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Mouseman
It was a dark and stormy afternoon.
Much like Santa Clara Valley in the spring.
And he was a scientist, no, not mad, that was true, but he could get pretty wild down at the bar after work. Usually on Saturdays, when they did a sort of Urban Cowboy sort of thing going on. They didn't have a mechanical bull, but they had a big machine that beeped and you could win $25,000 if you pressed three buttons in the right order. Or fast enough. Or something, he'd never read the rules, exactly, he just sort of played every once in a while after a few beers, birch beer, strictly, usually, but you know how sugar could go to your head.
But that was then, this was now.
And now he was standing in front of a squadron of kids with all their little kid noises and smells and sticky hands. If he had to guess, and he did, to keep his mind occupied, there were about twenty five to thirty of them. Per two chaperones. Which was probably too much, really, as he would estimate ten of the students were, at present, roaming the lab in relatively unsupervised and thoroughly un-recommended fashion.
Well, he'd better say something, anyway, some of the kids were looking at him with that look that means they're going to be laughing about him and his sticky-out hair over lunch in the lab's cafeteria, where they'd agreed to host the school children for the day.
"Kids." He looked around, some of them even looked back up at him. "Hey.
"You are witnessing one of the technological marvels of this century..."
Stupid sticky out hair, he'd meant to fix that, last night, as well, he just forgot, in the rush to get out the door in the morning, the way you forget to do stuff like that sometimes... he just hated playing the stereotype and all. He could see them all staring at it. Well, the kids that were paying attention, anyway. One of them was playing, off in the corner, with one of the glass cases.
"Yes, children, ehm, please, don't play with the glass cases. Or the wire ones, either, please, come to think of it.
"What we have been working on, here at B---- Labs, is a multitude of things to make your lives so much richer, more full." He threw his arms wide, to give the kids the opportunity to tear themselves from looking at his hair to all the things around the cavernous room in which they stood. "For example, this, " he brought his hands down with a clunk on the metal table in front of him, "is a new type of metal table we've been working on to withstand zero G... that is, zero gravity. Ehm, which is, like, space. Stuff."
He faltered, because one of the boys was yelling something over by the glass cages in the far corner.
In the corner where they kept the radioactive mice.
disclaimer:
Here we are, week two in California, and the weather is still worse than in Lahinch.
Which makes sense, I suppose.
How're you kids? Adjusting to our new accent?
We've had a few hardships, lost an engineer on an overdose of Jamba Juice, walked the hell out of our legs through the Redwood Basin state park, lost an intern to a mountain lion that followed us home after the walk. But all in all, good going.
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