Greasy Bacon and Pancakes

Who: Cheryl and Hannah
When: Midmorning
Where: Diner

Cheryl felt adrift by the time the sun came up. She'd had trouble sleeping again with the house creaking and every little noise causing her to sit up in bed and look around. It had gotten to the point where she was dressed and had coffee before six am. She did her laundry, cleaned the house - although it was still pretty spotless - and forced herself to stay put and not run to Jeremy or Drew. She'd told Drew she needed to meet more people in town, so she was hoping that would be the case when she finally ventured outside mid-morning. As much as she understood it, she didn't want to grow paranoid of the participants the way Jeremy had and she didn't want to consistently hide away inside of her house after having been locked up for six months.

She stopped at the diner first to get some breakfast, not feeling much in the mood to cook. And cereal wasn't to cut it today with her appetite. Cheryl sat at the counter rather than a booth, not really wanting to isolate herself for some reason. If she was going to "readjust" to society, that also meant not hiding in the corner.

Hannah, on the other hand, had fallen asleep to the sounds of rain and thunder - one of her favorite things to listen to - and had slept a good solid ten hours like the dead. When she woke, the weather was nicer and while she still had to face the thought of figuring out what to do to pass the day, she figured she'd start it off with a walk. A walk to the diner, so she could get some more pancakes, because the ones she'd had last time had been bitchin'. And she'd remember to ask the waitress which container held the maple syrup. Unless she started feeling adventurous and just picked one randomly.

Harnessing Anubis, she made the walk through the town that was slowly becoming more familiar, feeling for the door so she could pull it open and step inside. When she wasn't approached after a moment or two, she followed the sounds of clinking glass towards what felt like a bar counter. "Whose leg do you have to hump to get some delicious pancakes around here?" she called out in the strange mixture of sarcasm and amusement that she used when she was in a good (or at least decent) mood, boosting herself into a seat.

Startled at the unexpected voice beside her, Cheryl jarred the coffee cup in her hands, sloshing some over the side to her fingers and the countertop. She cursed softly and set it down to grab her napkin before blinking over at the woman slipping into the chair beside her. Cheryl began to clean up the mess she'd made, thinking she shouldn't be so jittery. "I think that might get more than a few eager responses," Cheryl told her, noting the dog by the woman's side when she'd wiped up most of the spilled coffee. "Are the pancakes really that good or are you just hoping the humping will be enough incentive to make them delicious?"

"I think I don't want to hang around with any people who'd take leg-humping as an acceptable bribe," Hannah returned, releasing Anubis' harness so he could sit at attention beside her. "Besides, I didn't say I'd be the one doing the humping, now did I?" She smiled and patted Anubis' head. "The pancakes are good, I was here the other day. The bacon's better, if your eventual goal is to replace all the blood in your body with grease."

Cheryl began to grin at that, but her smile faltered a bit as belatedly she realized she recognized the woman. Experiment A. Hannah. She had been one of the people bitching at Jeremy on his confessional post. It was hard to remember much about the woman during her three months as an intern due to the massive mental breakdown, but Cheryl did know she wasn't very pleasant. Cheryl forced herself to relax since she was unwittingly taking on Jeremy's paranoid mentality. "You would be surprised at what people will take as bribes these days," Cheryl commented, picking at the corner of her napkin. "I ordered the bacon, myself. I'm not too worried about eating terribly healthy at the moment. Anything delicious and greasy is totally worth it to me at this point. I'm Cheryl, by the way."

"I might be disgusted at what people will take for bribes," Hannah said, shrugging, "but I doubt I'd be surprised. Considering the fact that everyone here essentially took a bribe to either be a guinea pig or to fuck with us. Leg humping seems pretty mild in comparison." She accepted a cup of coffee from the waitress and placed her order, adding cream and sugar - she had no idea if it was real sugar or a substitute, but she didn't give a damn, either. "Delicious and greasy is good with me, too. I'm still playing catch-up from the month we had of fun with diets and exercise." Her clothes, while still a little loose on her, were definitely better than they had been in August. "I'm Hannah," she said, holding a hand in the woman's direction to shake and utterly failing to recognize the name. If someone had mentioned the intern-journal thing, she'd've probably remembered, but it had all hit so low on her drama radar that she hadn't bothered to learn names.

