sixthiterationlogs | [PLOT MINGLE] The Specimen Room

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[PLOT MINGLE] The Specimen Room

WHO: Jude Sullivan
WHERE: The fields (behind the Town Hall)
WHEN: August 18, Afternoon
OPEN TO: ALL, Mingle style post for the Specimen Room plot
WARNINGS: See the Plot Post for details of the Specimen Room and its contents

Jude's glad to have the meeting out of doors, with or without the illness to prompt it. The cave-in hadn't scared him out of the canyon's cracks and crevices, but the room he'd found with Margaery might, and he needs every helping factor he can get to keep himself steady through the meeting. Public speaking is less a great fear than a thing he's never cared to do, but public speaking on a subject like this might prove too much, and if he pitches over again in front of someone, he's going to throw himself in the fountain and never come back out.

He'd gotten some help to carry the board out of the inn, tacking up fresh sheets of paper to the back of it. While others gathered those villagers well enough to come out to the fields, he'd done his best to recreate his and Margaery's view of the room through the glass, the layout of the coolers, the shape of the machinery at its center. Next to that, he'd tried to draw a rough overview of the room--what shape it might have from above, the placement of the door, the curve of the tunnel that Margaery had led him down.

As far as he'd noticed, there was no way around the rest of the cave to get at the door, but he hadn't been very inclined to look. When he pulls back from the board, charcoal staining his fingers, his brow where he'd wiped back his hair, he turns to find a crowd gathering behind him.

When it comes to the actual explanations, he struggles a bit to project his voice, but the words are there when he looks for them. He sticks to using the drawings to present the information, pointing to each element in turn. "There're electrical lights, florescent ones, in the room and the coolers, so I guess they're working too. And the glass was--uh, well, it was thick enough that knocking into it didn't break anything." He drops his gaze to his feet, hiding behind his hair at the memory.

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Jude hangs as long as he can at the side of the board, answering questions. Every answer feels like it has to be mined for: going back into himself and the memories, skirting the edge of his fit and the bubble of fear that had prompted it. Once he finds anything of note, he has to drag it back up, check it over in his head, find the words that express it the best way to the person in front of him. Several times, he lets himself be pulled in to clarify something, or translate Margaery's idea of modern technology.

By the time he gets a moment alone, he's talked more than he thinks he's bothered over the span of his entire stay in the village. Wandering to the other side of the board, he stares at the older notes, the strange discoveries logged in chalk, and lets himself wilt.

He's been out here for hours, even before the meeting started, getting the drawings ready. Plenty of people will go see it for themselves, but at least he can offer something to the people with sense to leave it alone. If he'd been in the crowd today, and nowhere near Margaery the day she had her vision, he thinks he'd never set foot in that crevice at all.

[Hit him up with questions, or find him hiding behind the chalk board, trying to catch a break.]

Ravi isn't sure whether he ought to be spending so long away from the hospital with people coming in at all hours with new bouts of this strange disease. He's been taking samples where he can, wearing a mask at all times, but even so, he's worn. He'd mainly been trying to get some fresh air to stay awake when he overhears someone talking about specimens. Suddenly, all his work sees unimportant. He drifts over, wary about all of this, but needing to know more.

He needs to know about the details. "What sort of equipment was inside? Can you draw a map to where it is?" he demands. He needs to get there right this second, already intending to see if he can't put a heavy object through the glass (though he already knows, deep in his heart, how effective it would be). "Were there centrifuges? How many vials of blood are we talking per person, did it look like they were doing tests? What about other fluids? Saliva, sexual excretions?" He's demanding and constant, but his mind is racing.

This is what he does, this is what he'd been doing at home, it's what he would do here if given the chance. "I knew that there was something like this going on," he says, utterly serious as the feeling sinks in his stomach. What would he do next, if he were running the experiment? "They're after something, I need to see the room."

A crowd is a crowd, indoors or out, and Kira takes up a place at the edges of it. There are two gatherings that stick in his mind, before the earthquake: before he lost his powers. Credence's disappearance, and the meeting Ren had called shortly before his death. He hadn't spent long at the former, emotions running high and his own focus too deeply narrowed on his friend to sit through any kind of debate.

He'd left Ren's exhausted, and he can't imagine this is going to be any different.

