circle7 | technical problems; free-for-all

Should've stayed behind, Bentley thinks to himself, but he's not about to disobey orders. (It was a suggestion, really, but it might as well have been a command.)

"Sure thing, sir," he answers, pushing himself along, while making sure to stay behind Garamond. He seems to know how to handle Calibri better, anyway. Bentley is shocked enough at the fact he can even touch the man. Though he supposes it makes sense - he is the boss, and Garamond himself can appear rather threatening. (Even though Bentley has no idea it's just him who thinks so at this point.) "Is it that bad?"

"Yes it- Boss!" Calibri gives a frustrated sound, face twisting with emotion for once - irritation, from the looks of it. Since Garamond pulled him away, he has been on a painfully slow crash-course with the far wall, though he can't do anything until he gets there (physics is an unfortunate science about equal and opposite reactions, after all). So for the next few seconds, all Calibri can do is cross his arms and float aimlessly by. "I highly advise against going in there!"

And scold. He can do that too; he can always do that too.

Garamond pays no mind to Calibri’s warning chides, and with a simple push he glides away from the doorway and towards the nearest counter, anchoring himself down by grabbing the corner. Thankfully, precautions had been taken to secure furniture to the ground, else they’d find themselves with an even bigger problem. Truthfully, with some of the stuff floating around Calibri’s lab, it may have been better to close off the area and mark it a lost cause; a hazardous waste zone – but their organization (and Calibri particularly) wasn’t fond of losing valuable research if unnecessary.

There's more of those vials floating around, thankfully at a slow enough pace where collision won't prove dangerous - or deadly. Bentley's eyes widen, still, at the sight of the lab. It's part fascination, part horror. His own science-loving bones feel some affinity for the place, while horrified at how many people must get hospitalized by the things that come out of this very room. Not to mention, some vials weren't closed up in time from the looks of it, and little orbs of liquid fly aimlessly through the room. They seem so innocent, too, being small, clear drops; but Bentley knows better. That just makes it more ominous.

"C-Calibri," he hesitates to address the touchy man, "Do you know what that stuff is?" A metal finger points at the droplets, floating a few feet to his right.

Finally reaching the opposite wall, Calibri pushes off of it, shooting him back into his lab. His hand catches on the door frame, and from the inside, he quickly enters the combination to close the door before any more hazardous substances escape his sight. He turns to the two of them with a frown and makes a beeline for Bentley, bumping into the doctor and causing the man to float a few feet forward. To probably what was the doctor's horror, Calibri reaches out, swabs his finger on one of the orbs and pops it right in his mouth.

There is a pause. It is a dramatic pause. "It's water," he announces, before his eyes widen, seeing as Garamond was getting dangerously close to his distilling tubes, which were the most volatile liquids of all, being close to finished. "Boss! Please don't touch anything!"

Garamond freezes on Calibri’s command, his back pressing up against the counter somewhat to the avoid the lazy glide of the vials. He wasn’t sure of the severity of the consequences involved if he did happen to cross paths with the distilling liquid, but Calibri rarely raised his voice for no reason. On the rare occassions it happened, Garamond was inclined to listen.

“What’s in these things, anyway?”— They looked harmless enough, after all. How Calibri could distinguish them from the other floating concoctions was a feat in itself.

Calibri, you never cease to amaze Bentley.

"T-that was really risky, you know!" the doctor shouts in response, but Calibri seems to be preoccupied with fretting over the boss. That's not surprising, anyway; it'd certainly be bad if something happened to him.

Sighing, Bentley just keeps his back pressed against the wall, close to the door. Just in case he might be able to bail out. Calibri wouldn't mind, right? But as it is, it's probably best for his own convenience to help out with cleaning. If he doesn't, there's the real possibility he'll have to take take of some poisoned patients, he's sure. For now, knowing what's in those things is an advantage, so they can clean up properly - so Bentley is silent, eyes on Calibri, listening intently with his arms crossed.

"Poison," Calibri responds, matter-of-factly. Truthfully, he can't even see the label or the test tube itself clearly enough from this distance to tell if it really is poison or just another harmless compound on its way to becoming it, but either way, it's a safe guess, especially given that this is his lab, after all, and all things were assumed dangerous until proven otherwise.

