1089/While You Were Gone
From MahouMUSH
| While You Were Gone | |
|---|---|
| Date of Scene: | 22 February 2016 |
| Location: | Mitakihara - Downtown |
| Synopsis: | UMBRA's in a sad state. |
| Cast of Characters: | Euphemia Barchetta, Takashi Agera |
- Euphemia Barchetta has posed:
UMBRA was thrown into a state of chaos. Takashi hadn't been directing things and was conspicuously absent, only to return just long enough to anger a key Eclipse ally and get three quarters of the groups funding revoked, along with a significant portion of their lab equipment. Funding included the support staff, and there was practically a flood of people gathering up their personal belongings and heading out to other divisions, the vast majority of these going right along with the lab equipment to aid the cause of the very same person Takashi had angered.
With their absence meant the paper shufflers, which was truthfully what Takashi had mostly had his office staff doing, had no more paper to push. A power vacuum formed as people tried to figure out who was in charge with Takashi still missing. Once again the operative term is chaos.
And into that chaos and vacuum stepped one Euphemia Barchetta, twelve year old Midchildan Mage extraordinaire with a curious, hyperactive personality and very little sense of the way things are supposed to be done. Most people would look at this situation, run a mental simulation, and expect the entire place to burn down within hours. These people would be wrong because they're overlooking two very important facts. The first one is that most of her more disturbing personality traits revolve around the fact she only really cares about her self and wants what she wants and when put in a situation where she's in near total control they become a non-factor.
The second is that Euphemia /thrives/ in chaos. It's order and restriction of freedom that stifles her but here where nobody knows what to do and is looking for any little excuse to do -something-? Here is where hyperactivity can actually be an advantage.
She set to work immediately- or rather she set everyone else to work immediately. Figuring out who they had left, what lab equipment remained, how much money was in the accounts and how much was going to be there later. Ask questions, wait, get answers- those don't require actually doing things herself, which is great. Their most valuable asset still remained, the entirety of Takashi's own laboratory, but it was almost completely inaccessible due to the dark energy swarming within- the very reason no one was capable of intruding to remove it in the first place.
There was just enough equipment left over from all the other labs to effectively recreate Euphemia's own, which had gotten completely stripped down and this was done immediately. Half the remaining staff was laid off on the spot- once they grunted the equipment in to place, of course. Euphemia put everyone to work.
For a very long time UMBRA had mostly been a front for Takashi's own experiments and research, with a side of helping Fate gather the Jewel Seeds, and a little bit of Euphemia messing around in her own lab. When Takashi finally comes back he finds a very different atmosphere. The office workers have their noses to the grindstone, collecting and collating data into proper digestible to a 12 year old(and her Intelligent Device!) reports.
Anyone who is asked is working on nearly the exact same project: subspace and subspace distortions/anomalies. Half of the team seems to be working at it from the angle of the Jewel Seeds and their own particular disturbances in the fabric of spacetime, while the other half is grinding away at the problem of the dimensional turbulence that surrounds Earth and the Subspace Incident created by attempting to transit subspace through it.
This second part was the better research path for now for an important reason. While they had no access to Jewel Seeds or the information on them contained in Takashi's computers, they did have Euphemia and Bulwark, who had both directly encountered the Subspace Incident and had spent a not insignificant time trapped within, out of phase with time.
Of course almost no one is qualified to work on the actual science of these issues with Takashi gone, so Euphemia had resorted to the next best thing. Using her own bank account and generous salary, which had mostly piled up unused after she got tired of clothes shopping, she had slipped significant wads of money to a few of the Physics professors at Infinity to redirect their curriculums towards this task. Now the best and brightest that Tokyo had to offer were all doing their job for them, and while much of the information gleaned wasn't either out of date or not useful there was still a significant amount of good new data and theories.
In her lab Euphemia had been working hard, trying to learn how to weave spells that could pick apart the fabric of spacetime itself, using the Dimensional Transfer spell as a base. Her current working theory is that if she can open dimensional rifts attuned to either the Jewel Seeds or the Subspace Incident that Really Big Things will happen. The fact that this kind of meddling is exactly what the Time Space Administration Bureau was created to prevent gave her no end of satisfaction as she threw herself into her research, and no one in either Eclipse or UMBRA knew enough or cared enough to stop her.
She does pull herself out of the lab when Takashi finally comes to see how things are going, and as previously stated the actual office workers are extremely busy. It looks like the organized chaos of a small bee hive, with Euphemia currently occupying the position of Queen. People aren't exactly coming up and handing her reports, but they are filing them electronically and forwarding them to Bulwark who, lets be honest, is doing all the actual reading.
- Takashi Agera has posed:
To say that the fate of UMBRA hasn't been on Takashi's mind in some way would be incorrect, it's just that other things - other people - had taken priority. The way the meeting with Precia Testarossa went hadn't helped.