Cheryl took her hand and shook it firmly. "Nice to meet you." She pulled her hand back, enjoying the smells coming from the kitchen. It made her stomach growl impatiently. "The minute I stepped into the grocery store I grabbed practically every fattening item I could. Having lived off of meals I wouldn't necessarily call food for several months made it difficult to go for healthy, but I figure I deserve a couple boxes of Twinkies now." Cheryl motioned for more coffee. "I'm guessing you didn't get much of a choice when it came to diet and exercise fun."

"Nice to meet you, too," Hannah said, taking her hand back and sipping at her coffee. "I loaded up on crap food, too, when I was at the store." Of course, her desire to cook had waned rather significantly in the past week or so, but she was keeping that quiet. "Canned ravioli and Oreos, here I come." She grinned briefly. "But no, we got crap like the cabbage diet and the celebrity lemonade diet and shit like that. And sure, we got to choose the exercise, but we had to go for like, four hours a day and god help you if your idea of exercise didn't match the scientists', 'cause then it was back to stupid diets. What about you? Any fun and exciting crap you dealt with?"

"Ooh, I forgot ravioli," Cheryl said, disappointment tinging her words. Ah well, she could always make another run to the store. Cheese ravioli. Yes, that was going on her list. "I did not, however, forget the double stuffed oreos. And vanilla ice cream to crumble them on top of. With chocolate syrup. Dammit, I'm hungry." She straightened a bit on her chair and arched her neck toward the kitchen to see if her food was coming out any time soon. "I don't envy the cabbage diet at all. Or the four hour a day exercising. I could barely get through a forty five minute run let alone four hours of that. As for me, no... no diets or exercise. Well, some exercise, just not four hours of it. And the food was really more like an oatmeal, boxed mashed potatoes, limp vegetables and cold meatloaf with jello kind of diet day after day." Cheryl paused hesitantly. "I got sick, so I spent most of the time in solitary confinement." Which was the best way to describe a mental hospital. If that's what it really was. And look, there was her waffles and greasy bacon. The woman set the plates in front of Cheryl who immediately reached for the maple syrup. "You weren't lying about the grease, that was for sure."

"I never lie about grease," Hannah said solemnly, accepting a coffee refill as she waited for her pancakes. "That sounds like hospital food to me," she agreed, figuring that's about what she meant with regards to solitary. And being sick. "Sucks for you. Though compared to most, it sounds like you got off easy." She wasn't sure how she felt about that; cool that some people had a chance of making it out without being hopelessly scarred for life, but pissed that it hadn't been her.

Cheryl snorted at that before digging her fork into her waffles. She wasn't so sure that she had gotten off easy at all. Not with the conditions they had left her in. Not with what they did to her. But Hannah didn't know what Cheryl had gone through anymore than Cheryl knew what Hannah had gone through after Cheryl's three month stint as an intern had come to an abrupt end. More than that, Cheryl really didn't feel like explaining it and she was sure Hannah didn't really want it explained. So she settled for a dismissive shrug, even if Hannah couldn't see it. "Yeah, I guess so." She took a bite of her waffles, enjoying the syrupy, buttery fatness of it all. "But we're all out now, so I guess that's the important thing. It's just trying to figure out what to do from here, right?"

Hannah gave a snort of her own at that, pausing briefly as her pancakes were brought and she asked for the maple syrup. She didn't feel adventurous enough to risk getting blueberry or boysenberry syrup today. "If you say so," she said, buttering and cutting her pancakes, using her fingertips as little as possible to orient herself. Sure, she wasn't going to go spewing her conspiracy theories at the drop of a hat, but she also wasn't the type to sit there and lie about thinking they were really out. "This place is going to get boring real fast." She wasn't suited to sitting around the house all day or being idle; it was why she'd gotten a job in the first place.

