Aberrant: Infinite Earth - Fiction - Just another day at Stonehenge [FIN]

[The Traveler]

The Professor heads to the main bridge of the ship and starts operating the helm, warming up the flight system and adjusting the invisibility cloak to make sure the only thing that could follow is someone who knows how to trace chronoton particle traces.

"There, we should be there soon." She says, sitting in her captain's seat. She grabs a book from a small library shelf near her main control console and starts reading.

[Mech]

He went back to the medical bay, since he knew where it was and laid back on the bed. He still needed to recover, a couple hours later he would awaken refreshed, feeling better than he had since getting here.

[The Traveler]

The Professor looks at the engineering display on the navigation console as Sarah walks into the Bridge, a large dinner in her hands.

"Professor... I thought you would eat with the rest of the passengers. Even the guy we picked up is eating."

"Oh... sorry, I was just watching out flight and trying to make in-roads into this world's global telecommunication network."

She was patched into every wire and server in the world, soaking in every bit of data into her computer's servers. She was a curious sort and listening the news of the world. The BBC, CNN, NHK... all obsessed with the nova phenomenon. "Best to get intelligence on this new place through it's media."

She has the ESS run along the Thames, headed to the bridges of London. She knows of a couple old sewers large enough to accommodate the ship's form. She grabs the plate of spaghetti and starts nibbling.

"Sarah... whatever we do here... we should stay careful."

"I'm aware. Kevlar peacoat?"

"Yeah."

"X44 pocket pulse derringer?"

"Definately."

"Should I expect us being up to some skulduggery?"

"Oh definately."

The best days the Professor has are the days when she can play a little fast and loose. Of course the only people that will get her worst are the worst... She realizes what she has is some false bravado.

[Karren Gaunt]

Having politely excused herself from the cafeteria as soon as she was able to get down a nova-sized meal to quiet her grumbling stomach, Irma withdrew to the cargo bay, produced her gun cleaning supplies from the invisible space of her Collection, and set to work.

'Care for your weapons as you would yourself,' her tutors had told her growing up, 'do it slow and do it right.'

She had taken that lesson to heart and by now it was almost meditative, consuming almost all her focus as, one by one, going from smallest calibre to largest, the chronopath manifested, unloaded, stripped, cleaned, reassembled, reloaded, and then vanished her armaments back into the Collection. Her eyes were calm and almost happy, a ghost smile on her lips as her quantum bubbled back towards full reserves. It woudl take her over an hour to service all the pieces, several in fact if she worked on her largest ordinance, but she didn't mind.

[Mech]

Once he woke, the amnesiac nova followed the pulsing of his node to the nearest of his comrades, leading into the cargo bay.

The assortment of weapons made him smile. "Looks like someone likes to always be prepared for anything."

[Karren Gaunt]

Her awareness 'pinged' Mech as soon as he entered, but Irma waited for him to speak before looking up and pausing with a half-disasembled rifle on her knees, features stained with grease and eyes alert.

"There is a certain value to overkill, especially when it comes to dealing with other Novas," she confirmed, "My gifts have left me with a lack of 'kill you with my mind' powers, so I make it up with ordinance. Lots of ordinance."

By way of demonstration, she held up one hand, summoned a heavy pistol into it with a faint crackle and just as quickly and quietly made the weapon vanish again, invisible and undetectable to all-but-the-most quantumly attuned. "Feeling any better?"

[Mech]

He nodded. "I feel back to normal in terms of power, but I still don't know who I am, or how I know all the things I can do."

"You've had to fight alot of other novas then I take it?"

[Karren Gaunt]

"My share of them, yes," somewhat demurred the chronopath with a textbook nod of rueful pride she didn't feel in the slightest behind her social mask, "I am Devries-trained and it's how I get by in the multiverse when I have to live on the grid instead of off it. A job no better or worse than a lot of Travelers pick up to survive."

She resumed her gun maintenance, deftly stripping the weapon at hand to bits before cleaning out what needs cleaning and oiling what needs oiling.

