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Foundation Scions	Laplace Scientific Computing Center is completely frantic with activity- it may actually be every day that the myriad teams of researchers employed by the organization have to get elbow-deep into impossible anomalies, esoteric experimentation, mad-science innovation, and bleeding-edge medicine, but today is one of the first times since the creation of their very own warpgate that Laplace has that chance with something properly improbable and verifiably from another world, with such an enticing sense of puzzle and mystery attached.     What this means for the Elites coming in to assist and observe is, where notable and repeat-visitors might otherwise get Ooh'd and approached by curious staff, or have questions poked their way by labcoat-wearing and clipboard-wielding technicians, once all of today's visitors have been given Special Access name-badges, all the attention most are given is to come and join the current of employees dodging other duties for the sake of a chance to see how this goes down.     Where the Storm-in-a-bottle Artificial Somnambulism experiment called for the use of a chamber nearly the form of a surgical operating theatre, the location set aside for today's project is far more like a bunker- fortified glass walls look into a room lined with computer banks, readout screens, and extending cables, lights angle towards a central dais where a dozen rolling tool-carts have clustered around, each with clipboard-clutching Laplace technicians ready and waiting for the call to try their zone of expertise in trying to understand this impossible object. Those researchers not lucky enough to be part of the proceedings cluster as a crowd against the hallway windows, staring in and taking notes, parting like the red sea to anyone heading into the experiment lab- doing so necessitates passage through a literal airlock.     Distressingly, no personal protective gear is offered out- it may not be strictly necessary on the other side of the airlock, but many of the less-notable technicians have shrouded themselves within it, heavy welder-like masks, metal collars, oversized gloves- the tone and quiet buzz is nearly that of a Hollywood movie cult.     Overgrown tape recorders, wheel-cart computer consoles, floor-bolted blast shields by which to hide behind, a key and consistent trait within the chrome-paneled laboratory is modularity; whether this is because of the changing genres of research the room has to service, or from a common occurrence of destructive disasters, is up to imagination. Kept in a bell-shaped glass case itself is an overengineered record player, actively being treated like a sterile-packaged surgical instrument by the workers buzzing about. Next to it, ominously, is a comfortably-padded chair.     Most of the staff inside also part, and give newcomers space, leaving the masses of mobile probe setups, spectroscopy equipment, microscopes, and circuit-riddled masses of chrome uncertainty, which no doubt need expert hands to even understand, around the veritable altar. The overhead light inside are bright, banishing shadows and glaring off shiny metal from far too many angles, sterile, immaculate, and hostile.
Foundation Scions	Hunched over a standing desk placed conviniently near the observation dais is a strange figure, with the yellow ribbon and uniform-piping of Laplace's Cryptography department, shuffling through stapled stacks of paper with a faint stereo-static buzzing undertone to muttering. While the crowd of scientists involves more than a few with fishbowl-shaped glass helmets, the Cryptography Lead is the only one with a helmet that is liquid-filled, a spiky clump of ferrofluid within the goo rearranging every few moments between ? and ! , and occasionally, a dizzy @ , as cryptic information in the number-filled sheets catch his attention, confusion, or bewilderment.     Nearby him, in the full Laplace regalia of a long, high-collared lab jacket (read: white and chrome flak jacket), fishbowl helmet, and chrome sealed-cuff gloves, is a (nigh-unrecognizable, without her usual style of uniform,) Mesmer Jr., holding onto the coil-corded sensor of her standard Animal Magnetism implements. Nervously at her side, and far out of her element, but along, as the one Foundation employee to have witnessed the anomaly's recovery, as an FDMO representative, and as an accomplished visitor, is Matilda Bouanich, sticking out like a sore thumb in her SPDM Monitor Assistant garb, with no scientific-seeming protective gear at all.     Lilian's arrival to the prepared chamber is a re-emergence of all of the buzz- Mesmer, Matilda, and (a moment later,) the Cryptography Lead turn to look toward her, with only the latter immediately speaking, his hand depressing a large button on a tape-recorder nearby. "Ahem. Recording for reference, the date and time is now October Tenth, 23:25 and eighteen second, 1999+12. First impressions of the object, soon to follow. Lilian Rook," The ferrofluid shifts from a ! back to a spiky * , pulsing with the sound of his voice, "A check off as to the laboratory conditions would reflect well on the procedural 'record', if you'll pardon that that pun was, in fact, intentional, but quite a few of us have been vibrating in eagerness. Oh, I just can't wait." Stereo-buzz flattens out the words, but a slight wiggle to the department lead's shoulders fills in for tone.     "Could you provide, in your own words, a quick overview? A complete overview would be best, but if I ask for more than the eighty authorized hours in this premises, we might run out of technicians."
Lilian Rook	The state in which Lilian arrives at Laplace probably doesn't mean much of anything, except that she'd paid attention to the answers Vertin had given when asked. Surely by coincidence, her recent experimentation in fashion seems to have coalesced on something slightly difficult to pin down the era of, reminiscent of her Elibe, City, and Cecilia-borrowed aesthetics, with a little Supervillain Simulation pageantry added in a moment of overenthusiasm. Surely not by coincidence, she looks like she's been running around all day; quietly trying to catch her breath while walking, but glowing with a sense of overworked determination.     Dressed in a cream-coloured, off-shoulder outer blouse that's been 'mostly' buttoned over a black halter cross top, she's wearing lantern sleeves with cuffs while baring her shoulders anyways. The spare room is held down by a dark grey waist cincher, ending at a black sword-mounting belt around her waist, double looped and worn like a fashion accessory. She's finally cut one of those swing skirts well above the knee, midnight fabric over charcoal thigh-length leggings of some indefinite material which probably has to do with casually wearing her armour up to the knee; and up to one wrist, mismatching the short-style glove for her dominant hand.     You can tell she enjoyed it a little too much after she got Night Mist's pendant to rest squarely framed in the halter keyhole; the eyelets down the cincher are strokes of subtle ogham, her skirt buttons are four different alchemical symbols on one hip, and the o-ring in the belt opposite is decorated with charms matching the eight master and crown cuts, all white gold. With a materials list including linen, wool, coutil, nylon, leather, and magnetite, it's intensely difficult to pin down an original world, and the colour scheme is pure classical fashion cold-neutral, so . . .     Suspiciously kind of Foundation-core, actually. It's a perfect fit for lugging around 13x13x2 inch brick of transparent acrylic that is clearly carrying one of the two 'Golden Records' belonging to the Voyager probes; especially lugging it around Laplace. Too bulky to fit in her bag, Lilian has clearly been carting it around by arm, and given that this is sort of her last ditch effort to have it looked into, she felt there wasn't any point in covering it up either.     The record alone is audacious enough. The additional etchings that have been scratched in the margins, if someone is familiar enough to tell, are frankly over the top. It's about as flashy as anyone can accidentally be while cruising around a building filled with eccentric scientists. Both of those, in Lilian's murky imaginings, pale in comparison to what may be on it. And so, in the elevator, she ruminates on a time at which she heard 'stepping outside of your natural demographic is a sort of performance all on its own.' and for the second time since, twists open the one makeup prop she's kept around ever since the sim, just in case. By the she reaches the observation area, she's walking around as if she owns the place.
Lilian Rook	Pulling up into the chamber, Lilian scans around the crowd, once and only briefly, with the distinct sense that she didn't particularly linger on any individual face, save, inevitably, the Cryptography Lead of Laplace. The emergence of a minute smile indicates her relief that the most striking looking guy in the room is almost the most important. As if that makes this much easier.     'Could you provide, in your own words, a quick overview?'     "Of course." Lilian says, smoothly as can be, and finally tilts the sealed 'container' up to face the light, held out in both hands.     "What I have with me is, obviously, the 'Golden Record'; specifically the one originally attached to the first Voyager probe, by our best guess. How it came back to Earth, I haven't the foggiest clue, but I've taken it to what analysts I've been able to secure, and they've all independently checked the uranium two-thirty-eight electroplated onto the cover so that it could be dated by aliens." Lilian says, pausing only at the mild absurdity of what she's saying. "I've been learning a lot about the Voyager probes, you see. As a result of this." she adds, and then finally thinks to set the block down on a table where the researchers can finally get at it.     "Either way, all of them independently confirm that the time this disc has been around is eight hundred and thirty-four years. It's not possible for that to be a mistake, seeing as the uranium is some sort of special isotope that was generated just for the records themselves." Lilian gradually takes on an expression of wistful vexation just staring at the thing, folding one arm and propping her cheek up against her thumb and finger. "You can scan it again if you like, but I assume that LSCC's scientif prowess will of course uncover the same answer."     "What's more important for now, I think, is what's on the thing." she says. "The expert opinion thusfar has been that the record's original markings have been studied by some unknown party, and utilized in some fashion to alter the information physically encoded on the disc. From what I've been told . . ." She pauses to gesture at the infamous geometric cover shapes, using her left hand on purpose.     "These lines indicate the record is to be used with the stylus on the spacecraft, and those indicate how the pictures and audio are encoded, based off . . . well, you'd know better tha I. Something about atomic spin rate; it's all so that a hypothetical alien civilization would be able to decode it."     "Now these--" Her fingertip moves from the calibration circle to the space between the original designs, now dotted with countless intermeshing lines, mostly curves and partial loops, intersecting some nearly straight ones, seemingly radiating from the famous binary pulsar diagram. "Are new. And they're on the cover, so they aren't playable. But I've been told that the reverse side is modified in a similar way as well, meaning that there is either audio or visual information encoded overtop the original."     Gesturing in a 'take it away' measure, Lilian says "I've exhaustively checked it myself; there are no signs of magical tampering. All I can suggest is that the visual data be calibrated the same way as before, to see if you get that test circle as you're supposed to, and that the playback be calibrated by--" She glances, only somewhat subtly, towards Mesmer, and sneers only with her eyes. "--the segment featuring Ann Druyan's recorded brainwaves. Seeing as you have an 'expert' on hand to verify them."
Lilian Rook	Folding her arms again to indicate her technical overview is complete, Lilian adds, with only a hint of embarrassment. "Ah, the tamper-sealing actually lifts off if you subject the four corners to an electric charge at the same time. I was using my magic for it each and every time, so . . ." Lilian fights back a shrug, and runs her hand back through her hair instead, choosing to look glamorous about it (and flash some of the gold ink at the top of her back) rather than admit she ran out on recorded audio. "It should be easy for you."
Flamel Parsons	"I'd love to see a verification of 'brainwaves'!" Flamel Parsons lifts up his research mask, pointing over towards Mesmer. He's *already here*, apparently, having insinuated himself into some of Laplace's extraversal study by some maneuver of bureaucracy or appeal or another. They can't make him *leave*!     "But the *timing* is the interesting part to me. For it to behave like that, atomically... something must have happened with the time." He taps his cheek, thoughtfully looking up. "Astrotelepathy is sort of a crank science where I come from, but a lot of people think they can use psychic abilities to communicate with aliens. There's some theories about what they're actually communicating with, and *one* of those is, they're actually speaking to a kind of astral life that lives inside the event horizon of a black hole." He puts two fingers on his temple, and several telekinetic hands carefully help steady the tamper-resistant resin, and they'll help make sure nothing gets damaged in the process.     "There's *something* about a black hole, theoretically, that means a mindscape shouldn't lose *astral complexity* if it enters. So the theory goes that black holes, if they've ever consumed a mind, have probably consumed the astral complexity. I wonder if your disk got caught in the vicinity of one of those rogue psychic black holes, and this carried a message back! That would explain the strange adjustments *and* the strange timescale." He sounds quite excited to learn about strange aliens!     "Or," He peers over his sunglasses, sheepishly. "Maybe they just found a different world's Golden Record. The wandering psychic black holes might not have anything to do with it. I'll take a shot at psychometry, though!" And so, once things are unsealed, he will: rotating the record in one big telekinetic hand, a thin beam of light runs against its surface, reading the recorded psychometric impressions more than the physical grooves, magnetic records, or even visual changes. Who knows what'll still be there after more than eight hundred years, though...
