Work Text:
Quiet settled over the darkened laboratory—not even light could shine through the windows. Those were where the paintings were, and they lined the walls in dozens of uneven rows, many unfinished. There was really nowhere else to put them, and it should have been nighttime anyway.
Crazy rubbed at her eyes as she awoke sitting at her desk, one that wasn't quite as good as her last one, with chipped wood and cracked varnish, but still fulfilling its purpose.
She hadn't meant to fall asleep earlier. Now there was dried paint stuck in her hair and on her sleeves and she didn't have the energy to try to take any of it out right now. And now her painting was ruined.
At least she’d put her shades away—away as in placed in a far corner of the desk where it could fall if she wasn't being careful enough. That was one other thing that wouldn't really look good with paint on it. It wasn't one of her brightest ideas.
She reached over to switch the lamp on. The cold light harshly illuminated the small room. Crazy blinked for a few moments adjusting to the brightness. The lamp was battery-operated since she hadn't had the time to fix up a proper lighting system for this area of the lab yet, so there was sort of a permanent blackout throughout most of the building all the time.
Crazy squinted at the small canvas on her desk. The paint smudged in lines from her long strands of hair having pressed against it in her sleep.
It didn't really look like the little house she was painting anymore, more like a bunch of colorful blobs, the ones that dried on her hair.
Well, that was another one to add to the wall. Maybe not if she could find a way to fix it, but those ones usually ended up on the wall anyway. Actually, all of them did eventually. It was sort of like a collection of hers, running all around the laboratory.
She snapped the bottles of paint shut, the little click of the plastic lids louder than they should have been compared to the silence. Hopefully those didn't dry out too much from being left open. She’d prefer if she could use those again.
Reds, yellows, blues—as of late Crazy hadn't been much of a fan of the mixing process. So lying on the desk was not one or two or three bottles of paint, but a number which was probably more than she actually would and had to use.
The desk was sort of like a painting too, with all the spilled colors streaking all around. Crazy looked down at her hair and shook her head. That would mean that right now she was also a painting. And paintings went on the wall. There was no room on the wall for either of them.
Perhaps this was her calling to dye her hair. Although she did not know if it was actually a good look for her, especially considering it was dried paint—but still.
Besides, there were no mirrors here; that was just one of the many ‘goals’ (they were more like rules) Crazy had set for herself.
But she was open to painting mirrors or drawing them or writing about them. Just no mirrors in the laboratory itself. Anyway, that would leave less space for the paintings.
Her next piece could be about the dyed hair, but she’d never really done self-portraits before. Colorful hair didn't really fit the red theme she was going for anyway.
Now that she thought about it, if she didn't know any better, this place looked more like an art studio than any lab she’s seen before.
Anyone walking in would probably think that, but they were wrong. Yes, there was indeed some serious science happening within these walls, even if those walls could be likened to an artist’s fever dream.
And it wasn't necessarily just paintings there, no—it was also writings and sketches, and most importantly her papers, the ones recording her more significant findings in her experiments.
The wonderful wall could fit many things, but that was mostly because the other rooms were chock full of a bunch of other obviously important things. That was why. Clearly this meant that the wall proved very useful.
Crazy stood up and put the unfinished painting in the wall pile, where many other works sat incomplete awaiting their spot high off the floor.
Of course since the wall actually referred to multiple walls, it would make more sense to call it the walls. But it was just easier to consider it as one big wall since there were things on it everywhere anyway. If it got to that point, the ceiling could function as the wall too.
She looked up at the clock. 6:00 AM—no, that wasn't right. Not an actual clock, but a piece she worked on a while ago. Also not finished.
Crazy looked down at her watch, but that one didn't work either. Broken, and the cracks were visible too. That was from a particularly poor experiment. Not to mention the worn strap.
There weren't actually any clocks here either. Unlike mirrors, there wasn't really a specific reason for their absence, the same way that there weren't any… say, elephants, here. There were no actual elephants here, and would never be—as with clocks and mirrors.
A painting of an elephant probably hung on the wall somewhere in this laboratory. Probably—Crazy couldn't bother remembering all of them. Supposedly elephants were rather intelligent creatures, but that kind of thing didn't fall under her area of expertise, which was… well, that she didn't really know either.
But it was nighttime for sure. She knew because it was dark inside. But because of the wall it was always dark inside. So it could very well be morning, and 6:00 AM at that.
Actually, a little peek behind the so-called exhibit would tell her the answer immediately. Empirical evidence was the basis of her work, after all.
