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originaldetectivesheep · 8 years ago

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A Life of Riley Part 4: The Dumptrucks of the Gods ch 3

Chapter 2

III

Carolína scooped together a bit of lettuce around a couple stray pieces of meat, picking up from what was her side of the bun. I poked around with my fork to grab up a few of the french fries that were too soaked in egg yolk to pick up by hand, and decided that if she was just leaving the other tomato slice, I could take it too. The bus was going to be coming, sooner or later, and the chivito al plato from her cousin's Colombian-Uruguayan fusion place wasn't disappearing fast enough: just one of them was probably lunch for three or four people, and the two of us had more on our mind than gorging on South American beef rolls.

But it did help, a little: we really felt like we were getting prepared, getting ready to jump off into the unknown. Carolína had found Melanie's apartment, and she said, while we were coming over to get lunch, that they were cool by text, but she didn't look relaxed – and the place we were going to was out on a suburban bus line that ran once an hour. It felt like we were packing up for a train to Siberia – to see, from what I'd managed to pick up from Carolína and Riley, a witch who lived in an abandoned clock tower.

Carolína rolled her half-finished Coke between her hands. "I really hope it'll be okay," she said, "and no offense, Yuping, but I really wish we could bring someone else. Not instead" – she held her hands up, like she hadn't known me since she joined the lab, and I might not get her meaning right – "but just because I know Melanie, and I'm thinking about how we have to talk to her. Sajitha would help – Sajitha was thinking about her, about me, when there was the problem with my last apartment – and of course she and Remy used to go out, so he could help, but not now. Mel and Remy were cool before, but, you know, you never know who's cool with an ex when they're single but not when they're together with someone new, and then of course Sajitha's with Remy now, so both of them are out – I don' think this would matter, but…" Her voice trailed down, and she forked up another pile of steak.

"But Melanie's already do many strange thing," I followed, "and strange thing about relationships is only next strange thing. So, don't trust; must take care." I nodded, but Carolína shook her head.

"It's…it's not quite that," she said, "because, I mean, I ought to be able to handle when people get weird about who's with who. I'm more worried about what'd happen after she got weird – what'd happen to her. I mean, if we don' get her, I'm sure Riley'll figure something else out. But she didn't stop with her alchemy after the thing where she got her stomach pumped – the only way she's living so far out is if she's also got to find someplace to put a workspace." She shivered. "I feel bad for people living there, already – and I don' wanna even think about what'd happen if she got strange."

"I was busy last term," I said, "and I think I miss what happen with Mel. I hear about it around the lab, little bits – but mostly it was your roommate, and I didn't wanting pry. And also it's Remy, and he's not want talk about his ex. I know about alchemy, and ham, but what is alchemy? Isn't dead for chemistry since three hundred years?"

Carolína sighed, and nibbled down a french fry to collect her thoughts. "It is, and it was, and it shoulda been. Melanie was in chemistry – that's where she met Remy – and for a while she was cool, so it was okay to live together. But she got these ideas about bacon vodka last term, and they put her down a rabbit hole. She took over the basement of the house, and like reduced all these cheap pork meats, and at the end she could turn them into like rocks – mineral balls of essential salts. And then she tried to recompose them, and make an elixir of eternal life. But, of course, she just end up with like a gallon of liquidized ham – don' even ask, I don' know what she used for a carrier – and when she drank that, that's when she went to the hospital." She shook her head. "After that, I don' know how she passed her classes, but she's still here, still around school – and because we made her close up the basement lab because it made our whole house smell like wet bacon, she got out; had to find another place to live." Carolína shook her head again, staring out the window in front of us.