Angela	Without Petra, Angela isn't exactly in a position to visit Laplace herself which is a little annoying to her because she wants to be able to directly check out another mysterious lab facility for herself so she can get a proper sense of its vibe. She wants to know, on some level, if Laplace makes the same sorts of sacrifices she had to make to get LobCorp through its project but part of her suspects that since it's very unlikely for Laplace to literally operate off of suffering that it's probably much better managed. Still, that could be useful for understanding anyway. If the desperation is the same, but you aren't running off of psychic torment, just how much better of a situation does that result in? She's a bit curious about that. She could send Roland over to cart her over instead, but he has no expertise in this and might just break something important because he seems, to her, to be a bit stupid sometimes. She could send Tiphereth, but she was a lab experiment/daughter not a scientist. Netzach? HAH. No. Hod? Yesod? Knowledgeable in their respective fields but not, explicitely, this one. Benjamin? Ugh, he'd probably be helpful when discussing the Storm but she really doesn't want to. Gebura? More likely to break something important than Roland and she's feeling sour over how well she's getting along with everybody after the war. Malkuth? She's been going out too much as it is. Chesed? The Foundation probably has their own coffee machine. And this means that Angela considers doing something she hadn't done ever before. Let Binah go outside. Binah was THE Sephirah who sided with her. There is some risk in letting her leave the Library because the Head certainly would like to collect her, but--even Angela herself has been in the City. It's not a big risk with reasonable precautions, Angela decides. And so it's Binah who ends up carrying a digital pad with Angela's face on it into Laplace. Binah's face is sporting the beginnings of a bruise and it looks like she's bled through her black and gold patterned coat a bit, but she is all smiles and untroubled. "I don't appreciate you risking our appointment by letting the Stray Dogs assault you without reprisal." Angela is saying to Binah. "Without reprisal? You wound me, Angela. I'll have you know I struck their pride quite grievously. Besides, if they're too hurt to visit the Library, wouldn't that be terrible for you?" "They were about to bash your head in. You're lucky that ''Dart'' person intervened and didn't recognize you." "And more importantly, you said Xion was involved in the prior operation? If I'm quite lucky I can give her my little gift." Angela lets the matter drop as Binah limps along. The Ex-Arbiter has a little satchel over her arm that is presently clasped shut, there's a bit of dust on it that she has made an attempt to brush off but doesn't seem too fussed about it.     hey move where directed and end up in the chamber. Even Binah's a bit startled by the appearance of the Cryptography Lead, though she masks it quickly. "Gold and black, my favorite combo." She quips. "And white." Angela points out to be difficult. "And pan the pad around so I can see who is present." Binah helpfully does so. Angela looks Lilian over, and frankly also Mesmer and Flamel. ''Flamel.'' "Flamel." Angela says. "Can you censor your dialogue a little less, it will be difficult to collaberate when we hear half of what you are saying." "Hm? It's censored to you?" Binah asks, which Angela wholeheartedly presumes is just the Arbiter trying to fuck with her.
Rita Ma	Outfits are a statement. Today, for Rita, those statements are I Am Normal and I Am Keeping My Hands To Myself, sentiments sartorially broadcast only a couple degrees short of 'sink-gripping and mirror-staring affirmation' intensity.      Her dandelion bolero jacket is a couple shades sunnier than Foundation beige; her dark skirt is youthfully pleated rather than secretarially pencilly; and her button-up shirt is only a little too breezily unadorned to fit in. Even her signature shoestring-ribbony hair tie is, today, in a more subdued hue.      This degree of inoffensive dignity is necessary, because she is going to a facility full of pervert equipment. However austere a big tape recorder or server-bank may seem, she knows better: such things are part of the girlprobing-voyeurism industrial complex, much like 'dossiers' and 'nurses'.      Given that, she leans over and stares at Lilian's lipstick in the elevator like it's a breathtaking act of bravery.      "Miss Rook...?" (Are you really gonna?)      . . .      Rita nods politely to both Mesmer and Matilda, with a small encouraging smile, and then has a side-panel of narrowing her eyes suspiciously at the Cryptography Lead's wiggle and 'eagerness'.      "I read about this a little in National Geographic," she says, with a modicum of pride. "The Voyager probe was launched in nineteen-fifty... um, nineteen-seventy... sometime in the twentieth century. It's about twenty-one-hundred in your world, right, Ms. Rook? So somehow, it's been about seven hundred 'extra' years."      "The two things I can think of are," she unclasps her hands from behind her back to finger-count, "'this is your world's probe but some time-speeding-up things happened to it', or, 'this is a probe from the Multiverse that landed after Unification'. There's some Earths out there where it's twenty-seven-hundred already, right?"      "--the segment featuring Ann Druyan's recorded brainwaves."      "Oh!" says Rita, startled, as she tries to put that through her understanding of Science and Technology. She looks down at the disc with a subtly different gaze. "So there's a person on it."      She gives a tiny awkward waist-height wave, to the disc.
Flamel Parsons	"Can you censor your dialogue a little less..."     "Oh, sure! Just copy and paste the stuff from before, I'll up the clearance for now." Flamel says, nodding brightly. "Really, though, that's surprising. I'd have figured you of all people understand the dialect best!"     "So there's a person on it."     "Probably not! Not any more than you'd find the whole ocean inside of the ocean's waves." Flamel says brightly. "Heck, sometimes there's not even a person inside a brain. I should know, given I'm not one!" Even still, one of the telekinetic hands waves back to her just to be friendly -- despite the, shall we say, *awkward history* and all. "But you can learn a little more about a brain with the brainwaves, just like how you can know a little more about an ocean with the ocean's waves."
James Bond	Bond is here, decidedly as an observer rather than an assistant; lab work isn't his forte, but information gathering is. This is admittedly a different from the usual way in which he does it--but he suspects that the dangers are only different, not absent. He feels that Laplace's particular precautions regarding this experiment are all the more justification for that suspicion.     His 'PPG' amounts to a medium-heavy grey herringbone button-two three-piece suit, with soft, narrow shoulders that give a more natural look than the trends of his native late-eighties Earth. Matching double-forward-pleat trousers and a white dress shirt and a black silk repp tie keep him looking sharp. His ID badge is clipped nearly on the breast pocket of the blazer. It sways slightly as he enters in through the airlock.     "That's a nice new look," says Bond to Lilian conversationally on the way in. "What brought that on?"     He listens to Lilian's explanation of the Golden Record in a much more sternly professional way than with friendly conversation. But I've been told that the reverse side is modified in a similar way as well, meaning that there is either audio or visual information encoded overtop the original.     "So, someone out there found it and tampered with it--nonmagically--and left, what? A note, like the symbols on the record, for anyone to work out how to see what they'd written?" Maybe they just found a different world's Golden Record. "I'd thought about that when we saw it in that facility. But that wouldn't explain how old it is." this is your world's probe but some time-speeding-up things happened to it, or..     "Right." He pauses. "What was it called. Relativity? There was a movie, years ago, where astronauts traveled so far from Earth that when they got back, everyone was gone. What's the chance of that?"
Flamel Parsons	"I'd thought about that when we saw it in that facility. But that wouldn't explain how old it is."     "Well, some worlds are in different temporal disparities. I mean, besides the *most obvious* case here." Flamel gestures all around. "Yet... When they unify, they tend to mostly unify their core Earth region. And this one was at least altered post-launch. More importantly," Flamel waggles the free hand. "The impression I get is that the folks who got it went to a lot of trouble, so they were very *motivated* about it. Even if it doesn't come from Lilian's world, I bet learning about it will help Lilian understand what they wanted."
Lilian Rook	'Miss Rook...?'     "There's no sense in declining to take the initiative." Lilian says to Rita. "It'll be taken by everyone else sooner or later if I don't."     'What brought that on?'     "Things that the world has been shouting at me for years." Lilian says to Bond, cryptically and yet specific on the way. "And a few people. Rather explicitly."     . . . . . . . .     'For it to behave like that, atomically... something must have happened with the time.'     "FDMO Agent Matilda Bouanich can verify that the sample had already been isotope-dated when it was recovered." Lilian says, in a way that would be defensive if she weren't just pawning it off on Matilda with a little gas to go. "As for the rest of your conjecture . . ." Lilian stops to think as un-distastefully as she can. She still looks at him like he's a bit of a crank, but not in a wholly dismissive way; neither mistrusting him out of hand nor dignifying his theories as being equivalent to hard fact. "My world has no significance evidence of intelligent alien life." she concludes.     'Hm? It's censored to you?'     "Clean yourself up, Binah. Your present state is embarrassing." Lilian says automatically. She makes no efforts to hide that particular contempt. Some things are easy in this particular stance of hers.     'So there's a person on it.'     Lilian smiles, because it's Rita, but covers it politely with the back of her hand, because this is Laplace. "Not to the best of my knowledge. The brainwaves are merely a recording, inscribed as audio, allegedly recorded from the creator's thoughts and inner reflections about civilization and the universe. I think it was done in hope that, if an advanced civilization could recover the disc, they could also analyze the pattern and 'read' those thoughts, and thus learn all about us." she says. "Well, from the perspective of a marxist atheist philanthropist, at least."     "But otherwise, you're correct. Those are the two most likely possibilities, and neither are terribly likely."     'A note, like the symbols on the record, for anyone to work out how to see what they'd written?'     "It's very plausible that someone at least attempted to duplicate the original analogue encoding process to store data of their own on it. But if it were a 'relativity' issue, the record would appear younger, rather than older."
Xion	Xion had been on Big Key duty during the operation, but had expected enemies of all kinds at the facility Lilian had drawn the party she gathered to and experienced none. Certainly, Lilian had promised no taxing encounters but also Xion had understood that as 'no Boss Fights', not 'no incidental fights'. The relative peace she encountered had given her a sleepy experience with the facility as a whole, dreamlike uncut-scene without break or pause to demand the unspeaking Will and Body's cohesion. Drifting into reverie, she was late to the record itself. In retrospect, she found the thoughts of 'wow! a golden record! I bet that'll be important!' a little childish and direct. But the noirette was here at Laplace today, home of the Science Equipment Zone, in a casual friday outfit. Dressed in black fuzzy boots with white wool interiors, black leggings into black denim shorts, black belt with silver buckle, black tank top, red and black plaid stripe thick shirt worn openbuttoned, and dark magenta knit beanie worn with the rolled up lip of the beanie dropped over ears and only letting curls and bangs of black out of the fringe of her headcovering, Xion waits in the Laplace elevator with a lean opposite to Rita, not 'wary' and also not aligned. The LSCC places the Nobody on edge plenty enough, the entire place one 'oh no! Xion! heartless attacked the facility! use your enormous key to smack heartless in containment suits! also, critters are a new enemy type! learn all their moves new!' away from being a nightmare scape and yet not pushing that vibe at all beyond the standing state of any multi-level secret science facility with themed and wall-dominating machinery might. Binah, meanwhile, puts Xion more at ease, an odd companionship within the motion towards the record, and the noirette lets Binah make the first approach towards her. Sensing a swelling moment, she imagines Binah having a clear plot for her approach and angles to accommodate. Sticking hands in the shallow pockets of her jean shorts, Xion chews on the inner corner of her lip and continues to move through the 'welcome! now get on with it' reception with grace, as she came with Lilian and that was important. Her explaining the disc before the Cryptography Lead is inspiring primarily because this is the first time Xion has learned this information. "Seven hundred years of extra information?" She repeats, after the math is made, baffled. "So using the same principles as the record, can't you decode the return message? Is that what we're here to do?" Xion asks, but the question seems rhetorical by the ending when Lilian is prompting the arcanists of the LSCC to take over.
Flamel Parsons	"My world has no significance evidence of intelligent alien life."     "Very suspicious! Someone's cleaned up too much, which means it's obviously real." Flamel says, brightly. "Lucky that you have such dedicated conspiracies working on that, though!" To the person who, maybe most of anyone in this room, knows precisely how hard the relevant conspiracies are or are not working.     "Can't you decode the return message?"     "Part of that's going to depend on the quality of the reply!" Flamel squints at the big disk, scratching his cheek. "But whoever it was, they took their time -- and the record's -- composing it. So I gotta hope we'll get a quality message back! Or, something weird, being shouted by a telepathic black hole, which I'm still putting my support on. But maybe they were just a perfectionist. Wouldn't you be, if you had such an important reply-all to send back?"
