Agoraphobia [Sarah]

[Chryses]

The cafeteria was huge and bustling. Shatterdome 13 was the biggest building Chryses had ever seen in his life. It could have fit his whole home village in it - just in one of the Jaeger bays, actually. The sheer number of people, tables, and room in the cafeteria made Chryses want to turn back, go hide in his room for a while. But it had been a long time since he'd last eaten. The past morning, Chryses had skipped breakfast exactly for that reason. There were people everywhere, talking and laughing with each other, and here Chryses was, awkward and feeling like a new kid on the first day of high school. He tried to draw as little attention to himself as possible by skirting the perimeters of the room instead of walking through the aisles between tables. He felt a little like a criminal, hoping not to get caught. An interloper among this crowd of people who clearly all belonged there.

When he reached the end of the line to buy food Chryses felt a little faint. There would probably two hundred people ahead of him. They were all still talking, too, laughing and calling to each other. When someone got in line behind him, there was a moment of nearly paralyzing fear that the man would try to start a conversation. Luckily, he started talking to the man in front of Chryses. They ignored the fact that Chryses's head was in between them and started to jovially discuss the outcome of a recent sports game. Their chatter involved a lot of slang that Chryses was utterly unfamiliar with, meaning he couldn't understand what they were so excited about, or why they were laughing. It made the wait in line seem even longer than it was.

After that ordeal, Chryses grabbed whatever food was closest at hand and got out of the area as fast as he could. That left him with a new problem: he was clutching his tray to his chest, staring with renewed horror at all the people and tables. The idea of sitting with a bunch of strangers to eat made his appetite fade, but he knew that it was unhealthy for him to skip meals. If he was called, by some strange twist of events, to fight Kaiju tonight, he'd practically be guaranteed to die. He needed to keep in good physical shape. So he steeled himself against what he perceived as the stares of practically everyone in the room and went back to walking along the outer walls. It took him about ten minutes to get around the whole room, and he was still no closer to finding somewhere to sit.

He was about to give up and sneak out with his tray to eat somewhere else, like under his bed in his room, when a group of men and women got up and left a table empty. Chryses practically ran to sit at it, tucking himself in at the end where he hoped no one could get at him. A group of people sat down to share the table with him, but they sat at the end and left a radius of about five chairs between him and them.

Relaxing slightly with a huge sigh, Chryses started to poke at his food. He didn't feel much like eating but he wanted to leave the crowded, open space as soon as possible.

[Meister]

sarah barton

Propping her elbows on her lab table, Sarah stared at the microscope before her and tried to remember the last time she'd left the lab. There was a fuzzy something yesterday, and her stomach had ceased growling a few hours ago. A few smudges of kaiju blue were on the fabric of her shirt around the level of her bellybutton, and though she couldn't recall putting them there, Sarah knew they were likely from her habit of scratching absently at her stomach when she was hungry.

That, if nothing else, told her it was time to abandon her microscope and brain tissue slide for a meal. Stretching and sliding off her stool, the xenobiologist yawned. She added figuring out the last time she'd slept to the list of things she needed to do after she finished her meal, and wandered out of the lab.

Without windows, it was hard to tell if it was day or night, and her internal clock was no help. Sarah regularly messed with her circadian rhythm, and had long since given up on relying on her biological awareness of the passage of time to give her even as much as which extraterrestrial objects were in the sky. At that thought, she grinned. Her classmates in astronomy had always wanted to strangle her when she referred to the sun and moon as extraterrestrial objects, even though they fit the definition.

The walk to the cafeteria was filled with thoughts of her brain tissue slide and the processes that had been captured in the slice of brain. It was fascinating to see the familiar shape of a human neuron in an alien specimen, to see evidence that their brains ran on electric impulses generated by the ebb and flow of ions. Sarah scratched idly at an itchy spot on her arm, unaware of the flakes of dried kaiju blue that fluttered toward the ground.

She certainly noticed the wrinkled noses and sneers that accompanied the gesture, and hunched her shoulders sightly as she opened the cafeteria door. Outside of the haven of the labs and her fellow "lab rats," anyone fascinated by or even interested in kaiju beyond the myriad ways they could be killed was viewed as some sort of freak, someone with a mental defect who couldn't possibly be in their right mind.

