u/BigIntoScience

(Not sure if this is quite the right place to ask this question, but here I am anyway, because I'd wager some of y'all will have an answer.)

I'm doing some fiction writing that plays around with a concept from the book series His Dark Materials, where everybody has what's called a "daemon"- a piece of their soul that lives outside their body, in the shape of an animal whose species reflects their personality.
(daemons are also sapient, and fortunately don't really have the same environmental requirements as the real version of whatever they are.)

I'm liking the idea of some sort of monitor lizard as a daemon for one of my characters, but I'm not sure something as solitary as most monitors (really, most non-avian reptiles) are would quite fit him. So, what are some monitors are at all social? As in, ones that will choose to hang out in close proximity to each other sometimes, for reasons other than mating or to fight? Or, heck, ones that will tolerate each other well but might not deliberately seek each other out- that'd work too.

I'm finding some pictures of emerald tree monitors outright sleeping on top of each other, so those sure look like an option, though I can't figure out whether that's actual social behavior or just "we both wanted this basking spot". And I know Komodo dragons will group up in the same area if there's a big meal available, though they might be too big for this particular situation.

So, I know viruses don't have a color because they're too small to interact with visible wavelengths of light properly. I also know they're so small that getting any real mass of them would be functionally if not outright impossible.

That said: what if I did somehow get a visible amount of pure virus? Like I've gone through a country during flu season with some kind of magic beam and extracted a milliliter or so of pure flu virus- an amount where you can put it in a little vial and easily view with the naked eye that there's a substance in there. Would that have a color then? Do we know?

Edit: also, new question. Would a pile of viruses stay in a pile? A single virus, not contained in any kind of liquid droplet, is so tiny- could gravity even pull a single virus down, if I managed to take one single virus out of the vial and place it in the air?
Because if it can't pull a single virus down, I'd expect a pile of em to drift off in all directions. Unless they stick together, I suppose- those sort of alien-robot-shaped bacteriophages in particular look like they'd tangle pretty effectively.
(For the purposes of the first question, we'll imagine the vial is full and capped, so whether or not gravity would keep em in the vial isn't relevant.)