He gives a frustrated huff as all his struggling (and, admittedly, moving his limbs about like that while in his oversize jacket just makes him look like a large and awkward fish of some sort) gets him nowhere. Ultimately, Calibri just crosses his arms, floating aimlessly between Bentley and Garamond. "Like I said, it's a useless endeavor at this point in time. The logical choice of action would be to go outside and wait until this gravity...mishap has righted itself."

“Suit yourself.” Garamond straightens back up as he speaks. “These little glass vials of yours are going to be in pieces once the gravity’s back on, you know that. If you want to lock up the lab and start over once we’re back at the base that’s up to you.” As if responding to Calibri’s gesture, Garamond crosses his arms as well – and his grip lifting from the table causes him to enter a steady ascension.

“I wonder if you could even survive being closed off from your lab for that many days.” Garamond adds with a laugh. “What do you think, Bentley?”

Bentley laughs stiffly in return. With his nervous glancing at Calibri, it's clear he's afraid of agreeing with the man. Who knows, Garamond could turn his back for one second and turn back around to find a poisoned doctor on his hands. He shudders at the thought.

"A-anyway," Bentley interjects, "We should start securing the test tubes. It'd save Calibri a lot of trouble. If you have containers with seals, we could try to capture as much of the liquid as we can, but..." A glance around is enough to know what the problem with that is. "I can't tell many of the fluids apart."

A safe choice for Bentley, considering Calibri had his eye on the doctor for any slip-ups already, and being that he was clearly less in the mood for joking than his superior. "These are useless now," Calibri says, and if his voice were more expressive, the words might have been mournful. As he is, though, they just come out as deadpan as everything else. He bats away a small droplet of something bright yellow with the end of another floating test tube.

"Pocket what vials are already plugged, and maybe the ones locked in the machines. Everything else is already lost." There was a lot of hard work in all that liquid floating around, but he didn't seem to be the type to pity himself and bemoan his losses anyway. Calibri busies himself in pushing off the floor, towards the distillation wall, maneuvering as best as he could through the jungle of poisons. He doesn't miss them all, and what few droplets he does collide with, he brushes away with his arm. (Is that a hole that acid just burned through his sleeve?)

"If you are up to it, that is."

“Well it shouldn’t take too long, should it? I imagine we’ve only got a few hours before the gravity’s working again.” The old man pulls himself back down, observing the obstacle course of lab equipment orbiting it’s way around the room. Grabbing any old thing out of the air probably wasn’t a safe way to go about things, but that’s what Garamond did, plucking any contained liquid or powder out of the air and stuffing it in his inner pockets. “It’d be a bit inconvenient for all these fumes to escape while we’re still in the room.”

Bentley is the opposite of the boss, in that he does not carelessly reach for floating vials. For each one he plucks out of the air, he makes sure it is upright, is sealed tightly, and does not get shaken. They go into one of his vest pockets which zips shut - more secure that way.

But ever paranoid, Bentley has to ask, "Isn't there a vent in here for fumes, just in case?"

Calibri points to the ceiling (or rather, he points to the floor first, before remembering that he's upside down), to an innocuous corner where a hint of grating can be seen from where a high cabinet is blocking most of the vent. Who in the world thought that was a good idea? "There."

“Well that’s a problem,” Garamond comments. “Ha ha, I guess the floor plans weren’t exactly made with these anti-gravity mishaps in mind.”

Edited 2010-06-13 04:13 (UTC)

"O-of all rooms..." Bentley trails off, shaking his head. Of all the rooms on this spacecraft, the most dangerous one gets the worse circulation. No wonder Calibri is a bit loopy.

A sigh, and the doctor crosses his arms. "I guess it can't be helped. We should clean up now, before something with deadly vapor or something shatters when the gravity is back and kills us all."

Now, Calibri is a logical man, a fact he prides himself on, so when it's obvious that warnings and dissuasion aren't going to work on Garamond (because it's equally obvious that Bentley is just getting dragged along on the boss' whimsical escapades), he accepts it as such. He rights himself as he reaches the floor, grabbing a few vials trapped under the tables and neatly slipping them row by row into his pockets.