It's the importance of the thing that draws him: if this were something that could be left to word of mouth, why call a meeting at all? The board is an interesting addition, and he assumes they're all out here in some hopes of not catching the plague. As the sun beats down on his head, he catches what he can without pressing in too close to the crowd, judging as much of the information by the waves of reactions as the words or illustrations.

"They're probably collecting the blood before they stick us in the fountain," he thinks aloud, feeling numb to the facts of it. Prolonged exposure to people can do that: shut down his own feelings, distract him from his own reactions. But more than that, it's just too much to form an opinion on, too much to panic over. If this room has existed this whole time, what effect does it have on his life now?

Bodhi has a much easier time appreciating Jude's work when it doesn't make him feel like a pinned specimen under glass. The mere existence of specimens under glass doesn't perturb him one bit, as long as he isn't one. He looks on with eager interest for a while, inching quietly away whenever the scene gets too crowded but drifting his way back whenever it clears. For a long time he's content to just look. He likes puzzling things over carefully and quietly until he's learned enough to talk without feeling stupid.

That and he's still not actually sure Jude doesn't hate him.

He tries to make his first actual question a clever one. "Just glass? Was it joined to the rock, or..."

Seeing Bodhi drift in and out of the crowd is a kind of life-raft tossed into the water. If anyone might understand the struggle of standing in front of some pages, trying to make observations of a thing compelling, why not the guy he met trying to impress the importance of rock samples upon a crowd? Blood probably ranks higher than rocks for most people, but Jude wishes they were just talking about the caves themselves, instead of the vials tucked inside.

It's a double-edged thing, when Bodhi speaks up. At least it isn't about the blood, and at least it leads him in a direction he can go, but he wishes there were someone more in charge, with more a presence, to lead the discussion.

"I don't think so," he answers. "It was all flat, like enough rock had sheared off to show the glass behind it. But the floor of the cave was too clean. If you--" he leans back, craning his neck to point at the other, hidden side of the board. "The old notes say there were burning insects in there, last time, so I don't know if it was always that far in, or if the earthquake had something to do with it?"

It's enough for Jude to shrink away, mulish behind sweat-darkened hair, retreating inward from the questions. He can't even start to answer one before there are five more, pressure mounting, discomfort going with it. The last demand is the most obvious, the easiest answer to all of them--and Jude hates it. He doesn't want to go back, but to refuse would be to show that, and he refuses. If there's anything about this place that makes sense, it's not showing fear.

That he already fucked that up in the cavern is irrelevant. Going back might be the only way to disprove it.

"I can show you the way, I don't think I can answer any of those questions. It looked more like everything was just--on display? It was all close enough to the wall to read the labels, that's not much room to work on something."

Either way, it's still more raw data to turn over. Bodhi nods, following carefully. "Could be the earthquake. But it's kind of... It's a strange choice, isn't it? I don't see why it would have to be glass. I, um, I could be missing something, but if they're in control of everything, well." This seems so perfect, exactly what he would have guessed was sitting someplace. Maybe he should just accept it and feel exonerated, but he has a suspicious nature after a lifetime under Imperial rule and all their manipulations of living memory. He doesn't articulate all that much, just frowns and examines the picture more closely.

Stupidity is a weakness he likes admitting only slightly more than fear, but at least he never seems alone in the discussions here. It isn't like reading the same book as everyone else and missing the point, or forgetting large sections of it because something in his head stopped tracking the words, part of the way through. "I'm not really following," he admits, scratching a section of hair back behind one ear.

"You mean like, glass instead of bugs? Why do either? Just leave a dead end like in all the others." Technically, it still is a dead end: there's just more to look at.

"No, that's exactly what I mean. Maybe the earthquake damage could be an accident, but even if it is, what reason could there possibly be to, well, put a see-through wall up? If everything here was built, then that's a choice." And Bodhi's not exactly the world's best mechanic, but he knows enough to be pretty confident that there's not a sound engineering reason for a random glass wall. "If you have a window, it's to look through."

Stella has learnt to equate town meetings here with bad news. There'd been Karen's murder, and Ren's town hall that had devolved into a lot of shouting and arguing rather than a productive discussion, and Graves's meeting after Credence's transformation that had really only resulted in more raised voices. So when she notices people gathering in the field behind the town hall, she can't help but feel a degree of apprehension over what it could possibly be this time.

