Logs:Of Words and Weirdness (Or, Shoot Lasers and Win)

Of Words and Weirdness (Or, Shoot Lasers and Win)
cn: anti-gay slur, mention of rape/assault
Dramatis Personae Kavalam, Spencer	2023-05-16 "I'm not trying to lead."
Location <PRO> Spencer & Kavalam's Cell - Lassiter Research Facility - Ohio
The staff calls them "rooms", but they're prison cells. This is a standard one, small though not claustrophobic, and the door with its single narrow reinforced glass window locks from the outside. The walls are off-white and the floor is the same multi-gray linoleum that plagues the rest of the facility, at least the parts the subjects get to see. There are two small desks with attached shelves, two twin XL beds, and a stainless steel sink/toilet combo in the center of the far wall. The inset overhead lights are cool white LEDs that make everything look kind of sterile and washed out, and are controlled by the staff from outside. Kavalam may not be actually unnoticeable, anymore, but as a cellmate he's still pretty unobtrusive. By the time nightly headcount comes around he is -- not on the door, but then, he is not getting counted anyway. He's already in bed, or on bed, where he has been lying in silence for some time now. He has a copy of The Book of Mormon held slightly up in front of him, though by this point the pages have not turned in a while. Whether he is reading it or staring up at the ceiling is hard to tell. He is still reading it -- or staring up at the ceiling -- by the time the night count is over and the doors are locked. Spence had been out until the last possible moment, and answered security's dire warnings with exaggeratedly chipper politeness. Now, present and accounted for, he drops heavily onto his own bed. For a moment he is almost completely still, struggling to breathe deep and deliberate. The he rolls onto his side to face Kavalam. "So uh. How was your day?" "Have you read this?" Kavalam does not look away from the book. "Your people are in it. Some long time ago, in America. Does your book mention it at all? Very wild stories." He sets the book down on his chest, open to its current page. "Busy. Tedious. The rec rooms should switch names I think. Are you panicking?" "Yeah, I read it." Spence scrunches his face up. "Well...some of it. I skipped the boring parts. I haven't read all of mine, either, but I'm pretty sure there's no America in it?" His eyes widen slightly. "The folks who've been here a while say it's probably best to avoid the other rec room. The E-19 one. Though they also it's never boring. Are they exaggerating?" He blinks. Frowns. His eyes track left and right (or up and down, depending on how you look at it) before returning to Kavalam. "No. Not panicking. Thanks for checking, though." "How can we know whose account to trust, then. Theirs is very exciting. Does yours have submarines." Kavalam folds his hands atop his book, eyes fixed again now on the ceiling and not on Spence. "Everything here is quite boring. Of course they are exaggerating. Other rec was time-pass. Loads more punching there. Have you not gone? After some while the same three rooms get tiresome so --" His pause here is brief. His knees crook up towards the ceiling. "Now there are four tiresome rooms. One whole different crowd there. Not any better games, though. Are you --" He stops here, frowns, one finger tapping at the book's spine. "-- stupid question. Everyone here is upset." "I think that depends on who you are, and why you are trusting either of those accounts. Finding meaning through the Torah is a part of my identity." Spence reaches up and unclips his kippah, his hair all askew underneath. "Our version doesn't have submarines, but there's still exciting parts." He bends the metal hair clip back and forth, watching it buckle open and shut. "I think it'd be asking for trouble if I went. I come off naive. I don't think I actually am, but I also don't think that matters." His hands go still on the hairclip, then bend it one more time to clamp it down on the brim of the kippah. "Everything is pretty upsetting. I think I'm dealing better than most of us in the big ways, and I want to use that to help everyone. But it's the all the little ways that are getting me." "I am not going to trust the Da Vinci Code," Kavalam explains, as if this is quite obvious. "There are no vedas here. I am choosing something new to believe until we get out. We have limited options but next best, I think, is Fifty Shades of Grey." He rolls onto his side and props his head against a palm. The book slides down to the mattress. "What trouble would you be asking?" His heavy brows have pinched together. "I don't know how to tell the big ways. Or the little ways. Same four tiresome rooms. What is the scale we use?" Spence guffaws, startling himself. "Gae could ask his mom for vedas, if that would be more helpful to you than Fifty Shades of Grey. Or The Book of Mormon." He chews on his lower lip. "Trouble like, looking weak? I don't really care about that, but it might hurt our organizing. I'm not the leader of our uh...gang, but folks probably think think I am." He's popping his entire kippah rhythmically inside-outside-in now, and