nightlogs | Everything It Seems I Like's a Little Bit Harmful for Me [Open to All]

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Everything It Seems I Like's a Little Bit Harmful for Me [Open to All]

Who: Dan Sagittarius and you!
What: Dan tools around in the workshop and tests the limits of North's homeowner safety compliance, makes some presents for people, acts helpful.
Where: The Workshop and outdoors near the kitchen.
When: Early October
Warnings/Notes: The usual warnings associated with Dan - alcoholism, drug use, swearing, potential references to dead children, sex work and/or firearms. Lots of nicotine addiction in this one.

Dan hates the cold.

He fucking hates the cold, because his circulation has gone to shit and sucking down cigarettes all his life has left him with a permanent sensitivity to chill along with an inconvenient and unpleasant nicotine addiction, and that combination, here at the North Pole, means he has to run a regular gauntlet throughout the day to go on smoke breaks outdoors. Instead of just popping outside to take a leisurely break from whatever he's doing, he suits up with gloves and coats and hats like he's putting on armor for battle and then houses each cigarette in record time, shivering and wincing the entire time.

When he isn't on smoke breaks and isn't running around with Bunny on missions, he's recuperating from whatever adventure he's been on by working with the elves in the workshop. Dan's father was a carpenter, a tailor and a woodworker who expressed his affection in showering his wife and seven children with gifts and attention. Dan inherited that, and he fills his idle hours with woodworking and sewing, making Christmas gifts for the people at the Pole who've been pulled into this adventure, mostly practical things like warm socks and step stools, but sometimes just tchotchkes like carved effigies. He's excited that North apparently had a bevy of goose down, and is starting to piece together cozy coats for people, and he's been building various hurdles and tunnels for Cammie to test her holon on.

Throughout the day he tries to think of a way to not be colossally rude while smoking indoors. It's poor form to light up under someone's roof and make everything reek of tobacco, and it feels all the more inconsiderate to do so in the Pole, where the merriment is unilaterally pretty child-friendly in a way cigarettes are not, and even more rude to do so while the homeowner is in captivity. Still, after a particularly frozen smoke break where he returned to warmth with his hands so near-paralyzed and bone-white that it took over an hour to get back to doing his woodwork, he decides that North would be understanding, and decides to undo the smoke detector in the kitchen. After all, the kitchen is ventilated, and smoking in here just during the coldest part of the night isn't too harmful.

I. These Are Just a Couple of My Cravings

Most things in the world are made for adult men slightly taller than Dan, but most things at the Pole are made for North and the yetis, and that means Dan can't just accomplish his goals by standing on tip toes. On account of the elves constantly getting into things they shouldn't and causing accidents, the kitchen is equipped with a smoke detector, which is about eleven feet off the ground. Standing on the highest shelf of a ladder, Dan can just barely scrape the corner of it with his fingertips. His only hope of reaching it is to jump, which may be unwise, but the siren song of nicotine has been known to wreck many a man on its rocks.

"Hey, do you mind holding this ladder while I try to reach this?" he asks the next person to come in.

II. A Little Bit Sweeter

By a few days in, Dan's got a straight-up workspace in the workshop, a table festooned with the tools of his crafts. Right now, it's covered in fabric and threads and scissors and rulers and a mannequin and all the deadwood of tailoring and mending as he works on a big, puffy coat to swaddle Elle in. He's at a frustration point, because at some juncture he fucked up the circumference of the sleeves, and he's realizing that his error might be so serious as to necessitate scrapping the coat entirely. He's chewing his nails in annoyance at himself when someone comes in, and he pounces on the opportunity to distract himself with some new task.

"Hey, you need anything mended? The tailor's open for business right now."

III. So Please Be Kind If I'm a Mess

The second Dan's cigarette is burned down, he rushes back into the communal relaxation room, teeth chattering and hands tucked into his armpits. Snowflakes dot his hair, and his cheeks are flush red. He strips off his gloves, and his fingers are a mix of angry red and bloodless white. He hastens over to the fireplace and groans as the transition from too-cold to too-hot makes his hands cramp, then reaches for the rice pack he set over the fire to warm up without having to hunch over the flames.

