[center][color=ff0911][h3]Jason[/h3][/color][/center]
[b][url=https://goo.gl/maps/gPyE7sSo8VUVPkXe7]Muraya Ramen House[/url], Balibago, Angeles City - 10/18/2022, 20:02 UTC+8[/b]

[color=ff0911]"Spicy Miso, please."[/color]

The waitress nods, taking back the menu and leaving Jason to his own devices.

The gunmetal jacket Ai Chen had thrown in his face on the flight over is unassuming enough, though infiltration work really isn't his forte. That isn't to say he's feeling much career fulfillment carrying out haphazard acts of terrorism, but he has to admit that his Noble Arm is uniquely suited towards 'lowering morale.'

The mission itself is rather onerous - him against pretty much all of task force: Obsidian. While he hasn't been saddled with taking them all down, besides his extraction, he's mostly been left to handle the whole thing on his own. Can't have him flipping out on any partner, and it's not like they could split up after he begins spreading the virus.

The waitress eventually returns with his bowl of ramen. He shoots her a thank you before breaking apart a pair of chopsticks and digging in. Maybe he should have tried actual filipino food for his first visit, but as a creature of habit, he can't resist going back to his old favorites.

The spice dances mildly on his tongue, and he bites into it hard enough to bleed, willing the regeneration to do its damn job. The scars on his skin and dark circles under his eyes are both its most glaring failures, but his burnt taste receptors from years of drinking coffee before it adequately cools down is perhaps its worst shortcoming. It wouldn't be so bad if he could fix it once and be done with it, like the same haircut he's been sporting since he got his powers, but he either can't help but foil himself with the same bad habits he's always had or his self-image is so intertwined with the damage that he keeps bringing it back without realizing. Either way, he reaches for one of the bottles of chili oil the restaurant leaves on every table and begins pouring on more of it, then takes a bite and smiles at the double-whammy of repaired taste buds and increased heat. It's not like he can feel the painful parts, so the physiological responses to extreme heat have a novelty to them not unlike the deterioration of motor function from alcohol.

Whatever, this should do for the taste test.

He bites into his thumb and pulls a small ball of blood out, hidden from the other customers by his bowl. Modifying blood is his specialty, but the most literal of modifications still elude him. Changing the color of blood to a different shade of red is easy. Blood already changes color based on its level of oxygenation and can range anywhere from a vibrant scarlet to a claret shade of black. While he's managed to keep blood healthy and alive at its more unhealthy shades, nothing really happens when he tries to go for shades of blue or green. Perhaps more frustrating is that, when he tries, he finds that it really isn't that difficult to push the color slightly away from red, towards orange, brown, and especially towards pink. At the extreme end of alteration, the orb of blood looks more like an orb of Pepto Bismol. Something about the image of that wretched indigestion medicine near his ramen makes his stomach turn, so he returns the ball of blood to red before taking another bite.

What he'd really like to accomplish is clear blood, indistinguishable from water, but the opacity on his little ball of blood isn't quite so flexible. When separated into component parts, semitransparent blood plasma should make up more than half of the contents of blood, but even through conscious effort, all he seems to be able to make is this sickly yellow mess that fills him with similar disgust when left next to his food. Does pure blood plasma even still count as blood for his powers? Is the blood plasma he creates even close to pure, or is it some bastardized contaminated mix?

Fuck it, he'll just put the blood in the chili oil.

Next, modifying the blood to have no taste. He begins trying to remove the iron so that the offensive taste of pennies doesn't stand front and center, but try as he might, any satisfyingly inoffensive taste constitutes complete death of the sample. He ends up having to bite into his thumb a few more times before finally giving up on removing the iron, aiming to overpower the taste instead. Luckily, enhancing the inherent meaty flavor leads to a surprisingly pleasant outcome, resembling the miso soup in some ways. Maybe he could slip it into the Miso too. Just gotta make it more of a dark orange-yellow... yeah, that works. Taste test, and- okay, a little bit more tweaking.

By the end, he has something that any chef would crucify him for comparing to miso, but it doesn't particularly change the flavor when added to proper miso broth.

It strikes him, all at once, that perhaps matching the ramen flavors was an unnecessary step to take, but he rather enjoyed the food here, and defending the chef's professional integrity is the least he could do before terrorizing the staff with zombie customers.

Well, no, the least he could do for them would be contaminating all of their supplies and not giving a damn how it affects the ramen. The entire exercise in blood flavoring has been a waste of time, hasn't it?

Jason physically shakes off the gloom. He has to consciously remind himself that further development of his Noble Arm could eventually lead to a breakthrough, no matter how inane the direction seems at first. He finishes off the rest of his ramen before flagging down the waitress for his check.

While he's waiting, he considers how to handle task force: Obsidian after drawing their attention here. Realistically speaking, all he'd need to do is infect one of them with the loneliness virus and his job would be done. Since they seem to be recuperating, it's unlikely that the Ritz hotel becomes an easier target just because some of them are drawn away, and thus it's likely best to just send one of them back as a trojan horse.

Jason takes his lightly flavored blood, keeping it red, and begins modifying the virus within for delayed release. This, he has already mastered, albeit only relatively, since the variance in victim metabolism makes it difficult to nail down a specific time frame before secondary symptoms manifest. A side effect of the greater delay is that the increased heart rate is harder to notice at first, though it stops being beneficial once it starts to kick in, becoming more obvious due to the longer period it's drawn out over. He should also probably keep collateral to a minimum, which in this case means making the virus lose potency if it hasn't infected a body by... let's see, the restaurant closes at midnight? That works.

Mixed in with a lot of broth or the rest of the chili oil, the dosage would be rather low, but direct consumption would still have people turning within several seconds. He decides to shoot for a dosage and potency where secondary symptoms begin to manifest after fifteen minutes or so, hopefully enough time for people to finish their meals and walk out, if only to lessen the trouble for the restaurant owners.

...Which is pretty pointless considering they're likely to get infected sooner or later, whether it be by the broth or their customers. He can feel a light ache at the back of his head at his own wishy washy bullshit and decides to stop thinking about it before the thoughts start to become their own problem.

When the waitress comes back with his check, he pays in cash, leaving a generous tip, before standing and infecting all the chili oil bottles he walks past. His own table was at the end of the restaurant, so it was simple to get all the unoccupied tables, and for the rest he just floated the blood droplets under their table when he passed by and into the chili oil bottles from behind their lines of sight, quietly observing the other customers as he did so to make sure none of them paid enough attention to notice. When he reaches the front of the restaurant, he stops, turning around and walking towards the back of the restaurant, as if forgetting something. It's rather trivial getting into the kitchen, albeit not very far in, and floating over the flavored, colored blood into all of the pots that look like miso.

One of the chefs realizes he shouldn't be there, but doesn't seem to have noticed his sabotage. "Sir, you can't be back here."

Since it's not the waitress, he plays up the clueless foreigner act, apologizing in Russian, not expecting it to be understood, before using a common tourist phrase, letting his accent shine through. [color=ff0911]"Where is the restroom?"[/color]

The woman shakes her head, probably unsure if the foreigner would even understand her words. "No public restroom." She moves forward to drive him out of the kitchen and he lets her, backing off and continuing away from the kitchen once he's out until he passes through the front doors.

Now he just has to wait.