xp_logs | Doug and Angelo, Saturday evening

Angelo hunts Doug down in the lab and eventually kidnaps him.

All things considered, Angelo didn't come down to the basement all that often when it wasn't for team business or the medlab. Quite apart from his very busy schedule, he just never seemed to have reason to visit the labs - or not reason enough to disturb whatever work had Forge's attention just then, anyway.

Today, though, a little bird had told him someone else was down there, someone he'd been meaning to check up on for a while, and he seized the opportunity.

"Knock knock."

At this rate, Forge's lab was starting to feel like Grand Central Station or something, people coming down looking for him. "Hi, Angelo," Doug said, waving from where he sat at his laptop typing away.

"Hey." He hadn't come too far into the room, never sure what delicate piece of equipment might be upset by who knew what. "Long time no see."

Doug nodded. Everyone had been busy with something or other since the invasion of Manhattan, and then the attack on Garrison, Pete, Dani, and Jay. But he was slowly getting used to socializing again in small amounts, so Doug didn't scowl at Angelo or anything that would have indicated he wasn't welcoming company. Besides, Angelo was a good friend, and probably a bit lonely with Amanda off gallavanting around Europe. "How've you been?" he asked the other man.

"Ah, good as I can be with everythin' goin' on." He was looking at Doug a little more carefully than usual, trying to get a read on... something. "How about you?"

"Recovering." That seemed like a good way to sum up the past little while in a single word. Not that Doug was saving up the words for any particular purpose, it's just that everything he'd been through was sort of hard to explain, even to someone who knew most of what had happened.

"Recoverin'", Angelo echoed. "Well, that's better than not recoverin'." He wasn't going to make Doug do any explaining, unless he wanted to.

Doug grunted and nodded. "You're probably right, it beats the alternative." He'd come close enough to the 'alternative' twice already, and that was plenty for him. He wasn't suffering from the nightmares he'd had before since Emma's bit of psionic therapy, but the memory of drowning in the dark was all too fresh and clear in his mind still.

Angelo just nodded back, lapsing into quiet for a moment as he glanced around the room - then something on the desk caught his attention and his eyes narrowed. "You been holdin' out on me, Doug? Where'd you get real salsa, with Mama Lupe's still closed?"

Doug frowned and looked down at the jar and the open bag of tortilla chips. He sighed and turned the jar around so that Angelo could see the label. Store-bought, and only medium, not his usual 'nuclear death waste' as others tended to call it. "Tell no one," he said to Angelo, pointing a finger mock-menacingly.

Angelo was still blinking at the jar, not sure he was reading it right. "You are eatin' medium salsa? They'd never believe me."

"Still." Doug tried to growl and sound intimidating, but it wasn't working. He sighed. "So, part of the recovering is that a lot of," he waved a hand at his body to indicate his pale color and short hair, "got kind of...reset, I guess. Well, taste buds were included. I tried to go straight to the 'good stuff', and nearly burned my mouth out. Gotta work my way back up to it, condition them again." Unintended side effects really sucked sometimes.

That got a sympathetic wince. "Man, that's gotta suck. At least you know you'll get there though, right?"

Doug pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I sure hope so, anyway. Between this and the unintended vegetarianism, my eating habits are all out of whack." He wasn't sure when he'd be able to look at or smell, much less taste meat of any sort.

"It's not even been a month yet", Angelo pointed out. "Give yourself time - it's a hell of a thing to happen to anybody."

"Meh." Now that his emotions were somewhat less closed off than previously, Doug was starting to feel a bit of impatience, wanting to be recovered and back to normal, or at least what passed for it in his life. He knew in his head that Angelo had a point, it had been such a short amount of time since the events in New York, but it felt like an eternity from where he was inside his own head.

"No, none of that 'meh'." He studied the other man for a moment, thinking. "C'mon. Bring your chips, we're goin' to my mom's. If you've gotta eat easy, you can at least have better than that."