Timekeeper	Wholly unrelated to matters on Lilian's world and yet invested in the presence of Lilian herself, the Timekeeper simply invites herself into the preceedings. It's rare for anyone to actually have both the knowledge and the guts to question her wanderings enough to prevent them, and so with so many people crowding into Laplace's research labs, no one stops to ask whether Vertin actually *should* be there, up in the observation deck. Standing right beside the cryptography lead, arms loosely folded with her hands tucked into her elbows, she looks down into the theatre past the brim of her hat, a patient oasis in the frantic activity of the scientists.     This places them right nearby Mesmer and Matilda, separated by the length of the desk Ulrich is at, plus the inches added by Vertin's casual-seeming lean against a tall copper pipe. Lilian's arrival is met with an unreadable look, eyes scanning her while she and Ulrich get through the necessary introduction, before landing and lingering on the set of skirt buttons. She blinks and finally looks away, smiling faintly about nothing to herself.     Down among the throng of researchers is one who doesn't particularly stand out from the rest, but only because the baseline level of ridiculous overwrought Design of the average Laplace researcher is so high. A young man with grey hair, one blue eye and one unnervingly gold with black sclera, and a fairly modest uniform by Laplace standards (though he has *shorts*, for some reason), X was, in contrast with Vertin, likely specifically told to *not* be here. But through time-tested strategies of wheedling and promising to be good, and being more determined with insisting than anyone had the time to refuse, X ended up getting his spot in the historic project that's found its way to Laplace today. (What an ironic adjective to use, ha!)     "Amazing! You know, it's still fourty-nine years until Voyager 1 is launched as of this era! Or was it launched seven-hundred and ninety years ago, and we just never knew it~?"     Playfully casual and being one of the few scientists lacking any safety gear besides goggles and gloves that visibly go under his sleeves up to the elbow, the tool cart that X stays by is the least refined-looking of all of them. Cluttered with what effectively looks like toys, including a lighter, a Newton's cradle, some sensitive physics measuring tools for pressure, and esoteric arcane devices with disorganized wires and stylized butterfly branding that matches what's on his lab coat.     "We can rule out relativity quite comfortably, actually! At the speeds it should be traveling, we would expect to see it minutes younger than on Earth, nothing on the scale of centuries, and certainly no older. So what a curious question!"     Vertin leans forwards to tap on the speaker button from the viewing dias. "Do you believe the context you discovered it in has any relation to its peculiarities, Lilian? Is it absolutely certain the alterations were made before it returned to Earth, or that it was launched as planned at all?"     At Vertin's question, X sighs and rubs the back of his head, his one black eye winking closed. "Ahhh, space. The confounding variable in the nature of cause and effect itself! On our own lovely planet, if a record were to suddenly disappear to some alternate dimension, the vacuum where it was would propagate through all the atmosphere, miniscule as that shockwave would be! Up in space, who knows?"
Flamel Parsons	"We can rule out relativity quite comfortably, actually!"     "I don't even know what that is!" Flamel says, his own upbeat tone almost mirroring X's in a way...? "I only know about the aliens. But I feel like we can definitely rule in some kind of alien. I mean, after all, what kind of Earthling would go all the way out there just to timewash a record and send it back with a new message?"     He regards the toybox selection of tools with a slight incredulity perhaps not warranted by a man who is, himself, peering over the kind of scanning equipment that would be put together in an eighties spy film out of various pie tins.
Lilian Rook	'Do you believe the context you discovered it in has any relation to its peculiarities, Lilian? Is it absolutely certain the alterations were made before it returned to Earth, or that it was launched as planned at all?'     Lilian regards Vertin with a lightly confused, vaguely hopeful look of interest; similar to finding a joke very funny but not being a hundred percent sure she read the punchline as intended.     "The context is . . . somewhat classified. For various reasons. But I can state for the record that--" She sighs, catching herself doing it now, too late. "--the item was recovered from another institute of scientific research, in a derelict state. The data we recovered relevant to the record's retrieval is still being decrypted and processed, but it's quite clear that a number of specialists were already studying its peculiarities." she says, lying a little more than telling the truth.     "Resultingly, I find it hard to believe that someone on Earth took such pains to do something so roundabout, using a piece of may as well be regarded as archeological junk in my era." The choice of 'era' is so natural that it feels like a genuinely unconscious pseudo-slip. "And I wouldn't expect to find it in a top secret bunker if it were merely a coded message from spy agency or another. To the best of my ability to recall, there were signs it had been held by the organization for over a decade."     'Amazing! You know, it's still fourty-nine years until Voyager 1 is launched as of this era! Or was it launched seven-hundred and ninety years ago, and we just never knew it~?'     Unfortunately, Lilian cannot entirely contain her 'who is this sassy lost fuckboy?' expression at X. But she's sooo polite. "I'd certainly hope that there haven't been hundreds of undocumented Storms prior to the Storm of ninety-nine. For all our sakes."     'Ahhh, space. The confounding variable in the nature of cause and effect itself!'     "And you are . . . ?" Lilian asks, but looks to the Cryptography Lead for the answer.     'Very suspicious! Someone's cleaned up too much, which means it's obviously real.'     Lilian sighs a second time. She's really hoping Flamel is wrong, but not quite prepared to fully commit to the idea that he is now. He said it in such a stupid way there's a slight chance he's right. "If nothing else, 'dedicated' is accurate."
Angela	''I'd have figured you of all people understand the dialect best!'' "I don't want to presume fluency with the others." Angela says. "Besides your dialect is a bit different." Flamel's censoring is in white text, in the City censoring is exemplified with red and black. "But I appreciate you being reasonable about it all the same." ''Clean yourself up, Binah.'' "My apologies, Dame Commander." Angela interjects before Binah can comment. "I insisted on punctuality over presentation. I will instruct her to 'clean up' after the meeting." Binah gestures with her hand at the pad like the boss has spoken and she, a mere employee, has nothing to do but listen. It probably is true that Angela doesn't care if Binah's 'presentable' or not if it gets in the way of being on time. And besides which, she's distracted shortly thereafter by spotting Xion whom she immediately breaks off towards. She's listening. She's definitely listening. But. Binah reaches into her satchel and draws out... a stuffed Xion plush, complete with a plastic keyblade in her hands. The stitching is professional enough, albeit Binah's predilection is to make her dolls a bit spooky so the doll isn't smiling and the stitching is just so to add a bit of unsettlingness to the design, even if it's competency is perfectly there. "I've been meaning to give this to you for some time." ''Vertin.'' Binah incidentally holds the pad so that it's camera and video feed is facing Vertin for the moment. Angela visual novel stares at Vertin from across the way like she's memorizing every detail. Why Angela is interested in someone who is completely unaffected by reversals of time as someone whose mind alone is unaffected by reversals of time is a mystery. Her expression is difficult to read. Not quite clinical, but not quite desperate either. She isn't in a position to stare at X. Her head jerks a little like she's trying to signal Binah to bring her pad to face the new voice but ultimately settles on, "Pardon me, who are you?" When Binah has a moment, she wiggles her fingers in a posh wave at Rita.
Lilian Rook	The psychometric imprint Flamel lifts from the disc itself is faded by more than just a decade in storage. It's easy to reconstruct the scenes of its study under NAZCA; the most vivid are by far the violent final moments of hazmat-suited researchers, turned to sprays of blood and empty clothes by the shifting fluid thing of glass and chrome that stabs its way into the room, annihilates its staff in moments, and then taps at the interface with shape-formed human hands, as if already familiar. But the days, weeks, months, and years of study before that are clear enough, if utterly monotonous.     It's a process of seeing frenzy turn to fascination, fascination turn to intrigue, intrigue turn to interest, and interest turn to idle reference, dwindling down to a preserved document for occasional checking, despite the fixation of one or two repeated faces.     Everything immediately before that is chaotically jumbled. Secondhand delirium from someone on their last mask filter. A fire. Tinnitus. Underwater shouting. Electromagnetic shorting of countless pieces of equipment on a harness. Clutched tightly until the thrum of helicopter blades, and locked away in a black box. And then, before even that, the last time it was touched by any coherent thought was so very long ago that he can only recall the barest wisps of what was once indescribable psychic intensity. Grainy and faded like a photo of a photo of a photo, worn down by centuries of nothingness.     An impression of touch. Wonder. Nauseating hope against hope. Of being played and replayed numerous times. A sense of aching, solemn urgency. Second thoughts. Regretful parting. A wisp of a thought, incoherent and illegible, that somehow makes him think of the sentiment: 'see you soon'.
Xion	Xion can't tell if she's more interested in the Cryptography Lead or the mysterious record, but one of those two things has emoting ferrofluid so maybe there is a clearly advantaged party. The record, of the two, is quieter, subtler, drawn apart as a puzzle rather than a leader of solving them. He's not really talking to her, and also recoding, and he's addressing Lilian, so she lets her fill in the log. Xion has a few side things to attend to! Flamel gets into decoding the record's psychometric imprint, and the noirette appreciates from a small distance. Respectful, as if Rita is right and it is a person, or simply keeping healthy spacing from key items in a room of folks, Xion still wants to reach. She had once promised to, when she fought under a different name, and now it was such a habit to see the most mysterious presence and want to know it as her own. Enticed, she reaches up twiddling fingers across the intervening space and reaches more relationally into the golden record's imprint. Was there some slice of heart there? In the depths of her reaching, Binah slips into her periphery and Xion pauses, not startled but drawn certainly out of a deep focus to see the bruise-faced Binah and smile warmly. "You made it." She speaks, as if greeting an old friend over a restaurant meeting, and lifts her free hand to take up the slightly eerie doll. It's a doll that will go into the inventory as 'Binah's Eerie Doll' and it will take up a Key Item slot, but not immediately. It's actually quite charming! Xion often smiles, but it's not a default for her. "It's sad that it's taken a while, Binah. It's really nice! You made it yourself? Handmade things are twice-special, I hear." She winks, and then looks down to favor the doll for a moment more. Binah had put effort into this. "Thank you." The disappearing-behind-back moment where the doll disappears into clipping//a dwindling puff of darkness, and Xion returns to the task of the record, not sure her own keychains of heart and imprint could gain much of use from the Voyager's Reply. "It's from the past, present, and future all at the same time? . . . Do you think those arriving from space are 'looking down' at us, even if they're excited to be here?"
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's smear of psychic impressions spills out the back of his head as he reads it, like a projector running a reel. "Nnnnnh..." Comically dismembered NAZCA soldiers and scientists. Long ribbons of images of the same room over and over. Rooms of people slowly emptying as reports are repeated.     Stumbling distortion. A figure staggering through -- what, a submarine? Something underwater? What could be on fire and underwater besides a submarine? And then the long trail of stars, until... That slight whisp. The tips of whatever manipulators touched its surface. The slight exchange of whatever was once respiration or heat exchange for what once touched it. And he whispers, reciting:     "See... you... soon?"     He blinks, pulling his psychometric reading away. "They sure scrubbed it clean of much psychic impression, with all their excitement... Hey, you know, you didn't tell me you got this from a vague yet ominous government organization! What's that all about? Were they decent folks? Before the, ah," He waves away the gleaming translucent psychic shimmers of hazmat researchers being stabbed and killed. "Well, before all of the, uh, way it goes sometimes." He has a solemn understanding that vague yet ominous government organization (and especially their hazmat-suited researchers) do tend to get mass-annihilated by mysterious ultraviolence during the course of research.
Foundation Scions	'You can scan it again if you like, but I assume that LSCC's scientific prowess will of course uncover the same answer.'     "Certainly, for the sake of repetition, and documentation, we'll conduct a proper suite of imaging. As it won't provide anything new, there's no need at all to delay the investigation into the unknown for protocol. Rest assured, we're all as eager as you are." He doesn't know how eager Lilian may or may not be, he's just eager himself. 'FDMO Agent Matilda Bouanich can verify that the sample had already been isotope-dated when it was recovered.'     "Pardon-? Isoto.. oh! Yes, yes! That was indeed a metric most thoroughly presented, on dry-erase writing boards!" Matilda puffs out her chest, as if her brief agreement carries any real verifiable reliability. 'Now these--'     "That's the best thing about this, no matter how many layers of obscurity, a means exists to find pattern, purpose, and meaning in any manner of message, with the right sequence and attribution. With enough time, I could examine this for my first few theories, all we'd need is..." He mutters, the ferrofluid buzzing, "No, that's out of line to the computational budget we've been given for the next decade. Brute force isn't elegant, but it also isn't timely. Oh, I could just stare at this for hours, but to not tread on trampled-down ground, let's first get it to where I can listen for hours." 'Amazing! You know, it's still fourty-nine years until Voyager 1 is launched as of this era! Or was it launched seven-hundred and ninety years ago, and we just never knew it~?' "49." "49." "Pssh, clearly it is fourty-nine! That is the cause of all of this curiosity!" 'Ah, the tamper-sealing actually lifts off if you subject the four corners to an electric charge at the same time. I was using my magic for it each and every time, so . . .'     The Cryptography Lead's ferrofluid buzzes, "Can we get the conductivity transformer over here?" He waves an arm in the air, and a scurrying technician pushes a cart over, a dial-covered box with wire probes and a current waveform across a green screen panel. "It's certainly no matter to get open, we'll just affix these to the sensors, and," Clip cables on, the Cryptography Lead turns a dial on the transformer, up, up, up- when the seal lifts, he ever so gently pushes it higher, and dials back the charge. "Just like that, we're in. Hardly a puzzle, but it's never not safe to be safe, and not sorry."     Only at this time does the glass cover of the Laplace-provided record player also get unsealed. Overbuilt, heavy-duty, with extraneous handles, dials, and cable ports, the actual mechanism of the record player is fundamentally the same as it has been since the turn of the century. Gingerly, with (laced-up leather? Latex? Vinyl?) gloved hands, the Cryptography Lead transfers the disc to the turntable surface, positioning the crystal needle at the calibration zone.
