trans_9 | Whodunnit?

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Whodunnit?

It was time to get a little more organized, share some information with each other. She had a talk with that bigface kid, Jaime, to see if he could do anything to shield them from Stacy's prying eyes and he said he had a few ideas, so a meeting place was chosen, and it was time to gather.

Cybil had a good authoritative, shouting voice.

"Everyone, listen up! We're meeting down in the city near that big tree. Grab whoever you see and get down there."

Indeed they were. People were starting to gather there.

[ooc: Instead of little subthreads, everyone post in one thread as people arrive. Try to keep the convo general, like everyone talking to each other, instead of devolving into private conversations.]

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"You got it boss-lady," said Jaime, holding up his hands, his fingers glowing with a blue energy that spread out around them in a large flattened sphere--it even slipped under their feet.

"Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed by the glowy energy thingy. This is is cloak us from Stacy's sensors so we can talk without her knowing what we're saying. This is NOT the most effective telepathic block, though, so if anyone else can do something to help with that, or offer more shielding than this, it'd be appreciated."

"Lyta?" Cybil asked. "Can you help shield us from Stacy?"

Lyta's brow creased, a little surprised by the captain's request. "She's not scanning anyone," she began to explain, but interrupted herself when she saw the looks on some members of the group, suggesting some of them weren't 100% comfortable with her assurance.

Sucking in deep breath, she nodded. "Yeah. I can. Just give me a minute."

Her eyes narrowing slightly, Lyta focused her mind on the wall she kept around her own thoughts and pushed it outward, stretching it to shield the whole group from Stacy's prying mind. In all honesty, she wasn't completely positive how long she'd be able to keep the ship from breaking through, but it would at least give her time to warn the captain if Stacy did decide to to poking around.

Once it was complete, she turned back to Cybil. "Ok. She's out."

"Alright, we have to make this fast. We don't know how long we have until Stacy starts poking around or the kid gets tired and runs out of juice."

She looked around at all of them.

"What I need is for everyone to think of everything they've discovered or noticed in the time we've been here--anything unusual, any clues about who's taken us--so we can put it all together."

She went on, "I'll start. Lyta, Nathan, and I were poking around at one of those huge gates in the city, and I shit you not--I got possessed, by some...thing. The ship's holographic doctor even picked it up one scans and Lyta had to force the damn thing out of me. When it was in there, I...saw things. Things that seemed like memories. They were fuzzy, but I remember being tortured, and these voices saying something about brain-altering and that they were trying to do it because I was the captain. I screamed something to them about my crew. I don't know if it was some vision of the future or a trick, or...something, but it certainly calls into question why I started out listed as the captain. If something happened before we all woke up. If our memories are right, and our own."

She went on, "And that question-mark, question-mark hologram--it keeps talking in riddles, but some of them sound like warnings or dropped information. After that thing possessed me, the hologram said something like 'He'll come for them, one by one, until the dams break and the flood scours the earth.'"

Sam stared up at the captain like she were completely off her rocker. He glanced around the room, at the crowd of people, once more before finally speaking. "I think I saw the Ghost of Christmas Future down the block, thatta way," he said, pointing in the direction of the building with staircases on the ceiling.

"Yes, you can talk," Pat muttered, before letting Toxin take suit form. He was the one who'd seen things first-hand.

Sam looked over at, well, the dude who looked like he just jumped out of a Spiderman comic--complete with a set of over-sized teeth that looked like they'd probably seen their fare share of animal carcasses. "You sure that wasn't your breath?" he said.

aime snorted, then quickly carried on--somewhat distractedly, as he was multi-tasking, "Okay, so...were they the same thing? Uh, I mean, that you both saw? What did it look like?"

What little there was of Toxin's upper lip curled back as he growled at Sam, then glanced to Jaime, narrowing his eyepatches.

"The thing that possessed me--we saw it in the air for a minute--floating. It was a cloaked shape."

Ghosts of Christmas past? Possession? None of this was really in his league. Tony was standing at the fringe of a handful of near-strangers, trying to puzzle this out.

"I almost think somebody's screwing with us." Though it wasn't like Tony'd been doing much besides being bored. "Maybe they like to poke people and see how they react." People, of course, being a loose term. He gave Toxin a glance and decided that eye contact was probably not a good thing. And to think, he'd thought the symbiote was almost cute before.

"It's possible," Lyta said to Tony's speculation. It wouldn't be the first time an advanced species had taken members of younger races to be used in 'lab experiments.'

"But I don't know. When I was trying to force it out of the captain, I got the strong sense that, whatever it was, it knows why we're here." She mentally kicked herself for pushing it out so quickly and not taking the time to press it further for answers, answers they surely weren't going to get from Stacy.

"And then there's the way it was trying to keep us from opening the gate..." She then turned to address Cybil. "And those images you and I saw. If they were memories, then odds are you have more of them hidden away behind all those blocks in your mind. It's possible you know why we're here, too, and some just doesn't want you to remember it."

"Is there any way you could get that out of my head without causing a stroke or brain damage?"

Lyta frowned and offered an apologetic shrug. "I don't think so," she answered. "Not without knowing who put them in or how they were put in. I could probably break them one at a time but the human brain isn't meant to deal with that much stress at all once. And even if we did it over several months, I'd probably only get through two or three at most before it killed you."

