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Syndulla Scrap; Tuesday [06/18].

Wayne was not feeling so hot today, and it really hadn't improved much as the day went on, so he could only conclude that whatever bug Delirium had gotten had made its merry way over to him. Great. And, really, by all logic, he should be following his own advice to her and be resting and hydrating right now, not going out and moving pieces of metal and scrap from here to here as he usually did after his classes, but Wayne wasn't one to admit that he wasn't feeling well. He certainly wasn't one to stop working if he wasn't feeling well unless Katy made him stop, and, well, weren't no Katy here to stop him, now, was there?

It was just a little bug, anyway. If anything, maybe the hard work and fresh air would help him sweat it out of his system. And he was at the very least staying hydrated. From plenty of bottled water. That whole glowing water thing was sticking with him, much as he'd rather it didn't, and it didn't take a whole lot of looking around to see that there might be a little something more to that.

A little something more he was trying to ignore, for the most part, just like the raging migraine pounding in his head right now. S'just a bug, though. Ain't no reason to get excited...

Syndulla Scrap is open!

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"Wow," Mae said, perched atop the junkyard fence. "You look like crap."

She wasn't feeling 100% either, though for her that was less due to a bug than to two nights in a row of haunting dreams about a town filled with ghosts and lorded over by a luxury-cruise-liner-sized cephalopod with glowing eyes that poisoned the minds of both the living and the dead.

"Hahaha, looking like crap in the scrapyard." She was a lyrical genius. "At least there's no glitter?"

"At least," Wayne agreed firmly, giving a piece of sheet metal a disgrunted and grunting toss from here to here, because there wasn't any point in arguing the fact that he looked like crap when he, indeed, looked like crap, which was just a shy reflection of how he felt, too, "there's no glitter."

And he pondered on that a little, because it was always good to appreciate the little things in life, and tossed a smaller piece of metal from here to here before his head swiveled up Mae's way.

"Mae," he grunted a greeting. "How are ya now?"

"Eh," Mae said with a shrug. "My brain's being mean to me."

She was not one to downplay it when she was feeling weird. She just didn't want to let it stop her from going out and running around the distinctly-not-an-evil-snowglobe island.

"...mine," Wayne said, after a moment, "is also being mean."

He winced a little as the next piece of scrap let him know that it had no intention allowing him to move it from here to here with a metallic scraping sound that just about made him want to crawl right out of his dry, itchy, greying skin.

"Think there's a bug goin' around," he noted, squintingly.

"Really? I woulda guessed it was your body that was messing with you," Mae said, her eyes wide and concerned. "You're not having weird nightmares about giant squid people and sideways buildings too, are you?"

If she was going to end up looking as weirdly wrecked Wayne did, she was not going to be happy.

Wayne turned to give Mae a squinting, frowning, disapproving sort of look. "What?" he asked, shaking his head, looking away, and then, with his face squinting again, looked back. "No."

Looked down a second time, thought about it more, decided he might have learned more about Mae in just that one second than he'd would have liked and was a little put off about the whole thing, really, because you just start getting used to someone being a little talking cat person...or at least being really good at ignoring that they were a little talking cat person...and then they spring something like that on you, and, well, that just wasn't fair, that sort of thing doesn't settle well no matter which way you try to lay it down.

He looked back again with a grunting whimper of a disapproving, "No," followed by another mostly confused, "What?

"No," he seemed to conclude, finally, with the barest shake of his head. "Mae, no. I meant 'cause I've got a headache."

One that was just about as bad as the aftermath of a steer kick to the back of the skull, realleh, but he clearly hadn't meant all of...that.

Giant....squid...sideways...buildings...

Hard no! On any of that!

"Oh." Really, one no would have sufficed. Mae kicked her heels against the fence, her eyelids settling back to a tired half-mast position. "Yeah, headaches suck." She had one of those, too, but she sure wasn't telling Wayne that now. "So if you've got the flu or whatever, why are you in the scrapyard?"

It wouldn't be a very hard no at all if it was just the one, now, would it?

"S'not the flu," Wayne informed Mae with a note of squinting insistence. "S'just a bug. Ain't no reason to get excited. Ain't nothing worth missin' work fer."

Those pieces of scrap and metal weren't going to move from here to here by themselves, Mae.

...well. They might. 'Round here.

And then what the fuck else was Wayne going to do with his time?

"Dude," Mae said. "You're, like, turning gray. That's not a healthy skin color on you."

Wayne grunted, a sound that turned into a low, rumbling sort of growl as he passed a bit of a glowering squint at Mae. It was a bit hard to just sort of ignore everything that was happening if she was just going to perch there telling him about it.

