Adventures in Babysitting

[pugsmuggler]

It was uncharacteristically early when Garamond decided to stop by Calibri’s lab. The installment was still relatively new to the first circle’s queen ship. The counters were still glossy-tiled and free of chemical burns, the utensils all shiny and unused, and while it accommodated for plenty more than just Calibri’s research, no one really had the nerve to go in there with it being consistently occupied by the circle’s finest poisons expert — No one except for Garamond. From Garamond’s perspective, Calibri had acclimated himself to life on the ship quite well, and handled his responsibilities aptly. This particular morning, however, Garamond had decided to hand Calibri a responsibility that extended slightly beyond what Calibri had signed on for.

Ten-year-old son at his side, Garamond let himself through the laboratory doors and into the. He found Calibri, after a brief trip around the countertops, curled up asleep underneath a desk. Calibri was equipped with a stylus and notebook in hand as if he had fallen asleep scrawling notes. Garamond, not visibly surprised by the scenario, crouched down to Calibri’s level, perching himself on the toes of his loafers.

“Ah, there you are,” Garamond announced himself. “I had a favor to ask.”

Comments

[kobacake]

"No!! You have to promise!" Danny whined in frustration and shoved his hand closer to Calibri. He couldn't believe Calibri didn't know what a pinky promise was. "Hold out your hand like this."

[tactician]

With a clear look of skepticism, Calibri held out a hand and then slowly closed his fingers until only the pinky finger remained extended. What was the point of this, honestly? Homo Sapien traditions were so strange sometimes.

Tentatively, he attempted to poke the tip of Danny's pinky finger with his own. (Was that it?)

[kobacake]

Danny narrowed his eyes and canted his head just slightly to the side (a look that clearly read: Seriously?!). He hooked his pinky with Calibri's. "You're so dumb! It's like this. Now you have to promise."

[tactician]

Calibri's skepticism only increased. He tightened his finger around Danny's, almost to a painful degree.

"Is that really necessary?" he sighed, but he seemed to realize that this, too, was another lost cause, because shortly after, he recited, "I promise to ensure your safety as long as you are under my care, Daniel Owen Garamond."

[kobacake]

Danny's Gravely Serious expression returned to his face again as he bobbed their hands down once and up again to seal the deal. He kept their fingers linked while he said, "If you break it you have to swallow a thousand needles. That's the rule."

[tactician]

Very seriously, Calibri asked, "Is it required that all thousand be swallowed at the exact same time?"

[kobacake]

"I don't think you can fit a thousand needles in your mouth all at once..."

[tactician]

Calibri nodded.

"Very well. That's physically possible without certain death. I accept."

[kobacake]

"Whaaaat?!" Danny finally unlinked their fingers and dropped his hand, but stared at Calibri in disbelief. "There's no way you could survive something like that!!"

[tactician]

"You can. A human's stomach acids are theoretically low enough in pH to dissolve even steel," Calibri said sagely, withdrawing his hand as Danny did. Since the boy had stopped eating, he began cleaning up after Danny's dishes as well, stacking them and covering them as he did his own.

[kobacake]

"No way!" Danny slid off the stool, stretching his arms over his head once his feet hit the floor. "It'd totally slice up your insides whenever you swallowed it."

[tactician]

"It wouldn't be comfortable, but it's not fatal to swallow a needle."

Then Calibri paused, hand stilling over a silver handle, looking thoughtful.

"It'd be a good torture method, for example."

[kobacake]

"But then a thousand of them wouldn't fit in your stomach," he retorted, trying very, very hard to block out Calibri's second sentence.

[tactician]

"Not in one sitting," Calibri agreed serenely, depositing the two trays of emptied plates outside in the hall. If Garamond had enough forethought to send the food down, then he probably had arranged for the trays to be picked up at some point as well, knowing that Calibri rarely made his way past the doors of his laboratory to begin with. "But it could be done."

[kobacake]

"This is gross." A shiver ran through Danny's body as he dropped his arms to his side again, trying to block out the image of swallowing needles and what not. Now that he wasn't occupied by fear or hunger or arguing, he took a moment to really take a good look around the lab for the first time. He'd been here a few times prior with Garamond, but he'd never been too interested in the surroundings before. He walked over to one of the tables, examining some beakers and with different colored liquids inside, but figured it was best not to get too close to them. What was he supposed to do in here all day? None of this stuff looked very fun...

