For almost an hour after Reed and his guards had left, Loonie sat with her head in her hands. She didn't have anything to distract her, her phone was gone - her last connection to home - she had nothing to drink, she barely had any food. So many clothes had to be thrown away, things she'd bought to prepare for her new job, outfits that she'd thought were cute... She just didn't have space. The one thing that she'd made sure to keep was her guitar... It was the last thing that they'd seen fit to allow her to keep that she could actually use to keep herself busy, but she only had a few training materials she'd bought from the music store near her old apartment... Maybe she could convince them to at least let her get more of those so she'd have something that she could do.
Loonie hadn't even cried, she'd just let her head rest in her hands. She honestly just felt... tired. So very tired. She'd been up here, away from home, for months now, and what did she have to show for it? She had a roof over her head but in a lot of ways, she was worse off now than she was when she'd barely been up here for a few days. No freedom, no money, no work... She had money but it was in an account that she couldn't actually access anymore, not without leaving her home... which she could no longer do. Not without getting shot or worse, anyway. The one, small, saving grace of her new home was that she'd discovered that she had a small window on the far side of her bedroom that looked out over a tiny dirty field and a street. She'd be able to at least look outside and see the sky if she wanted, but they'd made it very clear that she shouldn't leave her front door unless they were knocking or she finally wanted to 'give up' and go home.
There were going to be some very long days ahead of her. She knew that for certain.
When time passed in this place, it crawled. She had so little to do that even playing her bass grew boring, and people would complain if she played it at night... And honestly, they'd complain if she played it during the day sometimes, leaving her nothing at all. She'd requested training materials for her bass so she could at least learn some new songs so she didn't play the same ones over and over, and the jokers who were guarding her had decided that 'training materials' could mean coloring books. She'd considered setting them on fire in protest, then remembered that these were going to be some of her only means of entertainment. She finished them in two days.
She didn't even honestly know how long she'd been here. There was snow outside more days than not, so it was "winter" but further than that she didn't know. She didn't have a calendar, sometimes she'd sit with her door open but on her bed - they'd said she couldn't leave her room but they didn't say she couldn't have the door open if she wanted to look out onto a refuse pile and let all the stench of the other residents into her room. For lack of anything else to do, she'd even scrubbed her room completely clean - she was terrified of getting fleas because she was pretty sure they wouldn't buy her anything to get rid of them. They didn't even let her get her own groceries and they often took her requests as 'suggestions' and bought her things she didn't actually want or ask for. She'd gotten laundry detergent more than once when she'd asked for juice - they didn't even let her wash her own clothes, she had to let someone come get them and bring them back clean... She now only had the left legging of all of her sets. She was absolutely certain that they'd stolen them all intentionally just to annoy her.
The hound often just sat with her door open, knees pulled up against her chest as she sat on the cot that was her bed, watching what little that she could see through the door. Passing days by just... thinking, watching the people go about their business, sordid as it was. She'd even seen someone get murdered - as a Hellhound, when they'd died she could actually see their soul... and she'd seen it slowly sink down, down, down. Most of the time, things weren't at all that interesting. Kids sometimes played on the trash pile and they were fun to watch, but mostly people just threw more trash onto it. Some guys came by once a week to cart some of the garbage away, but they took far less than was piled onto it every week, so it just kept growing and growing over time.
She assumed that at some point Christmas had come because she woke up to find a bottle of cheap, shitty whiskey sitting outside of her door... She didn't know if it was from a fellow inhabitant of this rundown shithole or maybe one of the guards had actually gotten her a gift. She'd opened it and then taken a single sip when memories came back to mind... She'd first gotten here by getting wasted out of her mind and shooting her own father... and now she was in this particular situation because she'd been drunk and set someone's hair on fire. The liquid - which already tasted like piss - seemed to turn to ash in her mouth, and she had to force herself to swallow. She put the top back on it and set the bottle back outside of her door and went back to bed... When she woke up from her 'nap', it was gone.
Loonie spent more time sleeping than doing anything else, wasting away entire days just laying on her cot, barely moving other than to eat or use the bathroom. She wasn't even sure what she thought about some days; she'd sit up in bed thinking she'd only laid down for a few minutes and realize that the entire afternoon had gone and she didn't remember falling asleep and didn't feel rested... It was starting to make her wonder if maybe she really was going crazy, losing days, if she was in some small way losing her mind... if the people who put her here were winning.
It was on one such day that she found herself being taken off to be questioned... She hadn't even realized they were knocking at first, she'd been lying in bed and heard shouting before she finally realized that someone was at her door and not trying to get to someone else. It made her paranoid that she was slipping or wasting away somehow and just losing touch with the world around her. They'd showed her to a van much like the one she'd been delivered here in, rather roughly thrown her into the back - they knew that if they hurt her it'd just probably be healed by the time she got there - and given her a bag to put over her head.
