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Entry tags:
- !location: contagion containment,
- !plot: melting clock,
- !status: open,
- anwei ayles,
- clark kent,
- daniel jackson,
- faiza hussain,
- fletcher tringham,
- hellion,
- howard bassem,
- jamie hemeros,
- jamie mccrimmon,
- kanoe zouichi,
- kon-el,
- marco,
- miranda lotto,
- rachel berenson,
- rory williams,
- russel tringham,
- sakura haruno,
- sensor,
- tana moon,
- tim drake/red robin
Melting Clock: Quarantine
After Sam Henderson's announcement, the Contagion Containment and Treatment lab was going to get busy. Anyone suspected of being affected by the mysterious affliction would be brought here, and put into one of the large bubbles that would keep any potential contagious diseases in - and the patients themselves. Once in inside, they wouldn't be able to get out again until the Medical staff had cleared them.
And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.
They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.
[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]
And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.
They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.
[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]
no subject
Which was difficult enough. Some property of Stacy? With the ship's claim to be working for everyone's better interest (after a fashion), this didn't make sense. Not to say trusting Stacy made sense in the first place, but out of all the creative ways she could think to turn people into either puppets for her manipulating -- or the Dalgig -- without any sense of a stop being set in place yet, this whole process was too chancy.
Another individual? So far no one had mentioned any odd confrontation with someone on ship. Plenty down on XaXing, if the best way to check that was comparative reviews between people's regurgitated memories, if they'd remembered something that turned out to be significant. It was also possible people hadn't been infected at the same time and that the rates of reversal were tied in to either their time of exposure to whatever caused this time regression rather than having been through the same area in the same timeframe. All of which was getting caught up in details yet again. "Has everyone here so far been interviewed, as far as you know?"
no subject
"Our premise so far is that Stacy is somehow buffering the memories that were formed after they arrived on the ship - that's why people can still remember arriving and their actions here. And that whatever happened did so on shore leave or just afterward.
"Right now I'm hoping to find either a XaXing shop or an exhibit they all visited - possibly one where the owner insisted on showing them something that wasn't for sale, or offering them a sample, or the equivalent. Or someone purchasing something on XaXing and bringing it back to the ship. And that person might not know what they had - or they do, and aren't going to confess to using it on their crewmates."
There were too many ways they could let the answer slip away from them, like sands through an hourglass. And considering that some people here had already lost years of time - and weren't that old to begin with - they needed an answer, soon.
She sighed. "I think everyone who's come in has been interviewed. Whether they've told us the truth is another question. And I don't see any grouping that suggests why they would be chosen, or vulnerable, or whatever."
no subject
He hops up and sits on the edge of one of Stacy's pocket-like beds. "You figure out anything, Hairdye? Me and Anwei sound like we know what we're talking about but actually, we're totally clueless."
no subject
Or they might actually start believing her when she said it was natural in the first place
Sakura frowned, reviewing her mental list of everyone she'd spoken with so far. "They're not part of any one group," she agreed, addressing Anwei first, "Let alone moving in the same circles of friends and acquaintances. If this was targeted, I doubt it was even at us as a collective group of people known as the crew on Sta'c K'ltrrb'txft." She stumbled over Stacy's more proper name, stubbornly spitting it all out anyway.
"If it's something they bought, people aren't remembering it. Or they're lying," she conceded, looking toward Howard, "But it's still too sporadic. Coming back up should have exposed more people, or maybe even fewer."
Losing sight of the forest for the trees. She sighed, rubbing her forehead. "I place my bets on something on planet. Not guided, or at the very least not premeditated. The affected aren't strategically chosen without the time-loss being transmissible. There's no evidence that it is, if you can argue the other way around. If it were based on contact alone, we'd be showing by now. Friends, family, they wouldn't just be identifying the ones losing time, they'd be showing signs themselves. Which can point toward magic or technology, too -- like you say, morphing alone should have taken care of any biological means."
She figured if someone had wanted to age everyone out of existence, they'd have had to make it transmissible. "Just after shore leave should have given us at least one person who'd never been on planet in the first place. Not everyone went," she noted, "While everyone in Quarantine has. Which brings us back around to XaXing, and what short list of things that cropped up across multiple stories." Substances, stalls, stranger merchants...
She looked down at her data pad with a frown. There was something there that she was missing. Opening up one of the detailed travel histories she'd taken, she scrolled down the list. What was it?
no subject
She definitely needed to leave a note with Dr. Sam about what to do if she started regressing.
"Something on planet is my strongest guess right now; followed by something bought on the planet and brought back to the ship, with the outside chance of someone bringing something down to the planet to trade, and it activating there." That would be difficult to trace, now, wouldn't it? Some arcane bit of machinery triggering, and then handed off to be sold and resold without anyone realizing what had happened. "But nobody's mentioned that yet; everyone seems to have been using XaXing dollars."
She drummed her fingers together in front of her face. "We still have maps of the layout of the shops that Guide gave us, right? We may want to track positionally; which shop furthest from the hotel did everyone who is affected visit? The closer a shop was, the more likely that people would visit it. We need the unlikely shop; the place where people are urged to come in and take a free test or sample a dream or observe some effect. And the owner of the shop wouldn't want to be affected, right? Not unless they were part of the effect." A time-thief, maybe; stealing people's lives to extend their own? Maybe only able to steal a few moments from when they were in the shop, but taking those and not caring that those people would go toppling away through their history, forgetting their lives?
no subject
He crinkles and uncrinkles the edge of one of his papers on the clipboard. He should switch to a datapad at some point, but you can't fiddle with a datapad as much, and fidgeting helps him think.
