Vytal Mind Asylum, as the name implied, was a mental institution that was dedicated to healing minds of whatever ails it. This place was funded and owned directly by the state, that meant the patients here weren't just left to rot away, abandoned and forgotten by society. Instead, this institution was solely focused on recovery.
Perhaps this meant nothing special to most people. It was rather common knowledge that hospitals were meant to heal. However, it was also common knowledge, at least to those that dealt with hospitals directly, that most places would rather deal with the symptoms instead of the illness. The longer a person needed aid, the more money could be bled from them.
However, Vytal Mind Asylum was run by the government. Which, similarly, was supposed to help but took advantage when they could. Regardless of any corruption, as an official hospital, this place was under heavy scrutiny to operate effectively.
Lie Ren opened the door of his rust bucket and stepped out. His boots met the asphalt of the almost empty parking lot, and his gaze met the trees of the forest. As he closed the door to his car with a loud creak, he began walking towards the rather out of place rigid stone building amidst the flowing trees.
He hadn't really kept notice of his visits here, he only came by if it was required of him. It would not be unnatural or unreasonable for him to never return here. Although he was incapable of holding onto grudges, that did not mean he was daft. Certainly his condition was not normal, and it took him a few years before he managed to convince the staff here that he, himself, was normal.
Truly, there was no reason for him to willfully walk through the doors to this place.
"Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?" A nun, with grace encircling her mind, who was sitting behind the reception desk, had asked almost immediately after the doors opened.
Even though he had spent a few years as a patient here, and a few more years supplying payments for another patient, he had yet to discover why church members were employed here. It was of little matter, though, since none of the religious people here held even a drop of the seven sins, they were truly devoted to their god and his teachings.
"Good afternoon to you too, Sister." As a child, he had been rather meek and shy, so he lacked experience in holding conversations charged with emotions. As a teen, he managed to replicate and simulate enough emotions to fool the doctors, so as an adult, he had zero difficulty holding small talk while pretending to care.
Although inefficient in daily activities, small talk was of the utmost importance in forming connections to people. On a rather inconvenient note, the church members here were almost invariably happy. That meant he had slight difficulty when reading the flow and ebb of the conversation.
As they talked in circles, his mind was busy elsewhere. Religion was a rather troublesome topic for him to consider.
Even though he was born in china, his parents were rather lax about what they preached to him. All they mostly forced on him were certain precepts to be a morally good individual.
Certain men of logic would rather die before considering a holy deity existed. He would almost have agreed with them. However, no amount of logic could describe what had happened on that night. Although he had yet to be convinced of a biblical god, he did not rule out the existence of beings beyond mortal cognition. The biblical depiction of a few celestial messengers would occasionally itch at his brain as he recalled the form of that thing.
A few minutes had elapsed before he was led down a familiar sterile hallway, he stood in front of a steel door for a moment before it unlocked following a rather harsh buzz.
Only a few steps into the rather large room, and he already began feeling a headache. The chaotic emotions, the kind that no sane person would even feel, stabbed at his eyes. The chemical cocktails and the neural impulses of the mentally ill were hazardous to his own sanity.
Through his blurry vision, he caught a glimpse of turquoise eyes nearly glowing in a gray world. He focused his attention and took a few more steps. He arrived at a rather secluded area near the back of the room. Through the interlace of metal covering a large window, he could see a vast and lush forest that stretched on for miles.
He had probably spent too long listening to radio reports of land prices, since his immediate thoughts were about how much that area would cost. They were not close to any major highways, so commercially the price would be rather low, but maybe a factory or two would recoup the cost rather quickly.
He noticed something odd within his own mind as he looked down on the trees. Normally he paid no attention to his old memories, those with colors, since with each day that passed the colors blurred and mixed together until they faded away. However, he still intellectually knew the color of things. So his first thought was that leaves were green, but then his mind rejected that idea.
Leaves being green were in their nature. He had seen amber eyes today. It was autumn. His brain connected these facts, and he remembered that most leaves would take on an orange hue as the seasons changed.
He tore his gaze away from the forest. His headache had mostly subsided by now. He stared down at the girl with turquoise eyes, like the letter had claimed, who was painting. From her position of facing the forest and canvas, it could be reasonably assumed that she would be painting a landscape. Yet that was not true, or if it was then it had been heavily abstracted by her shattered cognition.
A dark murky flatland had substituted the forest, flowing ribbons with rigid branches were spiraling down, and a myriad of swirling stars and were peering over the horizon. The largest point of separation was, of course, the large monolith emerging from the ground that had no counterpart in the real scenery. Aside from how sinister the brush strokes appeared, the entire piece flowed together rather nicely.
On the ground surrounding the painter were more pieces of questionable, yet well crafted art. Or more accurately, scraps of what might have been well crafted art. Torn shreds of paper were littering the floor, and the original contents were unrecognizable, however from what he could glimpse and sort together. He saw a malformed hand emerging from a skull, a halfway melted whale, a shattered bowl holding a flaming gem, and a lightning strike swirling upwards.
