WHATEVER YOU LIKE | private, abathur

[aya]

[div style="margin: 0 auto; width: 55%; font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;"]Admittedly, the tortoiseshell had been intrigued by the recent spider's joining - she'd never met someone like that, and she wanted to ask him questions, tons of questions. However, it had been only been a day or so since he had joined, and Aya didn't want to overwhelm him so soon. So instead, she sated her appetite for answers by scouring the library and teaching herself about totally unrelated things.

So that was how Aya spent her day - sat upon a table, with tons of books open as she was totally absorbed in reading about mechanics or genetics or philosophy. She hadn't even noticed that it was pitch-black outside, her yellow eyes following the words closely as she curled up by the books she had out.

[member=1431]ABATHUR .[/member]

[ABATHUR .]

The library, much like half of the other buildings in this decrepit place, seemed very... fragile. Like it was about to collapse if he entered it too quickly, like it would suddenly be set on fire if he stepped on the wrong piece of the floor. The books had the same feel to them, that feeling they were this close to being suddenly removed from this plane of existence, turning to dust in your paws while you looked on in a deadpan state of confusion. He told himself he wouldn't go there very often, but sometimes he just felt like making sure his knowledge of the medical world wasn't invalidated by a sudden leaving the world he was used to. Just a hobby of his. As such, he had rented quite a few books on the medical craft, if for nothing more than for a fun reading while he figured out where the hell he was going to live, and accidentally destroyed a couple others, something that was most certainly not his fault it was the fault of whomever felt like nuking this town.

What was definitely odd was him finding the questionnaire one, the one that had lots of questions about his livelihood, sitting in the library. Perhaps not odd, he reasoned, since she was rather inquisitive, so it made sense she would be in the library, but definitely not anything he planned on finding. He didn't feel like saying anything, though, so instead he just walked up, putting himself next to her not too close so as to not enter her personal bubble, while still maintaining his vision. What was that, a book on physics? What a strange topic for a feline.

tags - "speech"

[aya]

[div style="margin: 0 auto; width: 55%; font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;"]Truth be told, Aya was actually dozing off a little. Her eyes were half-lidded when she caught something in her peripheral vision; she didn't move at first, thinking maybe it was something here to kill her. Then when her yellow gaze actually glanced to her right and she acknowledged that the large presence beside her was a large spider, she relaxed again. "Hey, birdeater." She mumbled sleepily, stretching and looking over at Abathur. "Are tarantulas diurnal or nocturnal?" She'd been doing a little reading on spiders as well, interested in why Abathur would choose a body like that and not wanting to overwhelm him with questions she could have answered herself.

That question might have seemed a little random for the situation, but it had popped into her mind and Aya wasn't one for small talk, really. She glanced back down at her book, pushing it back toward the center of the table and toward the messy piles of books she'd skimmed or fully read, or just picked up and planned to read. It was a book on physics, yes, but honestly Aya was more interested in chemistry and biology than physics. Still, it didn't hurt to learn. "How're you enjoying Tanglewood so far? It live up to expectations?" The tortoiseshell did hate small talk, but in her mind, it wasn't idle chatter if she actually cared about the response, and she did.

She stretched out again and laid back down in a comfier position, stretched out on the table with her tailtip twitching as she watched the spider with fascination. Aya wanted to ask about his eyes - how many colours did he see? Did his eyes all see slightly different things? Could he see in the dark? Still, she didn't want to bombard him, so maybe she'd write all her questions down and ask them over a period of time.

[ABATHUR .]

Birdeater - that was a new one. Most people didn't even bother learning his species, which was fine. He usually didn't bother learning anyone else's, just intuiting it from how they looked, which, considering the abundance of magical creatures, could be difficult sometimes. Oh, and she had more questions for him, more things for him to answer. How entertaining. "Spiders don't sleep. Instead, go into inactive state for amount of time to conserve metabolism. Most spiders, active during night-time. Avoid diurnal predators. Others active during day. Depends on species, environment." Speaking about spiders was a nice, casual discussion for him, like talking about the weather, except he had very strong opinions on the weather and could usually find it in contempt. Being an ectotherm did give you such things. "Personally, had previously adapted shorter inactive cycles to accomadate diurnal and nocturnal lifestyles, allow easy socialization, but all current mutations, gone." Which was certainly a shame - the rainbow eyes were oh so handy in terms of expressing his emotions.

Abathur could relate to Aya on that level, at least. The inquisitiveness came natural to him, but small talk? He essentially never brought it up. It felt inefficient to him, totally useless conversation only there because someone once couldn't figure out what to say and absolutely needed to say something for some reason. He was all about efficiency, of course, if his way of speaking didn't give that idea enough. Oh, the ever present question about his comfort. That was barely interesting enough to hold a conversation, he felt. "Tanglewood, strange. Atmospheric radiation, dense swamp, unnatural foliage, all interesting. Uncomfortable to live here, but has research upsides." He gave an approximation of a shrug with two of his front-facing limbs. "Preferred previous place of residence, but can adapt to life here."

tags - "speech"

[aya]

[div style="margin: 0 auto; width: 55%; font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;"]Aya allowed a soft chuckle to escape her - "inactive state to conserve metabolism" just sounded like sleep with more steps. "And are you specifically nocturnal or diurnal?" That was the answer she had been expecting, but instead she got "either depending on species," which was basically what she had assumed anyway. Aya's tail flickered with interest at his next answer. "Current mutations? What happened, did the body die?" She wasn't personally experienced in all the body-swapping some animals did, but she was tired and thus didn't regard reincarnation between timelines a viable option.

