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sessions:007 [2014/12/25 15:18] pinkgothicsessions:007 [2017/11/18 15:22] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
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 Keneh paused, at first to stare out of the van at Delaney, perhaps thinking her to be joshing her. Then she considers the request. For a moment, she's picturing herself tossing the suitcase at Delaney with the comment 'Here, catch!', but of course that would hardly be a sensible thing to do. She grabs a hold of the one she's got, then pushes to her feet, annoyance in her body language. Her gaze sweeps the inside of the van - everything is interesting. Absolutely everything. She gives a frustrated grunt, then reaches down to pick up the broken suitcase that had spooked her earlier, simply to spite it. Fortunately, it doesn't fall apart as she lifts it. A moment later, she's sliding out the back of the van. "You're making me steal things," she points out, venting her frustration with a petty accusation. She saunters a few paces away from the van, making sure to hold both her foraging prizes in one hand. The other rises up to her face to scratch lightly at an itch on her tip of her nose. "Better?" she asks. Keneh paused, at first to stare out of the van at Delaney, perhaps thinking her to be joshing her. Then she considers the request. For a moment, she's picturing herself tossing the suitcase at Delaney with the comment 'Here, catch!', but of course that would hardly be a sensible thing to do. She grabs a hold of the one she's got, then pushes to her feet, annoyance in her body language. Her gaze sweeps the inside of the van - everything is interesting. Absolutely everything. She gives a frustrated grunt, then reaches down to pick up the broken suitcase that had spooked her earlier, simply to spite it. Fortunately, it doesn't fall apart as she lifts it. A moment later, she's sliding out the back of the van. "You're making me steal things," she points out, venting her frustration with a petty accusation. She saunters a few paces away from the van, making sure to hold both her foraging prizes in one hand. The other rises up to her face to scratch lightly at an itch on her tip of her nose. "Better?" she asks.
  
-**✘ IN PROGRESS**+<fc #008888>She breathed a sigh of relief. Okay, they were technically still too close if those cylinders were liquid oxygen or something, but if they were just nitrogen - and for a biotech company, they almost certainly were - then at least diving behind Robert's car was a possibility. "We can put them back afterwards. And if the police appear we were checking for survivors, and now we're looking for contact details because the van doesn't have any on the outside." </fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Delaney glanced back over at the van to check that. Not that she was actually going to ring any "How's my driving! Contact on this number!" that was marked but maybe they could get back online and have someone //else// do that. From overseas where it was safe to do so.</fc> 
 + 
 +Keneh's slid back down into a kneel by now, the position uncomfortable on the hard pavement, but her curiosity simply getting the better of her. She puts the broken suitcase down beside her and slides the other half onto her lap, then fumbles with the clasps. While she finds their grasp firm and them reluctant to budge, they look like the only obstacle - unless this is going to turn into a bad movie and it's going to spray her with acid or something. The vague superstition makes her tilt her torso to the side a little, alleviating the mild pang of paranoia with a pointless gesture - then she flips it open. 
 + 
 +Robert's sauntered back by now, keeping a distance of approximately five metres, wary and frustrated, but clearly his curiosity has finally wrestled his mood into submission. He looks grouchy, daring anyone to say something about how he's yet to disappear into the car despite all his voiced concerns, but he's keeping perfectly quiet now. 
