[Adelie]

The first thing she did was go back to sleep, of course. When she awoke to a world illuminated in greyscale, her groggy morning barely-sentient mind flooded with all sorts of explanations. Perhaps it was still night. Perhaps it was one of those little waking quirks, like how you might awaken with a swollen eye or a sore back. Perhaps it was just a strange dream, one of those where everything was the same as reality except for one little detail.

It didn't really matter which one of those was right - all that mattered was that one action solved all of them, and that was rolling over, burying her face in the pillow, and going back to sleep.

[Adelie]

The second thing she did was go back to sleep, of course. She might have woken up once before, she might've observed the exact same things and come up with the exact same conclusions, but that didn't stop her from acting on them all the same.

The third thing she did was look at the time - well, look in the sense that she fumbled, eyes half-closed, for her buzzing phone and once it finally made it securely into her hands, she caught a quick glance of the glaring fact that it was two in the afternoon, and that she most certainly should've woken up hours and hours ago.

A brief flash of panic crossed her mind - she had classes in the morning, she had papers to grade, she was late to something-or-other that she couldn't quite remember right now - before she recalled, with great relief, that she was on vacation.

[Adelie]

It wasn't often that she had a chance to go on vacation, after all. Someone feeling a little sassy might point out that as a student, she technically had three months of summer vacation every year - but she would be the first to argue that summer vacation wasn't a real vacation.

She had to run lectures in the summer, after all, since the professors were entitled to vacation time while their teaching assistants were still shackled to the whims of their students; the few spare moments she had were dedicated to finally getting a few more words of her thesis typed. Maybe in a few more decades, she'd be done.

[Adelie]

But this weekend was special. She'd been unable to secure herself a vacation for the holidays - she'd taken one look at airfare costs and balked - but one of her fellow teaching assistants, perhaps encouraged by the very same problem, had offered her a trade. She'd sub in for them later this month, and in return, they'd take her sections this week.

Both of them would get a week free to do whatever they wanted - and for her, that was apparently lying in bed sleeping until two in the afternoon and doing absolutely nothing. But, y'know, in a place that wasn't her bed. That made all the difference.

[Adelie]

From this bed - which bore no real difference to her bed at home apart from the vaulted fact that it was several hundred miles from her apartment - she stared at her phone and at its steady vibration as the number of unread messages she had received increased before her very eyes. Clearly someone desperately wanted to get ahold of her; she just hoped it wouldn't interrupt her vacation.

vennn. chi chi chi chi
vennn. chi are you okay
vennn. i came by and knocked on your door but you aren't responding! is everything okay?
chi-korita. wat
chi-korita. wtf why are you at my door
chi-korita. i just woke up
chi-korita. i'm in rewhister right now on vacation. what's even going on?
vennn. ohhhh
vennn. girl have you looked at the news?
vennn. actually you don't need to
vennn. just look around you!

[Adelie]

She looked around. She looked at the white sheets on her bed, marked with a satiny grey damask pattern to break the monotony on the eyes; she looked at the black screen of the television, nothing playing upon it; she looked at the steel grey palm tree outside her window, framed by a few pale grey honeysuckle brambles leaking from the window box just upstairs.

Wait.

She'd noticed it already, of course - twice, even. Yet after repeatedly dismissing its existence to focus on more important things - like getting a good morning's sleep - it was no surprise that she'd simply blinded herself to the obvious fact that plants should not be grey. Nor, for that matter, should the sky be grey, or the ocean beyond it.

Her vacation was really shaping up well, wasn't it?

[Adelie]

chi-korita. okay wtf
chi-korita. so I'm guessing you're talking about the mysterious and obvious lack of color in the world?
chi-korita. Like, I'm not just imagining things, right?
vennnn. yeah! everyone's so confused about what's going on.
vennnn. have you seen the news? people are saying it's a government conspiracy or something.

After scrabbling around a bit on her nightstand for the television remote - she would like to blame this on the lack of contrast caused by a lack of color, but in reality she was still just slightly sleepy - she turned on the television and was immediately greeted by some low-quality shark render in some low-quality made-for-television movie. Evidently, no matter how much of a worldwide emergency this might be, it was still unable to unseat bad programming.

[Adelie]

A few channels away, she finally found what she was looking for - a press conference currently being held by a few familiar faces. That actually came as a surprise; she had been expecting statements by politicians, since they were usually the first to jump on emergencies like this, but this conference was held by a few reasonably well-regarded scientists in physics and astronomy.

Perhaps that was a feature of the time; she had slept through most of the panic and the outrage, after all.

"...as of right now, there is no known cause for this phenomenon," one of the scientists continued. "However, apart from the obvious effects, there appear to be no further effects on the population. We advise everyone to be careful, but not to panic, and to await further information."

[Adelie]

chi-korita. Okay, I saw the press conference by Dr. Fischer.
chi-korita. Sounds like they have no idea what's going on, honestly. It's all just 'don't panic!' and no substance.
vennnn. ouuu
vennnn. isn't dr fischer that guy from the science tv show for kids?
chi-korita. Yeah, but he's a good scientist in his own right. Makes sense they'd put him in for a press conference, though, since he's a known personality.
vennnn. i've just been watching enn
vennnn. they've been interviewing a bunch of people and no one knows what's going on either.
vennnn. there's a rumor that there's some specialized genetic experiment they might use, but i dunno what they're going to use that for
vennnn. how do you fight the lack of something?

Truth be told, she hadn't expected 'go fight it' to be the approach people were taking with the current situation - but considering how war hawk-ish politicians had recently been, she wasn't entirely surprised. This whole genetic experiment thing sounded like another waste of money to her too, but perhaps her opinion was diluted by unceasing nihilism towards the perennial lack of funding the university experienced.

[Adelie]

It was surprising, somewhat, how at ease she felt about it all.

It would make sense to panic - after all, color was something that she and everyone else had simply taken for granted their entire existences. To lose it was akin to suddenly losing an entire sense, like suddenly learning to walk without a leg. But at the same time - she didn't really feel much at all.

Maybe it was just the tiredness speaking; maybe it was just that she wanted to go back to bed and enjoy what little vacation time she had without world emergencies getting in her way. Maybe after too much stress she was simply dulled to the impact of this event, or maybe the implications itself were so great that she naturally shielded herself from thinking too much about them.

It didn't really matter, in the end. She was on vacation, and she'd be damned if she let anything get in the way of enjoying it.

[Color Harvested]