2018-05-11: A Much Healthier Planet
- Log: A Much Healthier Planet
- Cast: Loren Voss, Tabitha deVriese, Elhaym van Houten
- Where: Volgran Forest - Crash Site
- Date: May 11th 2018
- Summary: Three Solarians have an impromptu meeting in a medical bay. Loren works on a hobby. Elly suggests a new name. Tabitha makes herself at home.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Vane, for a variety of reasons, has become one of -- though hardly the only -- point of interest for the crew of the stranded ship, partially as a result of its less-occupied-by-the-local-church nature, partially because the local spellcraft style has drawn some attention, and partially because thanks to deVriese's sampling, the population characteristics are a little better known than some.
That, and the wildlife nearby is a little unusual even for Lunar -- this last had been the reason Loren himself had been sent out to collect samples as a part of his most recent assignment.
Rumor has it he didn't come back with much of interest.
Unfortunately for him, this one's true, though the reason he didn't come back with very many samples of the local flora and fauna is one he's kept mum on.
Largely because it would mean admitting to what he'd gone ahead and done... and the fact that he'd made a serious error of judgement.
For now, he's holed up in one of the side medical bays, little more than a miniature clinic compared to the rest of what the Tzadkiel boasts. But then, there's a purpose for this -- there's no use tying up the surgical wing for what can be solved in minutes with a diagnostic tool and some antibiotics.
In any case, no one else is here at the moment, which makes it a rare place of semi-isolation aboard the ship.
If anyone thinks he's in here doing work though they are quite mistaken.
With care, the medical officer places another card in position, balancing it atop an already considerably tall stack of delicately arranged cards.
Yes, he's clearly in the middle of building a literal house of cards. And thinking, largely about recent events. It's always easier to think things through when his hands are occupied. This has been the case for him as far back as he can remember -- it's just how it always is.
That woman... he's going to have to write a report about that woman. At least to say that she knows who he is, in a manner of speaking. He takes a step back, holding his breath as he eyes the placement of his latest card. ...He should be honest about what happened. But at the same time, he won't catch himself any favors if he does...
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
The door swings open with the speed and total disregard for occupants of a self-obsessed egomani--oh hey it's deVriese.
"Can you believe it!?" she laughs, giggling prettily. "I'm like, I get it, you know, a girl's gotta--"
She stops. Tabitha is dressed like she just finished a workout - long hair up in a working ponytail, heavy curves covered by a tank top and supported by a sports bra that looks like it takes some engineering notes from industrial cranes, and gym shorts, a towel slung around her shoulders. She stops. "Loren!" she chimes, shifting gears immediately. It's amazing how she can move that fast without banging things around, but her footfalls are surprisingly light as she dashes over and takes up a spying position over his card house. "Oooo," she says. "That looks like it took you a whiiiile..."
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
Elly van Houten is here too, her hair flatter than usual. She has put on the singlet that usually goes underneath the pleather one-piece and might, in the eyes of the people of the street, seem weirdly underdressed because you can see how high-waisted those ballistic nylons are. Here, this is just moderately casual. She is also, perhaps horrifyingly, following after Tabitha. "I really can't believe it, but I know it must have happened," she answers Tabitha, when
BAM
CARDS
Elly blinks once at the construction of Loren Voss, even as Tabitha greets him with great enthusiasm. She steps forwards, but -- is that a breeze caused by her Ether powers, or perhaps just by the passage of two nearby bodies? "Oh, wow," she says, sounding surprised.
Maybe even delighted.
But will this house of cards... be renewed? Or will it...
come tumbling down
tumbling down
tumbling d--
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There has to be some way he can fix this. Some way he can -- once again -- try to make up for what he's done. The problem is, he just can't see what that is from here. He--
This is the point where Loren picks up another card.
This is also the point where the door swings open and in walks not just deVriese, but...
Van Houten.
He draws back, as if his hackles were already lifted by virtue of her presence.
"Did you need something?" he asks, before his gaze tracks down at the...
...
He gets a moment to actually be embarrassed by getting caught like this. And then, inevitability ensues.
It's the nature of houses made of cards to fall. They can't stand forever.
