The Universe's Mixer

Frustrated with the way that things were going, not able to understand these people that it had brought in and their apparent inability to relax and go with the flow of things, their unwillingness to conform like the people who were it's natural born citizens, The City had decided it needed to round them all up and put them in one place. A place where they couldn't get out, where they could be kept calm and docile, where it could study them closely.

It chose Arkham Asylum. There were enough rooms within to harbor every person in their very own cell. It had both maximum and minimum security wings, floors actually. The higher up a person found there room within the walls of the asylum, the more they needed to be watched, sedated. Held on to. The asylum was also on an island. With only one gate allowing access into the rest of the city. It could secure the building very well. Make sure nobody wandered in that didn't need to be there. That nobody got any bright ideas about anything.

They were taken while they slept. It moved them silently, instantly, from their beds, couches, chairs - or wherever they slept - into a room at the asylum. The nurses and doctors would appear, setting up IVs and deciding drug doses. Some patients were strapped down to their beds for their own safety - and for the safety of the staff - until they could be properly sedated. Some, those in the rooms on the higher floors, were put into straight jackets and weren't allowed to have human contact at all. The staff had to use special poles to stick these patients with their medicine. Those were the ones that the City worried about most of all. Those were the ones that it was having the hardest time learning about.

After a while, it let the calmer ones, the ones that responded to the drugs more, wander about. They were allowed to go to the commons room, they were allowed to eat their meals in the dining area, spend time in the inner courtyard. As long as they didn't start causing problems, they were allowed to roam. They could interact freely with the other patients. They had something of freedom, right up until it was time for lights out. Then everybody was ushered back to their rooms.

The others, all except those of the highest level, were taken out at special times. They were allowed to see the courtyard once a week. But not when anybody else was there. And only with a veritable army of staff members on hand to regain control should it be lost. Those of the highest level of security, those people stayed in their rooms all the time. The City could not risk them being let out.

So it watched them. It studied them. It tried to get to know them better. Learn what it was that they wanted. Tried to learn their personalities. Tried to learn why they wouldn't submit. It couldn't really tell if it was having much success or not. If it was learning anything new. It couldn't tell if any of this was going to help in the long run, or if it had just given them further fodder to be angry and discontent. To hate it.

Well, a few more weeks then. A few more weeks.

He was wearing a scarf.

It was a scarf that he'd been wearing the whole time he'd been here. It seemed wrong. He was pretty sure that he wasn't a scarf kind of guy. But he couldn't really recall much. His world was hazy in his memory. There were some really big things that kept popping into his brain, but he wasn't sure about them.

He kept thinking that he was God. But he had no abilities. No powers. But he was so sure that there had been something like that in his life. That he'd been able to do things and help people. He had this very watery memory of some hideously shaped thing, that he was the hideously shaped thing as well as it being an entity in and of itself. When he mumbled these thoughts at the nurses and doctors, they only smiled at him. The kind of smile that made him feel like a child. Like they were humoring him. It made him angry, but he couldn't really get angry enough to do or say anything about it. It was a strange, passing sort of anger.

And the goddamned scarf. Most of the time, he just sort of ignored it. It was plain black. It was soft. It hung around his neck in a single loop, both tails over his chest. It wasn't a particularly significant scarf, he didn't think. But when he tried to take it off, he couldn't. It just wouldn't come off. Sometimes as he was doing it, he forgot what he was doing. Other times, he would tug and tug and tug and nothing would get it to loosen. The only time this was really annoying was when he went to shower. The orderlies never said anything about it, that he seemed to want to never take this scarf off, but he had a feeling it wasn't normal to do that. To shower in a scarf.

He'd heard them once, actually, when they thought he wasn't near, they'd said "The guy thinks he's God and won't take that scarf off even when he showers. Why do you think he's in here?"

Jesse was allowed to wander around with the others now. Before he hadn't been. He couldn't be sure what changed, but he was glad to be out of the room, glad to be out of the restraints. He remembered those. He remembered how aggravating it was and how helpless he'd felt. They were gone now. Nobody put them on him anymore, even when he was in his room.

Right now he was on his way to the commons. They had a television in there. It was more often than not on a channel that played a lot of cartoons. He liked that. He liked when the lady came around with the snack cart, too, and he got to have crackers and juice. Or sometimes, every once in a while, cookies and milk. Those were really good days.