@clarke.griffin

[strove]

Thank you to Yalena for getting us sorted. [Sort of sorted. Sort of.] Now that we've arrived in New Tokyo and we're stuck inside for a little while, I think we should talk about some new changes that we're facing. I can't be the only one.

But first: a good number of us are here unwillingly, but we have to wait until we're fully prepped before we can go anywhere. Heading outside in these temperatures while unprepared could cost you your life. We all hate being trapped somewhere. I think that's pretty well-established. We also hate having to do anything or be anywhere when we didn't ask for that to happen. At least it doesn't seem like we were drugged, though it wouldn't hurt for Katelin and I to take some blood samples to confirm that. We'll have to store them until we get back.

As for the changes in your lives: have you noticed any? For instance, apparently I'm a lab tech at Giles Bell. I tried to set myself up for a new internship there that I could get easily, but I got ... elevated. Or hired beyond that? I'm not sure what the right terminology is here. Has anyone else noticed this? Or had it happen to them? I got permissions to take leaves from both of my jobs. And no, I'm really not prepared to work as a lab tech. I don't even know the first thing about setting up gels.

As a bit of a personal request ... does anyone think we can make pancakes in the small kitchen here? I have a craving for them. I've not really had cakes of the "pancake" variety before, but I want them now. And if you think we can, can you make them?

[This last bit is Loki's fault.]

Comments

[retravel]

[ keith condenses many of fitz's stray thoughts and theories into a singular case study, encapsulating the elements of the dreams that involved flowing between each other, collapsing and interacting.

and he extends the potential of the other areas: the ruins of this world and the shipwreck of a scientific facility. symbolism and abstraction abounded, but the universe is cosmos, not chaos. things have order and meaning, even if humans struggle to perceive them. ]

This is helpful to know. Thank you, Keith.
I think you're onto something.

[ dangerously close to a bullseye, even. ]

Did you have a strange dream before the other night? I know several who did, including myself.

[secondnature]

I didn't, but my roommate did. He told me about it.

Were they all different?

[retravel]

We have two different ones on record, to my knowledge.

The first is of a group travelling for a long time and reaching a bridge. The unafraid cross the bridge and walk into the light, reaching somewhere new. Perhaps they make their way through a portal, but that's just my own interpretation. Myself and two others had that dream.

The second is of a facility where people are being held. Trapped, maybe. Some are sick and dying. The person who had the dream remembered using a scalpel and trying to escape, fighting a doctor or a scientist.

[secondnature]

That first one sounds familiar.

[Kind of like those bridges he saw in the city in the dream. Though the city itself wasn't entirely logical in its makeup.]

Jughead had that second one.

It didn't sound like it was good.

Do you think the facility there had anything to do with the facility in the dreams that just happened?

[Keith hadn't been there for long, but ... well ...]

[retravel]

Like the bridges in the dream?
Yeah.

[ he'd even jumped through one of the portals there, only to pop out of another one entirely. ]

Can't say for certain, but I think so, yes.
In a world as surveilled as this one, with technological checkpoints at every turn, I reckon it's hard to experiment on human beings unnoticed. It's simpler if the groups doing so are one and the same.

[ and if there are two... christ. ]

The rest of the locations I visited had some basis in reality, too, though I don't know if others had the same experiences.

[secondnature]

There were things that are in New Amsterdam. Buildings I know. We'll want to compare New Tokyo to the dreams, too. There are things I saw there that I was able to find through a search already. There might be more. It's just too bad that we can't go to New Johannesburg to check out the bridges more. At least right now. That might be a goal for us in the future.

As Displaced, anyway.

What do you think that Facility was? I mean the one where we just were.

Everything there seemed bad. Like it ended badly.

[And like it or not, the conveyor belt of Displaced is rolling along smoothly.]

[retravel]

I think that's a good idea. New Johannesburg also seems to be a spaceport, and space travel is only a hop, skip and jump away from all the rest.

[ time and space, dimensions, the multiverse. Might as well seek it out. ]

We're of similar minds on the facility. Whatever its makers were trying to achieve, it would seem they succeeded, with some of the spectres proud of their work and others mired in regret. I found blood in the water, quite literally, so it evidently ended in the loss of human life. And a great deal of it, at that.

[ he doesn't say that people who use human beings in such a way likely believe they're doing what's right — what's necessary. it may illuminate their motives, but it's a slippery slope, in terms of empathising with the creators of an underwater tomb. ]

The question is if, and how far back, it predates us.

[secondnature]

I couldn't control myself there. It was like something was exerting a pressure on me. It created false trauma.

[Keith doesn't mind explaining the effects, even if he doesn't explain exactly how he knows. He knows he's mentioned not being alien to people, but heck if he knows who does and doesn't know. By now, he doesn't see any issue in sharing it—he just doesn't here in case he has already. Whoops.

Being Keith means interacting with people and doing his best but always struggling when those people number over, like, six.]

I'd say it's linked to whatever brought us in. If not us, then whatever's happened to us. Or whatever was the key to bring us there.

We have to take it that whatever it is had something very bad happen to it.