 + 
 +There are four vials in the suitcase, filled with something that might as well be coloured water. There's a sheet of paper in the top. Keneh plucks it out with some curiosity. Oh, great, another ID - and then a bunch of incomprehensible jargon, in key words, printed into some kind of template table. "Delaney?" Keneh asks, glancing at her and holding out the sheet of paper. "Does this look relevant to you?" Her free hand closes the lid on the suitcase and slides it back down onto the pavement, then fishes for the other one. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>This was a bad idea and she was doing it anyway. Taking the form she eyed it carefully. Those strings of letters and numbers were probably the ID of each vial, and that cluster of digits in it might possibly be a date from... some time in September? Maybe? Handled by three teams or scientists or technicians, plus one courier. Stable at room temperature, that was nice. "I think this is saying it breaks down at about eighty degrees? Except I'm not sure what 'this' is," she reported. "If it's related to the hoard at least we know cremation will work." Nevermind the fact nobody had heard of one of the things being killed yet.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Contact details for a lab in Townsville - she was going to make the assumption that place was utterly doomed and a deathtrap based on Ethan's last report - but nothing that she could puzzle out that told her where the van was going. 'Inland', except there wasn't much in this direction. Surely it should have been heading south towards Brisbane. Or to the airport. Unless they weren't able to get on a commercial flight with unknown biologicals, which kind of made sense, but west via Darwin was a horrible route overland.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"Is it too supervillainy to wonder if Deiparous has some secret underground lab hidden on a cattle station?" Delaney asked as she flipped the page over seeking something useful.</fc> 
 + 
 +The second suitcase has popped open by now, albeit only after some stubborn coaxing involving awkwardly twisted arms - the damage to it's managed to make one of the two clasps event more difficult to pry open, as if it were an animal that's gotten its bite tensely caught in prey. "It might not be that secret," Keneh offers. "Maybe the government made them build at least one lab somewhere remote, where standard pathogens won't do much damage, and told them to put all their viral research there." A sigh. "...this is still greek to me. This is making me feel illiterate." Another piece of paper finds itself passed to Delaney, almost absent-mindedly, as Keneh inspects the single, larger vial in this one. It looks like it's a shipment of desert sand, though no doubt it's something else. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"Oh come on, couldn't they attach a spectra or a molecular diagram or a receptor site or //something//?" she said in frustration. More papers were shuffled. "We have a vial of... blah. That should not be mixed with blurr, which is probably in one of these cases too, but no idea what either of them are. Other than it kills more mice than water but less than ethanol, which at least makes it fairly harmless if anyone wants to be suicidal and take a swig."</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>If she was brutally honest her chain of custody forms probably didn't make much more sense than this one did either, but at least stuff like haemoglobin and salt levels were widely recognised! These had a heap of tests with funny codenames that may not be code names after all, but were no less helpful for it. She felt like a high schooler again.</fc> 
 + 
 +Keneh closes the case again, letting it settle on the pavement next to the other. For a moment, she stares down at them reprimandingly, then her gaze sweeps back to the van. It lingers well past its welcome. Without announcement, she tips forward, then pushes herself up to a stand from that brief instant of being on all fours, and a moment later, she's walking back to the van. Time to get another two... even if trying to understand any of these substances seems sisyphean and the others aren't going to be any better. She wants to do something useful, damnit. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Her friend reaches the van again before Delaney realises where she's gone. "Keneh, we can't just sit in the middle of the road and go through all their paperwork!" she protests as she stuffs the pages back where they came from and snaps the cases shut again.</fc> 
 + 
 +"I'd go through it in the van instead, but by decree of Delaney I'm not allowed," Keneh calls over in dry humour. Clunk. Thud. With a glint to her eye, Keneh resurfaces from the shadowed interior with two more suitcases. A part of her wanted to counter-protest that they were in no rush now that they were past Charters Towers, but that seemed both insincere and unnecessarily grim in subtext. She resists the urge to toss Delaney one of the suitcases to keep her busy, instead walking back to where the other two suitcases are and slumping back down into a sit - less aggravating for her knees this time. The first one clicks open. "Where do you get this sort of suitcase padding, anyway?" Keneh finds herself asking. "Or suitcases like these, for that matter," she adds in after-thought. Her adrenaline seems to have made way for a reasonably good mood for the moment. Maybe it was that she was fooling herself that they really had all the time in the world for this - a luxurious illusion of freedom. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"Rowe Scientific and Edwards Group do them, I think?" she answered after racking her brain for which company names were on the front cover of the supply catalogues. "Or just get a locking case from wherever and get a custom insert made, people do that for stuff like guns and collectables all the time." It was a good thought but she couldn't see the cases being a good way of tracking the company down. Not that they needed to, they knew exactly where Deiparous Technologies was. Err, or at least where it had been.</fc> 
 + 
 +Keneh popped open the first case and tugged out another paper. A brief glance proves it another one for Delaney to assess - evidently Delaney is not being consulted as to whether she //wants// to assess them and her gripe about how they're in the middle of the road (well, side of it, but same difference) doing something probably pointless is clearly being ignored. 
 + 
 +It's when the next case opens and three pieces of paper find themselves tugged out of the top that Keneh's interest is rekindled. The first one is more gobbledygook for her, following the structure of all the previous paperwork they've been through. It's the second that makes her pause. It's split into sections, some of which have a language Keneh can actually handle. 'Firmware Version'. 'Neural Network Interface'. 'Fractal Propagation'. 'Latency'
 + 
 +She looks at the vials - there are four of them, each about as wide as two of her fingers, filled with an oddly creased black liquid. The hair on the back of her neck are, as of yet, undecided whether to raise. Other than that this stuff is programmable, or can interface with other software, she doesn't know anything truly damning just yet. 