"'Coming back up should have exposed more people, or maybe even fewer'?" he echoes Sakura. "Isn't that just the fancy way of saying you have no idea what numbers we're looking for? Here, if you're scanning through looking for weird places, I have a list of places where people who were definitely unaffected went. Might help the process of elimination a little."
He hands her a page off his clipboard. "We can definitely check off most of the places in the main bazaar if you think it's an object or place and not something people ate or bought. That place was teaming with crew. But everything a bit further out's up in the air."
no subject
The idea on time, where it went, was interesting. Hard to imagine (like many things weren't since waking up here), and beyond anything Stacy had been interfering with since they were on ship -- as far as Sakura was aware. Preservation of the memories gained on ship alone... it was disquieting, but it didn't slow down the other processes. Whatever function allowed those memory sets to remain didn't preserve the body along with that glimmer of mental clarity.
Odd, but not where her thoughts were moving. "It's a fancy way of saying having only people who went planet-side show up so far is a pretty strong indication that we're limited to the people who did take advantage of shore leave. As soon as someone who never went planet-side shows up regressing through their own life, then we're looking at the entire active crew." And hoping it couldn't spread to the millions in technical pod-rest.
"Thanks," she said, flashing Howard a small smile as she accepted his page and started to compare lists. Tapping on some names twice sends them off her main list, to a second file she'd somehow managed to work out. Considering she'd never heard of a hand-held text communication device several months ago, she was getting along fairly well now. "Anything further out, or anything sticking out. Even if people are facing confusion as to why they remember some specifics that don't make sense now, they're still capable of noticing something outside their own inconsistencies. Especially if it stuck out at the time."
She paused, reading out a handful of listed locations. She finished with, "Or this place. A clock stall, with some kind of odd, melting clock that rang out doom." Which could not, of course, have been literal. "Where do any of these check out on the maps?"
no subject
Imagine if the crew started aging forward at double-speed, or faster. They'd die of old age in weeks if not sooner.
"Here's Guide's map; I scanned it in." She pulled it up on one of her screens and started adding little green stars over the locations; they made a spatter of color around the perimeter of the mall. She added the star for the clock shop last, and frowned at it.
"This is not the furthest out in a straight line, but it's probably one of the furthest if you have to go on foot," she said slowly, tracing an elaborate path through the winding narrow streets and side-streets and alleyways. It was a bit out of the way, and it had stood out in more than one person's mind, because Howard had marked it too. "It's between a hubcap store and a - aha." Her voice dropped. "A place that sold potions of rejuvenation. Eternal youth. Very interesting."
no subject
He looks at the map. "Are you freaking serious? Are we seriously going with the creepy clock? Have our lives really turned into an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? We should have just used our power of cliche to figure that out ten hours ago and got some bed rest."
It's hard to feel excited about having a lead when it feels like it should have been staring them in the face the whole time. "Unless it's the eternal youth place, but some of our guys in the bubbles are pretty young. I'd bet some store cross-contamination over people actually buying stuff from there. So what do we do from here, tell Stacy to turn around because the weird clock might be killing off her crew?"
no subject
She examined the screen along with Howard and Anwei. "People brought the clock up in interviews with you, too?" She frowned, looking at the pattern of stars on the map itself. Maybe...
"Cross-contamination's certainly possible." If some mixture between the potion's stall and the clock merchant's wares could feasibly create the conditions needed to start sending someone backward through time. "Ask her if there's anything in her memory banks that would suggest this is possible, or if she knows of any kind of clock able to cause this kind of time-reversal on its own. Or just ask her to do exactly what you said. It's a better lead than anything else we've had so far, and one way or another most of them point right back to XaXing as it is."
no subject
"It might have some supernatural component. Maybe it has to look like a clock, or it doesn't work. Or the person who has it is testing to determine how to reverse-engineer it. That person probably has some very useful information. Let's hope they are willing to share." She gave a quick, narrow smile that slit her face with very sinister glee.
"We write up what we know. If Doctor Henderson is willing to sign off on it, we can probably consider dropping the quarantine. We make a general announcement to the crew about the clock shop, and another one to Command recommending that we question Stacy - maybe she'll actually answer them."
She took a sip from her thermos/dehumidifier. "And we hope that we get the answers, and the cure, in time."
no subject
He sighs dramatically. "Life would be so much easier if we could just snap our fingers and tell Stacy to go somewhere." He snaps his fingers to illustrate.
"What's our backup plan, in case she doesn't listen to us? I mean, we could just resolve all those guys to their fates as the world's oldest premature babies, but I'm thinking nobody's going to be cool with us just sitting around without working on plan B."
no subject
"We'll probably still be moving some people right back into Medical. If Doctor Henderson signs off that we're not considering this contagious, there's still a number of people who'll need closer monitoring as time progresses." She paused, looking down at her data pad. "And we'll need to be prepared for that possibility, even if we're turned around and heading back to XaXing within the day. Help make sure anyone taking responsibility for friends and family is prepared as well."
For those who had either in anything close to abundance on this ship.