Sarah herself carried the stigma of being a kaiju cultist's daughter. She had never mentioned it, but it somehow still got out to folks. And in a closed environment like a Shatterdome, gossip traveled at the speed of light. Within days of arriving, new rangers and technicians seemed to know that she was ranked high among the freaks to be avoided, and could usually claim an entire table just by sitting at it. A brave few were willing to sit at the same table with a buffer of several empty seats, but their numbers were, as mentioned, few.

As soon as she caught a whiff of the mystery meat in the food line, her stomach roared its approval. Covering it with one hand and grinning, she made her way through the line. She'd heard several people complaining about the ration fare here, but she forgot to eat often enough that the taste hardly registered with how fast she wolfed it down.

Tray balanced in one hand, Sarah scanned the cafeteria for a relatively empty table. The number of people around indicated that it was at least a conventional mealtime. She spotted one with several seats open, and an unfamiliar man seated at it. Sarah slipped into a seat across from the man and placed her tray down. It bore the mystery meat, rehydrated potatoes, and something that looked less like the beef jerky the chefs swore it was and more like something escaped from the lab.

"Hello," she greeted the man absently. Sarah picked up the maybe-jerky and examined it, holding it up to the artificial light. It seemed brown rather than gray-blue, but she still didn't quite trust it. Turning to the man, she waved the jerky at him, feeling the mild lethargy of earlier fade in the face of new energy from that elusive source in the "H" of ADHD. "Think this is really beef?"

[Chryses]

Chryses was nothing less than terrified by the girl - probably a woman, actually - who sat across from him. She was very pretty, with eyes that reminded him (not to be too melodramatic, or to sound too much like some trashy romance novelist) of a stormy sea. He almost cringed at the cheesy comparison himself,but the green-hazel ring around her pupils which slowly transformed into a dark blue on the edges were striking. And Chryses had grown up in a coastal village, so he felt he could judge with some authority. The waves churning tended to turn into a sickly, swampy green while the clouds turned dramatic dark blues and greys. Because the ocean had become something of a nightmare creature with its own whims and wills, ready to spit forth Kaiju at any moment and destroy the entire village, actually going near the water was a great taboo. But the draw of it was undeniable, its miraculous vastness, its deceptive beauty, its heart-pounding danger. It sent a chill down Chryses' spine to think of it. It was even more chilling to be reminded that he was currently surrounded by it on all sides, the waves pounding like a heartbeat against the shore at all minutes.

It was only after an inappropriate length of gawking at the girl that Chryses realized he was acting like a freak. He quickly turned his head down to face his hands in his lap, a blush rising up on his cheeks. His hands, which had been turning white at the knuckles from the strength with which he was gripping the side of the table, quickly dropped down and twisted together anxiously below the table. He felt his embarrassment in a rush of blood to his face, his heart pounding loudly. He squirmed uncomfortably, willing his face to return to its normal colour, shuffling his feet and trying to think happy thoughts. He'd made a friend at the Shatterdome, after all. He wasn't a complete freak. Someone, one person at least, thought he was worth a conversation. Possibly, hopefully, more than one. And obviously the woman across from him hadn't thought he looked frighteningly weird, because she'd been brave enough to sit with him. He was pretty sure he'd ruined that impression already, but he felt like he, as an adult, as a representative of his great nation, as a man who'd gotten through a few years of his life sleeping on the couches of strange girls who'd thought he was handsome, he should be able to handle this situation.

When he looked up again, he became aware that the woman had asked him a question. He looked at her plate, then at his plate. She was thoughtfully holding a piece of possible food in her hand. At first Chryses thought it was something she'd brought along with her from somewhere else, some kind of weird alien anatomy she'd stumbled upon in the hallway or something. But when he looked at his own plate he found he had one too. A weird stick that was withered and resembled a very gnarled twig. He picked up his own too, his eyes widening in surprise and horrified wonder. He met her eyes briefly, his eyebrows raised. He sniffed it, and found it smelt like very little. Maybe leather. He tried to test the texture of the - debatably, foodstuff. It turned out it was very brittle and snapped under very little pressure. This allowed Chryses to see the inside of the... thing. While it was a strange shade of brown on the outside and a sort of plastic coating, the inside was an extremely appetizing grey colour, like the kind you might see on a pair of discarded lungs.

