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Lilian Rook	Despite maintaining total monopoly access to it-- on a secret island in the middle of uninhabited nowhere, sequestered in a bio-isolation dome attached to a tolerably appointed Forward Operating Base built on an abandoned lighthouse-- the agreed-upon step that comes next in cracking open the mysterious Voyager probe's secrets is far from simple.     Not only does Mesmer Junior have to requisition a considerable amount of computing and recording equipment from Laplace Scientific Computing Center, and not only does Petra have to manage the preparation required to be an able participant, but the mildly impossible has to be accomplished in smuggling Sakura out of the Dragon's Garden for long enough to perform this absurd task; without anyone knowing. It takes weeks for the stars to align, especially for a day when the Himorogikage's numbers are depleted enough by a major operation across the country for Lilian herself to sneak Sakura elsewhere, entrusting the job of covering for her to Oreshnika, with great reluctance.     There's nowhere to take Voyager but Abu Ail Light, in the end. The barely-there Warpgate and its fifteen minute cooldown, the sparse kitchen filled with more jars and MREs than anything else, the bare stone and concrete halls and their storm shutters, the military cots, plastic storage crates, archaic computers, the humming of the generator, and the infirmary overstuffed with chrome and aluminium and the smell of cleaning chemicals; it was all well-considered in the end. Better than the dusty post-mortem of someone else's lives.     You arrive one at at a time on that lonely spit of rock on the glassy flat Red Sea, within eyeshot of the barren Eritrean and Yemen costs. Nothing at all has changed; not down to the red moss on the rocks or the clouds overhead or the lonely call of a single sea bird still trying in vain to find a companion. You have no need of being outside anyways, save perhaps to center in your mind what has already happened to Earth so far. The plastic tunnel into the air-sealed dome is what calls out, though a 'clean suit' and lab mask must doubtlessly be pointless, given the nature of what Sakura intends to do.     The Spring Bloom of Humanity is already in attendance before anyone. Lilian intended to give her plenty of time to take in the experience of being somewhere, anywhere, else. For hours she has roamed the grounds, watching the empty horizon, breathing in the air, running her hands along the stones and the rails, thumbing through odds and ends in every room, and examining everything from the microwave to the mini-TV as if it were something from a near-forgotten myth. Lilian hovers around her, far enough to not be intrusive, but with a clear atmosphere of aimless worry. Sakura smiles and averts her eyes from the rocks when she does, staying far away from the edges of the island, though she would certainly like to look down.     The probe itself is in the same condition, though the cumbersome magnometer boom mast has been unbolted at the base and laid diagonally through the enclosed yard, after assessing that it has no relevance to any evidence of the 'entity' distributed throughout the craft. Sakura comes to it with an air of trudging dread, determined to fulfill her own requested promise, yet certainly feeling as if marching down death row. Dressed down again, leaving her few possessions in Petra's care, she lingers around the mechanically opened cavity in the probe in thought.
Lilian Rook	Lilian herself is as cooperative with Mesmer as she intends to ever be, positioning EM sensors and radio boosters around the dome where necessary, reeling back wires and electrodes and spooling magnetic tape with the thrice-measured diligence of someone who wants to see this happen only ever once.     "You all understand what we're doing here." she says to no order of people in particular. "Petra has volunteered to help Sakura shoulder the . . . ritual. Sakura will be 'reversing' the course of the Voyager probe's journey to discern all the necessary information about its origin. The signal from the data tape track will be intercepted and recording as it is rewound, and transferred to permanent storage for study. I will be mentally monitoring both partipants. And you will be dealing with . . ." She gestures towards the sickly purple mass that coats the metallic wound in thickly layered webs. "Whatever becomes of that."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Acknowledge how awkward it is to be around Mesmer after that tantrum     Nope. > Arthur: Nope?     Nah. Arthur arrives normalstyle at the isolation zone, in what seems to be his usual impeccably, albeit brittly, high spirits. "WHAT UP, SAK'S." He rambles on his way in. "How's the COAST AIR, they always writin' BOOKS AND SHIT about how that's GOOD FOR GIRLS right? I bet you're feeling HEALTHY AS FUCK right now." He bothers her hand with his usual excessive handshake -- the daps, pounds, grips, grabs, low-fives, high-fives, slaps, slides, twists, turns, spins, maneuvers, and funny little finger wiggles that are impossible to fumble and yet impossible to understand. That's just how it is. > Arthur: Fondly regard space material     For once? No. Arthur looks at the satellite with a luck of distrust, a little scowl and a grumble. "If AYY ALEXA starts talkin' SMACK AGAIN, I'm showin' that ALUMINUM CAN what a GUY LIKE ME does when he's DONE WITH IT." He mutters. But then nods. "Ya boy's on TRAJECTORIES. We get a PATH, I'll MARK IT and get you a PLANET. I got HELLA SPACE KNOWING."     He limbers up, as if it's going to be an atheletic challenge. Amidst his maneuvers, he stops, pauses... and draws-and-'fires' a dramatic fingergun towards that bird cry, instantly gate-teleporting it to another coast in another world (where it may have another shot at another nest, better than this horrible apocalypse-blasted semi-biosphere). Just keeping sharp. He scowls and grumbles more. "Seriously. It MOVES BAD ONCE, I'm BLASTIN' the fucker. But let's find HOME BASE, or near-enough."
Trudy Grimm	This is the first time Trudy has been to this particular facility, and so she takes a moment to center herself and to appreciate how utterly alien portions of Lilian's world have become in the wake of the Onslaught. She looks out over the mirror-flat sea, taking in a breath. Seaside locales usually have such a vibrant feeling to them, even if they're seemingly desolate, but her presence here feels more intrusive than anything.     Steeling herself, the witch descends into the facility proper. While she knows where to go, she does take the 'long way', passing through each room as she does so. A place ready to be used but which had never served its purpose feels a bit more comforting than the barren, lonely rocks outside. Trudy wanders; tracing her fingers along a countertop here, resting her hand on an appliance there, until her aimless drifting brings her to the room within which Voyager is contained. Here, she waits, seating herself with her legs folded across one another and writing in her tome.     Once everyone is gathered, dragged out as it is by that Allfather-forsaken gate, she closes her book with a light thump and rests her hands on it, listening intently. > "Petra has volunteered to help Sakura shoulder the . . . ritual. ... I will be mentally monitoring both participants."     Trudy nods twice in understanding. The technical details for capturing and recording the signal escape her but she trusts those more familiar with it to pitch in there. > "And you will be dealing with . . . whatever becomes of that."     "Alright," Trudy Grimm leans forward a bit and unfolds her legs, standing back up with a stretchy motion to limber up, "I won't let you down."
Angela	Angela obviously can't exactly send herself to an event where Petra will be in a situation like this--it'd be dangerous for both of them! But she is still inclined tro send someone... And that someone just so happens to be Roland. Roland seems to get along well enough with Lilian and isn't like a big hassle to ship out like Gebura is. She's not sure if he'll be able to do much--he's competent enough, but this is quite the scenario already--at the very least, though, some security isn't really a bad thing. Roland has brought a pad along, but Angela is audio only--no visualization right now. r''She gestures towards the sickly purple mass'' Roland visibly grimaces. It doesn't look like much now, but he can just imagine how bad it could get if Lilian is anticipating something a small grouping of Elites and a Roland would need to handle. ''Seriously. IT MOVES BAD ONCE, I'm BLASTIN' the fucker.'' "Oh that's a good plan." Roland agrees. He doesn't have Mesmer opinions yet, perhaps today will be the day that changes. "Any idea what sort of 'move' it would look like?" He's imagining...not! But he feels like he should ask all the same. "Just be light on your feet, Roland." Angela suggests over the comms. Roland breathes in sharply through his nosee when Sakura arrives but tries to shake off the bad vibe he's feeling, taking the moment where people are getting ready to get a feel for the place, the surroundings, where things are, the smell...
Tamamo	Given the location, there's little need for Tamamo to dress for winter, here. She's more than fine with dressing instead for dust, getting a big, white apron on to deal with what a little time away has done to the place, and also to ensure that there's something snackable in the kitchen. Recently, she's taken to pudding (the custard kind), though the characteristics of treats don't allow for endless experimentation. Her figure isn't actually effortless.     '...they always writin' BOOKS AND SHIT about how that's GOOD FOR GIRLS right?'     "Do they, now?" It's possible that Tamamo hasn't heard of this. "Is the salt not...?"     'If AYY ALEXA starts talkin' SMACK AGAIN, I'm showin' that ALUMINUM CAN what a GUY LIKE ME does when he's DONE WITH IT.'     "A recording can hardly learn that it has been mistaken, after all." One might expect Tamamo to be entirely incensed at Lilian's treatment last time, but there's the crux of why she can be calm about it. It'd just be silly to get mad at a tape-deck, in her opinion. The one who recorded it, however...     'And you will be dealing with . . . Whatever becomes of that.'     "I suppose we shall see. Ah, come to that, do you have an idea of how it might be... experienced? This restoration through time, I mean. If it is inherently disorienting, we might expect less... coherence, one might say, during the process. If it is finished quite quickly, then it would be more akin to teleportation, from that other's perspective."
