(TPOR) Chapter 83: Escaped Friends (Patreon)

Evening in the institute was like evening in any boarding school. At least Zed tried to believe it was. The slow crawl to lights out was usually untasked where they were left to their vices... or virtues, as instructor Ivanovic their one Russian mage in the institute liked to think.

“It is my believe,” he would say in his russian brogue, “that for every good we have bad. So for every bad there is good.”

Somehow Zed had a strong feeling his scale of good and evil differed very greatly from that of the combat mage. So when Doctor Shequifa had suggested—there were no suggestions from instructors in the institute—that he get his own room, he hadn’t been surprised to learn Ivanovic was the main source of the idea. Their defense was that with his erratic behavior whenever he was woken from his induced dreams he was a potential menace to his roommates.

So here he was, the sole occupant of his own room when he had once shared one with Peter, Nurifa and Anthony.

Unlike the hallway outside, his room walls were covered in white foam padding. He slept on the bottom section of a bunk bed with no top mattress and had a small table where he kept his institution recommended text books, all with thick backs and voluminous pages. Normally, he spent his afternoons after whatever daily lesson they learnt in math or chemistry or principles of magic sleeping. With nothing to do when he woke up, he would head to the cafeteria to pick up his dinner then return to study whatever he could from the textbooks. Once upon a time he’d done the studying alongside Nurifa. Now, he did it alone.

Lonely as it sounded, he’d been doing this for almost a month now. It no longer felt as lonely as it sounded. But he would be lying if he claimed he didn’t miss studying with Nurifa. Or his old room. Or his friends.

Zed rubbed tired eyes and spared his reading table a glance. He had failed to fall asleep after Anthony and the others had left him. He’d slipped himself into bed and turned and tossed for a while before accepting his inability to sleep. His friends’ invitation remained on his mind. And while it was an invitation he would’ve taken regardless, he was hesitant today.

He turned his attention from his reading table, rubbing his once rune-bound arm. He traced circles in spirals where The Berserker had runes, unable to remember even the simplest of all the runes. He did this for a while, a nervous tick The Berserker had had in his dreams—dreams too detailed and too well crafted by a level seven security clearance mind mage.

It seemed the residual imprints of today’s dream would last longer than usual. It made it a good thing that these dreams only granted their brains muscle memory experience.

Imagine if I could fight or make snap decisions like him, he thought with a nervous chuckle.

“That,” he answered himself, “would be wild.”

Finally, he forced a halt to The Berserker’s nervous tick and got up from his bed. It was thirty minutes to the meetup time and he had a better motivation to go out beyond a friendly hangout.

New Quest: [A Dubious Escapade]

Your amazing friends have invited you to a less than reputable outing. Attend on your best behavior.

· Objective: Escape the Institute 0/1.

· Reward: Pocket memory (Large).

· Bonus Objective: Escape with your friends 0/3.

· Reward: Military knife.

He turned to his wardrobe on the east side of the room and retrieved a clean jumpsuit. He changed his underwear and inner shirt before slipping into it and headed out.

He wondered how exactly the words intended on rewarding him in the waking world. And what exactly was a pocket memory?

Still, that was worry for a different time.

The hallways were lit with florescent bulbs affixed to the ceilings. They cast the entire length and width of them in white lights that gave it a mental hospital visage, knowledge he’d garnered from a mentally challenged grandfather.

He walked the hallways, opting for the stairs instead of the elevators, stretching out his time of arrival as much as he could. Why they hadn’t just asked him to come to their room so they could go from there was anyone’s guess.

New Quest: [Suspicious Rendezvous]

Why can’t you meet your friends at your old room?

· Objective: Discover what your friends are hiding.

· Reward: Pocket memory (Small).

“Okay,” Zed drew out the word in suspicion. “That’s not suspicious at all. And what’s this obsession with pocket memories; and what are pocket memories?”

He paused and waited, standing halfway down a flight of stairs. Nothing happened.

“Alright. A different approach.”

What are pocket memories? He thought.

He waited again and nothing happened. Now he really wanted to know what pocket memories were. But first he found himself stuck between turning back and going to his old room to stumble on the reason he couldn’t meet them there or continuing his downward descent to the bottom of the institute building. Considering the possibility of finding his old room empty, he opted for the latter. Besides, he could always ask Anthony why they chose the West Wall instead of their old room. The boy was a down right terrible liar, after all. If there was a secret to be had, that would be the best way to catch a whiff of it.

The West Wall, like the name suggested, was located to the west of the compound. It was far from the building that housed the children but not so far that it was impossible to get to in reasonable time at jogging speed.

