taxonomites | 034 ± [visual / location: speares] a set of new wings and anything gold

Oh, Glitch has more in store for him than just gold.

A little beyond the pot of gold, left of the rainbow and next to a tree, there is now a phone booth. So inviting, so... Booth-y.

It's like it's asking to be investigated, with its door all open and welcoming like that.

Far be it from Glitch to look a gift phone booth in the...whatever a phone booth has. He's already in curiosity overdrive, so this new item of intrigue stands little chance of not getting poked.

Or stepped into.

-- And the doors snap shut behind him! Totally not terrifying in the least. Shocking maybe, but not terrifying. They did the research on things like this.

"Hello, sir!"

There is a moderately sized video screen in this phone booth. Currently, it is displaying a hamster waving enthusiastically with its little hamster paw. It looks inordinately happy to have just essentially trapped Glitch in this booth.

"How are you today?"

The research is appreciated, although he is still a bit startled.

The hamster gets a so-we-meet-again look, narrowed eyes and tilted head, but in the end the cheerfulness wins Glitch over. He shrugs, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

"There's a rainbow in the sky, s-so it's a good day," he said with a nod. "Um. How are you?"

For all the trouble and pain they caused, the aliens were still in charge and maybe, maybe if he showed them enough respect they'd be benevolent.

"Oh, yes, the rainbow! The colors were tricky."

With a little grin the hamster leans forward. Time to cut to the proverbial chase! With gusto!

"The real question, sir, is how are you. But I asked that already." It hmms to itself and contemplates the next move. "Is there anything you've been wanting lately? We've heard some rumors."

Home was Glitch's first thought, even though he knew the hamster would just tell him he was home. But that was all he wanted, to be back in the O.Z. with DG and Cain and everyone, and then maybe something could be done for his poor head.

Something...oh.

"My brain," he said quietly, and he'd asked for that before too but it never hurt to try. "I think-- I think I do need it after all. I I don't want to forget again."

"Brains are quite hard to come by, you know. Very complex and full of things." The hamster rubs a paw on its little hamster chin as it considers the current dilemma. Mostly this is for show, but one can never tell considering the apparent lack of hamster facial expressions.

"We might be able to do something about your situation. Just a little something, if you're willing to work for it."

Glitch stared at the screen, hesitant and far from trusting but curious about the offer.

"What...what sort of work?" He certainly had to know that first.

"Gold?" Jayne's eyes lit up as he looked intently at the tablet. "We get gold now?" He started turning over the possibilities in his head. How much food and guns and ammo could he get with all that gold? He could get stacks of girly mags, and more t-shirts too. It'd be great.

But then he grew suspicious too. "They really givin' us gold for nothin'? Might be a trap."

"Yes! It's very shiny." Glitch nodded to emphasize this point, and was about to go picking up some of the gold when Jayne raised the issue of traps. He snatched his hand back with a tiny gasp.

"It would be a trap, wouldn't it? All pretty and and tempting and then next thing you know you're getting gobbled up."

"Yeah," Jayne agreed. "It'd be jus' the sorta thing them there aliens would do. Put somethin' temptin' like that out for grabs, and then punish ya when you take it."

Still, it was so very shining and tempting.

"Didn't ya see nobody leavin' it there? Maybe look 'round. See if anybody's hidin' and watchin'."

"I can't fault your logic," Glitch said as he edged away from the pot. Keep in mind, Jayne, that your logic in this case is hamster logic so that might not be much of a compliment.

Glitch did look around, just to be safe. He was standing on the side street outside Langwe and Gale's, the wide vehicle-entrance doors open to let the mild spring air into the shop. There were some Extras giving him curious looks but otherwise no one seemed interested in the gold.

"I don't...see anybody else," he concluded. "And, well, it is on my property, sorta, so-- finder's keeper's?"

"Well hell, if someone were dumb enough to leave it lyin' 'round on your property, I'd say you got rights to it now." There was a hint of glumness to his voice. As Glitch had been talking, Jayne had looked out the door of the ranch house for a rainbow and his own pot of gold, but had seen nothing. Figures the guy with the weird zipper looking thing on his head would luck out.

And with that thought, Jayne asked the obvious, "What's with your head?" Subtlety of a jackhammer, this one.

"Right!" Glitch agreed with a nod. Possession was some high percentage of the...thing where you own stuff.

His elation crumbled a bit at the question, and he sighed. "It has a zipper on it, i-it's a long story about witches and brain theft."

"Brain theft? I ain't buyin' that. Ya can't be talkin' at me if y'ain't got a brain." Jayne had never gone to school, but even he knew that a person needed their brain to talk and walk and stuff.