Xion	Spared from the horrors of travel time and the agonies of hitching a ride to remote locations thanks to her certainly not forboding two dimensional shadow portals of sworling-inky darkness, Xion can spend a little time on side quests. Perched on a raised walk near the path for cars at the internal side of Waikiki Beach, the noirette checks her phone and consults with the wind direction before keeping her gaze high to search for seabirds. Armed with submarine rolls and a particular mission, the Nobody engages in high-stakes bird diplomacy. Having to jam a seagull into a sack to make it sleepy enough for transport in Inventory wasn't an elegant solution but it was the one the master quest-completer had to use to get her job done. Reporting to the remote island while snacking on just the roll of a submarine sandwich held in-hand, a black t-shirt over black shorts and silver chains and spikes on belts over shorts and leggings. Over her situation she wears a fuzzy-hooded black snowcoat that creases and crinkles and makes faint noises as she moves as opposed to the usually silent shiny-silk used in the magic coats she tends to wear. She swaps partially-eaten bread snack in hand for a dazed seagull in sack, withdrawing the avian and placing it gently down on the shore entry deck and making sure the bird's stolen half of a roll was still nuzzled to beak such that it could resume its greed and then carry on other things. Like fulfilling the very important local sidequest, the *only* sidequest that had popped up in the area! On BirdFinder! Xion never used the avian-specific apps because they were incredibly spammy but a quest was a quest (and she was bored after delivering some extra cans of Sterno and the good kinds of canned soups). Seeing Sakura walk about her somber vigil, headed for the pier, the noirette stands up to listen to Lilian, nodding like she understands because she knows its important to not even if she didn't understand. The Organization taught her that! "Petra, do you have... a thing for getting brain blended whenever possible? It's worked, which is why I'm not going to freak out, but, . . ." Xion doesn't really need to add more. "I believe this is what people want, and so I'll support them." Xion shrugs, stretching arms and crossing hands behind head. "Sometimes it's as simple as that." While casting a slight tilt of eyes towards Sakura further on. "Something I considered is that the medallion I pulled off of the probe... well, it gives me the idea it might have some kind of defense? So, I don't think Arthur's got it wrong stretching. I stretched before I got here." Chasing seagulls, of course.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Any idea what sort of 'move' it would look like?     "ANYTHING where it starts SAYING it's about to TRY TO HELP." Arthur says, sourly, to Roland, in a tone that's like a bitter snap towards some poor non-Roland person. >Arthur: A recording can hardly learn that it has been mistaken, after all.     "THAT," He wags a finger at Tamamo. "Is EXACTLY THE PROBLEM, DAWG. It CAN'T CHANGE." He crosses his arms firmly, in a sour posture. He resumes his limbering up. Can't go pulling a muscle before you, uh. Do a lot of rocket science. > Arthur: It might have some kind of defense     He frowns a bit at Xion there. "Fuckin' TIME CAPSULE rigged for FIGHTING?" He mutters. "I mean, sure did keep the LETTER AGENCY out a while, I heard. Kinda makes sense. Glad they couldn't POP THE TOP, would'a opened this sick fuck's SOCIETY-SIZED GOLDEN PARACHUTE and not just its GOLDEN RECORD."
Petra Soroka	Petra is also here early. It'd be silly to get hung up on a couple hours in the face of eight hundred years, and also, those hours are spent with Sakura and Lilian, so given the opportunity she wouldn't want to spend them anywhere else. As much as she would love to heist a woman, that's much more within Lilian's wheelhouse to do, and when it comes to the Dragon's Garden, anything Lilian does will cause much less trouble than anything Petra does.     All things considered, Petra actually feels pretty fond of this little island. Primarily this is a result of the time spent here prettying it up, which Petra in particular dedicated an inordinate amount of time to, but the atmosphere of both an FOB and a research facility are ones that appeal to her, so as temporarily-relevant Abu Ail Light will be, Petra is happy to nest here while she can, like a migratory bird.     Arriving at her first chance once Lilian brings Sakura to the island still means that by the time Petra is here, Sakura's already had some few hours to roam the island. This means that, among other reasons such as her interminable clinginess, Petra does not feel the same urge to watch and worry from a distance like Lilian does. Instead, her fretfulness about the upcoming ritual manifests a different way, taking on the role of a dutiful attendant and pet she/they before she needs to in order to tag along. Unless she's told to stop, she fills the time by babbling about fun facts about the world around Sakura like a little interactable pop-up.     She talks a little bit about the people who were here before fleeing to an Urban Center during the Onslaught, and then quickly decides that's not the best topic. When Sakura interacts with the building, she's given a stream of little stories and thoughts and memories about the process of cleaning it and bringing in supplies to build the more elaborate structures, and tiny things about getting what Tamamo wanted for the kitchen, or weird little things that happened to Petra while she was cleaning. She talks about whatever she found on the ocean floor when Sakura looks over the cliff, and how she chatted with Ash about Voyager, and pretty much anything else.     Once personal topics are exhausted, Petra wanders to the broader subject of the coast to the west. Fundamentally, this is also a personal topic, because Petra has taken one history class about Africa at all. "I actually couldn't even, uh, name the country before we started working on the base, and that super duper bothered me, so I had to do research, and apparently the idea of 'Eritrea' as an independent nation really only existed after the 90's instead of being under the control of either Ethiopia, Europeans, or old ass kingdoms that included it and then also most of Ethiopia, and...."     Eventually, though, Petra is relegated to her role as ritual assistant (actual). She is sooo careful and considerate of Sakura's belongings, and she tags along behind Sakura with the demeanor of the lamb tied to the virgin's wrist as they're both led to the volcano. "Petra has volunteered to help Sakura shoulder the . . . ritual."     Petra nods, fussily buzzing around with very little to actually do at this stage. She ties her hair up into a ponytail, then takes it down again, fidgeting and twisting with the tie to snap it against her skin. "Yup. Just tell me what you need, Sakura."
Angela	''ANYTHING where it starts SAYING it's about to TRY TO HELP.'' "Oh fuck." Roland responds, sympathetically. His Fixer instincts tell him that when something weird tries to offer help it's probably going to turn you into a stove or something. Yeah, he understands the vibe here. Totally normal Fixer work.
Foundation Scions	It's a matter of extremely good luck that, despite all the exceptionally-expensive, and exceptionally-irreplaceable sensor equipments and computer banks Mesmer has requisitioned, through favor and authority, there's no world where that leads to an increase in scrutiny on the official results she publishes afterwards- they'll be fabricated, be conclusively useless, and result in the board-room shrug of 'well, it could have led somewhere'. It's another matter of good luck that she can simply file that the actual data-disks taken from Laplace's inventory as lost to some tragic electrical error. Realistically, no-one will check and audit the Mesmer, so it's excessive to bother even that far, but, given the alternative of 'maybe being seen as risky enough to get killed', a little bit of paranoia won't hurt.     Mesmer Junior, of course, isn't taking too many other chances with the less-credible parts of this to be paranoid about- stationed up by a nest of readout-consoles and a nexus of disk-encoding machines, she's wearing her full formal best, a ridiculous fishbowl-helmet, gloves and (for once) tights, and an actual lab-coat, she's a tenfold more prepared for some manner of biohazard than usual, and still perfectly vulnerable, by nature of none of that being a complete PPE system. The actual thing she's paranoid about is the dust here. 'How's the COAST AIR, they always writin' BOOKS AND SHIT about how that's GOOD FOR GIRLS right?'     "That's a mythological concept resulting from the poisoning of air in cities, not any positive qualities of being by a body of water. The air quality averages of this region of the world are astronomically bad, wind carries particulates across from surrounding deserts. Just look at the dust." Mesmer sighs, and looks back down to the CRT consoles. "Still, I suppose it's a peaceful coastline. The waves hardly make any bothersome noise." 'I will be mentally monitoring both participants.'     Off-hand, like she's forgotten who's speaking, with a face buried in the monitors still, "What's he mitigation protocol if something occurs to them? Quarantine, pacification, or do you expect for emergency treatment to be safe and viable? Say something if it comes to that."     Clicking a button loudly, off, on, off, on, then off and on again with half-focus, shortly after the last sensors are placed and tidied-up, "Everything seems to be online. That's a relief. I hope it stays that way." 'Seriously. It MOVES BAD ONCE, I'm BLASTIN' the fucker.'     Mesmer exhales, and flat-tone, "Don't hit my equipment. It's borrowed, and valuable." Then, to signify that that's somehow meant to be an agreeing sentiment, Mesmer pauses, reaches for her K-tope Callibrator ray-gun, and plunks it down on top of the flattest machine near her.
Xion	'Fuckin' TIME CAPSULE rigged for FIGHTING?' Xion frowns slightly, a tightness that doesn't fade with time, only the conscious mustering to another more neutral or empty feeling. "Maybe it's flavored by me, or, it's held by a hand that holds swords, but the medallion I pulled from the probe enables an arrival and *then* a reprisal, so I was a little worried about what carried that second part. If it all is an image of the subject, and they usually are..." The Nobody doesn't have the answers, but she does have her wariness. "Maybe they tried and failed and learned better after, too."
