OOC: Smoke has both! :) Smoke originally suggested Mitchison do the how-you-do, so it's not entirely Trav being nutty. :p

How long has it been since we left Livingston? How much of Smoke's injuries would have healed now?


Smoke Alarm outlooked impassively on as the soldier-boy tried the how-you-do, returning the last stage with a pat-a-cake and another curtsey. It was passable, but he was no Kang, of course, and was unbold. But, unlike Sereth, she wouldn't make a to-do about it; the Kang how-you-do was meant for two people.

As Traveller cameout of the talkiphone box with flowers, she drifted after her, outlooking on as she placed them by some kind of sign. 'It's a scrap-heap?' she realised sadly. She walked circles around it and performed the cross-body palm-out gesture, but didn't know any of the people well enough to chant for them.

Trav steps back, sniffing, tears streaming down. "UNIT, they're good caretakers, they protect this planet from bad things. These are all people who got made unalive keeping other people safe. They can be yawny and uptight, but they give everything to make sure that everyone else can play games safely. They patrol the carrydoors. All of these folks, they're in the great pool in the sky. This is... my chant, for the unalive. Like that Pex guy you told me about, just like him. This flower, it's from my home planet. It's for all of the brave unalive ones." Trav tries to explain it in Kang terms, not that successfully, probably.

'Oh.' Smoke Alarm said, having nothing else. It wasn't a time to be talky. Good caretakers? she wondered. She bowed her head in sad respect, and walked another circle around the scrap-heap. Because, in the Towers, everyone goes on the scrap-heap in the end, and the Kangs erected heaps of scrap as totems to remember the unalive.

OOC: She's good.  She's probably had a couple of days of resting and reading books and snuggling with sympathetic Us, as well as treatment by Dr. Newton, so she may be a bit achy but is completely functional.

"An expert in time traveller relations?" It is true that Stanley has interacted with a couple of time travellers and alien species, but not that many. A lot more than the average person, but way less than Trav and Sereth. He certainly wouldn't call himself an expert."I'll keep it in mind, but I think I'd rather help people with my medical skills and knowledge. Maybe if I get bored with that."

OOC: RE: Boyd:
I have nothing against him appearing.

Some time later....

Mitchison has escorted Stanley and Sereth, Trav and Smoke Alarm to a conference room nestled within the White Tower.  (Stanley, being a native of this time, this country and this very city, is astonished at how UNIT manages to conceal its operations in "plain sight" on an historic site open to tourists and vistors: his tax money, it seems, is being exceedingly well spent.)  The room is appointed with a large flat-screen and conference phone, but otherwise its furnishings are fairly basic corporate, well-made but not ostentatious, unless the chairs, table, etc. have features that aren't readily apparent.

After a short while, the door opens and four people enter.   They're led by a relatively unassuming-looking man in an immaculate UNIT uniform, who Trav recognizes as Commander Henry Boyle.  Following him, also in uniform, is Specialist Spiezo, who Stanley and Trav both remember from their escapade in Egypt.  And they are followed by a pair of young women.  They're alike enough in appearance to be twins, and they're both wearing glasses and lab coats, but Trav has to do a double-take -- under their white coats, the one on the left is wearing a white silk blouse and a floor-length tweed skirt very like what the First Traveller wore back when she was barnstorming around Africa back in the day, while the woman on the right is wearing a blue school uniform-like ensemble, complete with tie, that Trav would swear is an exact copy of her look from her second incarnation.

The officer scans everyone's faces and gives a smile as he settles on Trav's.  "Traveller!  It has been a long time, though I'd guess not as long for me as it has for you.  Director Stewart asked me to help conduct the briefing... her exact words were 'tear yourself away from that Viyran cipher for a few hours,'" he adds ruefully.  Addressing the others, he says, "I'm Commander Henry Boyle, attached to UNIT.  I accompanied the Traveller on her journeys, for a while... though not this Traveller."

Indicating the others, he goes on, "Specialist Victor Spiezo, who may be able to give you some more insight into the technical complications that our team have been wrestling with in devising a rescue for the Rayburn expedition.  And... the Osgoods," he says, a bit hesitantly, "who have been looking at some of the theoretical issues involved with the dimensional interface."

Spiezo, a relatively slight and small fellow by the standards of the UNIT soldiers that everyone has seen around the Tower, gets very wide-eyed at the sight of Sereth.  For a moment, he fumbles with a device hanging on his belt -- not an obvious weapon, so far as Sereth can tell -- but then he catches Trav's eye and gulps, with a guilty expression, and leaves the gadget alone.