"Tanglewood, strange" was about the understatement of the century as far as Aya was concerned. Tanglewood was downright freaky - freaky people, freaky place, freaky traditions. The tortoiseshell stretched and took to her feet, yawning a little. "I've noticed the radiation too - I assume it's radiation, anyway. You know there are still like, frogs and alligators living in the swamp? I've been trying to catch one so I can see how the water radiation's affecting the animals that live in the water full-time or most-of-the-time, but they're quick little bastards." She hopped over the physics book she had open and opened up a very wordy, thick book, glancing at it before shutting it again. "Previous place of residence? Where'd you live before?"

[ABATHUR .]

Ah, she had a more fitting question that he was probably supposed to have answered from the beginning. Shame on him, he supposed, for over-complicating things, but he was very into biology. "Diurnal. Makes clan life easier." Even the naturally nocturnal animals lived during the daytime in these sorts of clans. Owls, some canids, snakes, bats, he'd seen a lot of animals not adhering to their natural body processes, which he honestly couldn't blame them for. Sometimes you had to adapt yourself to a situation, ignoring the basic laws of biology and directly editing your DNA in such a way that it probably made you infertile. "Most likely. Unknown what happened to base arachnid form. Larger, seven legs, more scars, emotion-based eye color, various mutations." He did so miss all of those, especially the eyes - he had to redo that, with how helpful it was with communication and all.

"Subject Aya, interested in biology - should focus on biology, radiation, yes?" Didn't make sense to distract yourself from your topic of interest with meaningless stuff. Unless she was planning on making a cyborg. That would be an interesting endeavor, at the very least, though he didn't know if messing with DNA was one of those "because I can" things; though, who was he kidding, he was likely to do something similar, considering his track record. Abathur "resurrect someone from the dead just to prove he could" Everman. An experience he regretted as of now, to be sure, but luckily nobody here knew about that. Where was he from, though? That was a conundrum he couldn't really answer reasonably. "Cannot explain previous habitat - do not know how self got here originally." A strange situation, befitting for a peciuliar place like Tanglewood, he thought, though he did now decide he didn't like talking about his past because it was painful. "Could help subject Aya with catching indigenous entities. Have... experience."

tags - "speech"

[aya]

[div style="margin: 0 auto; width: 55%; font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;"]His answer made sense - obviously if he was interested in socialising at all, diurnal life was the best option. Though honestly Aya hadn't thought the spider struck her as a particularly social creature. She supposed that it was just his manner. Aya herself knew the importance of adapting, though she had never had to do so to the extent that Abathur had. Not that she knew that, really. As you learn and grow, you had to adapt to different people, adapt your speech and loyalties to prise what you wanted from people, adapt to different emotions to present a different version of yourself.

But she almost felt like she didn't have to adapt anything to Abathur; he was so odd and out of place, she wouldn't even know how to get him to like her if she felt she needed to. "Emotion-based eye colour? Like your eyes changed colour with emotions? That's very cool, how'd you even do that? Did you get to choose the colours, or does your brain already associate different colours with emotions? I thought that was societal." She was practically muttering to herself by the end of her questions, tail flicking as her mind whirred. How fascinating that would be, and what a challenge it would have been to guess which colours meant what without the aid of body language or voice tone.

Aya glanced at her books of physics and astronomy and linguistics, considering Abathur's question. "Sure, my main interest is biology, but that doesn't mean I can't know about other things. People would be very boring if they just picked one thing to be experts on and then never learned anything else." She laughed at the prospect of it, in her head imagining some nuclear scientist babbling expertly and then flailing around to try and hunt. In any case, Aya wouldn't put it past herself to attempt to build bionic limbs or organs if she found a connection she was interested in between engineering and biology. Possibly not, though - paws weren't ideal for building, and using even the most dexterous of mouths would be highly unsanitary. Still, genetics alone was enough interest for her.

Oh, sounded like a case of amnesia. "You don't remember? Do you have a head injury? Oh, did you get traumatised and then injured? It must be episodic amnesia, if so, since obviously you're still super intelligent and your motor functions are fine." Suddenly Aya was very awake, ears perked as she fumbled through scenarios. "You seem to remember wherever you were before, or at least your opinion on it, so maybe someone messed up a murder attempt or just tried to get you out of the way. How interesting!" Her tail swished, pleased with this apparent mystery. She almost missed his offer for help. "Experience? Your voice makes that sound extremely ominous, but I'll accept your help anyway. I'm also working on a little something to help with radioactive resistance, so everyone's brains and organs don't get all messed up from generation to generation." After all, unhealthy or mutated organs were unusable, and mutated brains produced such monstrosities as serial killers and incels.