No, she couldn't possibly. Going outside was unreasonable. All work could be done inside—and that was it. Time didn't really matter anymore in the laboratory.
Admittedly it was rather difficult to depict many of the subjects of her work without proper reference, only with what Crazy could remember or imagine in her head.
It was more about the making of the piece rather than what was in it. For example… Crazy looked around the room. There, the yellow flower. And the deck of cards.
Those ones were fun to make. But that was all they were… a flower and a deck of cards.
She looked over to the right; there was the crane. Then to the left, the teddy bear. And next to that one—ah, that was where the elephant was. Anyhow, the rules made an exception for paintings. As previously established.
Crazy reached over to put on her shades—with no paint stains on it, thankfully. Those were difficult to wash out.
Actually, the stains from last time were still there. Spilled a bottle once a while ago. Red, but she was still… decently fond of that color. Though troublesome, they did not affect her vision.
Through her shades her eyes honed in on another painting. The ocean landscape. She had never really been fond of landscapes; that was a more recent interest. This one was old; the dust made that apparent. The blues were sort of faded because of that.
Looking at it now, it reminded her of something… something important…
She’d forgotten to water her plants today. Or yesterday. Or whenever, if it really was 6:00 AM right now. Yes, that seemed important enough.
The garden was in another room, the room with the most lights—and that was on the other side of the building. It was a greenhouse of sorts, she believed, if it was still a greenhouse with all the tarp inside covering the visible glass walls which made up the little room.
The lights there were plenty enough for the plants—no need for the sun. And the sun couldn't even reach down here anyway, she just didn't really like seeing all the dirt packed all around the outside walls, didn't really like being reminded where this laboratory was, had to be.
Crazy got up from her seat and reached to grab her hat off the metal wall hook, one of the few things on the wall that stood out from the rest.
She stood for a moment trying to pry it off the hook before realizing that it was the model version she’d made and glued there before, a seeming waste of a hook amongst the row of several other similar ones.
That one was made out of paper; the real one was on the right. It was a miracle she never ended up tearing it off.
So Crazy grabbed her top hat (the right one) and the lamp on her desk and walked right out the room—no purpose for doors here either. Except for the front one, which was always thoroughly locked. And she made sure of that.
The laboratory stretched out in long corridors, like a maze, a maze that in turn was kind of like a strange museum given all the things everywhere. It almost felt like an adventure to walk down them, even though she already knew what and where many of these things were.
Lamp raised, Crazy turned right and made her way down the hallway. Maybe she shouldn't have put her study all the way near the end. There actually was supposed to be more space there, but that didn't end up working out. Apparently there was a large aquifer near that wing of the building, she had been informed prior to construction.
It probably wasn't a good idea to build this place underground, or near huge bodies of water both above and below. But there were ways to make it work, and she knew them like the back of her… her head. That was how that phrase went.
Crazy stopped and approached the far side of the hall. She raised the lamp to a particular work. A poem, though the words had been covered over in whiteout. Next to it, one of her old lab reports. And below were blueprints for… something. She couldn't really tell what that was supposed to be.
Crazy shrugged and continued walking, stepping over a bucket that she knew was going to be there without having to look.
Then she felt something metal at her feet, and it scraped the floor with a grating screech. Then it rolled with several clangs. Oh, it was there. She walked around it as it continued to clamber down the corridor, like she had passed someone by on the street.
Crazy passed the storage room, which proved to be pretty useless unsurprisingly. The sealed boxes were stacked in piles beyond the entrance. It was like a maze of its own, a maze within a maze.
Her footsteps echoed as they hit the metal floor; it was the only sound down the long, dark space.
She stared at the light up ahead. She was close.
After a while, the laboratory felt smaller than it really was. And it wasn't like it had to be structured like this; that part was choice. And the length of the hallway didn’t make it so that there were more rooms, but rather that there was more room between each room and more room per room—what a steal!
The lamp swung as she walked through the brightly lit room. Crazy switched off the lamp and set it aside, grabbing a watering can off the floor, the one that was strangely shaped and unusually large for a watering can that was only used when she remembered she had to, and for plants that didn't really grow to their full height.
Rows and rows of potted plants filled the small room. Not really a garden, necessarily.
Most were green, but some were starting to brown and a select few were teetering on yellow. More for the compost pile, she supposed. (That was the big brown lump in the corner.)
She turned on the faucet in another corner of the room and filled the can up to the top. It felt less and less heavy each time she came down here to water the plants. That part was the easiest to get used to.
The sound of running water on thin hollow metal and of the whirring heaters around her filled her ears. Or it was the whirring of her wings behind her, but she doubted it since she’d long gotten used to that, though a little less easily than the weight of the watering can.
