Delving Deeper
Posted on Wed Dec 20th, 2023 @ 11:40pm by Evelyn Reynolds & Nollel Livaam (*)
Mission:
Fractures
Location: The Grotto, SS Mary Rose (Prime)
2118 words - 4.2 OF Standard Post Measure
As it had turned out, the decision to turn their focus to the Grotto had been a blessing in disguise. Though it was clear that a lot of the crew were suffering from similar lapses in temporal permanency, Evelyn and Nollel had encountered a couple of stragglers that somehow made the prospect of poking at the source of the problem a little more palatable. Being utterly alone on the ship had been a daunting prospect but evidence of hope in the form of enough support staff to at least run a small base of operations had gone a long way to settling Evelyn's nerves, even if they were all dealing with the unspoken concern that any one of them could disappear again at a moment's notice. She had tried not to dwell on that as Nollel lead the way to the Grotto, a now-infamous part of the ship that the doctor had yet to set foot inside. Anticipation wasn't granting it any particular esteem.
"So there are no working theories at all," she repeated back, still trying to get her head around what limited investigation had already taken place. "The three of you didn't notice anything odd at all?"
"I was not there for the investigation but Jeassaho told me that Delaney disappeared for a few seconds or at the very least she thought she did as one second she was gone and the next after a few moments of panic was back with no knowledge of what had happened," Nollel explained as she moved to open the doors to the grotto. The grotto was secure with very few people allowed in but Nolle and Evelyn had access despite the other woman having never been inside before. "It was odd when I was there with Michael and he then felt poorly so we had to leave. It just made me feel off not quite my usual self."
"Is there any rhyme or reason as to why the Captain has kept around a closet full of artifacts he knows next-to-nothing about," Evelyn asked dryly, mostly rhetorical. She understood the rigors of civilian life didn't always allow for stringent protocol, not to Starfleet's standards at least, but it was still hard to wrap her head around the potential for something this powerful to have been just sitting around until it decided to malfunction.
“Because it would take a lifetime to go through. Trust me Cassie tries on the nights she can’t sleep but still there is just so much.” Nollel said “The Collector really liked to collect.” She explained trying to not smile at her own joke. The Borg was becoming nothing but a distant memory for a moment as she had a problem to solve.
"Surely arranging some sort of storage option off the ship is more sensible," Evelyn countered, once again finding her sensibilities for how things were run slanted somewhat diagonally to what the rest of the crew simply nodded and accepted as normal. "I can understand not wanting to accidentally toss the baby out with the bath water but if we don't know what any of them do, then there's little change of added advantage and more risk of..." The doctor stopped as they reached their location, holding her tricorder up. "...this."
Resigned to presence of chaos for the time being, Evelyn frowned faintly and tapped the tricorder's transmit sequence. "Okay, so here's the tachyon signature I was talking about." Waiting for Nollel to receive it on her own device, the doctor scrutinised the door to very little effect and then glanced back at her new readings. "No luck yet pinpointing a direct source. At the moment, they seem to be everywhere." She squinted. "And no where. See what I was talking about? There." It was only a fraction of a second but the data cut out entirely, a complete absence of anything unusual. From what Evelyn could recall, it wasn't unusual for tachyons to behave erratically but she hadn't exactly specialised in quantum physics.
“You are speaking as a Starfleet Officer and not someone who has been out in the universe with very little credits or options.” Noelle said softly before she nodded looking at her tricorder. “We need a scientist to be fair. Someone with a bigger science brain than I have.” She admitted feeling out of her league as she watched what was happening.
Having opened her mouth to respond to the inference that a sensible approach was somehow mutually exclusive to a healthy income, Evelyn caught herself in time and decided it wasn't worth it under current circumstances. What they were experiencing now was proof in point of the folly in keeping potentially dangerous items on board, especially ones you had no understanding of, and if being flung throughout the temporal spectrum was somehow profitable then they'd better start the process of collecting renumeration before all of them ended up scattered throughout their own potential timelines. She held her tongue but her frown remained intact. Approaching the door, she hit its released and peered inside. "Let's see if we can figure out a point of origin."
Nollel nodded and stepped inside and to the left to let the woman see exactly what they were dealing with. The room had not changed much in the last week or so which thankfully was a relief the only signs that anyone else had been there were the jacket and notepad left behind by Cassie. Everything else was exactly where she had left it. "We were moving towards the back wall and were about half way across the room." She said thinking of the area they had been in where Michael had collapsed.
Whatever Evie had envisaged when she'd first heard about a stash of alien artifacts, it was nothing like the sheer abundance that confronted her now. She could see the signs of partial organisation but honestly wasn't sure how you went about categorising items that had no immediately obvious function. Stunned, she stood for a moment and simply stared. "What on Earth..." She rallied, drawing in a deep breath. "Or rather not on Earth, I suppose."
