the doctor opens pomegranates by convincing them to turn themselves inside out. it's pretty easy, all things considered - pomegranates naturally want to split apart and get their seeds everywhere.

the main danger is that sometimes they're so eager about it that they expel their seeds with a frankly unnecessary force. makes a mess and also a few holes in the walls or the you. he has it down now, though! to, well, a science

he's the equivalent of the sort of sicko who writes shell scripts to automate a simple thing instead of just like, doing the thing by hand. only with reality

honestly the more I write him, the more aware I am that a lot of the good doctor's madness is just him being willing to consider possibilities that don't occur to other people, along with not being attached to things that other people think are important. like why is it so important that space stays constant. why do we have to make ourselves work around space when we can persuade space to work around us instead

I love how many Red Science experiments are like. you look at them and suddenly, viscerally Understand why the good doctor is Like That

Benthic's motto is Omnes adsint, quamvis dementi, quamvis nefasti - or, translated, Welcome to all, however mad, and however unholy

the doctor is very definitely at least one of these things

the doctor, out at IKEA with some measuring tape, trying to find a new sofa or something for the house. finds a furniture that would be perfect except that it's a wee bit too big. he begins expounding, at length, in public, about the tyranny of spacetime and the treacheries of the centimeter

(freewriting - Selcouth experiments on some Lethean tea leaves.)

You watch as the Meticulous Apothecary performs test after test. They immerse individual leaves in glowing reagents; powder them beneath amber tools; examine them as they burn through an array of lenses.

After every single experiment, they take notes. They write pages of observations. They decant their slime into sealed vials. They rhythmically squeeze lumps of amber in their tentacles. They carefully wrap every individual item before boxing it up, and then for good measure, they label the boxes themselves.

(You are beginning to understand how they remember so much, despite the nature of their work.)

Finally, they turn to you. As I suspected, they write. Traces of irrigo. Sealed/contained/tempered in a way I do not understand, though. Aspects denatured-coagulated through exposure to an unidentified substance. I have a hypothesis guesses, but no way to confirm them.

Guesses?

They have a. They pause. Their tentacles squirm as they consider how to communicate something completely incomprehensible to human senses. They write multiple words and cross all of them out. Something that suggests a relation to death, they finally write. (They underline "something," apparently disgruntled at the generality of the word.)

That makes... quite a bit of sense, actually, considering the supposed providence of these leaves. Aren't there multiple rivers that flow through the land of the dead?

So I hear, they write. But I have no way to obtain a sample. Unlike for humans, death is one-way for us.

There is something peevish in the slant of their writing. You suppose that is only fair.