Welcome to Gaia! ::

The doorway led to a large office and several more halls, which compromised of many other doorways. A blonde hunter in coveralls was carrying boxes labeled FEAR CANDY stacked high and wobbling slightly. A wobbling that increased perilously when somebody just had to call out and startle her, "What...shitshitshitshitshit...do you...nonono...want?" The voice belonged to Clarice, for once without her cloak and clipboard.

Boxes no longer blocking her vision, Clarice raised her eyebrows in surprise. A trainee being all helpful without being asked? She remembered this one too, from the Deathsweeper Test video. It was the first time a candidate had crawled out of a piranha pool. Clarice's answer to this was to simply add more piranhas, but she's glad to see her help for the day was someone who could handle a little biting. "Excellent! We'll be feeding the some of the minor FEAR manifestations, also known as minipets. This is what they eat...we're still trying to figure out how to reproduce them ourselves, but at the moment we still have to ah...import them."

But not enough biting to actually get the job done, so don't hold a grudge okay?

Nudging a door with a sign announcing it to be The Petting Zoo, the two were greeted enthusiastically by some of the minipets in tanks. Most ignored them, some peed in a very pointed manner. Noticing one, Clarice's nose scrunched up, "They're charming. Really." She was so going to try and get the trainee to clean up the cages, no lie. "Yeah, the Halloween critters do so love their...smaller critters. Doesn't it strike you as odd? A dragon having a pet dragon? Or maybe it's the equivalent of people who own pet chimpanzees, though I always found that odd as well..." the assistant's voice trailed off and she frowned, one of the more humanoid minipets catching her eye. So creepy. It was almost like having a bunch of tiny, oddly dressed human children around staring mutely at you. Or dolls...the doll pets were so wrong on so many levels.

"Just drop in one candy per cage. Recently one of the older ones did this slightly epic transformation, and so these guys are on an increased feeding program to see if anything else Ascends as well." Just please not the dolls. "You can skip over any doll-like ones, though." That's right doll pets. Ascension denied.

"Oh...a lot of the fish ones died in a failed breeding program. But most of the rest are still about, we've gotten a lot better at keeping them alive recently." Clarice hoped that this was at least slightly reassuring to the trainee. Life Hunters...they saved lives. Sometimes. Minipets, division leaders, trainees...all still alive due to the ever reliable Life Division. Sometimes.

"Just one, it's a bit of FEAR in a compact, simplified form. But the dolls...do not need any. Regular dolls are bad enough, but these ones move. They're good at it too, they'll stay still while you watch them and then shift positions while you aren't looking. It's like being in a crappy B-horror movie," she paused to consider this for a moment, "...which in all honesty, covers a lot of things hunters get to do."

Considering this, Clarice had to agree, 'Wasn't my idea but the doctor does like to cultivate a certain atmosphere of do not want in the labs wherever possible." She tapped the glass of a creepy doll in a box and squinted. Yeah, I know what you're about, you.

"All you would have to worry about with a Caelius doll is your hair care products, " she continued, thoughtlessly parroting her superior's words. She caught herself guiltily and then glanced over at Ariane, she probably wouldn't mention it to him. Probably. But...she wouldn't be mentioning the piranha's to the other woman anytime soon. "A doll of the doctor, though..."

A glazed look of dawning horror followed this horrible line of thought.

"Oh, sorry, I'm Clarice. I..." build traps and defenses, "...make things." Like the ones that fake-killed you, "And occasionally act as H's personal gofer. He's basically just a hedonist whose only happiness, beyond aspirations to godhood and proving his own superiority, is making other people miserable."

Accurately describing his personality wasn't an issue, if he was listening in, and there was always a chance that he was, he'd probably feel smug about her description. But looks? Men could be so sensitive about their looks. "He looks..." like a criminal? Like the sort of doctor that leaves you in a tub of ice with a confiscated kidney? "Kind of rugged. Like...like..." She absently tossed a candy to something made of slime and god-awful, trying to think of some male archetype to refer to.

A cowboy? Too...rural.

A fireman? Too appealing.

A detective? Too law-abiding.

A terrorist? Too accurate.

Clarice was at a bit of a loss.

The assistant was about to deny having much to do with the pendant design, but froze at the mention of using one in an ambush. "That's good to know, I'd hate to dent his ego, and it's not like he actually looks like a monster or anything," he just acts like one. "But what...ambush exactly?" She asked carefully, "There's a few gaps and mismatches between some trainee reports versus some of the hunter and tech reports." The doctor had yet to bother explaining the reasons to her, but he was in something of a fuss over it.