"And now, here we go: here we go over her place, where she's got to have another lab – where she's got to be doing more experiments – to get her to come talk to Riley about helping us. I mean, I don' know whether I want her to say yes or no." I nodded; that, at least, I could understand. Things seldom got simpler when our lab got involved, and from what Carolína was saying about Melanie's past, it sounded like she might have that same effect on us. But Riley wanted to see her, called for her by name, and so of course we had to go and see. Our phones buzzed in unison with the bus-inc notification, and I hurriedly bent my half of the bun around most of the meat on my side of the plate before we had to pick up and dash across the street to the bus stop.

It was a long ride out, and then a decent walk from the stop to the development – an old watch factory made over as condos (so, not exactly an abandoned clock tower then), and new enough the city hadn't changed the bus route to put a stop in front of it yet. Carolína texted Mel as we came into the lobby, and got a reply just as the elevator came down and opened up; fifth floor, apartment 509. The fifth floor, when we get up to it, was quiet, almost still, with crumbs of gypsum dust in the carpet and occasional stacks of drywall along the hall; this part of the building was maybe still being finished, and maybe that explained why Melanie, if she was still making strange alchemical meat distillations, hadn't gotten evicted yet. The rest of the building certainly looked nice – and completely not like a place that would be welcoming of people running a smelly science lab in their living space.

Apartment 509 was another long way over even inside the building; it was right at the end of the narrow hallway, up against the outer edge of this wing of the old factory. Carolína knocked on the door as we came up; there was an interphone button, but maybe Mel'd told her not to bother if it wasn't connected yet. We waited for about half a minute, and then Carolína knocked again – and now Melanie opened the door. She looked normal enough; blond hair even if she had a kerchief tied over it inside, medium height, green eyes behind safe and simple clear-frame glasses – if it hadn't been for the noise behind her of at least two industrial evacuator fans running full blast, I might have almost believed that she was a normal person, and that the smock and rubber gloves were because we'd surprised her cleaning.

"Carolína! It's good to see you again – are you well? And this, this is your lab buddy, Yuping, right? Hi Yuping, good to meet you – I think we might have said hi maybe a while back, so in that case, it's good to see you again. Won't you come in? You've come out all this way to talk to me in person, so I'm not gonna keep you standing in the hall." Mel had retreated a couple steps back into the apartment, taking off her gloves, but stopped when she noticed us still standing in the door. "No, it's all right – it's safe – I'm not doing anything dangerous in here, and I'm definitely not doing anything with dangerous reagents out in the open. I was just cleaning up before you got here so there'd be a place to sit down; there's nothing in progress. Come in, come in." I wasn't sure how I felt about all the statements in that sentence, but you had to start somewhere, and if Melanie said that her apartment was safe, the fact that she hadn't killed herself or transfigured herself into a pillar of salt or anything yet indicated that she knew what she was talking about.

"I'm sorry for not just coming and trusting," Carolína said as she came past me into Mel's front room or living room, strewn with glassware and journal articles over almost every surface, "but in our lab, we always have to make double sure moving somewhere that it's safe – you get into the habit, and soon enough you treat every lab like that. It's not about you, it's just what we get to doing with Applied Physics."

"No, no, it's not a thing," Mel said, turning something off with a hiss and a whir like an autoclave was spinning down. "I completely understand, and it's a good rule; sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's where even in your own space, so when you're in someone else's lab, you've got no clue what's what and what's important. Definitely agree; anytime you're in a strange lab, treat everything as dangerous until someone from there tells you it's okay." I looked around at the piles of dubiously-washed beakers and flasks on Mel's coffee table, the random journals landslided across her couch and her one chair; if she was saying this stuff should be assumed dangerous…

"This stuff over here, that's all fine," she said, bustling back to us, stripping off her smock and throwing it vaguely at a coatrack. "Go ahead, sit down. So what was it that you wanted to ask me about in person?" I sat down gingerly, trying to shift the journals and article packets all at once in case they were left open to some important page.

Carolína was perched at the edge of the sofa, almost in front of one of the arms, her hands folded. "We came out here because we wanted to ask your help with something. It's…it's something Riley wants." She was all nerves, very aware of the holes in their relationship from the past, and how people tended to react to the idea of becoming involved with our lab.

