Don't Be Afraid Of The Guy In Shades

[MurderWeasel]

Leave it to fate to turn what was already an uncomfortable experience (going way out of one's comfort zone on a long trip away from home with a bunch of strangers) into something even more miserable (doing so while visually impaired).

Zandah had never in his life broken a pair of glasses before the trip. He had, in fact, long stopped thinking of his glasses as objects in any real sense, let alone something susceptible to damage that could be lost or destroyed. He wore his glasses from the moment he woke up to the second before he went to bed. He didn't even consciously realize he had them on, even if they needed cleaning. He'd just take them off, wipe them, and put them back on as part of his routine, the same way he might crack his knuckles to relieve tension.

So, the day before the trip, he'd been stressed and tired and had laid his head down on the desk, and his glasses had made that uncomfortable, so he'd taken them off and set them next to his head, which was still uncomfortable but less so. Then he'd fallen asleep, knocked the glasses off the desk in his sleep, and upon waking up he'd pushed his chair back, rolling the wheels right over them, then had jolted upright when startled by the noise and stepped on them to boot, and somewhere in all of that the bridge had snapped where it connected to the left lens, the right arm had become detached, and the right lens had popped out of the frame. In other words, they were fucked beyond anything Zandah could fix in the eighteen hours before departure.

Fortunately, Zandah did have a backup pair of glasses. Unfortunately, they were prescription sunglasses at least a cycle out of date, and maybe two. Zandah never really wore sunglasses. He'd gotten them as part of some kind of buy-one-get-one deal, thinking maybe he'd become the sunglasses sort, and he hadn't. Over the past four or five years, he'd looked at them now and then and thought that maybe someday he'd wear them, and still he hadn't. On bright days, he never even considered that sunglasses were an option.

He'd briefly tried to pretend that relying on them wouldn't be so bad. In Evangelion, Gendo always wore sunglasses because his regular glasses broke, so this was just like that, except who wanted to be Gendo? And it immediately became clear that this was going to be even more of an ordeal, because the sunglasses sat further down Zandah's nose than his regular glasses, which meant not only were they tinted and a different prescription, they also gave him a different focal point. He had eyestrain and a headache within twenty minutes.

In the two days since, things had gotten better in some ways and worse in others. The eyestrain had lessened as he acclimated, which was good. Everything was still a bit fuzzy, though, and the colors were off because of the tint, but not in any consistent way. Sometimes he could forget he was wearing sunglasses, and other times the world was impossibly dim. It also turned out there was also another student on the trip who wore sunglasses all the time, but in his case it was because he was blind, so Zandah had gotten to explain no less than five times that, no, he was not blind, just very nearsighted and he'd broken his normal glasses.

Then there were the constant unusual effects he discovered. The sunglasses haloed lights much more than his normal glasses did, so there were fuzzy rings of illumination around every light source. They also, he had only just now learned, interacted with computer screens in a very unusual way from a distance. If he tilted his head just right, and looked sort of from the side, the laptop someone was typing on a few seats over in the lounge went completely black, like it was turned off. Move his head another way, and the contents returned, like magic. He had this distant memory that there was something special about the way monitors worked that meant older video cameras couldn't record them properly, but couldn't remember what it was. It probably was related to what he was experiencing.

For now, though, this was something to do in a place otherwise largely devoid of Zandah's usual diversions, so he tilted his head back and forth, watching the screen lights go out and then come back again and again.

[Pippi]

It was a revelation that she discovered, then forgot about, every couple of weeks or so, but you know what? It was nice to get out of her room for a while.

She’d made this decision entirely on a whim, but you know, thinking about it, most of her best ideas had been done entirely spur of the moment. The tattoo on her shoulder had been a snap decision only partially influenced by weed and alcohol, the replica Apollo Justice bracelet had been a last-second ‘click-Buy-and-don’t-look-at-the-price’ purchase. Both of them were things she caught herself glancing at every now and then, even to this day, and each time she did, she felt a little serotonin spike, and a small smile crept onto her face. Hell, if you wanted to go even further with this, it had been a flash decision that had caused her to travel all the way to the States to study, just a sudden, instinctive realisation that she would get cold feet if she didn’t apply in the next few seconds, and that she just had to bite the bullet and deal with all the bridges when she got to them.

So maybe she needed to make more of these spur of the moment decisions.

Now, obviously leaving her cabin wasn’t really on the same level as getting tatted or leaving everything behind for a brand new country. And it also wasn’t like this was the first time she’d stepped out of her room since the ship had disembarked. She’d spent most of the first day on the observation deck, gazing out across the blissfully endless ocean, lit cigarette in hand, utterly enraptured. She’d only decided to slink away when she’d heard a significant number of footsteps coming towards her, whereupon she’d performed her usual party trick of locking her bedroom door behind her and staying firmly put for a full 24 hours.

