savetheearth | I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade [February 4, OPEN]

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I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade [February 4, OPEN]

Who: Lazarus Lawliet and open to anyone!
What: A day in the life
Where: Multiple locations around town
When: February 4, Wednesday
Warnings: Mild swearing and suggestive content

A- Willow Ridge Boarding Academy, Morning

With the help of various Numbered individuals, a few discreet contractors and one chameleon-faced custodian, Willow Ridge is coming into its own and turning into a somewhat respectable establishment. By now, it's common knowledge that the teleporter is in the finished basement that Shou has helped to turn into a very comfortable work space, and a clear and efficient path, complete with helpful paper signs, has been established to help anyone who wants to use it get there as quickly and easily as possible. Since he owns and inhabits the building housing the main mode of Numbered travel between echo zones, Lazarus sees some serious traffic, and has gotten used to it. He no longer automatically looks up every time he hears a door and footsteps, but sometimes if he knows that there will be a lot of people coming through, he makes sure that coffee and donuts are available for travelers coming and going.

That's not to say that people don't come to inquire about other matters. L employs Numbered when and where he can, whether they're handy with tools, good with computers, or are just capable enough to learn how to make a good latte. He's easy enough to find, tending to stick to where the teleporter, computers and coffee are located downstairs. That being said, if he's not there and you're looking for a quiet moment to speak with him in private, he's probably upstairs in his room, sitting by the open window and taking a cigarette break.

B- Espresso Yourself, Afternoon

Now that Espresso Yourself is open again, it means picking up slack as the Numbered population worldwide seems to be thinning out. While that makes the remaining Numbered more high profile and curious to the general public, it also means that Lazarus is scooping up shifts and stepping behind the counter on days where he's short-staffed in an effort to keep the business running smoothly. As long as he's making something like a profit, he can put that money into other projects and causes. Espresso Yourself isn't a cash cow, but it takes in with enough to keep up renovations on the school and provide the people working for him with a respectable paycheck. Considering the social climate they're occupying, that's not bad at all, and Lazarus won't complain.

Maybe you're here to sample the vegan offerings on the menu, or for a mid-afternoon smoothie, but if you drop by after school lets out, you might get caught in the middle of some trouble. Four of Locke City High's football players come in wearing varsity jackets, laughing and joking as they order the most needlessly complicated drinks they can. L knows they're trouble the second they start teasing Torin's parrots, but even after he tells them to cut it out, they're talking too loudly at their table, making audible fun of Lazarus, his employees and the hipster clientele. He stares; one of them makes eye contact with him, and grins as he dumps what's left of his latte on the hardwood floor.

"Hey, this coffee sucks!" he says loudly, to the answering laughter of his friends. Lazarus sets his jaw, reaching under the counter for a bucket half full of soapy water and grabbing a mop as he comes out from behind the counter. The offending football player snickers, standing up to allow him access to cleaning up the mess, but Lazarus holds the mop out toward him.

"Uh, I don't work here," he snorts.

"Clean up your mess," Lazarus says softly, pressing the handle into his chest.

Another one of the football players stands up, and the one who dumped his coffee knocks the handle away.

"Look, it was an accident. You're lucky I don't ask for my money back. What are you going to do about it?"

"No accident," Lazarus says, picking up the mop and practically flinging it at the kid. "Clean up your mess, and then get out."

"You taking crazy pills, bro?" the coffee spiller's a big guy, and he's not used to getting this kind of lip from people he could absolutely smear into the pavement.

"Actually, I..." Lazarus eyes widen, then he pinches the bridge of his nose, cringing. "Oh, shit. My prescriptions. I forgot to refill my prescriptions. Uh..." he nudges the bucket toward the jock, who takes a jumpy step back. "Just clean this up, please. I have to make a phone call."

C- Drug Store, Evening

Lazarus avoids eye contact with the old lady in line to pick up her prescription.

"Heart medication," she says sweetly, turning to glance at him. "When you get older, everything just starts falling apart!"

"Yeah... I know," Lazarus answers. "I can see that."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I didn't mean... just that I know it's hard getting older. I'm sorry."

There's a frosty silence for a few moments. "What are you here for, multivitamins? Those look like the jeans my granddaughter wears."

"...yeah, multivitamins."

Lazarus gets his seven different paper bags, dropping them in his basket and ignoring the way the old women watches his back as he walks away. He takes a turn down his favorite aisle; the assorted scents don't make a difference to him, but he takes a few of every color anyway, filling the rest of the basket with disinfectant spray and wipes. As he's putting the last can on the shelf into his basket though, he pauses, placing it carefully back. Lysol Disinfectant Spray, Spring Waterfall Scent. Not today, no room...

