Day 50: Arts & Crafts Room (4th Shift)

[jouer_sans_voir]

It barely felt like she'd been outside for any time at all when the intercom sounded and the nurse came to fetch her. "Can't I stay a little longer?" she asked, but the woman only clicked her tongue and frowned, reaching to feel her forehead as though testing for a fever. "The weather simply isn't good enough, Natalie dear," the nurse said, once

Comments

[toxicspiderman]

Curiosity was a trait the human genome had had a long, involved, love-hate relationship with.  Too much sent entire populations off cliffs in little rafts (before the advent of the internal combustion engine, this was generally a one-way ticket at best).  Too little, and all they were good for were lavish sword and sandal epics long after the Empire had fallen.  Sangamon Taylor was one of the idiots in the boats, a fact he would readily admit.  Sometimes it got him laid.  It also had led inevitably to being fired by Mass Anal and spending his nights knee-deep in toxic waste and his days facing off against talking heads.  So far, it hadn't gotten him killed.  Yet

[quarter_english]

After L left the library, he spent a few quiet minutes in the Sun Room

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. was happily piling mixing up layers of papier-mâché to spackle his image of the model patient when one Grade-A geek surfaced and attempted human interaction. The smarter they got, the fewer normal wavelengths they tuned in to, on average. S.T. liked to think he bucked the general trend. He and Dolmacher balanced each other out -- anyone meeting them thought Dolmacher was the smart one until about two point five seconds after he opened his mouth

[quarter_english]

L waited for Taylor to call the nurse over. Any curiosity he might have felt about Taylor's request was ancillary, unimportant -- the only reason he was intrigued at all was that the little he had seen suggested that Taylor wasn't the art-for-art's-sake type. L himself wouldn't have wanted to speak while the nurse was hovering; he waited for her to pad away.

When she had gone, he kept his voice low and articulate. "Yes. Well -- maybe. It will depend. How familiar are you with toxins, and their possibilities for modification? My specific interest is in those which might have an effect on the human brain and nervous system. It might be more of a medical question, but it's hard to say."

As he asked, he pushed magnets around on the board, without intent. His goal was to look busy.

[toxicspiderman]

"I'm a biochemist. A really damn good one." It was said with only the slightest swagger. Just enough to show he meant it. The results would speak for themselves. "They couldn't pay me to make that crap, but that's only because I have ethics." And a well-honed sense of self-preservation. A lab hood only went so far, especially when one's hypothetical employer was willing to put microbacterial toxin farms in their unfortunately competent-enough employee's chicken salad sandwich to shut him up. He dipped a finger in the glue-water mixture and swirled it around until the emulsion evened out. Yeah, that would work

[quarter_english]

With his fingertips, L slid two magnets down away from the group to form a line of text--one which, for the moment, he kept hidden

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. snorted at the first observation. No shit. He'd skipped the part about the invisible force field, or maybe no-one had read him the riot recap. Story for another day