Day 42, Afternoon: Lil' Tyke Toys

[toxicspiderman]

Sangamon had eaten, caffeinated, didn't need any girly crap, and he'd already ascertained that the bookstore was useless for anything beyond the usual purpose -- namely, providing bored housewives with a rotating selection of paperbacks and cookbooks

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[pleading_ngri]

Some stores seemed more appealing than others, for the purposes of snooping around. In the end, it had come down to a toss-up between the bookstore, the electronics store, and the toy store. Phoenix decided to go with what was closest, since his odds of finding anything useful anywhere in Doyleton probably washed out somewhere around equal.

He hadn't anticipated just how creepy walking through the aisles would be. There wasn't anything major that was wrong with the place, but the absence of household-name franchises, their replacement with ones that he'd never heard of, kept strumming at the same mis-tuned chord way down in his gut. Investigating in the bottom of the retail uncanny valley, he thought flatly, inspecting a package of building blocks. Copyright, plausible date- as far as his admittedly pathetic knowledge of children's toys went, it checked out. He put it back, continuing his circle around the store. If his attention hadn't been caught by the humming of the electric engine, he might not have even looked away from the shelves and realized who exactly was manning the controls.

"S.T." He stopped alongside the display, flashing an intrigued grin at the man on the other side. Surprisingly enough, he didn't seem especially out-of-place fooling around with a toy train (though the picture probably would've looked more complete with a bottle of beer on the table, nestled between the trees like a monument). "I didn't expect to see you here."

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. had located both power boosters purely by ecolocation. One was approximately two-thirds of the way down the tunnel, and the other was at the summit of the lone sculpted hill. Which made a certain sense from a marketing perspective, as it covered any deficiency in locomotive power. But it was unappealing from a philosophical/aesthetic viewpoint.

He'd contemplated (and dismissed) using some of the plastic people to create a tableau implying carnivorous habits on the parts of the box cars. One, it was juvenile. Two, it matched common, mediapathic stereotypes of mental patients. While the bulletin board tended to corroborate them on a daily basis, adding to the bad PR here would be counterproductive. Not if he ever envisioned fantasies of convincing the townies to aid in some sort of protest, zoning-related or otherwise.

The door opened and shut, and then a familiar voice hailed him. He didn't look up from the track, where he was running the train back and forth through the area of maximum slowdown. Back and forth. "Power attenuates with distance -- square of the resistance." The square-law nature wasn't audible, but he was speaking to an audience who could at least be trusted to know basic algebra, so he left it in. "But you have to know where the source is." While he pontificated, the locomotive pulled out of the voltage Sahara and was nearing the tunnel. S.T. shrugged. "It was a shitty metaphor anyways."

He set the control box down and looked up. "I'd been meaning to find you."

[pleading_ngri]

"That's what you said. Well- wrote." S.T. had been vague on the bulletin, but Phoenix preferred it that way. He didn't know for sure the upper limit on how many people in the institute were actively gunning for him, and that didn't take into account opportunistic psychopaths who might've seen personal information and picked at it for their own reasons.

"You have test results, though?" This was just flat-out awkward. Phoenix had asked for forensic results plenty of times, but not in the first person. He was tempted to pick at the synthetic landscape while they spoke - he'd always had this problem with keeping his hands to himself - but in the end decided he didn't want to look any more uncertain than he already was. All the same, he let himself set straight a couple of toppled plastic people by the sideboard, just as likely abandoned there by the last child to play at the table.

[toxicspiderman]

To bend the metaphor well past the point of elastic motion and into the range where it was going to snap and fly off and hit someone in the eye, the train had gone right past awkward and into the territory of serious conversation, no bullshit, prevarication, or propaganda allowed. Even when not talking to walking polygraphs. S.T. could feel a headache gathering in his sinuses, and this time it was only indirectly the fault of the damn needles.

How the fuck did Dr. J do this? Oh, right. He had an underpaid gum-popping nurse drop the bombshells, amid the avalanche of insurance forms and illegible prescriptions.

"Yeah." He'd taken a stack of readings and proved absolutely nothing he hadn't already guessed. He had enough ego left to not assume confirmation bias as Occam's razor. "Custom-targeted neurotoxin for you, triptych of retroviruses for me. All completely plausible and completely fucking impossible at the same time." Either due to time frame or due to the fact that psychic powers lurking in underused portion of the brain was the province of quacks and gullible undergraduates.

"Unless you're secretly Gandalf and the lawyer thing is just the lamest cover story since Boris Badenov left the airwaves." He paused. "You aren't, right?"

[pleading_ngri]

That was less helpful than Phoenix would've liked, and he didn't even try to hide the answering shoulder slump and 'that's it?' look. How vague the results had turned out to be didn't exactly crush him, seeing as nobody's life or criminal record were on the line, but in the end, 'custom-targeted neurotoxin' didn't help him much more than 'magic rock from a little girl.' So much for dramatic breakthroughs into the human experimentation angle.

"I wish. I'd be better in a fight," he replied under his breath, having gotten the gist of the question even if one half of the contained references had zoomed over his head (Boris who? Was that some kind of Cold War thing? Hell, people around his own age weren't supposed to be able to make him feel this young).