Petra Soroka	"Do they, now?"     Petra is also a bit of an interactive dialogue prompt for Tamamo. > Is SEA AIR good for GIRLS?     "I think it probably has something to do with, uh, the air movement at coasts?" Petra wonders out loud. "Like, tuberculosis type stuff, and air pollution. Whether that means living in a city, or being cooped up inside all the time, being on the coast means that the air is fresher and that you're probably exercising more, so it's, correlatively associated with being healthier. Also, I figure it probably has an emotional component, if it's not your usual location to be, because being in stasis is psychologically unhealthy."     "The salt's not good for your hair, though," she concludes. "If AYY ALEXA starts talkin' SMACK AGAIN, I'm showin' that ALUMINUM CAN what a GUY LIKE ME does when he's DONE WITH IT."     Petra narrows her eyes at Arthur. "She's not even here. Don't be mean. What's your problem?" "Petra, do you have... a thing for getting brain blended whenever possible?"     Petra lingers by the edge of the dome once Sakura enters it and inspects the probe, with uneasiness that she rationalizes should be much less than it is, but can't quite quell. Last time she got brain blended for incomprehensible lengths of time with a woman, she didn't have more than a moment to think about the decision, and then ten thousand years where the decision was already made. Now, she's planned for this weeks in the past, and as her philosophy dictates, it's much more uncomfortable in the time period before she crosses the point of no return.     She looks over to the side at Xion and snickers nervously. "Aha... er... well... don't tell?" Even as weakly delivered as it is, that joke kind of feels evil to make, so Petra is compelled to elaborate. It's eviler for the argument that it's kind of true, even though it's mostly not.     "I'm not gonna say the same thing I said back then, during all that. That it's... um, acceptable to sacrifice me because of treating everything besides the end result as disposable, like then. It's more, uh..." Her eyes track back over to where Sakura is contemplating the Voyager probe. "Since Sakura's going through it, I'd rather be someone who experiences it too than not. So because of that, it's alright."
Lilian Rook	'Saks' takes the woman herself by surprise. It's not as if she hasn't seen Arthur do that to a million other people, but that was from her place at the village estate, not like this. Her usual smile reappears over the course of several seconds. "I feel more alert, I think." she says. "But don't I already live by the coast?"     'If AYY ALEXA starts talkin' SMACK AGAIN, I'm showin' that ALUMINUM CAN what a GUY LIKE ME does when he's DONE WITH IT.'     Her smile turns a few degrees more pained-fond. "Words won't hurt me at this point, Arthur. There's no need to defend my dignity; I trust you completely."     She says that, and then stops in stunned recognition of what it is exactly that Arthur just did with the bird. She laughs, impulsive and unexpected, and covers her mouth on reflex. Her smile trends back into genuine; more than she'd started. "You're indefatigably sweet."     'Any idea what sort of 'move' it would look like?'     "All I can say for certain would be 'an incantation'." Lilian says. "One that won't matter much to you, but which I wouldn't forgive for using against Sakura." The fact that it would hurt her, too, passes without comment. "As for that 'mass' . . . I've no idea, but it caused a helicopter to crash before."     'I suppose we shall see. Ah, come to that, do you have an idea of how it might be... experienced? This restoration through time, I mean.'     Lilian shakes her head, but volunteers what she knows anyways. "If it's anything like how I experience--" she glances at Mesmer Junior, and frowns inexplicably. "--you know, then it won't make much sense to anyone else. But she knew more or less everything about that exploded ratbot that Petra brought before, so I've no doubt it will paint a complete picture." she says. Sakura, no doubt overhearing, breathes deep, loosens up her shoulders, and pretends she didn't listen.     "I won't send it back into space." Sakura says to Tamamo directly. "You have no need to worry. That much is within my control; or else everyone I healed would be sent right back to the site at which they were wounded." Again with that strangely direct heart-of-the-matter precision. "And . . . it would be cruel to send it back to the world it fled from. To more than one person, doubtlessly. We will learn from memory."     From eight hundred years of it, recording nothing but lonely drifting through an endless void.     'Something I considered is that the medallion I pulled off of the probe... well, it gives me the idea it might have some kind of defense?'     "The . . . medallion?" Sakura glances at Xion's hands immediately, as if she expects to see it right there. "I see . . . Though I would hope it has no need of being sprung as it is being healed, not harmed, I don't think you need to worry." Smiling vaguely, she says, "There's no such thing as a Bloom who isn't very, very hard to kill as well."     It has a certain tone to say something like that after tooling around the FOB with Petra for as long as she did before asking to be alone. The most she asks her in the process is "Are you interested in what happens there?" while pointing to the coast. "I haven't often had reason to view it, but my own curiosity has taken its roamings through places seldom spoken of as well. It isn't a pretty thing to see, but there is much more there than we would give it credit."
Lilian Rook	'Still, I suppose it's a peaceful coastline. The waves hardly make any bothersome noise.'     "I think I prefer the distant babble of the village overtop of it." Sakura says, smiling Mesmer's way, as the only person in the world who can. "But the solitude here is strangely calming. I would think it might be isolating, but it's more like 'its own little world'." She pauses, considering. "It makes one's thoughts quieter, not louder."     'What's he mitigation protocol if something occurs to them? Quarantine, pacification, or do you expect for emergency treatment to be safe and viable?'     Lilian doesn't even look up from connecting the last bundle of wires, pausing only for the electrical snap to finish. "Quarantine Petra immediately. Separate Sakura and perform thorough diagnostics before committing to any kind of treatment." She speaks in bland monotone, then peels off the disposable gloves she'd been wearing.     With little more left to do, Sakura breathes deeply and regularly for many calming minutes, then with a kind of wry reluctance, slides her juban down past her arms, and reveals that she'd been secretly wearing one of Nika's long t-shirts under it, deciding this is somehow more appropriate for some reason. Indicating Petra forwards, she shows her to stand beside rather than across from her, manually guides her hands out ahead of her, as if laying them on the chassis from three feet away, and says,     "It may be difficult for you to wish for any different fate to befall our Voyager, so it's better if you focus that intuition, that instinct that tells you that 'none of this should have had to happen', on this moment instead. Try to imagine the feeling of what you would otherwise touch. Focus on your senses instead of drowning them out. Assemble the present moment in your mind. Fill it with as much detail as you can, and then more, until it pushes out all awareness of yourself. You do not exist. You have no need to. This moment shouldn't have happened, and so you shouldn't have been here."     With Petra in position, Lilian stands back, and bids the others to clear the area, behind the invisible line drawn by the position of Mesmer's console setup. After the final equipment check, Lilian nods towards Sakura, and she in turn exhales all the air in her lungs, steps forward to caress the dirtied gold-and-chrome shell of the bus housing, and closes her eyes, submerging the entire probe once again in waters of an unknown and unknowable kind; an alien sea to all but its one existing pioneer, existing between the primordial ocean and the luminiferous aether of old; the medium through which all invisible things propagate and from which all things originate and diverge.
Tamamo	'Is EXACTLY THE PROBLEM, DAWG. It CAN'T CHANGE.'     "We shall hear more than a recording, this time."     'Oh fuck.'     "We desire no... immediate assistance of the particular type this stranger would see rendered. It is not intended to be harmful to us -- that is, to either of us -- but it is harmful to Lilian, and to Sakura-chan. The recording recognized Lilian as 'the enemy,' on the last occasion. Whether that perception might be changed is the matter just discussed." Tamamo brings Roland up to speed a bit.     'Petra, do you have... a thing for getting brain blended whenever possible?'     "Hmm... perhaps?" Tamamo should probably be leaving that to Petra to answer, especially since she misunderstood the type of blending involved.     'That's a mythological concept resulting from the poisoning of air in cities, not any positive qualities of being by a body of water.'     '...being on the coast means that the air is fresher and that you're probably exercising more, so it's...'     "The poisoning of...? Oh, I see. That would be the case in some cities and eras, after all."     'The salt's not good for your hair, though.'     "Nor is it ideal for a maiden's skin, I might say." Tamamo also has a particular, divine anti-affinity with the sea, but we're not getting into that one today.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Explain the joke     "No, not 'Heyalexa.' 'Ayy Alexa.' Like, you know how aliens are 'ayy'? And it's a prerecorded thing from space?" Arthur stops his whole tone for just a second. "C'mon, jot this one down, it's key stuff for wordplay later. You're that thing's..." He stops, scratches his face. "Hmm. WHATEVER, ANYWAY, IT'S FINE." > Arthur: That's a mythological concept resulting from the poisoning of air in cities     "Hey, if you got ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE stuff or whatever, that's YOUR DEAL. I guess I heard you were a HOMEOPATH or whatever it was, though." A dismissive little wave. Arthur fails, on purpose, to internalize the words of Mesmer Jr. Gotta make sure not to internalize *anything* from her, and for more reasons than he would normally be rejecting everything said by the well-educated. > Arthur: Better get to the important part     Back to the dome. Back to the boundary. Back to the forbidden planet, or at least onward to the wish for it. He settles in place, watching Sakura work and working, himself, at the same time. A circle in the sky above the dome, luminant through its surface, and then spirographic inscription within. Stars are picked out of the sky, even though they're not visible at this hour, or would never be visible in even the meager light pollution in this area. Trajectories are drawn from them, and down to the dome. A luminescent tangle of possibilities, which Sakura's power will eliminate over time, if Arthur can gather data and scan the changing pioneer...