Foundation Scions	'--the segment featuring Ann Druyan's recorded brainwaves. Seeing as you have an 'expert' on hand to verify them.'     The Cryptography Lead starts up, "Of course, all the more convenient that we have a Mesmer consulting-" Interrupting, "It should be an easy enough." Mesmer meets Lilian's sneer far less subtly- she's by far the wrong person for subtlety. "Artificially altered brainwave patterns are distinct and noticeable, even if we didn't have an oscilloscope transliteration of the original record on file. We do, so it's far more trivial." 'I'd love to see a verification of 'brainwaves'!'     "Of course you would." She sighs.     Mesmer, too, is one of the scientists here who brought a Cart of stuff- connecting by an audio cable into the record player, a CRT screen bwips to life on a mobile console. Just in the calibration phase, the audio isn't going anywhere else yet, the ten-times-speed brainwaves that ought to be encoded on the record, if correct and reliable, play across the screen in oscillating waveforms, Mesmer Jr. carefully reading meaning and pattern into the scratchy peaks and troughs, judging it for herself, at the same time as she matches it to a master copy transcription. 'Do you believe the context you discovered it in has any relation to its peculiarities, Lilian?' '... But it's quite clear that a number of specialists were already studying its peculiarities.'     "Ah-hem, I must add my agreement! I saw it too, and it was most confusing of a circumstance! It must be a true mystery! But if it was so interesting, even if not launched, perhaps it is still worthy of study, no?" Matilda has a constant little dazed expression on her face from all of this buzz- it isn't her element at all!     Mesmer Jr., still half occupied with reading the brainwave display, puts a hand on Matilda's shoulder, getting her attention with a little resultant squeak- "Ah-!" "Matilda. Could you sit in that chair? It'll just be for a moment." "Hein? But, for what?" Still questioning, Matilda sits down in the suspicious chair anyway. "The object is a record. The data, with whatever answers it has, are in the sound." "Yes? I know that! That does not answer my-" "It's a simple measure of risk and value. If listening were to compromise an individual, we can't play it for all, and between you and Ulrich, it's simpler and more accurate for me to monitor your mental flux than an Awakened's." "Oh! Oh."     Mesmer claps chunky headphones around the side of the dazed Matilda's head, and readies the cord to plug into the record player. The Cryptography Lead takes over at the oscilloscope readout Mesmer had previously been watching, ready for it to shift from 'brainwaves' to 'any other recorded sound', he himself happily suited to start to pick through the mysterious contents from the safety of watching the screen- as if on-theme, the ferrofluid face of his displays o/~ , stereo-buzz humming coming out of the speaker in his neck.     "On the mark, we can commence the first trial." He looks to Lilian, as if he's prompting her to give the go, but apparent impatience overtakes him- "Commence. Let's get to cracking this open!"
Lilian Rook	'Were they decent folks?'     Lilian's grimace could be easily read as a logical reaction to the scenes of violence and chaos that Flamel just projects out there like an old reel film; even though it isn't. "I couldn't tell you." she says, meaning both 'I don't know' and 'I'm not at liberty to say', very carefully balanced so that either interpretation is Your Own Fault. It's spoiled, just a little, by her eyes saying No.     Lilian shakes her head, emptying and filling her lungs like she'd clear her throat. "In any case, I'm already surprised you got that much off of it. Perhaps I should have come straight to you before running myself ragged." She says it as though she's merely somewhat annoyed by wasted time, but those with enough aptitude can sense how incredibly dim her energy signature actually is right now.     As it won't provide anything new, there's no need at all to delay the investigation into the unknown for protocol. Rest assured, we're all as eager as you are.'     Mister Cryptography Lead's eagerness to skip ahead earns an understanding nod from Lilian; a moderate gesture that is nevertheless hopelessly charged with anticipation and encroaching exhaustion. There's no point in looking reserved; her gratefulness is etched into every angle of her posture.     Matilda is compliant as expected. Plus one more point.     'With enough time, I could examine this for my first few theories, all we'd need is...'     "Depending on the results of Laplace's examination, and the degree to which I find LSCC's security satisfactory, it may be possible for me to leave the record here for an extended period." Lilian says, drawn out and cautiously. It's the type of thing where she is neither confirming nor denying the existence of a superior who could make that decision; the idea that this artifact could be her personal possession is absurd on its face, but tantalizingly plausible. "So I look forward to seeing both." At least she seems to like his enthusiasm.     If it has to be a Laplace freak, at least it's someone who actually enjoys getting his freak on.     'Just like that, we're in. Hardly a puzzle, but it's never not safe to be safe, and not sorry.'     Lilian blinks. A moment's consideration passes by, timed to the buzz. She might memorize that one.     'Artificially altered brainwave patterns are distinct and noticeable, even if we didn't have an oscilloscope transliteration of the original record on file. We do, so it's far more trivial.'     "Then I look forward to seeing you prove it." Lilian says, intentionally rephrasing the last thing she just said. Her 'gentle' urging couldn't be more condescending if she tried.     Lilian turns her back to the crowd to watch Mesmer work, primarily seeing if she can put a hole through her skull by staring. Matilda, despite her extremely obvious relevance, having helped her recover the disc at all, is completely forgotten by the side until actually called for by the object of Lilian's disdain, and even then, she spares her just a glance. Perhaps if this were back at Trídéag, she'd pull Matilda out of that chair right now, but as long as she has two fixations right in front of her, the arcanist is just too low priority to think twice about.
Timekeeper	"So there's a person on it."     Vertin purses her lips to think. "We have quite a few experts here in the difference between recorded brainwaves and a person themselves, so if that's the case, it'll be revealed without trouble. But that leads me to another thought: does your world have a phenomenon similar to the Awakened? I'm not wholly familiar with the Antegent, but is it possible that you've measured the age of a 'spirit' rather than the material?" "The context is . . . somewhat classified."     "Understood." Vertin nods. The fact that it was an object of study for some time by people with incentives to funnel not-insignificant funding into research is enough to rule out all of the uninteresting possibilities, which means there's an absolute *flood* of interesting ones waiting.     "So ruling out that it wasn't altered on Earth, it could only have been altered elsewhere. If Voyager were hypothetically traveling for all of those eight hundred years, then it would still be only a fraction of the way to reaching even the nearest solar system besides Earth's; 'familiar ground', as far as anything in space goes. To have received a 'response' means that it's fulfilled its purpose before even leaving its backyard."     Thinking about it in terms of the reflected response along the same lines of the extended 'hand' of the golden record, Vertin is suddenly *much* more gripped by the concept. Something, someone, impossibly far but still nearer to Earth than to anything else by orders upon orders of magnitude, received proof of people's existence and sent a return message in kind. Knowing that the golden record is vaporized by the Storm even far off into space, decades before it could even reach someone as 'close' as this responder in Lilian's world, feels like... inches left between outstretched fingers before a fall.     "Hmm. Could there have been arcane anomaly of some sort, distorting time and space such that life on a different timescale from Earth's could exist and be undetectable in a pocket?"
Timekeeper	"And you are . . . ?"     Oops! The fuckboy answers anyways! He plants his hands on the corner of his cart, leaning forwards on his tiptoes. "X! Mechanical scientist, enchanter, and Laplace's own engineer of fate and chance~" No one calls him that last one. "And what a chance today is, mmm~?"     With just a slutty pinky stuck out out, not looking at the Newton's cradle, he hooks the finger under a ball to start it swinging, rhythmic clack-clack continuing as the balls go back and forth. "You see, within a closed system, like Earth, everything that happens neatly happens because of something else within the system. The wind blows today to form a cloud tomorrow, bringing next week's rain. But what's a weather forcast to do when a meteor strikes and incinerates the air all around?"     He flicks the middle ball of the cradle, sending the entire thing into flailing chaos. "Well, he simply predicts the weather the next day~." X reaches into the underside of the cart, which seems to be just absolutely stuffed full of garbage, literal garbage. Random scraps of metal, dominos, little wooden levers and slides, cups, marbles, and so on, with no rhyme or reason.     Like he's doing a performance on stage, he pours a cup with water, sets up a sheet of metal to block the view of some part of the cart beside it, and then stacks up bits of junk into a stupid little Rube Goldberg machine. Halfway through, in the stretch before it reaches the cup, it's built behind the metal so that no one can see.     Using the lighter, he ignites a small pile of gunpowder that boils a test tube and creates gas that pushes a small golden marble to start rolling. "Up here, when it was launched, we knew everything *about* the probe, and the disk it held! The time it was launched, the direction it went and how fast, what was written; if we wanted to, we could find the little tiny flakes of gold leftover from the carving, scattered in the dirt and ocean! But then,"     The ball drops down a spiral funnel, vanishing behind the metal blockage. "Gone! Out of causal relationships, out of mind! And that's the way it'd end, until...!" Plop, into the water it goes, visible at the end of his goofy contraption. "There it is again! But how!"     His index finger lazily traces a line, "Maybe there's the angle of reentry! But was it launched at all? If the disk wasn't vaporized in the atmosphere, then surely it wasn't sent back by the same means humanity launched it with. But there was no arcane tampering, you say! A spell to reinforce it? Teleportation back to Earth? Perhaps a case of spacial misalignment and realignment, with no incantation at all?"     Smugly pleased with himself, X leans back, gleefully watching Matilda get strapped into the machine. Preempting the criticism he knows he'll get, he says airily, not even bothering to wave his hand to the arcane devices on his cart and their readings, "Oh, and don't bother snarking me for wasting time, Mesmer! I've already taken my measurements; I'm not just some layabout, you know."
Angela	''We can't play it for all.'' Angela is about to express that they can use Binah since if she dies horribly and melts into a pile of goo or goes insane they can just kill her and restore her from book form, but the rest of what Mesmer says informs Angela that she specifically wants a local arcanist rather than to put just anyone into mortal peril. She sighs softly, because that would have been such a useful opportunity to make use of a Binah. ''See... you... soon?'')] As a message that's either adorable or horrifying. Angela thinks of Fragments, of Johnny and Robin the Great, and that pull towards space they have that might be coming from some sort of entity that's ''out there''. This record was found in Lilian's world, could that pull be from the same individual, somehow? If it's a Voice from outside of time, then could it have even reached her world before it unified? If it's like Fragments, is it something even to look forward to? Angela remembers Fragments as a danger to the facility first before a strange friend of Petra's. She reminds herself that it's a bit presumptuous to even assume anything like that. Could've easily come from one of the vague yet ominous--Oh right. ''From a vague yet ominous government organization!'' "My understanding, Flamel, is that unlike your organization, this organization was more violent and ominous rather than vague. My understanding is that for all intents and purposes, their aims were pretty clear overall." ''It's sad that ti's taken a while, Binah.'' "Oh it isn't so bad. In the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been so long, though of course it felt like much longer than it actually was. I needed a new hobby, and since I credit you with seeking it out, it felt only appropriate to gift you an example of my craft." Binah knows her path. She applauds herself that her hands didn't shake from longing of home. Angela doesn't feel she has much to say to the Cryptography Lead here. He seems competent, which she appreciates, intelligent. Not cruel. And he does draw the eye. She has a question for him but unfortunately it's way too inappropriate to ask him about it mid trial so she elects to hold onto it. He IS an Awakened, she confirms from Mesmer's words, not just a man with a prosthetic head. With some effort, Angela forces herself to not look back at Vertin. ''X'' Angela thinks about strangling X. She glances to Flamel, remembering that he's here, and then thinks harder about strangling X. It's a little strange, because she obviosuly knows he's not HER X, but that actually makes it easier for her to want to strangle him. "This isn't a closed system anymore." Angela points out, she's uncertain if the Distortion phenomena will remain local forever. Warpgates mean connections doesn't it? But even ignoring something like that, if a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tornado then there's a lot of off world butterflies to account for. ''Don't bother snarking me for wasting time, Mesmer!'' Angela's reputation with Mesmer increases one point.
