Scene #8999: JPT: Basic Braining (2)

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	BASIC BRAINING - FLAMEL'S MINDSCAPE »»EXTRA CREDIT STAGE«« "You said posts, right? Did you see the communication's center? I bet that's- I haven't gone in yet, but it's got to be something, right..?" "C'mon, we can get in and out easy if you can do something like- like that, right? Get there faster. Or funner. Sound good?" Unlike anyone else in the collect-a-thon portion of Flamel's Basic Braining class, Psychonautra seems to be physically keeping the figments and baggage tags on her person. Over her vitally important mind-diving jumpsuit, she has a bulging military-esque backpack, stuffed to the brim with collectables from the first sapient mind she's been given free rein in since Persephone's. From the shifty way she keeps glancing at the employees-only sections of Flamel's mind, she might have gone bounding off for mischief even without the excuse of accompanying Meika. "Hell yeah, let's fucking roll, dude. --Ah, hmm..." She considers the child's bike that Meika stole from Flamel's memories, and how Meika only just fits on it herself. With Petra being a whole entire second girl, and a bulky one (because of her backpack! Rude.), the odds aren't looking good. Thankfully, the second psi-power that every proper Psychonaut learns is levitation! Psychonautra isn't one of those, but she knows that's a true fact about Psychonauts, and it maps closely enough to Petra's own (former) psychic bodily control. She hops and flips onto the back of the bike, landing precariously with just a single foot on the back of the frame, balanced with little tingling flares of psychic energy to either side. "Alright, alright, so here's the plan." She crouches down on the back, somehow totally stable even when Meika starts pedaling towards the Communication Center. "I saw Parker wandering off to the Facial Recognition Department. We follow some guy in, switch out for a uniform, and no one'll be able to tell we don't belong. Then it's a short dungeon crawl around until we find the communications floor for trusted peers, and... we'll figure it out from there! And then leave, after. That's part of the plan too."
Meika Kirenai	With the whir of chain gears, and boot soles scraping rubber sounds on the kickoff, the bike starts rolling, to any onlooker's worry. Meika, facing forwards, and not playing this segment from third person view, is luckily oblivious to the precarious nature of how the two of them careen. 'We follow some guy in,' "Like that one?" Point, followed up by immediate half-panicked readjustment from taking her hand off the other handlebar, followed by squeezing the breaks and kicking her heels down to slow the bike. Psychonautra can see her wince from the racket, but the kickstand's down, and she's hopping off to carry on anyways. "Two uniforms..? That's- right. I guess they'll be around..." Bike hesitantly abandonded for corners to slink behind, for the first time, this long-term Fixer job is starting to actually track as the spy mission it's supposed to be. Unconsciously, she switches to whispering- the normal kind, not her old magical trick. "... Cameras are yours to handle, yeah? That's a lot less scary. You already kind of look a part, a little. I- yeah. Leaving's easy, right..? We're supposed to leave anyway." As the semi-familiar janitor slips through the actual entryway, Meika flashes some sort of uncertain-meaning gesture Psychonautra's way- obviously intended as a spy-esque silent gesture, but there's no prearranged clarity to it, and she quickly realizes that- "Let's- let's go, right in, yeah?" Despite asking, she isn't waiting. She's finally getting caught up in a bit of the tight-feeling excitement pressure, walking heel-toe with a somewhat awkward haste, to slip in behind and go from there, for anywhere a badge, jacket, hat, whatever items of proof-of-belonging the communications department requires, to snatch and show Psychonautra eagerly and descend further into the magnetic tape-filled dungeon crawl en-route to Flamel's Posts- en-route to tap into whatever contact network of peers and comrades.