It was absolutely the work of someone steeped in lunacy, but if this was an improvement had yet to be seen. Although she was painting, and no longer manically rambling or simply being catatonic, this didn't matter.
Why was he even coming here? He did not even know much about this person. He had met and learned her name a few hours before the sky went dark on that night. Even then, there was not much in common with them. They did not speak the same language, so they did not even have a single coherent conversation between them.
But when the ink black sky and sea were dyed a mix of purples as a magenta colored star crashed down. After escaping the madness and panic, she had been among the handful of people who boarded the same emergency lifeboat as him. And after fainting from being dehydrated, they were the only two people to be successfully resuscitated after being found.
If he had emotions, then he might have formed a close bond for having survived near-certain death together, but he felt nothing of the sort. She was incapable of holding a conversation when they were both patients, and around the time he had left to reintegrate into society, she had ruptured her eardrums, permanently deafening herself.
There was truly no reason for him to do anything for this girl, but perhaps it was an obligation that was forcing him. An indescribable desire to protect the single other person who bore witness to the same sight he had seen, to preserve his own sanity, perhaps. He was not alone. He had not gone mad. It was her that had broken, a sort of reassurance that he was still sane.
He stood around for around an hour, but she showed no signs of recognizing his presence. She had begun clawing at her painting. Her dull fingernails tore through the thin clan as she growled out gibberish.
It would not do anything to let her know he was leaving, but he still muttered a "Goodbye Nora," to her as he walked away.
He did not have all day to waste away here. He was no longer confined here anymore after all. He had a job to do. So he made his way outside. As soon as he passed through the front door, his hands deftly worked in tandem to retrieve a cigarette and light it up in a few seconds. Although he no longer felt emotions, he could still be stressed out.
As nicotine was absorbed through his lungs and flooded his blood vessels, he entered his car and turned the key. He slipped on his shades and, as he waited for his engine to start up, he fiddled with the radio in his car. It seemed like a slow news week. Most stations were talking about Van Allen, and the local stations were still talking about a whale fishing boat that had capsized a few days ago.
He found a station warning about an incoming storm, and his car finally kicked into gear so he peeled out of there. His drive back was uneventful, like always, so he began formulating the plan for his investigation.
Lloyd Alban had gone missing last night, and the first nighttime activity that came to Lie Ren's mind was fooling around with a night gal. So the first stop on his hunt for clues was where he knew a pimp would be. His run down car didn't look a bit out of place as he parked before a small dark stone building.
He snuffed out a cigarette, and another bud was deposited in an old stale cup of coffee resting in a cup holder. He exhaled the remaining smoke after he exited his car. His windows were already stained with enough dust and smoke for today.
The private investigator stepped into the dimly lit building, his gait slightly off from the sticky floor that clung to his boots. His nose was immediately assaulted by the reek of stale beer and vomit.
Only a handful of people were present inside, and the first that caught his eye was a tall, dark-skinned man sitting on a stool in the corner and playing a lively melody on a trumpet. The musician's emotions were in direct opposition to his performance, a vibrant dread was circulating through his heart.
The rest of the occupants here all had about the same shade of despair swishing around in their skulls. They were just the run-of-the-mill alcoholics. Aside from the black youth, the only remaining sober person was a big man behind the counter. The owner of the Little Bear's Bar, Hei 'Junior' Xiong, was the first and only son of the current head of the Xiong branch of the Triad, and he was also the boss of his family's prostitution ring.
"Xiong Junior, remember me?" Ren asked with a false smile as he took a seat at the counter.
Junior rolled his eyes as his hands wiped down a dirty glass with a dirty rag. "Are there any other Chinese private dicks around here?"
The matter of their shared nationality had led some to associate Ren with the Xiong family, so it was often that he was suspected to be on their payroll.
"Did any of your girls get into trouble last night?" The PI asked.
The bartender froze for a second. Fear and anger flared up but it sputtered out as relief smothered it down. "I do not know what you are implying." And he answered truthfully as a reassured confusion drifted around. He took comfort in his own lack of information. If something did happen, he had no knowledge about it.
"Okay, thank you for the information. It was really helpful." This was also the truth. Since Junior did not know, then that meant the likelihood of a night gal being involved dropped dramatically. Of course, he was not the only pimp in town, but he almost certainly had every East Asian girl in the streets on his leash. In Ren's experience, most of the wealthy white men who were looking for a night of fun went for something exotic to them.
"At least buy a drink before you leave." False sincerity flooded Junior, but it failed to mask the burning hated and the frigid anticipation.
"Sure, surprise me." He slapped down a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, directly onto a sticky spill.
Annoyance rippled through the tall man like waves, anxiety pulsed through him in a display, and with feigned calmness he kept his body language quiet as he meticulously went about serving a drink to the PI.
"Color me surprised you hired a black musician." Ren knew that the current head of the Xiong Family was rather notorious for hating both whites and blacks.
"Yes, well, that boy is quite skilled for a black." Discomfort muddled his mind, and when the cheerful melody harshly missed a note, regret clouded over.