Flamel Parsons	"You remind me a lot of some of our disembodied brain employees!" Flamel rambles to the Cryptography Lead, cheerfully. "And Agent Nein, one of our big heroes and researchers." He facilitates the quick and safe transfer to the record player...     Mesmer's sentiment gets a beaming smile from him. "I *would* though! You know, we usually use so much psychic material in our technology, we hardly have time to use the more physical material. It's always a treat to watch you work, Mesmer." He's always so beamingly positive. "Besides, I could pick up plenty of emotion, but brainwaves... no, way too far back for me. So I need a physical read, and that means a solid piece of equipment to work with the material instead of the astral."     "If listening were to compromise an individual..."     "You're *right*," Flamel snaps his fingers. "Better make sure I prep too." As the record gets set up, he makes sure to take countermeasures. Repeatedly performing Automatic Writing about who is and is not trustworthy here to offload certain group integrity processes to outer arm ganglia, muttering the exact number of people in the room repeatedly under his breath through repeated re-counting, and keeping his eyes fixed on a "to-do" list he's written of relevant data he plans to gather. Plus fundamental facts in case of memory disruption: - YOU ARE FLAMEL PARSONS AGENT OF A VAGUE YET OMINOUS GOVERNMENT AGENCY - YOU ARE HERE TO HELP ALL PEOPLE AND PEOPLE-PRESENTING ENTITIES WITH POSITIVE INTENTIONS FOR FREE THOUGHT - YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR ANY FORM OF VIOLENCE OR HARM - DETERMINE FACTS ABOUT THE RECORD AND RECORD THEM - IF THE RECORD HAS BEEN ACTIVE FOR LONG ENOUGH THAT PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCING HARM, SAFELY REMOVE THE RECORD FROM ANYTHING IT IS INTERACTING WITH - DO NOT CONTINUE TO THE NEXT THOUGHT IN A SEQUENCE OR PATTERN IF IT IS UNRELATED TO THESE TOPICS AND GOALS - IF YOU HURT LILIAN ROOK AGAIN BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN SO DON'T DO THAT     There are also many little symbols just in case his language gets scrambled. He had it printed out before he got here, apparently. He was already worried about a mental payload.     But as he mutters, and writes, and reads, he also listens. That part, at least, the sense and faculties are kept open for. He's *excited* to study an anomaly like this... Even if it's an ominous portent.
James Bond	So what a curious question!     "If you say so." This is a run out the clock type of situation, Bond decides. If no one gives this kid any fuel, then he'll gas out and leave. Do you think those arriving from space are 'looking down' at us, even if they're excited to be here?     "If they're excited to be here, they haven't done much looking," Bond dryly answers. Teleportation back to Earth?     Heartbreaking. The most annoying person in the room just posed an interesting idea. "You mentioned the speed it 'should' have been going. Maybe it was moving faster than it should have." Could there have been arcane anomaly of some sort, distorting time and space such that life on a different timescale from Earth's could exist and be undetectable in a pocket? "How different a timescale? How 'undetectable?' How small, or... tightly-shut a pocket? Before Voyager there were UFO sightings all over the world. I'd imagine ninety-nine per cent of them are rubbish," he says, "But if we suppose one out of every hundred was real..." It's a simple measure of risk and value. If listening were to compromise an individual, we can't play it for all, and between you and Ulrich, it's simpler and more accurate for me to monitor your mental flux than an Awakened's.     "Excuse me," says Bond, who neither cares for nor despises Mesmer. "If this is a joke, it's not funny. All this theater, and there isn't a better way to test this than playing Russian roulette?"
Timekeeper	"See... you... soon?"     Vertin's eyes widen slightly *more* than 'barely'. She abandons her casual lean to put her palms against the edge of the desk alongside Ulrich, not having anything to contribute (she's not a scientist!) but being glued to following the results. "Pardon me, who are you?"     Vertin finds the source of the voice calling out to her in the tablet effortlessly, rather than confusedly looking around faces. She straightens up and pinches the brim of her hat to tilt it just a little as a greeting. I am Vertin, the Timekeeper of the St. Pavlov Foundation. Lilian and I are acquainted, hence my interest. Am I correct in assuming that you must be Angela of the Library?" "Well, before all of the, uh, way it goes sometimes."     Watching the psychic images Flamel waves away with some fascination, X has an easygoing smile on his face. "Gosh, I hope not! I've only seen a massacre like that happen here a handful of times, and never that bad! I'd hate to meet whatever that thing was. But maybe since we're just government contracted instead of government ourselves, our own ominous organization's got some protection." "I saw it too, and it was most confusing of a circumstance!"     In terms of comfort in this kind of circumstance, Vertin's two allies in this room are probably Matilda and Bond. She's much better at not giving any trace of discomfort, probably for good reasons, but the Timekeeper's preferences lie in tea and literature consumed in the quiet of her manor, not in this mob of people. Especially Laplace, given everything.     Vertin gives her a nod and a little attention, because the best thing to do when you're uncomfortable is to improve the moods of other people who are probably uncomfortable in similar ways. "Thank you, Matilda. Perhaps you can help ensure that we don't re-trod familiar ground, if these past researchers studied it enough to lose immediate interest.")     And then Matilda is hauled off to the chair where she might die. Vertin's eyes widen, and, in an uncharacteristic display of assertiveness, she steps out from behind the desk to briskly walk onto the floor and reach out as if she's going to grab Mesmer's wrist, though she stops just short. "I'm certain there's a better way than this. Could we evacuate the room and play it aloud, measuring the psychic fluctuations or something without anyone potentially subjugated to them? I won't question your expertise, Mesmer, but this seems like a hasty, crude game to play."
Lilian Rook	'But that leads me to another thought: does your world have a phenomenon similar to the Awakened? I'm not wholly familiar with the Antegent, but is it possible that you've measured the age of a 'spirit' rather than the material?'     Lilian turns her head to glance back at Vertin, only moderately surprised, and about as uneasy. "You could say so. We've always been more precise in differentiating them, though." she says. "Regardless, I'd find it difficult to imagine. The residence of a non-material entity could theoretically speed up the isotope's decay, especially if it converts it to energy, but that would normally be something relatively easy for my world's experts to detect." She breathes out cautiously. "Though I'd like it to be one that's simply so faint as to be undetectable for now."     'To have received a 'response' means that it's fulfilled its purpose before even leaving its backyard.'     "That's the part that worries me." Lilian says. She doesn't elucidate, only pushing back her hair to squeeze the back of her neck instead.     'Hmm. Could there have been arcane anomaly of some sort, distorting time and space such that life on a different timescale from Earth's could exist and be undetectable in a pocket?'     "Frankly, I've no idea." Lilian says, now nervously staring out the window. "Nobody's been to space enough to even verify what sort of magical energy is available there, much less what sort of anomalies there are."     However much she'd like to keep fretfully staring at Matilda and Mesmer, or rather, the screen, X somehow exceeds Lilian's impressive ability to filter out people she doesn't care about by setting up an entire contraption out of a cart full of garbage he apparently just has on him. When she first catches a glimpse, her unwilling fascination is rooted by something similar to watching a youtube video of a surgical tumour removal.     'But there was no arcane tampering, you say! A spell to reinforce it? Teleportation back to Earth? Perhaps a case of spacial misalignment and realignment, with no incantation at all?'     Then Lilian takes a very sharp breath.     "I see. You've made your point." she says, going from 'crossing her arms' to 'holding her arms against herself'. "Then I suppose there's still a lot to discover. The people with their fingers in NASA have never exactly been prone to sharing information."     Hearing Xion repeat a second keyword makes her squeeze her fingernails into her arms, even with Bond making a usually tension-soothing dry witticism. It winds her up enough to actually talk to X more.     "Is it really out of causal relationship with Earth just because it's too far to observe? Regardless of whether we can influence it anymore, everything that can happen to it in the future is determined by what we did to it first. The way the universe responds to it, even a hypothetical intelligent actor, is limited from the very start by what we put into it. There's no escaping causal relation, as far as I'm concerned."     "Causality is even more certain than time. One thing has to follow another, in a straight line, forever and ever and ever."
Lilian Rook	The brainwaves visualized on the monitor check out exactly, ruling out degradation of the disc under interstellar conditions. As-expected for NASA, good news for everyone present, and deeply annoying for Lilian when Mesmer inevitably gets to be right about something. She starts tapping her finger on the inside of her arm as soon as it's confirmed, tilting up her chin by a few more degrees while watching.     So too do the first stretches of the record. The greeting from Kurt Waldheim plays as expected; the adio quality isn't exactly crisp, but it's about as expected for the sheer analogue simplicity of the object. Numerous multi-lingual greetings play out, all fifty-five in sequence, so mundanely that no one would miss anything by fast-forwarding. Once the United Nations greetings gives way to recorded humpback whale song, there's a harsh decline in fidelity, and an immediate introduction of scratchy artifacting that smushes together sounds.     The whale song is only faintly audible, half-covered in static. Clearer, in the foreground, equally marred by distortion, are a string of sounds in a certain order. The harshness of the audio, suitable to an emergency broadcast played from an degraded loudspeaker, makes it unclear whether the intended delivery was at all replicable by humans, but even to an amateur, the pattern is unmistakably 'words'. Ones that attempt to vaguely follow the rhythm and cadence of the Secretary General.     It's followed by fifty five single phonemes exactly, and the distortion fades for the remainder of the whalesong. Only to cut back in again partway through 'the Sounds of Earth'. Intermittent splicing chops up the sound of birds with only vaguely similar shrieks and croons, the noise of ocean surf with something bubbling, and the ambiance of a thunderstorm with what might be muffled explosions. The insertions bear such a crude similarity that whatever thought went into them could only be imagined to be enticingly alien, or perhaps grasping and fumbling.     Bach is given no time on stage whatsoever. The space once reserved for the main purpose of the Record-- music-- is ripped into with either startling impatience, or galling pragmatism. The playback is converted into loud, grating, unease-inducing blaring sounds, of the kind that intuitively elevate the listener's heart rate, then follows with an extremely lengthy and rapid sequence of electric 'clicks'; not long and short like morse code, but strictly on and off like binary, with gaps only between long streams of non-stop crackle.     Then comes the sound of an explosion; one that implies tremendous scope through the lengthy soundscape of its rumbling aftershock, coursing through air and ground of some indeterminate, badly compressed texture. Just when Matilda thinks she's safe, it repeats, then again, and finally a fourth time, before cutting off with a harsh buzzing sound; one that is easily identified as destructive radio interference, which would be unremarkable if this weren't an analogue device.
Lilian Rook	Then comes the screaming. The engraving is so clumsy and imprecise, having to carve between already etched grooves, that it's impossible to conclusively tell whether or not it was synthesized from all that general address, by copying previous patterns stretched and sped-up; but one should hope, given the morbid list of alternatives.     Unfortunately, a minute and a half of human screams, dwindling in volume slowly, doesn't have a supernatural effect on Matilda's brainwaves. The sequence of fuzzy-sharp distorted phonemes that follows doesn't either. It's the long part after, laid out first in monorhythm, then strung together into sets with structure and timing, which reflects on her mental monitor; something that induces a strong sense of safety, integrity, and reassuring 'oneness' with those perceived to be near the listener, inducing an engineered sense of unquestioning solidarity with no one in particular. If anything, it could be considered selective therapeutic. If anything else, the arcane record player is certainly showing fluctuations, emerging only now. Unstable, erratic, and low quality, but whether for the improvised medium or being an imprecise approximation, saying so would be a matter of research.     The string is short enough that Bach's last notes have been played out, and the disc cuts right back in at Puspawarna, which repeats infinitely on the arcane record player, by some lingering aftereffect.     'Gosh, I hope not! I've only seen a massacre like that happen here a handful of times, and never that bad! I'd hate to meet whatever that thing was. But maybe since we're just government contracted instead of government ourselves, our own ominous organization's got some protection.'     Whilst Matilda is on the chair, Lilian silently agrees with Vertin, and uneasily replies to X. "You'll only meet someone like that if you find just the right person to treat just the wrong way at just the right time for just long enough."