"Half a brain," Glitch clarified and helpfully knocked on the side of his head. He had no idea if that was the empty side but that was neither here nor there. "A-and it was done by an alchemist so there was some magicy stuff involved."

Pause. Smile. "Name's Glitch, how d'ya do?"

Jayne just shook his head. Now he had another brain case to deal with, since River was already there. At least this guy could speak in sentences he could understand.

"Jayne. I'd be doin' better if I had my own stash of gold waitin' for me, but other'n that, can't complain much."

Oh no. Nothing is ever that easy. Handouts without a catch don't exist. No such thing as a free lunch. Be careful what you wish for. And a thousand other cliches that had some kind of a basis in fact, even if it had been lost to time and repetition long ago. There had to have been some reason for them to be said, right?

"It probably means that you've got something terrible coming."

Ever the pessimist. Realist. Whatever Corwin felt like calling it today.

...oh dear, and here's Glitch as one of the city's bounciest optimists.

"Or or it's to make up for all the terrible things that have happened," Glitch countered with a grin. Hey, a month ago he had to bury his best friend, he'd take any compensation offered. "Wouldn't that be nice."

Corwin's had a long time to get wary of things that seemed too good to be true--more often than not, it just turned out that they were.

"Or else it's a bribe to keep you placated until the next time something bad happens. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you just don't get something for nothing." Even here. There was always something lurking around the corner, just waiting to pounce on the unwary.

"I dunno," Glitch said with a shrug. "I mean, a bribe would make more sense if I could, you know, spend the gold on stuff. As it is all I can do is...is look at it and go 'oh, how shiny'."

Then again. "M-maybe it's both?"

"Not everyone can actually see past that part. Most people, in fact." At least in his experience, and he'd certainly had enough of it. There wasn't really any doubt of which side he'd be on had it magically appeared in front of him.

"'Both' just seems a little too diplomatic."

Glitch shrugged, accepting that. At one point in his life he'd been something like a diplomat and stillt ended to default to compromise.

"We're probably overthinking it," he offered, and chuckled at the notion of him and his half-a-brain overthinking anything. He reached into the pot and picked up a coin, rubbing it between fingers and thumb. "It could be some joke that's only funny to hamsters for all we know."

"Yeah, the last joke that was only funny to hamsters ended up with the walking dead overrunning city." And wasn't that a pleasant memory. Avoiding teeth and beheading monsters in the streets...and all for some damn alien amusement. "Excuse me if I'd rather not trust magically appearing wealth."

And this would be one tiny high schooler from Roswell, New Mexico, staring at the pot of gold like someone's about to pop out from behind it and shout 'gotcha'.

"This place keeps getting stranger."

"It does, doesn't it?" replied the middle-aged zipperheaded native of the next dimension over from Kansas. Glitch had given up his trepidation and was now removing the sparkly gold coins from the pot and stacking them like a particularly enthusiastic Scrooge. "I-I'm not gonna complain about this particular weirdness, though."

While she tried her best to keep her eyes on the man's face, she couldn't help but allow her gaze to wander up to the zipper on his head, if only for a moment. The curious, need to know girl who had a desperate thirst for knowledge and answers wanted to ask what that was all about-- was it some sort of weird hair jewelry, an actual zipper, etc.-- but she was far too polite to outright ask something so rude.

"Gold doesn't seem like something to complain about. Though, I gotta ask: Is gold even worth anything here?" She'd been under the impression that Taxon functioned under a credits system.

And Glitch would appreciate the moment of tact, if he were aware of it. The topic of the gold's value was a much better one, in that it was pretty much guaranteed to avoid all trauma.

"Not really. Well, aside from whatever you can get out of using the gold itself." He shrugged, then gave the tablet a curious look. The query and the more-unfamiliar-than-usual face had him thinking new arrival so he smiled gently.

"S-so I just need to figure out what to do with it. And, ah, hello."

"Gold's good for plating," Liz offered.

What? Science geek. She spent a little too much time reading up on things that are otherwise useless amounts of knowledge that have only ever come in handy while caught in Czechoslovakian drama.

"Oh, yeah, hi. I should've said hi first, sorry... I'm Liz."

"That it is," Glitch said with a nod. Plating what though...oh, he'd figure it out.

He waved off her apology. "A-and I could have said hello sooner so-- we're even!" Pause. "No, we're not even, I have your name and you don't have mine. Which...which is Glitch."

There, all equaled out.

"Are you the, um, one of the glitches I've been warned about?"

