Title: Peculiar Institution
Rating: T, for some possible coarse language and the eventual inclusion of adult themes

Summary: In a world where the Scream Extractor is a name on every tongue and human children have become part of the workforce, Randall Boggs makes an irrational decision and has to deal with the consequences.

Disclaimer: All canon settings, concepts, and characters belong to the good people at Pixar and Disney who created Monsters, Inc. All original material, including characters and concepts, are otherwise mine.

Author's Notes: And here's chapter two of "Peculiar Institution"! To remind anyone who may have forgotten since last week, this story's an AU, presenting my answer to the question, "What would have happened if Mike and Sulley never made it back from the human world?" It's a misleading phrasing of the question, I'm afraid. I think it's only fair to warn you Mike and Sulley fans now that they will not be showing up in PI; this fic's Randall-centric.

Enough blather. Enjoy the chapter!

Corinne didn't cry for long. It just wasn't in her nature to do so; it wasn't productive to sit on her bed and cry. She sat up, wiping tears and drip from her nose away with the back of her hand, and took a deep breath. She knew she had no right to be mad at David, no right at all, and it was only making her feel worse.

She got to her feet and sighed, running her hands over her scalp. The bare skin fuzzed against her palm—she would have to shave again soon. Maybe she should do that tonight. Surely David would let her out of the room long enough to attend to basic hygiene. Remembering the look on his face when she'd first come home bald, years ago now, brought a smile to her lips, but it was a weak one and didn't last long. She'd pushed him. Again.

David wasn't her father. As far as she knew, he wasn't related to her physically at all, though to hear it told, the adoption agency she'd come from originally had barely any records on her, so there was always a distant chance. No, he wasn't her father, not physically and not in the emotional sense either. He was just David, the man who took care of her, and had been since she was little. That was The Way It Was. And he did a creditable job of it, too, when she wasn't making it hard for him.

Corinne frowned. She wasn't too fond of introspection, especially at times like now, because she knew—knew—that she was entirely in the wrong here. It was something she didn't like to think about—it was hard to feel tragic and put-upon when one's confinement was one's own fault, and there was nothing she wanted more at the moment to feel tragic and put upon. She turned her mind resolutely away from thought and examined herself in the mirror on her wall. The crying had made her makeup, dark and dramatic, come down, so that she looked something like a monochrome clown. Uck.

With a dramatic sigh, she dropped into the chair in front of her desk and reached for a paper towel. Scrubbing the makeup off made her feel a little better and a lot cleaner, and she really did need to take a razor to her skull. She was beginning to look like she had hair—ew.

Grounded. Okay. She'd been grounded before; she could do grounded again. She chucked the paper towel in the general direction of the wastebasket and reached for her radio. Immediately, the sound of wailing electric guitars filled the room, and she was quite willing to crank it up loud and let the music blast the thought out of her head. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Fabulous.

Then her bed jumped on her.

That was what it seemed like, anyway. Something smashed into her from above and behind, and she was enveloped in a fluttering sheet. She flailed, letting out a yell in protest, and almost immediately something long and flat clamped across her mouth.

She felt a thrill of panic, the first, as she tried to scream again and was muffled. She couldn't see anything but a rough crosshatch less than in inch in front of her, and as she pushed desperately back, toppling the chair in her haste, what felt like hard, warm cables wrapped around and around her, pinning her arms to her sides and lifting her feet off the ground.

Her panic was full-fledged now; this was no prank or practical joke. David wasn't going to release her; they weren't going to have a good laugh about this. She began to kick, driving her heels up and back as hard as she could, but she'd barely landed two blows before her legs were bound too. Then there was nothing she could do, but she thrashed and strained and tried to scream anyway.

A confused sensation of movement, a strange rush of sound, and not ten seconds later she was tumbled to the ground, still tangled in whatever it was that covered her eyes. Her limbs loose now, she tore free of it, cursing all the way. She tried to leap aggressively to her feet and ended up sprawling, tripped by the loop of the fabric tangled around her ankles.

