed by the guards. That could work. "I... maybe could get access to a set of keys? Possibly. Why the hell do you wanna go down there, anyway?" he said, looking up to Yolanda.

[AllOurPrettySongs]

Yolanda walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting fashion. "Just, trust me, okay? We have to cover all bases in this place." A tendril of fear snaked it's way through her, unwelcome and, up until this point, quite unknown to her. She wasn't stupid; she knew that there was a big possibility that they'd get caught and punished. Her own wellbeing, she didn't particularly care about that - she could take the physical injuries. But Daniel, he was just a regular guy, with regular pain resistance and an obvious fear of the lurking creatures. Yolanda didn't want to be responsible for that, didn't want to be the one responsible for breaking him.

[DELTED293y5gds]

Daniel recoiled ever so slightly at her touch, but that was mostly due to the fact that he hadn't really had any physical human contact in roughly six months that was anything less than a shove. After the initial shock, he found the sensation strangely soothing. HE relaxed a bit after a few moments, listening to what Yolanda was saying. She had a point. Honestly, by this time, anything was possible. He felt uneasy about it, sure, but maybe its what they needed to do. "You're right." he said, cracking his knuckles now. "I'll see what I can do."