ArchivedLogs:Curious Coffee

Curious Coffee
Dramatis Personae Iolaus, Tatters
In Absentia	2013-01-26 Conversation over caffeine; Tatters ends up explaining herself at length; Iolaus ponders the war on paperwork.
Location <NYC> Evolve Cafe - Lower East Side
Even during mid-afternoon, it is not altogether unusual for Evolve to be a crowded place - the coffeeshop, at least. The club doesn't get crowded until the late evening and into the night. Still, on this Saturday afternoon, it is mostly deserted. Two bored looking employees chatter quietly between themselves behind the counter, and the plush couches and armchairs stewn around the room are mostly unoccupied. One couple sits nestled together in a couch near one corner, and another man in a dress-shirt has a few stacks of papers neatly lined up on the coffee-table next to him. This man is sitting in an armchair in a little cluster of three, laptop in his lap, typing vigorously. A coffee-cup sits, too, on the table beside him, but steam has long since stopped rising from it, forgotten in his work. One of the other chairs in the cluster is occupied as well, by a stout, *gollumy* looking girl in a jacket, holding a steaming mug in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other. She sips occasionally from the former as she reads the latter, her usually wide-set eyes shifted close to each other as she concentrates on her News. It's...not clear how long she's been there; certainly she wasn't here when the man sat down, but she doesn't look newly arrived, and could very well have just stealthed into place without distracting the fellow from his work -- at least, until some article or other produces a weary, chuffling sigh, and she leans forwards to place her drink on the table with a soft clink and flip open the newpaper with a rustle, thumbing through to find the second half of that article. Distracted for a moment by the presence of another person, Iolaus jumps slightly in his seat in surprise. He glances around the room, quickly, looking at the other chairs as if half-expecting to see an entire three-ring circus have appeared sometime in the space since he last looked up. Alas, no tigers, nor bears. "Oh. Hello." he says, cheerfully enough, eyes flicking inquisitively over his companion-in-caffeine. He gives her an apologetic look, stacking some of the piles of paper on top of one another to make more room on the surface of the table. "Sorry about all of this," he says, piling papers in a precarious precipice almost a foot high. "Eh, s'cool. Paperwork happens." The newcomer glances up from her reading to smile a -- well, it looks like it's supposed to be friendly, but it mostly looks hungry -- smile, her eyes unconsciously sliding slightly further apart as she refocuses on someone further away, her shoulders shrugging beneath her jacket as she continues apologetically. "Sorry to bother you, but table, light, you know." With a worried flick of her eyes she leans over and extends a hand to catch the stack as it *looks* like it's about to topple over, but when the man's paperstacking dexterity averts this particular disaster she pulls back and takes another sip of her drink. "No bother." Iolaus says with a dismissive wave and a warm smile. He glances over the paper on the top, and then begins digging through th pile to locate one piece in the haystack of paper in front of him, pulling document after document out, checking, and then stacking it is in his lap. It takes searching almost the entire pile before he finds what he's looking for, putting it aside and moving the stack from his lap back onto the table. "I swear, it breeds. Every time I read through it, there's more paragraphs of text to read, and entire new families of regulations have sprouted forth." he says, half to himself, half to his companion. "That's probably someone's power. Some poor mutant bureaucrat unkowningly multiplying the red tape that crosses his desk." Tatters grumbles and glances up at the window, watching a gaggle of pedestrians stroll by with a faraway look as she mock-ponders. "Is it truly humans who are the real monsters? Or is the real monster the guy who turns paperwork into more paperwork? Perhaps they are right about us." She takes another sip of her drinks, grimaces (one of the barrista's glances over and sighs; Tattes had made it clear that no, it's not their fault, this chai is probably delicious and her taste buds just got miscalibrated, and she'll keep buying the things until they start tasting good again), and looks to her newspaper with exaggerated forlornness. Iolaus chuckles. "Bureaucrats are the real monsters out here. Give me the choice between a bureaucrat and a murderer, I know which one does more damage." he jokes, with a playful wink. He does gives Tatters a curious expression and glances back towards the counter as he watches her take a sip of her drink. "Don't like how it turned out?" he asks, glancing to the right at his own. He takes a sip and makes a grimace of his own, replacing it back down delicately. "Cold