as above, so below
Kyoko’s selection of plants is very much intentional, and I think especially that the plants she picked out for their poisonous properties are worth discussing briefly. If you look into the mechanisms and the pharmacology of them, you’ll find that they vary widely. In fact, she has very little overlap in mechanism, and she has one example of each of the major modes of action employed by dangerously toxic plants.…
By some fortuitous quirk of timing, Audgrim called me less than five minutes later, before I’d actually managed to find his phone number again. “I found something,” he said.
“And good morning to you too. Does it have to do with the bodies at the funeral home?”
There was a brief pause. “Yes, actually,” he said a moment later.
“Awesome. I’m going to make a series of guesses, and then you can tell me how close I am, okay?” I was grinning wide enough to look a little unhinged. Saori was too, and she’d turned down the music so she could hear the conversation clearly.…
Later. Much later. I’d fallen asleep at some point, tangled in a pile of limbs with Saori. She hadn’t woken up yet. Probably not surprising; I hadn’t actually had a nightmare, but I could hardly ever sleep deeply. I didn’t sleep very long most of the time, either; I usually woke up in the afternoon, but that was because I went to bed after sunrise often as not. I wasn’t sure I could extricate myself from the tangle without waking her, and didn’t try. I was quite content to stay where I was, though I did free one arm enough that I could stroke her hair while she slept.…
Kyoko closes her eyes to mitigate her sensory overload. There’s an interesting point here, and it’s just obscure enough that if someone does notice, it would be easy to think it’s a mistake on my part. To avoid that, and because it brings up some interesting details, I thought I’d write up a discussion of the topic.…
Saori’s car was a disaster, to a degree I had to somewhat admire. It wasn’t exactly that it was messy. There was none of the fast food detritus that often showed up in someone’s vehicle if they weren’t fastidious. There was very little trash of any kind, in fact. But it was cluttered with a bewildering array of random objects. The medical kit and emergency blanket, I could understand. Four decks of playing cards and a sack of dice made a degree of sense. Even the two coils of climbing rope, sledgehammer, electric drill, and spray paint, while maybe a little suspect, I could see why someone would have in their car.…
I really wasn’t very good at indirect approaches most of the time. Not when it came to social situations. I used to try to be polite, to follow rules of etiquette and use social niceties. And what I found was that while I can do it, I do still know those rules, using them in any but the most formal of contexts just never seemed to work for me. I will fumble over my words, say the wrong thing, struggle to convey my meaning. When people do the call-and-response pattern that characterizes a lot of small talk, I respond in ways that do not line up with the other person’s comment at all. This was overwhelmingly the lesson I had learned from trying.…