“The Collector liked to collect,” Nollel commented again and quickly moved over to the automated hologram turning it off before the voice of the collector could add a whole other level creep factor. “Cassie tries but no one is overly interested other than her and Gregnol is trying to organise and get this off the ship and it’s not exactly a small amount.”
Though she didn't say as much, Evelyn found herself contemplating her own involvement, which she hadn't anticipated as being an option but it was difficult to deny that her interest was piqued. If nothing else, her pragmatic side argued, it would help speed up the process of removing more potential threats off the ship and, if she gave it some thought, she could already think of several people who would give anything to explore the veritable treasure trove. Spending time with Cassie would be nice too, though that required getting the woman back.
The doctor carefully picked her way through the clutter.
"Back here, you said?"
"Past the stuff labelled as saleable and keep going. I kept getting a power surge from somewhere back there which was what we were looking into when Michael got poorly." Nolle said picking up the notebook that had been left behind by Cassie and looked through the notes that the woman had been making the last time she had been in there.
It took a while to pick her way carefully through, not just because of the logistics of navigating the clutter but also because Evelyn found herself increasingly intrigued by the enigmatic nature of at least several of the items. Her practical side still found fault with the idea of storing a museum's-worth of potentially-dangerous oddities on board a spaceship but from a personal perspective, every inch her father's daughter, the eccentricity of the collection was instantly compelling. Several times, she paused, cautioning herself not to touch anything, and covered her fascination by scanning the offending object for signs of the tachyon emission she was tracking. Eventually, the wandering took her around several large shelves and she found herself standing amidst some of the larger, still crammed-together, pieces.
Gregnol was sitting on a veritable fortune.
Evelyn didn't have to know what any of this was to be reasonably sure her first impressions were correct. Having grown up on an estate that harboured its own collection of rare antiques, the would-be Duchess, (as Jake had an overfondness for referring to her as during their Academy days), had absorbed by simple means of repeated exposure enough of an instinct for spotting the rare and unique to be pretty assured the room was full of one-off wonders. It was hard to know where to look first, especially as her tricorder readouts were now fluctuating at such a rate as to be virtually impossible to interpret. "I think..." She paused, unsure at first of how to finish the sentence with the information she had at hand.
Nollel looked up from the notes and smiled as she watched the woman going through items before realising that it was not the time nor the place for that. "You think what?" Nollel wondering starting to walk over.
"Tachyon emissions are difficult to track, especially with standard tricorder settings. I think you're right, I think the source could be in this section somewhere, but I'm struggling to..."
Evelyn wasn't sure what prompted her to turn around. As far as she could tell, there hadn't been any unusual sound or sensation, no sudden explosion of activity from any of the devices around her, and yet she instinctively knew that something had changed. Peering hesitantly through the clutter, the doctor tried to quell the sudden escalation of her heart-rate and warily called out, "Nollel?"
She was less surprised than she would have liked to be greeted by absolute silence.
A glance down at her tricorder gave Evie pause for thought. The spike registered only seconds ago seemed related to the other woman's sudden disappearance but without the proper equipment or expertise to analyse her scans, creating a working hypothesis was going to be difficult. What she really needed to do was track down Cassie but they weren't even close yet to having enough information to track nor predict people's temporal displacement. With a final glance over her shoulder, Evelyn carefully wove her way back out of the Grotto, pausing only once to confirm that she was, once again, completely on her own.
Don't panic.
They had left the others back at the makeshift command centre. All she had to do was get to the Operations offices and find a way, first and foremost, to gather any remaining or re-emerging crew to the location. What if they're all gone? The doors slid shut behind her and Evelyn swallowed, overwhelmed by a sudden unwillingness to move lest it trigger a time jump that flung her to god-knows-where in the history of a ship she'd only been a part of for a very short amount of time, relatively speaking. Split down the middle, the two predominant facets of Evelyn Reynolds squared off against each other, each determined to be the loudest, each just as persistent in its intent.
If you move, you'll die.
Inaction is the only guaranteed failure.
If you move, you'll die.
Doing nothing isn't going to safe-guard against displacement, someone has to at least start.
If you move, you'll die.
If they hear you, you'll die.
Nobody's coming.
I have to try.
Nobody's coming.
I'm dying.
She first became aware that she was on the floor, back pressed against the bulkhead, when the sudden sensation of warmth against her forearms revealed itself to be the grip of concerned hands. Hunched over, her face pressed into the confines of knees drawn close to her chest, Evie's first instinct was to curl into a tighter ball. It took the insistence of a familiar voice to draw her upwards, dangerously close to being defeated by the trauma she'd dodged so eloquently since arriving. Recognition took a moment, the sheer effort to pierce through her own warped perception to identify the threat as a genuine fallacy, replaced instead by the reassurance and confusion of someone she would have felt more mortified to be rendered so vulnerable in front of had she not been so utterly relieved to see him.
"Oliver?"