Foundation Scions	'Depending on the results of Laplace's examination, and the degree to which I find LSCC's security satisfactory, it may be possible for me to leave the record here for an extended period.'     Distracted by his work, the Cryptography Lead doesn't look Lilian's way when he responds to her- not that he has eyes in the first place. "Oh, the security here leaves no complaint. Headquarters is only accessible by permanent employees, so visitors are rare beyond Era-appropriate cause for utilizing the Rehabilitation Center. And, the security task forces themselves, you certainly won't want to be getting on their nasty side, ever since they amped up their measures to fend off the Manus, both the prisoner sort and the meddling miscreants that trudge in from outside to cause a ruckus. No, you won't find a lack there." For idle response chatter, he is shockingly talkative. 'Then I look forward to seeing you prove it.'     Mesmer's lip twitches at the condescension. "Please maintain workplace-appropriate behavior. My assistance is for the sake of the project, not your 'entertainment'." Lilian is literally why any of this is happening, she's literally the core of the project, finding answers is fundamentally for her. Come on, Mesmer.     With the oscilloscope display in front of her matching up, correctly, Mesmer lets out a litle exhale- "The calibration is pristine. Check my work yourself, if you're inclined." A small hand motion, with the first three fingers of her pistol hand- her right hand, point to the still-going display. 'To have received a 'response' means that it's fulfilled its purpose before even leaving its backyard.'     Matilda gets momentarily lost in thought musing on the local planets of the solar system itself having written a letter back on it, the time-scale of 'eight hundred and change years' not intuitively parsing as far-longer than it would take to pass Pluto by, even if it isn't close to enough to get to anywhere else. 'Oh, and don't bother snarking me for wasting time, Mesmer!'     She doesn't. It'd be too much to glare at him and give a huffed exhale of disdain- no, okay, she actually does do that part of it. Wait, no, there's a bit of snark on the horizon- "Tell me when you're done playing with toys. If you're here to observe, do it quietly." That counts as implicit permission for him to be here, when he didn't even have it in the first place! X is winning! 'If this is a joke, it's not funny. All this theater, and there isn't a better way to test this than playing Russian roulette?'     "It isn't. Rest assured, you have a field expert in the maintenance of mental faculties on-hand. Me, if it wasn't made clear enough. I'll be monitoring, and if it comes down to it, coordinating repair. Ideally, it won't come down to it, but," Exhausted, dismissive, "Science demands trial." 'Could we evacuate the room and play it aloud, measuring the psychic fluctuations or something without anyone potentially subjugated to them?'     "A room, without any brains within it, wouldn't produce such a thing as that. No, this isn't hasty, and it isn't crude. I'm certain I'd be able to undo whatever type of trauma this could instill, if it even is a threat." Mesmer sighs, foot-tapping, annoyed. "A first-hand witness will be required at some point, and regardless, your judgement wasn't asked for in this matter."     Matilda, with the headphone set on, just looks Vertin's way, smiling a little bit.
Angela	Angela turns her gaze back to Vertin at being talked to. "Binah." Angela says. Binah 'obediently' turns the device so Angela can look into Vertin's eyes. "Yes. I am Angela of the Library. It is good to see you face to face." She doesn't reach out to tear a page free for a few reasons, not least of which is she doesn't want to put a bad light on LIlian by being rude, but she also feels like they just aren't acquainted enough yet. "I've been wondering, are you the type if, before it became an unavoidable duty--before your role was counted upon--would you prefer to be washed away with your comrades or struggle alone if it came to it?" Answering this question can increase your bond with Angela! And even give 500 Wilderness Shells! ''But this seems like a hasty, crude game to play.'' "Binah would be the safest test subject if aren't insisting on an arcanist test subject. I can restore her." Angela says, having been convinced to bring it up now that Vertin is expressing uncertainty in the plan. Binah glances over to Vertin. She doesn't see an avenue of attack so she doesn't say anything. Angela, of course, isn't going to bring up her reasons for asking until the project here calms down. When right now, it's actually heating up. ''The golden record'' "I do not recall the screaming on the track list." Angela says.
Rita Ma	"The brainwaves are merely a recording, inscribed as audio..."      Rita smiles back at Lilian's smile; 'apologetic' against 'near-giggly'. "Oh. So it's just a brain-message. Okay." Her wavey-hand drops, and her gaze shifts from 'person?' to 'object...' regarding it.      "... does your world have a phenomenon similar to the Awakened?"      "Mm! Mmm... nn?" Rita's perked by Vertin springboarding off her; then gives a thoughtful-uncertain negative. She hasn't seen anything like that in Lilian's world; but, then, Lilian's the expert.      . . . There's no ignoring Binah for long, though. Not with the particularly mouthwatering smell of her bloodied clothes. The posh wave snaps Rita's eyes to her with a telling speed. Rita's pupils are a little too dilated. She gulps, then remembers to frown, then looks away again, wrinkling her nose.      (Of all the people Rita can hate for Lobotomy Corporation, Xion ranks in the least-hateable three alongside Kukuru and somehow Sarracenia- she can be neutral to them. Flamel, she thinks, rates a bit higher for prickly mistrust. Angela is mixed, but Binah makes top quartile, 'held back' in despiseability only by a lack of familiarity.)      (For close allies she has... Lilian. Bond's been good to her, but there's not much emotional closeness. Vertin is 'an ally', but ditto. Call that one and two-thirds.)      (Rita, of course, is not doing math, because the blood in the air is currently making her feel like her insides have been dug out with a freezing shovel and need to be replaced with someone else's. But it adds to the general unease.      Conversations ebb in and out for a little while as Rita does her very best cosplay of a normal girl who's never bitten anyone in her whole entire life. Time is kept by the progress of one droplet of sweat that rolls from her temple down to her jaw.      "... massacre like that..."      "... angle of reentry..."      "... physical read, and that means..."      "... even more certain than time. One thing..."      The droplet falls off Rita's jawline, and that startles her back into mindfulness from zoning-out, just as the recording's playing. It isn't as though she can readily interpret brainwaves; but she can see a spike, and see if Matilda jolts, and hear a very muffled sound, when it's something as pronounced as those explosions.      "Oh," she says, and remembers to swallow drool. A little dumbly: "... Four of them. That's funny, Ms. Rook."      A little cough follows, and then she looks back with dull resentment. "... I'm sure that's unsanitary. Ms. Mesmer, can't you make Ms. Binah take a shower?"
Lilian Rook	'Please maintain workplace-appropriate behavior. My assistance is for the sake of the project, not your 'entertainment'.'     "Really? You've always worked tirelessly to give me no end of the latter. I think you should at least be paid for it; don't you?"     This is literally the least weird Lilian can be about Mesmer in full PPE getting pissy. Please try to understand how hard she's working.     'It isn't. Rest assured, you have a field expert in the maintenance of mental faculties on-hand. Me, if it wasn't made clear enough. I'll be monitoring, and if it comes down to it, coordinating repair.'     "You hear that?" Lilian turns her head to Bond, arching an eyebrow. "It's all going to be fine. She's here." Unfortunately, this is a place that would pick up on excessively British humour.     '... Four of them. That's funny, Ms. Rook.'     "And too many, in my opinion." Lilian says. Her voice constricts the words into something quiveringly loaded. "I got the message just fine the first time."     'Ms. Mesmer, can't you make Ms. Binah take a shower?'     "Oh I'm afraid she's rather a fan of oozing blood." she interjects unasked-for, confabulating up something pointlessly antagonistic on the spot. "She's typically absolutely pathological about cleanliness, but when it comes to this . . ." It's a totally unproductive insinuation, but it feels better than staying quiet for another few seconds.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel observes. He watches. He even, entirely un-asked-for, gets a quick look at Matilda's surface thoughts, to observe the effect. "What's it like? What do you hear?" It'll be a while before he gets a chance to listen, but as soon as he gets one, he will as well. Still using his countermeasures. Still externalizing as much as possible and then engaging with it in that guarded way. But it seems to be largely effective. Largely pretty good. No major issues detected in Matilda...     But *wow*, what a nice feeling once he examines it in her auditory cortex. He just has to get a peek. Nodding along, even despite the screaming, he beams. "What a strange, positive feeling I'm detecting! I didn't expect *human screaming* to make this effect, but you know, animals see human screams as a way to consolidate human force against hostile outside threats. Humans make *this sound* and then suddenly there's more humans, and they're about to attack you, the territorial outsider."     And then he's looking at Lilian, sourly, as she chats with Mesmer. "You know, you don't have to act like that." He says. "Mesmer *is* a well-qualified expert. I know you're decent at *commanding* minds, but your academic study really leaves something to be desired. Not that you seem much interested in it." His tone is just a little bitter. Then he goes back to his counting, he goes back to his writing, he goes back to his reading...     He stares at his list, as if something about it doesn't make any sense. Not counting. Not writing. Just reading it. Just staring. He grinds his teeth, trying to figure something out. Reading the fundamental facts over and over.
Xion	'Is it really out of causal relationship with Earth just because it's too far to observe?' 'Causality is even more certain than time. One thing has to follow another, in a straight line, forever and ever and ever.' Xion, in her casual flannel and shorts (late fall goth edition, belt studless) considers her own understanding of Lilian's world, a vision from far away looking-down upon the Earth-as-it-was. Of shapes that was painfully different. Of a feeling sent forward, driven forward, directed in advance. Chewing in on the inside of her lip more, wiggling teeth along cheek-ridge, Xion's hand drops with a slithery sussuration of chain to bring down a certain keychain charm out. With a wrist spin to draw the black chain around index and middle finger one way, then spinning the charm around the other way when the round ball at the end containing bright crimson liquid that sworls with a dark mixture-pattern as it churns in the glass-seeming charm-ball. Kcha-kcha-kcha-kch-tk. Shshshshshsh. Kcha-kcha-kcha-kch-tk. Thoughtfully consumed by the line of questioning, there's no skipping through the noodling until with her fingers wrapped in her keychain's little links the eureka snap's a little dull. "What if it is a causal relationship, then?" Xion asks, believing Lilian's first impulse to doubt by running the idea of what if it was maximally true and finding plenty to talk about. "We can see stars in the sky because of light sent from far away. There's a signal transmission across great distances - the shine we receive is a beam of data of a kind. Something could have disappeared from the sky and we wouldn't know until that... transmission? Was received? Until it disappeared in the sky." Scowling a little, Xion scuffs her boot and looks to Matilda on the Chair within the Device, hearing . . . something? A transmission, the return service of the human hope created by scientists? Would it be beautiful? Would it be terrible? Is she even saying anything? She had a point, stick to it. "So, what if the world this is from - Lilian's world - is being affected by something that sent a... causal tide. A force, like light, that washed against the world and lit it. . ." Xion's eyes, bright and blue, flick over to Lilian, her mouth faintly open in strange consideration of an old conversation about the colors of light and darkness, the other side of the ring spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. "Can't we see a comet before it arrives? The early warning of a shooting star? What if it was that we were getting the early warning of something entirely different? What would that resemble? Would it send a message back ahead of itself? What would that *sound* like?"
Lilian Rook	'You know, you don't have to act like that.'     "Oh my god. Don't start trying to tell me my business now or you can just get out." Lilian says, all as one long, rambling exasperation. "She's not going to--" comes out as the bullet already loaded in the chamber for men acting like this, but Lilian racks the slide to quickly eject and replace it when she consciously remembers that it's Flamel. "--let you rummage through her research if you're nice enough to her. Give it up before you embarrass yourself."     'Something could have disappeared from the sky and we wouldn't know until that... transmission? Was received? Until it disappeared in the sky.'     Something about those words makes Lilian feel goosebumps on her arms. "I suppose Voyager One was still transmitting its location by twenty-thirty-five." she says, to get out of saying a lot of other words out loud. "I recall that it died and came back to life once before. Perhaps . . ." she begins, and then cuts out.     'Can't we see a comet before it arrives? The early warning of a shooting star?'     Lilian breaks kayfabe for just a moment. It's as small as an unusually semi-sharp "Hey." before her urgent look smooths back out again. "I believe there was a telescope, wasn't there? The middle of the uninhabited desert would be an ideal place for a permanent observatory."