"Oh God damn it," Dan mutters, as his clumsy-with-cold hands fumble the rice pack and drop it straight into the fire. He huffs with frustration as he gets the fire poker and tries to retrieve the rice pack, but by now the pack is decidedly on fire, looking like a burning baked potato. "I owe North some rice."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The peaceful quiet of the Relaxation Room made it one of Miguel's favorite haunts. But even here, he wore his usual combo of nanosuit and sweater that somewhat accomodated his proportions.

So he enters, carrying a cup of his own comfort habit (the espresso in the building is surprisingly decent) and watches the unfolding scene stone-faced. There it is. A bag of rice mid-immolation. Another day, another incident of minor Pole Chaos.

Setting the mug on an end table, he lassoes the bag with a tether of laser web and tugs it out onto the stone hearth, careful to avoid getting cinders on wood.

"Let's not owe him a workshop, too."

"Thank you." Dan wasn't expecting someone to swoop in and rescue his hot pack, and he's delighted to see that the burning rice hasn't strewn everywhere. The rice bag may actually end up salvageable after all.

He crouches over the hearth, holding his hands between the fire and the rice bag, which might cool down enough to be used for its original intended purpose. He glances over at Miguel, smiling through occasional winces as the blood rushes back to his fingers. "Hi, I'm Dan. I'd offer to shake hands but mine are still about to fall off."

He gestures with his chin at the mug on the table. "You a coffee-drinker too?"

"It's a decent enough work partner."

Now that the immediate crisis was out of the way, he gets a proper read on this stranger, the odd reds of his eyes occasionally catching firelight. All the clues hinted clearly enough that Dan had been outside for a smoke break and was having a rough time of it. Even as a less approachable type, Miguel still had that caretaker streak in him.

"There's a kettle around here for the fireplaces. What do you think of tea?"

Tea, not coffee, because Dan's voice sounded rough and Miguel assumes the cold was part of it. He didn't know yet that it's what he always sounded like.

"I love tea. Me and my spouse actually got a special blend in the canister up on the top shelf over there. Ginger and rose and lemon verbena, good for warding off malevolent spirits where I'm from." Dan points at a bookshelf that has some odds and ends, including the canister in question, although his hand still has a claw-like appearance from the cold. "I'd be happy to share it with you."

He's observing Miguel as much as he's being observed, and making no judgments. The red eyes don't alarm him, and the gesture of kindness has provided a complicating context for the otherwise aloof posture. Dan's curious. He likes being curious, likes looking for information instead of just assuming it.

"You got a name or should I might could come up with one for you?" He sits cross-legged in front of the fireplace and starts to unwind a scarf from around his neck. It's slow going. Once he gets that off, he takes the rice pack - just now cooled enough and not-on-fire enough to be touchable - and holds the pack in his lap like a kitten, kneading his fingers into it to revive them.

Sharing?

"You might regret that. Then we'll have to sit and chat."

But Miguel decides to indulge the offer. So far, Dan's company was inoffensive, compared to how irritating everyone else was (Jaskier.) So he gets the tea canister that smelled of ginger off the shelf and onto the same end table. Keeping things neat and orderly.

"No nicknames." is the terse answer, brows furrowed as he fills the heavy iron kettle with water. "Just Miguel is fine."

He sits squat in front of a fireplace, comfortably bendy despite his build, dangling the kettle over the heat with the metal hooks on hand. The assorted winter-themed sweater of the day is covered in holly-leaf patterns, concealing much of the nanosuit beneath. Though really, his spider-skull did not help him much in the approachability department.

Edited 2023-10-13 07:18 (UTC)

"Oh no. Sitting and chatting. Don't reckon I know how I'll survive that." Dan winks. "No nicknames it is, Miguel."

He clocks the nanosuit, although he doesn't really know what it is except that it looks like superhero stuff, which is far removed from Dan's world of rugged drifters and monsters in the wilderness and spirits caught between planes. At a certain point, tech becomes impenetrable to Dan, like sounds at too high a pitch for him to register.

"Did you arrive with that big batch of us a few weeks back? I been going on away missions, so I ain't been keeping track of who's coming or going as well as I'd like." He starts to flex and clench his hands now that they have some feeling back in them, but he keeps the rice pack smoldering in his lap.

