How Green Becomes Wood

"Oh it hadn't occured to me the sorts of things they'd make us smell," Daizi groaned, somewhat concerned about how awful the worst smells would be for her, considering her sense of smell was improved not only by her blindness training her to be more aware of that sense, but by her pregnancy, "Maybe in the sight portion you'll be able to figure out why my eyes don't work, and then, I don't know, be inspired to discover how to fix it. Go on, lead the way." She gestured to them, not knowing this museum well enough at all to find her way through it without a guide.
 
Alec took her hand and followed Xander, who led them with a map. "I guess I never thought about why you can't see," Alec commented as they walked. "It was just sort of part of you, like your hair color. But I guess it can come about for different reasons, can't it? Diseases and underdevelopment and such."

"Some dude went viral not too long ago for curing blindness," Xander commented. "Got a lot of internet sensation, but it turns out, it was just a special cataract surgery. Not the same thing at all."

"Ouch," Alec winced. "That's not good. Oh! That's cool! They have a whole display oh eyes!" He paused. "It's also kind of creepy."
 
"It's actually because I have something called coloboma, which is when part of your eyes are missing. It's a congenital thing, but can run in families, so we were a bit worried about the baby, but we know she can perceive light, so I think we're okay. I'm missing my occipital nerves, and treatment can't give me new ones so," She shrugged, "and no, that isn't really the same thing... But cataracts do take away your vision, partially or entirely, so fixing that is still something. Sometimes I wish I could even just see light and dark... But also I think it would be too overwhelming for me at this point."

She followed them inside, wondering at the irony of their blind parent taking them to an exhibit on sight, and stopping to stand beside Alec and the eyeballs, she asked, "Are they all human?"
 
"Um, I'm not sure," Alec said, peeking through his fingers at the display. "I can't tell."

Xander leaned forward and read the prominently displayed plaque. "Nope. Several human, monkey species, ape, fish - fish? why fish - pig, and a couple of birds. One is an owl. The biggest eye of any bird. The biggest eye in the world is apparently the giant squid, but they don't have one of those here."

"That's too bad," Alec said, still covering his eyes.
 
"Well fish have eyes too," Daizi said, "Dark really likes goat eyes. They have those horizontal pupils, he drew them on my hand once so I could understand. I ended up walking around with a pair of goat eyes and human eyes drawn on the backs of my hands, but I guess that just made me look like him, since he has eyes there."

She put her hand out on Alec's shoulder, and finding his arms raised said, "If this bothers you, we can move on, we don't need to stay here staring at eyes."
 
"Are we staring at the eyes, or are they staring at us?" Xander teased.

Alec reddened. "I'd really rather not think about it!"

Xander chuckled and moved on. "Okay, over here, we have a display that shows a cross-section of an eye."

Alec took a cautious peek before dropping his hand. "This one looks more like a cartoon. What did you say you were missing? The... occular? No, that's not right. The occipital!"

"Oh, it's that bit right there," Xander said, pointing out the small line in the large eyeball half.
 
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"We're staring at them," Daizi said slyly, "I know too much about how the eye works to be confused. If there's nothing connecting it to a brain, you're not going to see anything."

Saying that, she slowly walked on, following the twins to the next display. It being something raised she could touch, she ran her hands over it, and corrected them, "Optic nerve. I think I said it wrong before, but my brain is fuzzy about all sorts of things these days. It basically means my eye can't transmit anything it detects to my brain, so it's like I'm not seeing anything. Theoretically, if there was ever a procedure that can transplant a cadaver's optic nerve into my head, I'd be able to see. Although who knows how good my vision would be without it, imagine I go through an entire surgery only to learn I have a degenerative condition that'll just blind me again."
 
"That is really depressing," Xander agreed. "I think I'd rather not have it at all than to lose it slowly. Just in my opinion, but it's a personal thing."

"Let's move on to something happier," Alec said.

