"I remember..." Flynn paused, thinking hard. If he focused, he could picture the sun, on a summer day so hot, there seemed to be a haze over the asphalt. He could remember the orange glow of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. He remembered Alan's grumpy old cat, Gort, that used to sleep in the sunbeams that streamed in through the living room window early in the morning.
He couldn't remember it's warmth on his skin, or the cool ocean breeze ruffling his hair. He couldn't remember Gort's soft fur on his face in the early mornings when he'd wake up on Alan's couch when the patch of sun just formed.
Flynn laughed. "The sun, Alan used to call me a reptile, because every time we used to stay up late working at his house, and I'd inevitably end up sleeping on his couch. The sun... I'm not sure how to describe it, but the surface that the sunlight most directly hits through the window tends to heat up a lot more than the rest of the house. And that couch was just under the window, so I'd always wake up to it's warmth, and... well, as the sun rises, that patch of warmth would move, and... well, inevitably I'd roll off the couch onto the tile floor to follow it, and that's how Alan would find me. The connection to reptiles, they're... a broad category of animals--it would be like if gridbugs and bits were categorized together. What reptiles have in common is they don't generate their own heat, so they often lay in the sun to warm up. There's one called a Gila monster. It's a type of Lizard. A lizard is" Flynn frowned. "A lizard is..." He pulled his disc off his back, and pulled up a still image from a memory, showing a young boy holding up what appeared to be a fat red and black striped lizard. The colors of the memory are... muted, and the image itself was blurry, as though the memory had degraded.
"That's a Gila monster," Flynn said. "They're venomous, though it's a defense mechanism rather than for hunting like some other animals are. Alan, Roy, and I, we took they boys--Sam, Jet, and--Or kids, I guess I should say, since Nate--Roy's... well, now his niece--goes by Naomi now. Well, we took the kids camping out in Arizona, and they'd run off. Not far, we told them not to leave the immediate area of the campground, and I was in charge of making lunch. It was a complete disaster, if you ask Alan. I never got very good at grilling. But. The next thing I know, Jet came running back, Sam and Naomi not far behind him, calling out to Alan, shouting 'Dad, Dad! Look what I found!'" Flynn chuckled.
"It scared the crap out of us when he held up that lizard, grinning like he'd just won the jackpot or something. It was a baby, probably. Not yet fully grown, but it was furious to have been caught and was hissing viciously. We were lucky none of them were bit. Alan wrapped the Gila monster in a towel, relocated it... somewhere else within the park, and we had a long discussion with the kids about catching dangerous animals."
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