Logs:Let It Grow

Let It Grow
Dramatis Personae Dallen, Quentin	2024-03-25 "Wow."
Location <XAV> Workshop - Xs Grounds
A large barn-like building situated at the far end of the gardens from the mansion proper, this makerspace functions as a classroom for many of the more hands-on classes. An expanse of workshop space, it is subdivided into smaller segments for the different types of activities: Woodshop, Welding shop, Machine shop, Electronics, Bike shop, Screen Printing and Photography, Fabric Arts, and the Rapid Prototyping Lab with a trio of 3D printers. The space comes complete with a large host of tools available for use, although many of the more dangerous require prior clearance from administration to use -- students with appropriate clearance to use them can gain access to locked equipment with their student IDs. From sanders to MIG/TIG welders to soldering stations to industrial sewing machines to its own darkroom, though, this space is well equipped for teaching students how to make. It's not empty in here, but it's grown quieter as the night grows later and more students trickle off to homework or bed. Over in electronics there's one skinny brown-skinned teen, dressed in large soft maroon sweater and jeans. Whatever he is currently tinkering with it's not immediate its purpose. Quentin is perched on a stool, arms folded at the table, peering very intently down at a PCB. There are headphones on his head, one finger idly tapping at the crook of his arm in time with unheard music. It almost looks like he's doing nothing at all with the circuit board right now, but closer inspection shows the small resistor carefully fitting itself into place. Dallen is the last one out of the woodshop, though he hasn't actually been woodworking for quite some time now so much as tidying up the space. He isn't upset about the mess, not really. Maybe the other students who were in here earlier didn't know where all the hand tools were supposed to go? Or how to operate the shop vac? The signs do say what should be left open and what should be closed and -- oh no, that's just dangerous! But finally he is making his way out, carrying a stack of whimsical garden labels shaped like honeycombs, hollow cells surrounding a row of solid ones where plant names can be written. He's still wearing his apron, sturdy double-stitched black canvas with "DEA" hand-embroidered on the chest pocket, over a gray henley shirt, rugged blue jeans, and tan work boots. His thoughts are a soft jangling tumble of sensations -- snapshots of the things he'd been putting away, the refrain from "Growing Season" looping over and over, the edges of the signs in his hands (oh no missed a spot sanding). When he realizes he's not actually alone in the workshop, he drifts over to Quentin, craning his neck at his project, tilting his head one way and another, mentally trying to identify the components and divine the purpose of the gadget before he gives up and asks -- probably too softly for the other boy to actually hear through the headphones, but at least he's thinking words, now -- "What is that?" Quentin's finger continues its tapping -- a little quicker and a little harder as Dallen nears. His other hand is squeezing hard at the crook of his arm, his brow furrowing slightly as if his task is taking abruptly more intense concentration. When Dallen actually approaches him, though, this tension is easing. The small tapping of his finger stops, seemingly shifted to a small bobbing of his head. He doesn't look up. "This, my good man, is --" The circuitboard lifts in the air, slowly rotates in front of Dallen. "-- absolutely nothing, yet. Once I get the sensors adjusted right, maybe it'll be a lifechanger. Not for me. How long have you been doing that?" The that comes with a very small shiver of the honeycomb signs in Dallen's hands. Dallen's expression doesn't change, but his vivid sense of the world around him brightens subtly at being addressed as "my good man". He blinks at the floating circuitboard, still unable to match it to the admittedly limited range of circuitboards he has seen in his life -- the innards of broken toys, of appliances, of the amazing variety of robots his roommate is always showing up or disappearing with... "Who's life would it change?" His eyes are still very wide when they shift to Quentin, and go even wider when the wooden signs vibrate. The rough edge he missed on one of them sends a weird slithering buzz up his arm. "Oh, I've been helping out in my dad's woodshop since I was really little. I'm not sure I can remember when I made my first project." He's trying anyway, fitting memories together like a jigsaw puzzle -- from handing his father tools to his father guiding his hand with the same tools. He pulls away from this suddenly, self-conscious that he might be rudely zoning out. "Where did you learn to make...computers?" "This kid I tutor," Quentin says as though the