Welcome to Gaia! ::

It almost wasn't in this case.

He'd read it, of course; he'd read everything, pored over it, aware in some corner of his head that he wasn't exactly in a situation of legal recourse. Deus contracts were a sham, unenforceable; they were nothing but a reassuring facsimile of personal protection, and he knew this. The fact that the entity being protected appeared to be Life Division and not Obadiah Thompson did not make the acknowledgement any more comforting.

It was on his third pass through that he hesitated on that paragraph, H's pleasant little smile flickering in his mind's eye, and his general experiences with Lifers filing past immediately afterwards. He felt that the odds of being assigned someone who could broadly be described as "sane" (even by Island standards) were vanishingly small, and more than anything he wanted someone sane to be there--someone besides himself. No, scratch that last part. Just someone sane to be there. Someone he trusted just enough. He briefly considered Noah, then thought of Peyton and uneasily dismissed the idea.

He hesitated, and then reached for his phone.

He didn't come running, but he did come: delivery, one slightly-sloppy Life trainee with white hair tucked up into a cap, somewhat sleepy-eyed and distracted. It seemed like he always dressed up for Taym, something that might eventually get embarrassing -- jeans that actually fit tucked down into his combat boots, an actually collared shirt, even if it was open over the slightly-too-young grafitti t-shirt he wore underneath, layered coat only slightly-wrinkly on top of it all. Ever still wasn't a confidence-inspiring sight, though, and probably never would be.

Well. Maybe he was to Taym. A scary thought.

Ever trailed the intermediate, uncertain, arms wrapped around the clipboard, oddly quiet in the moment. He'd joke around in text, but here and now, one-on-one...he shot Taym a sideways look as they headed into the room, clutching at his clipboard and with just the right amount of bright-eyed excitement mixed with nerves to put him right at home in the Life labs. But he didn't say anything.

"You will find, Mr. Thompson, that I very nearly always am," H greeted him with a smile before turning to Ever. "Welcome to Sector 14, Ever. I trust you'll do very well down here." The tone this was spoken in was not threatening, but there was a certain confidence in the doctor that gave the statement all the or else it could ever need.

"We normally begin our sessions with a brief physical," his voice carried, and others stilled and grew silent. "Due to our new arrivals," he nodded to the newest clone who refused to look up from where he was fixedly picking at his jeans, "Canary and," and then Taym, "Obadiah Thompson, today we'll be doing a more thorough physical." Ezekiel stared at the two and looked about to bolt until a tech placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"We're ready, sir," Sunny's voice called out right before the nurse poked her head into the room and immediately scowled at Taym. It was a you are such a ******** ******** up scowl.

"Then we'll start with Subject 0," he gestured toward Ever and Taym. "Please follow the lovely Ms Daye to the next room."

Of course the first request was, "Strip."

A person only superficially acquainted with Taym, unaware of the occasionally labyrinthine shape of his neuroses, might have been startled by how unmoved he was by the idea of taking off his clothes in front of Ever, of all people. This was partially because of the presence of the clones close at hand (the distraction, terrifying, of the name Canary); it was partially because both H and Sunny were part of this and he refused to balk in front of them.

Mostly, though, it was because Taym's discomfort with his own body was an awareness of how unattractive it had always been: an object of revulsion to women, a object of mockery for a straight man, an object of pity for pretty much everyone. He had no desire to impress a person who fell into Ever's demographic, and so it was with very little hesitation that he obediently shed his scarf, his coat, and two layers of shirt. The sun-brown, freckled jut of his collarbone suggested that he also had no qualms with his own body if he was alone repairing fences in the middle of the jungle somewhere.

Truth told it was less the object of revulsion it had once been. He was no longer a barely-alive corpse, although he'd also had several weeks to backslide now, and had. It was painful to see that the sharply-delineated shape of his ribcage did not truly subside when he lowered his arms, every curving bone still marked out, and when he turned to (habit) neatly fold his shirt he exposed the startling march of his spine between sharp and angular shoulderblades. Goosebumps rose on the backs of arms whose insides were dotted with meandering lines of old scars although the grey-blue webs inside his elbow had faded nearly to invisibility now; he shivered and trembled like a dog at the sudden air but shot H a defiant look and then, for good measure, extended it to Ever as well.

He stopped there, bare to the waist, apparently seeing no need to go any further.

"Sunny Daye?" he said flatly.

It was doubtful that any of them would wait for him, but that was just fine: Ever had excessively neat handwriting and filled the paper in quickly, trailing when he needed to and otherwise standing out of the way. Maybe he leaned a little, against the wall, and maybe he quirked a smile at Taym when no one else was looking, but...altogether, he focused. This was largely familiar.

Few kids these days learned script, or diagraming sentences. A lot of Ever's education had been somewhat old fashioned, and that served him well here.

He wouldn't make trouble with the bosses here, wouldn't ask questions, but perhaps he recorded them for later, on a sheet of paper low in the stack. Tiny, piled thoughts for later, when he wouldn't get tossed out on his a** for butting in.

"Yes, he chose that name for himself, and he is quite capable of writing," the doctor answered easily. "What is the significance of that name to you?"