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After some soda, the other two videos were unspectacular when it came to granting new information. They'd pinned two new markers onto the map and shared it publicly - and Robert had found a way to add commentary to the markers, in which he pasted the associated youtube links (though he accidentally switched up two for the whole five seconds it took to realise it).
A Google search (prompted by 'Have you searched anywhere other than youtube?') for Robert's prized keywords yielded a clearly well-established joke site about conspiratorial and paranormal phenomena around Townsville, but also turned up a handful recent Twitter messages. Twitter had taken to the subject with the vanity hashtag #ashfall, which served to give Robert a name for his wikia. Apparently he didn't much care about formatting - everything went on one page, as blandly as possible for the time being, a collection of links with descriptions most often simply the title of the source.
They spent another hour calming themselves down a little, awkwardly talking about other things as if their past lives still held relevance… and then noticed one of the twitterers was, in a stroke of irony, the author behind the joke site. A curious - perhaps also hopefully sceptical - click onto the page in question revealed that the latest blog entry was entitled 'Something unexpectedly serious for a change', lamenting that the site was probably the worst place to put it, but he didn't maintain a different one, linking to the youtube videos and explaining that it was, as far as he could tell, real. The blog entry was being actively expanded, although chiefly with observations they'd already made on their own. The activity was enough for Robert to link to the wiki in the comments, suggesting collecting information there.
From there it was less than half an hour until Robert and 'Ethan Z' (Ethan did not like giving out his last name) had opened a Hangout. Ethan was blogging and tweeting from mobile, moving through the city at the moment, trying to chart out some of the damage. In the solitude past midnight, he enjoyed the virtual company - he'd already explicitly thanked them for providing some much needed emotional support just by being alive, and suggested they read his 'Zombie Survival Guide', including applicable paragraphs about how to stay mostly invisible while on foot, how to pack if a return to one's safehouse was not promised by fate, how to pick safehouses… matters he hadn't thought he'd ever need to take seriously, much as he'd nerded out getting them right, but was now following meticulously.
At the moment he was travelling up Castle Hill with binoculars to see if he could estimate the relative density of the problem in the various suburbs by signs of fire by charting the city from the highest point, and things were fairly calm.
The Hangout popped up with Ethan Z: got any theories?. They'd only exchanged facts so far - nothing about what might have caused this, what the mutants hoped to achieve. It was Delaney's turn with the laptop at the moment. Robert had encouraged both of them to treat it as if it were their own, given his concern for the information infrastructure. Who knew when they'd lose contact? No point being territorial about it.
Delaney finally understood the phrase 'crawling up the walls'. Tiredness, anxiety, fear, doubt and the urge to do something were a volatile mixture and attempting to go Spiderman on the bricks was starting to seem reasonable. It wasn't as if anyone ELSE was obeying the laws of physics. Why should she have to?
Instead she was sitting here playing at being that annoying voice in RTS that calls out map positions and provides canned responses and helps move the plot along and warns 'enemy unit sighted!' whenever something went ping. Which was better than being Ethan and out there in person, but she'd always thought people that had full scale zombie survival plans were crazy.
And no, this situation was not changing her opinion of that. Zombies did not have telekinesis, pyrokinesis, the ability to crush steel or the foresight to capture people for non-edible purposes. Ergo any plan based purely on zombies was not going to work, and it was sheer luck that Ethan's schemes were more broadly apocalyptic-survival in nature.
Which was also unfair. If they were stuck in a post-Apocalypse situation surely they were supposed to know what the Apocalypse was.
Multiple, and they all sound like Hollywood. Xenomorph wearing human skin is winning she tapped back under Robert's Hangout name. Which was admittedly unhelpful, but how could you apply logic to something that was gleefully breaking science left right and centre?
Ethan continues: ok! I got nothing better, would guess government project gone wrong but as much as my opinion of them is not very high this seems like more of a fuck-up than even they would manage.
Robert and Keneh meanwhile are sat with their backs against the wall, watching the security cameras continue to stream unfettered images of the dishearteningly boring exterior and interior views of the mall. On the one hand, it was a welcome assurance that they had more than a few minutes left. On the other hand, if it weren't for Ethan, they'd feel like idiots for staying here when there was clearly nothing terrible going on any more. They're both enjoying a can of soda, each, but it's Robert that looks more refreshed. Likely he'll have no problem outlasting either of them. No surprise, he probably slept during the day.
Ethan comments: what I don't get – why is there no clear epicentre? short of 'townsville as a whole' which doesn't count
Government project hadn't actually occurred to her as a theory. It probably should have but that would require compentence she wasn't entirely sure they possessed, or offloading it to the CSIRO who definitely knew better and understood how containment worked. Or at least she hoped they did. If it was government Abbott would be boasting about miraculously breaking science and blaming townsville for panicking she typed while rolling her eyes.
Ethan had a good point though. If this was 'something from space' there should be a crater somewhere, and she wasn't sure that carpark fiery skid mark counted. Didn't re-entry cause a sonic boom? Because that hadn't happened.
Could the epicenter be something non-obvious? A device they can't get too far from? Throwing random ideas., or some sort of latent incubation period that gives them time to scatter and now they're looking for something.
It takes a minute for Ethan to start typing again, judging by the Hangouts activity indicator. incubation period? what kind of disease gives you super powers? Then: I mean.. could be I guess?
It took a moment for her to reread the conversation and realise what Ethan was getting at. I wasn't thinking disease, more parasite. Like that fungus that enslaves ant. Sorry, biologist here, Delaney responded apologetically. Doens't explain where it might have come from or how to stop it if that's the case.
A disease would be nicer than a parasite. A disease could be cured, a parasite had to be killed and extracted, possibly not in that order. And sometimes actively killed its host. And now her thought were going incredibly dark places again, so she took a sip of soda and ordered the sugar to make them go away.
✘ IN PROGRESS