"Dr. Schofield disappeared only a couple of meters from where you were working?" Stanley thinks about that for a moment. It had allowed the people here to come up with a way to protect themselves, but only because Sokolov thought something had protected him. "Have there been any instances of multiple people disappearing at the same time or do people get taken one by one?"

Trav of course crosses her arms and listens, as her companions ask the right questions.

Sokolov steeples his fingers and frowns.  "There isn't a lot to tell," he says.  "When it had been going on for a while, then we began to look at security logs, environmental monitors, that kind of thing.  I said that the cameras didn't see any thing, but once we were looking, we did find recordings of the vanishings.  No apparent energy spikes to accompany the disappearance.  No chemical residues, particles or emission -- nothing seemed to be... left behind... or radiation as you would expect from matter annihilation.  If there is something we should have been looking for, either I can not think of it, or we were never set up to measure it."

He shakes his head, then swivels back to his console and taps a few keys.  On the monitor in front of him, video starts to play: it's a young woman, moving at a brisk walk with a package clutched to her chest.  She briefly starts, with the beginnings of a surprised look on her face, and then, to all appearances, she has dropped off the screen and the package falls and slides a short way from her momentum.


Dr Makoro looks at Smoke Alarm.  "However it happened, perhaps there is some discriminating factor applied, that decides what is and isn't part of a person?  I don't know."


"It is a good thought," Sokolov replies, "but, it is one that Dr. Alston had as well. The first disappearances were all single people in isolated places.  So he ordered a 'buddy system' to be put in place.  That stopped as soon as five people vanished from the mess hall, all at once."

"Maybe there's something different about you. If you don't mind?"

If Sokolov and his friends assent, she scans them with her sonic. Anything unusual?

'Or mayhaps, where they're outgoing, they can't be nekkid.' Smoke Alarm wondered.

She'd outlooked at the viddy on the picture-spout; it was exactly what she'd show-and-telled. She might've felt as a proud as a pussy-cat about her knowhow, except it was about people getting gone, mayhaps even unalive, and all she could feel was sad and worrywarted.

'Have you tried texting any of them? They have talkiphones, don't they?'

"It looks like she noticed something just before she disappeared." Stanley remarks. No strange bursts of light or static. "What about the timing of the disappearances? Is there a pattern in the time between incidents?"

"We can determine that from the time indexes of the disappearances."

"Smoke, can you guide our new friends back to the TARDIS? Sweet Boy is probably the safest place for them while we investigate this phenomenon. If they can be snatched from him, then we have a real problem."

She then turns to Kalath. "Kalath - Hunter Jumping - you can do it to a degree, right? If you were moved somewhere against your will, could you jump back?"

Finally, she turns back to the display. "Can we get a display of the cafeteria again? I'd like to see who had the Spag-Bowl and see how they disappeared. Smoke, you were definitely on to something. If at all possible, I'd like to get video records, locations and time stamps of all of the disappearances."

Trav opines, "we could go back to Sweet Boy and use his sensors, but they're strong. The problem is that heavy, active artron scanning might disturb the local spacetime and wipe away clues. I'd rather personally inspect the disappearance sites."

She tests her phone, to see if she can communicate with Chibi back on the TARDIS.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:48, Wed 24 Oct 2018.

'Course I can!' Smoke Alarm answered, wondering how Traveller could possibly think otherwise. 'Tracking back is easy-peasy down that straight carrydoor. But should we? These ones are sound-and-safe right here and now in their brainquarters, not so in the carrydoors. If we foot outside, mayhaps what's making them gone will make them gone.

Murcheson looks glum at the question, after a pause to parse "talkiphones", and Makoro rescues him from having to say anything.  "Off the grid, I'm afraid, the ones who were carrying them at the time."


At Trav's suggestion, Sokolov turns back to his controls and starts tapping keys.  Of the three, he's perhaps the one who's showing the least in the way of emotional stress at the predicament, but Stanley can tell that he's glad to be doing something even if it's not clear that it will lead anywhere.  The display shifts over to a timescale, showing a gradual acceleration, but if there's any additional significance it doesn't immediately jump out.


At the additional query, Sokolov grunts and enters some more commands.  The screen closest to Trav comes to life with a simple interface to the security system, and the controls next to them flicker and unlock.


At once, the little avatar pops up on Trav's display.  "Hi, Chief!  What'cha need?"

OOC: Points two and three here have potential to go somewhere, so an Ingenuity + Tech roll would be appropriate; I'd suggest that you propose a theory around what you're expecting or hoping to find.

She frowns.

"To jump, I would need to give in to the Hunter, at least temporarily. And can only jump 'home'. I believe at this point that would be the blue-box."

OOC: That might not be entirely correct, but it's what Kalath believes. But she is deeply steeped in superstition.

Trav nods. "Good. Because if any of us get taken away, you may be our ticket to coming back home."

Trav is fiddling with her phone. "Chibi darling. I am sending you a set of parameters. Run this script through the diagnostics and send me the results, hm?"

Trav is using her readings of the subquantum field that seems to be protecting everything and checking to see if the TARDIS can emulate it. This strikes her as rather delicate - something as strong as sweet boy may be absolutely wrong for this kind of work - but it's worth a shot.

OOC:20:34, Today: The Traveller rolled 22 using 2d6+14 with rolls of 5,3.  Ingenuity 8+Tech 6+2d6 - TARDIS duplication of quantum protection, use wake to find monsters - viable?