He tugged Daizi gently over to a section about wavelengths of light and how the eye translated them. He and Xander spent some time trying out the different eyeglasses, sight stations, binoculars, and all the rest of the things available, but they tried not to take too long. It wasn't long until Xander was guiding them out and on to the section on olfactory senses.
 
Daizi thought about it for a time, "I think I probably feel the same way... Because you can't really miss something you've never had. And you don't need to learn a new way of life. But at the same time... I'd love to see the stars, and your faces, and Dark's, and hers. Sometimes I think if I could see those things just once, I'd be satisfied to go back to how it all is for me. Because then I'd know, and I'd be able to hold the picture in my mind. I love Dark so much but I've never been able to see a single one of his tattoos." Alec may have found the topic sad, and she supposed it was, but to her it felt more wistful, like reflecting on all the choices you didn't make in life, and what you would do if you could remake them. Except hers was a choice she couldn't make.

A soft smell was being pumped into the first room of the Olfactory exhibit, setting the tone for what was to come. Like with the exhibit, the first room had noses of different animals (although these were fake), and each model showed what the animal's nasal conchae looked like, since that bone increased surface area and affected how strong an animal's sense of smell was. Additionally, there was a video quietly playing suggesting why humans, and many primates beside more nocturnal ones (largely lemurs and lorises) have a heavily decreased reliance on olfactory compared to many mammals.

The more exciting portion, however, was in a little side room, where a big table sat, full of squeeze beakers to explore a variety of scents, allowing patrons to see how their sense of smell interacted with both their sense of taste and memories.
 
Alec wrinkled his nose at the first whiff of the first test tube. "Old socks. I knew it! Why is it always old socks? It's so gross. It reminds me of our bedroom floors growing up."

"I guess it's just an easy thing to replicate," Xander snickered. He tried the next one and nearly gagged. "I don't know what this one is, but it is so gross! Dumpster, maybe, with dead fish or something. I dunno."
 
Daizi, from curiousity, went to smell where Xander had and then quickly stepped back. It was a long time since her pregnancy made her throw up, but she still did, on occasion, get mildly nauseous from it, and this smell instantly turned her stomach. Making a face, she said, "I don't really care what it is, I'd rather not smell it long enough to figure out."

She took a breath, hoping to get the foul smell out of her nose, "Are we breaking the game if we only smell the pleasant ones?"
 
"I don't know, they aren't labeled," Alec said worriedly.

"No, wait, here's the labels. They have them covered," Xander said, looking at the front edge of the table. "How about I look ahead and tell you which ones to try? I'll give you a couple of kind of gross ones, but nothing too bad, and mostly good ones. You still have to guess what they are. How's that?"

"I think that sounds fair," Alec agreed. "What do you think?"
 
"I'm okay with that," Daizi agreed, and then cautioned Xander, "but be careful about the bad ones. I'm still sensitive. But I suppose we're better off playing the game at least slightly."

She tossed her hair and moved more in line with the boys, "And you still need to smell eveverything. You don't get out of it because you're helping to guide us."
 
"Hey, I'm the dungeon master here," Xander smirked. "I get to create the levels and battles, but don't worry, I'll be checking to make sure none of them are too bad for you."

"I think that's the most agreement we're going to get," Alec said resignedly.

Xander checked the first label and gave it a little sniff and moved down a couple before nodding. "Alright, these three are good. I mean, not good-good, I can't tell you that, but I think safe."

The first was freshly mown hay, which made Alec sneeze, the second a rose, and the third cotton candy.
 
"The dungeon master makes characters who still end up dying," Daizi replied coyly, but let it go. She followed him, sniffing where directed. The hay she was more or less neutral on. The roses she lingered at, because of how many emotions she had tangled up in her rose bushes, but when she smelled the cotton candy scent, a bright smile lit up all of her features, "It smells like Dark. Underneath his cologne, and the scent of wood baked into his skin... He smells just like this."
 
Alec sniffed at the cotton candy one more vigorously, frowning as he did so. "I can't figure it out," he finally admitted. "It smells familiar, but I can't quite place it. I don't think it smells like him at all."