Flamel Parsons	Tailgating works. Uniforms would be tough to pick up outside of a staff locker room... are there any? Does anyone change clothes around here? Well, either way, security guards don't seem to criticize either of them after they brandish enough of the materials they grabbed from Flamel's memoryscape -- enough that they can convincingly pass as one of the roles around here. The Parsons Institute's COMMUNICATION CENTER is about what you'd expect. There's someone in here, too. "How can I connect your call? Thank you kindly, putting you through to amygdala." Rambles the operator's voice. "Repeat your code? Sure thing, sonny, authorizing and getting you on the line with the Prefrontals." And, on occasion, he says something like, "Telepathics, how can I connect your thoughts? Right, language center coming up." A light turns on, large and red and mounted on the wall to warn everyone: "OUTSIDE CALL". The huge boards in here are covered in so many wires, and there's antennae everywhere, and they're all twisted around the base of a big transmitter tower that looks like it rises out of the facility completely. And all operated by one man. It's that man again. The same one who walked into here, the familiar janitor, chef... and now operator. He's not even wearing that janitor uniform anymore! He's got a hefty headset, the control panel for a big industrial elevator, and a lot of wires to move around. There's some absolutely unhinged puzzlesolving to grab a piece of radio equipment that can tune to the OUTSIDE ANTENNA, probably, which could be solved by carefully observing the rearrangement of the wires. One could also, of course, just ask the man himself. The security in here doesn't seem badly hostile.
Meika Kirenai	One thing spending day after day around HTO facilities has instilled in Meika, is the power of 'having a badge lanyard', even if the security there is rigorous to the point that just stealing anyone's, or any lanyard that looks close enough, wouldn't really help. But the feeling of security is still there, even with one just grabbed from a desk. At least the security here is kind, or lax, or something-enough that scrambling and scrounging pays off enough to progress further. "Oh! Outside calls, that's got to- that has to be tied in that all, somehow, right..? So that's..." Thumbnail chewed side molars, the utter maze of cabling is an alien knot of functionalities she doesn't know where to start, beyond the obvious bright-red lightup attention grabber. Meika doesn't even think, at first, to try and simply ask the attendant. That seems so obviously to be a failure-state, raising any official's attention an ire, even as staring out and trying to parse the puzzle is eye-straining enough to start fidgetting with the closest reach-height antenna, tapping and bending the weak metal without even realizing. Hopefully that doesn't do anything bad. "... Hey, Petra? Does- does it look like that one's... no, wait..." Heartbeat after heartbeat later, standing still around the bustling activity of the operator, she starts to aimlessly blabber, "... What if we just climbed up the tower and pulled something off..? Or would- that can't be right, but where is it..." In all likelyhood, her not-very-disguised chatter is construable by the operator-Cruller to direction seeking, if he's in a state to overhear- otherwise she's taking to guess and check poking through cables and their routes, haphazard with the equipment and forgetting very quickly that this all, still, analogous to someone's mental processes. Poor antennas. "Did- did Mister Parsons ever get you the radio you talked about? What do they look like, or- where'd he pull it from..?"
Petra Soroka	"... Cameras are yours to handle, yeah? That's a lot less scary." "Oh, see, the thing is," Psychonautra keeps her voice low too, and before creeping around the metal flooring, she slaps some padded external soles on the bottom of her boots to silence her steps. That's the weirdly niche spy gear that a vague yet menacing government organization ought to employ! "I do that sort of just by releasing a wave of psi-nullification energy that temporarily destabilizes the immediate area of the mindscape and totally blocks anyone looking into it. So it's like, super painful, and not subtle at all. But we won't be caught on camera!" The search for uniforms, despite turning out to be mostly unnecessary, leads into an entirely different problem developing for the intrepid infiltration pair. There are-- still figments to gather in here! Psychonautra gets invested in wiggling open the lock on a door, and once she's shimmied it open and peeked inside to see the lack of uniforms, rather than moving on her way, she starts whisper-ranting and digging through her backpack. "Aha! I knew it. This is one of those side area closets that you totally have to go out of your way to even see, much less end up inside, so it's exactly where you'd hide the mental baggage that requires just a bit more of a fixation to deal with. I've definitely got a-- where's the matching... hold on...." After distractions, when Psychonautra is peeking her head around the corner into the central operator's room (above Meika's head, despite being shorter), she's got her psi-blast revolver ready by her side. The idea of simply talking it out doesn't even occur to her at first. The radio equipment is like-- or is literally-- a glowing goal to reach in her eyes, and the rest of the room is the set dressing to cross to get there. "... What if we just climbed up the tower and pulled something off..?" "Oh, we have to climb." Psychonautra agrees to that all too readily for it to be the only option. "A psychic radio's a good idea for what to grab, yeah. Like, we can't just grab a generic one, though, but it's pretty likely that his idea of whatever groupchat or forum or Microsoft Teams chat he uses to plan government villainy will be visualized that way." She's hanging from the ceiling, ankles wedged into nonspecific metal piping to maintain her balance, when her curiosity gets the better of her. She flips and hangs upside down, backpack nearly ripping her out of her perch, and withdraws a measuring tape, lowering it down and down from the ceiling to right behind Ford Cruller's body. She measures his height, carefully tweaks the extended measuring tape to get the length of his arms, neck, and then she's scrawling out notes on a pad she somehow procured while looking up (down) at Cruller. "Hey, Operator Cruller, are you just Agent Parson's mental image of yourself as a generic service worker put in place to work at the large scale mental machinery in his head, or are you real? I checked your physical proportions, which would usually be the best sign of being influenced by memory based on which parts most strongly stuck out about you to him, but you seem all good. Are you-- but, I mean, you're not a Psychonaut, right?"
