Scoping out spirit residue
{{ | date=07/07/2018 | summary=Alma asks for Emma's help with the gate. (previously) | cast=
| place_name=Emma's office in the Hall of Science | log=It's gorgeous outside, which is why it's almost a crime to be down in the 'dungeon' - the basement of the science building where Emma's office is located. Instead of the bright sun, the halls are illuminated by pale flourescent lights, giving everything that coloured cast that reminds people that they are, in fact, in a basement. Emma stalks down the hall with her bag over her shoulder, unlocking her office and entering within. She drops her bag on the sofa, before flopping down herself. "Ugh." She says to herself, arms thrown wide on the cushions.
Alma texted Emma earlier in the day to meet up at Emma's office. "Something really weird happened to me and it's on my hands. and there's related stuff. Can you look at it with yoru scope? and then maybe you can take your portable one with me downtown?" Emma was amenable to doing some investigation and gave Alma a time to meet up. Alma shows up at Emma's office, looking a little bedraggled. She's got some bruising and a scrape on her elbow, in fact. "Hey, I got maybe some interesting stuff to show you. It's weird. and there's something going on downtown too. I think we should check it out."
Emma apparently had forgotten all about meeting up, given how surprised she seems to see Alma come into her office. "Oh, hey Alma." She calls over, sitting up on the couch. "What's up?" Emma gestures to the seat at her desk, silently encouraging the other to sit down. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
Alma grabs the old chair and pulls it closer to the sofa and turns the chair so she can sit backwards. "Ok, so I have a mentor who lives out of town. I've been slowly learning from them. I get some direction and then I experiment with it and try things out." She adds, "It's some of my favorite type of learning. Self guided but with some advice. They are so good at it." She catches her self before she changes the topic to edupysch research even though it's been on her mind. There's a headshake as she gets back on track. "Most recently, they told me to look across the guantlet and look for restless dead. And they gave me some instructions on what to do if I didn't find any." She looks at Emma, "and I didn't. The instructions included a letter... really old paper. If nothing worked, I was supposed to burn it, and then if that didn't work, call my mentor." She stops to see if Emma has any questions yet.
Emma makes sure the office door is closed, and sits upright on the couch as she listens to the other's story. While Alma speaks, she nods a few times, pulling out some tea and getting the kettle on her desk going. "Where were you looking across the gauntlet?" She inquires. "Was it within the barrier - the area that's gone all weird on us?"
"I've been doing it all over the city," Alma explains. "But when I burned the letter, I did it down at the riverfront at the stargate... well really it's called Transcending. You know what I'm talking about?"
Emma shakes her head. "I'm not really too familiar with that area though." She adds, apologetically. "But... anyhow, go on."
Alma pulls out her phone and taps google maps and pans and zooms over to point to the park with the sculpture. "I'm not sure where the barrier you're talking about is. Is this inside of it?"
Emma seems impressed by the sight. "Yeah, that's solidly inside the barrier." She remarks, sitting back in her seat. "Huh. I didn't even know that was there. Learn something new every day!"
"I wouldn't have found it except for the murmurations. Two nights running there was a murmuration over that part of the city." Alma pauses a moment to explain, "All the other birds... waterfowl, hawks, owls... nothing else was there that night. Just the starlings. I'm going to do some bird watching later to see if it's still deserted." She gets back to what happened, "So, I burned the letter and watched the smoke rise up from it and cross the barrier. It was sucked in by the gate on the other side of the gauntlet. I waited for a reply. What came back was ...like ribbens and layers of black screaching and moaning in anguish and anger. and it started to come at me. So I got out of there. and called my mentor." She pauses, and looks around. Could I get some water?
Emma gestures to the Kettle. "Would chai do?" Emma offers, apologetically. She listens attentively to the other's story, leaning forward as she gets to the part involving beings from beyond the rift. "Huh. Any idea what that was about? What sort of creature, or creatures, it was? Alive, dead, undead? What did your mentor say?"