Nueva York was an even further removed place by a hundred years or so. The suit's circuitry had a mesoamerican quality to its curves and angles, something easier to see in the dim light. It was like embroidery, in the sense of being more personal compared to the straightforward build of the (somewhat functional) dimension-hopping watch.

"I did. I'd been mostly spending time building up some semblance of a lab near the workshop." he makes no effort to hide the frustration in his voice. The technology here was severely limited compared to what he was used to. But he was making do.

The last of the coffee will get sipped up as he waits for the water to begin to boil. It felt like using some ancient cauldron.

Edited (tagging while hungry u-u ) 2023-10-13 20:17 (UTC)

"Science, huh? I never been good at that, so it's nice that we got some people who feel enthusiastic about it. I don't got the formal education to know my periodic tables or molecules."

Dan isn't aware of how many planets there are, or that water freezes at thirty-two Farenheit, or what an atom is. He meets Miguel's frustration with a sort of encouraging coolness, like he understands the frustration but has faith that things will sort out to be better than anticipated.

"What are you planning on doing in a lab?" Dan wipes some water from his forehead where some snowflakes have melted and started dripping down his brow. "Did you make your outfit?"

"Studying the workings of this universe. Hindered by all the atom smashing machines being several miles in diameter in this world, though." he grumbles. It's a long list of problems he will have to tackle in smaller pieces. At least he had a decently powerful computer up and running to start.

The second question seems to surprise him, though. He is starting to guess that Dan had a good eye for detail.

"I did. Though it involved more electronics than sewing." he adds, assuming Dan would have some questions about its make. He would be... somewhat useless if he had to hand-make an entire suit the old-fashioned way. Fitting gadgets became something of a necessary skill, though.

"Atom smashing..." Dan says quietly to himself, but it all sounds a little like word salad to him. He's serious about what he meant. He's glad that there are people here to be strong in places he's weak at, and the last few years have really highlighted how much there is in the many universes for Dan to not-know.

"You mind if I ask for a description of the electronics? They do what, regulate temperature, talk to other electronics, provide some protection?" If Miguel doesn't rebuff him, Dan leans in to take a closer look, although he understands the seams much better than he does the wires. "You know, if you need someone to sew up a base for you to add electronics to, that's one of my favorite ways to spend time between away missions."

There's no rebuff, though his demeanor and body language are already closed-off to start. It seems impossible for Miguel to dial down the intense look on his face even during casual chatter.

The surface appearance of the suit will not make much sense. It sits snug over his body, blinking softly with the activity of a dozen overlapping layers of nanotech. The texture was like a mix of smartphone screen and breathing skin rather than a fabric. There was no obvious weave, though there were a few proper seams here or there, hidden well away.

"All of that. And a few other features." The coldness in his voice loses its effect given the kind gesture he was willing to do for Dan, but he maintains it anyway. Miguel leaves the offer hanging in the air, lured away by the whistling of the tea kettle.

He opts to retrieve the hot water for them instead.

Dan's posture and body language, by contrast, is friendly and inviting in spite of the way he's still hunched in on himself from the chill and still shivering. He's attentive to Miguel's expressions and offers eye contact. He isn't insulted when Miguel doesn't take him up on the offer of a new suit base. He might feel uncomfortable accepting a time-intensive gift from a relative stranger himself.

"Thank you," he murmurs as a hot mug comes his way, loose-leaf tea steeping. He holds it to his chest.

He decides to explain the purpose of the particular tea blend, in case talking about his job outside this world opens up the doorway for Miguel to tell him about his. It's less invasive, he thinks, than continuing to pepper Miguel with questions. He's getting the sense that Miguel's somewhere between a scientist and a superhero, or both instead of between - Dan's struggled a bit to gel with the superhero types, he thinks, because the ghost hunter lifestyle of having minimal centralized coordination, showing up to a case after two shots of whiskey, and 'making it work' with two dollars, a five-finger discount and a prayer that the hospital bills won't stack too high instead of cutting-edge technology and alter ego doesn't quite mesh.

"Where I'm from, herbal practice is the best way to protect folks from spirits. Rose and ginger in particular are good for warding away ghosts from wandering into people's dreams. Most of what I do back home is laying spirits to rest and making sure folks pass over peacefully instead of continuing to cling."