A stray gust is enough to spell this one's doom. The whole construct trembles briefly.
And in a cascade of cards, it's across the table and all over the floor.
Card still in hand, Loren glances down, deadpan, at the destruction.
"...Is there anything else you wanted to do today?" he asks the both of them.
But even he can't hold that pose, so to speak, forever. He just sighs, drops the playing card onto the top of the pile, then glances between the two of them, as if taking in for the first time their choice of clothing.
"Sparring practice?" he ultimately asks, folding his arms over his chest.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha's grin slips wider as Loren's gaze wanders, but she doesn't tease him with it directly any further. Tabitha deVriese is not an animal.
For instance, she finds it more fun to make her prety suffer at length, rather than speeding to the kill.
Instead, she draws back and sets a hand on her hip, grinning like she were not in the least perturbed by somebody involved accidentally blowing over Loren's weird tower thing. "I mean, I don't have plans," she says, glancing to Elly with a curious cock of her eyebrow. The notion that this was some kind of undertaking of value has eluded her. You don't build things you want to keep if they can be blown over by two passing gossips, right? Yeah. That's logic.
When he prompts them further, she shrugs, lazily. "More of a general workout," she says, rolling her shoulder. "They have one of those weight machines with the cables, for working your back? It's great! I'm pretty sure the Lambs around here think a back workout is just doing back curls with a rock on your back."
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
Elly, silently, dies a thousand deaths. He was working so hard on it. Now it's spoiled. Now I've destroyed another thing. She lowers her eyes, looking towards her hands for a moment, mouth opening and closing wordlessly for a moment.
"-- Do they really?" she asks Tabitha, face still kind of ashen but eyes screaming with her relief at the prospect of a topic other than 'Loren's dreams, crushed by her destroying presence.'
Externally, she seems more or less the same as always, though. Hurray!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
By its very nature, it was doomed to destruction at some point of another.
This is a fact that Loren is acutely aware of -- this isn't his first time playing around with cards. But at the same time, Tabitha isn't far off when she wonders to herself about the 'point' of doing something that is by its nature fragile and doomed.
There isn't a good reason for building a house of cards, except to see if it can be done, and for how long.
There may be a metaphor for mortality in here, somewhere!
But his currently wasted efforts (such that they were) aside, he's somewhat more put on edge by the widening grin from Tabitha's corner of the room here. What's that about?
...Does he want to know?
"Hmm. There's something to be said for the basics," he allows, punctuating the comment with a shrug before he stoops to pick the fallen cards off the floor. "...Wouldn't surprise me if they did. I was speaking to some girl a few days ago who went on and on about 'wind spirits'." He stands again after a moment, dropping the cards into the general stack/pile that's formed here. "Filgaian, not from Lunar, for what it's worth."
His gaze is almost clinical as he turns his attention first towards Elly, then back towards Tabitha.
"Anything of interest out there? I suppose you've had the same amount of luck that I have."
Which -- even rumor aside -- can easily be gauged by his reports from his ruin expedition and intelligence work: none, none at all.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha is too self-absorbed to understand the haunting poetry of impermanence.
"Wind spirits?" Tabitha asks, and chuckles deep in her throat. "I keep telling you, Loren, this is why we had to invent a God for them to line up behind. They'll come up with something stupid, otherwise!"
She struts over to the tabletop and, because it's no longer occupied by a card house, makes it the home of her butt, setting herself on the tabletop and crossing her legs. This sets her plastic sports bottle into view, too. "Hm, interesting...I mean, they're all interesting. There's some toothy Baskar child who tried to bite me..." she counts off on her fingers. "I think she may have been deducted by Science, actually, she kept muttering about being abducted by people from the sky and experimented on. I didn't think they usually put those back down, but..." Shrug. "Well, father never did tell me everything they get up to, you know." She counts another, "Some sort of Baskar offshoot woman, she said Zortroan? Elruvian, I think, from the accent. She's selling street food out on Blue Dragon Way in Meribia, so I guess she knows where the hungry stomachs are." Another finger, "Some scrawny scholar woman who looks like she hasn't eaten in about a year but thought she could threaten me...her cat girlfriend who took it badly when I acted like the scholar hanging out with her was the same thing as buying a pet..."