"HENRY!" Trav hops up out of her seat and immediately runs into Henry's arms, giving Henry a big glomp. "Look at you, you look great!" She sadly smiles at him. ""Some things have changed, and not just glasses." She's sure that Boyd has high enough clearance to know about The Marshall, and the Time War. "But look at who I saw. Look at him! He's just a bit greyer is all. But he still kicks ass." On her phone is a picture of Zhu Rheng, standing next to a frowning Warlock. "I know you're super busy, but if you can, I want to get dinner with you. Lots to talk about. Lots of important stuff to talk about. I haven't heard from Gwendolyn, but I mean to track her down."

And she turns in utter shock at the two women. "Oh, ladies. Um, hi. I'm really flattered..." but Trav isn't sure if she is being praised, or trolled, as she looks at the two women in disbelief. She extends her hand, somewhat at a loss for words. "I'm the Traveller. This is face number 5. Hank, if there's a red headed UNIT person around here in a leather military uniform, Kate is getting yelled at."



Spiezo gets a glomp and a smooch on the forehead. "The team is together again. Good to see ya, buddy. You been keeping tight-ass Weber out of trouble? I hope the entire Egypt team has been allright. We saved the world, baby. I hope our sonic drill is being moved into mass production."

She lets go of poor Speizo and introduces her Companions. "Allow me to introduce the people who current run with me and help me see straight - Doctor Stanley Newton, saver of lives and the TARDIS straight man. He's my rock. He and his mom help me make the right decisions of the heart, and he's the best MD who has been on the TARDIS since Doc Holliday. Next, we have Smoke Alarm of Paradise Towers. She's a Blue Kang, from Paradise Towers, who met the Doctor and Mel long ago and is now outgoing to play ball games and wall scrawl across the universe. She teaches me more than I teach her. She can run and go anywhere and can do Kang Fu. Also, Blue Kangs Are Best. And finally, Sereth, the Ambdassador of Draconia and blade and hand of the empire's Emperor. He brings dignity and justice where ever he goes, and is the cutting edge of peace. His blade keeps me safe and he has felled many an enemy of of the Universe, consider him a friend of Earth. They're my family, I trust them all with my life and beyond."

She takes a seat. "While I've worked with UNIT London for years, my home UNIT office is UNIT Dallas." She holds up her old UNIT Dallas badge. "I worked with Colonel Rayburn back when he was Sergeant Rayburn, back during the Invasion of the Mummies, when the Daleks assaulted the Alamo, and during the Dinosaur Rodeo of 1938. So, I owe him, and I'm bringing him home. I'm sure you have a presentation ready. If you three can forward whatever technical details concerning this case to my UNIT FTP? It'll get forwarded to my IPad. Lets get this show on the road, I'd love to see what Josh and his team were originally were investigating, that they were in what appears to be in some kind of submersible."
This message was last edited by the player at 02:19, Sun 17 May 2015.

"Good boy, Speizo. You're overcoming your scanning impulse. But you know what might help? Making that device look something less like a -gun-. May I see it?"

Trav smiles benignly. "Also, if you ask the Ambassador politely, and assure him that it's in the interests of the scientific advancement of your world, and that you obviously admire him as an ideal example of his species, he may let you scan him."
This message was last edited by the player at 01:31, Sun 17 May 2015.

Outgoing inside the tower, Smoke Alarm outlooked curiously around, wondering what this whole place was for. Their comeout was a meeting-square-room with a big picture-spout and talkiphones. It was all very fancy-pants, at least by Kang standards. Smoke Alarm jumped on a wheely-chair and spun around and around and around.



'No ball-games!' Smoke Alarm protested with an alarmed yelp, jumping to her feet again. Didn't Traveller have the knowhow by now? 'No fly-posts, no ball-games.' she continued, repeating the last because she didn't have a third for the sing-song.



'Blue Kangs, Blue Kangs, Blue Kangs are best!' Smoke Alarm sang out loudly, making safe-and-sure that everyone knew and knew it well, and pumping her small fist with every word.

"See what I mean? I need to visit the Paradise Towers. I can teach them soccer or stick ball. Smoke, I should bring you to see the '84 Mets vs Phillies. Baseball is America's game! Don't let NFL heads tell you otherwise."

'No! No ball-games!' she exclaimed, dismayed.

A grunt.

"It's clearly not a weapon. Or if it is, this species is even more primitive at this time than I believed." A wistful sigh. "Oh we best get it out of the way with." His eyes glanced at Spiezo. "I am an ambassador of the Draconian Empire. If you wish to scan me, or whatever, have at it. But be aware it better be the scanner it is claimed to be, and not an effort to weaken me, or ambush me."

He was being friendly enough for now, his hand nowhere near his blade.

