"I don't see her. Use your phone! I'll take care of this thing!" Travel scowls - If this thing had actually hurt Smoke Alarm, she'd never forgive herself. She squeezes off another shot.

The Qplotl whirls as Trav's turbopistol blasts sizzle past it.  The phased artron bursts dissolve the dimensional gap that allows the Qplotl to remain safely out of 4-space, and now it is visible to Trav and Sereth, as well as Stanley, bringing up the rear from the direction of the Collinswood house.  At least, for the moment.

And so is Smoke Alarm!  She's a short distance away from the Qplotl, and she feels the gluey feel to the air around her evaporate.  Sereth and Trav can see that she's rumpled and wild-eyed.

Trav senses motion beside her, as James raises his rifle, though he doesn't fire as yet.

OOC:

19:21, Today: The Guardian, for the NPC Qplotl, rolled 16 using 2d6+8 with rolls of 4,4. Resisting Trav's scare: Resolve(4) + Ingenuity(4).

With a "Yes, But" I will strike off half of Trav's Presence (just 1, alas) from its Resolve.  However, this does bridge the dimensions for a bit, making the Qplotl and Smoke Alarm accessible to those of you stuck in 4-space, and vice versa.

Smoke Alarm can make a Coordination + Athletics against the critter to try to get out of its range and adjacent to the others before it can close dimensions on her again.  Anyone else interact with the Qplotl for now, which would include Sereth attacking it.

More concerned with cutting it down so it would -stop- hurting Smoke, he attacked, whilst barking a command.

"Stanley! Grab Smoke!"

OOC: 10:35, Today: Sereth rolled 18 using 2d6+8 with rolls of 6,4. Co-ordination + Swordfighting.

Yes! I rolled well!

Smoke Alarm had stop-signed in dismay. Her friends outlooked but did not eyespy, they outlooked right thru her like she wasn't even there. They were outlooking about,  asking where she was,  like a game of seek-and-hide, but she was totally unseen. A neat trick, but not if her friends couldn't eyespy her. 'I'm here. Eyespy! Pretty please!' she begged, feeling like everything was going down the plughole.

But then Traveller shot it and the slow-poke zone went away, all the gluey air gone. She was free as a mouse! Desperate and frantic, unbraveness icehot on her neck, feeling the rat-tentickles grabbing after her, Smoke Alarm sprinted to the side of her friends.


OOC: Running away,  18
09:50, Today: Smoke Alarm rolled 18 using 2d6+10 with rolls of 3,5. coord (4) + athletics (4) + Kang Fu (2)

The Qplotl is just lunging after Smoke Alarm when Sereth leaps in its way.  It frantically tries to phase out, mid-way through its grasp, but it doesn't quite manage that before Legate Sereth's great sword slashes through several of its grasping tentacles and into the belly of the beast.

Smoke Alarm's heart skips a beat as she feels one of its long arms snag the bottom of her shoe, and the shoe comes off as the tentacle phases out.  Smoke Alarm stumbles and falls forward -- but Stanley is there to catch her before she can hit the ground.

OOC:

21:21, Today: The Guardian, for the NPC Qplotl, rolled 15 using 2d6+9 with rolls of 4,2. Grabbing for Smoke Alarm: Coordination(8) + Fighting(5) -4 (3rd action).
21:20, Today: The Guardian, for the NPC Qplotl, rolled 12 using 2d6+6 with rolls of 3,3. Blocking Sereth: Strength(3) + Fighting(5) -2 (second action).

Which is a most palpable hit: with the Qplotl's already degraded strength it's up to Sereth whether you want it to be flat-out lethal.

OOC: Trav will probably be pissed; but I'm gonna make it lethal.

Sereth's honor blade cleaves through the convolutions of the Qplotl's flesh, spilling violet smoke.  When it intersects the vertical slit of nothing through the middle of the creature's body, everybody feels space convulse around them.  Sereth is wracked by conflicting synesthetic impressions -- he feels the thing howling through the blade; he sees the heat of its agony -- and is flung away as the hulk splits apart.