She's more interested in using the data for passive scanning - stalking hunting space monsters may be leaving a wake in all the interference.

"Mister Sokolov - may I inspect the device you put together? I just want to passively scan it and look it at. I won't touch anything."
This message was last edited by the player at 00:35, Fri 26 Oct 2018.

"I don't think we should leave the safety of this room until we have a better idea about what we are dealing with." Stanley agrees with Smoke.

"Of course. You're both correct."

After a little analysis and thought, Trav decides that the best way to achieve this will probably be to reconfigure the TARDIS force field generator into a wide-band etheric field array.  This will blanket the dome that the group is currently in, but can't be extended beyond that range without starting to tax the primary TARDIS power conduits.  The other down side of this approach that occurs to Trav is that it is going to effectively lock the TARDIS in place -- the field will destabilize if it is dropped or the TARDIS dematerializes, and while it is safe enough to be inside the TARDIS when that happens, it's likely to produce localized spatial distortions and energy surges.

Reconfiguring the generator in this way is going to be a somewhat finicky process taking perhaps a half hour.  However, Trav is pretty confident that it will then enable her to detect any resonant interactions.


"It's over here."

Sokolov indicates a workbench supporting a rather marvelous-looking contraption that began life as the focusing unit for a hyperwave comms transmitter, but seems to have been augmented with additional capacitors, power and signal leads that are now connecting to ports on an adjacent console, additional breadboarded circuitry, and (for some reason) a wind-up mechanical timer.  He also taps a few keys, and a screen lights up showing a fairly simple computer program.  "Here.  The timing driver code, if you need it."

Smoke Alarm outlooked to Traveller. 'Would TARDIS talkiphones still work, if we were made gone?'

"Nothing is ever certain, but I would think so. These phones are hooked up to Sweet Boy. Whevever he can go, the phone signal can go. And he can go *anywhere*."

OOC: So, are we doing that?

Smoke Alarm didn't have knowhow of all the technicky stuff, but she could eyespy the situation, rememorised much it too well. A tower of many rooms and carrydoors and systems and systems; a little band hiding in their brainquarters, unbold or unbrave to leave; an unseen something bit-by-bit making them gone, whether unalive, wherelse, or wiped out like wall-scrawls. That had been the life of Kangs, her own life. And she could eyespy the comeout of all this; there was only one, in time. Wipe-out. 'No ball games, no fly posts, no wipe outs.' she said with Kangly determination.

'Are there no fire-escapes, no unseen outways?' she asked the three.

"Oh, look at this, it's marvelous, amazing! I love the wind up. Mr Solokov, you are a certified genorous. Not only is it brilliant, it's beautiful." She carefully examines it with her sonic, not touching anything, with a cross between reverence and childlike glee."

Stanley also had a question for the survivors. "Did anything unusual happen before the first person disappearance? A delivery or a glitch in a system."

Dr. Makoro answers.  "Delivery, no.  We've not had any arrivals since the last staff rotation, eight months ago," she says.  "And I don't know about any sort of 'glitch' -- I don't believe there was anything that had been seriously suggested as a factor, at least...."  She looks questioningly at Murcheson, who shrugs and shakes his head in the negative.

"There was the conjunction," Makoro observes.  "Two of the other moons in Three's collection aligning with us.  But it's hard for me to imagine what kind of effect it could have had.  The change in the gravitational influence on us here was so negligible, compared to what we experience just by sitting so deep in Three's gravity well.  Some influence on the storm patterns, maybe, but you would have to dig deep into the data to tease it out.  But then, none of us have really been able to work out any kind of causation for these... events... in the first place."

Sokolov shrugs.  "It is no great thing," he mutters, perhaps a little bashfully.  "You spend as much time improvising your instruments as you do on your actual science, because no one has thought to design the sort of tool you need, you get the practice in knocking together things.  But I am no sort of engineer."

Trav sets to work configuring the etheric field array.  As she works, the sound of rain starts up on the roof of the habitat and the transparent overhead dome, growing in strength until it's a drumming that rises and falls with the strengthening wind, and there's even, occasionally, a telltale creak in the structure itself.  Still, as yet it doesn't seem like the storm is anything that the base can't handle.

Finally she has the field tuned to her satisfaction, and activates it.  What it shows her when she starts to read the overall scan is interesting.  There are resonances or echoes in the field, dotted all around the base.  They all appear to be stationary.  When she maps them out she quickly finds that many line up with areas of known disappearances, and some where the Hecate staff had not necessarily marked anyone disappearing, but could plausibly be; they had not isolated every single person's last known location.

What's more, of the known matches, the strength of the resonance tracks roughly with the timeline: the weaker disturbances correspond with the earlier known vanishings.  Looking at the pattern, the travelers are put very much in mind of the surface of a pond where a person has tossed in a sequence of stones over time, the newer ripples radiating the strongest waves, and the older ones gradually shrinking and smoothing to nothing.

Unhearing any show-and-tell of fire-escapes and unseen outways, Smoke Alarm went to outlook at Traveller's work on the picture-spout. 'What's that, Trav? Someone dropping rocks in pools?'

"That is the idea, love." Trav starts texting a set of instructions to Chibi.

"So, if I have this right, it seems that the disappearances have a connection to the conjunctions of the planetary bodies in this system., I may need to head back to the TARDIS to make manual use of the Orrery."

'Oh reary?' Smoke Alarm repeated. 'But if we're outgoing again, we might be made gone. Can it be made sound-and-safe?''