What she hears described makes her blood run cold in an instant. Hard on the heels of the anxiety is anger, a bright hot rage at the unbidden sense of violation that she has to swallow hard, because it won't do anyone here any good for her to get angry. Stella has always believed they're trapped in an experiment, at the whim of some twisted person or organization pushing them into constant stress scenarios to see how they react; this just drives that feeling home all the more. Any thoughts on what the observers might be using these samples for would simply be conjecture, and Stella isn't willing to draw too many conclusions on that front—

But something feels wrong. It's not that she doesn't think this is something the observers would do; it's just that it's all too... clean. Too neat. Like someone wrapped it all up like a Christmas gift with a pretty bow and left it on their collective doorstep to see what they'd do with it.

"I think we were meant to find this," she says to whoever's nearest. "The observers wouldn't put something like this somewhere where we could just stumble over it accidentally. If it wasn't meant to be seen, what's the point of the glass?" Stella shakes her head. "I'm not entirely sure we can even regard this as evidence of anything, although I suppose they've meant for us to try to draw conclusions about it."

It's not that she doesn't want answers — far from it. But she's also a naturally suspicious woman, and this is far, far too convenient.

Edited 2017-08-21 03:06 (UTC)

Wanda stood to the left side of the gathering a small distance away from those closest to her. She was wearing green cargo pants and a plan tank top, with her hair tied up and off the back of her neck. Her arms were crossed over her chest as the sharp stare of her light green eyes narrowed at the board.

It was uncomfortable.

She knew what it felt like to be tested on, to be treated like a 'thing' instead of a person. Wanda had never complained about it and she rarely brought it up. Her and her brother had volunteered for those experiments and in a way that made them easier. She hadn't been alone and she had something to keep her going through the pain and torture that had killed everyone except for her and her brother. Her thumb gently brushed over her side, tracing a thin scar beneath the fabric of her skirt.

"Do they want us to know that we're just test subjects?" Her voice was tense and filled with anger. She didn't speak to anyone in particular since her eyes were pointed at the imagine that had been drawn on the board but the question was out there for anyone to answer.

It's exactly the line of logic Jude doesn't like to follow--because it interacts with their overseers at all, because it acknowledges them. Perfectly fine isn't how he'd describe living in a petri dish, but he'd been closer to it when he didn't have to think about it that way.

He'd done everything right, he'd thought: kept his mouth shut, learned to live with the hallucinations, never hurt anybody who didn't ask for it--and he's still wound up in a cage.

He can't even send letters. He can't even ask his mom how she gets through her days, trapped and tested. Jude goes quiet, grasping Bodhi's point entirely. He half expects Sam to sidle up with an I told you so. "So they're fucking with us, and nothing changes," he says slowly, then: "I mean, if they're not just fucking with us, and it's real, what does that change either?"

Clary didn't plan to take up a lot of Ravi's time. He seemed serious and focused and a little... intense would be the best word that she could use to describe it. She didn't blame him. He'd been here a lot longer than her and has been trying to find out more about this place. from what she's seen, Ravi was sort of a non-stop kind of guy.

But that didn't stop her from having questions of her own or the audacity to ask them.

"Wait, do you really think that you can do something if you see it?" She put out a hand as if the gesture might slow him down. "The board.. thing," She waved a hand trying to form the right words in her mind. "Said that you guys found pods too. What if they want us to find these things. It could be a trap or something." She was thinking a lot like how her father operated, manipulating people like they were puppets.

Clary was just a spectator at the question and answer portion of the meeting. She didn't know enough to ask specifics and the others around her were doing a good job at filling in the blanks for her.

The longer she listened, the most unsettled she got about all this. It was pretty messed up...

She spotted Jude taking refuge behind the chalkboard and stealthy crept around the large mass of people see how he was holding up. This was a lot of stuff and a lot of people were looking to him just because he was the one who found this fucked up testing room. "Hey." She offered Jude a small smile. "You doing okay?"

She wondered why there wasn't a leader in the village. Clary's current guesses included: no one wanted to take up the role and no one could agree on one person.

"I'm not sure what the difference is between real and... fucking with us." It's still an unfamiliar curse, but he didn't swear much before the academy, too much of a goody-two-shoes by nature. He can learn again if it works better. "Sorry, I know this..." He's learned a little bit about Jude, at least. Or at least about Jude and what happens when Bodhi tries to use him as a sounding board to think out loud at. "Doesn't help you any."