As he wheels and gets to a defensive position on one knee, just in case, Sereth feels another electrical crackling and Trav's holo-projector gives up the ghost.  He's left there as his true self.  James Collinswood, to his credit, merely nods and calmly thumbs the safety on his rifle.  There are numerous scattered lumps of the Qplotl on the ground, but as everyone watches, they begin to slowly shrink into nothing, venting purple mist as they go, growing smaller as the creature's "rat" extrusions grew bigger during Smoke's first investigations.

Several moments of silence go by.  Then, through no easily explained chain of events, Smoke Alarm's shoe drops straight down from above to bounce off her head, and comes to rest in the straw, smoking slightly.

Sereth eyed Traveller; before turning to James, and bowed elaborately.

"SEreth of the Draconian EMpire, at your service."

Trav runs up to Smoke. "Oh, baby. Stan, over here please? Sereth, thank you." She immediately checks Smoke for her quantum integrity. "Shit." She's examining Smoke on a quantum and Artron level, while making room for Stan to treat her physically.

OOC: 00:25, Today: The Traveller rolled 17 using 2d6+10 with rolls of 1,6. Awareness 2+Science 6 +Sonic 2 - Checking out Smoke.

Trav doesn't seem too bothered by Sereth having killed what seems to have a vortex scavenger. She thumbs quickly some instructions on her phone, setting the TARDIS sensors to ping to them an alert for any more swarms of such things. "Keep an eye out, Chibi."

As she examines Smoke (while also holding her tight, grateful she's still alive), Trav explains, "James, your child is the last survivor of a terrible war my people were involved in... where everyone lost. The Doctor and I, we're the last of our kind. That thing there is a scavenger of a kind. I can't think of a safer, better pair of people for him to be with than you and Marianne. The Doctor and I? We have too many enemies. I have my own children, but I had to leave them, partially for that reason. I might go back to them, some day." She grows quiet as she continues to examine Smoke's artron field and temporal signature, making sure the creature didn't eat any of the Kang's timeline or infect her.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:31, Wed 22 Apr 2015.

Finally free of the big brain-thing, Smoke Alarm could at last calm down and stop fighting. It had been a very narrow fire-escape from something she could barely comprehend, and a deep sense of shock seeped in. She'd been badly beaten, almost made unalive. Wide-eyed and pale, Smoke Alarm stayed quiet as a mouse, letting Stanley and Traveller hug her tight. Mayhaps they needed to feel better. When her shoe popped out and dropped down onto her head, she clutched it tightly for the sense of something real.

'Stanley. My arm popped out again.' she said softly. It was clear that she'd taken a battering from the thing. 'You're not going to make me go back to the housepital, are you?'
This message was last edited by the player at 01:22, Thu 23 Apr 2015.

"I can't promise that, Smoke. That depends on how hurt you are." Stanley says with a faint smile, glancing at Traveller. He trusts Trav to spot any weird Time Vortex side effects of the attack, so he focuses on what he can actually see and learn from examining Smoke. It would help if he knew what that creature has actually done to her. He doesn't know what to look for, so he can't rule out anything. He quickly, but carefully begins examining Smoke Alarm. The first thing he notices is that Smoke Alarm is not as energetic as usual. That is a bad, or at least not a good, sign. Stan tests her reflexes and checks for internal bleeding as best as he can.

Stan asks Smoke a question, to see if she remembers what happened to her, but primarily to keep her talking and prevent her from slipping into unconsciousness without them noticing. "Smoke Alarm, can you tell me what you did before you got attacked? What did you do after you entered the barn?"

OOC:
Spending a SP for examining Smoke, don't want to miss something dangerous this stage:
22:19, Today: Stanley Newton rolled 28 using 4d6+8 with rolls of 6,3,5,6. Ingenuity(4)+Medicine(4)+SP(2d6).

This message was last edited by the player at 20:23, Wed 22 Apr 2015.

The Traveller's scan of Smoke Alarm doesn't reveal any serious quantum instability: her tissues are highly charged with artron flux at the moment, as is quite common when a person has made several unshielded dimensional translations, but that should have no long-term ill effects.

