Symbiosis [RPG]

[mtmerrick]

==Random Soldier==
One of general carters men stopped short. The "thing" they were supposed out be transporting had disappeared. Aw crud, Carters gonna kill me

==Alexa==
Alexa slowed down at a red light, and saw in a parking lot, several government-looking squads, two restrained individuals, and what looked like a robot built around a trash can. "Uh.... Kaze, Illia....?"

[Magical Girl Mimi]

-==IC: Omega==-

"... I see it too." Omega said with a blank look on his face, as he stared at the robot with an incredulous look on his face.
What the heck is that thing?

[mtmerrick]

==Alexa==

"Those don't look like any American feds I know......."

[Trijhak]

IC:

"I have no ideas, Carter. Also, what is that tapping at the window? And why have we stopped?"

The day just gets weirder... Daniel thought to himself.

[Magical Girl Mimi]

-==IC: Omega==-

"I didn't think so either." Omega agreed, still looking at the very odd robot.

[Trijhak]

IC:

"Nevermind my questions. I'm going to get out of this vehicle and ask why we've stopped. That will hopefully provide the answers I seek."

As soon as he finished speaking, Daniel exited the vehicle and immediately stopped as he saw one of the weirdest looking things he ever saw.

WHAT THE [CENSORED FOR MLNO]

[mtmerrick]

==Alexa==
"They're not after you are they?"
"..."
"Why does that robot keep driving into that SUV?"
 Daniel then came out of the car. "And... he's just a kid. What's going on over here?'

[Flipz]

OOC: Apologies if this ends up being a double-post, hopefully it won't be, given how long I've been typing it up.

==Lord Regulus==

Regulus led Tyler into a river-side shed, into a long, apparently-disused tunnel beneath the underground city.  After almost fifteen minutes' worth of walking, Regulus walked into the rusted-out remains of a telephone box, one that had apparently dropped through a hole in the ceiling above.  Suddenly, the interior of the box flashed with holographic projections and scanners, and after a full minute of scanning, Regulus smiled and stepped out of the telephone box.  Tyler keenly notices the rust had now taken on a distinct tinge of blue, if that was at all possible.  "It's open," Regulus announced, "You may follow me."

Inside was a technological marvel.  A device of cogs and gears so intricately complex even a symbiote would take decades to repair it.  Regulus smiled and chuckled.  "Oh, that.  It's just a replica, we use it to refine spare parts.  Do us a favor and don't tell SCP, would you?  It's bad enough that our kind is in their database."

Moving on, Regulus allowed a needle on a handpad to draw some blood.  Once the DNA match was confirmed, he gestured Jarvis, Tyler, and two scientists through.

Inside was a stark white curcular room with bent walls, like a sphere with the top and bottom sliced off.  The walls immediately lit up with cyan and lime green lines of light, like a gigantic, complex circuit board.  A tone sounded, and Regulus strode over to a wall where a clear panel of Google Glass popped out.  After several complex login sequences, a door on the opposite side of the chamber opened.  An emaciated, elderly man on agurney was wheeled in on a stretcher by two men in white medical coats bearing a complex medical sigil apparently embossed by pure silver.  Accompanying them was a beautiful woman with flowing black hair that fanned out behind her as she walked--another scientist, if her lab coat and tablet device were any indication.  Tyler could dimly spot the outlines of more fantastically complex gearworks at the edges of the door--unlike the previous device, these mechanisms had been enhanced with electronic components and connections, but were no less complex.  Regulus gestured to one of the scientists who had accompanied the group in from the gears chamber.

"Mr. Matthews, meet Dr. Cave Cliffords."  The man, a slightly balding fellow with thin-rimmed glasses and an expensive-looking analog wristwatch, nodded politely.  Regulus gestured to the body on the gurney.  "Doctor Cliffords has been dead for three years now."  As the living Cliffords stood next to the stretcher, Tyler could see the resemblence--clearly the mand had fallen victim to a terrible disease.  "The last time we tested this device, a dolt of a technician failed to properly seal a container of radioactive material--a highly rare isotope with a very specific signature that we planned to use to track whether or not the actual time travel was successful.  Long story short, after a few moments, the container burst and Doctor Cliffords experienced a severe and quickly fatal dose of radiation, leading to his death.  A year later, however, he reappeared in this chamber, apparently none the worse for wear.    The container had failed to transport, but he had.  Upon re-autopsy, we discovered that Doctor Cliffords' symbiote had survived the accident and left his body, and found a new host--Dr. Carol Johnson, here."  Regulus indicated the black-haired woman next to the gurney.  "We've kept them apart, for the most part--for obvious reasons--but occasionally we've risked their interaction--such as now.  Dr. Johnson is in the unique position of knowing what advances in research her past self had made, and therefore being able to pick up from where Dr. Cliffords leaves off.  Of course, there's an obvious problem--"

"Stop staring at my--"
"I'm not, I swear!"
"I distinctly remember doing so, and I distinctly remember me telling me to stop--"

"Jarvis, please, separate them before I get another headache like the last time."  As Jarvis lets the scientists out of the room, Regulus resumes.  "Aside from that issue--oddly, you'd expect someone to get along better with themself--there's another pressing issue with the situation that I'm sure a brilliant scientist like yourself has figured out."