"Chai is fine," Alma says with a small smile. "My mentor said that ghosts that stick around usually are connected to things that were important to them. This letter belonged to someone who in life contained great power. My mentor thought that this person would come and help me, I think. But since nothing that looked human came out... my mentor thinks that means this person is gone now and the only thing that remains is his anger. Which is directed at me now. So there's that. I got a ride away from the place from Aaron. He also goes by Abraham? Do you know him? I knew he would know about spirit stuff because he called me on the phone from the other side once. He checked things out and found something on my hands. I checked, and I found it too. Do you want to take a look? I also brought the shirt I was wearing in case anything got on it. You could take some samples from my hands too." Alma looks a little uncomfortable at the idea, but also intrigued.
Emma raises a brow, reaching over to her bag and pulling out the strange, compact device that she'd been seen with before. The one that she used to take all her 'measurements' the week prior. "Well, let's cross the sampling bridge when we get to it." She reports, taking a moment to set the device aside and pour out some chai. She hands a steeping mug over towards Alma, before picking up her 'tricorder' again. She flicks it on, waving it around Alma as she hmms and haws. "What did Aaron have to say?" She asks, distractedly.
<<DICE>> Emma rolls arete, difficulty 3 <<DICE>> 2 successes (7 8, Specialty: No, Willpower: No) <<OOC>> Emma looks for spiritual resonances.
"Not much, just that he saw something on my hands and thought maybe it could mean that now I have the spirit linked to my hands. I didn't see any link, I don't think? But I did see something going on with them."
Emma spends a few moments scanning, muttering 'fascinating' a couple of times like she was examining a particularly interesting beetle, or unusual artefact. The device in her hand whirrs and hums a bit, leading her to frown a bit. "Huh." She says, finishing up her analysis. "Well, I'm definitely detecting some sort of... energy field. It'll take more comparisons to your baseline - the data I took earlier - to sus out what's going on." She snaps the 'tricorder' looking device closed, shifting her jaw as she looks askance at Alma. "What oh what did you get into?" She wonders aloud.
"So I was thinking..." Alma says. "Do you want to take that to the gate? You could take measurements around it and I can look to see if the birds are still gone."
Emma considers for a few moments, before shaking her head. "Well... I suppose I could do that..." She begins, slowly. "But... if there's a big, angry EDE there, then I'm not so keen on getting on its bad side." She decides slowly. "What I /could/ do is use my Terrascope to study the location remotely. It's harder than being there, but... safer, as well."
"OH" Alma says, "You are so right. I didn't think of that at first." A terrascope? Alma is really excited about this idea. "You have... a terrascope? I never heard of that. That sounds really useful. Is it here? Can I watch?" She looks pretty tired, but the prospect of this has raised her to a level of cheerful curiosity.
Emma shakes her head slowly. "I don't have it *here* at the moment." She admits, eyes flicking across her different pieces of equipment in her office as if to make sure. When she looks back to Alma, she settles back into her couch. It groans under her shifting weight. "May I ask... what were you trying to accomplish? What exactly, when you went and did what you did?"
Alma stares off in to space to think about this. "There's more than one reason? None--they are my mentor. None asked me what the dead whisper. I was telling them about the city and about how it's been changed and people no longer existing. I thought about it, and realized things were quieter than maybe they should be. So None told me to do more checking and gave me the letter to help. Have you heard of this thing called Eater of Souls? I was wondering if it is eating all the dead before they pass on. I thought maybe this would help me figure that out. Or..." she adds, "maybe None set me to the task so that I'd learn more about how the gauntlet works."
Emma shakes her head at the mention of Eater of Souls, but all the same gives a small, involuntary shudder, like the name touched something deep and primal in the Etherite. She presses through after a moment, though. "Hm. Okay. Well, with the caveat that we're way outside my area of expertise, I can do some reading. See if there's anything recorded in the literature similar to this. Have you talked to your mentor?"