Something laughed, and she looked up and saw a Thing.

It was taller than she was, purple and blue, with a long body and too many limbs. It had striking green eyes, and it was those that freaked her out the most of all, because not only did they look too human to be set in such a bizarre face, but they were undeniably intelligent as well, and that scared her.

And it was laughing at her.

An unexpected rush of anger flooded her, and she felt her teeth bare in a snarl. She twisted around and drew her feet to her, nimble fingers untangling them and pushing the offending sheet away. But when she turned back, it—whatever it was—was gone.

Corinne deflated. She got to her feet, shaky and uncertain, all anger gone just as quickly as it had come, and took a look around. She was standing in a cage about the size of a walk-in closet; the cage was in a huge hangar of a room, at the end of line of maybe a dozen others. Almost all of them, she noticed, held kids like her, though none looked as old as she. Gray walls soared up and curved into a roof a remarkable distance up—the room they were in was massive, if not empty.

Far from empty, in fact. All around bustled Things, no single one looking like another. Corinne backed away from one passing close to her, shying from a touch that never came. It was a tall, thin Thing, poisonously green and yellow in color and covered from head to foot in long fur. It had long, strong arms and hands with too many fingers. Vaguely humanoid in shape, it was by no means the most bizarre looking inhabitant of the room.

She scrunched down in the bottom of the cage, which had a solid floor and a wall maybe eighteen inches tall around it before it separated into bars. She pressed her back into the corner; it was too overwhelming. Corinne buried her head in her hands, squeezed her eyes closed, and tried to convince herself that none of this was real.

Within a minute, it was over. The last Kid Katcher bustled through the assigned door in exactly fifty-three seconds, a multitude of tentacles wrapped around a flailing bundle in a sheet. (The idea behind the sheets was that if the targets couldn't see, they wouldn't fight, and even if they did they'd get too caught up to do any damage.) Martinez rolled his acquisition into the cage his assistant had ready and locked the door.

"Success, sir," he told Randall with a smile. Randall was not unfamiliar with the adrenaline rush of a textbook capture, and Martinez had been assigned one of the older kids, who were most likely to cause trouble. He was willing to overlook the patent obviousness of the statement.

The Kid Katcher ducked away to consult with his assistant, and Randall looked into cage. The kid was struggling to get free of the sheet; he reached between the bars and yanked. It promptly surged free and just as promptly tripped and fell heavily to the bottom of the cage. It had a lot of skin exposed for a human, and was completely hairless, though the dark shadow on the head indicated incipient regrowth. Randall had to laugh at how ludicrous it looked. It looked up at the sound and their eyes met for a brief moment. Its eyes were dark brown, nearly black, and set in a face that, despite the lack of hair, looked feminine (he thought—it was hard to tell with humans, sometimes). There was something clear in her gaze, a comprehension more complete than the blank uncertainty he was used to seeing in the younger ones. Then a look of rage transfigured her features, and he could only laugh harder. Anger was not an uncommon reaction.

There had been sixteen kids slated for acquisition tonight, and an even dozen of the cages now contained a newly acquired teenage human. He glanced at each of them in turn, judging their reactions and comparing them to what they usually saw in the younger ones. A lot of the females seemed to be crying, some of them hysterically. That was usually the most common response, especially among the younger humans they kidnapped. The males, though, seemed to be blustering; that was new. They were threatening all the monsters around them, with fists and with words both, swearing they were going to invoke whatever human agency it was they thought could help them. Underneath their thin veneer of bravado, however, was an unmistakable undercurrent of fear; they were terrified and this was how they showed it. Randall chuckled to himself as one particularly weedy boy lunged at him, brandishing all but useless fists and demanding his rights in a high voice that kept breaking spectacularly. He ignored all of them.