as ice. Must have been here a lot longer than I thought," he says, sheepishly. "But it was good before that." Tatters snerks at the rejoinder, then frowns a more genuine frown and holds her mug up to glare at it, her eyes once more sliding towards each other. "Nah, I think I just broke my tongue at some point. I *used* to like this stuff! Elsewhere I'd suspect the, whatch'you'call'em, of messing with my drink, but the folks seem pretty cool here." She lowers the mug and takes another sip, makes a face, and sighs. "And since this chai is objectively probably delicious, I'm going to keep drinking it even if circumstances prevent me from enjoying it as much as I should." And she takes another sip, out of spite. Take *that,* circumstances. This statement causes Iolaus to furrow his brow, giving Tatters another, more openly curious look. "Yes, they generally are. You... broke... your tongue, you say?" he says, folding his computer screen closed to give her his full attention. "I think, this, I'd be interested to hear." he says, tilting his head to on side. His eyes flicker over Tatters once more, and he leans back slightly in his chair in a gesture of openness. "How did you manage to do that?" "Oh, um." Tatters blinks and clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, belatedly realizing how weird her statement had probably sounded, but soon settles back and glances over at Iolaus as she launches into an increasingly familiar explanation. "I'm a metamorph, but I don't have, like, convenient snapback? So if I change something and forget how it used to be I can't always put it back right. Complicated chemical crap I can't just clone from existing tissue probably gets it the worst. Case in point: taste buds." She makes a face. Well, more of a face than her face was already faced, at least. "Huh." Iolaus says, fingers tapping against each other contemplatively. "That's..." his eyebrows furrow slightly, tilting one head to the side. He is silent for a few moments, thinking, before he says, "What happens if you are unconscious? Do you... snap-back then? Or do you just remain as you last were when you were conscious?" "Nope! Well, sometimes I, like..." Tatters flexes her fingers and looks at her hand contemplatively as she spends a second to find a phrase that doesn't sound stupid. And fails. "...sleep-morph, but that never makes me *more* human. Thankfully I've never broken anything important in my sleep. And thankfully I've managed to avoid any brain damage." She looks particularly grim at that thought, her frown sufficient to barely budge when she takes another drink of her chai. Eventually, she glances back across at the doctor and grins an awkward-looking, rueful grin. "What you see here is years of gradually forgetting how pigments work, and of faces being complicated." She rolls her eyes and wobbles her head, miming a burst of vapid chatter. "'So if you're a shapeshifter, why do you look like that?' 'Cause fuck you, that's why, and looking Smeagolesque is better than the creepy dollface I get when I try for 'normal.'" Grump grump grump. "Fascinating." Iolaus says, eyes widening slightly as he listens to the woman across from him speak. One finger rises to toy at his bottom lip as he falls back into silence for several moments. "That's incredible. I'm sorry for the trouble you've been having, though." he says, sympathetically. "I imagine there would be some way to train you to get the desired... form with more practice in the same way that we can teach people to individually tense and relax muscles. But some of the more complex things are more difficult to build on, I imagine." His nostrils flare for a moment and he looks up at the ceiling. "Can you... mimic something that you can see? Or hold? Or does it require an active thought and reconstruction in your mind?" he asks, again, turning his eyes back onto Tatters. "Yeah, all of my issues *should* be fixable. And -- yeah, that's the thing." Tatters nods as he carries on with his questioning. "I don't have, like, those intuitive powers. I have a sense so I can see what I'm doing I guess, but like..." She sits back and pulls her feet up to her chest, taking another sip of her chai. "I *could* like...turn into an animal or something. But I can't just look at an animal and be like fwoop now I'm *that.