"Hold it, you said retroviruses?" That mention piqued his interest, and he zeroed in on the new line of inquiry. He knew it wasn't Landel's etiquette to come right out and start interrogating people about these things, but this was close enough to business that he pushed that aside. Besides, S.T. didn't exactly seem like the type to collapse into a puddle of traumatized angst. "Edgeworth probably told you about me, but what happened to you?"

[toxicspiderman]

"Dragged up there, shot full of crap by a guy who got his bedside manner out of Alice in Wonderland. Stop me if this sounds familiar." He shrugged.

"Hence the field trip. At least what they did to you is guaranteed non-contagious, and the acute damage is all there is. Not bioaccumulative at all." Not directly, though who the fuck knew what the long-term effects of magic exposure were.

Something occurred to him. If Phoenix hadn't talked to Miles, then he needed to back up. Square one, layman's terms. Basic science before the part with scary consequences and pie charts. "Do you know what a neurotoxin is?"

[pleading_ngri]

Another question fired off, along with a backstep, just in case Phoenix had harbored any thoughts about pushing that line of inquiry any further. That was the practiced move of someone who was already used to being questioned, and Phoenix actually bit his tongue, albeit under protest. He was still getting information - that was the important part.

"I couldn't write you a paper on them, but the word roots seem pretty clear. I guess that 'toxin' has a pretty loose interpretation, though, seeing as I'm still functional." He drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, taking the hook of a question mark readily. "You're the scientist, though, so I'd appreciate it if you could catch me up on the specifics."

[toxicspiderman]

"Nerve damage doesn't have to mean total destruction. Brain chemistry is a biochemical Rube Goldberg machine. Touch the wrong wires together and you're toast. Touch the right two and you're high as a kite, man." His standards for acceptable recreational drugs were dropping precipitously.

"But yes, the fact that you're not paralyed, convulsing, or dead is a good sign." His tone would be patronizing, if it weren't laced with enough irony to power a poetry slam. "No, really. Any problems remembering words? Visual hallucinations?"

[pleading_ngri]

"Words? No, nothing like-" Immediately, the straight diagonals of chains came rattling in, defiant of gravity, and his eyes darted to the spot about a two feet in front of him at chest-height, where, sure enough, an ornate lock popped into being with a solid 'clank.' On a hunch, he glanced behind himself, and found a pair of chains crossed behind him, too. Oh well. When he really thought about it, the truth in this case was pretty harmless. At least, it was nothing he minded telling more than he minded trying to stare past a psyche-lock until it gave up and went away.

"Okay, then. This would be the visual hallucination part," he sighed, rubbing at his face before meeting S.T.'s eyes again. "Lies or evasions in response to a question trip it, as far as I can tell. It doesn't matter whether it's me lying or the person I'm talking to. I can describe them better if you want, but I'm going to be honest first, because having these in front of me is kind of distracting." He glanced down again, at where the chains disappeared into the table, just in time to see the train clatter straight through links made of steel as thick as his thumb. It was more fascinating than distressing, but just by a nose.

"In the middle of the procedure, when they-" He paused for a moment, glancing aside and grasping for the right word, and when he spoke again his voice had been lowered to something safely inaudible outside the two of them. "If you saw a long needle in there-" he indicated a rough length between his index fingers, which he knew was probably inaccurate, as he'd mostly glimpsed the things head-on, "That started under my eyebrow and went in past skull, as far as I can tell. Both times that happened, I had some trouble understanding what the doctor was saying for a few seconds. But that's it, and it hasn't happened since."

The lock shattered in a dramatic, tinkling crash, falling into sparkling shards that disappeared as the chains flickered, then hissed back. "There," he breathed, realizing his eyes had once again been tracing shapes through thin air. He promptly returned to the land of sane, normal eye-contact with a slightly resigned smirk. "That's the sideshow."

[toxicspiderman]

"Temporal lobe. Verbal processing unit of the brain. Speech, vocabulary, semantics."

Whatever the sideshow was, it had an audience of one. S.T. hadn't seen anything except the detached expression of someone who'd had enough acid to jump off a high-rise balcony. "And naah, I don't need the blow-by-blow. Unless you think it's important. Hearing about bad trips is almost as boring as sitting around and watching your buddies twitch on the rug without offering to share."

"Okay, here's the deal. If it isn't debilitating, anything we could do here to try to treat it could throw your brain biochemistry off. It's either a miracle or science they're pretending not to have that it didn't already. Probably the latter, based on the -- other evidence. You don't want to try to damp this down with drugs -- anything that will dull the affected neurons would fall into the toxic lobotomy bucket. If -- when you get home, your best bet would be to find out if stem cells have gone from the pipe-dream cure-all to patented and FDA-approved. Let your body heal itself."

The lecture had come out in a rush. All bullet points present and accounted for. All useless. S.T. slumped. It didn't mean a fucking thing when he couldn't do something about it. Either it. Maybe medical science thirty years on could, but that didn't help him. Thirty years of watching cell division Russian roulette. Waiting for a transcription error a little more serious than a transposed phone number.