[Mech]

He nodded. "I remember sparring with other novas as a child, but the faces are all hidden. It was never a real fight though."

He looked saddened by it. "So what was your world like?"

"I'm sorry if I'm being a pest, but since I know so little of myself, I feel it behooves me to know the novas around me. I'll leave you be if you want."

[Heather 10093]

Click to reveal..

Sorry if I'm interrupting the flow of conversation here, but I finally came up with something to post.

Heather wandered down yet another hallway, finding the entire facility to be fascinating. The aesthetics alone were so very alien, before one even began to consider how very, very large this vessel was on the inside for being so small on the outside. She was wondering how it was accomplished--shrinking every thing as it entered? Spatial compression? Folding the edges of the surrounding space through a quasi n-dimensional event horizon while somehow avoiding the shearing effect naturally generated in such a circumstance?--when the sound of voices drew her to another room.

There, she found Mech and Irma discussing their homeworlds while Irma worked on some fascinating bits of machinery. Heather pondered the purposes of the devices, and where Irma was keeping them all, as she listened unobtrusively. She honestly wasn't trying to eavesdrop, she was trying to be polite by not interrupting.

As yet another device was disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled, she starting assessing them. Some were wired, and evidently used some form of conductive energy, while others showed no obvious motive forces beyond the obvious triggering mechanisms, but a common theme was a central focusing chamber, evidently to direct whatever effect they generated. With so many, surely she could accomplish a great many different things.

[Karren Gaunt]

Click to reveal..

OOC: And what a nice post it was.

It was a long few heartbeats before Irma answered, thinking about what she should say, what she dare say, what she *wanted to say*, to this Innocent. Her social mask roiled slightly, the chronopath not entirely unmoved by the man's visual appeal. So she decided on the truth or at least part of it.

"I wouldn't know anymore. It's been a long time since I left home," she opened, thoughts adding a dry 'nine years, two months, three days, eight hours, thirty-two minutes, 24 seconds' for her own benefit, "And when I left it was all going to hell anyway. Utopia had betrayed us at the behest of a madwoman. Sterlized most of us. And some Novas had been hitting back at Utopia and their employers hard as they could, setting the world aflame as they went. Enough to make it a war in fact. My father did his best to keep me out of it, but in the end, it touched us all, and sent me into the Multiverse to try and prevent it from happening again the only way I know how."

She smiled wryly at Heather's lurking place, clicking a clip of ammo into a light machine gun and poofing it away, "Come on over and pull up a box. Perhaps you could cheer us with your stories."

[Mech]

He looked up and spared a smile to Heather, the woman with a number following her name. Something told him there was a real story behind that.

He looked back to Irma and nodded. "So you have some experience with what we may be facing here then."

He knew he could fight, better than many others even, but even so, he sighed, This could go badly, for all of them. "I'm sorry."

When She invited Heather over, he echoed her welcome. "Come on, we're all in this together now, no sense in not being able to sit and chat."

[Heather 10093]

Heather walked in and sat down where indicated.

"I'm sorry," she said contritely. "I don't know enough about other worlds to know what to tell you about mine. I can tell you that the history books say that war used to be common, but that there hasn't been one since the War of Enlightenment. Once Queen Victoria ruled the world, it was like nobody even thought of war any more. We've had widespread air travel since the discovery of spatial buoyancy made the costs worthwhile. That was about 120 years ago."

She rubbed her chin in thought. "Um, we stopped using coal when we realized the effects it was having on the environment. A lot of people still have fireplaces, but they don't put out enough smoke to worry about. Lightning capacitors replaced coal for a while, but they were really dangerous when they malfunctioned. Aetheric induction is a relatively new development, less than 20 years old. It uses negative energy to draw energy from the fabric of reality itself. It doesn't generate large scale power, but the circuits aren't that expensive to produce so they were just introduced to most devices that required power."