"I think they meant me to get help from the spirit, you saw how that went. Since the person the spirit was is gone, my mentor needs to deal with it. That's going to take work. They said I needed to figure out why the spirit came from the gate. Oh," she says quietly, and show Emma a text on her phone. "DO NOT CROSS". "That's what they sent." She looks strained and confused, "I don't know if that's just me or advice for anyone." She sighs. "I would like to be able to give you direct and clear answers. I REALLY would like to be able to do a literature search. Do you know this guy Aaron? He has a huge library. He said I could use it. Do you want to go with me?"
Emma nods her head slowly. "Abra... Aaron and I have worked together in the past." She confirms, reaching over to her desk to pour herself a mug of tea. Letting it steep, she considers for a few moments. "So, lots going on, with a lot of question marks all around. Here's what I propose. One: I go ahead and read through my personal library. It's not as big as his, but it's the one I'm familiar with. Two: TerraScope out the area, see what sort of spiritual energies are left around there. I might ask you to watch my back for that. Three: Have you talked to someone with a background in Bio... Life? YOu should, and have them check you out." Emma drums her fingers for a moment, thinking. "Anything I'm missing?"
"That sounds like a good plan. I think... I might know two people who have some understanding of it?" She ponders, "Kai knows about plants and growing. She'd probably have a lot of insight in to whatever this is." She puzzles, "Well, I'm going to check out the life around the area. Like, is the bird population out of wack. I'll take a look around and then maybe stop by the zoo to talk to the wetlands coservation people there to see if they have anomalies in the population data. Is there... um... does this stuff affect sky quality for looking through telescopes? can you check that stype of stuff?" Alma mentally tapers off.
Emma cocks her head to the side, not quite following. She bobs the tea bag in her chai a bit, helping it along, before settling it back on her desk. "I'm not entirely sure what you mean about 'this stuff' and 'sky quality.' Can you explain?"
"Like, um," Alma ums her way through this. "There's when people like to look through telescopes and the seeing is good or not. It's weather for telescopes. Well, whatever phenomenom is at that gate... what all does it affect? It might be affecting the bird population in that area. Does it affect anything else? I don't know this type of stuff. Anything is possible! Like, I think everything is so much more rich and complex than I knew... like our bodies maybe don't end at our skin but maybe we span dimensions" She's excited because anything is possible! "I mean, once you discover all this, anything is possible? we have so much to explore. so me, I know about ecosystems and population dynamics and stuff. So if something affects it, yeah I see it. But... what if it's like some ... what if the spirit thing is a metaphor that intersects with the watershed metaphor... like in some other space they interact and then it comes out where we see it here like missing birds. Ok, I can detect that. What do you detect? Do you think there is some colliding ideas or something that you know? like that would end up reflecting here?"
Emma's lips twitch as she says, wrly, "I'm familiar with Seeing." She listens for a bit, shaking her head a bit. "Buuut... I'm really not following you." She admits. "I mean, yes, things are complicated, and the gateward phenomena might have an effect on birds but... why would you suppose that it does? Everything is interconnected, yes, but it doesn't mean the connections are strong?" Emma gives a bit of a shrug. "One thing at a time, I say."
Alma starts explaining concepts from conservation ecology and about environmental toxins and pollutants that result from various factors. How a policy decision might lead to a lack of predators to eat as many mosquitos which results in the spread of West Nile which causes a decline in the crow population. She emphasizes that to understand a system, one should look at the entire system, not just bits and pieces of it. Of course, she says, it's also important to be able to isolate things... So then she gets to the gate and the effects and considers that it might be modeled in terms of a toxic spill, perhaps, and determining the parameters of that will determine the mitigations people will take. Also, determining exactly /what/ it affects will give clues like, by analogy, when people do forensic ecology to see which strain of bird flu is affecting farms in which regions... basically Alma does a big huge infodump and perhaps it takes her a while to realize she doesn't have a receiptive audience. }}
