Onward, Into Darkness

[cyan_maid]

[Around dinnertime, when everyone has gone to their rooms and had their time to think about the day, a note is slipped underneath your door. It reads:

I've made soup for everyone tonight.
It would be a kindness if you were to come to the cafeteria and partake.
- Jane

And, true to the letter, when you enter the cafeteria, you're hit with the distinct smell of pumpkin. There's a large covered pot on one of the tables filled to the brim with a sweet pumpkin soup full of carrots and sweet potatoes, a ladle beside the pot, and a stack of bowls and spoons. There's even enough cutlery for Bolton and Jamie to come, if they want to show up - Jane is, if anything, an excellent host. Please help yourself! There's plenty more! is on a folded bit of paper beside the pot, but where is Jane?

Well, the kitchen door is propped open, and she's very diligently working on scraping out the remains of a huge, tasty pumpkin and setting the seeds aside. She sniffs every once in a while, and her face is a blotchy mess, but she's still going. Having something to do seems to keep her from diving too deeply into despair.

Just...don't let her, or yourselves, be distracted forever.]

Comments

[stitch_in_time]

[The Doctor shows up with a few more pies from the diner, because why not.]

[He's also brought some things from the art room, and he can be found adding to his wall decoration from last week, adding three new runes and translations for Lightning, Kurumi, and Ricky.]

[ratherdoweddings]

What do they mean?

[Yurika looks over the Doctor's mural.]

Is it in your language?

[stitch_in_time]

Yeah. It's- all their names.

[He gestures at the others from earlier in the week, that have accompanying translations in English.] Seth's last name is spelled as 'Twitrite'.]

[That's probably just a typo.]

This place always gets cleaned up durin' the trials. The Benefactors want it to be like it never really happened, whatever their reasons. I might not be able to stop them, but I can do this.

[ratherdoweddings]

You're right. Keeping out hope up -- this is part of that, too, isn't it?

[stitch_in_time]

That's important, yeah. Call it survival instinct or grit or bloody-minded stubbornness, but hope's what keeps everyone going.

[Togami'd said something about hope, hadn't he. In that other game he'd been in.]

Might be even more important here, mind, and I don't mean that poetically. Whoever's behind this has a goal, twisted as hell, but they're trying to prove something. Whatever it is, I'd bet hope's pretty antithetical to it.

[ratherdoweddings]

Lightning-san wasn't a very positive person, but even she said that hope makes miracles happen.

[stitch_in_time]

I don't know if I believe in miracles. Happenstance and coincidence, sometimes, but not miracles. But I do believe in people, when I let myself.

[ratherdoweddings]

You've always been skeptical of things that people call magic, but I think that what we've seen here just shows that magic is science that we just haven't seen the explanation for. What do you think a miracle is, Doctor?

[stitch_in_time]

Oh yeah, call it what you want, there's always a rational explanation. Psychic fields or temporal manipulation, it might be big and spooky, but there's always a solid reason.

[If he lives long enough to remember it he'll tell you about the one Christmas where he got to play ghostbuster with Charles Dickens.]

A miracle... the universe is a big place. Sometimes things happen, and it looks impossible, and whatever the reason is it's beyond anything anyone can figure out, so we call it a miracle.

Then sometimes you get ordinary people in impossible, terrible circumstances, and they do extraordinary things.

[ratherdoweddings]

I think that's something we can do. Even now. But I'm still afraid, if even close bonds can't save us from dying by each other's hands.

[stitch_in_time]

There's always something we can do, yeah, we just have figure out what.

[It sounds more like he's trying to convince himself than anything at this point.]

The Benefactors are better than I'd like at denying us resources, though.

[ratherdoweddings]

And the resources we do get don't make sense.

[stitch_in_time]

Huh, yeah, most useful thing I've gotten is my screwdriver, and it's broken. And I can't even be sure they didn't give it to me so I'd be too busy fixing it to try anything useful.

[ratherdoweddings]

A screwdriver? That would definitely be useful if we didn't have that rule about tampering!

[stitch_in_time]

Not just any screwdriver, my screwdriver. A sonic screwdriver.

[He pulls it out of one of the sleeves of his spacesuit to demonstrate. He's made a little bit of progress in removing the caked on... whatever it is, but it's been very persistent.]

Normal screwdriver uses the principles of leverage to catch hold of screws, yeah? This uses sonic interference to unlock just about anything that's not deadlock sealed. I mean doors, computer systems, anything.

[ratherdoweddings]

Really? That does sound amazing! That... stuff on it looks really gross, though. Like ABC gum. What is wrong with the Benefactors?

[stitch_in_time]

Whoever figures that out could make a mint with a tell-all psychological study, most likely.

[ratherdoweddings]

The computer, too! I can't believe I didn't realize it was alive before. I mean, they had the blueprints to the Nadesico, and a more advanced holodeck than ours, so why wouldn't they have an AI master computer like the one we had?

[stitch_in_time]

That's a good point. Might be a pretty basic AI, from what we've seen, but... the way Bolton and Jamison acted when that motive got handed out, didn't seem like it.

[He looks down at his PIP for a second.]

Think it keeps office hours too?

[Are you pondering what he's pondering, Pinky.]

[ratherdoweddings]

Do you mean... could we talk to it? I don't have the kind of modifications Ruri-chan has to talk to computers, but she does make all the announcements...