"It still means that someone had to take them at some point," Ravi says, already beginning to think that it would have had to be done before. Maybe there's a gap between where they were and the fountain? Maybe that's where they outfit them in the scrubs and the backpack, taking their samples before dumping them in healing water, though that theory has holes in it, as well, seeing as there hadn't been water when Ravi had arrived.

He narrows his eyes at the boy who's talking about it. "It might not be the primary lab, maybe that's connected to something else, but if I can see the setup, I might be able to glean what tests they could be running," he says, heart thumping wildly at the notion of getting somewhere, finally. "I'm not asking to break into the lab or steal all the samples, I just need to see it," he pleads, hands folded together.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ravi, dude," Major says, having arrived a bit later than his friend, coming up next to him to place a hand on his shoulder. "I know you've got like, a major Science Boner right now, but .. maybe try asking questions like a normal person. You know, one at a time. Waiting for an answer in between. Maybe having a little bit of a discussion about said answer. Then asking a second question, or a question about the answer that was given." He taps Ravi on the chest with a quick flick of the back of his hand, positioning them so they're facing each other. "Here, let's practice." He clears his throat as though preparing to deliver dialogue in a play. When he speaks, he puts particular emphasis on every word. "Hey Ravi, how's everything been going today since I saw you this morning? This is where you answer, and then we chat, and then I ask another question or you ask me a question after you've given me the answer."

It isn't that Major isn't overwhelmingly curious as to what's going on because - what the hell? - and it's more that he knows how obsessive Ravi can get about this kind of stuff. Besides that, he knows how exhausted the guy's been with whatever sickness seems to be stampeding across town like the Wildebeest that killed Mufasa. He's trying to lighten the mood, give Ravi a bit of a more pleasant distraction from everything that's been going on.

Edited 2017-08-22 07:06 (UTC)

"Dude, that's some heavy shit," Major replies, now having turned towards Kia from where he's standing on the outskirts of the crowd. He doesn't have an issue with them, really - crowds, that is - but with his newness to the village and the general lack of understanding of what's going on at any given point, he figures he'd let the more seasoned veterans get closer to hear and absorb all of the information. He's been listening to the brief presentation, arms folded neatly across his chest, before observing a couple of the conversations going on around him. Kira's, though, caught his attention more than the others - maybe because he's already met him, and he's familiar.

"What do you think they're going to do with the blood? Clone us after we die? Do a whole like .. Battlestar Galactica thing, turn us into Cylons and keep our consciousnesses on a mothership somewhere?"

"Does it," he asks, glancing at the drawing, the many coolers with vials. "It could just be a bunch of blood, from anything, with some labels. Seeing it won't tell you that." And then it will be time to break in, and steal things, and invite something worse--or play into something bigger than blood in a fridge.

It makes his head hurt, but he knew--they'd have to show people. No one's going to settle for a drawing of a thing, when it's right there for looking at. The only way he gets to go to sleep at night, and never climb a wall or sail across the new sea, is if he helps people like this. People who want to figure it all out, and stress themselves over puzzles all hours of the day.

"But--fine, I'll show you. It's just up north of here, there's a crack in the wall." Looking out at the crowd, he figures anyone else can follow, and he won't have to take them all one by one.

It isn't, but not because of Bodhi's asking. He'd wandered down that tunnel after Margaery with little thought for what might be at the end of it--only that he couldn't let her go in alone, and think him incapable or unwilling. It had already backfired, already put him on his ass with his head squeaking against the glass, bright light filling up the world. That isn't going to happen today, if only by force of will.

"It's like you said," he replies with a shrug: "it isn't sustainable, just ignoring it. It doesn't make all of this go away." Looking at the sketch again, he points at one of the coolers, the short strokes of vials spaced evenly within. "And what I mean is--if it's just there for show, then it's just there for show. And if that's really our blood, well. They've had it this whole time, so what really changes, for any of us?"

At first, he thinks someone's followed him around the board, more questions at the ready. He shifts a look over one shoulder, wary; sweat-darkened hair falls over his eyes. His mouth nearly opens on some retort, but stops for the actual question.

