glencolareef | LOG | DAY 003

The door opens again. The drone is carrying... something. It's so hard to focus, but Martin thinks it might be a body. Jon? Is it Jon?

He tries to say something, but his throat is so dry. He manages a croak of sorts, but the drone tosses whoever it is into another cell, and Martin can't physically summon the ability to focus well enough to understand how to respond to that. He passes out again.

Another sound catches his attention at some point after that. It's not one of the drones, but the sound of... footsteps? Ones that have a limp to them. His voice is little more than a whisper when he speaks. "Water...?" He should be more polite, greet them, do more than lay here like a useless lump and beg, but his mind is consumed by that one thought.

The rasp of a voice could almost be written off as a figment of his tired mind, but it sounds like it comes from one of the bodies in the cells and it has Jet pausing in the middle of the room. Every part of him is tense and ready to react the second these drones so much as stir, but if they were sensitive to sound, he'd already have been found out.

"Hey." His voice isn't unkind, just a little terse. "Just a second, gonna see if these doors open." He turns to the computer nearby, it's screen only reading out Password on the screen. Well...fuck. What he wouldn't give for Francoise and her ability to decrypt and hack anything.

Jet spares a second to look around the station for some sort of cable and, finding one, spares another to plug it into the port hidden just under his hairline. There's no dizzying rush of information, no readout behind his eyes or even the worst case of a virus taking advantage and feeding through to him. At least not more than the one that might be corrupting his systems. It's a relief as much as it's entirely, frustratingly, disappointing.

With a muttered curse, Jet pulls the plug, wraps it, and stuffs it into his jacket pocket with the bone he'd found the other day before moving to the cell.

"Hey, man...can you move a bit closer for me? These bars are tight, I'll only be able to reach so far." And how was he going to get this water to him when his receptacles were bigger than his own hands? Drip-feed, maybe. "What's your name?" He's pretty sure he heard it, but it's a good way to get him to focus for now.

Martin's brough the mattress to the bars, at least. He tries to shift closer to the stranger, pressing his face into the bars. They feel cooler, at least. His breathing is harsh and quick and his features are flushed like he's been running. No sweat adorns his brow, and he's stripped down to nothing but his boxes and an undershirt. His glasses are lying on the mattress near his head, and Jet will be able to see one of Martin's hands is wrapped in a flannel shirt. He's clutching a rusty metal shiv and the small pile of rusty flecks near his hand point to a final escape attempt. Just outside the bars are an antique knife and a lockpick, things he's managed to push through.

"Martin. Please."

Jet's eyes dart from items to man and the lack of sweat on his brow mixed with the apparent feverishness. Not for the first time in the last two days, he wishes the read-outs at the corners of his vision showed anything but empty information. A proper diagnosis of everything wrong would be way more helpful, instead all he's got is military training 101.

"Alright, Martin. You're gonna be fine. Here, it's the best we've got right now." Jet fishes out what water he's got and dips his curled fingers in to bring them through the bars, his knuckles catching in the space between them, but it was enough, he presses them to Martin's lips to get the water into his mouth. It wasn't much more than a wash of liquid, but he repeated the movement until it was at least a swallow. Inelegant, but effective enough to keep at it, talking as he does. "My name's Jet. I know you're thirsty, but we gotta take it slow or you'll get sicker and I'm gonna need your help getting you out of here."

Martin catches maybe half of the other man's words in the haze, but what he does understand is moisture. He might look back on this with shame, at just how undignified it is to suck on a complete stranger's fingers like they've been covered in the ambrosia of the gods, but here he is. He makes a helpless sound when the fingers disappear and don't come back again with more water, clawing weakly at the bars. It's the first time he's found it in himself to really move in a while, though. To have any semblance of something like hope.

"Drones," he finally says in a cracked voice when he manages to pull himself out of his own head. "Break them." Because he suspects his rescuer is going to become a fellow prisoner very quickly, otherwise.

That little sound is sharp to his conscience, but he still sets the can of water aside. There's more. Enough to keep at this a little while, but not all at once. He couldn't let them rush. Movement is, at least, a little better than he'd found him.

Jet glances over his shoulder at the perched drones and their unresponsive state. For now, he has no doubt, they'd be trouble soon enough. Having his plasma gun would be helpful about now with everything else in him on the fritz. "They're off for now and I left my baseball bat in New York; notice any weak spots?"

Edited 2023-05-29 07:23 (UTC)

"Ports." It's so hard to focus on this conversation. He can vaguely see the can with the water, and Martin just want to phase through the bars to be able to drink all of it. It still wouldn't be enough. It feels like he's never going to have enough water again. The tease of it is almost infuriating.