All in all Randall was pleased with the day's work. Twelve children successfully caught out of sixteen was better than they'd hoped, for it was a lot harder to kidnap children than scare them, and forays were abandoned at a much higher rate. Since there were so many closet doors that could be used, so many different opportunities to catch the kids they required, it wasn't imperative that they attempt to complete every assignment, no matter what. Besides, Waternoose had a team of monsters already at work constructing a viable human breeding program so that the monster world would eventually become independent from the human one. It would be infinitely easier for all concerned if they didn't have to rely on the uncertainty of the acquisition system forever.

He watched as the assistants began the quick task of returning the doors and transferring the caged humans to the holding chamber. The process was almost entirely automated—the doors were returned to the massive storeroom, and a sister system latched onto the cages from above and took them out of the acquisition floor. (The move was met with a new chorus of screams and sobbing; not a surprise.) The kids would wait in the next room, unknowingly, for the SE process to begin. After that took place, a dealer in human servants would come and take the newly-pacified children away to be evaluated and sold, but that was out of Monsters, Inc.'s hands. They had nothing to do with that—it was actually the descendant agency of the CDA that took care of that. The CAA, or Child Authorization Agency, employed mostly ex-CDA agents.

To his surprise, though, he found himself watching the last cage in the row, the one that held the bald girl. She wasn't crying or threatening or banging on the bars like all the others. No, she seemed remarkably calm; if her eyes were suspiciously watery, at least they were open, and she was watching her surroundings as her cage began to move. Or rather, he realized with something like a shock, she was watching him. Their eyes met again as she rose, and the intensity of her gaze was enough to make him look away first, unnerved. When he looked back up again, she was gone, along with all of the others.

Since he was going that way anyway, Randall volunteered to take the reports on today's activities with him up to management; he'd make sure they all got to where they needed to go. He had them spread on his desk and was paging through them—this was as good a time as any for a surprise inspection, so he was making sure the assistants were doing their jobs properly—when he realized something was bothering him. He tapped the fingers of one of his lower hands against the desk while putting one of the reports back in it folder with his upper, and tried to pinpoint it. There was one last report to check…it was hers.

He paged the folder open and was greeted with a distracted-looking picture of the girl. Her name was listed as Doe, Corinne, and according to this she was seventeen and an only child, living with a legal guardian by the name of David, with no surname provided. It was by no means a comprehensive compendium of information, but they really couldn't get much more than that without endangering the people who collected the data. Randall sat back in his chair, crossing both sets of arms, and gazing at a painting on the wall above his door without really seeing it. The tip of his tail, which was hanging at his feet, twitched rapidly, a sure sign that he was thinking hard. He leaned forward, and without really knowing what prompted him to do it, snatched up a pencil and erased the check over the "Success" box on the forms. He made a new mark in "Aborted," circling underneath the most common reason for mission failure—a pet sleeping in the child's room. No one would question that excuse, since, though the children had been proven to be okay, pets still posed a problem. He closed the folder with a decisive motion, and hopped lithely to his feet.

Walking out of his office like nothing was amiss, Randall handed the stack of folders to his secretary. "See that these get to the right place," he said, inserting a note of distraction into his voice. "I'll be leaving work early today. I've got somewhere I've got to be." He didn't bother lingering to hear her reply, and he was too deeply immersed in thought to have comprehended it anyway—he only abstractly noticed the sharp-edged smile she gave him as she took the paperwork. He was trying to think if there was anyone who would notice of one of the humans suddenly went missing, but the only people who came to mind were himself and the Kid Katchers. He certainly wasn't going to tell anyone, and the Katchers never had anything to do with the kids after they were secured. With no real recollection of how he got there, Randall found himself in front of the doors that opened on the small, individual chambers housing the kids. He paused, took a deep breath that in no way belied nervousness, and pushed open the door.

Author's Notes: You can tell Randall didn't come up with the name 'Kid Katchers', 'cause it's disturbingly cutesy-wootsy.

Many, many thanks to Random Drifter, Till My Head Falls Off, and SylverStrike for reviewing! The next chapter should be up in about a week, barring any unforeseen delays. All feedback is welcome and appreciated. Thank you!