Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where everything is sweet!

[skinandbone]

The sun rises on Taxon, but this is a different sun. It's brighter. Yellower.

Lemony-er.

Specifically, it's a big slice of candied lemon, shining through pink and white drifts of cotton candy clouds. Wherever the golden light of dawn lands, surfaces are left sticky with a thin glaze of honey. Mercifully, this soaks in quickly.

The buildings are different, too, made of gingerbread and decorated in icing. Windows are panes of glassy sugar, shot through with wavy bands of bubbles.The streets are paved in hard candies, and, for alien reasons, the sidewalks are pancakes, light and fluffy and squashy underfoot. Inside, furniture is made of chocolate, and the faucets dispense everything from lemonade to simple syrup. The homes of all the real people of Taxon have been gathered together and arranged into a cheery little village set a short distance from the sugar-glittering city. Everyone is neighbors now, and isn't that great!? They can all borrow cups of sugar from each other!

The changes have extended to the citizens, turning the Extras into a pastel rainbow of sugar people. Off to the east, there is a new bit of landscape: a mountain made of massive slabs of cookie and cake. A river coils down from it, shimmery pink and foaming with scoops of rainbow sherbert.

Everything is bright and colorful, over saturated and – this is a telling detail – outlined in heavy black lines that are always at the edges of objects, no matter how you turn your head. In such cheery surroundings, surely the newly candied people of Taxon will wake with joy in their hearts and a snazzy group song on their lips.

Look, the Extras have already started.

“How do you say good morning
To a hundred different friends?
How do you give a good wish
That never ever ends?

Ta-ta-ta-taxon! It's the city that can't be beat!
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where everything is sweet!
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Making friends is work that's never done
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where learning can be fun!

And for five disturbing seconds, bubbly, cheerful credits flick across everyone's vision. Your chief writer for this episode is Tinae Crice, Taxon.

LOGO! The word Taxon flares, then vanishes in a shimmery puff of sugar crystals and tumbling candies. Another beautiful day in Taxon has begun, so let's all get to learning, sharing, and just plain having FUN!!

Comments

[smecker]

Hi, Robert. Welcome to Taxon. PTSD is a not-uncommon reaction. In this case, so is diabetes.

Paul Smecker notices the licorice-and-chocolate man (with a silver bracelet) shaking a Candy Extra (Candextra? Filler candy?) and furrows his brow. Okay, no, he doesn't, he doesn't really have 'brows' anymore, but if he still had 'em, he'd furrow them.

He's been playing match-up on the candy people he's seen so far. Some of them are easier, some of them are harder; this one he's not sure.

(None of this is to imply Paul Smecker is taking this all well. He had his freakout. He had it silently, sitting in his candy treehouse that is on top of a candy tree in the center of the candy village. He had it with slow, building horror and then some savage pummeling of his candy bed. Which accomplished nothing. He's entered the state on the far side of freakout, now.)

Paul stares a little longer, then decides to cheat and use his tablet. The man before him is.....

..... Robert Lutece? Oh jeeze, they've got two people in Taxon who switch gender without the necessity of needing to tuck, stuff, and plump?

"Hey," Paul calls out as he walks closer. "Calm the hell down. You are supposed to be a scientist, aren't you?"

Paul Smecker does not, at first glance, look to be made of candy. He looks to be made of cigarettes: something decidedly... adult for this cutesy, colorful world. At least, until one realizes that he's giving off little puffs of powdered sugar from his over-sized cigarette arms and legs with every step.

Paul is smoking a regular-sized candy cigarette, as well.

His clothes are made of Sweet Tarts-- a pastel pink shirt and pastel green trousers, formed of hundreds of small, sugary discs carefully threaded together.

And finally, two coffee-flavored Werther's rounds form his eyes.

[bloodandrhetoric]

Robert takes in the candy cigarette man at a glance: colorful candy clothes, candy white body, some manner of candy eyes . . . God, what's the point? The man's candy, he's just. Candy. What more is there to notice? He's candy. Robert's going mad.