Crazy flipped the faucet off. The water came from that same aquifer that was supposedly close by. See, there were ways to make it work.
Maybe even to wash the paint off her hair. No, that was more of a later task; would she really just pour a whole can of water over her head? The real plants needed watering, thank you very much.
Then she held the can out as she walked down the rows of plants, the water droplets making beating sounds as they hit the leaves. She rounded them a couple of times and refilled the can, repeating the process. And again.
She would have called it a habit if she actually remembered to do it every day. It would have been better if all of these were cacti instead.
It was like rain in a way. She hadn’t seen rain in a while. The plants were having their own little rainy day of sorts, just without the clouds and the actual important parts that made rain, rain.
No, that sounded stupid. She was watering plants with a watering can, that was all.
She shook her head and let the can empty on the final plant. She’d deal with the dead ones later.
Crazy set the can down in a random part of the room and crossed her arms acknowledging the plants for a few moments. There was one she really liked, that spider-looking plant on the far end of one row with the long leaves and the tiny flowers budding in some spots.
She’d have to cut them off soon; they were nearly growing to the floor. Or she would have to conjure up some other special place to put it, though that would sort of defeat the purpose of having them all in rows for ease of watering.
She walked over to the plant and felt the leaves in her fingers. This plant was a pretty good one—easy to take care of on top of that. Strong, firm leaves—and much more green than the others.
Speaking of the floor, there were tons of soil spilled there, but since technically there was soil everywhere (in the pots), she didn't really see it as much of a problem.
And she did have cacti. A cactus. One. That one sat on the right side of the room from where she stood. While it would be ideal to have all of the plants be cacti, she still ended up watering that one cactus the same amount as any other plant. Which wasn’t good per se, but it saved time to water them all at once.
The rest of the plants were either a bunch of veering-on-droopy assorted flowers or sad little sprouts that were supposed to be fruits and vegetables. They weren’t. Yet.
That was all of them. Crazy let go of the slender leaves and walked over to pick up the lamp again. She switched it back on and walked out the door.
Wasn’t there something else she was forgetting? Another important thing, she thought as she slowed her steps a bit.
She coughed as she exited the room. There was dust all over this place, and she never really had the time to clean. That was yet another something to get used to.
Crazy stood at the entrance and thought for a moment. Something important… something important… Nope, she was blanking out on that one.
She didn’t really want to go back.
It was that time of day, then, she decided: wandering time. She took a right and began to walk down yet another hallway.
This one didn't have any important rooms. All of them were empty. That was to say that they would—should have had things in them, just not yet, not necessarily now.
The usual items lined the walls. She tended to put more photos on this side of the building, though. She held the lamp up to a photo of a strange tree she saw once.
A lot of these photos were poorly applied to the wall. Usually it was with tape and often they would fall to the floor pretty soon after they had been placed there. Some of the higher ones she used a ladder for, and that ladder was in the storage room right now, if she remembered correctly.
Tape was not to be used in excess; saving resources was key, especially down here. Especially down here.
Crazy moved the lamp a bit to the left. Then there was a photo of the sun and the night sky, both taken with a cheap camera.
She didn't take those photos, she was sure of that; she wasn't sure why they were here. The glare of the light was very obvious in these two, clearly taken by a less experienced photographer. Not that she was an expert or anything; it just looked that way.
Crazy crouched down on the floor trying to look for some of the fallen photos. Unfortunately those were typically the better ones like that one of the deer in the forest. That one actually fell into the vents—easily retrievable. With the effort, at least. It would be back in its spot in no time.
Then there were the ones that looked straight out of a postcard or something one would see in a magazine. Those ones were also not taken by her. Few were, or some were and some weren’t. It just depended on where you looked, maybe how you looked even.
At the end of this hallway was the ‘observatory’ (this place was clearly more fit for land, and it was designed to be on land initially). Of course things changed, and now she was here with all the useless windows.
Why have windows when you couldn't even see through them? It didn't make any sense. She would have gotten rid of them if she could. The closest thing to that was covering all of them up, which was what the wall was for.
The wall, the wall, the wall. Everything here came back to that. It was a little irritating, how wonderful it was. The walls couldn't water the plants though. That was something less wonderful about it, she guessed.
Wandering got pretty old after a while, but the adventure was still sort of nice. Sort of. Sometimes if she was lucky she found things that she’d forgotten about or things she was certain she hadn't seen before even if she had. There were just too many things to keep track of here.