Turning from technology to more personal matters, she said, "My assigned husband was a professor at the London Imperial College until last year, when Chaos changed everything. Now there is no government, nobody who knows what is going on. Everybody was still trying to figure things out when I left to see the world."

[Mech]

"Fascinating."

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then continued. "What happened with this Chaos you speak of?"

[The Traveler]

The professor politely, and quietly strides in and sits on the spitfire stored in her cargo bay. She taps on a small computer tablet in her hand and sits back against the pilot's canope, her goggles up on her forehead.

She listens to Heather and her other guests, wanting to know more about her passengers. If anything, this'll provide more fodder for more adventures. The Professor bores easily.

[Heather 10093]

"Nobody knows. One day, everything just... changed." She pointed to herself, "People," to Ariel, "animals, everything." A look of sadness crossed her face. "Half of the people in the world just dropped dead, and nobody has any clue why." She slumps and goes quiet then, her cheerfulness for once dispelled.

[Mech]

The arrival of the Professor got a nod from him, but he turned his gaaze back to Heather. "For reality to alter like that, something major must have happened."

"Wait, did you say assigned husband? You didn't get to choose who you'd marry?"

[Heather 10093]

"Of course not. That would be terribly inefficient."

[Karren Gaunt]

Irma just couldn't help it. She laughed, closing her eyes, and recomposing herself with her lips behind one hand.

"Sorry, sorry, but even my upbringing wasn't that utilitarian, and my Devries had a very thinly concealed 'breeding program' that involved me being introduced to other novas my age at regular social functions while being raised far apart to avoid the 'like brother and sister' effect."

She manifested another weapon and turned to servicing it, green eyes recovering their self-control, "Something very, very different happened on your Earth, Heather. That's all I can say."

[The Traveler]

Sakurako adjusts her glasses. "Tell me more about this Aetheric technology." She says, hoping what is being used isn't what she thinks it is. Or perhaps something she thought couldn't exist...

"I think I have an inkling as to just what that energy is... at least when translated to what I understand of sub-quantum energy string forms."

[Heather 10093]

Heather smiles at the Professor. "Certainly. The circuits use a series of locked atomic columns to gather negative energy and widen the natural gaps in the fabric of reality a little bit, drawing power into the universe from the space between them. There are theoretically an infinite number of universes, but that is only a tiny percentage of the amount of stuff outside of them. By controlling the aperture through which the energy is gathered, we can avoid non-desirable forms of energy or any complex structures formed between realities. Simple enough really."

Click to reveal..

Unless you have mega Int of at least one, and points in science, your eyes probably started to glaze seconds into the explanation, which naturally was even more technical that what I could come up with.

[The Traveler]

Sakurako jumps up from her seated position. "You... your universe discovered the Probability Foam! YES! BRILLIANT!" Sakurako runs over and hugs Heather, patting her on the shoulder.

"Your technology draws energy from the probability that a form of energy you need is present in a sub-quantum vacuum. The only way that exists is if you draw from a trans-quantum paradox. Literally put, you draw energy from nothing because in one possiblity there is energy there! That's running on a sub "string" of noetic energy... you are indeed in a brilliant era!" Sakurako smiles, giddy as a schoolgirl.

[Mech]

He just sat there following in some fashion, but not particularly well. The marriage thing suprised him, A part of him knew that wasn't how things were done in his world.

[Heather 10093]

Heather and the Professor continued to geek out, leaving the onlookers to struggle to comprehend even a fraction of what the two were saying. The discussion grew heated at several points, apparently over issues of semantics and whose terminology was better.

Click to reveal..

The story seems to have stalled here, making a time skip in order, IMO. Dash, this is your world, so really you need to be the one to get us moving, though Irma or the Professor could do so by asking you some questions. Either way, it is you we are really waiting on.

[Dash Carpenter]

Dash reappeared out of thin air, or so it seemed behind everyone, thin smile on his face. It grew pained as he realized that he'd stumbled into the egg-head playground. "Professor, a moment please?"