He glances up at the signs hanging above the aisles, labeling their content. Isn't there room in his life, now? Taking a quick survey of who is around and who might be watching, he goes several aisles down, staring at a pink, orange, and purple array of boxes. Words are printed on them to evoke pleasure, ecstasy, the promise that they won't be noticed. He reaches for one, selecting it more or less randomly, shoving it into his basket along with the many bottles of Lysol. As an afterthought, he reaches for a bottle of lube, debating whether or not to pocket it or put it back, but feeling strongly that it's a decision he needs to make quickly before anyone sees him.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, Julien knew this kind of thing would come up. It probably already has, just not to his face before. Jokes and 'concerns' about this are easy targets when you look like a bird. His pupils visibly diminish to tiny points, but he makes sure his voice is friendly.

"That's a little personal, don't you think? Do you ask a lot of people about their bowel movements?"

The friendly voice is something that eases Lazarus into an incorrect but convincing sense of security. He's doing fine. Julien is OK with all this, clearly.

"Maybe a little personal," he replies, "though it's something everyone does, arguably making it very impersonal. I'm not asking about digestion so much as mechanics... do you sit, or perch? Is plumbing an issue for the volume of output? Is it better to go outside, and if so, what are your privacy concerns?"

Julien exhales slowly.

"No, actually. That is too personal, and not someone anyone wants to tell someone who's not their doctor. Cars and statues are safe from me. That's all you need to know," he finishes with a determined good humor.

"Oh... I see..."

He bites his lip, tugging at the short, coarse hairs at the back of his neck while he thinks it over. Gives it quite a lot of thought, really.

"...you should have said so. And don't worry, I would never accuse you of vandalizing cars and statues, I... feel that you wouldn't."

He waits it out, going and half-raising a folded wing so he can wipe his beak on what's left of his hand. "Well, I'm saying it now. People as a rule don't like having their shitting habits questioned." He isn't usually that vulgar, saying it like that makes his inner eyelids just barely show. Asking about, well, bathing and grooming could fall under 'bathroom', though, and that's less of a faux pas. "It's also why you don't stand right next to someone at a urinal."

'Vandalizing', huh? He'll have to remember that way of putting it when people get around to asking. They will. People don't have high opinions of pigeons.

He furrows his brow and nods, looking for all the world like someone who is hearing this for the first time.

He mumbles something about urinals being next to each other, so what then, but the discourse tuckers itself out before it's even gained any real momentum.

He probably looks troubled and a little bit lost.

Lazarus really doesn't know any of this? Julien tilts his head, and takes pity.

"Look. There are exceptions, but people don't generally want their defecation habits examined. 'Do you fold or scrunch your toilet paper', weird but probably fine. 'Do you have diarrhea often', only ever fine if you're a doctor, or they decided to volunteer that information. Some people do. You'll find some older people with issues there who'll complain about them."

Pity might be an appropriate way to feel, because it's truly very pitiful.

"I see. I suppose I hadn't really thought about it in those terms," he admits sadly. "It shouldn't be so complicated."

It is.

"It becomes second nature, when you're accustomed." Julien's not sure he's ever not been accustomed. He is a people person, good at finding reasons to like them, good at encouraging them to like him, and he can't remember not knowing when to refrain from a question. "Being closely examined makes a lot of people uncomfortable. They wonder, why the interest. Most people aren't particularly interested in each other, have you seen?"

Lazarus, contrarily, has never been accustomed. Poor social skills and situations had not really equipped him with necessary tools, and he'd been allowed to get away with far too much as a result of his chess prodigy status. As long as he was winning titles, no one really cared too much to correct him, because eccentric behavior was expected of geniuses.

Failing was not. That was when things had started to fall apart and get worse, spiraling toward rock bottom.

"Why not the interest? People are interesting," he says quietly. "I like hearing them talk about themselves, because then they're talking to me."

'Because then they're talking to me'. Oh, dear.

"People are interesting. I've only ever met a couple who weren't, and even that's certainly something," he agrees. "A lot of the time they're not very interested in each other, and there's all kinds of reasons - they're busy or worried about something, they think they won't like whoever they're around, they like being alone."

"But even in such cases..." Lazarus says softly, "no one wants to be overlooked or forgotten. No one wants to be that couple of people who weren't interesting . In the grand scheme of things, isn't it better that someone cares too much about the mundane details of a life than not enough? I mean..." he laughs nervously. "You actually never know when being interested in something really mundane can make a big difference. Someone saved my life once that way."

"And I'm glad," Julien replies. What should he say... how does he go on from here?