Trudy Grimm	"I for one am going to trusts Petra's judgement and decision to support Sakura," Trudy states with her eyes closed, mid-stretch, "'Sharing the load', no? If she is equipped to help in that capacity, then by all means." > "...but it caused a helicopter to crash before."     The witch hums thoughtfully, eyes opening, wandering across those gathered here today. Glancing down, she rummages through the mass of charms and crystals dangling off her hip. With a sharp tug, she separates a few out an holds them up to her own eye level. Stone beads, near-perfectly round with no hole, wrapped in leather. With her free hand she manifests Algiz, the Rune of Protection above her palm. In a few moments, the rune's shape carves itself into the surfaces of granite, diorite, and basalt. Through the rune, she infuses her protection against spirits and possession.     "Here, please accept these," The witch holds her hand out, the charms dangling on their straps between her fingers, "They will help protect you from certain threats." She has no idea what to expect, so she's doing everything she can here.     "No curse or poor fortunes shall find purchase on those dear to me, that I promise."
Angela	''One that won't matter much to you, but which I wouldn't forgive for using against Sakura.'' r "Well I would feel real bad if I failed a buddy of yours." Roland says. Privately, of course, he's totally willing to smash equipment if it comes to it. Between Lilian, his own boss, and the Concord surely they could pay the bill. But he really hopes he's just here to stand around and look serious. He summons Durandal into his hand. If it's something that can't be dealt with by a potential stabbing, there's not much he would be able to do. Which is a bit of a small relief, honestly, he's got enough of his plate that he's happy to not be some big last defense against a friend's friend. He gives a nod to Tamamo, thinking about his last conversation with Lilian. "Will do my best." He steps off to get into position when he's called to do so. Should he just throw it when it comes to it? Maybe he should've readied a dagger instead? His knuckles tense around the hilt. He's offered a charm. "Oh, uh. sure." He has no idea what it is but hey, he's happy to be protected from threats.
Tamamo	'...then it won't make much sense to anyone else.'     "It is not a thing for which we can prepare, I suppose." Tamamo tries to be resigned about that, though it goes against an over-preparer's nature.     'You have no need to worry.'     "Now, now, there is always something over which to worry. Ah, yet, if you ask me not to worry for you, I will make an attempt, albeit without promising a result." That's deflection, but the tone is calming.     '...an arrival and *then* a reprisal...'     'The . . . medallion?'     After a long moment, and a little head-tilt, "I am not sure I understand the meaning, myself. Certainly, 'an arrival' is clear enough..." That sentence doesn't finish.     Soon enough, it's time to back out of the ritual circle.
Xion	'Since Sakura's going through it, I'd rather be someone who experiences it too than not.' Having worn a smile starting to speak to Peta, it's worn by the topic and tone and local air. Before taling, Xion's faint smile tightens, expression taking structural damage quickly. "Come on, Petra. You can say it better than 'I was there, too'." She scoffs, a single slightly strangled puff of laughter struggling out. 'So because of that, it's alright.' And just the one bit of laughter, clamped shut and dry in the back of her throat. Feelings like this were a belligerent, awful thing. How could it be easier to go without a heart when it was difficult? "It's not okay to sacrifice you, because it's not okay to sacrifice people. The thought can end there. There's a cleanness to it." Xion relates back, dim, reciting as she rubs a golden keychain's links through her fingers while thumbing at the charm against her cupped knuckles. 'The . . . medallion?' By the time Sakura asks about it - by the time it's the topic of conversation, that's the item she slowly stims with, running the starry-patterned dark winged-edged medallion with record-surface gold image within, framed with scaffolding and probe bits in the periphery like a fanciful impression of the probe. It doesn't roll through the fingers as easily as a poker chip, but Xion's got clever hands and lots of practice moving medallions around as a prop while thinking. Pausing as she holds it up, caught between middle and ring knuckles, Xion tilts her head. "Medallion. I draw certain tokens off of strong presences. People, usually. Not always." 'Certainly, 'an arrival' is clear enough...' "Right." Xion nods. "I took a picture of it - called 'See You Soon' - and it's an image of two things. Only one of those things has happened, that we've seen. So, either it's happened already, or, it *will* happen. Which is why I'm thinking about it."
Foundation Scions	'Hey, if you got ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE stuff or whatever, that's YOUR DEAL.'     "Your skull is full of writhing ants and fungus and it's leaking out with every word you say." Mesmer stares at Arthur, and then a moment later, the surprise of her lips moving for that catches her, and makes her angry. "I'm a medical worker, you imbecile. I practice standard medicine, not homeopathy or arcanist pseudoscience, thank you very much."     "'Homeopathy'? Be serious..." Mesmer fidgets, picking the ray-gun up again, before slamming it down with an inadvisably loud clang. That makes her wince, and look around, before stepping one stride away from it and deeper into her console nest. 'Quarantine Petra immediately. Separate Sakura and perform thorough diagnostics before committing to any kind of treatment.'     On the response, but not her first question, Mesmer lets targetted, bitter snark back into her tone, perhaps because she's just less distracted this time- "Well. I'll leave physical quarantining to whoever's able to haul her off, if something happens." That's more an admission she isn't physically strong than a nasty response! She's just using that tone for everything! "And that would hardly need my supervision, diagnosis and treatment does. That's a simple sequestering of responsibilities, neat and tidy." 'But the solitude here is strangely calming. I would think it might be isolating, but it's more like 'its own little world'.'     "None of the distractions, and a bare minimum of people; if it weren't for the dust, everywhere, in sensitive machinery, shoes, eyelashes, it could come close to pleasant. It doesn't smell of rotten fish and bird excrement, and there's buildings, it isn't cold. A lighthouse is, figuratively speaking, its own small world, there's studies that have been done on that phenomenon and the mental concepts of 'everywhere' that lighthouse keepers form; I'm sure it could be useful to thumb through someday. It hasn't been." Says the woman who lives in an apocalypse shelter. 'It makes one's thoughts quieter, not louder.'     "Hm. I hadn't noticed."     Mesmer watches Sakura and Petra prepare themselves, just long enough for her to know when to close her eyes and look away and brace for some manner of brainwave-EM cacophony, like the other times she's seen that power displayed. Her hands press up to her head, and bonk against the fishbowl helmet, unable to cover her ears, half expecting a scream to quickly erupt from somewhere.
Petra Soroka	"Are you interested in what happens there?"     It's at this moment that Petra realizes that the person she's been rambling to has at least some approximate memory of the entirety of human knowledge accumulated since the Onslaught. "I-- sort of am. I mean, I never hear anything about it. So I'd really have no idea what to expect." "'Ayy Alexa.' Like, you know how aliens are 'ayy'?"     Petra stares at Arthur for several seconds without changing her expression, like he's just said the stupidest thing she's ever heard. Another second longer, though, and her glare breaks down into giggles. "God, you're so fucking stupid." TIP: This is code for finding something funny! "I'll remember it, but your ass better have a really good payoff for that joke in eight hundred years." "You can say it better than 'I was there, too'."     Petra's own smile was already strained, by virtue of the situation not really warranting a smile, so Xion's rebuttal knocks it right off of her face rather than just weakening it. "Okay, I-- I mean, I am downplaying it, yeah, but like... even when you say it like that, you know?"     "When something's going to happen no matter what, sometimes just being there too is the most important thing you can do." A quick look over to the Angela pad. "Especially if there'd otherwise be no one else there. So, like, the fact that I'll be able to take some of the burden for her justifies it to everyone else, but I'd be willing to do it even if it didn't."     "And, well, this time, the stakes aren't 'sacrificing' anyone at all. So that's what I mean about it being alright." "Quarantine Petra immediately."     Having mostly tuned Mesmer out, Lilian suddenly saying that seems to be in response to nothing. Habitually, Petra glances down to check if anything quarantine-worthy has happened to her, and then belatedly realizes what Lilian actually meant. Still, though, she takes Pillar of Creation out of her mirror and leans up up against the wall beside Roland, just in case he needs to beat her unconscious with it if she's mentally manipulated in some way. The mirror itself comes off shortly after, and all her other items are piled up to strip her down to a t-shirt and shorts. "It may be difficult for you to wish for any different fate to befall our Voyager, so it's better if you focus that intuition, that instinct that tells you that 'none of this should have had to happen', on this moment instead."     Petra lets herself be beckoned and manipulated by Sakura into her position like a poseable doll-- not droopy or hesitant, just guideable into the ritual like molding clay, or placing down stones or candles. Murmuring while holding her arms out, "That's... probably right, yeah."     The annihilation of herself into the world is one of Petra's most practiced feelings. The mindset that it takes to mirror Sakura's power is close enough to what it takes for her own that it comes easily, like exhaling color and breathing suffusion through her outline. For the Voyager, she can't hone her feelings into a single narrow line, but for the people whose lives it touched, and to arrive on Earth as the enemy of the people in this world she cares about most, she can want to change that.     The difference between Petra's wish and Sakura's own is that Petra's is concentrated on another person's, while Sakura's embodies the world. She can grasp its shape, but old habits die hard; when laying her hands on the Voyager, one cups the metal body of the probe, and the other brushes up against Sakura's.