The urge to scratch at a particularly grey and itchy and blotchy spot right under his collar was almost enough to drive away the attention from his headache, but he fought it down, which meant he somehow managed to be even stiffer than he usually was, hands balled up into fists at his side.

"Prolly jus' picked up a rash," he murmured. "At that onsen party yesterdaaaay. Lotsa stuff can stay alive in hot tubes...hot springs prolly aren't much diff'rent."

Mae decided to set aside the fact that she'd managed to completely miss that a party had happened yesterday. She wouldn't have wanted to go anyway! So there!

"Maybe you got a brain eating amoeba," Mae said. "Which sounded badass in my head but is actually upsetting when I say it out loud. Please don't have a brain eating amoeba."

A little voice in the back of her head said that it was so much worse than a brain eating amoeba. That it had to do with her dreams about giant squid people and that what she thought was reality was just a big, occasionally cruel game played by unknowable, god-like beings.

But that was just silly, right?

"I don't have a brain eating amoeba," said Wayne, who was definitely stopping by the clinic later to ensure that he did not have a brain eating amoeba.

So that would be some good news, right?

"That's just what someone with a brain eating amoeba would say," Mae said. ". . . Mostly because you usually don't know it's there until it eats something vital and you're gorked."

"I don't have a brain eating amoeba!" Wayne insisted, and, boy, wouldn't he feel silly if it turned out that he did, but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. "An' I'm not gonna be gorked. If it's anything, it's just a cold, and mebbe a rash from sharing hot water with some degen who probably has no business sharing hot water with anyone."

Now that he thought about it, actually, it probably had something to do with that shark guy. He seemed intent on an awful lot of canoodling with Vette, realleh, which number A: how about gettin' yerself a room there, big shoots? and number B: he'll refer you to the point about a lot of stuff bein' able to stay alive in hot tubs.

And those scabs he was gettin' did look an awful lot like scales...

It was one thing when your sister avoided certain hawkey players because they came back from a summer with their big city slams, but Wayne never expected he'd be the one coming back from summer camp with...space crabs.

"Sure thing, big guy." Gentle teasing kept the existential horror away, okay? "You should have just stuck to having your glitter-shirt bonfire. Like we haven't had enough excess water already?"

"I did have my glitter-shirt bonfire," Wayne said, sounding suddenly very dejected about the whole thing. "That week with the animals talkin'. But no one came."

Because you didn't invite anyone, there, super chieftain.

"Also," he added, because this felt like pertinent information that Mae might like to know, "the smocks do not work."

It defied logic, and he didn't want to think about it because of that, but he thought she'd appreciate an update.

"I would have come!" Mae said. "No one told me about it!" You'd think at least one animal would have felt like spreading the news. ". . . Maybe the glitter is made of brain eating amoebas."

These were the things Mae thought when she was not getting proper sleep.

"Well," said Wayne, almost thoughtfully, squinting off into the horizon, "that would certainly explain where I'd gotten the brain eating amoeba, then, if I had a brain eating amoeba. Which...again...I'll remind you....I don't."

He was sticking to that story until the cows came home, Mae, and, since there weren't no cows on the island, well...

Oh sure, Wayne's narrative. Ensure they'd be struck by a magical steer stampede. Good job.

"I dunno man, you've been exposed to a lot of glitter by now."

Mae had been exposed to exactly the same glitter.

Yeah, but Mae had a cat head. Maybe her whiskers made her immune.

There was a very long, very squinty pause.

"I don't have a glitter-induced brain-eating amoeba," Wayne insisted yet again.

But he didn't sound nearly so sure about that anymore.

“Glitter-Induced Brain-Eating Amoeba should be the title of a glam-metal concept album,” Mae decided. “But I am not the one to produce it.”

She could still only barely play bass.

“You know, I gotta say, Possum Springs has its problems, but death glitter isn’t one of them. Neither are mutant deep sea divers or actual facts vampires.”

Someone was getting a little homesick.

Emerging from Wayne just then was quite possibly the most empathetic, relating grumble-growl ever, and he took a moment to just sort of rub his aching, glitter-brain-eating-amoeba head.

"You know what?" he grunted tersely. "I will say this, and that's that this place sure puts a lot of Letterkenny problems into perspective. Worse we usually have to deal with is methhead skids, worm pickers, degens from upcountry, and people tryin' to grow pot in your back Bush. I could probably go for a few of those problems again for a change, that's what I have to say about thst."

"Right? At least with methheads and . . . I don't know about worm pickers, but Possum Springs has, like, weird train people and creepy old folks who yell at you to get off the power lines. Which are probably similar." Or, you know, not. "At least with them it's always people problems. Even when we had floods, we didn't have sharks in the floods."

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Syndulla Scrap; Tuesday [06/18].

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