Timekeeper	"This isn't a closed system anymore."     "Oh, it's a big one, for sure, but I have to agree with Miss Rook! Unification was a big push in innumerable directions at once, but we're not getting another multiverse anytime soon, I'd hope! So the pieces will fall as they will, in a line, forevermore." "There's no escaping causal relation, as far as I'm concerned."     "Precisely!" X's smile falters just a little at Lilian's building discomfort, but not knowing its source, he decides it's probably not his fault since she's still talking to him. He fishes the marble out of the cup, pinches between his fingers, and twists it around until something oily-not-water gleams off of it in the florescent light. "Space is only causally blind to those of us on Earth. Shout as loud as you want, but not a single molecule of atmosphere carrying your voice will reach past the exosphere, you know? To someone watching the universe from up on high, even those little particles of space dust that smash into a chunk of rock a trillion times until its angle inevitably bends it into becoming one of our meteors each have their causal purpose. Like the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, we're simply blind to some of the hands fiddling with the gears of our own predestination~."     "'So it goes'." "Mmm? Yes, Timekeeper?"     Vertin stops among the crowd of scientists to turn towards X and Lilian. "So it goes. Have you read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five? The aliens in it have a teleological perspective on time, viewing each event as happening in order to lead to later events, giving no preference to any point in chronological time. Events occur so that other events occur, a man dies, but so it goes, his death was guaranteed the moment he was born, in the precise way it played out. It's a mantra to justify apathy through determinism."     "I can't say that I have, Timekeeper. Are you making a suggestion, I wonder?" "I'm certain I'd be able to undo whatever type of trauma this could instill, if it even is a threat."     Without breaking eye contact, even when Mesmer tries to sigh and avert her gaze, Vertin frowns. Of course Mesmer's first assumption as to the kind of harm this record could cause would be comparing it to the Storm Syndrome, as a psychic disease, something she's well-versed in treating. But the Storm Syndrome is fundamentally 'of Earth'. When Vertin thinks of alien harm, she thinks of dozens of people, turned to goo-monsters in front of her eyes by masks over their eyes.     "... Is that a sort of risk you're fine with taking, Mesmer?"     In the end, her judgement wasn't asked for. There's nothing Vertin can do besides uneasily hover nearby and offer Matilda a reassuring smile as if they weren't uneasy at all.
Timekeeper	"Maybe it was moving faster than it should have."     "Maybe so!" X uses Bond's question to reinvigorate his own momentum, springboarding off like he's giving a lecture. He taps on a gold-rimmed stack of coils, light twitching in the core like a thrashing animal, to read the seismograph-like spew of data on paper it creates. "Buuuuut...."     "Well, on the way back at least, it was moving in a certain way, looks like! That being a magically-inclined sort of way, from the data. It seems like our extraterrestrial friend cast some sort of teleportation ritual using the probe itself as a catalyst... but then, where has the probe gone?"     Actually focusing on his work for once, X leans over and squints at the scribbled-over paper, palms flat against the cart. "No... it's oddly empty data. With the trajectory and destination of the ritual, we should have the hints necessary to triangulate the origin, but somehow it's been scrubbed clean. Is this a one way mail, then? A letter stamped with 'do not return to sender'?"     Vertin turns her head to look over at him, but she's much more interested in what's happening with Matilda. "I don't believe that'd track with what we know. 'See you soon' isn't the sentiment expressed by someone who'd wish to hide their location. The whole circumstance is oddly lonely, don't you think?" "You'll only meet someone like that if you find just the right person to treat just the wrong way at just the right time for just long enough."     "Mmm..." X muses to himself with a hum while cleaning up his doohickey demonstration. He pulls the metal barrier away, revealing the parts of the rube goldberg machine that were hidden, with a small dropper of rainbow-colored fluid dripping down onto one of the ramps. He wipes up the oil with one finger, stowing the wooden pieces away, and then twists his finger around to admire the iridescence of the fluid on it.     "If that's the case, then poor Laplace's fate is sealed. Causality's a pain, isn't it? I'll be sure not to fall into the same pattern along with the rest, myself."
Timekeeper	"I've been wondering, are you the type if, before it became an unavoidable duty--before your role was counted upon--would you prefer to be washed away with your comrades or struggle alone if it came to it?"     Vertin doesn't mirror Angela's pleasantry back, if only because she senses more important dialogue options coming up. Being asked such a heavy question on first meeting someone doesn't give Vertin pause for any reason besides thoughtfulness; she's guilty of doing the same often enough anyways.     "I'm grateful to have the role of Timekeeper," She begins, cautiously. "Because even if I were the only person in the world who could brave the Storm, I would still be working as I have been. For all that's happened because of the Storm, I've never once wished it would take me too. Does that answer your question?"
Lilian Rook	'So it goes. Have you read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five?'     "I can't say I'm familiar." Lilian says, splitting her discomfort between X's and Vertin's vague and menacing ideas now. The summary alone makes her distaste evident from her expression alone. Even without reading it, the emotional tone of how she says it is totally at odds with what she says.     "That's the inescapable conclusion of those who become obsessed with 'why', certainly; if you can place every system as merely another component in the ur-system, there's simply no way out of seeing it. Understanding everything about the universe, such that you can trace it all the way back to its origins, is the door which beyond lies the last and ultimate nihilism." Lilian builds up restless energy as she goes. A type of quiet agitation that she'd be better at hiding if she wore her face unmasked. It's so specific as to be vague. So rare in nature that it'd take ages to reverse engineer it.     Unless you're Vertin, Matilda, or Mesmer. Then it looks exactly like 'giving the wrong answer in class, even though you know the right one, because you know which one the teacher will tolerate hearing'.     "We're fortunate to be limited enough in our comprehension that there's no possibility of our species reaching that point any time soon."     'If that's the case, then poor Laplace's fate is sealed. Causality's a pain, isn't it?'     Lilian opens her mouth to autopilot something sassy and critical, yet still trying to backhandedly convey insight; then seems to realize she can't do that here, and quickly shuts up again.
Foundation Scions	. . .     All the way through the greetings, Mesmer, the Cryptography Lead, and likely, Matilda, sit in nervous (or excited, in the cryptographer's case) anticipation of what isn't normal with it. All the greetings go by, with Matilda mouthing along the 'Bonjour tout le monde' that represents French as a language of earth, the shoe not yet dropping, the sound not turning her brain to jello, no tormenting curse imposed on her for being the listener.     The Cryptography Lead actually starts to look a little bored, his ferrofluid resting as a wibbly ~ , as he scans the oscilloscope readout, until Matilda startles, and the wave jumps, at the onset of scratchy noise- the ferrofluid now a ! as he scrambles to hook an audio jack (presumably hooked into his fishbowl, as his ferrofluid wobbles to the frequency once it's plugged into the oscilloscope), and flip a switch, starting a tape recorder spinning its magnetic tape- and like attaching another audio jack into it. Left ear golden disc, right ear also golden disc, but a few moments delayed to reprocess sounds.     While Mesmer doesn't talk with an EM sensor up to Matilda's head, monitoring something about her, the Cryptography Lead does- "Grammatical pattern! Oh, I thought this would be even more obscured! Fascinating, fascinating! I'm not paid only to postulate, but if it came to dice, I'd bet on an understanding of intention, here. Not that I'm a gambling man, of course. I'll be going back and forth to be positive. Flagging the time for the linguistics department, do you have this written down? Yes? Good."     Tapping the oscilloscope to the cadence of the speech, the Cryptography Lead is enraptured by the project. A free hand, no longer needed for managing consoles, starts to jot notes down on a paper slip- phonetic extrapolations, mapping sound to his best estimate of IPA symbology, not that he could crack any of this, just to provide napkin-notes to the teams of desk jockeys who will later eat it up.     Matilda pulls a headphone side off, for a moment, in the midst- to which Mesmer, without a word, presses back to the Monitor Assistant's ear. She doesn't complain further, but by the way she sits in the padded chair, hunched up a bit, she's possibly quite uncomfortable. The Cryptography Lead doesn't have much to say about the 'sounds of earth' section's scattered discordance, little pattern to be found, even if his earlier ponderance sits true with signs of understood intent in the record, but when the recording dips into sporadic binary, he really starts to liven up- and switches a different button on the tape recorder, to transmit the audio he and Matilda have already gone through unscathed.     "Familiar, familiar-" The Cryptography Lead's pen hand dips up and down in tiny hatch-marks on the paper, a notary transcription of the binary pulses, his motions falling into a cadence that's nearly utterly impossible to follow, but he still has it locked on- taking a moment with his other hand, he pulls out a pad of notes, a fully disconnected motion from his writing, and fumbles through it until an ! pops up on his face. "Trajectory coordinates! Don't ask me to map these out for you, not my department, but you don't even have to call me a gambling man on this one, I'm certain. Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the crunched-out numbers... I won't give much, I'm sure we'll get those when we can. Fascinating!"
Foundation Scions	>Then comes the sound of an explosion; >A minute and a half of human screams     Already on guard, Matilda quickly adds hers to the chorus, prompting Mesmer to flinch in frantic worry, a hand already on Matilda's temple, before it's clear she's fine, and just scared, each pulse freaking her out, and the shift to screams causing her to try and tear the headset off. She's brave, that Matilda!     The Cryptography Lead isn't as certain as to the function of the following sequences, going back and forth with prior recordings, matching, unmatching, replaying, various stereo-buzz 'Hmmm''s ringing out. "Matilda. Say three pieces of sensory information." "A-ah, er, well, I'm surrounded by people I know, I see them, I'm indoors, I see the walls and glass, and I feel the chair beneath me?" "Hm." Mesmer wrinkles up her nose. "If you hadn't noticed, the recording is affecting you. It seems positive. That's distressing." "Hein? Why would it be?" "Synthetic implantation of thought-patterns, emotional feedback- if it's a *message*, it shapes and instructs. Take the headphones off."     Matilda does so, a residual confused look on her face- after the screams and fear, the ending part was nice! That's a terrible shame, to be scolded off of that! Comfort and oneness, who would be afraid of that! Legs trembling, she stands up from the chair, the Cryptography Lead not even looking her way.     "Fidelity shifts around the..." Ferrofluid blurbles, "... Minute mark, and continues..." He holds a notepad up to a too-intense light, a strange maneuver for someone without eyeballs. "Arcane fluctuations occur alongside the fidelity shift, if I were to wander back into the realm of supposition, that seems like a marker of more importance. Patterns, phonemes, oh, I could crack my head against this- You, get me a whiteboard, bring the printer over here, call the linguistics department, call... hm..."     Numbers, pattern matching, with a wheeled-over board, the Cryptography Lead launches into unexplained musings, most of his structured thoughts already aloud, crunching through primarily the proofs for his spoken claims. Arcane Cryptography is nothing if it can't be backwards-verified, so that next step, as much of a time sink as it is, can't just be skipped! 'Ms. Mesmer, can't you make Ms. Binah take a shower?' 'Oh I'm afraid she's rather a fan of oozing blood.'     "What?" Mesmer hisses, and turns around- only now noticing Binah's state. Previously oblivious to the woman's presence, Mesmer takes two, then a third, small steps backwards away from her. "-Disgusting, filth- leave the laboratory. This is a place of science, cleanliness isn't optional."
Flamel Parsons	"Don't start trying to tell me my business now or you can just get out."     "I don't see why I should be the one to get out, when I'm one of the subject matter experts, and you're behaving like the anomaly's got you in some kind of--" Flamel starts, still staring at his list, halfway through a harsh accusation to pathologize her behavior. But he just... won't look at her. He keeps looking at his list. Closing his eyes, sucking air through his teeth, and looking again. He doesn't turn to stare at her.     "Lilian." He says, pointing at her in a finger-bobbing motion. "Lilian, say something. Something I-- Something I can think about. Something I have to assign meaning to myself, something with wiggle-room. But write down what you *meant* for me to think of it, the reaction you *sincerely wanted*." Interrupting her before she could reply, "It needs to be something that would piss your dad off." He's... not actually immune to what he's theorizing. In fact, based on how *uncharacteristically* quickly he spat bitterness at her, he's actually one of the most vulnerable people in this room, the least psychically armored. And even the way he asked her to say something was just needlessly mean and emotionally negligent. He's clearly, obviously influenced by... something.     But he *did* make the list. He did account for exactly, specifically, precisely the scenario. The note is clear as day: "IF YOU HURT LILIAN ROOK AGAIN BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN SO DON'T DO THAT". He got a big dose of the Call of Humanity but he can take, as gosepl, that even smaller harm to her is risky, disadvantageous in some way. So why was it okay to do that just now? Because suddenly, everything she was doing seemed so emphatically primed to piss him off?     "Humans screaming around the fire. Humans... humans screaming around the fire." He whispers to himself, fidgeting with the list over and over. "*Humans* who are *screaming* around the *fire*, and that means they need to come together. They need to go to the source of the screaming and kill the..." He rubs his temple, practically shoving his sunglasses against his list.