[Karren Gaunt]

Irma had been pleasantly bemused by the conversation, plenty smart and intutively trained in the art of breaking space-time for fun and profit, but she'd never bothered to really learn the science behind it. It made good background noise anyway as she finished up the last of her smaller pieces.

Then Dash entered the scene, and the chronopath gave him her full attention, lips quirking as she intoned, "Does this involve how we're supposed to find your Directive and get in contact with them without being shot at by-god-knows-what kind of anti-Nova weaponry?"

[Mech]

He turned and looked at Dash nodding. I think if this pertains to all of us fighting, it's best simply to be up front with it, with all of us."

[The Traveler]

"I doubt it's going to be like that, everyone. One step at a time." She says with a confident grin on her face. "I can negotiate any situation. After all, I'm just a traveller, not a threat."

She brushes off her vest after getting up and looks over to Dash. "Yes?"

[Dash Carpenter]

Dash smirked for a moment. "Don't worry, I handled briefing them a few minute ago. We should have a safe reception for you. Take us upriver." As the Professor complied, Dash gave several more direction that seemed confusing, but it was clear soon enough that the ship was heading for an underwater metal covering of a hole in the shore, which he had indicated as the entry point.

Suddenly, a radio function crackled to audio life. "Station 101.2, who's this and what song do you want to hear?" "I'm Michael. Can you play Miss Shrapnel?"

Apparently, it was a code phrase, for the metal jerked back to reveal a watery tunnel. "Take her in Professor."

[The Traveler]

The Professor carefully aims the bow of the ESS towards the entrance. "Hmm... ironic, since this ship's exterior setting is a life raft and I need to sink..." She says with a smirk. "Oh well... Flooding ballast..."

The ESS sinks like a submarine would, uncharacteristically for it's form and navigates the tunnels. Sakurako follows the direction lighting for the underwater paths. When Sakurako comes up on the main dock chamber she blows ballast and surfaces. She politely re-opens the channel. But before hand looks to Dash.

"Would you be so kind to let your friends know the appearance of my ship is perfectly normal and we DON'T need a rescue team? Had to straighten out my colleagues in Section T regarding my ship and it's appearance when I popped up in their Cardiff submarine docks... just a thought ahead of time. They thought I was in distress or something."

[Karren Gaunt]

Irma was frowning as she thought through the problem. Younger and stupider, she had approached the Directive several times to help her get closer to Thetis... It never turned out well though between the grating culture clash and her eventual need to move on to her target regardless of any outside rules.

"I'll take point with Dash," volunteered the black-haired chronopath as they navigated the underwater tunnel, smoothing out the dark folds of her outfit, "When I signal, the rest of you follow. Just in case our guide's superiors are more akin to their multiversal counterparts than we hope. You wouldn't happen to have any kind of reliable comunication gear to go with this wondercraft, would you, Profesor?"

[Heather 10093]

Heather watches the piloting of the ship with great interest. She looks a bit disappointed at having to wait on Irma and Dash, but yields to the decisions of those more experienced with this world or with other worlds in general.

She does make a point of keeping her friends nearby where they won't won't cause much trouble.

[The Traveler]

Sakurako points to a blue cabinet near the communications terminal on the bridge. "There's ten over-the-ear universal translator enabled communicators in that cabinet. Distribute those as you see fit." She says to Irma. "Just take a calm demeanor for now. We're Dash's guests now." She says with a giggle. "Odd, you're my guests here and his guests outside. Brilliant!"

[Mech]

He nodded, taking one of the communicators and waiting with the others. He planned to bring up the rear, though he figured the Professor would wait till last herself.

[The Traveler]

"Okay... that should be a usable place to moor this thing." Sakurako says pulling up to a walkway next to the water. Sakurako guesses that's a usable slip location. She activates the light on the roof of the ESS and illuminates the facility.

"And there we go. Mind your step, and I will tie her to the dock once everyone's out. Should be enough lighting for everyone to at least step off without falling."

She gets up and motions to Sarah. "Get the dock lines and meet me at the airlock." Sarah nods, wearing what she grabbed earlier.