Forgive her for the confusion, Glitch. She was a recent arrival and having been given the general 'watch out for glitches' speech hadn't exactly left her with a clear picture as to what they were.

Really Glitch is amazed the confusion doesn't happen more often. It's probably because of the rarity that he is taken aback when Liz draws that particular conclusion.

So he frowns, blinks, and shakes his head. "N-no, that's...I was Glitch before I came here, it's just my name." Mostly. "The glitches the aliens do are are things that happen, not people."

"Oh God, sorry," Liz apologized, putting a hand to her forehead in embarrassment. The glitches hadn't been explained to her all that well and given her past with alien shenanigans, one couldn't be too sure. Paranoia, she has it.

"It's okay!" Glitch assured her and waved his hands dismissively. "Really, I mean if I'd more than half-a-brain, once I figured out the whole Glitch-glitch thing here I probably would've changed my name to...I dunno, Phillip."

Which was a perfectly serviceable name but...well, he hardly needed another one.

"...you do need to look out for the other sort of glitches, though."

"More than half a brain?" She echoed, not following. "You should give yourself more credit than that."

Dear Glitch: Liz Parker is sometimes too sweet for her own good. (See: It gets her into trouble more often than not.)

"So I've been told. There's not any way to predict them, is there?"

Cain looks. And then frowns, eyes going from the rainbow to the pot to the borderline insane grin on Glitch's face - and he can see the charms of a pot full of gold. It just seems a bit too shiny to be true.

"Hey, genius," he says, trying to disguise his tentative amusement. "What are you gonna do with gold when the rodents make us use credits?"

Finding the end of a rainbow? Nothing strange about that, not in his book because in the O.Z you can actually do that sort of thing. It happens.

It didn't happen often, of course, but it certainly wasn't that out of the ordinary. The gold, on the other hand, was downright odd.

Glitch snorted at Cain's query and started ticking things off on his fingers. "Gold plating, gold wiring, use it for solder, find out if anybody in this town's a jeweler and see if they want it, toss it into a fountain and make a wish...." He trailed off and shrugged. "All kinds of stuff."

Okay there wasn't enough there to do all that, but he had options.

This has got to be a joke.

[She genuinely doesn't know if she should laugh or not. If DG had been in possession of all of her childhood memories, she wouldn't have thought that finding a pot of the gold at the end of a rainbow was particularly unusual. But she didn't and she was. And this was Taxon. They couldn't trust the gold any more than they could trust the hamsters.]

Glitch held a coin up for inspection in the (fake) sunlight and made a contemplative "hmm" sound.

"I could run a few tests to make sure," he suggested, raising an eyebrow at the tablet. "W-with, you know, all appropriate safety precautions."

Oh dear he's going to start sciencing at it.

I'm not helping you clean up if you blow up the lab.

[She delivered the warning as seriously as she could manage, but there was a smile tugging at the edge of her lips and it took over before she could add anything else.]

What are you going to do with it? Apart from make a mess.

"I'm not gonna blow up the lab, doll," Glitch said, his tone reassuring. "Or make a mess, I I can be quite fastidious, you know." In the lab at least. The kitchen was another matter entirely.

What he would do with it was another matter entirely.

"...I have no idea," he conceeded at last. "Save it, maybe. Unless...well, do you want anything?"

"You get carried away, though," she pointed out. Which wasn't a bad thing. It just meant that things like cleaning up - instead of jumping straight into a new and exciting side project - might get delayed for a while.

"With the gold? I don't know. It's not as if we can spend it here, is it?"

"...that does tend to happen, yeah," he agreed with a sheepish grin. Either by getting distracted or taking a simple task and turning it into a massive undertaking.

"Not really. But we can make stuff with it, maybe. Gold-plated...stuff." Glitch rolled his eyes, frustrated with himself. "I-I'm starting to think all my creations were comissioned."

"I don't," she said, gently, "I've seen your work. You're the most creative guy I know, as well as the smartest."

There must have been a few commissions - things that her mother had asked to be made or inventions designed to meet a particular aim - but, even if that was the case, he was the one who took a vague idea and made it into something outstanding.

"You're just..." Glitch began, but trailed off with warm smile. No, he knew better now than to even joke about DG just saying anything, she always spoke her heart.

"You're just the sweetest thing," he said instead and decided that whatever he made was going to be for her. "Thank you, DG, I I know I can do it."

"I know," she said, with a mischievous smile that became a little softer and a little more sober a moment later. "And I know you can. I can't wait to see what you've come up with."

034 ± [visual / location: speares] a set of new wings and anything gold

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