"Two or three?" For a moment, Tony seemed stunned. "Christ, I've heard of self-educated shrinks with better records at dragging out repressed memories than that. No deaths, even." Of course, nobody had been dealing with alien brain-wipes before now. "Not to mention, while you take months to dick around in her head and cause all her synapses to misfire, we're probably going to get attacked by what-ever-this-is. What's the point?"

Alright, so he'd come off a little bit harsh, but the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the risk, here. It wasn't like he was actually worried about anybody's welfare. Nope.

"Hell, you don't even know if the ones you'd pick out would be useful."

"No, but I'd be willing to bet that ghost or whatever it was I pushed out of her does know," Lyta shot back. "And my guess is it probably knows how to take them out safely, too. So, I think if we find it chances are we'll find some us some answers."

"So we have a gate that has something horrible inside--we're pretty sure of that much. The other three gates are likely the same. Some...thing that can possess people--that might have some answers, some other cloaked thing running around, and another thing that smells like rotting flesh that may or may not be the same as one of the others--or they all might be the same thing. We have a missing bug. We have...suppressed memories, apparently. We have a hologram that talks in oddly appropriate riddles."

A deep breath. "What else do we have? Has anyone else found anything else we all need to know?"

Ax cleared his throat, half turning to point in the direction of the shady area that housed the maze near the tree.

"When Lyta and I explored the maze, we found a pit in the center. Ssen. Ter. Center. There was a presence inside the pit, but it was not threatening. Not unthreatening either," he reported. "It was simply...present. Tuh."

"What kinda presence?" asked Leela. "Did it say anything to you?"

Ax shook his head. "No. It said nothing, and did nothing. It was...similar to the realization that someone is standing behind you." He nodded in Lyta's direction. "Lyta attempted to make contact with it verbally and psychically but, ahh... 'no dice'?"

He was pretty sure that was the saying.

"If another case of possession shows up," Wednesday says as he glides smoothly up, "I may be able to do something to help." His gaze drifts in the direction of the maze, and then over towards Jaime. "Useful talent you've got there, m'boy."

"Possession's not the only concern. I recommend just staying away from the, ah why not, let's call it the Escher building. Stay away from there, I think, for the moment." The Doctor's expression was grave as he spoke.

"Three of us, Jaime, myself, and Scorpius, went in. There's a building with, well, a stone inside. But it's more than a stone, and it wants out. It's telepathic, very old, very powerful, and it has assassins watching over it. We barely made it out."

He scanned the group's faces, trying to impart exactly how serious he was, dangerous the building was. "I do want to explore further; there's something else trapped too that might need help. But no one should go in alone, and absolutely no one without me."

"Oh oh! And the hologram! We found this hologram of a guy before the stone angels of death killed him. It's blurry, but he looks sorta alien. We think it might've been one of the ones that grabbed us. It's like they were studying the stone thing, and he mentioned a war and something cutting them off from the rest of the crew and--oh. Khaji Da says he recorded it. So I can show you."

A wavery hologram appeared in the air in front of him, of a blurry, but nonhuman shape.

He was speaking fast.

"He brought them in. We don't know how. Angels. Angels from the Earth mythos, made of stone, but it doesn't break, and when it goes dark, they come. The Godseal is running, but we can't get through to try to reinforce the seals around the artifact. The light from his eyes is holding them at the door, but that will only last so long until it's exhausted. There's no contact from the rest of the ship--we haven't gotten the clear signal since they warned us we were under attack. There may not be anyone in the main ship left to help us. We're trying to figure out how to reach the window, but we have no rope, nothing."

His voice was choked. "We should've never thought we could control him. The Haunter of the Dark. But the war's gotten so desperate. If anyone ever finds this, please tell my mate M'rell'a that I'm sorry--"

A scream in the background. "The Godseal is shutting down! The Godseal is shutting down!"

"Restart the cycle! Override the safety protocols and restart the cycle! Restar--"

Screaming. Then it cut off.

"The Godseal was this...thing. Like a sarcophagus. We turned it on and the eyes lit up and it held the Angels at the door, while we got out through the window. BUT, in retrospect, we think something ALIVE was in the sarcophagus. Being experimented on. Then again, it could be something alive, but bad, like the thing in the stone, so freeing it might not be a good idea."

A deep breath.

"Either way. They mentioned 'the war' getting desperate--so desperate they tried to use something they couldn't control--and an attack on the ship, and losing contact with the rest of the ship. My theory is that whoever took us, whoever was a crew on this ship is dead now. And Stacy's driving."

A pause. "Or whoever killed the crew is driving. We haven't seen the whole ship yet. We haven't seen a bridge..."

"Angels..." Lyta repeated the word aloud then quickly jerked her attention to Cybil. "That's what you said was behind the gate. The one with the angels etched into it."

"The angels that we saw, that that person," he gestured vaguely to Jaime, meaning his hologram, "saw, weren't real angels. They're called Weeping Angels, and they look like angels, but they're not. They're not from Earth, they're from an entirely different planet."

He turned to Lyta again, then Cybil. "What did they look like? Faces covered? Eyes, especially? Yes? No? Were they made of stone?"

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