Chryses promptly put it down on his plate, far from any of the other food. "What is?" He asked the woman, unable to contain his morbid curiosity. He was quite certain he'd never had any food of the kind in his whole life. He began to suspiciously poke at the other items on his plate, but they seemed blessedly normal next to that... thing. He felt as brave as to shovel a forkful of mashed potato into his mouth. It tasted like cardboard, but Chryses felt he could at least be certain that at one point, they had definitely lived in the ground, on Earth, very normal little root vegetables. The meat, although unidentifiable, was a convincing enough colour and texture to assure Chryses that it was at least of Earth origins. With a sudden horror Chryses looked back at his meat twig and wondered if it could possibly be Kaiju. Surely the meat of Kaiju was toxic to human? Or at least taboo. He couldn't imagine eating the disgusting slimy flesh of one of those monstrocities. The idea made him queasy.

He decided, that for now at least, he would put the meat twig out of his thoughts and focus on the other three quarters of his meal. After all, he'd have to eat something, or he'd turn into one of those high school girls fainting all over the running track dramatically.

He shyly met the woman's eyes, saying, "My name is Argyros Chryses." At that point he realized he hadn't looked at the woman at all since becoming mesmerized by her eyes, and he swept a look over her. She was wearing civilian clothes but they were stained with electric blue that was unmistakable. It was obviously from Kaiju blood. Chryses's automatic reaction was to recoil, but he managed to resist the instinct. She didn't look evil or dangerous at all, with her vague smile and a smudge of dried blue liquid smeared on her temple, what looked like residue that had been on her finger and left there when she tucked her hair behind her ear or scratched there. He even smiled a little at her, unable to resist the impression that the way she was so oblivious was cute. He gestured to the patch of skin near his own ear and said, "You have something... Blue," his eyes twinkling mirthfully. "Do you work at the laboratories?" He asked, knowing they were basically the only places on Earth where you could legally encounter sanitized Kaiju blood.

[Meister]

sarah barton

Sarah couldn't help but grin at the man's reaction to finding jerky on his own plate. She stifled laughter at the comical look of horror on his face. He examined it as though he wasn't entirely certain that it was made of earthly foodstuffs, and she couldn't blame him for that mistrust. It was at the very least brown all the way through, if incredibly brittle. Probably safe to eat and unpleasant to force down.

But that applied to most of the food the cafeteria served. The potatoes tasted like cardboard, the meat had yet to be attributed to any animal or combination of animals, and any vegetables that found their way to the Shatterdome did so more likely by magic than by a cook's hand. Veggies were a rare sight, something Sarah was childishly thankful for.

"What is?"

"Beef jerky, I think. Some kind of jerky, at least." Her reply came automatically, mouth moving without any input from her brain. His question had enlightened her to a lot about him, and her eyes darted over parts of his face and his clothing. He didn't grow up speaking English, and from his heavy accent and turn of phrase, she could tell he wasn't fluent either. The man's dress and accent pointed to a Spanish, Latin American, or South American origin.

Hm. But then again, who was she to judge? Maybe he was from a part of Los Angeles that spoke primarily Spanish. Maybe he hadn't grown up speaking Spanish at all. Maybe he was from anyplace and grew up speaking any language and Sarah was just being nosy trying to puzzle it all out from a couple of words, without even letting the poor guy choose what she should know.

"My name is Argyros Chryses."

And maybe some of her earlier assessment could stand. Sarah dragged her head out of the clouds and back to earth, just catching Argyros glancing up at her. "I'm Sarah. Sarah Barton." At the sound of her name, the people on the other end of their table shifted away from the pair, muttering amongst themselves and trading grimaces. She ignored them with practiced ease and pried a chunk of mystery meat out of the glue-like gravy it was marinading in.

"You have something... Blue. Do you work at the laboratories?"

Automatically, Sarah reached up with one hand to swipe at the area Argyros indicated. Flakes of dried kaiju blood fluttered off of her temple, and into the glue-gravy. She wrinkled her nose and wrote the meat off as a lost cause. Her best bet was generally one of the vending machines and her blessedly mountainous pile of change. "Must've gotten on me when I was dissecting that tail sample." Smiling fondly in remembrance, Sarah pictured the sample. Besides being thick around as her hips and longer than she was tall, the vertebrae running through it had been a rich, welcome source of marrow. Marrow that she was still getting data from; she hummed happily at the thought and wiggled a bit from side to side.