* I'd have to change everything manually, and probably need to look up how the animal's actually built because fuck if I know offhand how, like, hooves go or where a cat's ribcage is. And I'd have to make sure I don't accidentally cut off blood flow to my brain or something because then I'm just *dead* and I don't think my, like...power subconscious is smart enough to figure out how troubleshoot that before I go braindead." She pauses and takes a breath, flicking her eyes back up to her companion. "Um. I spend a lot of time reading anatomy books. Figuring out what shapes things are and where to plug muscles in isn't hard, but chemical composition stuff *is* because it's less obvious what some formula on a page means in actual morphing-terms." "And colors, I imagine." Iolaus adds, as he puts his computer aside. He stands and wanders back over to the cafe counter with his sad cup of cold coffee and retrieves another, fresher one from them. "Do you have /any/ intuitive powers in that regard - even weak ones - or just none at all?" he asks, taking a sip of his drink and peering at Tatters over the rim of his mug. He smiles, slightly, with a little shrug of his shoulders. "Either way is much the same, I imagine." "S-hmm." Tatters finishes her own drink while he's replacing his, and leans forwards to place both her mug and the newspaper on the table, doing her best to fold the latter neatly. When the doctor gets back she sits still for a moment, obviously considering her answer, and finally looks up with a shrug. "Uh, not really. As I said, I have like a...sense, where I can sense what my body's doing and mess around with it. Which I guess is kind of intuitive, 'cause it's not like this mysterious physical...thing I have to train myself to use at all and can only perceive its effects. And it's fairly easy to, like, move tissue around and be like 'those fibers there, I'm going to grow more of them.' But there's nothing that magically figures out complex physical structures for me." And...that seems like a good enough explanation, for now. Might as well save the whole 'Sewer' Monster can of flesh-eating worms for later. Confident in both the content and scope of her explanation, Tatters looks back up and nods with a little smile. Nodding, Iolaus grins at her with a bemused little shake of his head. "Absolutely fascinating." he says, sinking back down into his seat and crossing one leg over the other. "Every time I think I have heard it all, something new comes right along. Shapeshifting, I've heard of before, of course, but shapeshifting with this level of control, never." he sips at his coffee, lips quirked into a smile. "I don't think I've actually introduced myself. Iolaus Saavedro," he says, switching his coffee-cup from one hand to the other so he can reach out across the table to extend his hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you." "Jill Francis." Tatters leans forwards, reaching across the table to give his hand a firm shake. Her skin feels rubbery and calloused, more like a thin layer of armor than the soft, elastic meatwrapping one would expect. She shrugs when she withdraws, reaching up to adjust her jacket as she leans back in her chair. "And honestly, I'm more baffled by other mutations just...knowing stuff. Like 'look at me, I can turn my hands into frogs!' How does it know how to make frogs? Are those frogs even native to this region? Mysteries of the Genome, oOOOooo." She waggles her fingers spookily at this, then leans forwards, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands as she squints across at the fellow. "Well, that's me. What are *you* doing with all these forms?" Iolaus chuckles at the girl's finger-wiggling, and he gives her a playful wink. "Mastering the genome, personally." he jokes. "Actually," he says, expression sliding towards something more serious. "I don't get to my lab as often as I'd like to, these days. Too much paperwork." he gestures to the pile, giving it a dirty look. "Lots of licensing regulations to read up on." "They *regulate* those?" Tatters blinks, obviously confused by the concept of science bounded by legal constraints. "I thought you just...set up some gear in a warehouse somewhere and Science away." "Well... if you are working on anything larger than a few cells, yeah, they regulate you. If you work with mammals, they regulate you more. Dogs or smarter, more. Humans? Forget it - most of science is paperwork, at that point." Iolaus says, with a playful wink. "Man, if I just set up shop in a warehouse and be done with all of this and not get arrested, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Alas...." his smile splits into a grin and he takes another sip of his coffee. "Mmm." Tatters shrugs and lifts an eyebrow at Iolaus, looking thoughtful. "Do you work for anyone, or are you just kind of...freelance sciencing? And what are you actually working on?" Beat. "...or trying to get the paperwork done for so you can begin working on. What." "I'm a doctor, actually." Iolaus says, reaching into his jacket and coming out with a business card that he holds out between two fingers. Iolaus Saavedro, MD., Ph.D, clinical geneticist at Mount Sinai Hospital. "I work for Mount Sinai right now, but if I can get through this huge stack of paperwork, I'll be working for myself." he says, with a small smile. "I'm opening a clinic, you see." Tatters leans forwards and plucks the business card from his fingers, looking it over and flipping it to see if there's anything on the back, and then dropping it into the pocket of her jacket with a smile. "Huh. Specializing in mutants? I dunno how much all there is for, like, gene therapy otherwise. Wasn't there, like, some scandal where a treatment turned out to be x-factor related and