OOC: Dear god, this is making my brain hurt, but I think I've almost hit all the plot points I need for this.

==General Carter==
Carter tackles Daniel to the ground and, shielding him from the robot, pulls his handgun on the thing.  "Stay back!  Just, stay back!"

[Trijhak]

IC:

Can this thing interact with humans?

Daniel inched slowly towards the robot, trying to be as calm as possible.

"Are you capable of speech?" he asked it, waiting for its reply.

[mtmerrick]

==Tyler==

"You're saying, what, time travel is possible? Ive been one of the greatest minds in theoretical physics. So unless you have possession of some tachyions, I'm afar aid I don't quite comprehend." After a short pause he added "thou if you do have a tachyion generator, this changes everything"

[Magical Girl Mimi]

-==IC: Caan==-

"Yes." Caan said in a robotic manner of speaking.
"Would you like some tea?" Caan asked, as the eye-stalk motioned toward the tray that was in front of it, even as the eye-stalk swiveled toward General Carter.

[Trijhak]

IC:

"No... I would not like some tea. Why are you here? Pretty random place for something like... you... to be." Daniel asked, now very confused as why there was a giant pepper pot robot asking him if he wanted tea. Tea was no reason to stop a vehicle.

[Magical Girl Mimi]

-==IC: Caan==-

"I exist to serve." Caan stated robotically, as it looked around.
"And if you have an insect problem, I would be glad to exterminate."

OOC: Yes, I wanted to throw that in, while keeping to the insanely peaceful personality currently there. =P

[Trijhak]

IC:

"Well, we do have an insect problem, if it's not already dead. It's, well, you'll know our problem when you see it. A black creature with ten legs and about 2.5 feet long. According to him there;" Daniel said, pointing at General Carter, "our 'insect problem' should be in a containment unit. Is that something you could do?"

[mtmerrick]

==Alexa==

Alexa watched, perplexed, as the flustered buy began having a conversation with the robot. He was tuned away, so she couldn't read lips, but the body language spoke volumes. "Wait a second, is that robot holding a teacup? o_O"

Edit: @ kz - feet, not inches

[Flipz]

==General Carter==
Carter cautiously lowers the gun, but still stays alert and ready to spring into action.  He decides to let Daniel do the talking, and stays silent.

==Tyler==

"You're saying, what, time travel is possible? Ive been one of the greatest minds in theoretical physics. So unless you have possession of some tachyions, I'm afar aid I don't quite comprehend." After a short pause he added "thou if you do have a tachyion generator, this changes everything"

==Lord Regulus==
"We can produce...limited amounts.  Part of the problem--and the reason we haven't taken full advantage of the device--is that the process by which we generate them is positively ancient; the first iteration was steam-powered!  We've made a few advancements since then, but..."  He shrugs.

"That's not the problem I was talking about, though.  Remember how we have two copies of the same symbiont?  It's a bit of a long story, but basically, the device can, for now, only project subjects into the future.  Furthermore, those subjects...don't stay there.  The cells in Dr. Cliffords' body keep growing increasingly temporally unstable; at a certain point, they'll be drawn inexorably back to his own time, to the moment of the accident.  We've managed to slow it down, somewhat, by keeping the machine on but idling and keeping him within range of the associated electromagnetic fields, but it's still inexorable.  The same thing happened when Bill Hawks and Dimitri Allen built their time machine well over a century ago; a young woman was transported to the future, and was drawn back to the moment of that machine's cataclysmic destruction.  That's why we need you."

"Of course, any and all contributions to this project would be highly useful--at this point, it's highly likely we'll need biotechnology to synthesize the componens we need for tachyon generation in any substantial quantities, as well as to properly regulate the reaction and dispersal--but our primary consern is with achieving permanent transit.  If we can nullify the temporal anchoring effect--well, you can imagine the advantages.  A bomb's about to go off?  Time-travel to a point after the explosion and its afterefects.  Infected with AIDS?  Time-travel to a time when there's a cure.  And as to revenge...let's just say that, if we can get the system capable of reverse time-travel, some judicious tampering with the past could prevent larger disasters, though of course the utmost care would have to be taken to prevent alterations--we need to maintain stable time loops, rather than branching eventual outcomes.  In the case with Infinitus, I think some early-childhood brainwashing, triggered by a specific audiovisual cue, might be just the thing to deal with him."

"Of course, that sort of thing is still many years away.  For now...I'd say shooting him a hundred years into the future should be most effective at neutralizing him in the present, wouldn't you agree?"

[mtmerrick]

==Tyler==

"But what about the orbital path of the planet? Even if the sun was stationary, where earth is in the solar system now will be empty space next week."

==Alexa==

Alexa's eyes widened as she saw general carter. "Uhoh" she muttered.

