savetheearth | I wear a demeanor made of bright pretty things [Semi-Open]

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I wear a demeanor made of bright pretty things [Semi-Open]

Who: Julien and whoever decided to come with him! See the plot post.
Where: The Locke City Reservoir, maybe an hour's drive west of the city center. It's a fair-sized lake surrounded by forest, with a shoreline that is mostly inclined gravel. It's not suited to canoeing or camping and isn't a recreation site, but the area isn't exactly off limits either.
When: Sunday the 11th! Forwards-dated slightly.
What: Finding the source of the contaminated water.

[This is three threads. Please, PM or plurk me if you have questions or concerns. I'm

Joysweeper.

Thread one is pre-reservoir on the tenth - as part of the handwaved preparations Julien wants to see if people actually can sneak, so asked some of the volunteers to meet him in a park. This is specifically set up so Julien can meet Alex and Nick in separate threads, but if anyone else wants to meet/talk casually with him, even if they're not going on to the next two threads, feel free!

Thread two is finding the site and Julien deciding to stake it out. His plan is for some quieter people to be investigating with him, a bunch of more combat-oriented ones hanging back in the woods, and a few people even farther back at the cars, but he doesn't really have authority. Feel free to have people from any group mingle and kill time together, especially if it's been a while since he decides to wait.

Thread three is the tanker full of pink goop showing up, a few hours after thread two started. You're fully welcome to have a character who was in thread two decide to leave and not be there for three! This is kind of in the middle of nowhere but waiting is boring.]

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"Walking's fine," he said, continuing the conversation where Julien had trailed off. "We got a bunch of spry little devils anyway."

Phrased intentionally for 'old man' factor because he was anything but.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but closed it and tilted his head inquisitively when Julien addressed him. The casual 'hmm?' seemed to shrivel up and die under what followed. His expression remained the same, but took on a blank quality pinpointing guilt.

Which may or may not have been fully visible behind his sunglasses. BIRDS!

"Hhhhhow could you tell?"

If Julien could still laugh involuntarily he might have, here. The subject was serious, obviously, but the way his eyes widened...

"Okay, good, you do already know." No one was close enough to notice. To cut down on the glare of the light a little he slid his extra eyelids closed. "I have really weird eyes - human skin is sort of translucent."

Alex was momentarily distracted by his third eyelid to respond right away.

"That must be, uh. Pretty gross, actually."

"You have no idea," Julien said with a grimace. "I'm disgusting, everyone's disgusting, piss is fluorescent, it's impossible to keep anything clean-" He made himself stop before his voice could start to rise, and shrugged, and had his pliable voice take on a neutral tone. "And I'm getting used to it, and sometimes it's actually useful."

"Anyway!" Julien leaned forwards. He was meeting Alex's eyes, but a trick of his own eyes, beyond that he saw a lot more colors, was that he could take in everything in his field of view quickly. The stars in the dappled deep shifting day sky, the trendy couple with the fat dog, the two yellowjackets veeing this way and that, the little birds flashing and flitting up in the trees. And, well - "You don't have a pulse, and your mouth... I mean, saliva. That's a new shade."

Fluorescent piss, huh? That'd make it easier to spot for clean up -- a skill someone with his sort of job would sadly find useful.

He leaned back an inch, brows furrowing. "Uhhh... My... saliva. Is a new shade."

Uuuuuhhhhhhhhh. What did that even mean. What was he supposed to do with that information...

"What's the old shade?"

"I don't know. I've never seen you like this before." Wait, he'd phrased that weirdly. Julien flapped one hand in a vague gesture. "Human spit is this spectrum, see? A lot of it's toothpaste and so on and a lot of the rest is probably diet, but there's this normal range of colors and shades, and yours is outside of that. I guess your mouth changed at some point."

His brow arched at the phrase, finding it a little odd as Julien had. It was a visceral reaction; not much thought went into it.

The explanation flew right over his head until he replayed it in his head and realized Julien was saying toothpaste and diet affected the 'color' of saliva, not that they were the 'color'. (Why Alex even took his words to mean that first was a mystery-- a mystery like his mouth.)

