Ryuji stumbled out of the elevator and into the Sink, paler than he used to be, visibly damaged, and bleeding profusely from a leg wound.

"Goodness gracious, sir," the CIU greeted him. "What has occurred? Mines, perchance?"

"No, in Y-17…" Ryuji said, limping into the main room, leaning against the wall throughout, "a bunch of these… tin cans with buzzsaws and fire and green stuff."

"Their official designation is 'Mr. Orderly', I believe. They are based on the Mister Handy mode-"

"Who gives a crap," he hissed, digging through his pockets. "I'm just happy… the building had the teleportamagic thingie by the entrance." He pulled out a holotape labeled 'Sink Auto-Doc backup' and showed it to the CIU. "Where do I put this thing in?"

"If sir loads it into my holotape slot, I can transfer the data and activate the Auto-Doc."

Ryuji had the tape in before the CIU finished the sentence. The lights on the top and bottom of the machine by the wall lit up, and a voice came out from a loudspeaker somewhere: "Well, whaddaya know, the Auto-Doc's back on-line." The voice had a bit of a southern accent to it, and sounded somewhat groggy, like whatever was in charge of the machine was just woken up. "And not a moment too soon." The machine's door swung open, revealing a small chamber with assorted articulated appendages inside. "Get in, I'll patch you up."

Ryuji would've probably hesitated to enter it, if not for the ever-growing bloody stain on his trousers. He stepped in, and the door slammed himself behind him. He felt something gently restraining his limbs and neck and heard a sound like a dentist drill spinning up. There was also a little prick in the lower regions, and he found himself going numb from the waist down.

"You won't… remove my brain again, will you?" he asked over the whirr.

"I don't believe you own one anymore, as far as I can tell," the Auto-Doc replied.

"Oh, bite me." Beat. "Wait, are you being literal?"

"Yep."

"Ah, sorry. I'm a bit slow now, 'cause of all the lost blood."

"No worries, kid. I have an onboard hematoreplicator, you'll get it replaced. Be positive?"

"I'll try."

"I'm asking for your blood type. The auto-check says B-positive, but the procedure says to confirm it with the patient if they're conscious."

"B, I think?" Ryuji said, unsure. "If your doodads say it's positive, it's probably that."

"Very well then, a few more seconds…" The door suddenly opened and the restraints on Ryuji's limbs were released. His lower half was still numb, so he stumbled on his feet a bit and needed to lean against the Auto-Doc for support. "The numbness will subside shortly, I used a bit too much anesthetic, I suppose."

Unrestrained, Ryuji walked (well, tripped) out of the machine and glanced down – the wound was gone. The only reminder of it was a hole in his pant leg and the drying blood. "So, uh, do you have a limit on how much you can fix and how often?" he asked the machine.

"Not to brag, but I'm sure I'd bring back a stiff if they were fresh enough," the Auto-Doc replied. "As for how often… well, there are some limits on the replication of things like stimpak fluid, but unless you'll require my services a few hundred times a day, don't worry about it."

"Great," Ryuji wiggled his leg to see how well he could control it; the sedative was slowly wearing off. "Thanks. I really appreciate it."

"Don't mention it, kid, that's what I'm here for."

"If I can make a suggestion, sir," the CIU spoke up, "a stimpak might be a more convenient solution than retreating to the Sink every time sir gets grievously wounded."

"A what now?" Ryuji asked.

"The simple version is," the Auto-Doc chimed in, "it's potent medicine in a syringe. Inject it in your body and your wounds will heal much faster for a few seconds. It wouldn't fix serious wounds too well like I just did, but it can give you a bit more time to get proper treatment." Beat. "You can also take ten at once, it should mostly heal you up."

"Maybe I could buy one for now." Ryuji reached into a pocket and pulled out a fistful of bullets he had scavenged here and there. "Can I barter with these?"

"Please place them on top of my chassis."

Ryuji did as instructed, putting all the bullets he had on himself on top of the CIU. They got teleported away, and a weird-looking syringe with a bunch of bottle caps of change appeared in their place. The syringe had a glass barrel encased in a metal chassis, an exposed sharp needle, and some kind of unreadable meter attached to the plunger. Ryuji picked it up and gently spun it around in his hands. "Uh, shouldn't that needle be covered or something?"

"I believe the consideration when designing it was rapid administration to wounded personnel."

Ryuji carefully put it in his shirt pocket, so that the needle pointed away from his body. "And there's no, like, side effects to that?"

"Well, you might need to eat a bigger meal later, but that's better than bleeding to death, now, is it?"

"If you put it that way…" Ryuji turned to the Central Intelligence Unit. "Moving on, CIU… can I just call you U?"

"I do believe the third letter of the acronym would cause unnecessary confusion," the CIU replied. "The first one doesn't come with such a burden."