She looks to Loren. "Lambs are very interesting, you know. What, did you think I went into the order to spread the word of Granas?"
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
"Just... in general? Was this that Armengard person?" Elly asks Loren, hesitantly, as if expecting him to snap at her. But his attention turns back to Tabitha and Elly feels a sense of surcease, of abeyed demise.
Tabitha throws herself around.
That gives Elly cover to think. When Tabitha trails off and Elly tries not to think too hard as to wh ether or not she recognizes the people to whom Tabitha refers to, Elly does interject, "I wonder if we should give them a different name. The Lambs here, I mean. If only to avoid confusion... But I suppose that's above our pay grades."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Fortunately for Elly, he doesn't snap at her. He just sort of... sighs, instead. "No. This is one of those Baskars running around. Lan Lilac. She's been a useful cover for intelligence gathering," well, such that he's managed to do that (it hasn't been one entirely long streak of failures, more like a few broken up segments of failures) "but her beliefs are..."
He lifts a hand, tilts it uncertainly to one side, then lets it drop.
Never mind that he's sort of met some of the spirits in which she's a devout believer. Never mind that he's still carrying one of their mediums in his bag.
He instead looks over at Tabitha, and as if in a sort of commiseration, rolls his eyes towards the heavens.
At a glance, he's casual right now, as if this were just another part of his daily life. But a closer eye might note the tension cording his frame, or the fact that he's kept his arms folded over his chest, or that he's not moved out from behind the table to approach them.
Though, the last part might be somewhat moot when Tabitha plants herself onto the table. He backs up a step, something akin to shock crossing his face before it, too, settles back into a mock-casual guarded neutrality.
He, too, is quiet for a moment or two.
"The apparent experiment? I think that's one of their strays, too, or something like that, based on her comments." He's heard rumors circulating about the labs before, and, well, at least half of the Elements are proof positive of some of the fruits of that labor. "It's possible she's an escapee, but there haven't been any extermination orders about that one in particular to my knowledge. Still, it seems she's capable of changing shape. It might be worth following up on."
None of the others ring a bell, as it were. "The field research opportunity. Hmph, well, you've got no shortage of subjects," he says, shrugging his shoulders as he glances back over at Tabitha. "Though I'd wondered if you were simply afflicted by religious fervor yourself."
His gaze shifts. "Like what?" This is to Elly. "'Moon Lambs'? It doesn't matter what we call them, they're still the same as the ones back on Filgaia. Hmm. I wonder how long they've been up here, though."
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha hems. "Well, if they want to see what she does in the wild, is that really an escapee?" she muses, to Loren identifying the weird stray. "I mean, if they wanted her back, they'd just have to ask me, at this point."
"'Moon Lamb...'" Tabitha repeats, exaggerating the syllables, trying out their shape. "Ehhhh. Space...Dog. No." She laughs, though, at her own mean joke. "Actually, they're not quite the same," she notes to Loren. "I never did put that report together. There's some subtle differences - not really enough to make a new taxonomy, I think, probably mostly related to environmental factors. Mostly they're a little thinner, on average, based on my admittedly not ideal sample sizes. I think it's because of the magic. Almost everyone has something and it's often practical, so you're not as in need of strong physique. That plus the landscape. It's not as hard a land as Filgaia, so there hasn't been the evolutionary pressure toward physical hardiness."
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
"They seem better fed, and the population's more spread out, too," Elly says. "Have you noticed that? The density is lower, but there's far less wasteland..."
"Rabbits, perhaps," Elly proposes, based on some obscure impulse.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
The expression on Loren's face might be best read as 'doubtful', as he appears to consider the idea that perhaps Lydia had been set loose on purpose just to see what makes her tick. Still, on this he hedges at least as far as 'out loud' commentary runs: "Hmm. Unless they can't reach you to make the request right now."
But the Lambs of Filgaia and the Lambs of Lunar are not quite the same.
"...Huh," he says, as if genuinely surprised for a change. "I hadn't noticed. So it's not just their magic? ...But not enough to speciate, either."
