[crow]

For a moment, Sam didn't answer. His gaze and attention were fixed on what was going on outside. He'd spotted it too, just as Eric had asked him the question--- some sort of black... mass? It was rolling in along the ground. For a moment, he thought it might have been alive, but a second later, his brain registered it a bit better.

It looked like... Well, 'fog' was one way to put it, but if you asked him, it seemed more like someone had dropped the world's biggest air-soluble bath bomb or something. "Whoa," said Sam. Forget the date. He fished around immediately for his phone. He had to get this on camera!

[Night]

Eric, finally having spotted the happenings outside as well, let out a low whistle. "What do you think that is?" He asked without looking over his shoulder, assuming that Sam would have been drawn to the window by the commotion just as he was. "Do you think it's... dangerous?"

And that was the real question here, wasn't it. There's no telling just what sort of horrible chemical concoction had been spilled to release whatever sort of gas that was, and if they couldn't go outside now then they were going to be stuck in this coffee shop all night.

Today only continued to get better.

[crow]

Sam had more trouble finding his phone than usual, since he was in such a rush to get to it. Funny how things worked like that--- the more you wanted it, the less you were able to actually get to it. But it was just a phone, and eventually he managed to fish it out of his pocket. He immediately went to join the crowd gathering at the window, pulling up his camera app and hitting 'record'.

"I don't know what it is, but I'm definitely putting this on my Instagram," he said.

[Night]

Eric did look back at that. "Instagram, really? You're worried about putting this online when we don't even know what it is?" If he wasn't skeptical about their compatibility before now, he certainly was after that remark. "What if it's dangerous? There's no telling where it came from. It could be some kind of... I don't know, escaped science experiment or alien space plague!"

It could be any number of things, really, and he hadn't even given serious consideration to whether or not it was sentient yet. It mostly just looked like some sort of star speckled smog, but it did appear to be twisting and spreading.

[crow]

"Yeah," said Sam, without missing a beat. "That footage needs to be out there, you know? Plus I do a lot of stuff on cryptids anyway." The trouble was that he had to work a day job, and didn't have the time to devote to full on cryptid hunting, so he didn't have a lot of great footage.

But it looked as if this was his lucky day! "Ma'am, mind letting me through? I'd really like to get some good footage of this," said Sam, excusing his way past a couple of old ladies.

[Night]

"A lot of stuff on...?" Eric could feel his eyebrows beginning to draw together in disbelief, but was unable to stop himself. "So what, you run some kind of bigfoot blog or something?"

It wasn't that he was entirely a skeptic, but he couldn't imagine actually devoting any sort of time to pursuing things that may not even exist. Who even had the free time? Unless Sam was some kind of unemployed weirdo out chasing aliens for youtube views. He was really going to have to have a talk with his friends and see precisely why they'd decided this was a good person to set him up with.

"What even is that, you think?" He asked finally, moving to stand at Sam's shoulder. Peering out at the strange fog seemed a better alternative to trying to figure out just how he'd ended up here.

[crow]

Sam shot Eric a look as Eric said the word 'bigfoot'. He was trying to gauge how much ridicule Eric was going to levy against him for it. Not that he wasn't used to that sort of reaction; he hadn't made it super big or anything yet, so it was easy to ridicule him.

Still, he wasn't the type to get bogged down by people's opinions of him like that. You couldn't survive in the hobby if you were. "You can believe what you want," he said with a grin. "I just like to collect information for the people out there who want it."

As for the black stuff, he could only give a shrug. "I've never seen it before either."

[Night]

Eric shifted, suddenly uncomfortable as he realized that Sam was legitimately serious about this. Perhaps he had been a bit hasty in his dismissal. "I'm not saying I don't believe..." He let the sentence trail, allowing the 'I'm not saying I believe, either' to remain implied.

He toyed with his own phone in his pocket, torn between catching the phenomenon on camera himself just to prove to his friends it had happened and calling to see if he could get a taxi to just take him home. Were they even allowed out on the street with that... thing out there? What would happen if they got too close? He had too many questions.