Zed found himself jogging down the rest of the way to make up for lost time spent using the stairs. Apparently, he’d stretched his time a bit too long and now he was late. It was useful exercise, not that he needed it. Living in a military related institute—even if only as social magic experiments—meant sufficient enough levels of exercises now and then. They also had gym classes.

In good time, he was out of the building and walking his way west. He passed a few members of the institute staff, some in jumpsuits or lab coats or one military apparel or the other. He liked to think of himself as curious for his age, and while he would’ve loved to figure out the difference between each individual uniform and personnel, Peter still hadn’t mapped out half the things done at the institute and the little he knew was so vast he hadn’t figured out which uniform design was allotted to which department—and he had stayed the longest in the institute.

Zed was curious of a lot of things but he wasn’t that curious. In truth, the only curiosity that held him, and most likely every other child in the institute, were the rumors of actual magi-tech being in the works. Most times he liked to chuck it up to wishful thinking: the dreams they were slipped into every now and again by their mind mages always had magi-tech living alongside magic. It wasn’t so far-fetched to start believing there was some kind of work towards the infusion of magic into technology in a world where it didn’t exist.

Most of the staff gave Zed a skeptical look as he passed them, but since it wasn’t necessarily time for lights out there was nothing much to say. Since the lights in the housing section of the compound went out by ten, he still had over an hour before his existence beyond his room would be questioned. So he picked up the pace.

It was a few minutes past their meeting time when he arrived at the West Wall. This section of the compound was partially unattended and its lighting always had ‘wiring issues’ almost everyone was determined to keep that way so it was dark. The only mild source of light that touched it came from the corners of buildings and they touched it in the barest illumination. It made it questionably difficult to see so late in the day, so he spent a few more minutes looking for his friends.

When he found them, Anthony was a panicked mess. His face was pale with fear and his glasses were held in shaky hands, unnecessarily smudged from excessive cleaning on his jumpsuit. He approached them with a reproach on his lips, annoyed at the boy’s constant need to clean his spectacles, when he spotted something new on one of the lenses.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, pointing a finger at the glasses as he drew close. “It better not be—”

“It’s really not as bad as it looks,” Peter cut in. “It’s just—”

“A crack,” he said, cutting the boy off. “And I wasn’t asking you. God knows Anthony could lose an eye and you’d just tell him to walk it off.”

Peter paused thoughtfully at his words. “I guess.” He shrugged. “He’ll have to get to the infirmary somehow, won’t he?”

Zed sighed in exasperation but steered his attention back to Anthony. The boy really was a mess. His curly mess of hair was messier than it usually was, his eyes were dull, and he had mud all over his shoes. The last part gave Zed a pause and he looked around finding only dry grass as far as the eye could see. Where in the name of God did he find mud to step in? It hasn’t rained in months.

He shook his head, discarding the unimportant. He pointed at the glasses again. “How’d that happen?”

Anthony looked down, cowed. “I fell?”

“Are you asking or telling?”

Anthony sniffled. “I fell.”

Zed had a feeling it was more than that.

He looked up from him and spotted Nurifa. He opened his mouth then shut it at the sight of another boy standing beside him. “Takeshi?”

The boy waved shyly.

That was odd. Takeshi was one of the only two Asians among the experiment group. For some reason his hair was always cut short in a military style and he had the blackest eyes Zed had ever seen. He had a bit of a long face, and he also never hung out with them.

Zed raised a confused hand in acknowledgement of the wave then turned to Peter.

The boy gestured dramatically at Takeshi before he could say anything. “Tada! The newest addition to our room.”

My replacement?

“They put him with us last week,” Nurifa explained.

“Did something happen in his room?” he asked.

“Not really.”

Takeshi rubbed behind his neck. “I actually liked my old room.” Nurifa turned to him in offended shock and he looked away. “No offense.”

Before anyone else could add to the conversation, Peter high jacked it. “Now, now. It’s no one’s fault that they brought him to our room,” he said, dusting down grains of sand from Anthony’s jumpsuit.

Maybe he actually did fall, Zed thought.

“I’m guessing it’s the institute’s way of showing some level of functioning diversity,” Peter went on, turning to the west wall that separated the institute from the world beyond. “Now, if everyone’s done twiddling their thumbs, and feeling as if they’ve been replaced,” he smirked at Zed, “I say we go have ourselves a good night out. Now, Nurifa,” he snapped his finger at the boy, “come gimme a boost.”

Nurifa went to him, leaving Zed, Anthony and Takeshi to stand in awkward silence. Next to the wall, he bent at the waist and set his hands, fingers interlocked. Still grinning, Peter stepped on them and, with a heave and a jump, he climbed up the wall and waited.

· Escaped friends 1/3.