[Dash Carpenter]

Dash picked up the communicator but clipped it to the belt. "Just come out all of you. Given the struggle we're in, do you really think the Directive can turn away novas in the state it's in?" When they exited the lock, there was a squad up ahead, firearms at the ready but lowered. Their setup was more from training preparedness than any real intention to threaten the party. Stepping out to meet them-

Dash saluted immediately as he sighted the dark-haired and mustached man in deep blue who stepped forward to him arms crossed behind his back. "Director Harris."

The man nodded. "Agent Carpenter. And our new allies, I hope. Welcome. We're glad you're willing to help us fight the stranglehold that the Houses have on both baselines and novas alike."

[Karren Gaunt]

Irma took one of the comunicators and slipped the speaker in her ear among long, flowing locks of black hair and the receiver patch on her throat, eyes comunicating a clear 'yes, I think it would' to the others before she followed Dash up and out of the craft onto the dock, outwardly just a very attractive young baseline in apperance and motion. Her green eyes were amused as she flashed first one and then the other Directive snipers lurking in a shadows above a 'I see you' grin.

It was a bad habit but sometimes she liked to let her antagonists know how outclassed they were. Vented stress during long hunts.

"Come on out but keep your guard up. We have two snipers on watch even as they're playing nice," she whispered into the comunicator almost below audiable range before focusing on their welcoming comitee and extending one hand to the foremost man, "That is the plan, Director Harris. Presuming you prove as glowingly virtuous as your agent Dash claims you are."

Her smile, fake and practised, was as convincing as the real thing, all warmth and good hopes for the future.

[The Traveler]

Sakurako peeks out and sets a rope around a mooring post before walking out. She looks over the walls, pulling out a pair of rubber gloves and running a finger across. "Hmm..." She speaks calmly. "I wager you guys have been down here a while. Usually an organization like yours would take pride in appearances but this is a sign... you're losing, aren't you?" She says, looking over the man in blue. "The question isn't if I will join, but just how bad is it out there?"

She observes the snipers, and notices there are a couple of bullet craters where a .50 caliber bullet has struck. She adjusts her reading glasses which display a HUD of the man in blue's heart rate and respiration.

Sarah climbs out and takes care of moving the raft against the dock. "This is my travelling companion, Sarah Hideyoshi..." Sakurako says as Sarah waves up to the snipers with a cute wave. "...and this ship is the ESS, and sorry for appearances... she's stuck in that form." She says, nodding to her ship and scratching her head with the clean hand.

"Oh! And I'm The Professor. Hello!" She says with a smile and a absentminded wave.

[Heather 10093]

Heather grabs one of the earpieces everyone else was grabbing and put it on before following the others out. She looked around the underground lair with unabashed curiosity, completely ignoring the snipers and the weapons of the guards.

The guards had a lot more trouble ignoring the small dragons that followed her out, or the way they would disappear randomly to move closer to something that interested them. A couple of the jumpier guards nearly fired upon them, though they never showed any concern or signs of aggressiveness, beyond a rather aggressive sense of curiosity.

[The Traveler]

Sarah does one last pull of the mooring rope and gets the raft in position from inside the ESS. She steps out, forgetting the difference in height between the ship and the docks and trips, luckily landing in The Professor's chest, face first. She grabs hold of Sarah and pulls her up. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I have to pay better attention just all those guys..." She says, pointing to the snipers on the catwalks.

"I know, Sarah. They seem non-threatening. Think about it. these people have their backs against the wall. This universe's nova population has created a Novacracy. Unfortunately it's designed to have them in charge and run the lives of baseline society like dogs... Think... would you like me controlling every waking moment of your life?"

"You... sort of do."

Sakurako is taken a back. "Ah..." She scratches her chin. "I'm... I'm sorry."

"Gotcha, Professor." Sarah says with a smirk.

"Please, Sarah, this is a serious situation here."

"You wouldn't know a joke if it smacked you in the face." Sarah mutters under her breath.