 + 
 +She brings up the third page, shuffling the other two to behind it. Her left hand rises to slide a finger in under her glasses, giving the inner corner of her left eye a light scratch as she looks at it. This seemed to be some sort of legal advice in keyword form, referring to several paragraphs... no doubt instructions as to what rights, exactly, needed to be waived by a test subject. 
 + 
 +"...Delaney," she says, tugging at her friend's attention, briefly trapping her tongue between her lips. "I'm a little terrified I might have hit the jackpot." A distributed, programmable system that came in vial form. There was nothing saying this was a neural modification - neural network was the software paradigm and said nothing about the biological component - but if it was, the chances this was relevant for Townsville suddenly seemed significant. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>In almost all circumstances 'jackpot' was a good word. Maybe it was the tone, but Delaney suspected they'd just found one of the exceptions. She leaned against Keneh's shoulder to glance over the forms. Then stopped glancing and read them properly. "Neural network would be software, software interface... well, that could explain the 'telepathy', it's not like we've seen any of them shoved in a Faraday cage," the biologist mutters.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Physical explanations for mutant powers is good. It lets people understand them, and if you understand something you can counter it. Remote pyrokinesis and telekinesis are more of a struggle to justify. Especially when even the most tentative solutions - projection of a pyrophoric liquid or gas, and either some sort of ultrasonics or a simple air pressure wave - would require large scale modification of a human body. Messing with the central nervous system she could (barely) comprehend. Realtime restructuring of large amounts of the body struck Delaney as pure science fiction. Although if it was happening around her she guessed she'd have to reassign that to science fact.</fc> 
 + 
 +"Software interface means it can be extended," Keneh comments, meaning it as a tentative correction. "So whatever this is, it's meant to be a module... - a framework, perhaps." Keneh's motions are slow now, very cautious, regarding the bottled substance with wariness. //Blood vector// - according to Ethan, or whatever had been left of him at the time. Please let that not have been a lie. If this was airborne in any way, she didn't want to be anywhere near it. 
 + 
 +'Calm down, this could be anything,' she told herself, but the knot in her chest did not want to budge. "Can you tell me anything about the biological function of it?" she asks, glancing up at Delaney, with a look on her face asking to be either told 'this is unrelated' or, at the very least, 'it's not airborne'. The fact she could open the case relatively easily either doesn't strike her as a reliable way of determining that it must be a very low-risk contaminant - or it hasn't occurred to her, either way. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"So we have an operating system in goop form? Windows Slime?" Delaney asked, gesturing at the bottles. That was a disturbing though. Yes, it was probably a more flexible alternative to trying to shove hardcoded things into a body and expecting them to play nice, but biological systems did not respond well to bugs. Possible case in point, Townsville. Who for once probably //could// use some Power Puff Girls.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>She turned back to the consent forms. Lots of disclaimers... okay, frankly scary amounts of disclaimers, including what looked like 'if this kills you your family cannot sue us for millions, and if we only cripple you we pay your expenses for a year at most'. Possibly significant but she wouldn't be surprised if their were similar templates in mild stuff like steroid cream just in case. Nothing on transmission vectors but equally nothing indicating it was //supposed// to be transmissible. In fact she could assume that no, that bit was BAD, nobody will ever regulate that. Not to mention being a nightmare to profit from. Medical piracy in a brave new world, that.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Aha! "It's meant to be administered intravenously and then it crosses the blood brain barrier," Delaney read. "It doesn't spell out what it is supposed to do once there. I think they were still making sure the test subjects weren't about to drop dead? There's a mention about possible seizures but that animal models were inconclusive."</fc> 
 + 
 +That brief elaboration is plenty to twist Keneh's gut into a knot as well. She's decided she doesn't feel so well. In a careful but firm motion, she pushes the case a few inches away from her. In her mind, a sense of responsibility wrestles with an instinctive disgust. 
 + 
 +They should take this to someone who knows more about this. Deiparous in... wherever they were situated. They might be responsible for the Townsville apocalypse, but they were also extraordinarily well qualified to handle it. Maybe they knew something about the substance that would allow them to come up with a vaccine, or a cure, or anything else that might stop it from actively spreading itself to new hosts. 
