Once More Into Collecting

Posted on Tue Aug 4th, 2020 @ 3:44pm by Ka'see 'Cassie' Anderson (*) & Fordyce Kirschler PhD

Mission: Mission 11 - Prospecting
Location: Deck 3 - Grotto
Timeline: MD01 10:00
2345 words - 4.7 OF Standard Post Measure

A man burst to life on the screen above the pair as they walked into the Grotto, with its odds and ends of wonders. He was older than most people had ever seen with waxy skin. He looked ill, coughing and wheezing “They will never find my stash… never in a million eons would someone think to look in a space that I made my Engineer completely strip out. They are going to walk past it every day and never see my collection of beautiful and deadly things. If they do it will be there funeral. I hope they almost do find it because they will never be able to enjoy it.” He chuckled again which started off another coughing fit as Cassie turned off the screen. Something did not feel right about what they had watched a million times, the idea felt too dramatic, to fake. She was showing Fordyce the Grotto after it had been discussed over a meal. “That plays every time we come inside. Cannot turn it off.”

"Not the healthiest lookin' fella. Or the friendliest," remarked Ford. He looked around and made a show of seeming unimpressed. "Seems awfully concerned about a whole lotta nothin', too."

"I think it is fake and overly done," Cassie said without a moment's hesitation. "It doesn't feel natural at all. I do not know I think this place is amazing. Every time I come in I find something different." Her hand went to where her wedding band was on a chain. The hand moved from her neck and trailed along a shelf filled with artefacts before looking over coloured potions and labelled powders that were neatly arranged on tables while large contraptions and machines he could never begin to guess the purposes of covered the other tables.

Ford took a similar inventory of the things in his immediate vicinity. He saw a leather-bound tome filled with a language he didn't recognize; three crystalline bottles that vaguely reminded him of that floating thing that laid waste to a bunch of colonies years back; several smaller bottles that for some reason reminded him of medication containers; and various...stuff. Lots and lots of various stuff. What in the hell was Lucienne Bex thinking telling him to find something in the middle of all this shit?

"How the hell you find anything in the middle of all this shit?" asked Ford, partially voicing his thoughts. "Y'all taken an inventory?"

Cassie looked at the man and actually laughed at his question. "It is only been me inventorying stuff as no one else gives a crap." She pointed to an area that looked organised. "That is done. This stuff not so much." The non sorted area was four times as big as the other area.

Ford side-eyed the daunting task. He had a list of crap he was supposed to recover for his handler at the Bank of Bolias, but none of this looked remotely like anything on the list. Maybe the ol' Collector absconded with everything of real value and left this trash heap behind? Or maybe he just wasn't looking hard enough. Things often were not what they first appeared to be, and inventory might be a good way to sort junk from non-junk.

"What keeps you coming back here? You a nostalgic?" asked Ford as he fumbled with his tricorder. It was a sleek black high-end civilian model, a gift from Lucienne before a mission on Ankcaton IX.

"Completely. I actually found my engagement ring in this chaos along with some stuff from my own era." It might be a fools challenge but she was nostalgic sometimes. "I also like to learn new things and this grotto is amazing for that. The Collector gathered some truly amazing stuff at least to me." She noticed the look from the man. It was daunting and possibly not what he was really looking to do but Cassie had only offered to show him.

Ford grunted in reply, but he was suddenly incredibly engrossed in his tricorder. He still wasn't sure what he was looking for on behalf of the Bank of Bolias, but he was pretty sure it wasn't engagement rings, bottles of dried up toes, and disintegrating paperwork. And since nothing obvious was turning up in the room, he decided to take a different tact and start looking for something more subtle.

Once upon a time, he'd worked for a shell corporation of the Orion Syndicate doing...things. Along the way, he'd picked up a few tricks from individuals who weren't exactly on the up-and-up with law enforcement. Thieves would leave tell-tale signs around for one another to indicate certain things - perhaps a store worth hitting up, an area that was off-limits to a rival gang, and so on. It had been an almost exclusively Syndicate thing up until the Dominion War when so many people went freelance and tried to make a quick bar of latinum in a war economy. The method of communication made its way out of the Syndicate and into lesser known organizations.

The idea was to create a pattern of microfractures, usually in hull plating or something similarly strong, that would translate into something. When Ford switched his tricorder to start searching for microfractures, he was surprised to see the walls of the room "light up." The whole space appeared on the screen like a luminous spider web. Some of it he recognized - some of it was even scrawled in the original cipher used by the Orion Syndicate - but a lot of it appeared to be nonsense. Probably some code this "Collector" came up with.

"This Collector's one clever son of a bitch," said Ford as he adjusted his tricorder to show the screen to Cassie. He figured there wasn't any harm in sharing the information with her. "Syndicate cryptolect and variations thereof, all over the walls…"

"Of course he is." Cassie murmured looking at the screen. "The man was from an alternative dimension and stole away to this universe." She admitted thinking if he was not hiding anything from her she should not hide it from him other. It could be important. "That makes no sense this room has been scanned and rescanned." Cassie frowned but the facts were in front of her, impossible to ignore.

"Wouldn't be much of a secret language if it popped up on the first scan, eh, sis?" said Ford as he observed the tricorder. "You gotta be lookin' at the right frequency usually. If you knew what you were doin', you'd use these real sophisticated sonic generators that'd leave very specific sorts of microfractures. And usually much smaller'n this. I ain't never seen nothin' on this scale."