Spiezo looks up at Sereth, and glances at Trav.  "Sir, I've been told -- more than once -- that letting my curiosity get the better of my manners is a habit I need to correct.  I am surely still working on that, but, I do realize that treating any visitor like a specimen to study is an offense -- much less one vouched for by a trusted advisor to UNIT.  If you're willing to provide biomedical data for our researchers, we'd be happy to have it, but at the moment you're our guest, here to help us with a particularly difficult problem.  I'd prefer to concentrate on that."

Sereth notices that the commander gives Spiezo a slight, approving nod, without making a big issue out of the exchange.

Boyle mutters darkly under his breath, but the only word that anyone catches is "cricket".

He clears his throat.  "Yes.  Well.  Mr. Spiezo, if you would be so kind?"  He nods at the screen, and Spiezo takes out a small tablet and keys some commands.

The screen activates, displaying a detailed three-dimensional topographic model of the Caribbean sea floor.  It rapidly zooms to show an oddly shaped green wireframe outline in 3D, some distance off the bottom.  The display also shows a timestamp.  "Here's a map of the dimensional distortion, dialed twelve months back," Spiezo explains.  "Now watch what happens as we run the model forward."  The animation starts, showing how that structure's shape twists, expands and contracts over a period roughly a week in length.  Additional visualizations show additional physical quantities oscillating over the same time frame, including patterns of electromagnetic and gravitic flux, flows in the motion of sea life and ocean temperatures, and the like.  Trav's eye soon realizes that she's seeing a three-dimensional "shadow" of a more complex motion in higher dimensions.

Spiezo taps another sequence and the animation slows to a crawl.  He walks up toward the screen.  "Now you see here, at the widest point of dilation,"  -- he indicates an aperture opening in the middle of the green structure -- "there's a short window of stability.  In this interval, it's wide enough that we could send a craft through, a Reconnaissance Oceanographic Vessel (Emergency / Rescue).  Good for a four-person team; a ROVER isn't as large or robust as the SPOT that Colonel Rayburn's team took in, but it would do to transfer people out over several trips."

"The problem," puts in one of the Osgoods, "is that passage through the anomaly, of course, creates dimensional stresses: the more mass, the more stress.  We don't have data to analyze from before the scans we made after the Jenny Dee disappearance--"

"--but the EM signatures we took then," says the other Osgood, "from before Rayburn took the SPOT through, were different from those we're seeing now.  And the aperture at its widest, now, isn't large enough to pass the SPOT, even though it clearly was earlier.  So--"

"--we're concerned about pushing another mass shadow through, and whether that might cause further contraction, maybe a complete collapse.  Our mathematical model says it won't, but--"

"--but that's only a model.  Testing it empirically, even with something as small as a UUV, could trap Colonel Rayburn's team for good, if we've got it wrong."

(The Osgoods hardly seem to have even noticed how they've been seamlessly picking up the same technical discussion.)
This message was last edited by the GM at 03:13, Mon 18 May 2015.

"Then taking sweet boy through the aperture would be the baddest of ideas. Sweet Boy has his own mass, and could entirely shatter that aperture. Hm. Hm Hm Hm. Girls, let me see your numbers. I want to see if I can get sweet boy close enough to take readings and act as a platform to conduct operations."

Trav aims her sonic at the presentation, superimposing a familiar looking blue box. A hemipshere is over it in green, that says ATMOSPHERE. Blinking, she's set the distance of the atmosphere field at the highest distance she can. "No one in my team has SCUBA training, and if the Colonel or his team are injured, tranpsorting them underwater would be hard, anyway. What I'm trying to suss is whether or not a party of us can walk across the sea bed and go through that Rift - something which I have a small measure of experience. Unlike a certain other character with a blue time travelling police box, I've had some pretty extensive experience in travelling to other dimensions. It's usually very dangerous, which is why I like to say here. Also, I may be able to rig something up with the girls and Speizo that can act as a block-transfer conduit, so we can stabilize that aperture to get our people out. Not to mention what is on the other side of that thing. Do you have any idea of what might be on the other side of that thing based on any further data, or any of Josh's transmissions, Henry?"

OOC: Trav goes over the Team UNIT's number's - Ingenuity+Science?
This message was last edited by the player at 12:38, Sun 17 May 2015.

OOC: Sure, you can make a roll.

In reply to The Guardian (msg # 30):

OOC:12:40, Today: The Traveller rolled 22 using 2d6+14 with rolls of 4,4. Trav works out Team Unit's numbers - Ingenuity 8+Science 6.