It is unfortunately difficult, in this candy form, to emote properly. Robert can only assume the 'look' he gives back to the other man conveys his sense of consternation at being asked to calm down in this situation, being accused of being 'supposedly' a scientist. Robert Lutece is the scientist so far as he thinks most people should be concerned, and while his reaction at the moment may be characterized as . . . emphatic, he for one has decided to deem it entirely appropriate for the enormity of the situation.

After all, he has somehow been transformed into candy. Surely any sane human being would find this a startling turn of events.

"I am supposed to be a human being," he says flatly -- but to Paul's credit, he does seem immediately calmer than he was, given someone to direct his egocentric disdain onto. It's funny the things that help in these situations. "Are you claiming you know me?"

[smecker]

"We're all supposed to be human beings, slick," (okay except for the vampires, gods, mutants, whatever) is Cigarette-Man's unperturbed response. He saunters closer and has a seat on a fire hydrant that seems to be made of Red Hot candies.

"And yes, I know you, except usually you have tits. So you don't remember me?"

His voice still sounds the same, Paul's discovered-- so the Werther candies watch Robert Lutece closely, because if Candyman really doesn't recognize him, that implies maybe more than just an altering of genital, uh, candy.

[bloodandrhetoric]

Paul is most likely expecting one of two things: either Rosalind Lutece has the ability to alter her primary and secondary sex characteristics as a matter of course, like Metody Green does, or she's experiencing some kind of glitch beyond the rest of them, and this is some alternate male version of herself. What he's probably not expecting is that the latter comes as part of the package with Rosalind/Robert Lutece. Dreamers don't usually know that they're dreaming, as it were.

"Rosalind?" Robert says, perking up at this information straight away. "Rosalind's here?" He looks around subconsciously hopefully, as some people do when something they want is confirmed to be nearby, as though this will immediately bring Rosalind Lutece into view.

[smecker]

Paul is expecting one of those first two options, but leaving aside a theoretical space for a third, based on 'Robert' not seeming to know who he is.

The words that come from Robert's mouth slot further into Theory Three: he's someone else entirely. Someone who knows Rosalind, but isn't her.

If he could see Robert's human face, he would undoubtedly default to theorizing 'twin', or at least 'sibling'. Same last name, strong strong resemblance-- but he can't fully see that resemblance at the moment.

He takes a drag on his cigarette, watching Licorice Lutece look around him. He hasn't interacted a hell of a lot with Rosalind-- most noticeably, he sat next to her in the meeting-- but she's struck him as... pretty damn independent. Self-sufficient.

"She's here sometimes," is what Paul says, a little slowly. "Not at the moment, according to the map."

And he double-checks that, just to be sure. Nope, no Rosalind. Just Robert Lutece.

[bloodandrhetoric]

There could be a million trillion Rosalind Luteces in the world, none of which are his Rosalind. Confirmation of her existence is reassuring, certainly, but no guarantee that whatever's become of him, Rosalind has met a similar fate. Is she also candy, somewhere? Candy, as his new cigarette friend had with such vulgarity put it, with tits?

None of this makes sense. Robert puts a hand to his head wearily and hums a familiar old tune (which Smecker may be able to pick out as a bastardized, calliope form of a song he knows, if he listens closely) to himself. Music's always steadied him through quantum cognitive dissonance.

It's a moment before his mind settles down enough to make use of any of the cigarette man's information. "Why did you assume I was Rosalind?"

Perhaps she, too, looks like a licorice abomination in gummy pantaloons.

[smecker]

"Why don't you have a seat," Paul suggests, instead of an immediate answer. He gestures with his cigarette at the sidewalk curb, composed of oversized hard candies.

The song makes his mouth (the jagged line between cigarettes) quirk briefly.

"You don't know where you are, do you? The name Taxon means nothing to you?"

[bloodandrhetoric]

Under the circumstances, Robert's usual tendency to bridle at any treatment that feels like babying is taking a backseat to the fact that, frankly, he really ought to sit down. He has the sense that his new friend is talking down to him more than slightly, but he supposes that, as candy, there's no way for him to know that Robert's a man of nearly forty years, not a schoolboy. He's prepared to be a little understanding on the point.

Robert perches himself on the edge of candy curb with as much dignity as he can muster.

"Nothing beyond the ancient Greek," he says. If Taxon is a person or place, it rings no bells.

"How long have you been candy?"