Stanley's examination reveals that Smoke does seem to have a number of distressed muscles and tendons around her shoulder; she also seems to have suffered significant bruising to the ribs.  However, there don't seem to be any broken bones, nor does she appear to be in danger of going in to shock.  Her other symptoms seem to mostly correspond to coming off an episode of severe anxiety, which seems understandable under the circumstances.

"Is there anything I can do to help, Dr. Newton?" James asks.

She loitered while Stan and Traveller outlooked her over, too shaken to squirm or complain. She mostly outlooked with eyespying across the barn at where the brain-thing had been, wondering if it was still there and would comeout back again.

'Nothing!' Smoke Alarm blurted out at Stan's question, on the defensive by reflex, in case this was just like the hospital all over again. But that wasn't why Stanley was asking, so Smoke relaxed and show-and-telled her story. 'I talked to the pussy-cat and footed in and found the air-conditioning was all weird, with hot spots and cold spots and thin spots and fat spots, and I tracked back and lost-and-found where it was outcoming. Then I eyespied a rat hole in the floor and outlooked down it and these rats cameout and they just sat there around it loitering, not running all around at random like proper rats. So I outlooked and did Science and gave them a piece of bread which they didn't want.' As Smoke Alarm show-and-telled her story, she regained a bit of her old liveliness and brave-and-boldness

'Then they started getting bigger but not biggerer at the same time, so I waved a straw at them, but it disappeared. Then some of the rats disappeared like a talkiphone and then they all jumped on me and grabbed me and took me into some kind of slow-poke zone where the rats were tentickles of the big muscle-brain thing and it grabbed me and make me a cowardly cutlet and tried to eat me like a Rezzie. But I was brave and bold as a Kang could be, and used my grabbler-gun to grab the beams and hold on and I used the talkiphone to show-and-tell you, and the talkiphone gave it brain-ache, so I kept doing that and it jammed the talkiphone, then I had to let go of the grabbler because it hurt too much, so I used my arrowgun to put a hole in the brain-thing and got away, then you all came, but you didn't eyespy me, then you did and Sereth chopped it up.' Smoke Alarm finally ended her breathless, punctuation-free account, and only then started to feel properly sound-and-safe, and shape-ship-and-sound, now she'd show-and-telled her friends and made it real.

Then she remembered. 'The cat! The cat knows! The cat tried to stop-sign me, and the muscle-brain tried to grab it too but it had tentickles of its own to make the brain's tentickles go away. Where's the cat?' Determined to lost-and-found the wise pussy-cat, Smoke Alarm pulled away, footing outside and outlooking about for the cat. 'Puss puss puss!' she called, which was apparently the language of cats.


OOC: I'm currently carrying 1 Coordination damage (down to 4) and 3 Strength damage (down to 1). How much of that was due to the slowness field? Does it go away now Smoke's out?
This message was last edited by the player at 06:47, Thu 23 Apr 2015.

OOC: All of it stays around for the moment, until Smoke Alarm gives herself a chance to rest and recover.  Technically it will take her a pretty long time to properly heal, but once she gets a good, long nap she'll just be "action hero" injured. :)

Despite her achy side Smoke Alarm is thrilled when, looking around outside the barn, she spots the cat, sitting calmly atop a wooden fence and licking its paws.  For some reason, she can't see its tentickles any more.

It cocks its head at Smoke Alarm.  "Miaow," it tells her gravely.

'You knew!' Smoke Alarm said, heedless of the fact she was getting talky with a cat who was not a cat. 'You have the knowhow of all this. You tried to stop-sign me. I thought you were just being a scaredy-cat. I should have listened to you.' she admitted.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:59, Fri 24 Apr 2015.

"Maybe you can get a glass of water for her." Stanley suggests to James. Having finished his examination he tells Smoke Alarm the good news. "Smoke, you won't have to go to the hospital. It will take a while for the pain to go away, but you'll be okay."

Smoke Alarm was rather distracted by the mystery of the cat right now, but was relieved to hear it. 'Okay.' she said, and went back to wondering exactly how she could get talky with the cat. Did it need a talkiphone?