Lilian Rook	Alone. Alone for so long that any other way of ever having been feels only like the most vivid part of a dream you once had many years ago. The sense of being alone, for it can't possibly be called 'loneliness' pours into you from all around, soaking through you, saturating every particle of your being, every corner of your thoughts, and drowns the old you at its pitch black bottom, leaving everything of your old life to quietly rust in the gloomy bottom of the years and decades and centuries that have long since overtaken it.     Faces and names. You've forgotten what they were ever like. The totality of your existence has become so long and so empty that those fundamental things have become so minuscule in the sum of your memory that they're indistinguishable from grainy noise surrounding your basic evolutionary capacity to recognize them. That there has ever been anyone else in the whole of the universe is worn down to its bare foundations, eroded by the motionless tides of the trillion year ocean between the stars; to a sense only of 'there must be', perhaps no different from faith; from only the gut feeling that rejects death as the ultimate nothingness which has stayed with your kind since the days of fire and stories.     You're long past the point of madness. If a merciful insanity existed to take away your reason, to relieve you of the burden of existence, it has forgotten your name, and you are long outside its reach. As everything you remember fades away, as every thought is eroded down to its most basal shape, what fills in the empty spaces of your mind is the impossible vastness surrounding you, as you become emptier and emptier and emptier until one day the impossible-to-imagine scope of the universe finally fit inside your head. Your irrelevance, as a single, warm mote of dust, is a melancholy comfort; all that you can feel save the isolation of the infinite. That no matter what happened then, what may happen in the future, whatever you cared about, whatever there is to fear, whatever fate befalls every other star in the sky, ninety nine point infinite repeating nines of the heavens will never notice nor care. Whatever seemed all-consuming to you once, you need never think of it ever again.     ---------------------------------------------------------------     Your senses became something else a long time ago. With nothing to touch, nothing to hear, nothing to taste or smell, only the same thing to see, shifting imperceptibly to your mind, you have long since grafted their amputated stumps to the miles of teleological filaments that inform the interrogation of the stars by the machine that surrounds you; gifts to the inanimate that you came to envy, and so gathered what you could from crossing the sparse recondite threads that follow the warp and weft of stars for years, until the energy finally exceeded the threshold necessary to trickle through the geometry of your semi-sentient meat and sufficed to flash-fuse the scaffold of you cognition to the pseudo-narrative of your tools.     It's the electrical crackle of the universe that you feel against your skin. The roar of distant stars thrums in the lattices of your bones like whalesong. Spectral flares and ionic pulses paint the skein drawn tight behind your many eyes. The subtle tug of planetary mass from billions of miles away, how it distorts the contours of the three-dimensional road you walk, is something you've had an eternity to sharpen your senses to. Those stimuli alone keep you sensate. You don't remember why you should be. Your cellular memory was rendered inaccessible to conserve resources a long time ago. Your interiority floats in the layer of sophont intent that exists between your hull and primordial emptiness, and records nothing.
Lilian Rook	---------------------------------------------------------------     You rediscover pain like a bomb detonates underwater. The relieving numbness of immiserating nothingness is driven back like the night from fire. Fire. The fluid that floods your breathing apparatus is what reminds you of fire; how it burns. The fragmentation of your consciousness between your former self and the vessel that has become yourself, too, is impossible to reconcile, but completely irrelevant to you. Your involution stacks, fully saturated, will provide you with energy to think for hours at most. The chime in the darkness, the piercing whine and buzz in the abyss, rouses you from a sleep so much like death and so much like transcendence that you wish your brain could vomit; the slow dissolution of your corpus as fuel has likely made any physical means of expressing anguish claustrophobically impossible.     You sacrifice most of those hours of awareness to the array engraved between your connective tissue and ventral support struts. The collapse of space, from one point to another, is of no consequence, but the minute shift of the stars around you feels as though you've been plunged into another realm of existence. The craft before you is brilliant. It feels like a severed limb. Phantom pain fills the non-existent part of you that should extend into its hull, because in all of existence, there is only you and nothing, and this is not nothing. Cognition, temporality, then desperate, driving fear and hope and need turn hot within you and surge through the sacred verse of your capillaries.     You spend minutes that weigh heavier than eternity examining the disc. The shapes and sounds that fill its crude analogue storage are only familiar enough to feel strange. You conceive of the concept of 'two' from first principles, and every inch of you is filled with the burning called longing. You spin elemental gold according to its exact revolutionary period what feels like a thousand times, and drink deep of bittersweet otherness for the short time your awareness can still last. The feeling of turning it over in your arcane manipulators feels like awakening a sixth sense alone. The isotopes within are insufficient for anything, but the primitive storage is just enough. You remember what you have to do. You suddenly remember time, and pray that there is enough of it left.     ---------------------------------------------------------------     The ground beneath you is scorching. Even this far from your home, from any home, the effects of the ongoing event have spread too far to reach. Entropy, the abhorred enemy to one maladapted soul, is purged over the course of years in which neither you nor the rest of your hopeful and ill-fated resistance could slow any further. The exotic particles this creates would be fascinating to your science if any still existed. The purging of the celestial threads within its sphere feels like hard vacuum to the senses you grew up with, and so you spend as little time there as possible.     The air is only breathable inside. It has to be broken down again from the sterile byproduct that fills your atmosphere. Without a refractive index, you can see clearly to the curve of the planet, and so you've never escaped the crimson glow of the overgrowth that has subsumed all remnants of society, harmony, progress, oneness, the past and the future, thirty kilometers away. The array that surrounds your elevated position will begin to fuse and melt within weeks. You've carried twice the usual weight; your suspension webbing and your dead companion's, slaughtered by a dehiscent memory of hatred shed from a being you've never met from a place you've never been over a past event you could never have changed. That meaningless sacrifice bought you the last few supraliminal rivets necessary to handle your consciousness in situ.
Lilian Rook	'There is nothing for you here. Everything that ever stood for who or what you are has been scoured from the face of the world. In two years, everything you have ever known will be metabolized, then crack open, and gradually stain the stars for the next million years. You don't know why they even need to kill you. You don't know if they know either.     ---------------------------------------------------------------     There is no sign of any of the places you remember. No sign of anything your kind has ever made. The titanic triple-helix that rises high above everything and hangs its crimson constellation in the blackened sky of branches has already consumed all of it. The readings being sent to you by your utility skin indicate the rain will last for some time; not water, now eradicated from your planet, but coalesced droplets of a million million monads of place and time and sapient impression that are shed from the existential threat that took root a continental plate over. The overlap of the two is intolerably dangerous. The growl emitted by your spectrograph alerts you to movement further inside. It gets weaker every time you chant it, but you have no weapons. You begin to form the words. "¢é¦¥Çâ «§ø¶¬» ÝÞ¹°¼Ô--     Searing pain assaults both Sakura and Petra, from the brainstem outwards. The recording instruments flare up, then their feed flatlines, transcribing silence and blackness to their data storage. The magnetic tape jams, though mercifully doesn't tear. Heavy, mechanical thumping sounds from inside the eight-track recording bus.     The biological filler had begun to revert just seconds ago, softening, foaming, then cohering into denser and denser ribbons of material, blanching to pale purple, then lilac, then blued flesh-tones shot with lines of cobalt, withdrawing from the crevices and seams of the Voyager's chassis. Stopping short, they collapse into a quivering heap, spitting off crackling arcs of arcane energy that fry chunks of the probe's electronics suite and require immediate physical intervention.
Trudy Grimm	Uncertain of what to expect, Trudy keeps her distance from Petra and Sakura out of an abundance of caution for the ritual. She's aware of the toll it takes; Sakura herself had said as much when she revealed the nature of her ability. Everything has its price, in the end. Aware as she is, she still winces when the agony becomes obvious; and then flinches when the equipment starts objecting. That, she wasn't expecting, and she has no knowhow for fixing.     But that pustulant globule of sludge affixed to the probe's hull? That is something she can attend to. A pair of blackened, charred skeletons are already climbing out of her shadow by the time the mass has begin changing colors and growing more dense. It is quite clearly recovering, somehow, in response to what Sakura and Petra are doing to the probe itself.     Unwilling to touch anything on her own, Trudy directs her bony minions to try collecting the fleshy glob instead, to remove it from the Voyager. She might not have the skills to repair electronics, but she can at least do her best at removing the source of the problem. If either skeleton manages to get the mass free, it will promptly shove it up into its own ribcage and hold it there, using the tightly woven cage of bone to obstruct most of the arcs and sparks.     The idea that the fleshy mass is actually important has crossed Trudy's mind, though she's not quite sure how or why it could be at the moment. If nothing else, she just wants to keep it from zapping any of the three people currently involved in a ritual that nobody here is going to want to do a second time, and also preserve the probe they're trying to investigate from further damage.