"Got it, C," Ryuji nodded. "When I was out there, I found some kinda hideout. Can you show me the map again?" The map materialized in front of Ryuji. He circled the unit until he was able to notice the cave from earlier. "Right here. Based on what your primer told me, it was too organized for a lobotomite to do."

"Most interesting," the CIU remarked. "The data I have downloaded during sir's absence included the footage from the surveillance cameras scattered around the complex. Not that long before sir's arrival, there were three other newcomers in the facility. I believe two of them briefly took shelter in the cave sir had visited."

"Three newcomers, huh? And where are they now?"

"Well, since none of them had undergone the brain extraction surgery, as far as I am aware, they have probably left the facility without problems, since the perimeter fence did not work on them."

The disappointment Ryuji felt at that moment was palpable. "Kuso," he cussed.

"Sir appears dissatisfied. Did sir hope they would be more useful for sir's escape plan?"

"Escape? Why would I want to escape?" Ryuji tried to sound convincing, but his frustrations overrode his acting skills. "Naah, I love this madhouse. I love dodging grunts with scrambled brains armed with machine guns, walking into a random building, and losing five liters of blood to a floating tin can with a buzzsaw."

"Five liters is the standard amount of blood in adult humans," the Auto-Doc commented. "Since you were able to walk in, just barely, you didn't lose more than two, maybe three."

"Yes, thank you, this is very useful at the moment."

The CIU ahemed. "I think sir should know," he said, in a barely audible voice, "I come with pre-programmed loyalty to the user – that is, to sir. My protocols say absolutely nothing about the head researchers."

"Like I'll believe that, C," Ryuji grumbled.

"It is the truth," the CIU replied. "Sir should keep in mind that I was programmed by Doctor Mobius, and even before he parted ways with the others on less-than-amicable terms, he maintained a degree of independence from Doctor Klein and others."

Ryuji said nothing, merely giving the round base in the center of the room an unsure look. Finally, he said, in a whisper, "...my friends are out there, somewhere. And maybe they think I'm an idiot, but I don't want them to get hurt. Or worse."

"I understand, sir. While the means of escape the other visitors have used are inaccessible to sir, retracing their steps might prove educational in some form." The CIU displayed a still depiction of a figure in motion, seemingly an old man in tattered dark blue robes, with some futuristic-looking energy weapon in his hands. "This one in particular broke out of the Think Tank restraints, damaging Doctor 8 in the process, and managed to utilize the technology stored in the facility for his own ends. Inspecting the encampments he had left behind might offer sir some useful insights."

Ryuji was hesitant. "How many of these encampments are there?"

The CIU displayed the map of the area and three markers on it – one northwest of the dome, one east and a bit north of it, almost completely north of his current position, and one in the north east of the crater, almost at the edge of it. A red line went through those points in that exact order, before going to a train tunnel and trailing off into the distance.

"There is one in Little Yangtze, one near the Signal Hills transmitter, and one near the north train tunnel. After that he remotely hijacked the locomotives operating in the facility and caused a large-scale incident that gave him both an opportunity to escape and a pathway towards the outside world, since one of the trains created a tunnel by ramming into a wall."

"Sounds like, uh, whatever's the opposite of a French exit." A thought appeared in Ryuji's brain/coils. "Wait, Little Yangtze sounds like an ethnic district. You've got some Chinese people there?"

"Not… quite…" The CIU scrambled to come up with a polite way of phrasing things. "It, um, used to be a… an internment camp for Chinese-American citizens."

That just raised further questions. "Uh, why was there an internment camp for them?"

"My data banks are incomplete on the topic," the CIU replied, "but as far as I can tell, It was established based on the President of the United States' Executive Order 99066, issued during the Resource Wars."

"The what now?"

"The Resource Wars, sir," the CIU repeated. "A bloody war between the United States and China between 2052 and 2077; both powers clashed to control what few precious natural resources remained on the planet."

Everything after the date range just bounced off of Ryuji's skull. "2077? Then what year is it now?"

"Two thousand two hundred and eighty-one, common era, sir."

Ryuji tried to react to that, but when he opened his mouth, no words came out. He had follow-up questions, but feared the answers, so he didn't ask them. If the war ended two centuries ago, he thought to himself, the camp must be empty… wildlife and lobotomites aside. "Let's move on," he proclaimed, displaying his sonic emitter to the console. "I need a better weapon. Or at least one that fires the moment I pull the trigger and not one second after."

"It got you through the Y-17," the Auto-Doc proclaimed.

"It didn't," Ryuji retorted. "I fired it three times, and then just gave up and ran past the bots. Did a few circles around the room to find the holotape. One of the robots nicked me on my way out."

