Welcome to Gaia! ::

He was, in point of fact, monopolizing an entire table. Reports--a great deal of them carefully censored with rows of black bars--were spread neatly in front of him. He was sorting them by some mysterious criteria into three piles, and occasionally affixing an item in the middle pile with a neon sticky flag.

In one hand he held the page he was currently skimming, and in the other--and this would have startled someone who knew Taym better than Ever, and might even have startled Ever--he held a brownie, of the kind that comes wrapped in cellophane and covered in rainbow candy-coated chocolate chips, although these had been pried out and disposed of prior to ingestion, apparently. He became aware of Ever's presence mid-bite, his eyes sliding over to him without comment, at first. His ear was missing a ragged chunk, the perimeters of the wound bristling with stitches but already--weapon bond--looking almost as healed as a stray cat's catch-and-release mark. Doubtless the ball-chopping comments would plague him for the rest of his life.

He finished chewing--he was eating the brownie like eating a brownie was a chore, like he might gag--and then said, in a tone that was startlingly friendly: "Ambrodiel."

He made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat, turning back to the page. "America Jones," he informed him, "would not go for the ears. Not mine, anyway. I'm pretty sure she's ordering up a month of mourning gowns and black veils for what's already gone."

This wasn't strictly true. There had been cooing. It would have pissed him off, had he not been more or less elated, high on pain and Valium and sex and affection and, most importantly, success. "Had a mission," he said. "Got a little ******** up. It was aiming for my face," he finished, vague and cheerful. "Coulda been worse. How are things, Ambrodiel?"

It was easy to equate homophobia, even Taym's stifled, quiet brand, with the sort of asinine masculinity that would have a man rising up in rage at being flirted with.

For a man afraid of what a person like Ever was because of what it said about himself, it would have been true. But Taym's particular brand of disgust--and disgust was the word for it--was rooted firmly in very secure and uncontested heterosexuality. He shot Ever a mildly irritated glare but didn't otherwise rise to the bait, and it was only partially his good mood. His general cushion of self-confidence was also undented by the insinuation that he was anything less than manful and rugged, goddammit.

"Might want to have a talk about that word with any of the many dozens of lipstick-and-heels wearing women on this Island with far worse scars to show than a little love-bite. If you haven't developed the immunity yet, you will. Almost forget about this one," he added, indicating his throat vaguely, "until I'm off the Island and catch someone looking. No one here does." So the self-deprecation, at least, was still in effect.

"Can't imagine that they have," he answered drily but without offense, peeling off a lime-green flag, affixing it to the corner of the page, and sorting it into a stack before reaching for another. "We can't all be walking around in a cloud of testosterone and brawn and Neanderthal chest-beating," he added consolingly, as if to imply that he did exactly this. Taym's uncanny ability to straddle a line between sarcasm and sincerity (his impressions of H, for example, both satire and alarmingly accurate in the same instant) suggested worrying things about his ability to lie in general.

"Sorting," he said, and maybe in another mood he'd have left it there, snapped. Instead he managed another bite of brownie, looking like he wished he hadn't, before he expounded. "These are reports from FEAR monitoring locations in civilian-populated areas, just things from the past couple of months. These," he indicated one stack, "are a cause for concern but with no actual reports of any substance. These," another, "can be safely disregarded. And these," the stack with the flags, "need looking into and possibly dealing with. There's already teams on most of them. Others have been assessed as non-vital, but that was by people who weren't me and I need work to do anyway. Get a job in the field, Ambrodiel. Makes buying cigarettes easier. What are you doing?" he countered, non-confrontational, not his usual and it better be good or get the ******** out of my way.

"The traditional way," he answered, setting aside the censored report onto the "not a concern" stack and reaching for one with more to go on. "Unbelievable though it may sound, money," he elaborated, in a sarcastic, lecturing tone reminiscent of a soothing 1950s PSA, "can be exchanged for goods--for example a laptop from Best Buy--and services--for example, runic outtfitting."

It was this, finally, that made Taym uncomfortable.

He shifted uneasily, glancing at Ever and then back to the page.

"I don't know," he said. "Depends on what you want. I don't know what kind of s**t you do for online classes and I know ******** about that s**t anyway. Eight hundred bucks?" he guessed, in a tone that did not inspire confidence as to the accuracy of the guess. "For the laptop. And then a couple hundred bucks to get it runic-ready. You're in Life, maybe they won't gouge you."