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

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[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.

What this meant in more immediate terms was that he couldn't resist a mystery.  Even if it meant playing Sherlock Holmes (or, more honestly, a less middle-aged Jessica Fletcher) for the hidden cameras.  He wouldn't go buy a copy of the NY Times just for the crossword, but on a slow day stuck in the office,it was guaranteed that any stray copies would be rescued and filled with his distinctive handwriting until all that remained were the intersections between 1950s tennis personalities and knitting techniques that required two X chromosomes, three hands, and more patience than Sangamon Taylor had ever been accused of having.

He had an experiment to decant.  But first, time to add a few logs to his cover story.  He commandeered an empty table, a bottle of knock-off Elmer's, and a stack of blank broadsheets, which he proceeded to ribbonize.

[Anon E. Mouse L]

[quarter_english]

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

Given the nature of what was available, it was impossible to muster any real interest in the promised table of snacks, but he hovered near it anyway, pretending to eye the sandwiches as he nibbled idly at the corner of a cracker. He scanned the room for Taylor. If Taylor passed through again, L would see him, then wait a minute or two and follow him to his next destination.

The tediousness of the operation rankled at him, especially after having spent what felt like a few hours in his own space the night before. His feet had been bare on the cold tile; he had worn his own clothes. He had been able to move freely and to use the equipment that he had chosen for his work. If he wanted to delude himself, he could even believe that he had made a step forward in the Kira case. But there was no point in that kind of delusion, and --

There was Taylor, at a distance, being escorted to the Arts & Crafts Room. L took another cracker, holding it as if it were contaminated by something other than a slice of cheese, ate his misbegotten snack with no enthusiasm, then scuffed up to the nearest nurse with a smile that appeared to be about as genuine as it was.

Moments later, he joined his quarry in the room. Taylor was hard at work on a project. L selected a magnetic poetry board and word magnets from the supplies, then perched on a seat at Taylor's table and set the board in front of him. After pushing a few words around with his fingertips, he murmured, "You are Mr. Quincy, yes? I asked the fembots."

His pronunciation of the last word was so precise as to almost be comical.

[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.

S.T. watched him dick around with some kind of reusable memo board slash incomprehensible haiku autogeneration utility. Either he was crazy or a particle physicist, in which case what the fuck did he need a biochemist with a Master's from BU for? Or he'd been born some kind of hyper-intelligent bird and hadn't yet realized human bodies had padding on their asses for a reason. S.T. squinted at him. Naah, just a geek.

Then he finally remembered not everyone could hear his telepathic broadcasts and talked. S.T. answered. "Yeah, that's me." Had to be one of the two from the bulletin, probably the less bitchy one. "You were looking for a biochemist?" At least this one didn't seem to have a hard-on for explosives.

He held up a finger. "One sec." S.T. flagged down a nurse and requested his creation, eyebrows dialed in to painfully earnest. "O.K., shoot."

[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.

The would-be beat poet was still looking for the meaning of life in a bunch of magnets. At least he wasn't sticking them to his third eye. Or he was just playing along; it was hard to tell.

"So if you're looking to dump mind-altering substances in the Head Bastard's hip flask, you've got the wrong guy. Safer just to shoot him." He shrugged. "Analysis and remediation, I'm your man."

Time to light off a trial balloon. There was one major source of toxic waste here, and it wasn't the food. Or the craft supplies. The nurses were traffic-coptering, so he used the PC term. "You looking into the 'sleep studies'?"

[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.

"Yes, precisely." He paused, then sighed, and added, in the driest tone imaginable, "Even if we wanted to poison him, we would have to locate him first. There's no point in getting ahead of ourselves."

There was no way of knowing whether or not Taylor would understand this as a joke. It was true that finding Landel in the flesh would be a first step towards beating him, but L wanted him alive, observable, able to answer questions--restrained enough to ensure the safety of his captors, yet whole enough to begin to right the wrongs he had done.

It looked like the nurse was on her way back, so L kept his next statement vague. "I'm afraid my associate has been troubled by dreams about shellfish." He shifted the position of his fingers on the magnet board, so that instead of covering the two small magnets, they would be underlining the words. With a light tap, he emphasized that he wanted Taylor to glance at them.

Change memory, the board said.

He set about rearranging the magnets before the nurse's arrival.

[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.

Then proximity alerts made the guy clam up halfway through stating the obvious. The tap was entirely gratuitous. S.T. had done his share of cloak-and-dagger, most of it just for the hell of it. This guy didn't leave anything to chance, and he wasn't sure of S.T.'s competency level. Both meant he wasn't ending up on the Christmas card list, but cards were a bitch to recycle. The latter was fixable, and he planned to do just that.

Once the nurse was out of their hair. She finally decided the lull in conversation constituted an invitation and ponied his half-assed maple tree, with all the disdain of a sommelier asked to serve Ripple. By the time it hit the table it was already obsolete. S.T. had seen the letters from across the room. Still, he did have a plate full of pulp to turn back into branches if conversation got dull. "Yeah, thanks." He refrained from making shooing motions at her equally diffident acknowledgment and retreat.

He leaned over to the crossword construction zone. Two schools of words clustered by the edge of the pile, momentarily uneaten. S.T. walked index and middle finger onto two of them (as it happens, heart and journey, which held no relation outside the weeks Top 40), and reversed them. "Any lead on the source?" Dreams. "Tess always blames it on sulfites. Hell if I'm giving up bacon." The latter was said with a tone of fond reminiscence, the sort no-one ever listened to.

"Usually it's something like that." He slid his tree through the second pile, jumbling it further and stacking several magnets on top of each other.