"Let me tell you about the least 'interesting man' I know, actually. He was networked for a while. Before your time, I think. Anyway, he's polite enough, but he never has anything much to say - make jokes, tell him the usual hooks people take to talk about themselves, those get basically no response. Asked questions, he gives the bare minimum of response. I showed up after this happened, and he didn't see any need to talk about it." Suzaku is a completely different kind of socially ungraceful than L, and honestly harder for Julien to talk to for long.

"He just refuses to engage. All the social interaction he wants and needs he gets from his work, and all his cats. People aren't his thing." Julien does not love cats.

Julien saying that he's glad gets a pale smile in return. Lazarus takes a small, searching amount of pleasure in knowing that people are glad he's around... even if it's just being polite in light of a jarring topic, which he can't dismiss as a possibility.

He blinks, leaning in attentively as Julien launches into a story about someone who is allegedly not interesting. He shakes his head, baffled by the oddity that Julien's relating; he sounds like a very frustrating person to talk to, though Lazarus is fairly sure that he could have gotten a reaction out of the man, eventually, if only because he doesn't stick to jokes and the usual hooks.

No, he asks about toilets and such.

"Ironically, he kind of sounds interesting the way you describe him," he notes casually. "I wonder how he'd feel about the fact that he made that much of an impression on you, even if it's one of frustration."

Julien is not mentioning that out of desperation he'd said something that basically amounted to offering to strip for the guy. This had been back when he hadn't looked a single thing like he does now. It had not provoked a response - Suzaku had acknowledged it without interest, like everything else.

"And yet, he's helping me. He offered his house as a safe place for the Numbered, back when we were afraid of the police, and even though he went off-network it remained so. Even though he's living there already." It is admittedly a huge place, but Julien is well aware that sometimes the more people have the more tightly they hang on to it. "I came by one day and asked if he remembered, and he said no, but he let me in and set things up for me anyway."

Ah, so the type that couldn't be delighted or shocked? That's just the worst. Lazarus tends to dislike it when a person's buttons don't exist, or are so well-hidden that for all intents and purposes, they may as well not.

"He's helping you, currently?" Lazarus asks, interest absolutely piqued, but to be fair that's been true for the whole of this conversation. "You're staying there? That's extremely generous of him, if so."

"I am part of the time. I've had friends stay there, now and then." Including the fugitive Aaron. "It is generous. The place belongs to his godfather and he's doing an extended housesitting bout. Maybe that has something to do with it, he knows it's not his."

"It would mean more if it was his, but that doesn't cheapen the risks he's taking by making it available to Numbered in the least," Lazarus comments. "I wonder if it's his inheritance."

"It might be. His godfather lives hard but is still pretty young, so it's not ending up his any time soon. It's nice to have a place to fall back to, even if I can't ever stay long. The cats," he elaborates. "I don't get along with all the cats."

L laughs ruefully. "Hard living catches up to you fast," he says, tone a touch sad. He knows all too well that youth helps, but doesn't inoculate.

"You could probably squash a cat flat with one of your feet... do they really pose a threat to you?" he asks; he could understand why a smaller bird might dislike them, of course, but is it really so instainctive?

Julien nods, a gesture practiced until he can do it without bobbing his head. Unlike L, he's pretty sensitive to soft spots and avoids them, though he suspects this guy wouldn't react like most people if he did ask.

"Do you think my host would want me hurting one of his pets like that?" he responds in the same tone. "I don't fight anything unless I absolutely have to. The ones that aren't scared of me want to play, but they're filthy animals and I get infections whenever they tag me."

L's reactions are admittedly pretty difficult to predict; he's spotty and inconsistent with them, known to be horribly callous about very sensitive topics and strangely touchy about pretty normal ones.

"No! No, I don't think so," he's quick to reply, seeming disturbed to think that maybe Julien was under the impression that he was serious. "I just mean that they can't hurt you, so... why the dislike? Just because of infections? I thought cats were clean, considering...."

"They can hurt me. Infected scratches or bites take longer to heal." Housecats have trouble getting through his very dense feathers and the scales on what isn't feathery. It's less of a problem now that he has such a tiny amount of bare skin. Still, it can happen. "They're not clean."

He probably shouldn't tell someone this fastidious exactly how dirty cats really are. "I can like individual cats and dogs fine, but I don't like either in general. Too many want to try and eat me. It gets old."

He nods, following the line of reasoning even if Julien's right about him being particular enough about cleanliness to find it somewhat disturbing. "I feel much the same about people," he says. "Sans the fear of being eaten... it's very understandable."

"I'm not afraid of getting eaten, I'm annoyed they want to try. You have a love-hate relationship with people," Julien says, remembering that bit earlier. And wanting to change the subject. The thought of being considered edible is horrifying, made even more so by the fact that if Julien's feathers are singed at all they set off an entirely pleasing roasting meat aroma.

"You want their attention, but you find a lot of them annoying, and purposefully think the worst of them."

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