Perhaps the ancient civilizations had attained a greater reach than was generally surmised.
"Where's the divergence point? With enough genetic data they might be able to work out the approximate date of the last common ancestor, if there is one."
This has also genuinely piqued his own interest, at least for now.
"...Though if we need the data from the main server back home for any analysis, we're out of luck."
What can you do.
"...Yes, I have noticed that, van Houten," he does find the space to backhandedly snipe, all the same. "Did all the fields clue you in, too? The land isn't actually dying up here. Though, I've wondered what effect all that stuff in the air has on them." Malevolence. He's talking about Malevolence.
"Rabbits," he repeats, shortly after. "Well, I suppose if we need to call them something..."
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
"Oooo," Tabitha says, leaning back on Loren's desk to prop herself up on her hands like his entire personal space were her property. "I like Rabbits..."
She angles her head over to glance at Elly, nodding. "Yes, it's a much healthier planet, all in all," she says, confirming Elly less snootily because Tabitha prefers to be a different kind of sadist than Loren. Hence the gym shorts on his tabletop. "Oh, I know they can't reach me right now. Which is kind of a shock, all things considered."
She shrugs a bit at Loren's further questioning. "We will, so we can't do much at the moment. I can get all the farmhands I want to let me measure," here she kicks her legs to recross them the other way, "whatever I want, but I'll need depth of data, not just a sample size here. Not sure how we'll get there yet. Maybe if we dump this goddess of theirs in one of the brain tumblers."
She doesn't seem to remotely consider that this would be difficult.
She glances back to Loren, blinking. "'Stuff?' I'm pretty sure that's just pollen. At least I assumed that's why I had hay fever for a while..."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
The urge to just shoo her off the table is an overpowering one, one that he's managing to (barely) keep a lid on only by dint of the fact that she's one of the few members of his social class who doesn't appear to openly hold him in contempt and the fact that her precise heft in the hierarchy here is... uncertain.
Possibly considerable.
And thus, a direct confrontation is ill-advised in various axes.
Still, her sitting on his desk after she's been working out is definitely grinding his gears, so to speak. It's just being communicated via a long stare rather than any direct word or action.
"They can't reach any of us," Loren points out, his gaze diverting towards Elly again for a moment, as if to attempt to read her own thoughts on the matter.
"So you would need... what, samples from the other cities? How many would give a good sample size, at that... hmm. It might take a few years if you wanted high-level precision. Particularly since the collection's likely to be solo work." They're not likely to spare crew to collect samples when they have enough to tend to right here and now. "Unless our stay here ends up being longer than expected in which case..." He shrugs. "They might want some longer term projects." Including the matter of that 'goddess' This all said, of course, as if it doesn't really fall inside his jurisdiction as it were.
He'd always wondered what it was like on the moon. And now that he's here and seen it, he doesn't particularly want to stay, greenery or not. But then again, his own situation has changed enormously from the time he'd still considered things like that seriously.
She's not the only one to blink in surprise. "No, the Malevolence, not pollen."
He knows that the ability to see the stuff is by no means common among Gebler, but -- and here he makes yet another assumption -- she would know what he meant and not just think he's losing his mind.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha considers all this, lazily tipping her head back and forth as if listening to some internal rhythm. She might very well have detected that Loren doesn't want her sitting here. She does not appear to be allowing that data to alter her decisions. "Yes, correct," she replies, lazily, to Loren's response. "Which is the surprising part. I kinda figured if you ended up on some other star they'd still manage to get to you." She chuckles. "They always seem to have a plan, but maybe not? That's interesting, isn't it?"
As for the methodology: "Oh, this is a whole planet. If we want actually good data, forget a crew, we'll need a whole division. I'm good, but I'm not that good." She chuckles. "Well, but I'll see if I can figure out a rough set of data I need, see if we can get a good depth to the sample size."
