Continue down the cell corridor.

Grimacing with disgust (or perhaps disguising a twinge of rational fear), Mina recoiled from the cell and its volatile inhabitant. She almost collided with the cell opposite number twelve, letting out a preemptive "Oh!" of surprise. She turned herself about, wiping her shoulders and hips as if the rust and decay of decades' worth of use had soiled her clothing on contact. Her eyes went wide, her brow furrowing in annoyance as the muscular malefactor grappled uselessly with the bars, ranting unintelligible obscenity towards her. She feared his mad barking would alert a guard, but in little time, his face contorted with anguish and he slumped to his knees in pathetic sobbing. Gross, she thought to herself.

Starting to feel rather put-off, Mina continued down the creaking, corroded corridor. She wondered if the heat of the ship's boiler gave rise to the stifling environs in this bleak chamber. The air was very much alive, heaving clotted wafts of invisible breath up and down around her. As if the darkness in the wretched souls of the imprisoned could not be contained within their own damaged minds, the lights overhead crackled dimness at sporadic intervals, buzzing and clicking with the cruel rhythm of a playground sing-song, warning her away. At the end of the next section, Mina espied a trembling shadow trying to make itself as small as possible in the corner of its cell. She wouldn't have noticed had it not been for the panicky shuffling sound of the indistinguishable figure that crouched there. She had an inkling the person was male, although its back was turned to her. Its head was kept hung down against its chest, and it just shivered and trembled like the unstable tectonics of an alien world. Hands clasped over the back of its neck, but she thought its fingers looked like wretched, yellowed claws unbecoming of a tactful and nourished human creature.

Though she'd exhibited worse judgment thus far, she decided to call out to this one as well. "You cold?" The noise to follow was like a mouse being caught in a trap. A stiff thing clasped around her arm and wrenched her back like a greedy, feeding animal. Something between a laugh and a yowl ejected from her voice, and she whirled around to see what had grabbed her.

Officious, rectangular spectacles gleamed at her like watchful cats' eyes in the night. When they lowered, the glare from the light above lost their angle of reflection and she could make out the face of the man now scowling at her with disapproval. He had short, wavy hair of dark, dark brown that was flecked with the occasional gray strand. Still, he didn't look that much older than her, though his lengthy frown wrinkled the pale skin above his taut, jutting chin. The way he stooped forward made Mina think he was slightly taller than she was. He wore a crinkly white doctor's coat over a suit with no tie, and stored numerous pens in his pocket. Her initial thought was this man, despite the semblance of authority he mustered about himself, resembled Dr. Frankenstein's milquetoast little brother.

"These patients are not to be given any outside influence. They are as dangerous as they are despicable. You should not be here!" His voice had a definite accent to it, just to further the stereotype. Though she'd spent her formative years in England, she could not pinpoint his accent any better than German or Swedish. Sometimes it was just difficult to discern a person's origin based on their accent, and she herself could attest to that fact. The two jostled each other about as she tried to break free of him, but he maintained his grip until he was good and ready to let her go.

"Alright, let me go! Who are you?" She regarded him with worse respect than she had shown the odious inmates, glowering at him with eye-popping vexation as though he were in the midst of a tantrum over his bedtime.

Huffing with displeasure, he pulled back his posture, though he still hunched his shoulders forward. "I am Dr. Krous Lerner. I am the psychological administrator for these patients, and it is under my partial authority that they are being transferred to Donovan Sanitarium. And you are risking undoing years of tedious and painstaking therapy."

"So? They're just a bunch of crazies," she said glibly. After a pause, she stepped forward and added, "You're just carting them off to Poveglia or some island or wherever so they'll never be heard from again." Her reference to the infamous Italian island was sarcastic.

The affronted disbelief on Dr. Lerner's face was difficult to wash away, but it was iconic while it lasted. Drawing back to reexamine who he was dealing with here, he seemed nonplussed with her very obvious heat. "I have worked with dangerous patients such as these for nigh my entire career. I know every vile thing they do to themselves. I know every cigarette burn their fathers gave them. I know which dents are from whiskey bottles thrown at them by their mothers. I know which words were playground slurs that haunt them like cursed mantras to this day. I can tell you nightmarish things about their motivations that were stricken from the court records."

Krous twirled a pen around between his fingers as he spoke, then jabbed it towards Mina before he made his next point. "But I also know every tenfold, hyperbole vengeance they enacted upon unwitting innocents. I know why each and every one of these dreaded souls are locked away in here. My signature is one of three on their papers." He leaned closer, his scowl returning as if to impress upon Mina the significance of the forces she was tampering with. "They have told me themselves of the vivid nightmares hitherto unknown to human imagination. Their few survivors now tell me of these same things."

With a cough, he leaned himself back and readjusted his glasses, shoving his pen and hands into his pants pocket. "So I would implore you," he said, now adopting an unsettling casual idiom, "To shoo along back to your cabin, or I must file a complaint to your father that the only mistake he's ever made is in allowing a civilian to test the fractured psyches of these prisoners."