She yawned and covered her mouth. She wondered how much sleep she actually got, or rather how much sleep she actually gets with no proper bed to be found anywhere in this place.
This could all have been an elaborate dream and she was still asleep in her study all the way on the other end of the facility. And when she woke up she’d have to do it all again.
The facility… no, it—this wasn't a facility.
It was hard to tell if she was dreaming sometimes. It probably had something to do with the lack of sunlight or the air pressure or something about the laboratory itself that caused that effect, surely.
Sounded like a good topic to explore in an experiment. Because again, science happened here, and all results counted.
She stood up once more and turned to continue walking. This leg of the wall she’d already gone through thorough inspection of, so she expected that the walk wouldn't be too long given less of a need to stop along the way.
Crazy felt her hat tilt a little sideways as she walked. Since it stayed on, she didn't make any move to fix it.
Her footsteps suddenly sounded louder as she walked into a large room, the echoes fuller and the darkness more oppressive.
The supposed observatory was much larger in height than all the other rooms. It was shaped like a dome and similarly to the greenhouse, the visible windows were covered up either with a tarp or other things.
Couldn't see the stars the long way down; dirt was the only thing to observe out these windows, like a strange sky, the only sky here.
The real purpose this room served was that it was an ideal place to store the master computer where she recorded and stored important information for later, for when she needed it.
Which wasn't often, but it was mostly a contingency plan. There was even a back-up contingency plan, and a back-up-back-up, and… That was just a joke; there was just one. Not a joke she got to tell often, as one would imagine.
Another bonus thing: the water nearby was a good power source. This location definitely worked out fine, even if that power source could technically flood the whole thing one day from just one wrong move. It was something that worked for now, which, to reiterate, was still pretty good.
She just couldn't figure out how to use it to power the lighting system yet, some kind of discrepancy in the way the energy was distributed throughout the lab. The lamp was fine to use though; she had tons of batteries lying around.
Probably not the best use of an observatory, but there were still other useful things here. Like a printer and a bunch of peculiar-looking tables, like ones a bunch of scientists in a sci-fi novel would sit around and plan on doing greater things. Good things. Like things that helped others and overall changed the world for the better—those kinds of things.
There weren't a lot of things one person could do with several tables, but they were good for experiments even when this wasn't really an ideal place for experiments to begin with. Such as… Well, there were a lot of them.
A flashlight would have better suited this journey than a lamp, she thought as it swung a bit in her hand, not unlike a pendulum.
Time to do… something here. To kill time. This was a good opportunity for logging, or to sit around, or for an experiment: that experiment being falling asleep again and testing whether or not… whether or not…
Crazy let her eyes adjust to the darkness and looked around again at the familiar sight of the wall, with all the usual unusual things. Dozens of little button-eyed puppets with dully colored hair hung by strings from the domed ceiling.
They were old and they were made out of cloth cut even older, before this lab was built. It had been challenging to get those up there, and she had to take them out of their boxes in the storage room. Things rarely ever came out of the storage room. Unless they had to.
She intended for it to be like in museum exhibits where interesting things were suspended at thought-provoking distances, and you’d look up and it would be great and you would marvel at the sight.
The result was evidently… thought-provoking to say the least, but it was not worth it to get them all back down. That would have taken even longer than they had getting them up.
Her eyes drew down to the illustrations instead; those were more typical. Then a thought occurred to her: drawing… Yes, that was something she could do now, and something that hopefully took time. Then she could probably fall asleep again, or wake up if that was the case.
Crazy looked around for a sheet of paper, the light of the lamp zigzagging and flickering around the observatory like a steady flame. She could have sworn that she’d left a full stack around here before—guess not.
She settled for temporarily tearing the nearest drawing on the wall and using the back. It would go back up soon, although it was technically against the rules. Things fell off the wall all the time, so it was somewhat unavoidable.
Paper and lamp in hand, she felt around in the dark for a chair and took a seat. Her hands hovered for a moment finding the table. The chair was a little low when she sat.
She always kept some kind of writing utensil on her at all times. At any moment she could have needed to use one, or not. Crazy pulled the mechanical pencil out of her pocket.
She clicked the end and brought it up to her face to inspect it—out of lead. She tossed that one aside and it fell with a couple of clatters; she’d get that later.
Crazy pulled out the spare one, setting the lamp down on the table. This one was probably somewhere in the middle of the observatory? She wasn't exactly sure.
The original drawing on the paper, it looked a little like something a child would draw: a couple of stick figures and grass and a sun in the corner. Not paint, those lines were drawn with crayons.
