[center][img]http://fontmeme.com/newcreate.php?text=Stain&name=Brushed.ttf&size=100&style_color=EEFF00[/img][/center]

The process of adaptation had been an easy one. Life was now about convenience, and, therefore, about compromise. He could make life convenient for others and they could make life convenient for him. His bare feet swung to the ground, and he felt the greenish grey paste between his toes. It gently retreated under his weight, but softy swallowed the soles of his feet around the sides. He was used to it.

A tap from behind the mirror (or, as they called it outside the cell, ‘window’) - Whatshisface’s stick. Apparently he had visitors, but that was their bad luck. They knew by now that he didn’t talk to Whatshisface. He could just about hear the man’s voice through the pane of glass, although he could only see himself staring back, wearing nothing but a baggy pair of shorts, hair unkempt, shiny tracks of sweat just catching the light across his body.

"Mr. Leon [i]something something[/i] Stain. [i]something something[/i] less violent patients. He merely suffers from [i]something something[/i].”

“Speak up! I need that diagnosis!” Leon knew there would be no response. It had been agreed by all relevant parties that Whatshisface would deal with Leon Smythe only when nobody else could do it and that, in return, Leon Smythe would try not to antagonise Whatshisface. Still, sometimes it just had to be done - especially given that they were probably talking about his [i]’impulse control issues’[/i].

“[i]something something[/i] generate a corrosive slime [i]something something[/i]"

As though on cue, Leon could feel a trickle of sweat run from his neck down his breast, where it gently congealed and clung to the hairs on his chest. He lazily wiped it off and flicked it at the mirror, where it splattered and drooped, visible only due to its pea-green hue. He couldn’t hear Whatshisface anymore. He must have moved on. Still, he’d probably be back. He had never once been presented as an exhibit without later being explored in the flesh.

He’d been prodded and probed so often that he’d given up on shame, as a concept, and was by now quite happy to traipse around his cell, or anywhere else he was permitted to go, totally or mostly naked. It made life more convenient. He didn’t have to worry about burning his clothes off and they didn’t have to worry about providing an infinite supply of clothes for him to burn. Even the powdered chalk that layered the floor was a concession to necessity; they had originally used a custom-built tiles that resisted the slime before realising that it wouldn’t simply drain and would leak instead into the corridor – the chalk collected and neutralised the slime and simply had to be swept up as and when. In return for behaving on ‘clean-up day’, he would get a say in who came to do it and access to privileges,  as evidenced by the empty fast food wrappers and empty cans of soft drinks that lay about his cell.

With that in mind, he got up out of his hammock – another concession to convenience, for, while he tended to burn through mattresses, a string hammock allowed slime to drain – and stumbled over the unevenly smooth or claggy chalk ground to the door when it opened automatically, pausing only to swipe up a bottle of half-finished Gatorade. His adam’s apple visibly bounced as he glugged down the sweet yellow liquid. 

He spent less than one second in the training area: it wasn’t just his own ‘guestroom’ that had opened, but everybody’s, meaning that the outside now contained both Whatshisface and Cortez the psycho – friendly faces only by the most perverse stretches of the imagination. Touching his neck, he hung back, lurking in the metallic doorframe and tried to take her in, but found his eyes constantly flicking back to Whatshisface and Cortez, just in case.