"Should we call someone? The police?" He asked after a beat of silence.

[crow]

"Yeah, yeah," said Sam, in a tone that suggested he didn't really believe Eric when he said he didn't not believe, but also that Sam didn't particularly care. People can believe what they wanted. The truth was out there, and Sam was just trying to find it. The most that this told him was that Eric hadn't wanted to laugh at him to his face, which was nice, but not all that necessary.

He was stopped cold in his tracks by what Eric said next though. "Hey hey hey! There's no need to involve the cops," he said, wide-eyed and startled. "What if they arrest someone?"

[Night]

Eric blinked owlishly at the question, his eyebrows drawing together. "Who would they arrest? The mist? I don't exactly think that you can put handcuffs on it." This seemed obvious for a number of reasons, the primary being that it was some sort of writhing, starry fog. Then, a thought occurred, and he regarded Sam with caution.

"Why, are you worried you might get arrested?" He hissed, pitching his voice low to keep from being overheard by the other patrons still milling about. "Did you do something illegal? Am I an accessory to something now?"

[crow]

"Well, I mean, everyone does a little recreational weed these days," said Sam. Not the smartest thing to be telling someone you just met for a blind date, but foresight wasn't always Sam's strongest quality. But he shrugged. "That's not what I'm worried about. You seen the news these days? If there isn't somebody to arrest, they'll find someone to blame and haul them off anyway."

That, and they'd put the whole place on lockdown, which was going to make it harder for him to get close to this stuff. But he was still mostly concerned about someone innocent being arrested.

[Night]

Eric really couldn't deny that, he supposed, but he still had his suspicions that Sam must be trying to cover up something worse if he were really that worried about the police. "I hardly think they're going to be searching people in the crowd for joints when they should be more concerned about... whatever that is." He nodded towards the fog, which really didn't appear to be doing much of anything.

That didn't mean it wasn't dangerous. "Maybe they'll have gotten calls about it before and at least know what it is." Eric pulled his cell phone out, his mind made up to go ahead and phone this one in. Though he wouldn't be surprised if they had already gotten a call or two, given the way it seemed to have people stopped in the street outside.

[crow]

"Yeah, they're probably not going to be looking for me," Sam said easily. "Unless they've gotten a stick up their ass about millennials recently, but then I guess if that's true, you're out of luck too, huh?" He had thought his argument was pretty compelling though.

He hadn't actually thought that Eric would go ahead and ignore it.

It wasn't until he could hear the tones of keys being pressed that he realized he'd miscalculated. "Whoa!" he said, eyes widening. He made a grab for Eric's phone. "Hey, don't you listen to people?"

[Night]

Eric tried not to roll his eyes. "I would be fine, because I actually am not worried about being caught carrying around illegal substances on a blind date. Just leave it at home dude, where were you even going to light up in a coffee shop?"

He was going to politely leave out anything about the fact that he wouldn't have had it in the first place. He had low hopes for this date to go well, especially now, but that didn't mean he was going to wax poetic about the fact he was a fearful and upstanding citizen.

He gave Sam a small glare when the other was successful at grabbing his phone away, reaching around to try and grab it back. "What the hell! Give me that!" He was half worried that Sam was going to drop it; he didn't have the money to go getting his screen fixed right now, and that would be just about his luck today. "Someone needs to report this! You already said they probably won't go searching you!"

[crow]

Apparently, no, Eric didn't listen to people. At what point did Sam say he had a joint on him? But that wasn't the important issue at hand anymore, so Sam let it go in favor of focusing on keeping the phone out of Eric's grasp.

"Come on, why do you need to bring the cops into this?" he said. If he hadn't been worried about the whole area being blocked off, he might have suggested... firefighters, or something. Unfortunately, he had some more selfish concerns, so he couldn't.

More than the mist, however, the two of them were starting to attract attention from the other customers...