kid in question is not a matter of months younger than him, "you know, with the Heidi braids? Been having a hell of a time, she's been scared to touch anything because she never knows when --" His cheeks puff out, the quiet explosive pop of air he expels augmented with his hands making a very recognizable boom gesture. "Figured if I could rig her up a pressure sensor she'd know when she's about to blow. Enjoy her gifts more if her friends aren't about to, uh --" His cheeks puff out again but this time he does not mime the Blowing Up. His brows hike at the question, and he's giving a dismissive shrug. "Computers all around us. You pick up a few things, you know? But," he sounds unnecessarily magnanimous but not insincere here, "it's real cool you learned how to make those trinkets. What are you going to grow?" The physical description matches almost instantly to the correct student in Dallen's mind, even though he knows little about her other than what she looks like and what her power does. He nods emphatically, more impressed now with Quentin's thoughtfulness than with his skills, which nevertheless remain impressive. "I don't know if something being all around makes it easier to learn how to do things with it." He's forming the words carefully, though not for fear they'll be received poorly -- at least not any more so than usual. He just isn't sure if those are the correct words for what he means, which is a rapid flutter of spring plantings with his mother and siblings interspersed with other memories. Some of the latter are clearly related to plants as well -- a grade school teacher's wilting monstera, a neighbor's lawn patchy and yellow despite sprinklers and fertilizers -- but others seem bewilderingly random. "Oh, thank you! I'm not as good as Bryce, but it's fun and useful sometimes." At Quentin's question, "Growing Season" finally breaks free of its refrain and plays on to the next verse. Carried on the bright hopeful musical notes, Dallen's labels bear not writing but seeds that sprout and unfurl leaves and flowers and tendrils in loving hyper-real detail. He starts to put names to each, but catches himself before they actually spill out of his mouth. Though now he's second guessing that therapy-honed reflex and considering whether it might in fact be appropriate to list the plants, mouth still open. He shuts it, blushes, and says, "Um, vegetables mostly, but also herbs, and some flowers." << (some flowers sun flowers some sunflowers sun some flowers...) >> his mind patters on, tucking the pleasing noises into Ryan Black's lyrics, which in no way distracts him from trying to feel out whether he can infodump about the plants by asking, "Do you like gardening?" Quentin's eyes flick up to Dallen now. Just for a second, curious. "Your brain is really loud." It doesn't particularly sound like an insult or a compliment, just a passing observation. When he looks back down the ultrasoft knit of his sweater, previously blank, has sprouted a knitted sunflower design, its face unfurled and tilted in the direction of the light overhead. "I did help my mom set up a station to automatically monitor the soil pH in our garden back home," he's saying with just a touch of smugness that somehow manages to carry over to, "but I left the plants to her. I was reading lately, though," and there's a quietly more intense note in his voice, "about efforts to breed lower glucosinolate load in Brussels sprouts and I bet a similar process would work on a lot of greens, actually. -- You like gardening, I take it." It may not sound like an insult, but Dallen is immediately trying to quiet his mind with a grab-bag of techniques learned from therapy and Psionic Self-Defense, none of which he's got a particularly strong handle on. But he smiles, at a small delay, when the sunflower appears on Quentin's sweater. He's immediately thinking of Mr. Jackson and his illusions, and how he would probably like some sunflowers... He's blinking at the idea of an automatic soil pH monitor, curious and still trying to work out whether it would be annoying if he asked (that might go under the plants that he left to his mother) when Quentin pivots. One of the plant labels in his mind bears a towering brussels sprout plant, and no amount of his sifting through its soil preferences, water and sun needs, sowing and harvesting information yields anything about "glucosinolate". He suddenly realizes the brussels sprout might be a bit loud and just tries to concentrate on the bridge of "Growing Season". "I love gardening," he says, very earnestly, "what's glucosinolate?" "Glucosinolates are a compound in a lot of cruciferous vegetables that make them bitter. Or -- technically myrosinase makes them bitter, that one's an enzyme that breaks the glucosinolates down and releases the bitterness while you're eating them. Lower either of those and bam, less bitter veggies, wider appeal. The brussels