She didn't know how long they drove for - time seemed almost meaningless to her these days - but she knew she'd fallen over a few times when they'd taken an especially sharp turn that she wasn't ready for. By the time they pulled the bag off of her head once they arrived, she had no idea where they were, though she knew that they were outside of the city. A large manor house seemingly buried in the woods greeted them, all the trees dusted with leaves... She didn't have a jacket to put on, she'd been forced to throw away that leather jacket she liked so much just to make space for a few more shirts, so she could only wrap her arms around her body to try to warm herself up a little... She was starting to realize that maybe she should have kept a jacket just to have something to wear... But it was far too late for that now.
They ushered her inside before she could really get her bearings and more or less frog-marched her through room after room, hallway after hallway until they finally arrived in some kind of conference chamber with a table and some chairs. There were two people waiting for her, neither with a face that she could recognize, and so, so many guards. One of them was a male wearing glasses and the other was another male - bald - and holding what basically looked like a phone. She figured it was some kind of recording device. The one with the glasses motioned for her to sit, and Loonie settled herself into her chair.
The two of them looked at each other, maybe expecting more resistance, then simply turned their attention to the hound. "We're going to ask you questions and you're going to answer them. We want as truthful as an answer as you can give. If we believe that you're lying to us, the session ends, and you go home. If we think that you are not cooperating, we will have one of these guards send you to your real home. Do you understand?"
Loonie nodded her head quickly, desperate for anything to break up the monotony. They hadn't called her here before - maybe if she cooperated enough they'd bring her back more often. "Okay. I'll tell you whatever you want." Even she could hear the edge of desperation in her voice and it ate at her - but at this particular moment, she'd do just about anything if maybe it meant she could get some kind of concession out of them. Better food, moved to a nicer home, a fucking book to read, anything at all. She felt like she was slowly dying by inches locked away in that room and there had been days where she'd seriously considered trying to 'run away' if it meant that they'd send her back and end the monotony.
The two of them looked at each other again and she even heard a laugh from one of the guards, but she did her best to ignore it. "Very well. We will start with something simple - you are a Hellhound, correct? What weaknesses and abilities do Hellhounds have?"
She told them everything, she didn't hold anything back - she was so desperate to try to prove useful that she told them anything she knew. She told them about hellhounds, imps, other demons, Hell itself, anything that they asked if it meant that she got to spend another few minutes here and not back at home... But even this reprieve was not going to last forever. She thought it seemed like a scant few hours before the two men on the other side of the table simply stopped asking questions and said 'thank you'.
Loonie leaned over the table and extended a clawed hand toward one of them - she could hear weapons being brought to bear all around her, but she didn't care - and outright begged them. "Please. Ask them if I can have my phone back. If they'll send me books. Please, anything."
The men simply walked away, and Loonie felt hands grasp her shoulders - she didn't resist, she didn't dare resist - but she called after the scientists as she was dragged away. "Please! I can't keep doing this! Please! I'm losing my mind!"
Her pleas fell on deaf ears and she was dragged back to the van, thrown in the back, and driven home to be tossed back onto her cot and the door slammed in her face. This continued for three sessions - pleading included - during what felt like the next several weeks. She never seemed to make an impression upon them, and she was never given anything 'extra'. Sometimes her guards or someone in her building - she couldn't tell who - would leave something outside of her door. Some mornings she woke up to find a coloring book, sometimes it was a comic book, sometimes it was just a newspaper. Once they'd even left her a book - it seemed like it'd been randomly picked, it was a book on the history of the Hoover Dam - but she read it anyway, front to back, more than once. She even found herself waking up early some mornings just to try to see who was leaving it, but they always seemed to turn up whenever she wasn't paying attention like they were toying with her. Sometimes she wondered if she was imagining them and she wasn't getting anything at all.
Then one day she finally spotted them - a gloved hand setting a book down in front of her door. She hurried to her door and used a piece of glass - she chipped it off of the mirror over the top of her sink, they never said she couldn't peek around corners, she just couldn't leave her room - to watch him leave. It was one of her guards, that's why she'd never realized who it was... they walked patrols sometimes, maybe she'd just assumed they had been walking past whenever she'd checked, and it was hard to see their patrols when she couldn't leave her room since her field of view was limited. But now that she'd spotted who it was - maybe it was just that one guard and that's why things only turned up sporadically - she watched them leave... and watched them walk straight to the trash pile. He fished around in it for a moment, then picked out a newspaper. He walked to the other guard and held it out in front of himself and gestured toward where the hound was, then stuffed it up and under his arm before continuing his walk.
Loonie's ears flattened against her head. Trash. They were literally leaving her trash, and she'd been desperate for it, to give her something - anything - to occupy herself with. Loonie dragged the book back into her room and slowly shut the door, then peeked at the cover to see what it was... a book detailing tourist attractions in the nearby area, a city nearby with some historical buildings, a museum, there was apparently a theme park nearby.
She curled herself up against herself in her cot and tugged the book to her chest. She'd been reduced to accepting trash to give her something to do while the days passed. She thought of asking 'how had it come to this', but she knew the answer. This time, she could admit it to herself - it'd gone wrong with her. She'd been the problem. Now, as the saying went, she was reaping what she'd sown.