Thread: After Hours at the Nerd Lab [BH6: Captain & Blue]

Joy Martinez preferred to work in the evenings. If professor Callaghan was around, her parents didn't worry. Sure the man wasn't... actually always there, but she didn't tell them that and professor Callaghan hadn't ever ratted her out even though he almost certainly knew that she was fudging how often he was in the lab with her while she worked. Maybe he didn't know, but it seemed more likely to her that the man understood that what she needed was a little room to breathe. Hah . It was nice to have alone time though. Well not entirely alone because there were sometimes other people working, but she usually put her earbuds in and got in the zone. People respected the zone here, they got it. She paused her work to take a sip of tea from her heavy travel mug and then set it back down on the table, making sure the lid got sealed again so that nothing would get in it before she got back to work. Safety was important, and she couldn't afford to take extra risks. Sometimes it felt like pretty much everyone was out to get her, but under the clinical lights and well filtered air system of the lab, she found a place where nobody worried about her and nothing went wrong. Well, nothing that wasn't fault in her design work. Ah, dang it. She had put too much heat on the small segment of plastic she'd been attaching, and it had melted very firmly to the metal below it. That's what she got for working while anything less than entirely focused. She could have cut the metal, saved the bits of scrap to use for something else, but Joy was in a little bit of a mood. Her chest ached a little today and she'd had a little bit of a cough and those put her on edge. It was the kind of day where things went wrong and her parents ended up with more evidence about why she ought to stay inside and never experience anything ever just in case. It would have been smart and good lab safety to actually go to the bin and put the metal and plastic combination into it carefully, so obviously Joy got close and then threw it in like she was angry with it instead. There was a nonthreatening ' boomf ' and a puff of pink rose up in the air, an experiment that was supposedly dud triggered by the sharp pressure of being hit. It was delightful to look at, and she identified it immediately as one of Honey Lemon's projects. Not that Joy had ever seen them in person for obvious reasons, but she had seen the videos of the experiments and talked to Honey Lemon a few times. She should have known to immediately cover her nose and mouth but it had been such a surprise that she just stood there while the cloud began to settle, gently dusting her hair and sweater in pink, confused and uncertain. Instead of focusing on protecting her face she was trying to figure out what had happened. This wasn't what trash cans were supposed to do, this was basically the opposite. The 'how' wasn't as important though, as the fact that it had happened. There wasn't even that much, it was barely visible on her clothing but it was enough to force a reaction. That wasn't fair, things had been fine for so long. The teen coughed, frowned, and then coughed again more aggressively. Her throat itched in a way that she knew all too well and she turned sharply, intent on getting from the bin back to her work station before things got too bad. The coughing got worse, and it felt like the breath was being torn out of her. It was the sort of thing that she could handle if she stopped it fast enough, something she could keep to herself and pretend had never happened. She was focusing hard on her breathing, fighting the panic that her body always flew into because that was going to make it worse. She needed long, slow, deep breaths, but it was hard when it felt like oxygen wasn't getting in. What Joy managed instead was an uneven combination of the two - sometimes she got enough air and sometimes it was the short, sharp gasps that came so much more easily between coughs. She put a hand on the table to balance and accidentally knocked her coffee mug over. It hit the ground with a bang that she barely heard, distracted as she was. Her ears were full of the sound of her heart beat and the gasps for air. It didn't matter how many times this happened, she never got used to it. She knew why, she had the objective facts about it, but that didn't help much when part of her brain was screaming 'not again' and the other part of her brain was just... screaming.