"Shorted out. Rotors? Knife." He means to break the rotors with his knife, but Martin's not coherent enough for strategy beyond that.

Jet nods. It's not anything he wouldn't have tried himself, he's pretty sure he can guess at a machine's weak points, but still not bad to ask. "Alright. Here, we'll do a bit more."

He reaches for the can and takes up more of the water to messily feed it to Martin as best he can. He's quiet while he does, focusing on the task rather than needlessly filling the air. Once another swallow or so is done, he sets the can aside again.

"Promise I'm not torturing you, even if it feels like it. Gotta go slow or you might just hurl it back up and be worse." His eyes cut up towards the toilet in the cell and he makes a face. "You didn't try to drink out of the toilet, did you?"

Edited (did you know you have to pick an icon) 2023-05-30 00:41 (UTC)

The water returns, and Martin is just as desperate as before. Maybe this isn't torture, but it's about as close to it as he's ever experienced. He can't cry. He's not hydrated enough to cry, but his next few breaths are a bit more shuddering as he squeezes his eyes shut.

"Tank. There wasn't anything else. I-I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got sick." It's shameful to admit. All of this is disgusting and pathetic. Naked, helpless, sick, useless. He couldn't face Jon like this now, even if he did turn up. He's too ashamed of himself and how easily he'd dissolved into an invalid in the matter of a few days.

But at least he won't die alone? No. No, he'll just be an inconvenience to this poor man.

He winces, both for Martin and his own tactlessness. This was why other people did the polite talking.

"Hey.." His voice dips a little softer, closer to how he might talk to one of his family instead of some stranger he was just hoping to keep clinging to the mortal coil. "You didn't ask for this. The tank should've been safe enough of a bet, fact it wasn't means it's been sitting there long enough to be contaminated. Not your fault again. We'll get you through this, Martin." There's a pause and then more water to be offered.

"Ive seen humans do some really amazing stuff, especially when they thought they couldn't or the odds were impossible. You can too, I know it. Just do me a favor...save crying for when you've got water spare in you, okay?"

Kokichi wakes up feeling less than great. The grogginess of whatever he'd been drugged with lingers. Everything is sore, whether from being grabbed and tossed around by the drone or from his initial "fall" from the tree. He remembers a spark of pain when he'd landed, despite his best efforts to drop safely, and an attempt to wiggle his feet confirms that the left one is definitely a little sprained.

He's pretty sure he was dreaming while he was out too, and that's never fun. The memory of a slab of metal hanging over him, the sickening anticipation of waiting for it to lower...

But he's not dead. That's something, at least.

Sluggishly, he lifts his head to look around. An unfamiliar building, cell doors with metal bars, but he's not locked up. There's silver lining number two. And distantly, through the haze of drugs still wearing off, he can hear voices. Jet and Martin. Hey, look at that, his gamble apparently paid off and the guy's not dead. Hurray. Kokichi gives himself an internal pat on the back still laying on the floor, because that's about as much as he can manage right now. But hey, he's not alone, so he pushes through the dredges of the anesthetic and speaks up to announce his waking.

"Ow."

The water he had is all but gone and Ben's supposed to be on his way with more...leaving them with little else to do but wait. Outside the cells, mind, just in case the doors came down again. It had taken a bit to clear out a corner and move the mattress out Martin had been using so rest on, then help the guy himself over there too, but it was better than ending up trapped again.

The voice from the other cell pulls Jet up short from whatever he'd been saying and he starts the slow process of getting back on his feet. He's sore, what real muscles exist in his body aching from the electricity, but it's the knee and the sway in his vision that makes the going rough.

"You alright, kid?"

Kokichi's eyes flick over to his company, quickly taking in the details. Jet doesn't seem to be in the best shape, but he's functional at least. Kokichi wonders how far it'd been from where he got nabbed to the cell, how long Jet had had to chase after it.

Points in the guy's favor, though. Kokichi trusts no one blindly, but it seems unlikely that Jet would be involved with whoever's responsible for the drones if he went so far to rescue people from them. Their friend the cop is notably absent, too. All of it gets filed away to muse on more once his head feels less foggy.

Giving a hollow laugh, Kokichi pushes himself up into a sitting position on shaky arms.

"Oh, totally," he says, bright and dry. "I love getting drugged and kidnapped!"

It's a while later, after Kokichi's spoken with Jet, and the angries drone ever finally stops buzzing, that Martin will offer his own greeting to the boy. He's lying on the mattress Jet had dragged out of the cell and still incredibly feverish and unwell, but he wants to make some sort of effort.

Without his glasses on, he sees Kokichi's form as a small, dark-haired blur in the dimness. But that's fine. He doesn't need those right now. "You got caught?" His voice is raspy.