"So, I have magic spit?" He scratched his jawline. "I don't know when that would've happened..." His last Echo had landed him with an aversion to garlic (tragic) and the one before that was his heart stopping (also tragic because of his experience with the defibrillator).

But these were the Echoes he remembered.

As it was, when the Echo responsible for the change in his saliva happened, his room mate had hit him in the head with a frying pan. Alex blacked out before he had a chance to feel the Echo in progress.

He seemed to brighten. "Maybe I can spit acid now."

Twisting in his seat, Alex spit on the grass behind him. It did not wilt. It simply sagged with the weight of his spit.

"Bummer," he said, facing Julien again.

This was obviously not making as much sense as Julien had hoped. He shrugged awkwardly. It was hard to explain a lot of the things he saw. "I have a pulse-moment that I have no idea what it did, and one that I found out later made my heart bigger."

Julien raised his eyebrows, but smiled.

"If you could you'd have noticed already. You kind of uh... spit a little when you talk sometimes. Everyone does." That he was fairly used to, now, even at close range. Even if he did always wipe it off.

Surprised, he asked, "Whoa, really?", then immediately covered his mouth with his hand. "Sorry."

Then, excitedly, he leaned forward and, still covering his mouth, asked, "Can you tell the difference between healthy-spit and flu-spit?"

"If it was acidic I'd be angry. It's okay! I'm used to it now." He shook his head a little, amused. "It's mostly when people are worked up, for whatever reason. Or eating. Corn on the cob gets juice everywhere."

That had to give him pause for a moment, and he blinked the more normal eyelids over his still-closed transparent ones. "I haven't seen anyone at the clinic who Strider id-ed as having the flu while I could hear it, but it's possible. I know if someone's been drinking, or took any pills, or... well, a lot of things. Still working on what colors go with what. But if someone's been coughing a lot, wet like, it does show."

"Daaaaamn." He leaned back, both palms on the table again, obviously impressed. "That could be really useful, you know? In medicine. It's a shame we have to worry about gardener aliens."

He folded his arms across his chest. "So you're working with Strider? Are you pre-med?"

"Hah." He adjusted the strap of his watch. Julien hadn't really considered those particular upsides before... "It does have some actual applications! But, it's not clear in normal photos, and I can't really pass it on, so it's... kind of a novelty, I guess."

Here came the apologetic wince of someone who'd ended up a few hundred thousand dollars in debt for a degree that was not useful. "Nothing like that, sorry. I just started volunteering at LSR when I moved here, a year ago. Strider's been teaching me things, but it's informal. Kind of wish I had gone with that in school, but it's a little late now."

A meteor streaked above, invisible to human eyes in the brightness of the day. Julien noticed and looked up to focus on it specifically, watching it burn up in the atmosphere.

Alex listened, unconsciously noting the fact that Julien had apologized for something he had no need to, and smiled at the end. If lips had eyes to roll, that would be what his were currently doing. He followed Julien's gaze, but seeing nothing but the brightness of the sky, lowered it again.

"Is there an invisible space whale up there?"

These days he saw faster, if he was a camera his framerate would be higher. Things had to be a lot quicker to be a blur now. The rapid streak of light was slow enough to him that he could see it more fully.

"Hmm? ...ah, no, if there was it's gone now." Julien rubbed the back of his neck. "Star stuff. Yeah, I'm pretty distractable now."

"Yeah? You gonna be okay at the reservoir?"

Letting his head tilt a little, Julien smiled wryly and slipped the sunglasses back onto his face. "Yeah. Yeah, I think so, actually. You should've seen me when all this started. Better now - I distract, but I come back to whatever it is."

"Cool, cool." It wouldn't do for Julien to be distracted by a particularly shiny beetle if they were being pursued.

"Okay, so-- I'm bringing shooting and stealth." He paused, craning his neck, then continued. "Ish. I used to hunt deer with my folks, but it's been a few years now. It's not something you forget easily, though. Your body, I mean."

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I wear a demeanor made of bright pretty things [Semi-Open]

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