Meika Kirenai	'Oh, we have to climb.' Meika nods once, in complete agreement. It may not be the only option, but that hint of outside confirmation to the idea is enough to get her clambering over equipment and shelving, even if she's far less graceful at it than a made-for-platforming Psychonaut. "Got it. Not just generic, it'll... well, I guess we'll probably be able to tell. Want to bet anything it'll have a big red light on it like that?" Meika wouldn't be able to name why, but with the basic braining basic training lessons still fresh at mind, the slight scene-placement and design-indicated clue-ins to what might be a key quest item are starting to take a little bit of a hold.
Flamel Parsons	Operator Cruller moves all over with that fancy elevator. It's a very non-OSHA-compliant version of the kind you might use to repair high-up electrical materials. Faster, definitely, and more rickety. But the old fellow keeps going. And he does seem to be identical to the Cruller(s) outside. "You're looking for outside calls there, hmm? Well you can't go climbing all the way out there, that's sure not the way to connect! Fella goes up there, who knows what mind he ends up in. That's the antenna, you girls are looking for a transmitter, so get inside there if you're planning on calling direct." WHOOSH-WHIRR. The elevator winches down to the girls, and the man narrows his eyes at them. "'Real?' Girl, you asking a phone-line operator what's real? I'll tell you what's real. Whatever you hear! You take a listen and you make it a good one: You talk to someone next to you, that's real. You talk to someone over the lines, that's real too. Add a delay, point-one seconds on account of I didn't use my copper-plated wires, that's real too." He tilts his head, listening to something on the headset, and whirring away to reconnect some lines. "Point five seconds? Real. A second of delay? Inconvenient. But it's real, right? Now, you get out in space, make it a minute of wait? Still real. Five minutes? Real. Ten? Real. Fifteen? Real. Twenty..." His elevator has elevated far away... Then it rapidly descends again as he has to do more work near them. He jabs a finger at Meika as she's started her clamber, making sure it's a steadying finger and not a destabilizing one, as he resumes the conversation like it never stopped. "...rty? Real, kid. But, someone records someone's voice on a vinyl, plays it back, you won't think that's real. And that's because real communication, well, it's about how real it is to you missy, it's about recognizing that there's never been such a thing as real-talk, and that's real-talk. Now if you're planning on doing something with the transmitter gear, best you understand that. Put it in the brain and cook it!" His elevator winches him away again. It doesn't take Psychonautra's confabulated years of expertise to recognize this as a condensed version of a lesson on the academic and even practical fundamentals of telepathy for psychics! There's a bunch of slight electrical hazards, swinging cables, and shit like that. Hope Meika brought Flamel's vague recollection of Soap Shoes for the bits where she'll have to grind on larger cables. She should be able to make her way into the interior of the transmission tower soon though -- and undoubtedly there will be what she needs there.