He blinks, hackles going down, and he falls immediately back into the old habits. "I'm fine, I'm just--reading this." Taking a step back from the chalkboard, he indicates the older notes. "I didn't have as much reason to look at them before all this."

That part at least, isn't a lie. He's avoided this board as much as he could since arriving, even as he supplied paper for the people keeping it up.

"Well, that's certainly what I think now," he sighs, casting Major a sideways look that is less than pleased. It makes as much sense as anything else, and pairs nicely with Mark's theory, equally loathed and respected. This time though, he's too tired for a bout of existential horror.

They're meat on hooks, dreaming something ugly and impossible while they bleed out. They're in the worst possible afterlife, building up karma until they're sent home.

"Sometimes--I just wonder what difference it really makes, day to day. For all I fucking know, we're already clones, and some other me is getting to live the life I thought I had."

That scents the water a bit, dread creeping up his chest, but he doesn't feel like doing the work for anybody. Scaring himself just plays into someone's hands, and that's exactly what this is for. Get gears turning, get them all in one place. "On the other hand, it could just be a reason for every sick asshole to get together and breathe the same air," he adds, nodding at the rest of the crowd.

"Huh, that's a thought," Major says, glancing up towards the sky for a moment to ponder it, let the weight of it sink in some. He won't dwell on those kinds of thoughts too long, his general and default setting mostly optimistic (especially given the fact that he's basically gotten a clean slate, showing up here; the only time his outlook on life and the future had truly faltered was when Du Clark had blackmailed him into killing a list of 300+ suspected zombies, and the guilt of actually taking the lives of the first couple had caught up to him. But, now that he's here, he's reverted back to being his generally pleasant self, even if he is a rat in a cage with some unseen jerks in lab coats are performing experiments on him). "Honestly, life wasn't great back home. I mean, it was mine, and it's not as though I didn't like it or anything, but .. it wasn't great, over all. What I wouldn't give for just ten minutes of Call of Duty, though."

At the mention of sickness, Major takes the opportunity to glance around. He's heard of the fever that seems to be sweeping through the town, though no one he knows has been affected, as far as he knows. He wonders whether the people who've congregated here are contagious - if the disease is contagious to begin with. That was never his area of expertise; it had always been Ravi's.

"I doubt whoever's in charge wants everyone getting sick and dying, though; don't they need to keep us in some state of 'being alive' in order to do whatever it is they're doing to us?"

"What is it with you guys and over-hyped shooters," Kira asks, just to break the tension of the topic at hand. It doesn't stray him for long, though. His own life wasn't going in the best direction when he left it, and he's struggling to think of anyone coming in off something happy. No one's crawled out of the fountain crying about their wedding day, or the birth of their first child, or graduating from school. Maybe some people come from perfectly mediocre lives, and they just aren't worth mentioning.

"I don't know what the limits of this place are," he admits, looking over the gathered villagers. Powers muted; powers taken; returned; given away. Even limits of ruthlessness are hard to gauge. "Enough people come in from bad situations that sometimes it seems like we're being appeased, but you'll also go fucking crazy if you don't let the good be good."

Now he scans the crowd again, looking for a familiar head of dirty blond hair. "But they've also killed people outright, and over a year ago--a cluster of people arrived to an empty canyon. Maybe the signs of the last group were faked, but, we can't really know. Sometimes I think the not knowing is the point, of all of it."

"Isn't that everything we've found," Kira asks, drifting drab moth to flame at the ugly bite of her reaction. It's slightly stronger, this returned version of his gift, and only this piece of it, so that his sense of the world is as much the feelings around him as his own vision, the sound of their voices. After weeks, he's learned to let it wash in and out, but the group setting is such a blast of white noise that he isn't sure what he feels at all, for the latest discovery.

The anger, he doesn't share, but it focuses him, and he can see her point.

Entering the fray to join the discussion, the white noise is all around him, the volume at a tolerable level. Still, it's a touchy subject, and his attention slips in tics--eyes flicking beyond Stella to another in the crowd, jaw twitching before it tilts to aim his gaze at another spike. It's the kind of effect that kept him off the subway unless he was three sheets to the wind and in possession of earphones.

Drawing himself back to her, he continues. "Every few months, we find one of these rooms--but what have any of them ever really told us? What's changed in our lives except the level of paranoia in which we live them?"

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[PLOT MINGLE] The Specimen Room

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