Miguel does give Dan a perceptive once over when he hands the tea, the sharp eyesight in the dark a quirk of his mutated biology. He did take his duty to others seriously, even if his thoughts on greater goods didn't always lead him to doing nice gestures like this. At the moment though, he wasn't complicating this beyond seeing the person in front of him besieged by the weather.

The frost has melted over Dan’s hair, though his skin still had its pale coloration despite the warm pack and the hot drink. Dan appeared to be having trouble with circulation. Miguel might have offered his own superfluous sweater - he merely wore something over his suit to break up the monotony once in a while, not for heat or comfort. But bundled up as he was already, one extra layer wouldn't do much.

"It'll protect you from having your fingers turn blue this time around." he says dryly, setting the kettle down. Multipurpose remedy. How Handy.

"Well, it's a little late for that, but at least it'll help reverse it faster." Dan makes a small groaning sound as he stiffly drums his fingers around the hot mug. "Don't never start smoking, Miguel. Ain't no good comes of it."

It was the best remedy his seventeen-year-old sister could offer when they were all trying to cope with the worst year they'd ever experienced and suddenly Dan - Danny, back then, sixteen - would start hyperventilating at a moment's notice. If you can drag, you can breathe. It's not that she didn't know that it would curse him for life to start. It's just that they were all already cursed in more seismic ways, and the idea that someday Dan might die of lung cancer or a heart attack instead of as a teenager at the hands of dark magic was wish fulfillment so fanciful as to seem comical.

It's easy to pick up bad habits for the longterm when the longterm seems to not exist.

"Thank you for the kindness. I couldn't have might made it through steeping tea on my own for at least another few minutes. The teapot might have ended up taking the same tumble the rice pack did." He glances at the rice pack, at the hole burned into it, the pieces of rice scorched and popped. "Besides, you rescued the rice pack in time that I'm going to be able to patch it and save it."

"You should follow your own advice, Dan." he responds. It's blunt, but in a way he would be blunt with anybody. The things floating around in the undercity of his home dimension were equal parts wondrous and terrifying, and an involuntary brush with that in a grey-walled Alchemax office gave him easy motivation to keep bad habits to coffee and overwork. Manageable, or maybe simply more acceptable with the added robustness of the altered genes.

"The reason they turn that color is because your capillaries - the blood vessels in your extremities - are too constricted to circulate properly. You loose heat easily that way, and the outside cold is dangerous enough."

If he were back home, there'd be more he could do with better tools. But he doesn't have any of that here, simply the knowledge on hand. So he uses what he has.

Edited 2023-10-14 19:11 (UTC)

"No shit?" Dan says, then laughs. "Boat's sailed on that one."

Dan has a tendency to feel like he's white-knuckling it through each day, barely keeping himself together enough to avoid going on a bender or getting himself killed or both. He doesn't think that he has a lot of bandwidth left over for the trial of nicotine withdrawal. So much of Dan's behavior careens towards instant gratification because he thinks he doesn't have it left in him to sit with any more discomfort than he already feels.

He holds his hand out. By now, his fingers are red more than anything, which makes some of the white gunpowder and bite mark scars show up more dramatically in the firelight. "That's why, huh? Did you go to medical school or did you just pick that up?"

"Boats can be sailed back to their docks."

He is apparently the type to get pedantic about metaphors. Miguel makes note of the scars on his hands, but decides not to ask. His fingers weren't remaining blue and that's the important detail in all this. Dan's question will get a straightforward answer, this time.

"I worked in Genetic Engineering. Different kind of doctor. Still need your base knowledge of the human body, either way."

He worked with trial subjects from time to time back when his job involved a more focused field and was the main obligation to get lost in. Alchemax kept him in a lab mulling over tissue samples rather than interacting with people.

"Only if the captain knows what they're doing."

Dan nods. His medical knowledge is limited to field medicine and some minor aftercare, stitching wounds, disinfecting, that sort of thing. He knows most of the bones and most of the vital organs, but not much about either.

"What were you trying to engineer, if you don't mind me asking? Research is a whole different world than anything I know. I'm just curious."

Miguel rubs his temple idly. He didn't have a lot of pride in what he did in the past. Regrets and guilt seemed to be a running theme in his life. At least being thrust into all this Spider-Man business gave him some way to assuage it.