The kindness is unexpected and doesn't really help with his emotional regulation. Trying to save his life, bringing him water, those are already things that already make this man a Good Person in Martin's mind. At least for the moment. But the fact he's being nice when he doesn't have to be is almost too much.

"'M not crying," he says in a trembling rasp. "Thank you. Take the shiv. You need it. Break-break things?"

Kokichi's sitting against a wall by this point, going through more of the messages he'd missed on the walkie-talkie while giving his ankle a rest for a bit. He glances over to the man as he's addressed. Martin looks rough, but at least he's alive. Thank fuck for that. None of this was in vain.

Not that Kokichi's looking for any appreciation. He's happy to let Jet take all the credit as the hero here.

"Nah, I totally wanted to get electrocuted and drugged!" He doesn't even bother with the peppy act just for one moment, affected sarcasm dripping from every word as he rolls his eyes. "Obviously I got caught."

Martin doesn't respond to the sarcasm. That's very easy to let roll off his shoulders when his boyfriend used to be the king of sneering remarks. It's especially easy right now when he can't summon the will to care. "How? I thought... people were hiding?" His ability to gauge time is also all over the map. "When did you get here? I... I saw it come in... sometime?"

Kokichu sighs heavily, dropping his head back against the wall.

"We were hiding, buuut...whoops, I slipped! So the drone spotted me and I got snatched right up." He shrugs. "Dunno how long I was out, though. You'll have to ask Mr. Jet about that."

He makes his way over, a little too proud to use the wall as a support when he doesn't have to, at least until he stops at the still-open door.

"Yeah? The cloud in your head's probably pretty bad, but the sorta metal-flavor in your mouth's probably best part, right?" He'd been drugged and kidnapped more than once in his life, it probably wasn't too different, right? "I'd offer you some water, but we're out. Ben's on his way to us with more." He steels himself and moves just inside the cell to hold a hand out for Kokichi to take. "Come on, sooner you're out of here, the better. No telling when these doors will close again."

"Yeah." He works a little more water into his charge and then sets the can aside to wipe his hands on his jeans and take up the shiv instead. "Yeah, I'm plenty good at breaking things. Take five."

Not that Martin had much choice, but still. Time to se what he could do about these drones. A walk around doesn't serve him much, so he sends a few texts, bends a few ears...and ends up trying the 'pick it up and drop it' approach.

"Wow, you know a lot about drugs! That's toootally not suspicious at all!"

Despite that comment, though, Kokichi sounds as cheery as ever – a little tired, maybe, but injecting plenty of pep into his voice – and he doesn't hesitate to make use of that hand. He tries to disguise the state of his ankle for the time being, doing his best to hide the limp as he exits the cell. Last thing he needs is fussy adults making him take it easy while there's important shit here to investigate.

So he wanders straight over to the computer terminal, leaning heavily on the table for support. He fishes his walkie-talkie out and sets it down to let the messages he'd missed start to play.

"Hey, hey, did you manage to figure out this password?" he asks, poking at the screen.

"Glad to see your mouth's not broken." He rolls his eyes and just keeps himself as steady as he can for Kokichi to get up. He seems okay enough which is the more important part.

Jet follows back into the main area and hovers by the wall, arms crossing over his chest as he watches. "Nope. Not interested in alerting some system or someone watching the system that we're here and messing around. That assumes there's not some kill-objective in too many failed attempts at the password. No one else had any clues for what it could be."

Sol. 'No one else' being Sol.

Kokichi hums an acknowledgement, crouching to peer at the keys from different angles. No notable fingerprints, no keys that seem particularly more worn than the others. He frowns at the lack of clues, but makes no attempt to type in random shit.

"And what happened to Mr. Mustache? Ooh, did the drone just straight up kill him or something?"

"Okay." That's it for... a bit. Martin isn't breathing quite as hard as he had been when Jet found him in the cell, but it's certainly still irregular. He summons what will he can to add. "I should have shorted out more. Sorry."

Kokichi rolls his eyes heavily. "It's a good thing you didn't. I mean, it sounds like the zappy parts of the drones are what got the cells to open. You'd have been preeeetty screwed if they were all totally broken before we got here!"

There's a mess in the corner from his investigation of one of the drones – though "investigation" in this case means more "heavy-handed dismantlement". Not for the first time, he misses Miu. Her terrible personality aside, she'd probably have been able to take these things apart properly, or at least made good use of the parts scavenged from them. He could have given her all this scrap and she'd have managed to put together a taser or something to better deal with any similar locks moving forward.

Not that she'd have been likely to help him at this point. He did get her killed, after all.

LOG | DAY 003 - 006

Morning 003

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Night 003

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