She blinks at Loren's correction. "The....demon dog stuff?" she says, blankly, looking back at Loren. "That's the stuff the locals say causes monsters and mean children, right? It's like the Evil King's Malice or the Demon Seeds or the Devil back home, it's just an excuse to explain God not stopping a Reaper from eating your parents." ... her head cocks, thought crossing her eyes. Even if Tabitha does not, really, think a lot about other peoples' heads, she does know Loren enough to think that him just casually accepting a Lamb (Rabbit!?) folk belief would not be in character. "...Isn't it?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He's just going to have to continue to seethe in silence about this. As she may have picked up that he doesn't want her sitting there, he's getting the idea that she knows this and doesn't particularly care to change her plans accordingly.
But at least the discussion on genetic variance is enough to divert his attention from the issue at hand for now.
"That much... well, it's probably better to be sure. Hmm. I'm not even sure we have enough on the whole ship for that..." It's the sort of conundrum he does like to mull over though -- the ones that are at least partially math-related. "I suppose with even an imperfect set they could run a very rough estimate, but then that significantly raises the chance of the samples themselves being non-representative of the genetic drift as a whole, particularly since they're all from the same place... Well, that's the sort of thing the academics enjoy arguing about anyway," he finishes, as if to dismiss the topic and its clear data collection issue for the time being.
Very quickly it becomes clear that she cannot, in fact, see it. Oh, great, he thinks, already steeling himself internally. This is going to be like the conversation he had with a fellow medic in the days following the crash-landing all over again.
He hesitates for a moment, as if weighting the appropriate response to that question from her.
"...It's real. There were a few cases with it showing up back on Filgaia. I suppose the first one was a few months after you were declared MIA." He looks away from her and his occupied desk, off to the far wall. "...But not everyone can see the stuff. I'm half-convinced the labs think we're making this all up."
His gaze, for a moment, lingers on Elly. She'd been the first one to start to see it, hadn't she...
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha nods to Loren's thoughts. She's clearly already reached most of these conclusions, but she lets Loren have them out anyway. "If we want to do it right, we'll need the Homeland's resources, but, well." Shrug. "We don't have those right now. But yeah, if we can get at least a skeleton of a data set together we can start finding out other things we need. It's an upside to the low death rate, here, we have some time before turnover makes us start all over." She grins, pleased as punch to be discussing Rabbit (Lamb!?) life cycles as if they were the lives of ants in a farm.
Loren dismisses it all, which is fair enough; they've mutually demonstrated they understand the problems at hand there. Tabitha looks much more interested in this Malevolence.
And, indeed, as Loren speaks, her face turns from skeptical to thoughtful, pursing her lips and swaying her weight a little. She pushes off the table, pacing away thoughtfully. "You hear about it up here," she says. "But it really is like those old wives' tales. They blame every little thing on it. Lost information...not everyone can see it? I wonder what the deciding factor is. Genetic? No, if it were genetic the people here should have--hm, but that's true for environmental causes, too..."
She crosses one arm across her chest into the crook of her other elbow, cupping her chin in thought. "Interesting," she murmurs. "Something like that, something that could increase ferocity in a subject...you're sure?" She glances to Loren.
It is the most sincere look he's ever received from her, quietly fishing for his thoughts. "It all seems pretty far-fetched to me. It's usually better to blame a bored teenager than Satan, see."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"It seems to originate from up here, or something like that," Loren explains, attention shifting towards a floating blob of purple that floats lazily through the air not terrible far at hand. "From what I've been able to observe, there's more of it near the larger cities. ...The fact that most of us don't seem to be able to see or interact with it makes it difficult to study."
To say the least. It was similar for him -- save in those cases where the presence of the stuff tipped close to some critical mass -- until he'd apparently developed the talent for seeing it without realizing.
"I wasn't originally able to see it. Something changed. Perhaps it's exposure, or perhaps..."
He nearly winces as the static-shock of that headache starts itself on up again.
Which is probably the reason why he slips his glasses off and rubs at the bridge of his nose.
"...I know what I've seen. Other than that, I have no idea. I'm not sure why I can see it now, or what it does to people, precisely -- other than the obvious mutagenic effects -- but..."
He straightens and drops his hand away. "It's not a hallucination. This is real."
Exhaling a breath, he slips his glasses back on but bows his head under the continuing fury of the headache that doesn't seem to want to retreat.
He didn't used to get attacks like this. Maybe it's stress-related...