"My poor 2246 biologist doctorate is obviously no match for your 2396 tricorder abilities." The Vulcan Hybrid said with a roll of her eyes.

After getting a good scan of the room, Ford noticed a blank space against the bulkhead about the size of a doorway. It was the only spot in the room not covered by some of the cryptolectic scrawl. He frowned and gestured to it, "That ain't nothin' but bulkhead, right?"

"Are you really considering that this 'Collector' made a grotto within a grotto." The woman muttered following his trail of thought hopefully. It was hard work when he was doing things that she would have never considered doing at all. She just was not sneaky enough.

"Seems like it," said Ford as he stood in front of the bulkhead. He pulled up a schematic of the ship on his tricorder screen and looked over it. According to the schematic, there was nothing behind here except the interface of a bunch of elements of the structural integrity field and the ship's superstructure. "Y'all didn't find no booby traps in here, did ya?"

"I was not out of the transport cycle I was locked into but from reading the records of the opening the Collector left an airborne pathogen that nearly killed off the majority of the crew," Cassie admitted with a bit of a shrug. Maybe this should be left for a little bit so they could investigate properly.

"Is anybody on this ship from the right time? Hell, I'm startin' to think I'm temporally displaced and just don't know it," said Ford as he stared at the blank wall. Finally, he reached out and tapped it. "Whatever's causing the power fluctuations is behind this wall, whatcha wanna bet?"

Without much warning, Ford opened a nearby wall panel and started making some adjustments to the EPS flow regulators for this area. He didn't want to cut power entirely but some disruption to the power flows should…

"Well, I'll be damned, this Collector fella was slicker'n a slop jar," declared Ford, smacking his knees as he stood up.

The bulkhead was there one moment and gone the next, replaced by a door that didn't exist a few seconds before. Instinctively, he reached for a gun that wasn't there. He left out a little frustrated sigh and went for the door control panel, figuring if something killed him when he opened it then it was just his time to go.

When the door opened, it revealed a room much larger than should have been possible given the ship's schematics. There was a complex looking device on a pedestal in the center of the room, but otherwise the space was full of more stuff. Debris, you might even call it.

"Shit," declared an exasperated Ford. He balanced on one foot to give the door a solid kick out of frustration. "Another junk room."

"Slicker'n a slop jar?" Cassie repeated for giggling. Humans came out with such unique and interesting expressions when they were angry or unsure. She stood up from her stool as the door appeared and saw him instinctively touching his belt, obviously looking for a weapon so the woman picked up what looked like a cane and waited.

"Let's have a proper look before you injure yourself in frustration," Cassie told him gently as she moved into the space. "We thought it was junk then we found some Bajoran artefacts that got us some big brownie points and credits."

Ford perked up. "Artifacts? Like, real artifacts? Or some old vedek's old papers about people needin' to stay in their lane and quit tryin' to be artists and get back in the fields?"

"Artifacts," Cassie said simply pulling her PaDD to her flicking through until she found the item that she was looking for. "There's no question that there's some sort of corruption in the Bajoran religion right now as this used to stand in one of there temples. It is some type of statue with a huge crystal in it. Was before I got freed so I have no idea past this image." she said holding it out.. "It was a big political mess, which makes sense considering that Bajor is still coming out of having been under the Occupation and just joined the Federation. The ship got a massive reward."

Ford perked up even further. "You said a massive reward? For what? Artifacts? You sayin' if we find more artifacts in here, there's a reward?"

"Sure." Cassie nodded with a shrug as she looked at the bigger space that had been created. "Anything pip your interest, Bro?" She wondered looking up from an old bounded book that she was looking through teasing him for calling her sis just a little. It was becoming easier and easier to let her human side out just a little more.

This room was different than the one before it. It looked less pillaged, Ford reckoned. And that was good news for him. On an average day, it was easy to forget, but he was really chained to the Bank of Bolias. This was a side gig. Lucienne Bex pulled his strings, and she was making him do a little dance here. The last he'd heard from her, she'd sent him a whole list of things The Collector had that she wanted. She said they'd been stolen; he wasn't so sure. More likely, they were highly prized items that private collectors would buy from the bank at a premium.

He took a cursory glance around the room and a few things actually stood out. He recognized a vase from the list. Also a small book, some kind of hand mirror, and an ornate box. So as not to be obvious, he purposely avoided all those things and instead picked up a square. At least, that's what it looked like. Just a regular, ordinary square of metal. It was lighter than he expected, and there were symbols engraved into its sides.

"What you figure this is?" Ford asked, holding it up. There was an obvious activator button, which he pressed. Suddenly, the ceiling of the room was lit up with a star map. The square was apparently some kind of holo-projectors. "Well, don't that just beat all you ever stepped in?"

Whilst Fordyce might have been distracted with looking around Cassie’s gaze went straight to something familiar. A dagger. The blade had a thin, curled cross-guard, just large enough to make sure its owners’ fingers were safe and the blade remained firmly in their hands. The blade itself was engraved. Seemingly strange markings are carved into the blade, but the blade will surely be decorated in battle. The cross-guard had a gilded sphere on each side, the weapon was clearly a custom order, probably by an important figure but what was it doing there?

“We do not press… you do press buttons that we have no idea about it seems.” Cassie said taking an automatic step closer to the man just encase but all that happened was the star maps. “I do not know about that I woke up from a 150-year transporter loop. Well, that is interesting.” The woman looked up and moved between cabinets as she tried to find something familiar. This was going to be a nightmare to organise and sort out.

TRUNCATE