"Riley? Riley Kannacheskis? Sure, ok. What is it?" Mel shifted in her chair and pulled a stray abstract out from under herself, dropping it onto a stack on the floor.

Carolína was doing a pretty good job of not freaking out because Melanie had just accepted the idea of helping the AP lab like nothing. "I – I'm not, exact, a hundred percent sure, not about like why, but Riley wants you to work on making an essentialized version of a fish for us. I – like I said, I don' know why we need this thing, but I know we need it; if you want, we can go and talk to Riley about what exactly and why or how if it matters. But you don' got to agree up front – any time you want to, we're not gonna force you to help with this." Carolína turned her hands over and knotted her fingers together.

Mel leaned forward, thinking, and took off her glasses (or maybe they were lab goggles) to chew reflectively on one of the stems. "A fish – I haven't done a lot of work with fish, but I think I can give it a shot. The problem is probably going to be more operational than anything; fish get expensive, especially because I can't just work with 'a' fish like someone going to the fish counter at the supermarket, it's all got to be the same species – I'm going to need a lot of all the one kind of fish that Riley wants to reduce."

"The fish is the grinckle," Carolína said, "the random fish that's all over campus. We can get a lot of fish, either we buy them from Facilities, or…we might have another way to get them." That pause meant that she was thinking about the hole in the machine room under her condo, and the slip-and-slide where the grinckles came marching to feed the place's household ghost. I wasn't sure that was the wisest idea, but people in the AP lab asking for help from Melanie Wolfram were already locked in to a bunch of less-wise ideas, and this one wasn't especially bad in that context.

Mel nodded, still frowning. "Okay; if the materials are okay, that's one problem solved. The other one then is getting them out here so I can work on them; there aren't grinckles out here, so I'd have to move them over from campus constantly, and with non-preserved inputs freshness can be a real challenge in the initial stages of the process. Do you know anything about plans for that? I could drive, but I'd probably need help moving the fish out to it and up here, and I could probably only handle a forty-liter bucket per trip, which might have to be a couple trips a day."

If Melanie was worried about the operational end, that meant she was already on board – and if she was on board, Riley was probably way ahead of us on the logistics. "Could move equipment instead?" I asked. "Riley say Leo is building fume hood, so idea is maybe that you're work on campus, closer to fish."

Mel nodded, brightening. "Yes – I should be able to set up a small process center at your lab, if there's room, or somewhere else if Riley's got other ideas. The only things I'd need that I couldn't transport would be the air evacuators – this is going to stink like hell, aren't the grinckles the ones that taste like rutabagas and smell like dirty socks when you cook them? – but if there's going to be a fume hood and adequate forced-air ventilation, that's that problem solved! Let's go – like I said, I closed things down for today because you said you were coming up to visit, so I can go see Riley and get all the rest of the background on this whenever. Did you drive up here? I have some stuff I'd like to take down, just to do a prelim check, or so that I can get an idea on total volumes and what reducing agents I'd want to start with."

"We took the bus," Carolína said, still a little shell-shocked at Mel's enthusiasm. "I thought about driving, but I didn't want to make it like…like we were abducting you or nothing." Carolína's Bronco did kind of have a bad reputation for grabbing people under duress lately.

Melanie nodded. "Yeah, okay, I can understand that. In that case, I can give you a ride back to campus – I'll show you what we need to bring, and then you can help carry it down to the garage. Right this way – just try not to bump into anything, some of the stuff over by the kitchen actually is dangerous. Nothing I need you to carry, but yeah – careful, careful." I looked over at Carolína, and she shrugged and stood up. I stood up, too, and returned the shrug. If we'd gotten this far, we might as well follow on all the way down to the end – no matter how weird and how dangerous that was going to turn out to be.

Chapter 4

#nanowrimo #alifeofriley #fiction

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