Welcome to Gaia! ::

As ideal as the seclusion and privacy of the underground lab was, devoid of many of the annoyances that the shared spaces of the main expanse of laboratory rooms seemed to inherently possess, it had its own particular difficulties. One of these was the severe lack of options in regards to the mobility of necessary specimens; carrying a single plant or minipet into the field and down beneath the earth's surface was fairly simple, but anything more required both assistance and ingenuity.

A temporary portal would have been nice, she'd thought, but that possibility required Lucky's assistance, and her present company was certainly not Lucky.

"It will be like opening presents. Halloween presents," Mimsy enthusiastically explained, giving Robert a kiss on the cheek before she stepped away from him to attend to the myriad of specimens. All of them had been collected for her use, but she had provided no specifications - it truly would be a series of surprises, packaged in carriers and boxes of samples. They had both carried these surprises to their final destination, but it was fair to say that one of them had done the majority of the work. And it was not her.

"This should not take long," she assured him, already depositing a leaf-shedding treefox into its new cell of a home. It stared miserably out into the room through the clear barrier, tinted a faint blue in the glow of runic energy. "And I have prepared another surprise for you! I will show you immediately afterward."

The last surprise had gone so well, after all, that she looked similarly excited when she informed him of this one. Her wide eyes lingered on him, waiting to take note of his reaction before she could continue on.

The specimen in the box must have been especially intriguing, Mimsy resolved, to command attention above the mention of a surprise. In spite of this, there was no hint of anger or irritation in her expression as she crossed the room towards him, and only mild wonder once she reached him. This was certainly a reasonable cause for distraction.

She rest her head on his shoulder as she peered into the box, and snorted at the sight of the creature that had elicited the request for gloves.

"Oh, how intimidating. I motion that we should have no contact with it entirely! Annihilate it at once. Are you frightened of its secretions? So frightening. It would be a terrible shame for my prime specimen to become contaminated," she teased, but turned to retrieve a pair of goggles from a hook on the wall nonetheless. After fishing two pairs of gloves from one of her coat pockets, she handed the requested safety materials over to him, and began to put on her own.

But she'd been watching him, even as she moved to collect these things, and there was something more undeniably intriguing than the creature itself - something behind his eyes that she wanted to poke, itching to see how he responded. As patient as she could be, curiosity always had a way of expediting that.

She leaned in close to him again, one hand resting with gentle pressure against his arm, fingers curling affectionately into the fabric beneath them.

"What do you want to do to it?" she asked, voice low and fractured beneath her restraint.

Despite her general lack of personal experience in regards to the effects of salt on a slug, Mimsy knew exactly what would happen. It was a simple effect, and resulted in what she imagined to be a particularly messy demise, but it was not one that she would have categorized as 'gruesome'.

She opted against asking why he chose such an adjective in favor of watching him jab his finger into the slug-shaped blob of FEAR that was the minipet, largely because she really liked seeing this. It was difficult to determine if the relentless prodding was hurting it in any way - she had yet to gauge a pain threshold in the non-sentient FEAR creatures, and could only surmise that they felt some semblance of pain when they reacted in the way that a pained animal might.

Which was where her relevant definition of 'gruesome' began to arise. Mammals had a much stronger tendency towards a pitiful, undignified demise, and the sounds they could emit in that downward progression were disgusting even to her at times (albeit nowhere near enough to cause her to dislike any part of it). She supposed that this was some portion of the reason that admitting their death at her hands tended to earn a very bad reaction, and it was exactly those reactions that deterred her from drawing attention towards her difference in opinion now.

A little giggle broke the hush of her voice at Robert's mockery of the slug, and her eyes, which had become progressively more glossy in her immersion of the moment, returned their focus solely to him.

"Well? Are you going to help it?" She tilted her head, closely resembling a child who was eager to know the next actions of the valiant hero in her bedtime story. "Or...would you like to show me your experiment? I have never seen what you have described, but it sounds fascinating to witness, and I may recall some minimal rations of salt in one of the rooms. I think that you have developed a very clever and informed hypothesis that would be undeniably helpful to our research."

The distractions might have worked well to temporarily deter a kiss from him, but not from her. It was carefully timed and notably lacking in brevity, and as she pulled away to look at him again, her hope to sway his attention towards her again was particularly apparent.

His proclamation was a formidable attempt at a statement of scientific nature, and Mimsy stifled another giggle, lest she deter him from making further progress in structuring his sentences; she remembered exactly how many insistent requests it had taken to reassure him over his appearance in glasses, and had no intention of ever repeating that particular variety of back-and-forth again.

Not a second was wasted after the nudge he gave her before she slipped out of his arms and disappeared into one of the corridors. She found it a bit endearing, really, that he could be excited enough to believe that she would need any additional encouragement to perform an experiment. Thankfully, the packets of salt were just where she remembered them, if a bit crusty at the edges with water damage, and she quickly returned with a look of pride that did not really suit the retrieval of table salt.

"Your materials, project leader," she announced, extending the handful of packets towards him. "And your specimen is as prepared as it may ever be, I presume, unless you have a suggestion that I have not taken into consideration, so...I will act as directed, as is necessary for this process! How should we proceed?"

She took a deep breath and exhaled through a smile as she took note of every little detail - which had less to do with the minipet, and more with the specific moment in its entirety. Alone in the closest thing to a secret laboratory she would ever oversee, with her acting lab partner, who was her very own husband, seconds from potentially extinguishing all signs of life within a creature in the name of scientific progress.

This might have been the most thrilling game yet.