Calibri glances at his watch. "I estimate at least a half an hour's delay before the mechanics get anywhere with the artificial gravitational system. Be efficient, but careful."

Almost as if on cue, there’s a crunching noise and an inauspicious “Oh.” A look in Garamond’s direction would reveal a bloody hand and a broken vial. Bits of glass go cascading out in every direction. Blood and crystalline liquid pearls up and enters the atmosphere like a steady stream of bubbles. Garamond opens his palm, looking over the now tattered label from the vial he’d just broken. “Say, Calibri, what’s this one do?”

Edited 2010-06-13 05:09 (UTC)

"S-sir?!" Bentley pushes himself over in Garamond's direction, alarmed, before he realizes that maybe he should slow down, what with a new poison and glass shards in the air. He raises his left arm against the spinning ex-vial pieces, the glass clinking against the metal. A drop of the liquid clings onto the surface of his arm, and the doctor looks down at it cautiously (as though just looking at it will poison him), eyes widening when it starts fizzing. Thankfully, on the metal, it doesn't do much except that; but that reaction doesn't sound good for skin contact.

"Boss, you need to clean that right away!" Frantically, he starts digging though his vest, searching for bandages.

"Boss?" Calibri's eyes widen, and it's perhaps the most expression he's shown in months. He doesn't ask, 'What did you do?' because that much is obvious, but somewhere in his head he does wonder how this came about, other than the standard reasons of Stupidity, Stubbornness, and Pure Bad Luck.

Like most of his poisons, the one Garamond unfortunately happened upon is colorless, odorless, and probably tasteless (he's not going to test that one out). It's near impossible to tell what it does without its appropriate label, but the basics are still the same. Calibri straightens, hissing under his breath as the motion just makes him bump his forehead against the underside of a shelf, and shouts, "Clamp your hand around your wrist to stop it from spreading!"

Taking Calibri’s advice, the boss grips the offended wrist. The skin on his hand is already freckled with yellow-green dots, though from they seem to be more localized towards the wound area. “Hm.” Garamond flexes his hand once. “It feels kind of warm.”

The doctor pulls a cloth and roll of bandages from his vest, making his way back over. Handkerchief in one hand, Bentley uses that to catch any stray drops of the liquid. When he reaches the boss, he motions of his hand.

"Here, let me see." Bentley starts unfurling the roll, placing another handkerchief (always prepared) in Garamond's palm carefully to soak up the blood. "What is this stuff, Calibri? It... smells awful."

"An experimental formula. The smell is probably from the sulfuric compound used as its base." Propelling himself carefully towards the other two, Calibri manages to bump into Bentley's back, and using the doctor as a foothold, he pulls himself to Garamond's other side, turning over the hand as he clamps his own fist over the Boss' to further staunch the blood flow.

"This is odd, though," he comments with a frown, like yellow-green dots growing on the skin was about as strange as a mild cut or acne. "I didn't expect a secondary reaction like this. This is bad - I'll have to refine the formula so that it isn't so obvious." He spreads Garamond's hand, peering closely at the palm for a second before raising his head. "Rest assured. The compound isn't fatal."

“I…” Before he can get another word out, he sees Bentley’s head inflates to the size of an engorged watermelon, drawing in various trinkets and containers from around the room which encircled the doctor’s brow like a halo. Garamond stares in awe, blinking profusely, his hand still limply around his wrist. His eyes had visibly dilated. “Good god. This is some stuff you’ve put together, Calibri.”

The older man shakes his head, expression flattening out as he tries to make sense of what he’s seeing. He knows he’s hallucinating, but the effects of the poison are dizzying, and he’s struggling to keep himself grounded in reality. For a moment he looks over to Calibri, whose fingers have wormed themselves under his skin like tree roots.

"Thank goodness," Bentley mutters to himself. Last thing they need is a dead boss.

Bentley doesn't even notice the strange look he's getting, just checking the wound for any glass shards before he starts wrapping the bandage around his palm. (It's that antibiotic bandage he gave Viana before.) The wound isn't as bad as it looked, though he had to pluck out a few pieces of glass, it's fine. (Apart from the strange dotting, of course.) He looks up when he's finished, blinking at Garamond. The doctor tilts his head, trying to get a better look at his face. It could be a number of things, with the symptoms he can see.