 + 
 +But she already knew it would take a supreme act of will to sit in the same car as this stuff, even if it was complete superstition on her part. The case clearly wasn't about to bite her. 
 + 
 +"...so," she says slowly, after an awkward moment's pause. "I vote we take this to wherever it was meant to be taken... then tell the staff what happened in Townsville, if they haven't heard about it yet, and hope they can engineer something to counter it." 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"As long as the driver didn't just see everything going to hell and jump in the first vehicle there and bolt out of town. It'd explain the crash," she cautioned. "Or if he wasn't delivering it to Townsville and saw something and decided to turn around." It was hard thinking of her home as a total no-go area. Hard, but vital, and there was more than enough sheer panic at the thought of returning to enforce that.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Still, finding Deiparous and giving them the stuff was probably a good idea. Unless they got arrested for theft. But this was not a video game, companies were not supposed to be evil in real life, she doubted they were BIG enough to be able to act evil in real life (unlike, say, Monsanto), and within 24 hours they were going to be getting //extreme// bad publicity. And nasty government attention. Surely they'd be grateful for any practical attempts to help or at least not make things worse, and giving suspicious documents and formulae to the media counted as 'worse'.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>"Do you remember which bit of paper any of those addresses were on?" Delaney asked Keneh before pivoting to Robert. "Thoughts?"</fc> 
 + 
 +Robert has evidently been staring at them in silence. Judging by his body language and facial expression, he's not particularly happy about the sudden extra responsibility, but isn't going to complain - this has the potential to be a more tangible help than any previous attempts they've done. That their previous attempts all went awry... he's going to ignore that for now. "I have no interest in staying on this road any longer than absolutely necessary," Robert says, flatly. "If you want, you can put the other cases back, but as far as I'm concerned, we're going to Cloncurry before we do anything else. Then we can look for addresses." 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>They were en route to Cloncurry, the van was facing in the same direction, the van was presumably on route to Cloncurry and then past there because there was nothing interesting labwise there. So it was the right direction. And maybe someone from Deiparous could come to them if they phoned. Wouldn't that be nice?</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>(No, mutant Townsville hivemind did //not// count as part of Deiparous, even if it had started in one of their labs by eating their employees.)</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Delaney levered herself to her feet. "Okay, so we definitely need this case, we can probably skip the others? As long as we've a clue where we're going or who we're calling later."</fc> 
 + 
 +Okay. Okay, taking the suitcase along required actually //taking// the suitcase. Keneh frowned - then closed her eyes, letting the battle rage on inside her. A drawn-out exhale morphs into a motion - then she's snapped it back shut and is shuffling to her feet with it. //Calling// might be the easiest exercise of the mentioned ones, given every single page they've read so far has a footer in fine-print with the most basic information about the main headquarters of Deiparous - but unfortunately, that's in Townsville. On the other hand, Deiparous had clients, and where there were clients, there were prospective clients, and while they hadn't looked for numbers and addresses on their website before - given they'd only wanted to verify that it was, in fact, a company that could conceivably be responsible for the Townsville disaster - there no doubt would be. Alternatively, there would be a list of clients, and //those// could be asked. 
 + 
 +Keneh's gaze dips down to the pavement, regarding the other suitcases. There was a strong urge to just leave them where they now were, simply to get away faster, but it was best if it wasn't completely obvious they'd raided the van... especially if others from Townsville came past here. Other //less human// passersby. She glances to Robert, dithering - then passes the case to him and begins to collect the other cases. Putting them back required walking back to the van and Delaney wouldn't like that, but nothing had exploded yet and she just really could not feel intimidated by a set of cylinders that looked like you could drop a bomb on them without that they'd get as much as a scratch. 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Ack, the van was still a death trap. Then again, it was a moderately contained one and surely the gas cylinders would have pressure valves. There was no ominous hissing. If they were quick and careful it should be safe-ish. If this blew up in her face - literally - it would be on her head, though. At least if they weren't hit she'd be able to say "I told you so" for the next week.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>...which should not be an argument in favour of doing something dangerous. Clearly she needed sleep.</fc> 
 + 
 +<fc #008888>Still chastising herself under her breath Delaney bent to help Keneh with the spare cases. The sooner they were back on the road, the better.</fc>
sessions/007.1419520729.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/11/18 15:22 (external edit)