seems a little less tense for it. "I don't know what scale, either, but I think I'm less scared than most of us. Not cuz I'm super brave or anything, it's just -- familiarity? And I think it helps, at least a little. But I don't say the right words. I don't move the right ways. I don't notice the right things." He reaches and sets the kippah down gently on the edge of his desk. Picks up a fidget spinner instead, its polished steel anodized like the rainbow sheen of an oilslick. Doesn't actually spin it, just presses his thumb into the smooth divot of its finger pad. "I'm weird. The more marginal --" Another scrunch of his face. "-- uncool kids are getting picked on so bad. If we're stronger, collectively, the bullies might think twice. And more people might join us." "Could his mother slip some keys into the pages. A shiv. I would read one whole Bible if it came with a chisel inside. In March two men escaped some jail with a toothbrush, I read. I do -- not think it was a jail like this one, though." Kavalam's mouth twists to the side, and his frown is growing a steadily deeper uncertainty. "Picked on, like we are back at the school, like they have been knocking Sriyani's lunch tray to the floor and laughing with their friends? Bullies, like they will call Harm a faggot and pants them in front of the class? We are surrounded by many-many rapists and murderers who will happily keep it up in here." He watches the motion of Spencer's kippah steadily. His fingers scrunch tight into his thick hair. "Having an entourage of bodyguards maybe helps with your brave, no? Surely you can bootstrap from there." Spence snorts. "Okay I'm laughing now, but I also didn't think she was gonna actually send us booze." The mirth fades quickly and he starts flicking the spinner in his hand. Short whir, stop. Short whir, stop. "See? Wrong words." This is tight and clipped. "It's not like I don't realize we're in jail, and it's not like I'm using woo words to try to convince people we're not. They're just the words I know from organizing. I can use different words. I'll learn. But the organizing isn't naive. What's naive is --" He shuts his mouth firmly and rolls onto his back again. The spinner whirs steadily in his hand. "Thinking anyone would take me seriously, I guess." "That family seems very well stocked in the booze." Kavalam is now fixated on the glimmering motion of the spinner in Spencer's fingers, watching the glint of light as it whirs. "Probably naive, yes. You are in company with a group of verum idiots who thought who thought we would take on -- what. Attack one entire military facility, chetu plan we had. Probably you would have been home safe in the morning if we had just stayed put." Probably last week Kavalam would sound bitter about this; today he just sounds wry. "Pottans all of us and you King Pottan for trying to lead us." He rolls back onto his back, staring back up at the ceiling once more. "What do you respect about your father? What do you think your fan club here worships about your father?" "I'm not trying to lead," Spence insists, "I just have ideas that could help. But only if we work together. The way they keep people down is by..." The agitation has drained out of his voice by the time he trails off distracted. "What's a 'pottan'? Is it an insult?" The spinner whirs to a stop between his fingers and he flicks at it again, gentler. "I respect his kindness and imagination and determination. Other folks in here..." He chews on his lower lip, staring up at the ceiling. "I don't know. They respect that he's a badass who shoots lasers and wins?" "No, pottan means we were brilliant people who made brilliant choices. Damn fools it means. And I have seen how they keep people down, ya, it's with big sticks. For beating." Kavalam lifts his hand to thwack an invisible nightstick demonstratively at the air overhead. "He's a total badass. Probably nobody here cares he is kind or creative, they care he smashed how many of these hell-holes open? Walked away? Big middle-finger to the whole government? But you want to start with the kindness part. You are Jackson Holland's son. The guards are scared of you. This whole place is scared of you. Maybe you should try to lead. Maybe you should lead with that." Spencer does not respond immediately. The fidget toy in his hand spins faster, then slower, his expression shifting periodically until he arrives at, "He took down those labs with kindness and imagination and determination and most of all organizing." He says this with the speculative tone of someone trying to explain something to himself. "I mean and lasers, obviously. But the Prometheus legends only talk about the lasers part." Whir, whir, whir. "Okay." This comes as lightly as it does abruptly, his fingers stilling the spinner between them. "I'll try." Deep breath in. "If that's what it takes, I'll do it." "Imagination and Lasers." Kavalam plucks his glasses off his face to set them and The Book of Mormon aside on the desk, rolling over on his side again, though this time to fluff his thin pillow up beneath his head and close his eyes. "Sounds like the kind of silly art project Mister Jackson would dream up for class."