As Trav studies the situation a little more closely, she realizes that the atmosphere scheme is likely to be extremely problematic.  At a depth of 1250 meters, the anomaly is more than 700 meters off the local sea floor.  Moreover, the information about local ocean conditions from the details in the original dossier suggest that there is some degree of free flow between the environments on either side when the aperture is open, with a low pressure differential.  Reducing one side of the passage to sea level atmospheric pressure would cause any transit through the flow to be into the face of a flow at the water pressure on the other side.  Pressure at that depth in Earth's ocean is around 500 PSI, so trying to move against it would be harder than swimming upstream through a fire hose!

The block-transfer conduit seems more promising, albeit challenging.  Without redesigning and constructing a great deal of equipment from scratch, though, it would require the TARDIS nearby, and Sweet Boy would be basically unusable for transportation while maintaining the conduit.  More, monitoring and operating Sweet Boy's block transfer rectifier would take continual attention, and that means leaving someone on station -- preferably, someone that Sweet Boy already likes and trusts.

As Trav ponders this, Commander Boyle pulls up some contact logs and plots.  "From what we gather, the refuge where Lieutenant Flynn was able to maneuver the SPOT is about a dozen klicks from the far side of the aperture.  A bit of a hike, to say the least."

Stanley frowns when the Osgoods explain this. He takes another look at where the anomaly is, before speaking up. "I may be missing something, but the anomaly is underwater right? Not on the sea floor, but still underwater. And seawater has mass, so why doesn't the water flowing through the anomaly have that mass shadow problem? If a small UUV could destabilize the anomaly, why not the litres and litres of seawater?"
This message was last edited by the GM at 03:13, Mon 18 May 2015.

"Hm, Stan has a point. Because it could be an artificially generated singularity that was designed to ignore the quantum characteristics of water. Which means that if we can reproduce the quantum characteristics of water somehow, we could bypass that. Maybe. Perhaps. Might also be a density thing."

OOC:Shame on you for using simple logic for disrupting Whovian technobabble, Stan!
This message was last edited by the player at 20:38, Sun 17 May 2015.

Still fuming about ball games, Smoke Alarm outlooked at the picture-spouts and the show-and-tell, trying to work out what all the blobs meant and what the comeout was at the bottom of the pool. 'It's like those rats and the brain-thing!' she said of the anomaly as it got biggerer and smallerer, and pointed and twisted her hand in the air. 'It's, it's outgoing up the corner.' That seemed the best way for her to describe the extra-dimensional anomaly, through a Kang's own weird sense of jommetry.

She wasn't perturbed by the two Osgoods. Left Turn and Right Turn had outlooked the same too, but they had joined different Kang teams and had different colours, so they could be eyespied apart.

Hearing Stan and Traveller, she had an idea. 'Mayhaps the water holds it open. Like filling a plastic bag with water, it gets biggerer with more water in it.' she tried to explain water pressure. 'Then spose you toss a brick in, some splashes out, and the brick hits the bottom, the bag stretches, and sploosh! It all comeouts.' Smoke Alarm made a little sploosh motion in the air with her hands, feeling rather pleased with her knowhow. Science! 'If you can't put a big thing in, then mayhaps a small thing? Like a pool-cleaner with a picture-taker and a talkiphone? Then it could eyespy the other side.'
This message was last edited by the player at 02:34, Mon 18 May 2015.

The Osgoods look at each other, then at Stanley.

"No, you're quite right, Dr. Newton.  It doesn't add up.  But we are caught in a dilemma: the data that we have has led us to believe that putting a vehicle into the breach could destabilize it -- but getting better data means putting a vehicle into the breach."  Glancing at Trav, the speaking Osgood adds, "But putting a means of actively stabilizing it in place would make that problem go away, at least, and perhaps then we could find out what is actually happening."

As they follow along with Smoke's contribution to the conversation, they nod.  "Yes, that's right, that's what we were of.  U U V, that stands for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, it's just like what you're talking about -- a little robot with a camera that can swim in the ocean and send back pictures."

"So, it still makes sense that we try to go in on foot? Also, I think that Sweet Boy, from maybe 50 meters away, might have slightly better sensors than a UNIT submersible robot, with all due respect." She winks at Speizo. "I think at the very least I can get is close enough for some passive scans to get us more definitive data without disrupting the anomaly. Also, I lived on a planet full of them that had dragons and space wizards for nearly 100 years, so it's kind of in my wheelhouse. Unless anyone else has a better plan? Also, ladies, you and Speizo get to take your very first TARDIS trip, although it won't be across time. But still!"
This message was last edited by the player at 06:04, Mon 18 May 2015.

Smoke Alarm nodded to the Osgoods, happy to have her knowhow confirmed. 'If not a you-you-vee, then mayhaps... a fishy? With a talkiphone. Do fishies go through?'