Meika Kirenai	'So it's like, super painful, and not subtle at all. But we won't be caught on camera!' Meika balks. "... Is that better than getting caught on it..?" ' That's the antenna, you girls are looking for a transmitter, so get inside there if you're planning on calling direct.' Meika throws a glance to Psychonautra, and immediately corrects her mental course for the destination. " 'Are you-- but, I mean, you're not a Psychonaut, right?' "... He's not on any of the lists, or- or profiles-" Why does Meika have profiles on mentioned-or-known Psychonauts? She's not properly said she's on a secret mission to Psychonautra yet, right? Whoops. Maybe that's normal. "Is he? That's- I mean, it's good to know if he is, but... he's just sort of..." 'Put it in the brain and cook it!' "... The transmitter? That- that doesn't sound safe..?" Meika slightly misses the last line's subject. "It doesn't cook brains, right? I don't want to- um... well, no, it's in his brain, we're in his brain, and he's only sort of crazy, so..." '...It's about how real it is to you missy, it's about recognizing that there's never been such a thing as real-talk...' "... Oh, is that, like... about, how even sort of, old tapes and videos, since they're still voice, get understood the same..?" Meika is kind of lost. It'd be really helpful if she was still a words-and-sound themed Magical Girl. Instead, she's trying to paste together what seems like lecturing into half-remembered fragments of other lectures on media, painted with the poisonous undertones of 'and that's why it can be a dangerous influence to engage with,' or similar tangents. Still. Up and up she does, in towards the tower, winding her route and trying to find the less-risky ways to get over there, even if she has to swing and jump little gaps every now and again. It's scary, it's exciting, and- well, she's also not really getting yelled at for trespassing? It feels kind of like a jungle gym. Smiles come easy. Wobbling ever so slightly on the cable, Meika curses that old Y2K fad shoes are, if still nichely useful, not the exact same as skates she'd wasted time trying to find alongside earlier collection tasks, and curses that she's not quite so sure how to use them, but silly stunt tricks with ill-equipped gear has been a frequent passtime of hers, lately, and why not let that carry over here? Precariously catching herself at the other end of a long grind, and finally up near the tower's interior, the blood-burning adrenaline of high-ish altitude stunt clambering makes it easy to slip into actually hollering out a 'Whoop!', and throwing a fist pump into the air. "Hey, did- did you see that, Petra?" Without waiting for an answer, she's dashing over the finish line and into the transmission tower, heart pumping and spirit weirdly high, for her. "I know you're around here somewherem or- where is it... Ahah!" »»OBJECTIVE REACHED««
Petra Soroka	"... He's not on any of the lists, or- or profiles-" "Oh, you've got the lists, okay," Psychonautra nods knowingly. It's necessary for a vague yet menacing organization to have lists, especially if they're just unclear enough to raise more questions than answers. They're like bureaucratic fingerprints; technically identifiable, tangible imprints of action on the world, likely entombed in some database somewhere, but inherently incomplete as evidence. Psychonautra carries multiple lists on her at all times, to deploy like chaff. This incidentally implies she knows anything about the lists Meika is talking about. She doesn't, and she doesn't believe that their contents are truthful either. She just approves of Meika having access to a list. "That's the antenna, you girls are looking for a transmitter, so get inside there if you're planning on calling direct." "Oh, thanks, Operator Cruller!" Cheerily dangling from a jury-rigged assembly of climbing harnesses attached to metal and wires, Psychonautra leans fully backwards with her head hanging upside down to watch Cruller as his elevator comes to a stop just below her, around where Meika is. "I guess the main goal was for her to receive messages to spy on the comms of people involved in the conspiracy of her family, but hey, why not talk, too! How else is she gonna question them about their shifty misdeeds?" In order to sequence-break and skip herself higher up along the tower, Psychonautra deftly reconnects her climbing gear to the cable of Cruller's elevator, right before he launches upwards and yanks her with it. She's dragged along below the elevator, her suprised yelp fading into the distance along with Cruller's uninterrupted ramble, and she's breathlessly in the middle of a response, clinging to the platform, when he comes back down. ". . . really a little bit like a Schrodinger's cat situation, because the realness of communication's more determined by observation rather than intention, I think! You ever heard of that whale whose mating call is-- oh, hi again, Meika!