[It's important to ground oneself when panic starts to rise. Panic can provoke the need for action, but it can also cloud one's judgement. The man in the brown jacket knows he will not do well without his wits about him, and so he grounds himself.

He is currently in one piece. No weapon, no comms, and no creds, but he is in one piece, and that will have to be sufficient. The superficial injuries on his skin and the unpleasant aftertaste of salt and sand are clues more than they are irritants. He is on a beach, and given that he was likely pushed ashore by the flow of tide, he is luckier than many. The ocean could have been more acidic, the air could have been unbreathable, and the sediment could have been poisonous. There don't appear to be high levels of radiation immediately noticeable in this area.

He is luckier than most, the man reminds himself as he refamiliarizes himself with waking. With movement. With a melody that he must remember.

The man allows that particular regret to sit a moment longer than strictly necessary. His mind remains unstill.

Perhaps that is why, when he hears footsteps in the wet sand, he grasps foolishly for a gun that isn't there. The rattling discontent in his head has made himself known once again, and he's hungry for more. The man doesn't have the decency to be glad of the gun's absence in light of this.]

Tell me what planet we are on and where the nearest and fastest mode of transport is.

[His voice may be pressured and urgent, but his tone is as level and steady as always. That discontent would have to try harder to undo seven years of practiced temperance.]

Bavan is a far cry from modern society in the Solar System, but it is a start. The man doesn't have the arrogance to tell himself he can build a space-worthy vessel from scratch, so he does not try. He does what he can with the resources he has, which are very little. The only option he sees for the moment is to adapt.

So he does what anyone on strict budget does. He haggles.

He got as far as saying to a (fellow, for however much longer) human clerk at a produce stall, "This is a smaller than average vegetable. I will pay you half its posted price." It has since been several minutes of back and forth, while the clerk has increasingly lost their patience trying to engage with him, and the man in the brown jacket has either simply repeated, "I will pay you half its posted price," or supplied additional commentary on, for example, the lack of ripeness in the tomatoes or the presence of bitter pit damage on an apple. He always seems to find the smallest of each of these pieces of produce.

This nightmare exchange has gone on too long, yet shows no sign of stopping.

[There is very little one can do to prepare for unpredictable physiological changes of this magnitude. For his part, the man who may or may not by now have introduced himself to people as Jet tried. Without guidance, he had nothing to do other than to meditate on it, but he refused to avoid the issue and let carelessness catch up with him.

Regardless, there isn't much he could have done. The fact of the matter is this: he had left his current lodgings for the day, because idleness leads to boredom which leads to undesirable impulse. He had eventually gone to a cafe that boasted outdoor seating and ordered a decaffeinated tea because he was thirsty. He had pulled open a book in order to read it. The flesh of his fingers had, after all of this, simply depressed against the table. And when they were pulled away, they retained that shape.

It's not something that escapes notice, when one's hand begins to behave as if it were melting wax, pliant to pressure and doughy in both form and texture. Jet's first mistake was needing to investigate the issue, because further pressure has only malformed the hand completely. It was immediately clear that, at some point, his right hand simply no longer possessed the stability that bone afforded it.

Jet may later like to think he acted the only way one could in such a situation, but truthfully, there are infinite ways to react to something innately horrifying. He had never suffered the radiation damage that he knew countless people on Mars experienced, but he had seen some of its worst, and this was similar enough that his mind went to the medical over the metaphysical. His choice relied on his first impulse, and it was to squeeze the "wound".

That was the breaking point. The remains of what was once Jet's right hand appeared to burst with a wet pop, no longer like wax but purely shapeless liquid spilling the hand, the arm, everything starting from the shoulder out of the sleeve of his brown jacket, gathering in a semitransparent pool of near-black interrupted with flecks of very bright green. The puddle is audible as it squelches back together as if still attached to its origin, rejoining him through his socks, but not reforming back as the limb it once was. It simply was part of him again. This part was quick; the subsequent jumping from his seat and crashing of chair and table as furniture was thrown away in the struggle of pure panic and broken decorative glassware leaves a drawn out, excruciating silence.

So all in all, not a great morning.]

[Do what thou wilt. I'll match prose or brackets, and I'm at erlking.]