"It probably will, yes." She was sure some people would prefer boring over what they'd went through in each experiment. Cheryl just wanted to be able to keep herself occupied as much as possible, whether it was from getting a job, or getting groceries, or even reading. "I guess they're expecting people to get jobs and find ways to entertain themselves, which honestly could be fine, or very, very bad, depending on the person." She wasn't so much wary and suspicious of Hannah as she was people she didn't know. Not that Hannah knew that Cheryl knew her - in a sense.

"'Find ways to entertain themselves,'" Hannah echoed. "That sounds ominous." More than it should, but then again, she knew firsthand how a polite veneer could conceal a true monster whose definition of 'entertainment' went so far beyond the bounds of normality that it was scary. "I guess the shrinks here are smart enough to weed out the crazies and let the rest of us figure this shit out in peace," she said then, starting in on her pancakes.

Cheryl hadn't meant to sound ominous, but she supposed she could see where it could be taken that way. She was getting full on just a few bites of her waffles, so she pushed the plate away and picked up a piece of bacon. "I don't know about that," she said after a moment. "I'm hoping that's the case, but sometimes crazy is able to come across as anything but. And then you've got to wonder if they were always crazy, or did the experiments push them in that direction, and is it really fair to exclude them from readjusting to society like the rest of us?" Cheryl wasn't sure what her point was - other than she'd been branded as mentally ill - crazy - and she wasn't entirely sure that she had been. "Have you seen many people from your experiment in town? Have the crazies been excluded?"

"I've only talked to... two, I think, in person," Hannah said, thinking back. "But there are more I've noticed on the journals. I don't care to talk to some of the ones that are here. From what I can tell, the crazies I knew about are gone, but not through any screening of the shrinks here. More they knew which way the wind was blowing and peaced out before it got to that." It was easier, more distancing, to say 'they' over 'he'. "Crazies don't need readjusting," Hannah said. "They need to be kept apart for everyone's safety. If the experiments made them crazy, then give them therapy until they can come safely join us, sure. But you can't just throw someone who's been traumatized into insanity into the deep end and expect self-sufficiency right away, that's fucked. And if they're dangerous crazy then no, keep those bitches away from me." She had a dog for protection, sure, but that didn't mean she ever wanted excuse to use him.

Cheryl hummed in agreement deep within her throat, although Hannah's words sort of had her thinking about her own situation. Cheryl was pretty sure she wasn't crazy - anymore. Maybe at one point? Maybe. They kept telling her she was ill, but what did that even mean? It made her wonder what Jeremy and Drew thought about what had happened to her - if they believed she'd gone mental and maybe still was? Cheryl was losing her appetite just thinking about it and she dropped her bacon to her plate with a slightly sick expression before reaching for her napkin. "You're right. So far everyone I've met seemed pretty mentally sound, but I guess you can never tell until you truly get to know someone. And I guess we've all got plenty of time on our hands to do that now." Cheryl reached into her wallet for cash. "I should go. But it was really nice meeting you, Hannah."

"Same to you," Hannah said, more for politeness than true sentiment. She didn't really have anything against Cheryl, but her idea of pleasant conversation wasn't really discussing experiments and crazies. She supposed she'd have to start expecting that until people got it out of their systems; it seemed almost like some people thought of it was some kind of fucked up pissing contest - a 'my experiment was scarier than your experiment' type thing. She was guilty of her own share in the atmosphere; she could have refused to discuss it entirely, but whatever. She didn't want to ruin her pancakes by overthinking things. "I'll talk to you later, I guess."

"Sure. Enjoy your pancakes." Cheryl set enough money down to cover her meal and slipped from the chair before heading for the door. That had gone all right, given her initial judgments on Hannah. Maybe eventually everyone could just start to try and live with some normlacy without the experiments and experiences hanging over everything. Which was probably why they were all there. To get over it. Which made Cheryl think they were going to be there a lot longer than she had hoped.