Lie Ren looked over to the trumpet player, currently resigned disappointment was mixing with the dread in his heart. Mixing, as in even the racial discrimination of his boss, wasn't enough to wash away his dread. He still looked young and soft. He probably didn't have enough time in the workforce to develop a thick skin, so even an offhand comment like this should have stung sharply.
"Here you go." An almost certainly poisoned glass of alcohol was placed down in the bar.
"Word on the street is that your old man is close to kicking the bucket." A rather constant rumor that held no credence. "People are whispering that when you are the big boss, you will be expanding, picking up where Slick Shady left his girls." Who was not rumored to be picking up the black girls of the night?
Fear, Junior was filled with barely concealed fear. It almost drowned out every other emotion running through his head. It was obvious that the baseless guess Ren had just made had hit close to home.
He did not know why Junior was surprised. Surely he knew that every would-be pimp out there wanted to gather up the girls left behind. Almost immediately after Slick Shady was shot down by the police after leading them on a chase downtown, even the slowest member of the lamest gang knew a power vacuum had opened up. His drug operation was immediately seized by the Spider Gang. In fact, it had happened so quickly that people started to suspect they had organized the whole thing.
"But what do I know? Please ignore my drunken ramblings. I guess I am just incapable of holding my liquor." Ren stared into Junior's eyes as he spilled the glass of poisoned alcohol directly onto the counter.
He did not care about what happened to Junior or even about what crimes he had done. However, being associated with the Xiong family was a real bother. And the more animosity that was generated between them, the more people would accept that their nationality was all that they shared.
As he got out of his seat and made his way outside, the PI noticed the musician eyeing him with nervous hope. Ren took out his cigarette boxes and subtly waved it outside.
Another hour was wasted today. He was also down to his second to last cigarette, but eventually the dark-skinned man exited from the rear door of the bar. Shock, etc… Clearly, he did not expect that Ren would still be waiting for him.
"Took you long enough." Ren expressed something, a sort of mix between indignation and impatience. As a first direct impression, he did not want to seem desperate for information, even though he had waited for an entire hour. Another matter of small talk being unnecessarily important. After successfully navigating through the emotional minefield of doubt and establishing a bare minimum of trust, the man finally began talking about something important.
"I don't know her real name. She never told me. Her work name was simply Gem." The man who had introduced himself as Flynt Coal, a rather on the nose stage name, began describing his worries. "She didn't seem happy. I know most girls are not, but they at least hid it or acted like everything was okay, but she looked like she was breaking apart every night."
Ren snagged a box of cigarettes from Flynt as he listened to this seemingly pointless tale.
"Her father had taken out a loan with Xiong that he couldn't repay with cash. He was hospitalized and his daughter was forced to work off the debt. Since she was black, most of the other girls shunned her, and she seemed lonely, so I tried to befriend her. And… uh… that was when I learned she was sixteen. I told Junior, and he kicked her out on the spot. He swore to take my fingers if I told anyone." He waved his music playing fingers.
The story was not uncommon, except for her age. In the first place, it was unnatural that the Xiong family would lend money to a black family, and it was even more unnatural that someone would ask the Xiong family for anything. As an organized crime family, they were the cruelest and most ruthless in town. However, underage prostitution was a certain magnitude more severe in the eyes of the people.
The average prostitute, regardless of the reason they were selling their body, was looked down upon for being a whore, however, a child prostitute was universally viewed as a victim by the public. Hookers were easy women looking for a quick buck, and a pimp was simply filling a role, but when children were involved, then that meant the pimp was a predator on the prowl for young meat.
The truth of the matter did not quite register with a lot of people, that pimps were inherently predators. He didn't doubt that the Xiong family had a secret ring of child sex slaves. Junior likely panicked because 'Gem' was working the streets.
"Last night, I overheard Junior talking on the phone. He reassured someone that their debt was taken care of and not to worry about their daughter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to piece together the parts. Something happened and I… I want to know if she's okay."
After taking a long drag of his cigarette, he dropped the bud on the alley floor. "Thank you for speaking to me. I am sure she's fine, and I will let you know if I find her." Then he began walking away. The first step on his investigation was going rather well.
As his car began warming up, he retrieved a notepad from the compartment on the passenger side and began jotting down the important bits of what he had just been told. And as he was flipping through the pages, something caught his eye, a note from a few days ago that he had forgotten about.
Favor for Oscar: Investigate the circumstances regarding the natural(?) death of his grand-uncle Ozpin, Professor of Anthropology at Beacon U.
This matter had completely slipped from his memory, chalk it up to sleep deprivation, but whatever it was, now his schedule was a little more packed today.
Thanks for reading! I'm always open to feedback, so please leave a review, or reply in my forum, about what you liked or hated about this chapter or the whole story. If anyone wants to be a Beta Reader, then PM me and we'll talk details.
I recommend checking out 'The Catalyst' by Essiter1987, if you want another story about a Lovecraftian RWBY mystery. It's pretty good.