[tactician]

"Don't touch anything," Calibri said without turning around, which made one wonder if he had eyes on the back of his head, or something. With all the rumored experiments he did on live specimens (including himself), a mutation like that wouldn't have been entirely unexpected. "Considering the pact we just made, I'd really prefer if you didn't catch a fatal form of Microfluenza right after breakfast and melt off the flesh from your bones."

He crossed the room to a dark and dank corner of the laboratory (which, considering the nature of the laboratory, was really saying something), patting the deceptively empty desk there. The light bulb in that corner of the room was flickering on and off like a bad horror film, and it cast shadows off the edges of nearby file cabinets and tubing that closely resembled a myriad of unseen horrors only vaguely known to man. Calibri's fringe cast a deadly-looking shadow on his eyes in that corner, making his expressionless face delightfully homicidal.

"You can sit here while you wait for your father."

[kobacake]

Danny jumped slightly at Calibri's warning. Really, that kind of thing shouldn't have still been surprising, but Calibri always seemed to catch him when he least expected it. At the mention of melting flesh, he distanced himself quite a bit from that lab table, wandering instead back towards the one where they'd had breakfast.

His expression turned to one of horror when Calibri wandered to the eerie corner of the lab. It was so dark over there that Danny hadn't even noticed the area before. He shook his head a few times, remaining right where he was. "N-No way!! It's way too creepy over there! And.. you can't just expect me to sit there and do nothing right?"

[tactician]

"You wanted to help?" Calibri asked, casting a quick look around the lab of poisonous substances before fixing Danny with a look that clearly said, Really?

[kobacake]

"I don't know anything about this kinda stuff!" Danny waved his hands in front of him. How could Calibri really expect him to help with his work. "Don't you have a TV in here or something?"

[tactician]

"There's a screen that reports the progress of certain distillation processes by percentage," Calibri answered, pointing to said screen across the room, its display overtaken by what seemed to be tiny little white numbers, impossible to read at this distance. It was the complete opposite of 'interesting,' from a child's point of view. "My laboratory isn't outfitted for entertainment."

After a moment, Calibri left the dark corner, purposefully striding to another table in the spacious room. He pulled up a wooden stool and set it up near one of the high-power microscopes, a complicated and incredibly intricate-looking machine that took up nearly a quarter of the table space. Then, he stepped back and patted the seat. "Come here."

[kobacake]

"Boring.." Danny huffed out at Calibri's explanation of disti-whatever processes. But when Calibri called him over to the microscope, he actually seemed kind of interested. He approached the table a bit cautiously and only took the seat Calibri had offered him when he was sure he wasn't sitting in front of some weird torture device. He examined the machine in awe. "What is this?"

[tactician]

Shuffling through a few plastic slides, Calibri eventually settled on one and slid it under the microscope, adjusting the angle and the power of the lens until the specimen under scrutiny came into crystal-clear focus. He leaned back and motioned for Danny to look through the apparatus, explaining as the boy did so.

He droned, "It's a type of rapidly-multiplying bacterium, at least three hundred times smaller than the human eye can detect. They're known for their distinctive range of colors - usually, microorganisms come in only one color per breed, whereas this one has the genetic ability to spontaneously produce offspring of a completely different tint and-"

[kobacake]

"Gross! I don't want to look at weird germs," Danny said as he proceeded to stick his eye against the microscope's lens. Clearly he wasn't too grossed out by the prospect. He expected to see some sort of weird toxic-looking sludge (after all, bacteria was supposed to be nasty, right?), so he was surprised when the image came into focus. Multicolored organisms danced under the lens, almost resembling a paisley pattern given their shape and assortment of colors.

"Whoa.." Danny gasped out. Having very little exposure to science, he couldn't help finding it fascinating. "It's so pretty."

[tactician]

It wasn't the exact choice of words he'd go for. To Calibri, the organisms were peculiar because of their natural inclination towards genetic entropy, which, for a universe that boasted infinite possibilities and utter chaos, still fell into an unsurprising manner of equilibrium and order more often than not. He figured, wisely, that that was a concept that would entirely be lost on the child, so 'pretty' would have to work.

"Can you count them?" Calibri asked, hovering over his shoulder, but not too close.

[kobacake]

"All of them?" Danny frowned slightly and bit down on his lip. There were quite a few on the sample that Calibri had provided, but he figured he could try. He began trying to count them by color. There were two blue ones, three that were an orange-yellow, one red, one greeny-blue... wait.. how many was that already? He resigned himself to counting them one by one instead, deciding to say it out loud so he wouldn't get confused again. "One, two, three, four..."

By the time he finished he pulled away from the microscope, looking at Calibri with a puzzled glance. "Twenty.. six?"