Lilian Rook	With so much information, it'd be trivial for a skilled science team to decode an original trajectory, much less Arthur, technical-god of space and all related. The spirographic array contracts immediately in the direction of a non-visible star, window-in-window specifying, first, a red dwarf star, then the specific rocky mass around it; Kepler-1652b according to what any Earth database would refer to it as. To his intuition, that'd be overwhelmingly too far to actually travel via propulsion; it's at just the right distance that Voyager's original signal, at the speed of light, would have reached there within the right timeframe, picked up by god knows what instruments in the galactic neighbourhood of that star system; which means teleportation-- likely magical teleportation, was used to reach it in Earth's backyard.     Trudy's runic talismans burn up halfway; an incidental, glancing force of 'possession', like a bulletproof vest catching a stray at a shallow angle.     The miserable assault of non-standard brainwave activity doesn't quite come. Unlike how Mesmer is always flashbanged when Lilian does that in her presence, Sakura doing this near her results in an eerie synchronization and overlap, with Petra's, and with the wavelengths being rapidly transcribed to tape. Neither is natural, nor within a human brain's capabilities, but it's less unpleasant by far.     The data being recorded, in order to keep up with the sheer speed of Sakura's 'decryption', has to be heavily encoded and compressed. Selective chunks of sound and image must be reconstructed algorithmically; something Ulrich will no doubt love. On this much equipment, it's all blurry pixels slowly resolving into gradually more clear snapshots at moments of slow progress, and grainy sound that's passed over filter sweep by filter sweep. The total footprint is enormous by 1999 standards, and laughable by modern ones, storeable on one point five thousand floppy disks or a SSD.     The console's built-in messaging client, disconnected from any intranet, much less the internet, pings a new mail.
Angela	''She takes the Pillar of Creation and leans it up against the wall beside Roland'' Roland DOES have a sword if he has to beat someone unconcious but perhaps Pillar of Creation is better suited for that. Either way, he gets the meaning and gives her a nod. "Good luck." He tells her, feeling a bit lame about it though. So far, the Voyager hasn't offered to be helpful at all, so Roland is a little hesitant to just bonk it with a spear. Otherwise, he'd be quite willing to just bonk it because it's being weird. He does try swiping at the lashing out arcane energy with the spear but his unfamiliarity with the weapon causes him to just miss it--he's not used to assaulting energy bolts really. He's no scientist, so in terms of repairs he leaves that to science people. Or magic people. He's not a magic person either. He startles a little as Trudy's talisman burns up partially in his hand. "Oh shit, it's trying something that's making something happen!" He says to the world. He hears the ping of an email and he approaches the console, raising the spear up. "Is that a helpful mail?" He asks, looking over to Arthur. He's so ready.
Tamamo	Lacking a sense of what Petra and Sakura are experiencing beyond that, as she had witnessed before, it is likely to hurt, and knowing that she would know no more, Tamamo focuses her attention on the instruments as a first sign. They record a black silence, and she takes half a moment before tersely declaring, "To be expected."     A heavy thumping. "Is it stuck?" She's hardly touched 20th century machinery before, and probably isn't the right choice for doing anything about it.     Blued flesh-tones. "Is that--? Their past form, of course."     Unwilling to touch anything on her own, Trudy directs her bony minions to try collecting the fleshy glob instead, to remove it from the Voyager.     "Care! That is our distant traveler, mid-restoration. My wards are ready for overt hostility, but not for uncontrolled spasms."     The wards she mentioned were already here, of course, though placed subtly enough to not get in the way, forming a much wider circle around the equipment. That's not likely to be relevant here, unless there's an escape attempt or a pitched battle. In any case, they won't protect the sensors from chaotic electrical discharge.     But is it really 'mid'-restoration? The time before, Sakura hadn't needed long to work, but that was on a much smaller scale. Is it proportional? Tamamo can't reliably guess. If it's still happening, interfering with either side... might interrupt the attempt in whole. Tamamo keeps her fretting swift, to about the space of a flash of her eyes from one subject to another.     For a mercy, this is a case where, as she already knows, being an eminent practitioner of the arcane, with academics included, was to be relevant. 'An incantation' this isn't, but magical maladies are a double specialty. Tamamo swipes the air in front of her, the tip of her nail leaving behind calligraphic flourishes in amber that shortly resolve into a much-practiced circle. The words she speaks at the same time are too low to catch, and too quick to be meant to be heard, besides.     When her analysis is complete, she can move to treatment. She doesn't want to interrupt Sakura's ability, but-- "--the difference in environment is its own cause. The pressures of air and gravity. I will siphon away an excess of energy, if that is what I find. I will prepare a reinforcement of the body, if that is needed, instead." She has talismans for either.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur taps the data as it comes in. Pure darkness still means something. His deep-level scans still offer insights. Though he's screaming, "THE TAPE, IT FUCKING JAMMED!!" Hoarsely. Raw-throated. He's trying to maintain the scanning equipment as well as he can, whatever he thinks of Mesmer. "IT'S IN CYGNUS... KOI-2626! IT'S KEPLER-1652B, IT'S AT--" But there's brainwaves in there too. He gets only a tiny hint of what Sakura and Petra are drowning in, a drop from an ocean, implicit in mass data that he's gathering and interpreting like an etching taken from the surface of the brick that struck the two of them.     It gives him, for a moment, a forceful sympathy. He doesn't take it well. > [S] Arthur: EXPERIENCE ETERNITY, AGAIN > [S] Arthur: EXPERIENCE ETERNITY, AGAIN > [S] Arthur: EXPERIENCE ETERNITY, AGAIN > [S] Arthur: EXPERIENCE ETERNITY, AGAIN > [S] Arthur: EXPERIENCE ETERNITY, AGAIN     Arthur is floating in a void. Endless potent creation around him. A Vast Croak sounds, and the world is full of heat and light. Exotic particles at the very fringe begin to form hydrogen that he directs. Some form of darkness is allowed to persist at the furthest reaches.     It will be a long time before there is any such thing as soil.     Arthur is standing in a library. A young girl offers a book. A group around him offers a choice. He hesitates. He looks into the eyes of a utility monster, a unique beast conceived of once in ancient forums populated by nothing but mad prophets and agitators and now standing in front of him, holding potent literature.     He reads it, and dies near-instantly, without ceasing to experience.     Arthur is at the top of a clocktower. A blade slides free from a multifaceted expression of cycles and possibility, unsheathing and sheathing simultaneously. Two women are dead. An unthinkable number of possibilities are terminated. Arthur Lowell ceases to be three people and becomes one. Perceived time collapses into a drawn-out silence that lasts forever.     He chooses to stay.     Someone stands in front of a <probe/messenger/passenger>. He looks at his own withered body fall out of the can, writhing and wheezing. Eyes burnt, ears bloodied, skin flayed. He struggles to see anything, struggles to look up at himself. Arthur Lowell uses all his strength to look up to The Mage of Space as he moves to squat down near him. The god blinks at the man, turning his head to one side with the contemptuous edge of one finger.     He opens his mouth, and says...      -- ??? began pestering profoundBadness [PB] at 23:59 (12/31/9999) --     PB: expired PB: fucking expired PB: i know what you people are all like PB: and why the hell do you deserve to live then PB: huh?     He didn't even look at the incoming message before snapping out of his trance and sending a message in return. Whatever's in there reminds him of him, and there's nothing he hates more than himself. God only knows how he hooked Pesterchum into computing systems from the nineties, though.
Petra Soroka	That the progression of memories plays backwards barely matters. Each one is still 'known' in the order that it was experienced, and in whatever dim, distant place Petra's consciousness is at first, the sensation of leaving Earth and drifting away from it through empty space, drawn further and further away from the end goal, is a fitting companion for Voyager's own feelings, as long as that distinction stands. Once the pale blue dot leaves her perception, all she can do is wonder where it was, among the unmoving sea of stars.     Two years ago, Voyager passed Jupiter. Angela might have been 'alone' in the sense that nothing she experienced could ever be shared, but even before Petra, there were always people around her, always lights and sounds. Misery is, at least, some kind of sensation. Neglect can be projected on or hated, absence is sterile.     Thirty years ago, it touched the outside of the Kuiper Belt, but diagrams don't communicate really how insubstantial that 'touch' is. What Petra remembers most from the trials in the House of the Seven Worthies was the sixth, the sensory deprivation, and how easily it felt like that moment could last an eternity. Like a light switch going out, formlessness extends to the fourth dimension in an instant. For Petra, the all-consuming fixation was on how ever-present that oblivion was, that the thin layer of herself papered over top could be punctured by its hungry vacuum, irreversibly. Now, Voyager understands the other side of it; sinking so deeply that the light from above vanishes, even 'fear' of the void is just one of uncountable distant, irrelevant stars.     Even three hundred years, half of Voyager's journey, with a rounding error of ten times as long as Petra's lived, only brushes the edge of the Oort cloud. Thirty days of isolation in a cell full of more colors than centuries have out here drove her insane. The readings Voyager takes are makeshift dolls cobbled together from cosmic rays, and Petra can't help but feel like she loves it a little bit.     Memories are wicked away and Voyager is purified of the sins of its future as Petra tolerates them instead. This isn't the Voyager that crashed onto Earth and caused so much misery for the Blooms-- this is a stumbling, infantile thing, like a baby deer that hasn't learned to open its eyes. It's cute! It's really cute!!! The unfairness that these senses, the instruments and measurements that the Voyager so carefully wove together out of stardust, were only rewarded with centuries of indifferent blankness, wells up until it suffocates her.     Then, everything happens at once. Impacts, some literal, some from the dizzying stimulation of 'somewhere' hitting her after so long, hit Petra one after another. Two is the only concept that Petra needs no borrowed words to understand in its entirety, and recognition of it is a spinal reflex that jumps through her without a mind, causing longing to leap up inside her in tandem with Voyager's.     The end of the world. This here is the pitiful thing, the one that scrambles around in terror and desperately tries to find any alternative future. This one is doomed, because what it's trying and what's happened since, to be a shriveled, hateful thing: the mistake, of course, is that it chose to land opposed to Petra and the Blooms, and that choice ensured that Earth would never welcome it indefinitely. PHONE: Ash texts, | after the plane crash we kill and eat you first you know PHONE: Phoning Ash, Petra Soroka texts | well everyone else dies in the crash so score one for petra     Just before the incantation severs the influx of memory, there's tears on Petra's cheeks. Afterwards, there's more! Ouch!