Considering the fact that the packets of salt had been abandoned in the underground facility for (presumably) as long as it had been abandoned, it was not anywhere near fit for human consumption. Combining exposure to elements with salt's property as a desiccant, that fact was readily apparent to Mimsy, and she assumed that it would be apparent to Robert as well, especially once the rigid containers of paper were in his hands.

But she was wrong.

Though she flinched at the contact of the salt and his tongue, she raised no question or commentary - she had identified him as the project leader only a brief moment ago, and interjecting so soon might provide the wrong impression. And there was a chance, however minimal, that he knew what he was doing. Maybe.

As he proceeded, it seemed that he really might, in fact, have some sort of passable expertise here. The implications of that notion caused her skin to prickle with goosebumps, and she breathed out into a quiet, awkward laugh as she nodded her head.

"Yes, I am," she confirmed, her voice a trembling shadow of the stable, reverent tone that she generally used in this setting. She held her breath as he applied the single grain of salt to the specimen, and continued to hold it as she waited for any signs of the reaction. This was where patience was a valuable virtue, and she was prepared to set the creature aside for a minimum of several hours to study any gradual changes - except there was nothing gradual at all about Robert's next step in the procedure.

As the small cloud of partially dissolved salt particles settled over the slug's form, she turned to raise a brow at him.

"Your eager and rapidly-escalating approach to achieving what you desire has some continuity in your methodology, I see." She shifted to lean against him as her eyes returned to the minipet. "Though I find it important to clarify that this is not classifiable as 'nuclear', it appears that Experiment B may be a success."

Unlike a typical slug, it didn't seem to be expelling all of its hydration at the points of salt contact. The surface of its head was, however, becoming somewhat slack, and it had begun to emit an erratic cacophony of sounds that implied it did not like this.

The corners of Mimsy's lips quirked upward into a small, earnest smile at the sight of his reaction. This was a specific, perfect sensation, a moment of wonder that not everyone had the opportunity to experience. Watching it happen with him was its own pleasant sensation, unlike the sense of wonder on its own - not better, but a different rush of energetic euphoria that encouraged her to want to press for more.

She opened her mouth to debate the validity of the use of the word 'swim' in this context, considering its closer physical relation to land than sea slugs, until the fact sunk in that she had just witnessed a reaction that she had never seen before, just as he had. Who could say that it would not swim out in some capacity, until it didn't?

"I don't know." The response had come in a breathless sort of way that implied she truly didn't. Her eyes met his, and were filled to the brim with a glimmer of excitement, of anticipating the part of this where they got to discover that answer.

"I don't know," she repeated, handing over the remaining 'materials' so hurriedly that she struggled not to drop them. "Do it! Do it now!"

'Freaking out' didn't exactly cover what was happening, Mimsy thought, but it would have been a fairly accurate assessment of its general reaction if it had not been doused in salt. Either the very angry at the food additive itself, and had activated some sort of defense mechanism, or she had just been provided with more useful data concerning a minipet's pain threshold.

Whatever the answer happened to be, she was very clear on one observation: Robert was enjoying this. The fascination of the new discovery had shifted its course, and had given way to something else. Something she often encouraged, yet rarely saw.

She was so enamored in this instant that she could not find the words to question his mercy, but it took only a moment longer to learn that she shouldn't have questioned it regardless. He'd lured it into a confident security. He'd tricked it into its own demise.

He did know what he was doing.

"I love you," came spilling out before she knew what she was doing, while her eyes danced between him and the withering creature. It both looked and sounded very much like a deflating balloon, from what she could surmise without removing the salt, and it would have been comical if the circumstances were any different.

"I..." She stopped to clear her throat in an effort to compose herself. "I think that it may be dying. Are you going to help it? Or..."

The heavy-lidded glance that she directed towards him was notably different from the look that accompanied the same question a short time ago. It still showed every ounce of her interest in the answer, but it no longer looked like she was interested in the actions of a hero.

This was the best kind of story, and it only took that single word to prove it. Mimsy's lips parted into a grin to meet his, one unequivocally cheshire in nature, and an inward sound of contented delight escaped from her throat.

The slug would meet its end at their absent hands, and there would be data to collect, samples to take, and theories to record, but not now. Not yet.

"I need--I need to--your, um--" she stammered, her hands a physical reflection of her repeated inability to grasp the thoughts that were all darting past her and into irrelevance, fingers snatching up partial handfuls of his clothing and releasing them just as quickly again.

"Come here." The command was a strange one, considering how closely she was already pressed against him, but it was all she could manage in her efforts to convey what she wanted to. She wriggled just enough to touch the tips of her toes to the floor again, removed her gloves, and began to tug on his shirt to pull him forward, clumsily stumbling backwards in her very inefficient attempt to reach one of the adjacent rooms.

What was meant as an incentive to finish the work had been rapidly repurposed, and the surprise now firmly occupied a different place of importance in the remnants of her plans. She persevered until her back hit the door with a light thud, then closed her eyes and exhaled sharply before looking up at him again.

"This is for..." Realizing that she was obscuring the one detail that could speak for itself, she moved away from the center of the door. The tag on its surface that had been hiding behind her head was now visible - it read only 'Morris', in a font seemingly designed to radiate official.

"For work--for us. Equally. You know. For...partners." Her vocabulary was still largely inaccessible, apparently, and her skin flushed with the concern that she was failing the moment. "It is important, and you--well, I thought that we could use it for...use it together."

With an anxious huff of breath, she abruptly stopped trying to construct sentences and pulled him towards her again, tipping her chin up in time to catch his lips in a kiss.