But even so, it was still a step forward for her. She hadn’t even been invited anywhere, or caught wind of some event or gathering that sounded vaguely up her alley. She’d just had a sudden thought that it might be nice for a change of scenery for a little bit. She could take her laptop with her, maybe grab a drink, find somewhere pleasant to sit in one of the public areas, and see what happened.

And she’d been right! It had been fun, in its own way! She’d found a comfy chair attached to a table that didn’t look like there'd been anything spilled over it, she’d nodded and said hi to anyone who passed her by, she’d cracked open the Word doc she’d been working on and gotten some good progress on it. It would have been even better if there’d been a nice window for her to gaze out of occasionally, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

The only drawback was that she had the distinct feeling she was being watched.

The lounge wasn’t exactly all hustle and bustle right now, and Kay had left her headphones in her cabin, so she was a little more alert to her surroundings than she sometimes… usually was. She was getting a growing feeling of paranoia, that there was someone, or maybe something if she was desperately unlucky, just out of her line of sight. And sure, they could have just been doing the same thing as she was, taking a break in the lounge and putting their feet up. But, well, a hunch didn’t disappear so easily. There was only one way to be certain.

Kay stretched, and let out an embarrassingly fake yawn, using her movement to catch a glimpse over her shoulder. There, she’d been right on the money. There was some guy right there behind her, staring right towards her, and nine times out of ten that would have been cause enough for her to pack her shit up and make a beeline for the nearest exit. There was just one thing that made her pause, though.

The guy was wearing sunglasses. The guy was wearing sunglasses indoors. The guy was wearing sunglasses indoors, while it was dark out. Now, he coulda just been that kinda arsehole, but Kay distinctly remembered that one of her fellow Cascadia passengers was legally blind; they’d needed to make a whole bunch of special accommodations for him onboard. Maybe this was that guy? Could be he just hadn’t realised he was staring directly at somebody. Probably would be a decent thing to let him know.

She turned around, one arm resting on the back of her chair, then frowned. Yep, guy was still looking right at where she was seated, doing this sorta weird thing with his head, tilting it from one side to the other, like the rolling waves were affecting only his neck and nothing else. There was still a chance he was just a shades-wearing-prick, who’d decided to creep on her for whatever reason. And that made things tricky, cause she didn’t wanna treat him as though he was blind if he was just a creep, and vice versa, didn’t wanna treat him like a creep if he legitimately couldn’t see.

Something nice and generic then. Yeah. Something that said ‘I am a normal human who knows how to talk to other humans, normally’.

“Um,” Kay said, immediately forgetting every word in the English language the moment she opened her mouth.

“Are you, um…”

All this time spent in the States, and she swore that her thick Welsh accent had grown even deeper. That familiar self-conscious gnawing sensation that everything she said was completely impenetrable had come crawling back with a vengeance.

“Do you… need something?”

A pause.

“From me?”

[MurderWeasel]

Oh no.

Disaster struck just like that. Zandah had this tendency to get lost in his own head sometimes, especially when there was a distraction, and in this case the novelty of the amazing disappearing laptop screen had entirely pushed from his mind the awareness that there was a person sitting there behind the laptop, doing their own thing and theoretically able to notice of him. As that fact suddenly came crashing back into his reality, he took the person in. She was really tall, probably taller than Zandah was (he had a hard time estimating that sort of thing, and besides a little tiny part locked away in the back of his mind was already feeling good about being shorter than a girl). She was also asking him a question, in an obviously uncertain fashion. Her accent said she was probably from abroad, maybe British but Zandah wasn't certain at all about that.

It was mortifying. Immediately, Zandah froze up mid-nod. His eyes actually closed for a moment, but hey, there was one thing shades were good for: she probably couldn't tell. It was tempting to just stay there in the dark for a while, like maybe forever, but he only gave himself a two-count before he opened his eyes again, and then, avoiding eye contact no matter how one-sided it'd be, he replied.

"Um," he said, "uh."

There was this wonderful thing about stumbling over your words: deployed tactically it could give the impression that you were painfully awkward and unsure to mask the fact that you were also stalling to figure out what to say.

"No," he continued. "No, I—I'm sorry."

He tilted his head again a little. The glasses had gotten him into this situation, so they would have to get him out as best they could.

"I, these aren't my usual glasses. I broke them right before the trip and, uh, this prescription is from like 2017, so I can't focus well, and I was trying to read that—"

Here he pointed vaguely over the girl's shoulder at a little metal sign stuck to the wall of the ship that he'd only just noticed. He didn't have a clue what it said; the text was too small and it was silver on brass or something, but that just made the lie better, right? It had to be a safety warning, a fire alarm or life raft or safety vest or Prop 45 warning that this entire ship could cause cancer or something like that. Definitely preferable to admit to focusing on that rather than staring at the computer screen, even if he didn't have the faintest idea what she was even doing on her computer because he had truly not been spying.

"—but I can't, really, and I guess maybe I was just sort of distracted by that?"

Too complicated. Too much disclosed. He should've just left it at no, and then probably immediately vacated the premises.