"Regrettably, the commissary has nothing to offer besides another Sonic Emitter unit. Sir could scavenge a weapon in one of the other buildings, or failing that, a dead lobotomite."

"How do I reach another building or…" he shuddered, "kill another living breathing human without a weapon then, huh?" Ryuji retorted.

"Sir could use the already activated transportalpondation beacons to-" He stopped, for precisely a second. "If I could suggest a stopgap solution: sir has activated the beacon near Higgs Village, correct?"

"I activated the one by X-2, the one by Y-17, and the one close to some warehouse hangar thing between the two."

"That is the one, yes."

A hologram of said warehouse hangar thing – a massive building made out of concrete and glass, with sheet metal on the roof and reinforcing the walls here and there – appeared on the CIU. The outer walls disappeared, revealing its interior – six small detached houses encircling a fountain.

"Since it is separated from the rest of Big Mountain by blast doors," the CIU explained, "there are no hostiles inside it, leaving sir free to scavenge. And I know that somewhere in there sir can locate a personality backup holotape for the jukebox, which will allow sir to install different samples on sir's Sonic Emitter. Such change will not make it fire faster, but it will increase the damage it deals… though it might use more power in the process, facilitating more frequent reloads."

"I'll buy more ammo then," Ryuji muttered, noticing another catch. "The jukebox won't have any samples installed by default though, will it?"

"Two of them can be found in Higgs Village as well," CIU replied. "I would not send sir on a pointless escapade."

"Hm." Ryuji mulled it over for a moment. "You know, this almost sounds like a plan. Get more juice in the sound gun, then see what the previous visitors left behind. I can work with that."

"Best of luck," the CIU proclaimed. "If sir would spare a few caps, I could restore sir's trousers before sir departs."

Ryuji glanced at the torn and bloodied fabric on his legs. "Yeah, that sounds good."

The center dome has two teleportation doodads available – one near the entrance, and one on the balcony.

After observing the area near Higgs village for fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the lobotomites in the area to collectively look elsewhere, Ryuji activated the teleportation doodad. In a blink of an eye, he found himself back near the hangar, in the vicinity of the only point of entrance – blast doors wide enough to fit a truck. Before anyone could spot him, he quickly spun the crank in the front to open it, dived in, and sealed it behind himself.

He was on a metal scaffolding, overlooking the suburbia he had seen on the holograms before. The interior was a few meters below the ground outside, lit up by the light coming from the hangar windows. On the lowered base stood six detached houses, encircling an inexplicably-still-operational fountain. Around the houses were lawns and trees; while they could've used a trim here and there, you really couldn't call them overgrown. And yet, the air, the dust, the stillness and quietness of it all told Ryuji that nobody visited this place in decades. Or perhaps centuries.

The scaffolding's other end was a steel staircase leading down. There was no path leading away from it, it just ended on a patch of ground between two of the houses, next to a white picket fence, in case the suburbia theming wasn't laid on thick enough. Ryuji descended the stairs and walked up to the fountain, then circled it to get a good look at the buildings. While identical in broad strokes, he was able to spot the subtle differences, like the barely readable house numbers on the wooden front doors. 101, 102, 103, 10…8? 8 was that mute brain in a floating jar, and the loud brain said something about sound being his thing. Deeming it as good of a lead as any, Ryuji entered the house.

There was no antechamber on the other side, just something in the shape of a living room, with a couch, a few armchairs, a jukebox and a coffee table. The dirty windows were letting in enough light to make things visible without eye strain, and so Ryuji took in the sights – the peeling wallpaper, revealing a large part of the wall, the eight still clocks hanging above the staircase, the eight picture frames on the side, with whatever was inside too damaged to perceive, and the multiple pairs of gray speaker horns on the walls emitting some kind of white (?) noise. There were a few bottle caps rattling around, and a carton of cigarettes in a box in the corner, that Ryuji grabbed to sell once he got back to the Sink.

The only other room on the lower floor was a kitchen, with nothing worth remarking on – or at least nothing that wasn't present in the living room, like kitchenware arranged in eights on the cupboard, a ham radio on the table, and another pair of speaker horns on the wall. After checking it out, Ryuji slowly walked upstairs, the steps creaking with every movement. Upstairs was a waiting room of sorts with a couch, and two doors – one leading to the office, and one leading to the bedroom.

Ryuji walked into the office first. It was cluttered with all sorts of audio equipment scattered on the floor, on the broken shelves and on the desk. Between the latter two stood a filing cabinet with a few caps and more cigarettes in it. After looting it, Ryuji turned back to the desk. Among the odds and ends on top of it, he spotted a by-now-familiar thin square frame of a holotape. He picked it up and checked the label. It read 'Sink Project – Jukebox'.

"Nice," Ryuji said, pocketing it. "Now to find an audio sample."