everyone threw a fit?" It's news old enough that even Tatters doesn't remember the specifics, except that it involved Daedalus corp and *didn't* involve her. She makes a mental note to Google it next time she's at a library. "Exactly." Iolaus shrugs his shoulders, non-committally. "It won't be a research institution, primarily. It's just a clinic for mutants to get healthcare. Besides, designing drugs for the X-factor gene would be volatile as all hell considering how differently it can express itself." he says, with a wave around the cafe. "I mean, the X-gene isn't the kind of thing that behaves similarly. Designing a drug based on it that would work for more than one person would be a nightmare." "Mmhmm." Tatters nods and makes a noncommittal noise, silently struggling with whether to open the previously mentioned can of worms that is her 'batch' of metamorphs. It's probably a bad idea, but some oblique questioning couldn't hurt and knowledge is -- well, it's useful. "Is it, like, entirely unpredictable, then? I mean, mutations seem pretty...random in practice, but can you tell what influences it to act in whatever ways?" "No. The genetics community has our suspicions, but we can't prove anything, and no one has the kind of research funding to do that sort of research, especially considering how narrow the scope and how useless of a bit of information it is." Iolaus sounds somewhat sad about this. "It's probably some combination of physical exposure, both pre and post birth and... well, some people believe it may also have to do with the junk DNA that people have floating around, too. But it's all just loose conjecture." "Hmm." While stil noncommittal, Tatters' response sounds slightly disappointed. The answer jibes with what she's heard and read from elsewhere, but there's always the chance some science-guy might have some insight. She'll have to go back to Daedalus and punch some answers out of someone one of these days. After a few seconds she shakes her head, bringing herself back out of her thoughts, and refocuses her eyes on the doctor before her. "Uh, what kind of genetic clinicking can you do, then?" "Whatever needs doing. I trained as a researcher as well. Admittedly, my specialty wasn't exactly mutant genetics - no ones was, or is - but..." Iolaus smiles and gives a little bit of a shrug of his shoulders. "I mean, who better to treat mutants who are getting sick than a geneticist?" he winks again, though this time, the playfulness is clearly tempered. "I guess! How close are you to actually making your think a...thing?" Tatters gives the pile of paperwork a look-over, raising a and bracketing it with her fingers to get a rough estimate of its size. In inches. It's about eighteen inches. A respectable size for a paperworkpile. "Building permits, medical permits, clinic permits, drug permits, loan applications, insurance applications..." Iolaus says, counting each one down on his fingers as he goes. "A ways away, I'm afraid. My hope is we'll be able to open on a small scale before it's all finished, but... well, let's just say that you shouldn't plan to cross the Bering Strait when you are still in Florida." "So you don't have the budget to hire an army of lawyers to do all that? I think they're supposed to be the correct soldiers for warring against a horde of paperwork." Tatters eyes the pile suspiciously as one would an enemy, crossing her arms as she considers various plans of attack. "Oh, I have the army of lawyers. Well. /Army/ might be too strong. I have a troop of lawyers." Iolaus says, amusement coloring his voice. "But running a non-profit is not the most... profitable thing in the world, so I am doing the best I can to use them only on the most difficult things." he explains. "And there's work a-plenty to go around." "A *platoon* of lawyers." Tatters offers helpfully, with another smile. It still looks a bit uncomfortable, pulling oddly at the corners of her mouth, and a twitch of her lips suggests that Tatters is aware of and annoyed by this failure of expression. She'll fix that one of these days. "Well, good luck. It sounds like you're doing good work. Uh, the ground work of good work. Good ground work. One of those." Iolaus' eyes twinkle mischievously and he nods, once. "I appreciate it," he says, raising his coffee-cup in a salute. He looks down at his laptop, closed for the moment, and sighs. "Back to the battle, I suppose." he says, opening it and looking down at where he had paused before. "You as well. You'll get the chemistry right eventually, I'm sure. A good tea is too important of a thing to let go to waste." "Thanks. And now that my tea's all gone, I've other battles to attend to too I think." Tatters stands with a groan and picks up her mug, leaving the folded newspaper on the table for future patrons. "It was nice meeting you. I wish you victory in your campaign." With another smile and a nod, she snags her worn backpack from beside the chair and hoists it onto a shoulder, then steps around and over to place the mug on the counter.