And since she ripped it off the wall there was, of course, the piece of old murky clear tape that held it there and a sizable gap of paper torn off the top edge like someone came over and started eating at it.
Paper didn't have a really pleasant taste, she thought, but it wasn't terrible exactly. Just okay. Not really something one could eat as a meal or even a snack, but something that tasted just alright.
The taste could not improve much, maybe it could be worsened, but overall it was decent and also not something that was important to think about right now.
Crazy blinked a few times in an attempt to focus back on the task at hand. Okay—not dreaming.
She briefly acknowledged the illustration with a nod and flipped it over to the back where some of the colored crayon markings were still somewhat visible. She wasn't sure if she’d drawn this one; she wasn't very keen on using crayons.
Crazy spun the pencil in her hands thinking of something to draw.
Insects, though welcome creatures, were a little too complex for what was supposedly ‘wandering time’, and landscapes fell under the ‘sometimes’ category.
Some things you could never have enough of, like data points and such… but landscapes—those she got sick of pretty easily.
It took way more effort for her to draw animals than was necessary. People were also difficult, but they were at least more… familiar. Faces were hard, those she usually left for last.
Actually, before that. She set the pencil aside and took off her shades, clipping it to her suit. There.
She brought her attention back to the paper. Using two hands she tried to smooth out the little wrinkles in the sheet—it looked to have been crumpled up and spread out again and the paper felt a little flimsy like it had been worn down by the passage of time, comparable to a map from a ‘message in a bottle’, though that kind of structure really only existed in stories.
That didn't do much. Crazy shrugged. It would go back on the wall anyway, where the open space was where it used to be. There was supposed to be tape here too; she brought it here the last time she swung by, which was… about a week or two ago, maybe three or four. A month.
Crazy couldn't come up with anything. She gripped her pencil and drew a random line. Didn't look right. She flipped the pencil and began to erase it, the little eraser nub giving off that usual toxic sort of smell. Drew another line, but she thought that the last one looked much better.
She glanced over to the big computer screen powered off a few feet away. It might have been a good idea to maybe install some kind of art program on it. She was sure that was something that it could run relatively smoothly—but no, that computer was reserved for important things.
Maybe a while ago were this a regular wooden pencil, she would have snapped it in half or something rash like that. She settled for spinning the little barrel around like she was cranking something up, except with her fingers; the cranking was denoted by the little intermittent plastic clicks.
Crazy glanced at the weird stains on her sleeves and gloves. Where could she have gotten those?
She thought about it for a moment, the clicking pausing momentarily. Oh, that hadn't been a dream. She reached up with her free hand to touch her hair—partly stiff and chunky-feeling, like paste. The paint. From earlier… or whenever that was.
But she was positive that they hadn’t gotten on her hands; she probably just didn’t notice. Well, there were stains on her hands now. Colorful stains.
Shrug. What was there to do about it? Later she could probably cover her whole head with paint or something to cancel it out and it would be like if she washed it out she’d technically be dying her hair… technically.
She wished she had that paint now. Probably would have made for a better medium than a plastic mechanical pencil that she’d definitely throw away after the lead ran out; she didn't really bother with refilling the lead, it was a little hard to take out the barrel entirely from this model.
There was a big pack of these in the storage, so it was kind of worth using them like this; she was the only one who needed to use them around here.
Crazy looked back down at the sheet of paper and tried to imagine something new there, maybe out of the little cracks made by the crumpling.
But no, there was really nothing to be made out of them, nothing to find there at all. It was just a crumpled sheet of paper and she was trying to draw on it when it already had a perfectly good one on the back—well, it was the front before she flipped it over.
She scribbled wildly on the mostly blank sheet and called it a day. Someone passing by could make something of it, this whatever it was supposed to be within the mass of swirled and curled lines.
She held the illustration in front of her. Maybe she could keep just this one, put it on her desk, not on the wall—it was something to consider.
Shoving the pencil back in her pocket, she shook the little eraser shavings off and walked back to the spot where she’d taken the paper. She looked around the darkened room and did not spot the tape she had supposedly brought here before.
So she tore the little piece of tape already on the page and taped it to face the opposite side. Hopefully it still held its stickiness.
Her eyes scanned the large wall for the empty space and after she’d spotted it she stuck it back on the wall—where it was supposed to be.
She patted the taped spot down once. She took a few steps back and admired… acknowledged the work.
Then Crazy turned around to begin the long trek back to her study, not looking back to make sure it didn't fly away. After all, all things belonged on the wall.
Curiosity_Guest Mon 27 Oct 2025 12:47AM UTC
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