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[2leftfeet]

CHARACTERS: Shepard & YOU
LOCATION: Deck 023, Various
WARNINGS: N/A (will edit if applicable)
SUMMARY: Going over data from the recon mission + miscellaneous catch all for end of May
NOTES: I'm game for more specific/individual starters or feel free to start one yourself. Prose or brackets!


i. Deck 023
[She gives herself very little in the way of down time between returning to the inhabitable areas of the ship and doing a headcount, collecting verbal reports and the data sent from the recon mission's fireteams to their respective comm liaisons. The result is a lot of data: text and audio files, a few scraps of video and days and days and days worth of mapping information from the devices that each fireteam had carried. Even with the gaps in communication, the resulting mountain of data is too massive for any one person to comb through and sort intelligently.

Doesn't mean she won't give it a shot. Shepard has set herself up in one of the large public rooms on Deck 023, meaning to take advantage of the large holoscreens there to go through the video data. It's all a little Shadow Broker: two screens running video, a third compiling the mapping data into a semi-useable schematic, and Shepard herself looking thrashed out and bright-eyed from lack of sleep bent over her own communications device, taking reference notes as she slowly limps her way through the datastreams. It's less than ten days worth of footage, much of it video and audio from points of aimless wandering down intersecting corridors and it's still an intimidatingly daunting task; she doesn't know how anyone could process a whole galaxy worth of information.

Eventually she leans back in her chair, pausing to rub her eyes.]

Hell.

ii. Kitchens
[Coffee. It's a nigh primordial need that she finds herself looking to satisfy at --what? Some ungodly hour, maybe. Or it could be the middle of the day and she hasn't noticed. It's been a long few hours and every time she sits in the quiet for too long, she starts to hear (or remember) the low droning tapping from inside the belly of the ship.

So she stays busy and right now that means standing in one of the Tranquility's many kitchens, listening the the hiss of the coffee maker as a pot brews. To anyone who might come across her there, she looks bone tired. A little sharp, a little lean. She's spent too many hours staring at datafeeds, eyes burning; Shepard looks just about as good as she feels which if she stopped to examine herself would probably be 'shitty'.]

Comments

[2leftfeet]

I've been informed by the field operative. She's going to be staying out of the field next jump cycle.

[Cut and dry. Losing someone in the field blows, but it's not like she can strong arm anyone into it - would prefer not to, honestly speaking. And she can't really complain. This is already bigger than she anticipated it being given the sedentary nature of most of the ship's passengers.

The rest is all speculation on her part, but--]

You'll know this already then, but apparently the link when down around the same time as your mirrors did. The jamming of the native communication network I get, but I'm starting to think the rest of it is less a technical issue and more of an environmental one. We've got singularities down there and-- [and she's been thinking about this for a while, but even so the words coming out of her mouth sound ridiculous] --maybe parts of the ship aren't existing in the same time or space as the rest of the vessel.

[darkart]

[ Severus nods, contemplative. If Elena reported it, then that loopholes around his ethical stalemate just fine. Not that there's a board of ethics here or anything, but just because he's an asshole doesn't mean he's soulless or without professional integrity. ]

There are more fields at work here than electrical ones, [ he agrees, despite not being entirely sure if 'electrical' is the correct term. He's learning, but the finger points of technology are a long ways out from being second-nature. ] Multitasking as a reaction to stimulation seems to be the norm, instead of one blanketed return effort to subdue us. When we went to Arima, we lost contact with the ship, and our communication devices didn't work at all. Despite that, when we all returned, the food stores were completely refilled. [ Star Trek transporters? Magic? Did the TQ lower down a basket on a rope? ] A vast effort that one hidden agent in a run-down shuttle could not have managed. Some other power, be it technological or otherwise, is involved here.

[2leftfeet]

[She'd been under the working assumption that this was going to be relatively simple - go into the ship, kick the shit out of a few would-be humanoids, find the AI core or wherever the crew was piloting this beast of a ship from-- it'd been optimistic, but generally the kind of spatial and physical things that made sense to her on a basic level. No one plans for warped reality on their crap work detail.]

Hell, who knows how much of it is even real. The nanites could just be screwing with us when it comes to half of the stuff we're running into down there.

[darkart]

I have plenty of experience with altering perception, illusion, that sort of thing, but nanites are beyond my purview. [ Probably obviously. ] The more I see here, the more I think it's a mystery that won't be solved by just magic or just hard science alone.

[ Which is honestly sort of vexing; his opinion on muggle science is not very high. He does have to admit people get shockingly creative with it, though. A thought that is no better illustrated than by the Tranquility itself. ]

[2leftfeet]

[She's not really a fan of the thought either. Science she knows - at least in theory. This magic stuff is totally alien, completely beyond the realm of her understanding. She can accept there are things outside her grasp, but she doesn't have to like it.]

Good thing we've got the two of us then.

[It sounds more optimistic than she really is, but she's not opposed to the occasional indulgence of positive thinking.]

[darkart]

[ Severus raises his hands in a c'est la vie sort of gesture, shrugging. Yep. But his expression is wry. This whole thing is frustrating and stupid and the fact that they're even here is the most frustrating and stupid thing at all. ]

We shall see how it pans out, I suppose. [ He nods at the bag. ] Let me know what you think of that, and how it works for you. I'll be in touch.

[ Unless there's anything else, he'll be off; he'd offer to help her with the paperwork, but he's actually pretty busy between this and xenogen business. There's a startling number of people on board with zero control over their various magical ailments. ]