<div class="floatleft">(http://i1007.photobucket.com/albums/af196/daisygirl1200/ddf435a3-2926-47ca-a945-2846ded513d5.jpg)</div><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: andale mono;"> Jack looked up from the cup of aggravating coffee, a disgruntled frown once again taking up residence on his lips as the apparently over excitable Probie got, well, over excited.<br/><br/>“It’s just sugar kid. I think I’ll survive,” Jack quipped as she grabbed his sleeve and spilled the now heinously sweet coffee. <em>Thank. God</em>. He popped to his feet to escape the flood headed for the edge of the booth and his lap while scrabbling to grab some napkins. The last thing he wanted to do was show up at the station with a giant wet splotch in a very inconvenient location on his pants. Jack shifted awkwardly out of the booth, curling around the corner to keep the flood from getting at him.<br/><br/>The Probie didn’t seem to be moving and he felt like he was getting dangerously close to invading her personal space. Jack was <em>not</em> willing to sit through another of those sensitivity training – even the words in his head were in air quotes – videos. <br/><br/>“A little room here?” he stated, trying to sound firm but not overly annoyed. Can’t let the new recruits rattle ya. It was like chum in the water. Jack wasn’t one hundred percent sure what chum actually was never having been outside a landlocked state. But his TO at White Sands used to say that all the time and whether he fully understood the idiom or not, Jack figured they were words to live by.<br/><br/>After a moment of still not making headway, Jack looked up from his personal crisis and would have turned a stern glare on the Probie but for the fact that movement on his other side caught his attention. He did a double take. The whole top of the diner appeared to be listing, the once solid wall looking more like so much congealed mucus than anything a wall should ever look like.<br/><br/>“Great hopping hooded figures! The wall’s melting kid!” This Probie was never going to make it as a cop if her insticts were so dull. You'd have thought she would have spotted this mess as soon as it started happening. Her facing the wall and all. Sheesh. But now that his razor like focus and sharp detection skills had been activated, Jack noted that there were people running around and screaming all over the joint. It was going to descend into anarchy any minute! It was a damn good thing a member of the Sheriff’s Secret Police was right here in the diner when it happened.<br/><br/>Jack straightened to his full height, pulling his natural air of authority around himself like a cloak. “Keep calm people,” he shouted over the cacophony, raising his hands in the air. “The Sheriff’s Secret Police are aware of the problem and everything’s going to be oh kay.” A mother snatched up a crying toddler who stood in the oozing mass’s path, inches from the molten material deluge while he spoke and the kid screamed, half drowning out the end of his words. <br/><br/>He huffed out an annoyed breath and called out again, “Everything’s going to be oh kay,” waving his arms in the universal signal to settle the crap down. <br/><br/>“If you’ll all just walk slowly and calmly to the exits located here, here and here,” looking very much like an airline stewardess as he waved to the front, side and emergency exits – which Jack would have known had he ever flown commercial - “the Sheriff and I would ask that everyone gather in the parking lot so we can take a head count. This looks nothing like something that would cause an explosion or any be caused by kind of radioactive material so I’m sure there’s no need to leave the parking lot or gather on the other side of the street.” He made sure to use his “Hail fellow well met” tone of voice to inspire extra confidence in his leadership.<br/><br/>“I did a tour at White Sands Missile Range in the army so I should know,” he added with a smile for extra effect while people ran willy nilly about the place screaming and trampling each other to get out of the building. The sludge rolled and oozed a scant foot or so from his feet, not that Jack noticed as he performed his civic - not to mention employment – duties with aplomb. The sludge hit the support legs on the booth where he and the Probie had settled, knock the table askew and sending a wave of over sugared coffee straight over the side and into his pants where it did indeed leave a stain in a most inconvenient place.  </span><br/>