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 Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:21 am
Lucky discreetly checked his watch again to make sure he had the right place. Noah Andersen, read one of the plaques beside the lab door. Yep, this was the guy. He glanced one more time over his shoulder to make sure Dr. H had not managed to spot him sneaking around the labs, but fortunately his longtime experience being in the building had helped him develop the perfect zigzagging path to avoid being spotted by anyone important.Huh, maybe Dr. H had been right about the whole 'hanging out with Mark too much' thing after all. Weird. He quickly pulled the door open and slipped inside. It was like any other sanitized white laboratory room in design. The difference was this one seemed to be full of plants in all shapes and sizes, growing out of labeled containers like someone's science fair project out of control. He couldn't actually tell if anyone was even in the room given some of the larger plants, and - wait, did that one just move? "H-hey... Noah? You in here?"
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Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:27 am
A face half obscured by goggles popped up over a tray of seedlings under a grow lamp. "Yeah? I'm here, who's there? Um. What time is it? Did I forget something?" Noah sounded worried suddenly. Had he missed an appointment, or worse, a duty? He tried to check his watch, found that he wasn't wearing one, and dropped one of his gardening gloves as he fumbled for his phone.
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Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:57 am
"Hey, no, it's okay, it's - you didn't forget anything. Everything's fine." It was a relief to find that Noah was more on the timid and nervous side. There had been every possibility he could have been walking in on a miniature Jack, or Rep, and by extension some giant man-eating monster plant or something. Lucky darted around a row of menacing-looking cacti and a pair of entangled, coal-black bonsai trees, waving his hands frantically to try and reassure Noah that this was not a problem visit. Given the other guy's hands were full, Lucky bent down and grabbed the fallen glove, offering it back to Noah. "I was hoping you'd be here. I didn't want to have to walk all the way to the greenhouse." "Oh, call me Lucky. I, uh, I used to be in life division up until... recently." Lucky stood there a minute before realizing he should offer his hand for a handshake, and did so. "Your name came up when I was doing some research - I'm actually here because I was wondering if you could tell me more about what you do?" He took the opportunity to look around a little. Plants. Wow. He was getting a steadily increasing feeling that he had no god damn idea what anything in this room even was, let alone what it was for or why they couldn't just grow them outside. Lucky put on his best 'I'm totally interested in this' face and gave Noah a look of feigned excitement. It was Noah's job to explain what the hell he was looking at here. "So, you like plants, huh?"
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Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:07 am
"Oh, oh, okay, I thought, I just thought maybe I lost track of time, that, um, that happens sometimes, usually when someone comes in here to find me it's because I'm supposed to be doing something, oh, thanks," and Noah stuffed the phone back into his pocket and pulled the glove back on. "I go up to the greenhouse once or twice a day when I have time, taking care of things, I have a flat of seedlings up there too but it's Melvin's so I don't like to stay too long, but nobody uses this room so I'm allowed to get my plants all over it."
He took the glove back off to shake Lucky's hand. "I'm Noah An-- wait you already know my name, uh. Nice to meet you. You want to know what I'm working on?" He broke into a big, beaming excited smile. "I've been performing a long-term observation project to observe and record the effects of ambient Fear levels on various types of vegetation, eventually I want to get some kind of sustainable agriculture set up for emergency supplies but first I need to know how the Fear and other energy levels affect plants and whether the results are safe for human consumption, er I mean, safe for Hunters, I don't think humans without weapon bonds would be able to eat food with any level of Fear infusion safely, but that's part of what I'm looking into, and on the side I'm investigating what mutations and effects the jungle plants have and whether some of the more aggressive alterations are current or whether they're from years ago and how that changes over time -- "
Sorry, Lucky. You looked interested.
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Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:26 am
Lucky smiled, nodded, and made a mental note to avoid any salads the next time he went to the cafeteria. "Wait - are you telling me you've eaten a Fear-infused vegetable or something before?" Lucky faintly recalled the time he'd drank the contents of an inkjar, and the ensuing ill effects. Not something he had ever planned on repeating. "Have you ever worked with any plants or plant-based creatures from Halloween? The kind made completely of Fear?" Lucky had pulled out a pen from his pocket and was poking it at something venus flytrap-esque, only a lot bigger. Noah would likely recognize it as a bad idea, if he paid attention - the infamous Deimos Flytrap was a prized replanting from a mission to a highly Fear-saturated area, and had grown quite ornery in its time away from 'home'. "I'd actually be curious to know what the differences are between a real plant and one of those, as well as any similarities. If those creatures can look and act almost human, I would guess their plants can look and act like... well, almost like real plants." Several of the open traps had begun to turn in his and Noah's direction like the heads of a hydra. There was a reason they didn't keep that thing in the greenhouse.
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Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:47 am
"Yeah, I mean, a lot of the techs like to test things on other people without telling them, but I don't do that, if I test things on myself I can get a good accurate experience of the results, other people don't always report it with enough attention to detail, also it's kind of mean-spirited, right?" He touched the leaves of what looked like a fairly ordinary tub of sprouts with his gloved hand. "This is from one of the minimal Fear exposure flats, it makes a great sandwich and I've only gotten ice-stomach side effects once." A small frown. "I keep the minimal-exposure ones in the back of the room on the corner closest to the hallway so that I can be fairly sure they're not getting ambient spillover from other people's projects, but I'm not a hundred percent on that, I take measurements daily and it fluctuates even indoors in a relatively stable environment."
He registered suddenly what Lucky was doing. "Hey, don't poke that one," he said hurriedly, "that's not mine, I only have it on loan and I wasn't planning to feed it any ink or blood, that's not within the parameters of the experiment and I don't know what it'd do to it, it's here mostly for comparison purposes and it's cranky. Um, yeah, Halloween plants get a lot more lively than ours, some of them are almost more like hybrids with animals, but they do have just plant plants. The sunlight's not the same, I'd love to do a good study on how they photosynthesize or even like whether they photosynthesize and if they don't what they do instead, but I'm only a trainee and I have to be able to produce quality results on my own before I can apply for an extended cross-world project."
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