James turns back to the Traveller.  "That's what the Doctor told us, more or less.  He had only been here a few days when they started showing up.  I only actually saw two of them, myself, but they did a number on the house, and we lost three from the stock."  He waves out at the fenced are where several cattle are getting their exercise.

"So finally he said he had to leave, to draw them away.  He said he was going to... oh, I can't remember it, I was never too sharp on the high-end science to start with and he told me that what he was doing wouldn't even be guessed at for a few centuries yet."  James sighs.  "It did seem to work.  We hadn't had any trouble, up till now.  Do you think that we're going to get more of those things, or that that one had just stuck around for some reason?"

"Wait a second," he says, as what Smoke Alarm has been saying seems to sink in.  "You think that Boots here was telling you that... thing... was in the barn?"  He indicates the cat.

'Yes!' Smoke Alarm insisted as if it was the most obvious thing ever. 'Boots eyespied the warning-signs, tried to make me 'ware the rats.' Smoke Alarm felt all dark and screwed up inside, regretful, wishing she'd done things differently. If only she'd done what the cat had said, she would have been okay. Curiosity had made the cat unalive, but cats had nine lives. Cats knew.

"Animals are smart, Mr Collinswood. They're sensitive to a lot of things we have to train ourselves to remember. I'm sure Boots here knows the land here just as well as anyone." Trav stands up, and scritches the cat. "Thank you for helping to keep my sweet Smoke Alarm safe, Mister Boots."

"I just came here to check something. I have no designs on your son. See, I know him in the future. I want to make sure that some people don't suborn him and make him into something terrible. Also, now, I know I'm not alone anymore." Trav brightens, and she balls her hands into fists, and does that little happy stomp that anyone who knew her back on Macross Island would recognize. "Smoke! Your Doctor? The one you gave the Fizzade to? He's un-unalive! He's changed his face, but we can find him! He made it out of the war! He made it, Smoke! Oh, he made it! Inexplicably, Trav feels this titanic geyser of happiness welling up inside of her. Things would be OK. If the Doctor was alive, the universe would be safer. The Doctor Lives.

"But first things first. James, Marianne, I'd like to check out your son. I want to make sure he's OK, and answer a few questions, for myself. May I, please?" She holds her sonic up.

If James and Marianne acquiesce, she carefully runs the sonic over the infant, taking a thorough full spectrum scan, similar to what she's done with adult Phillipe, Fortuna, Warlock and Evers. Her smile, as she's glowing.

"Now, this place needs to be made safe. Did the Doctor leave with you something that looked like a pack of TAROT cards? I give you my word, as a Time Lord, that if you would let me see them, that they shall be returned, and I shall only use that deck of cards if they wish to be used."
This message was last edited by the player at 20:42, Fri 24 Apr 2015.

Boots regards the Traveller enigmatically, but suffers himself to be scritched.


Marianne looks a question at James, but he says, "I think these people are all right.  More, I think there's a good chance they do know the Doctor indeed."  He glances at Sereth, as if that is all the explanation that needs.

"Em, why don't you stick with the Traveller and her friends, and I'll see what I can fix up for dinner.  If the lot of you would like," he adds.  By now the sun is starting to get pretty low in the sky.


Marianne shakes her head.  "I don't remember him showing us anything like that.  He did say he had something to do to try to protect this place, that he went into town to work on.  A... perception screen?  Something of that sort."

Not really wanting to go back inside the barn where she'd had the nightmarish encounter with the muscle-brain-thing, Smoke Alarm sat on the wooden fence, her hurty stretched-out arm tucked in her lap as she stroked Boots's soft fur. She couldn't find any tentickles now. Mayhaps she could only eyespy them in the slow-poke zone. Only the brain-thing's tentickles outgoed to the rats, but Boots's tentickles cameout of the cat. The cat was something more, a cat who was not a cat. But weren't all cats something more? She scratched the cat's head between the pointy ears.