Done with the office, he went to the last room of the house, the bedroom. There were two more jukeboxes in it, identical to the one downstairs. One was standing in the corner, the other was lying on the ground next to a toolbox – the previous inhabitant probably tried to fix it or take it apart, and then other concerns came up. In the furthermost corner from the entrance stood a queen-sized bed, above it another bloody pair of speaker horns, and by it, a nightstand with a stack of papers on it and a holotape on top of the stack. Ryuji picked it up and inspected it in his hands. It was labeled 'Audio Sample – Opera Singer'.

"Jackpot," he whispered, sticking the tape in another pocket. "Right, I got what I came for…" he muttered to himself, glancing at the metal box by the standing jukebox. He emptied its contents on the floor and put his loot in it. "Might as well go through the other five houses while I'm at it…"

The houses were similar enough on the inside. Let us just focus on the distinct features each of them had.

The upper floor of house 104 was split between a spacious bedroom with a few sets of clothes and creepy-looking mannequins and what, to Ryuji, looked like a sort of mini-catwalk for a mini-fashion show, overlooked by ten or so teddy bears, each placed on a stool facing the show. There was also a weird-shaped pink submachine gun on the bed, with a decal of a big-breasted chibi woman in a blue-and-yellow bodysuit unzipped to her waist, and writing in his native tongue – 怒っているワイフ, best translated to English as 'Angry Waifu'. Ryuji put the SMG in his box of loot, but didn't look forward to trying it out – it seemed more complicated to use than the Sonic Emitter, and his masculinity was fragile enough to be bothered by the color palette.

House 00 was as much of a mess as the numbering convention. Books and debris were scattered on the ground everywhere, there were two disabled or damaged robots stored inside, one on the lower floor and one on the upper, the bathroom had its bathtub disassembled and put against the wall to make space for some crackling generator or transformer or whatever, and in lieu of a bedroom there was a dirty mattress leaning against a wall, supporting a tipped-over bookcase from falling to the floor. Other things of interest included a painting of some guy in his 40s or 50s with knives embedded in it, and another holotape with an audio sample – 'Giant Tarantula'. "[Sounds more intimidating than an opera singer,]" Ryuji muttered as he stashed it away for later use.

House 101 was… well, 'well-maintained' would be a stretch, but it seemed decently preserved in comparison. There was a decently-stocked bar in the living room. Ryuji considered trying a wine tucked underneath the counter, but the moment he opened the bottle, the room was filled with the unmistakable scent of vinegar. He poured everything down the toilet, thinking about why houses 108 and 104 didn't have bathrooms. In the office on the upper floor, overlooked by a twitching eye on a monitor, he found another holotape, labeled 'Sink – Book Chute'. On his way out, Ryuji realized there's a massive flag hanging over the front door. It looked like the flag of the United States, but instead of whatever number of stars it should have, it had twelve stars in a circle around a thirteenth.

"[Weird. Did America join Europe or something?]" Ryuji asked himself when leaving.

102 was completely trashed, with debris on the floor and the furniture haphazardly tossed around. There was plenty of computer equipment in the living room, the office, and the bathroom, some antique-looking machines that Ryuji couldn't make heads or tails of. Other than the usual bottle caps, bullets and other doodads, the only loot of note was a few dozen or so boxes of 'Mentats', thin rectangular tin boxes with some breath-mint-esque candy rattling inside. Ryuji put as many of them as he could in his box and left.

103 looked… normal. Well-ordered, with everything in its place. There were two things that stood out in it – one was the bird cages of various sizes scattered across the house, and the other was a locked door on the lower floor. Ryuji lacked Akira's lockpicking skills, so he just shoulder-bashed it open, and tumbled down a flight of stairs into the basement.

"[Ow, ow, ow,]" he grumbled at the bottom, picking himself up. He then finally registered what else was in the room. "[...oh.]"

The basement was filled with empty cages, big and sturdy enough to fit in a reasonably big dog. In the middle of it were two tables, covered in blood splotches with all sorts of knives scattered around… was one of them a butter knife?! There was also a large scrap of hide on one of the tables and what looked like a one-handed chainsaw on one of the shelves. Ryuji picked it up and inspected it, morbid curiosity overriding self-preservation. "[I… I think I should go. That's the last house anyway.]"

He ran back upstairs and shoved the one-handed chainsaw in the now-somewhat-overflowing loot box. He then picked it up and left the house, then the hangar itself. There were some lobotomites in the distance about to spot him, but he activated the telethingy beacon and was back on the Sink Balcony in the blink of an eye.

"[Right,]" he said to himself, walking to the door to the Sink. "[That went well.]"

A/N:

Angry Waifu added by ZL Armaments Remastered.

Also, I didn't mention it here, but I've started a TvTropes page for the fic. FF dot net doesn't like links, but you can find it easily :P