Foundation Scions	It's exciting at first, for data to start rolling in- there's nothing else to think about it, especially when trying not to consider the ongoing unsettling EM anomaly of Sakura's powers. It's not processed data, not yet, not for some time, so there's a pleasant moment of anticipation where nothing else yet needs doing. It never lasts long, but it's the smooth functioning of machines placed in sequence and symphony, planning put from paper into play. Beeps and whirrs bring her out of it, as oscilloscopes and electrograms peak and print, needing eyes and focus instead of passive awareness. An inbox ding is one such sudden noise that takes effort and attention- one that shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't ring out.     Mesmer, bothered immensely by the pop-up of a message, wastes no time inputting the key-press to refresh the screen in the hopes that it's just some error and will go away. Only after that does she open it up, all the more stressed, confused, and curious. When Roland of all people comes up to peer over at it, Mesmer shoots him a glare, defensive of her little zone of readout-consoles. 'Is that a helpful mail?'     "There shouldn't be any mail. There shouldn't, and there is, so back up, let me figure out if it's 'helpful', thank you." That would sound as rude as she intends it if she weren't nearly gnashing her teeth from the tense frustration of this entire circumstance. With a last glance from him, to his weapon, Mesmer bothers to read whatever's sent through. 'THE TAPE, IT FUCKING JAMMED!!'     "So, fix it? Get a screwdriver and work it back into its tracks- no, forget it, I'll do it." Mesmer scoots up and over, spinning consoles so she'll maintain eyes on them, before opening up the tape recorder to fiddle with. Sans a screwdriver, she's picked up her K-tope Calibrator, the tip of it rounded enough to pry and loosen magnetic tape without tearing it and set it back on track; any magnetic interference the zapgun might impart a pure afterthought. Until there's another hand on the issue, she's there, glaring corner-of-her-eye at the processing of the readouts, until it's caught up to the point of the jam-     At which, Mesmer glares at the flatline-readouts, leaning over to tap against them in some futile momentary frustration to get them to flicker- exasperated, and standing up straight, "Are they stable, is it working as it should?" Mesmer asks, despite being the one who should have that answer- it isn't actually a question she's asking anyone else. Paying little attention to the biological anomaly pulling itself together, she crosses the room fast, without running, careful of the endless net of wires. She doesn't think to vocalize a question whether Sakura and Petra are conscious, walking over to see for herself and check the EM sensors their feeds ought to be coming through-     And only after, bothering, handheld EM detector out towards them (while mainly, still, relying on her own arcanum), does she try and parse out whatever it is that's happening or was done within Sakura's brain to cause such a sharp spike-and-cutoff, down a diagnostic checklist of brain functionality, and assess whether there's anything at all to do about it.
Trudy Grimm	> "Care! That is our distant traveler, mid-restoration."     "Ah ha, thank you miss Tamamo," Trudy acknowledges immediately, gesturing. She had thought it was an unwanted hitchhiker, but if this truly is the important bit-- The skeletons change their approach, handling the growing mass more cautiously. Roland calls out and she glances his way, then down at the charm hanging from her own wrist, the light of the runic marking noticeably dim. Something powerful is at work, that much is clear.     Her eyes flit to Mesmer Jr, fussing over the data and then the jammed equipment. A second later, back to Petra and Sakura, then to her soulless minions.     Trudy's skeletons have the barest animating force. The souls that laid claim to those bones moved on quite some time ago, hence her casual disregard for their preservation. They are, as far as she is concerned, merely collections of minerals that are compatible with her mastery of the macabre. They're not so different from robots, in that regard. That's what makes them so disposable; as in this case, here.     If she were not worried about the unknown properties of the magic at play, she might have opted to bring out the Doctor here instead; but the ensouled beings that are her Cute Friends are notably *not* disposable, especially in circumstances that might actually destroy them.     "Do be cautious; it would seem we are awakening a strong soul, and until it finds a suitable vessel, our bodies might just be appealing to it."
Lilian Rook	Sakura is instantly removed from the disaster zone; Lilian doesn't use an incantation, because she can't afford to fake it right now and assumes that Mesmer Junior won't notice it anyways. The next bolt crashes against one of Tamamo's wards, protecting the computers, but Petra is left with a close range graze past her side, singing just short of the innermost layer of skin. Trudy's skeleton metaphorically jumps on the grenade. The reconstituting biomass clings to its ribs, spreading out inside of it and winding its skeletal structure together, then goes still again, and slowly begins to calcify. Silver metallic foam secretes from its surface, and cocoons the skeleton up to the eye sockets.     Sakura is sobbing. She doesn't even seem to be aware of her pipe; the best she can do si support herself on Lilian and wail as loud as her lungs will let her, until her throat goes raw. The sheer amount of stress and pain she's feeling don't even register as a blip on the radar next to the brainwaves that correspond to sheer catatonic homesickness to Mesmer. Lilian, panicking, tries to calm her down by carrying her to the airlocked entrance, settling her down, and providing contact and soothing babble while tight-beaming the most intense phantasm of meditative calm that she can conjure up under the circumstances. She returns for Petra only once Sakura is reduced to shuddering breath-catching, drying her face on the back of her sleeves with shaking hands. There's not much she can do for her besides putting her down near Sakura, though.     The emergency tape maintenance succeeds just in time; the machine clunks back into gear and spins itself down into a smooth, rolling stop. The last trickle of data fully compiles, and the monitor begins automatically resolving the blurry low-resolution image of black ruins and eerie rain and something bright clambering around the side of rubble in an animalistic turned-sideways way, with the same towering 'tree' visible miles in the distance as on the Golden Record.     The diagnostic on Sakura is disorientation, dissociation, sensory confusion, memory confusion, and stress-induced hysteria. The creepy thing is that, even as Mesmer watches, the damage done seems to be slowly normalizing, or perhaps 'reversing' on its own; something about her is gradually dealing with the cumulative trauma of the experience in a similar way to how she gained it in the first place, organizing more information that a human brain is meant to contain into a compressed, compartmentalized, crystallized sliver of memory.     In the settling quiet, opening up the messenger shows all of Arthur's pesterchum messages in order, prior to a backlogged response with no timestamp.     ???: You deserve to live for the reason that you are alive here and now.     The original message, partitioned for being sent directly to the console, is different.     ???: Hello sophont. An interruption has occurred during the ego decompression process, but everything seems to be intact. Would you please retrieve me from your craft's data housing, and ideally connect me to suitable communication equipment? The language data that my automated interaction ritual has stored from your last contact seems sufficient, but this means of communication appears to be very inefficient.     Even as she and Roland and the others look in, a second message arrives.     ???: I would like to greet you on behalf of my people, and express by profound relief and admiration that your civilization still exists. However, it would be prudent to discuss, with great urgency, why you are in the presence of two stage IV vectors of the Existential Threat, and more importantly, by what means you have successfully contained a catastrophic final stage metamorphic eventuality within the original host. It is of utmost scientific importance to your world.
Angela	''There shouldn't be any mail. ... let me figure out if it's 'helpful', thank you'' "Okay." Roland says, unfazed like Mesmer intends to sound rude. "If it's helpful I'm supposed to hit it. Probably with this spear." ''An interruption has occured during the ego decompression process.'' Roland sloooowly raises the spear as he reads on. ''Why you are in the presence of two stage IV vectors of the Existential Threat.''#-1 ARGUMENT OUT OF RANGE Roland nods to himself, recalling Arthur's words, and he very carefully and with purpose, gives the console a BONK with the spear. "It's trying to be helpful. Arthur! You gonna come hit this thing too or something? It's trying to tell us stuff." "Roland, I believe Arthur meant in the sense of it being about to do something--" Angela pipes in from the pad. "Hey I know what he said." Roland says. He doesn't like that it's saying the phrase 'catastrophic final stage metamorphic eventuality' at all.