Angela	Angela settles something with Rita but before she gives the signal to Binah, Angela looks at Vertin. She could be lying, but if she were to take her at face value then... "I see." Angela says. She doesn't seem disappointed exactly, but not exactly impressed either. She is frowning in thought like she isn't quite sure how she should feel about that yet. Eventually she settles on, "We are quite different then, Timekeeper. If it were me, I'd prefer to go where they went, even without knowing where the Storm would take me. Though I suppose, in the end, I'm glad to be alive now, even as I am. But that determination came slowly to me. Since you answered my question, I'll answer one of yours when you'd like." "Binah." She adds. Binah, obediently, hands over the handheld video pad to Rita buit before she can leave. ''Disguusting, filth- leave the laboratory. This is a place of science, cleanliness isn't optional'' Binah pauses, looks over to Mesmer. There's some delight in her eyes as she grins at her. "Then what are you doing here? Ah, but I suppose a shower wouldn't help." She asks. But Mesmer gets her way, Binah departs shortly after.
Lilian Rook	'I don't see why I should be the one to get out, when I'm one of the subject matter experts, and you're behaving like the anomaly's got you in some kind of--'     "Oh so it's the anomaly that has me acting this way." Lilian scoffs, and only then pauses to consider that Flamel didn't specify a 'way'. That grabs her attention enough to glance over at him staring at is list. That's enough attention in turn for her to look faintly baffled at his request.     'It needs to be something that would piss your dad off.'     "Do you have any idea how little that begins to narrow anything down?" Lilian exasperates one more time. Then, finally, says, "Fine. How about 'Read the room and not your doctorate thesis'?" Funny enough, the act of saying it vents out enough of her irritation that when she receives a pen and paper (by motioning at someone to get it for her), she writes down something relatively honest before forking it over: 'Do you seriously not see she's always using her credentials as a shield to be shitty to whoever she can get away with?'
Flamel Parsons	"Fine. How about 'Read the room and not your doctorate thesis'?"     Flamel does that Motion that a man does where he's trying to make a woman stop talking by instantly re-initializing the conversation by inhaling in that one specific way that declares him to be the speaker now -- but he successfully stops it. He keeps his eyes on the list. And then he takes the paper, and moves it alongside the list he's been staring at. His hands clench and he takes a few focused, intense breaths.     "UPE-2811 'The Call of Humanity'. A series of sounds implying screaming and fire, utilizing the base elements of early presapient neurology, plus various astral and metaphysical mechanisms, to create an impulse to unite, move, and attack a designated outsider entity. An embodiment of someone screaming near the tribe's campfire and summoning guardians to attack the prowling wolf." He says, rubbing his temple. "I don't-- Can someone please yell in a triumphant way into an audio recording device and play that in my ear about twenty times? This is *really important*."     Regardless of if nobody does that: "We can't have this listened to regularly. You need to go to those coordinates, because I think that *is* a call for help. But it's a little too hot for the hindbrain to handle."
Lilian Rook	Lilian hears Flamel breathing and glares at him exactly on cue. He's so good at being human that it's almost staggering, actually. When he wants to be.     'Grammatical pattern! Oh, I thought this would be even more obscured! Fascinating, fascinating!'     Now, finally, Lilian starts to look more bothered by whatever she's missing than by anyone in the room; which means that she's actually really interested now, and unconsciously thinks that shifting her weight around will somehow allow her to listen in, as if the Cryptography Lead being jacked into the audio system directly were merely a matter of her not listening at the correct angle.     "Really now? That's shockingly direct. I suppose I imagined this sort of thing would inevitably pan out in a more unhelpfully dramatic fashion." she says, voicing-then-recognizing her irrational expectations of cryptic suspense in the same breath. Self-admonishing, she extends, "Destined to give us a vital clue, but only when it's conveniently just about to be too late. Of course real life doesn't work that way."     She pops up on her toes a little bit to look, when the big ! mark appears. She's so locked in on this guy's funny little head. Kinda like with Nemo, actually.     'Trajectory coordinates!'     Those words excite and chill her in equal measure. Lilian lets her arms down, but isn't quite certain what to do with her hands, and so falls to idly toying with the charms on her belt where the hilt of Night Mist would naturally rest if she were wearing it as a sword. "No, that's so direct it sounds intentionally helpful. Or at least, made with intent to declare something." Suddenly, she scowls in irritation. Before she knows it, she's turned to back-of-throat rasping tones and a posture of bristling offense. The words bubble up from a deeply emotional place before she even realizes it.     "Something that we were all supposed to know, but only wound up hidden away in a bunker for fifty of our 'finest human minds'; meaning fifty American men with STEM degrees and intelligence clearance. I can't believe--" Lilian cuts herself off once she realizes that she's getting carried away. She uncurls her fingers, and notices how badly her palms sting from her nails on her right hand, even through her glove.     Mustering up freshly renewed neutral tones, Lilian says "My apologies. I'm merely projecting my gut-feeling theories on the anomaly at the very first step of the research." and pauses to fidget-neaten her hair and smooth down an imaginary crease in her skirt. "You seem to be working quite efficiently, so I have no issues with leaving things to you from here. I look forward to seeing what results your thorough and methodical investigation will--"     Lilian winces, and covers one eye by reflex, along with the scar underneath it. The motion is just an instinctive use of her hand, like just being hit with the sudden onset of a migraine, so it's hard to really track the timing retroactively, other than being 'somewhere around the time that the structured rhythm started on-screen and Mesmer had Matilda take the headphones off.     'I don't-- Can someone please yell in a triumphant way into an audio recording device and play that in my ear about twenty times? This is *really important*.'     "--turn up." Lilian says, shaking her head and swallowing a moment of anxious nausea. "If you'd be so kind as to keep Parsons here and follow his requests to the best of your capability that seems ostensibly reasonable, I'd be very grateful. Barring any further questions, I'll step outside."
Rita Ma	Binah, obediently, hands over the handheld video pad to Rita...      "Thanks," Rita says with half a brain, which she would never say if her pupils weren't blown and the world weren't tinted a funny shade of appealing pink.      In the aftermath of Binah's spat with Mesmer, which she only halfway registers, she gives Mesmer an apologetic smile. It's probably a bit too dopey for Mesmer to take it without scorn.      ... Then, with the door shut behind Binah, Rita's brain slowly comes back online. She takes a deep breath, her pupils thankfully shrink down while she leans back into a corner of the room, and her gaze drifts downwards to--      Angela. Right.      For a tiny split second Rita contemplates squeezing really hard, before enough neurons reactivate to remind her that this isn't really a tiny Angela but just a tablet. What's left of the impulse is a little face-squirm and sheepish smile.      And, anyway... even if I can't trust a thing she says, she doesn't have a reason to be working against us here, I think. There's nothing to be gained by being ugly and it might just stop her from helping Ms. Rook. So...      Squaring her shoulders, Rita settles into the role of The Tablet Carrier fairly well, although she holds it at a slight distance from herself like a vegan waitress uncomfortably toting a platter of foie gras.      "... Thank you, Ms. Angela," she says after a little while of brining in the theories and the chatter. It's different, now that it's thought-through and she really means it. "I appreciate you being willing to send her away. She's one of the ones you trust most, right? So..."      There's no good way to end that sentence. Rita's thoughts turn inwards; then outwards again.      "A force, like light, that washed against the world and lit it..."      Xion's words catch her, particularly. She chews on something uneasily.      "Ms. Rook. The place the Antegent come from... we do know they come from a 'place', right? What if it used to be another Earth?" Implicitly, then, 'one a lot like yours, but where they won'. The serpent devouring its tail. It's not a happy thought.
Xion	'I believe there was a telescope, wasn't there?' Xion makes a face. "I think so, yeah. And it's always space, isn't it? Space and things falling from it. Space and things looking down. London-town, Lilian, London. We *had* to go to London, and --" Xion squints her eyes. "We did, didn't we? And there," Thumb and index roll the charm-ball of the keychain she had drawn out in her grip, spinning the chain by the charm now instead of charm by chain, t-ka-t-ka-t-kaa around the soft loop, grinding shy across the inside of the curve. "We found parts of a 'body'. We've found parts of a body the whole time, everywhere. Right, Rita? We found... teeth, in that hall of swords, frozen teeth. Teeth that mineralized you into more tooth. And in those streets, that first street, the," Xion gets a queasy tone. "Those nerve-angel Antegent didn't care about Roxas and I but chased after everyone else. And the people they got, flipped over, and joined the 'body', and," It falls out of her. "It's all structures, biological things, organs and bones, something sent on ahead. The Antegent are *sent ahead* of something, driven down to the planet, and are changing it, but what if that's the signal? What if that's the wave? It's--" Getting a little bang-dangled wide-eyed chain-of-thoughts talking through it mode about her idea, she stops as the Cryptography Lead speaks up, and Mesmer is coaching Matilda off the chair. Without thinking, she reaches, and feels out to Matilda for distress, and instead hears-and-feels Mesmer's statement of the positive effect of >extremely detailed explosion >1:30 human screams. It's the 'Call of Humanity' theory put out by Flamel that really puts Xion back on the path, until she realizes that she *specifically* may not qualify for data collection due to her own outsider status. Still - thoughts boil up. 'Something that we were all supposed to know,' "Imagine you're on a desert island. Imagine you're marooned on a comet. Imagine you're... lost, and as you're sitting there you receive this object from far away. Small and bright and hopeful. Peaceful. It has messages, and, joy, and..." And the music was erased, disregarded for the return flight. The original recipients would have no need for their own music. "...and it was all written on paper, paper you could use to write a letter back. A tremendous explosion, and then, the message of alarm and solidarity? A cry of alert? One followed by a guardian's response? And it made Matilda feel safe?" Xion feels like she's been ridden to one spot. "Maybe it's a message like, 'great calamity', 'alarm, alert', 'see you soon', and... maybe you were supposed to get it in time for something else to arrive. A different hope. The Antegent seem drawn to human noise, seem to be this photonegative of the same spaces, and are they the explosion? What we're alarmed about? Is the guardian coming? I--" With only fragments of a vision and the guess of Laplace, her expression dims, the fire leaving her, and with a taut sigh, Xion uses her fingers to tuck in her dangling hair to her beanie. "I think you should have a human researcher listen to the recording. Someone from Laplace, or, someone from Lilian's world who we know is human, but isn't Lilian. To be sure of the. . . meaning? Of the positivity? With everything else you're doing. I--" Don't want to get between Binah and sportswomanlike cattiness competitions. She had been sooooo good for soooo long this is a treat for her.
Angela	''She's one of the ones you trust most, right? So...'' Angela frowns. DOES she trust Binah? Is Binah even someone a sensible person should trust? Probably not, frankly. Binah would be the first to say she's untrustworthy. But she certainly thinks SOMETHING about Binah and Rita is now putting her in a position to consider what that might be. "...During the war there were people who felt they had to kill me. I can't exactly hold a grudge over that. It was not a fair situation. And there were people who fought because they didn't think there the Sephirah and I should be sacrificed." She pauses a moment before adding, "Binah is one of the few people who said a better world required that I lived. To be honest, I don't really believe her, and she'd call me a fool if I said I trusted her. But..." She is feeling strangely vulnerable, even if it's just a video pad that Rita is holding onto. And she has no idea that Rita was thinking of crushing it (she'd probably think it was kind of funny actualy) but she ultimately says, "Maybe if she's around I'll see what she means by that. I know she has a despicable past and she has a dangerous nostalgia, but she is a Sephirah who has never harmed me. Nor one I was obligated to harm." She glances back over to Rita. "It's strange to me. Her job was to execute people like me but she never seemed to express that to me." She goes quiet again and admits, to Rita, "There's another AI out there in the Outskirts. He's just some heartstruck fool wanting to meet the sender of a message out in space. I've been thinking about that, today. That message might be for me too." She startles a little because she's saying this to someone who came pretty close to murdering her, but she was being sincere and she didn't think about that in the moment. She exhales anxiously. "My apologies for rambling about irrelevent details."