taxonomites | [HOLO] [Sanctuary] 01: Stranger Things Happen

The phone was ringing.

The room Michael was in wasn’t the Westen house in Miami. But that didn’t make sense, because the phone was ringing and he’d gotten up to get it -- his mom and Fi were still at the table, and because Jesse wasn’t home he’d said, “I’ll get it” and he’d gotten up -- the phone was ringing, and he’d walked into the kitchen to get it. The phone was ringing somewhere around the fridge. The phone was ringing, and Michael had taken a step onto a square of kitchen tile and hit by a wave of something that stole the tile out from under him, and his feet, and the world. Everything just sort of went away.

His first thought was that thing they said that some bullets and explosions traveled so fast that they killed you before you ever heard them. Where you were dead before you knew anything was killing you. That was his first thought.

His second thought was the last far-off obnoxious ring of that goddamned phone -- the very last piece of his life to fall away, but then it was silent too and he was in this room.

It was a room. That was a start. It was kind of metallic, altogether, which you didn’t see a lot and was more corporate office or SyFy than it was practical. It was round, which put him in mind of a courtroom, and he was on some kind of -- platform? -- at the center which reminded him of a courtroom too, but the rest of the room wasn’t anything like a courtroom at all -- and he was at the center of it, which he didn’t like at all. There were steps down, he could see; and he wasn’t hurting, he had his balance, he could walk. Okay. This was all in his inventory, and these were good things.

He patted himself down briefly: empty pockets, no gun, shades, probably no IEDs strapped to him: okay, this was looking more like ‘the afterlife’ than ‘extraordinary rendition,’ but as Michael Westen did not actually feel like becoming spontaneously religious, he was electing to keep his options open. Something brushed against his hip when he checked his pocket, though -- under his suit jacket and shirtsleeve. Michael unbuttoned them and rolled them up, frowning, and found that some kind of metal -- device was seamlessly grafted into the skin of his wrist.

Maybe rendition after all.

He pulled at the skin around it with his fingers. No luck. “Damn,” he said aloud, half in appreciation for whatever technology and surgery had made this take so well: a tracking bracelet? Whatever it was, it wasn’t itching and it didn’t hurt, which spoke badly for his ability to take it off. Well, first things first.

Michael took a step onto the first stair and warily spied some kind of high-tech podium -- then another step and spun around, but there was no sound or motion but his own breathing.

“Hello?” he tried.

No answer. No cameras on the walls he could see, they were pretty smooth: “Hello?” again, louder, while he looked up -- bingo, there, something on the ceiling. It looked kind of like -- not a camera. It looked like not anything Michael had heard of, either. Like everything else here, actually, it looked manufactured at the Sharper Image. “Hello,” he tried this time speaking directly into the device with a pained smile and a wave.

Nothing. Michael took the next step down, and then the next, and then gingerly to the ground, like it might explode. It didn’t. He looked around again, like someone might appear behind him, and then headed to a wall near the high-tech podium, step by careful step.

“Is anyone here?” he called out a little louder: then, with an ache of something and on an impulse, “Mom? Fi?”

Whoever had brought him here, they were long gone. He felt for his cell phone again, but didn’t expect to find it there, and he didn’t. Before long he found a wall, leaned his head back on it and tipped his shades further back on his face. He’d been a prisoner enough times before. He was used, if nothing else, to waiting for something to happen.

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"Thanks -- Corwin."

When they reached the exit Michael took a deep breath of the air as he glanced back over his shoulder at the building, wondering what kind of air it would be: the dull, too-many-times-air-conditioned air of a covert facility where they didn't open the windows? Dank, musty?

Sharp. Clear. Outdoors. It was -- nighttime? -- here, and for all appearances, somewhere on the planet Earth. Temperate, Michael's clue-gathering mind flashed to work, so nowhere in Florida; if he had to guess it was fall weather in a place that had fall weather, which ruled out the tropics and the far north and south, he guessed. But Corwin had said underground, though nothing about the sky full of stars said underground at all to Michael: why would a person lie about something like that, though? What reason did Michael have to not believe him, aside from every rule of logic and his life experience?