"Probably because you aren't shoving your nose into his skin and sniffing," Xander said dryly. "It's cotton candy. I think it smells like the blue one."

Alec frowned. "The pink and the blue smell the same. They taste the same, too."

"No, the blue one taste more blue, like that weird blue raspberry flavor. The pink one tastes, well, it tastes like pink," Xander explained.

"They taste the same."

"Do not."

"Do too."

"Do not."

"Do too."

"I'll slip you a puke smell if you keep this up," Xander threatened.

Alec's eyes narrowed, but he stopped arguing.

The next four smells were wet dog, sandalwood, birthday cake, and vanilla. Alec got the wet dog right away and drew back from the sandalwood with his nose wrinkled in distaste. The birthday cake and the vanilla both smelled rather nice back to back.
 
"Nobody else has been able to smell it on him, but to me, I've always known he smells like cotton candy." She sighed, still with a warm sweet smile on her face, if her glasses were off hearts would probably be in her eyes. She allowed them to bicker over the taste of cotton candy, choosing to instead take some time to reminisce about her husband.

Wet dog was not as comforting, even with how much she loved Enkidu, sandalwood she didn't really respond to, and she went back and forth between vanilla and birthday cake, until eventually Xander had to tell her what birthday cake was. She frowned, upon the reveal, and said, "How is 'birthday cake' even a flavour? Or a scent? What does birthday cake even taste like? Any cake is a birthday cake if you put candles on it and eat it for your birthday."
 
"It is actually its own flavor," Alec told her. "It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I've seen it as ice cream, cake pops, and other treats. I think it's essentially white cake with sprinkles."

"I thought it was yellow cake," Xander remarked.

"It might be yellow," Alec admitted. "We should get some in some form or another so you can try. I think it mostly tastes like sprinkles, but, you know, it's a bit subjective."

"We're almost out of smells," Xander said, checking the plaques and taking a couple of sniffs. "Oh, man!" he gagged. "Most of these are horrendous! But I guess there's only so much sugar you can sniff. Oh, wait, here's a good one. Um, skip this one, and this... yeah, this one's okay. Nope. Yeah, try these."

The next scents were damp earth, mildew, sunscreen, dew, cheery blossom, Russian olive, and mahogany wood. Alec and Xander both said they couldn't smell anything with the dew. The sunscreen reminded them of the fourth of July, and Alec stated that the mahogany wood would smell like Dark if it had more spice to it.
 
Daizi tried to think up some response to the existence of birthday cake as a flavour, but it was so strange to her she couldn't come up with any words to express it, so she just moved on.

She loved the smell of damp earth, but most of the others she didn't have a strong response to. The dew she swore had a slight scent to it, but failed to know how to express it properly to the twins. The mahogany made Daizi smile almost as much as the cotton candy did, "It does smell like him. To get it right, you need this, his spices--you need that slight cardamom--and just that faint bit of cotton candy... I love him..." She lingered for a moment, thinking about how practical it would be to make a perfume or cologne modeled after him, for when they were apart and she was lonely. It seemed like a subtler solution to stealing a shirt or two from him everytime she went on a buisness trip... One hand caressed her belly, and it occurred to her she wouldn't need to worry about that for a long while, "I'm sorry Xander, I'm sure you thought you were free from 'sap' since we weren't together, but this whole exhibit is about connecting scents to memories, right? But pay attention next time you're close to him, let me know if you can detect the cotton candy on him."
 
"I don't really get close to him," Xander said, a touch uneasily, "but I guess if I find myself nearby, I'll shove my nose against his arm and give a couple of good sniffs."

Alec had gone back to sniff the dew again and nearly choked laughing at the thought of Xander actually doing that. Once he regained control, he said, "You could sniff a shirt when it's your day to do laundry."

"Slightly less weird, but still weird," Xander said. He looked down the row of scents. "I wish there was a fire one. I like the smell of a good fire."

"The mildew one made me think of a couple of different apartments we lived in," Alec remarked.
 
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