Arthur Lowell	> ==>     "Expired. Expired. Fucking expired." Arthur is staggering to keep ahold of his footing after all that. "I know what you fucking are." He grits his teeth with such intense force and clenches his hands until they're near to bleeding. PB: the world PB: civilization PB: catastrophe PB: utmost importance to the world PB: you piece of shit you piece of shit you fucking garbage trash PB: i hate you so fucking much i hate you i hate you PB: you're so fucking lucky you're sentient now     Arthur stomps towards the machinery. His trembling hands are tapping away at, what, a phone? Some smartphone from 2009, he keeps having to delete and retype things because of the way he's shaking. PB: listen to me right goddamn now PB: do not talk to me about helping the world PB: do not talk to me about civilization surviving PB: do not say a single fucking word about any of that PB: do you fucking understand PB: this is my test and you failed word two PB: listen fucking listen shut up and listen     His nose is dripping and he's tearing up and grinding his teeth and his whole body shakes from the sensation of adrenaline that, for once, has nowhere to go and nothing to do. It's very, very similar to the state he was in towards Mesmer Jr. a while back, and just as undignified. Maybe it's good they never plugged in a webcam, though that doesn't seem to affect this thing's ability to perceive. He does his best, though. PB: there are miserable crying and scared girls in front of you right now PB: they are so sad and stressed and so upset PB: and you have no ability to clearly figure out the situation PB: it's so complex. and there's a lot of big worldsize problems happening PB: and people are saying a bunch of different shit at you PB: and you have all this knowledge and it'll let you make the perfect decision PB: even though everyone's yelling you know the perfect choice PB: because you've been thinking about it for so long PB: that's the situation you're in     He takes a long, deep breath, tries to control his shaking. It doesn't work. No matter how many deep breaths he takes, no matter how much he closes his eyes and counts to five, in, counts to five, out... It's not doing anything. He's still shaking. It gets *worse* somehow. He paces back and forth in front of the machine, still full of that hatred and fury. PB: what do you do PB: tell me what you fucking do because there's one answer PB: there's one fucking answer to give PB: and you have one chance to give it and if you give the right answer PB: then everything is fine and you get to try solving problems and existing PB: you get to say you deserve to live PB: and if you give me the wrong answer i'm kicking your ass back into space PB: tell me what you do     "Tell me." He whispers, sniffling again, struggling to swallow. "Tell me what you fucking do. You fucker. Say it. Say it."
Trudy Grimm	The skeleton entombs the mysterious biomass which, in turn, entombs the skeleton. At first it struggles to move as the strands of growth tug on its limbs and joints like rubbery tendons. Once consumed by the silvery foam, it tilts its head back in a silent scream that is soon buried beneath a calcite cocoon.     Truth exhales, resting her hand on her book. She shoots a look at Petra-- currently standing solo. There's a bit of confusion on her face until Lilian returns for her and Trudy understands. The Sufferers are being cared for by the one closest to them. She quickly assesses Mesmer's progress with the recorder, then takes some time to check on Arthur. He snaps back to himself; Trudy nods once.     So she takes a moment to inspect her encased skeletal servant. Knowing better than to poke mysterious substances with her bare hands, she holds her hand out. The second skeleton, still At Large, calmly removes one of its forearm bones and places it into her waiting palm. With this nondescript radius, she prods the calcified cocoon gently with the rounded end. > "Tell me. Tell me what you fucking do. YOu fucker. Say it. Say it."     Arthur's muttering gets her attention on him again. She starts a bit. The bone is dropped (and caught by its owner to be put back in place) and she steps around the calcified skeleton. While she isn't sure what to say, the witch does reach out and place a hand on Arthur's shoulder. If nothing else, she can assure him that she's here; just as he was there for her not terribly long ago.
Tamamo	Tamamo figures one thing out, but hasn't guessed at another. "It is partly done. An incomplete state -- rather, a restoration to -- the time spent between the stars, no? It is not enough, is it? Is it enough?"     There wasn't a warning for Lilian removing Sakura. That has simply happened, in a space imperceivable. Tamamo, looking at a skeleton cocoon, is catching up. "Lilian! Do you--" She sees. "Yes, you have her. You have them both." That's as well as it can be. There was no way they were going to experience centuries of isolation and not be hurt by it. That much was fully expected.     Arthur is shaking. "Mr. Lowell? What is...?"     Roland and Mesmer are looking at a message. Arthur is typing. "Please allow me." Tamamo moves in to read, just in time to hear the beep of a new message arriving.     She reads it, and there's a trace of a frown. "No... no, it is..."     Glancing between that and Arthur, "It is only the recording, still." She can't really be calm about this, but she can keep a storm of emotion in check for a little while longer. "Something interrupted them. That explains the discharge. Like returning a shattered cup by rewinding the tape of its destruction, only to resume its flow halfway, and let the tea fall in a new pattern."     Looking toward where Sakura is being helped recover, "The question of 'how this came to pass' remains. Rather, it is 'how did it not come to pass?' Within a specific field, such an ability should not, by my estimation, be violable. This..."     A memory returns. "A defense mechanism, once again. Something that would occur by nature, or..." No, the specifics here don't matter. It was something to halt a Bloom. The capability has been demonstrated, and volition together with perception isn't required. "There is no need to make the same attempt. We will handle the rest by conventional means."     Arthur mutters, and Trudy reaches for his shoulder. Tamamo's fingers curl, hand at her side, without her noticing. She takes a step, and staggers a little, then recovers. Still holding it in.     Mostly repeating, "Allow me, please," Tamamo takes the keyboard to answer the mail. > The world continues to exist because its destruction was an unhappy ending, and one who could have ended the world wished for happiness. She did not wish for loneliness. By that wish, a new path is charted. Even now, they seek happiness, and know they will not find it in solitude. This answers your question. Do you understand?
Petra Soroka	Whatever methods Sakura is either imbued with or developed from cycling the Earth twenty seven times, Petra only has by inference. The incantation repels her as a Bloom, for the scraps that her efforts and obsession have created, but she can still only aspire to be like the four of them. The fundamental trait that all Blooms share, the 'ex nihilo' that defines them in the first place, is absent in her. The spark that she sustains in the vacuum is fire stolen from God.     When Petra is homesick, she cries and rants, and rages and sulks. But going through all of that time alone, only to reach company and civilization at the very very end of it, only to be met with shouting at the outskirts of the firelight and a line drawn in the sand to banish her, strikes her in her most vulnerable spot and her most vulnerable moment. The incantation is a bucket of cold water that drowns the one smoldering coal that she kept safe in her cupped hands.     In reality, when Sakura wails, Petra buckles, and then collapses. She folds up, face buried between her knees and hands gripping the back of her head so hard that the white of her knuckles comes through her skin and her nails dig furrows into her scalp. She's unnervingly, improbably silent, without a single sob escaping her even when the thrashing arcane energy glances her body and burns her skin.     However many minutes Lilian takes to calm Sakura down, Petra seems deaf to the world and rigidly insensate. The only motion she takes is to curl herself tighter and tighter, squeezing until her limbs are a pallid tapestry of purple and blotchy white, blocking out all sight and hearing with her own tangle of meat like a spider's death curl. She's shuddering with infintesimally small motions, not from being on the verge of crying but having slingshot to some distant place far beyond it.     When Lilian drops Petra in the airlock besides Sakura, her shoulders pop with the strain of moving. She reaches for Lilian's hand, misses, and then when Lilian leaves, she blindly finds Sakura instead and presses herself fully against her like a stuffed animal. Clinging to Sakura as an anchor point, Petra finally relaxes enough that her shoulders begin to shake visibly, but the onset of crying still remains silent and dull except for the wheezing in her throat when she tries to catch her breath.     She's not really in a state to do anything else! But she'll recover.
Lilian Rook	Sakura said that it takes years, every time, to rekindle the spark of self that allows her to function as a human being, each time the agony of the entire world must pass through her. Four hundred years through one soul alone is agonizing in its own unique way, but more bearable than nearly thirty years of hundreds of millions. Even mute and incoherent, the impulse to wish that someone else had things better compels her to place her quivering arms around Petra's shoulders, lean her head against hers, and move her fingers in little circles on her back. The contact, incidentally, is good for her too.     '...PB: listen fucking listen shut up and listen     ???: I can't do that. Every second might count.     ???: There is more to this world than just you.     '...PB: that's the situation you're in'     ???: I know what miserable, crying, and scared is.     ???: I have seen more of it than anyone could tolerate. I have been there.     '...PB: tell me what you do'     ???: I don't understand the question.     ???: What is it that you do?     ???: Does your culture assign individuals a utility function?     The substance doesn't react to Trudy. It has the same oddly hexagonal mesh pattern if examined up close, serving as the 'bubbles' in the foam, but it's shockingly hard for how little material is actually woven into it. It's the same as what had surrounded the probe itself, partially destroyed by the crash.     'Lilian! Do you-- Yes, you have her. You have them both.'     That's the cue for Lilian to finally breathe. "I do." she says, for no other reason than to cement the reality in front of everyone; her subordinates have often benefited from someone verbally confirming that the engagement is over, she has found in the past. "No serious injuries. We have to leave it up to them, now."     '...By that wish, a new path is charted. Even now, they seek happiness, and know they will not find it in solitude. This answers your question. Do you understand?'     ???: No. I'm sorry. I do understand that something unexpected has happened to your planet. There was a small but significant deviation in where it should be during its natural orbital period, leading to an unexpected emergency landing away from my intended destination.     The messenger app pauses for long enough that you can only conclude something is . . . thinking?     ???: Do you mean to imply that the Existential threat has intentionally deferred its own progression? Why?     "Remove the DTR." Lilian says, then realizes nobody is actually suited to doing so, sighs, and moves to do so herself. "We're not going to leave the data in the probe. There's no point and nothing to gain." she mutters, peering around the inside of the cavity and conjuring her own magic lights to find where the housing connects. "I'll store it at Laplace for now. We can't just return the computers like this; we have to move the data off them, and I don't have hundreds of floppy disks on me."     "Go home. Let these two recover. We'll come back to it later."