"Is there someplace you stay here?" He glanced sidelong at his erstwhile companion at Mike, a little strange to hear out of a mouth that didn't belong to Sam Axe. But he had nothing to say about that either.

As long as he’d been here, Corwin still had his moments about that sky. On the one hand, he was grateful that the mysterious “they” had put the effort into putting it there and he didn’t have to feel the walls closing in around him, but on the other its less than subtle perfection drove him insane. Would it really hurt to see a cloud or two? Or for a less rigidly scheduled circadian cycle? It felt like a glass lizard cage if he thought about it too much, with sunrise and sunset left up to the mercy of whatever entity turned the lamp on and off. Still, at other times, he was entirely neutral toward the thing as something that was simply there and good for little else than to tell him what time it was.

There were a couple of reasons that he could think of for the question of where he was staying, though he very much suspected that it was because Michael wanted to find somewhere to stay as far away from him as possible. Not that Corwin blamed him in the slightest.

“I’ve got a room in the Sanctuary. The building we just left.”

"The Sanctuary," Michael repeated, less for memory as in incredulity. He looked at the sky again, then at the empty buildings around them, and then the sky.

"It has -- rooms? What're they like?" God only knew he wasn't staying here a moment longer than he had to, but -- it was worth knowing. "Sorry, I realize I'm sounding like a Japanese tourist in Manhattan right now, this is just a lot to process. And you're about the only one I know here at the moment, well, in person anyway," he grinned, this time in sheer exhaustion, "but you know what they say about penpal relationships. They don't work out."

Corwin shrugged yet again (this conversation seemed conducive to that), gesturing vaguely for no real reason, except to indicate the building that they had just left, despite that it should have been obvious which one he was referring to. “It ain’t exactly five star, but it does the job.” He had certainly stayed in worse places, and at the very least it wasn’t outside on the ground without even a blanket to keep the rain off. He’d done that one a few times. And saying that wasn’t precisely accurate either. It seemed like “minimalism” was the prevailing theme of those rooms. But it kept him warm and that was about all that he could ask for at the moment.

It was beginning to look like no earthly power between man and God was going to turn Corwin into a conversationalist. "Is there anything else you think I should know about here? Food, clothes -- anything we're not allowed to have, I guess?"

Michael was hoping he'd say "guns." Not being allowed to have a gun was a state of being he was pretty used to. Being allowed to have a gun, however, was a sign that whoever had him locked up here wasn't afraid of guns, and that was not a sign he wanted to get.

Conversation was hardly beyond his capability, or even his desire, occasionally. Now, however, was not one of those times that he was actually in the mood for it. Explanations didn’t exactly require verbosity and tangents. “Most anything you want you can get out of the hatches with this,” here Corwin indicated his bracelet. “as long as it fits. It kind of works like a bank card as far as I know. Housing is free last I heard, unless they changed something.” Which was doubtful, unless there was some, what did they call it, glitch. That was the part that made him nervous. He’d managed to dodge them so far, but how long could his luck possibly last?

"Okay," said Michael encouragingly, who was still not about to look a gift help in the mouth, however eccentric and unforthcoming it might be. "It works like a bank card -- do we get allotted some kind of credits, do we earn them? How does this work?"

The idea of having to earn prison money wasn't exactly one he relished, but neither was the idea of not having anything. It was just plain stupid to be too stubborn to work the system they gave you. It was the only system you got.

“Yes,” Corwin answered, without bothering to specify which question that was answering. It was the same for both, anyway, so it was pointless to repeat himself. “Some of it shows up scot-free, but if you want any more of it, you’d better get your hands dirty.”

This was far more questions than he had asked himself when he arrived, but then, he hadn’t really been planning on staying, and this was hardly the worst that it could have been. He’d survived on less. But he still had to keep reminding himself that not everyone had that kind of experience with the strange that he did.

At this point really one thing was dwelling on Michael's mind and he shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced sideways to voice it. "Uh, Corwin? Where exactly are we going?"

“You’re the one that wanted to go outside. So we’re outside. It’s pretty hard to get lost around here.” Or at least it was for him, anyway. Handily enough, the mysterious “they” running this place had provided a map.

[HOLO] [Sanctuary] 01: Stranger Things Happen

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