sprouts," Quentin is adding casually, "were very loud. You don't have to stop, though, you know." his circuit board is lowering itself back to his table, tiny components continuing to assemble themselves. "If you're here," He waves a hand loftily around -- not so much at the workshop itself, the physical gesture accompanied with a mental understanding of the school writ large, "you've gotta be special. Shouldn't be muting yourself. Got a whole garden flourishing in there, let it grow." Dallen is trying to remember "glucosinolates" and "myrosinase" so he can look them up later, but the words are slippery and he is distracted. The noise in his head changes timbre, shifts to a different palette, rotates at right angle to itself in some indefinable way at Quentin's assessment of his noisy brain. For several seconds he just scrambles for words that are not quite where he left them. Then he stops trying and just lets "Growing Season" play again while he watches Quentin's arcane electronic components come together. He shifts the stack of labels so that he's no longer touching the rough edge he'd missed, and his fingers tap one after another in rhythmic but asymmetrical cascade on the underside of the bottom label. When he finds the words again he finds them all at once. "I don't like loud. Because it hurts. So I try not to be loud, to other people. I guess I mute myself...because I'm special?" He's not very sure of this, still batting it around through new-ish colors and textures, and it doesn't really seem to contradict any of the rest when he adds, "I'm here because of the x-gene, not the autism." The plants in his mind are growing, merging and emerging and bearing strange impossible fruit in the background of his disorganized thoughts. "Isn't it distracting? For you. In the brain." "Both part of who you are, aren't they? Move different, think different. Always gonna be someone out there trying to shut that down." Quentin's brows lift, his mouth pursing and twisting skeptically to the side. But then he just shrugs, bops his head -- more to the rhythm of the sound in Dallen's head, now, than to the music playing through his own headphones -- and looks back down at the progress on his sensor. "... guess maybe sometimes that someone is us. But, I mean, you wanna hide your light under a bushel, who am I to get in your way." Some of his spare parts are starting to tick themselves back away into the many (many) small compartments of storage at the side of this workspace. "Whole world is distracting. My brain can handle it." Dallen for once isn't wondering if the question is rhetorical. Whatever rearrangement happened in his brain has turned the old (well, not that old) conundrum of relating to his differences into a source of excitement instead of fear. Or at least, in to a source of excitement as well as fear. The memory that blossoms out of the brussels sprout plant's spreading crown starts with the soft repetition of the corduroy wales beneath his fingertips while his parents explained his diagnosis -- years after he was actually diagnosed -- untroubled by all the dire symptoms they listed because all those things were just...him, weren't they? That scene unspools into the music that Quentin is picking up through the wild, tangled forest of mutant vegetables. Not just picking it up, but moving to it. "Oh..." His eyes go even wider, and when his brain doesn't know how to interpret that flutter in his chest, it just becomes a diaphanous butterfly. "No, I..." When he doesn't know how to say it, he reaches for what Quentin had already set within his easy reach, and it comes so easily and naturally, "...set it on a lampstand, that those who enter may see the light." He hadn't realized until now he was rocking a little, and he's not anxious about it, and if it always felt like that -- just like the corduroy under fingertips -- he could handle a whole lot more, too. "Wow," he says, more or less unselfconsciously. Bop, bop, bop. The butterfly has, perhaps, fluttered straight out of Dallen's mind because it's perched now on the large sunflower that has bloomed on Quentin's sweater. "There you go." As the last of the drawers closes itself, Quentin is looking up with a grin. "Wow," he echoes, "that's what I'm saying. We were given gifts to use 'em, right? I see it. When you see it, other people will too." The actual sensor he's been working on picks itself up to float after him. "See ya 'round, Dallen." Dallen -- has been staring for a while already, at the collar of Quentin's sweater, and he transfers the staring back to the flower and the butterfly. "Yeah, I --" He doesn't say he's only really been trying to not pull at shadows. But if he can learn that, he can learn it the other way around. He doesn't try to say it, but his shadow is sprouting slightly amorphous and asymmetrical butterfly wings. He says, clearly and whole-fluttering-heartedly, "I'll see you! Too. Quentin."