At Traveller's happy shouting, Smoke Alarm slid right off the fence in surprise. 'The Doctor Doctor? Un-unalive? Like a zombie? ...Not like a zombie? Alive alive?' she worked out in amazement. She ran up to Traveller and jumped up and down with her in glee, sharing her happiness that a friend was a alive and sound and safe. The Doctor would put everything to rights.

"That's allright, then. I have some tools of my own. Don't worry, Marianne. As a mother myself, I'll do everything I can to make sure your little boy stays safe until he's ready to leave home. He's my kin, too."

As she scans Phillipe, she smirks to herself. That perception screen was almost strong enough to stop her. Boobie was nearby, relatively speaking. She needed to move fast. He and Sexy were slippery - she named his time machine that back when he had his second face and he nearly turned purple with embarassment - Zoe kept on tittering. But she thinks she knows how to contact him. She remembers fondly the games of hide and seek they played, back when he wore patchwork motley, then when he was a short guy, then with his 8th face.

This new one with the leather jacket. It was sexy. That boat had sailed, but still, a woman could imagine things.

OOC:22:51, Today: The Traveller rolled 22 using 2d6+16 with rolls of 1,5. Trav scans Baby Phillipe - Ingenuity 8+Science 6+Sonic 2 - Confirming suspicions about Paltree.



"Yes, yes, alive alive, not a zombie! I think so. He was here and he made this place disappear to protect baby Phillipe. You see, I think Baby Phillipe here is from Gallifrey, where I come from. That doesn't make James nor Marianne any less his Mom or Dad. The same thing happened to me, you see - I grew up as an Earth baby in a place called New Kentshire, on another Earth that had magic and big blue rivers of light, raised by a mommy and daddy not at all that different from James and Marianne. They raised me to be good and brave and kind. I had a 3 cats - Red and Daisy and Felix and a dog named Rosco. I'm sure that Mister Boots will take good care of Phillipe, won't you." Trav scans Mister Boots and the surrounding area perfunctorily, to make sure there are no problems.

"Now, we need to clean up this temporal spillage and deal with any time fissures, and reinforce the perception filter. If I had the TAROT, I'd subject this section of space time to a small Time Lock, so no time travelling meddlers could touch Phillipe's time line until he meets Stan and I. Maybe I can still do it, hm. Either way, I don't want anyone to mess with Phillipe and the Collinswoods."
This message was last edited by the player at 05:51, Sat 25 Apr 2015.

The smell of cooking burgers wafts in from the kitchen as Trav works.

As she takes deep scans of the baby's genetic and dimensional signatures, she finds, much as she did when she first met the older Phillipe, a predominantly human genetic structure with the interlaced grafts of Gallifreyan symbiotic nuclei and resonant structures to the TAROT analysis she was able to carry out.

Now that she has the right hunch to play, though, she also finds that the Gallifreyan sequences include long chains of nonactive, "junk" DNA -- except, of course, that there's no good reason for it to be present.  Any examination with human technology (after the completion of the Human Genome Project, that is) that would be available within Phillipe's projected lifespan would identify the splices as nonhuman, making Phillipe an obvious chimera.  So the junk sequences must be for some other purpose: when Trav subjects the information to some of the shortcuts and tricks that she remembers her old colleagues using, she finds the characteristic marker sequences used for tagging and identification by Paltreesalvanaron.  The old goat never could resist signing his work.

And when she knows that, she is able to read the header data planted within those sequences.  This is clearer with the baby than it was with the adult Phillipe, much less his subsequent incarnations, because the ravages of benign mutation and replication errors have had very little time to accumulate in his cells.  Decoding Paltree's record protocols, she is interested to note the designation Paltree must have put onto his project.  It's a very simple name: a single grapheme from Old High Gallifreyan:

Alpha.

OOC: This probably doesn't tell you a lot of substance you didn't already guess, but your description was vague, so if you want to refine what you're looking for, I'll either add to this or call for another roll.

Boots has snuck inside the house with the rest as Trav came in to conduct her examination.  When she does her casual scan of him, at first she thinks she failed to clear the pattern buffer from checking over Phillipe, and then she realizes that Boots, too, is walking around with some portions of his physiognomy extending out of 4-space, which is not very normal for most cats Trav has met.