"How're you feeling, boss?"

Hurriedly, Calibri manages to dig a small notepad and pen out of one of his breast pockets, slapping it flat against Garamond's forearm to write on it. "What symptoms are you feeling?"

“There’s, uh,” Garamond places his free hand on his head, rubbing his temples methodically. He looks back to Bentley who’s head is still swelling up like a hot air balloon. “Let’s see.. uh.. hallucinations is a definite.. can’t really think that well either. Heads kinda cloudy.. feels like there's some kind of bug inside of it maybe.”

For a moment, he just stares at Calibri and his notepad. Is it really the time for that?! But when Garamond responds so casually, he can't help but think something like this has happened before. Does he often run experiments on the boss?

"Do you have any water bottles in here?" he asks Calibri, because obviously getting tap is out of the question. "Or better yet, an antidote." (It's only slightly sarcastic.)

"I do," Calibri responds, with great confidence. "But in this mess, I doubt we'd be able to find it, and without the tubes in their correct location, I would strongly advise against a guess-and-check method to find the correct solution." He finishes jotting his notes down and clicks the pen shut, slipping both writing utensil and paper back into his pocket.

"Doctor," he says, as his free hand moves to pull Garamond's eyelids up, nudge down his chin to examine the tongue, feel around the side of his temple. Other than the fact that they're randomly floating around, it seems like a practiced routine. "Help me move him to the sink. You're correct - he needs to be properly hydrated."

Edited 2010-06-13 17:33 (UTC)

This wasn’t Garamond’s first experience with a hallucinogen, but it was his first experience with a hallucinogenin zero gravity conditions. Needless to say the stray objects floating within his peripheral vision weren’t exactly helping the situation. “Geez,” Garamond places his hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. “You keep it too bright in here, Calibri. How many doors do you have in this place, anyway?”

Edited 2010-06-14 04:09 (UTC)

Bentley just blinks at the boss, raising an eyebrow. There's only two doors - how bad is he hallucinating? The brightness can be explained by the dilation of his eyes, though. Well, better to focus on the task at hand, helping Calibri tug the man's weight over to the sink. While he's not heavy, getting enough footing to pull the man without pulling oneself is the difficult part.

"Are you experiencing anything else, boss?"

After a few failed attempts at trying to catch water in a cup, Calibri eventually gives up and bodily tugs Garamond's mouth towards the tap, to drink right as the water comes out, before the lack of gravity can get the better of it. "Open your mouth, sir," he says, and even though the tilt of the head like that is probably not great for the boss' hallucinations, the need for hydration is more pressing. "Do you feel any pain anywhere?"

Just like a dentist - talking to a patient that is helpless to answer him. Still, Calibri is not all cruel. His hand is still clasped tight around Garamond's wrist, and his other hand is supporting the weight of his head. His voice is now patient and calm, in contrast to his curt, trite tone earlier.

Damn, Garamond breathes out in a whisper, unable to stifle a small laugh. He’s startled and slightly bemused by the sudden move, and the way the eruption of water needling towards his face is almost frightening. He’s able to dismiss it, thankfully, being at least partially grounded in reality. He takes a drink according to Calibri’s wishes.

Poor guy, is all Bentley can think now, forced to drink water and say things at the same time. He notices the way Calibri handles him, though; it's a lot different than how he was just moments before. But that's understandable - the boss takes priority. (Though he does briefly wonder how far back they go, and in turn, how far back everyone on the ship goes with the boss, compared to himself.)

"I can continue cleaning, if you can handle the boss," Bentley offers.

Still holding Garamond's head under the faucet (careful you don't drown him there, Calibri), the poisons experts looks up, blinking at Bentley in surprise, as if he's stunned the Doctor would actually make himself useful of his own accord. Shocking. He nods slowly. "That would...be greatly appreciated, doctor. There shouldn't be much left. Please be careful and- oh." Removing the hand from under Garamond's head for a second (poor Boss), Calibri grabs something floating behind his head, and pushes it at Bentley. It's a pair of black rubber gloves. "Use those."

technical problems; free-for-all

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