-- on a different frequency not shared by any other whale in the ocean? I feel like humanity dipping microphones into the water to figure out what the sound was is the only reason it even counts as language, otherwise it's just molecular vibration. It's sort of the same with telepathy, I think? Barriers are typically the vessel through which language happens at all, so the most purely 'real' communication ends up being incomprehensible to people, which is why I find it a lot easier to just talk to physical representations in mindscapes-- like, Psychonauts have a concept of telepathy, so it's made real by the ability to mentally talk to their self-image!" Still hanging on to the elevator, upside-down and white-knuckled, Psychonautra hurriedly says to Meika before being yanked away again, "Oh, so, I saw a way in a few levels up the tower, so just meet me up the--eeaaahhhhhh--!" Her sequence-break is only successful to the point of being swinging from wires above the endpoint of Meika's railgrinding, dropping down once she's finally untangled to rejoin the party. "Yeah, that was cool as hell. Is speed your thing? I've never been too much about moving fast, but that looked like fun." Psychonautra's able to tell Meika what the radio looks like too, which is one of the great benefits of having a confabulated Psychonaut along for a spying mission on the Psychonauts! She plops down next to the radio when Meika digs it up, taking out her own and quickly jotting down the frequencies for her own use too.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's telepathy, the transmission tower... Meika lands perfectly at the end of a grind, at the base and core of it properly. And Psychonaut-Petra is very much able to find the right radio here in the open area, right next to the cluster of consoles in the middle of the many columns of metal that hold the transmission tower up. It's a little hand-held thing, and oddly, the only comfortable way to hold it is to bring it up to the side of your head with your index and middle fingers pressed against your temple. But, huh. That's odd. It's picking something up, the way a handheld walkie-talkie would pick up anything on the same frequency. It's able to listen in on Flamel-telepathy! "Now Agent Parsons, got a little assignment for you after that night class, you hear? An old MAD-men weapon, we've got a lead on it." That voice... Ford Cruller? "Wow, that's old... No infohazard risk on this one, right?" That one's obviously Flamel Parsons. "'Course not, sonny, I'd have half the Psychonauts there." "Alright! If it's no rush, I'll take time and wrap Basic Braining up." Operator Cruller passes by on the elevator, while he moves a big heavy cable. He plugs it in, forming another long grind that can take Meika and Psychonautra back to where they came from. But... he's just as oblivious as ever.
Meika Kirenai	'Is speed your thing?' "Huh? I- I don't know if I have a thing, or- or something like that. I just figured that'd be..." A noncommital shrug, somewhat diluted by the passive rise and fall of her shoulders from being out of breath with all the clambering. "... I've been working on- on like, balance, and handling that kind of thing when there's still a lot of friction... one of my friends does some parkour traversal stuff with skates..? She's been teaching me. It's fun. I think I'm even getting the hang of it, too. That's... well, I couldn't snag skates out in all the memories, but..." "We- we made it, yeah? Make sure to stretch your shoulders, from... hanging like that, you'll really hurt later if you..." Meika trails off, uncertain. "Wait, will you, even..? Since you just live in places like this..? Huh." The end-goal, right in front of them, tears her interest away from chatting- with Psychonautra's description and the chance to scrounge around for it succesfully, Meika lets out a whoop, and holds up the device to show off, before trying to figure out how it even works (with helpful pointers and fiddly trial-and-error). She's obviously surprised to actually hear something on the other end, a properly-succesful eavesdropping- she shouldn't be surprised, with the vibe of the environs and clarity of everything else, but. Mumbling to nobody, "... MAD-men..? What's that mean..?-" then, snapping her gaze to the sort-of-Petra, "We- we should get back and out, Mister Parsons is finishing up the class, soon, and we've been gone, so- quick, yeah?" A silent point towards the just-plugged-in cable- "Thanks for helping with this. I'll- I'll tell you anything neat I snoop on, if you want. That's only fair? If- if you care, or stuff. But... yeah. Race you to the exit..?"