"Hm. On a good day, it might've been something relatively harmless like the New Atlantis Project. Adaptations to living in an undersea colony, long term."

But he wasn't kidding himself, that wasn't his main focus there. His main project had always been something more sinister and self-serving for Alchemax.

"Most of the time, it was studying the abilities of heroes from a century ago, and how to augment the human genome to recreate them."

"Rough times in the world?" Dan raises an eyebrow and curls his hands around the mug of tea again. He takes a deep breath. The smell of the ginger, rose and verbena is soothing, and the steam feels like it's warming him up from the inside.

"Folks generally don't float the idea of adapting to an undersea colony if everything's going according to hopes and expectations." Not to mention digging back in time to recreate heroes; the unspoken part, Dan figures, is that there aren't enough, or any, heroes thick on the ground in the present.

"At first glance, it wouldn't seem that way. The colony was for research."

His home city is an expanse of green and monumental architecture. It was all very impressive, and conveniently covered the 'downtown' of the old city sitting beneath it all. Concealing all the messy grime and grunge of the machinery that kept the upper part of the city afloat.

"Nueva York is very structured, even with all the companies like Alchemax vying against each other. Actually disrupting the order of things gets you trouble, and people are messy. Even the most advanced algorithm will have things that slip through the cracks. The volunteers probably felt it was a way to escape."

The same way an alternate dimension might be an escape.

“Volunteers for the research colony?”

Dan shivers at the description of a regimented world fighting against the human inclination towards sloppiness and messiness, but it probably looks like he’s just still recovering from the cold. In a few words Miguel has described something that sounds, to Dan, indistinguishable from Hell. Dan’s never been able to put himself at peace with orders, structures, dictated from forces he can’t see or understand or negotiate with. Nueva York would do worse than chew him up and spit him out; it sounds like it might inter him.

But it’s not his place to air these concerns to Miguel. For better or worse, sometimes people get defensive about the worlds they come from - and far be it for Dan to commit himself to an impression of a place he’s never met, full of people he doesn’t know, when all he has to work on are a few sentiments from a relative stranger.

“And at second glance, how would it seem?”

“I’ve lost count of how many variations of New York I jumped to out in the multiverse, and not one of them was some pure utopia. Mine is no different.”

Miguel had taken it upon himself to try and make things better when he decided to revive his mantle. The city was his home, and that comes with a fondness and protective feelings for it.

“Downtown may not get a lick of sunlight from the geodesic plates overhead, but the best food is still there in all the noise. An Uptowner that turns a blind eye doesn’t know what they’re missing.”

It’s him, he was the Uptowner. Before the accident uprooted his life and opened his eyes.

“For someone from the past, it’d probably be more familiar than anything up top.”

"Well, that's because it's New York City." Dan chuckles. "Sorry, I'm a country boy. I love cities for the parties, but past four a.m. they get a little too crowded for me. There's too much traffic and ain't enough cow manure and deer ticks past that point."

Everything Dan says tends to be wrapped in a warm coating of conviviality and a little self-deprecation. He likes to tease, but not to be insulting or overfamiliar. It's a fine line that he usually walks pretty well.

"The best pizza I ever had was in New York, though. They still got good pizza in Nueva York? Sausage, pepperoni, red onion and peppers?" He flexes his hands in front of the fire again. They're back to their normal pallor. "I didn't get much sunlight growing up, and we didn't even have good food to make it worthwhile."

Miguel's expression falters into something close to amusement, so it looks like Dan wove his line perfectly between tease and insult. That serious demeanor of his had cracks in its armor it seems.

"That's a little old-fashioned by 2100, but there are plenty of purists who won't want to mess with a classic."

The old city was still around. Buried beneath the upper layers, but still around. Similarly, the old things one would associate with New York City could be found, if you looked with enough determination.

"Parties remain crowded, but transport has changed quite a bit in the last century. You'd be surprised at how much green space can be fit in with proper planning."

His partying days were far behind him, but as a fresh hire for Alchemax? A star geneticist landing the cushy job of his life had plenty of reason to partake in a little hedonism here or there. That was before the splicing, of course, when the sensory overload could be physically painful, and before the life-sucking misery of the work hit him.

III its raining spiders in here

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