[Flipz]

==Lord Regulus==
Regulus nods.  "I should point out that part of the reason we don't have reverse-travel capability is because it's pseudo-time-travel--we're exploiting relativity to accelerate the subject to the speed of light, utilizing our own equipment to ensure that the acceleration is executed along a curvature to correctly intercept Earth's location in the future.  It should be noted as well that our equipment generates a static energy packet at either end of a universal temporal relativistic curve; essentially, we create two momentary "bubbles" in spacetime that we can then use to track and calculate the necessary curve.  The tachyons generated by our limited process are used to track the stream of matter as it travels through what is, to oversimplify things, an artificially-generated wormhole.  Without this tracking, we cannot input the minor corrections necessary for precise destination calculations--the process generates a sort of Shroedinger anomaly at the source end, wherein the target is both present and already transported for about five seconds.  Our computers handle the necessary adjustments, but the generation equipment we have set up here has been refined and tailored since Allen's time such that the needed adjustments are minimal.  It's truly a brilliant setup, if I do say so myself--I have been working on this for my entire lifetime, after all."  He frowns.  "We've refined everything so well that we can set an exact time of forward transit as small as eighteen hours and still be able to determine the precise moment of arrival down to the second (less than that and the accuracy starts to drop dramatically).  The problem is, no matter how much we refine the process itself, the target aways manages to get pulled back to the present.  And we don't know why.  Our weakest area is in biological processes, and we think that's the key to figuring out what's happening.  We've sent inanimate objects through, and they get dragged back, but the time they spend in the future is always too short to get definitive results--they usually "fizzle out" while we're in the middle of scanning them, and they show no measurable anomalies when they return in the past.  Living beings, on the other hand, seem to be able to spend anywhere from a tenth to a sixth of the time "skipped" in the future, before being dragged back to the past.  Dr. Cliffords has been the exception, of course, but the specific physics involved are so complex as to yield little usable data, and in any case we know we can't find a full solution from him alone, since we obviously have his body."

OOC: I have a general idea of what's wrong, and it has to do with a combination of advanced speculative physics and the pseudo-semiphysical nature of the human consciousness.  Want me to PM you my explanation of the problem, or do you want to take a crack at it before the assassin shows up?

OOC2: Also, accelerating something to the speed of light and sending it through a wormhole can (theoretically) do some really weird stuff, which is why I have the tachyons to slow the matter stream down.  You know some funky junk is going on when something that by definition goes faster than the speed of light is being used to slow something down.

[mtmerrick]

OOC: the scary part was, i understood every word of that, and i have questions. but for the sake of not breaking the story i'll go along with it. And nah, i'll let you explain it

IC: Tyler just nodded. "so, the time-skipper is what your project is then. well i must say you've done a good job hiding it, and you're right, Chris would have joined in a heartbeat. as it is i'd love to help however i can."

[Flipz]

OOC: MTM, for your viewing pleasure I'd like you to imagine this next segment with the music from the very first chapter of Portal 2 playing; specifically, the part starting from when the alarm starts going off and the room starts moving; on the soundtrack, it's at about 1:07 in "The Courtesy Call"

==Regulus Laboratories==
"Excellent.  Most excellent.  If we give Jarvis a couple of days to finish moving your estate to Underground London, we'll be able to get started then.  In the meantime, perhaps you would care to see some of the amenities we have he--"

An alarm starts going off.  It's not a casual 'a bird tripped the motion sensor' alarm, either.

"*****************!!!" Regulus curses in Demotic.  He grabs Tyler's arm and starts dragging him to a circular pad of lights that had appeared in the room; tyler sees that the lights had suddenly changed colors and were now displaying a number of what could only be alerts and indicators of whatever was going on outside.  "This is why I hate traveling without Carter; there's only one way out of here, and the intruder's using it."  He activates some controls, and a pinpoint aperture at the center of the pad suddenly opens up and drops Tyler and Regulus into a huge, darkened warehouse below.  "We'll have to lose them in the warehouses.  Stay alert, stay close, and for ****'s sake, don't touch anything."  Walking to a large support beam, he waves his hand across a sensor, revealing a hidden panel with a pair of teardrop-shaped blades in it.  Regulus holds one one-handed, apparently familiar with its odd, illogically-balanced weight and heft, and tosses the other to Tyler.  "Anti-technology field," he explains, "for lack of time to explain in detail.  They can't track us now, and any advanced weaponry they try and use on us will fail."  The aperture above them suddenly snaps shut, plunging the two symbiotic hybrids into darkness.  Regulus presses an inset trigger in the handle, and a jet of faint, etherial "flames" bursts forth from the tip of the device, providing a little light.  "Be very careful with these; they inhibit all combustion in the area they occupy.  All combustion," he repeats unnecessarily; Tyler's knowledge of basic cellular biology had already moved to the logical implications of that statement.  "Controls are like a flamethrower, but with considerably more control over the exact size and spread of the gouts of 'flame.'  Hopefully you won't need to get the hang of it."  Regulus gestured for Tyler to follow him down the darkened, deserted halls of heavy iron doors and reinforced titanium crates.

OOC: Random encounter time; read a bit of SCP and make up something; we need to give the assassin time to get inside.
Also, yes, that was a seventeen-letter curse.