Not too long after Ami left his house, Takashi made his way through a couple Stacked Space doors in the Neon District, towards the warehouse door that also lead to his now downsized facilities.
He winced when he opened the door, and the situation he arrived in actually caused him to let out a confused sigh of relief. The swarming hub of activity, while strange, made him feel much better about leaving the place with Euphemia while he was out - and maybe even a little jealous because for once UMBRA was doing its job rather than acting as a front.
He slipped on a lab coat - feeling much more at home in it - and prowled his way through the busy bees towards the center of activity, towards Euphemia, leaning a hand on the door frame. "I see you got bored, but this ended up being resolved in an alltogether different way than I expected." Takashi said, with a half-smile. "I'm impressed."
- Euphemia Barchetta has posed:
Euphemia is in a small office that is pretty much just an official looking desk with a nameplate on it. This is important primarily because the regular office workers for some reason have an aversion to coming to her lab for official business, even after she explained to them that the dangers inside were only the usual temporary kinds rather than the creeping darkness that pervades Takashi's. That didn't mean she had to be formal about it, though, and when Takashi appears in her doorframe she sends him a smile from her desk.
Not behind her desk but rather on it, because she's sitting on the edge with her feet dangling over edge kicking back and forth. "Bossman!" She calls happily grinning brightly at the compliment and offering, "Thanks," before hopping off the side of her desk and snapping up a medium sized tablet computer from the desk beside her, walking over and offering it up to him. It's a visual representation of pretty much everything she's done in the past few weeks in case he wants it while Bulwark is pings Axion to offer both that and a flood of research data.
"Great to have you back! I could really use the data you've got on the Jewel Seeds and the frequencies of their distortions. I, erm, never actually had Bulwark scan them too closely myself, so do you know if they all run on the same or similar frequencies or are they all independent of each other? I'm thinking they're all pretty similar so that they'd resonate when brought together. Am I right?" She flashes him another bright smile, only to have her cyan eyes widen, "OH! I have something for you, I think you'll really like it. Just a sec." She walks over behind the desk and begins rummaging.
- Takashi Agera has posed:
Takashi smiles when he sees her sitting like that, legs dangling off. "Ah, good. Now I know you haven't been replaced by some sort of pod person. I was getting worried. It's impressive what you're capable of when you put your mind to it. That's why I like having you around."
He walks up a little bit, and Axion pings back, taking the data in and moving it to Takashi's personal mainframe to run simulations and work. "Sorry about the mess I left for you. Would've come back sooner if I could." he says, gesturing to his ear where one of the studs that makes up Axion's standby form is still cracked. "I had a bit of an adventure even before Fate-chan's mother got involved."
"Yeah I'll have..." he says, before Axion pings back to Bulwark and he frowns a bit. "...or Axion will just give Bulwark the information on its own before I finish the command, sure." he comments, and shrugs. "As far as I know the frequences are a little bit different - there's more to each jewel seed's uniquness than just its number." Then he leans forward just a bit. "Whatcha got?"
- Euphemia Barchetta has posed:
"If I was a pod person does that mean everyone would be like me? I'm not sure you could handle UMBRA if we were all like me." She thinks about that for a second and frowns, "Though if everyone was like me nothing would get done except labwork. ...the pool parties would be -awesome- though!"
Bulwark happily accepts the data stream and stores it all away, "Great! I've been waiting to get my hands on this information for weeks. What I have in the works will hopefully be great for recovering chunks of the ship, but unless there are Jewel Seeds stuck in Dimensional Space around this stupid backwater," just a remind that she is not, in fact, a native, "I need distortions that can interact with the Seeds themselves."
Now around behind the desk she opens a drawer and scoops something out of it, walking quickly back over to Takashi with a bounce in her step because she's pretty sure he'll like what she has for him. Without so much as asking she takes one of his hands and turns his palm up before slapping into it a squishy, soaking mess into his hand. There are little bits of hair sticking out of it everywhere, but that makes a lot of sense because upon closer inspection that's exactly what it is: hair. A whole hand full of it. It's been... 'moulded' in a vaguely canine shape, which is to say there is a protrusion at the top that might be a head?
"Here you go! I felt really bad when you said what happened to your familiar, so I went into the pool and managed to get as much of her as I could out of the filter." There may be one or two differently colored hairs amongst the black mess. "She sure shed a lot! Didn't really swim much but when she did there were hairs floating around for days." Which she naturally waited for the filter to strain out rather than cleaning.
Euphemia looks up to Takashi with a bright, beaming smile, "You're welcome!"
- Takashi Agera has posed:
"No, it means you wouldn't be like you." Takashi clarifies. "And that would be concerning. Also the pool parties have always been awesome!"
"I want to be there to intercept any chunks of the ship, or even knock them out if we can and get to them before the TSAB jerks do. Last time someone was very adamant it didn't belong to me which we both know is a falsehood." he says with a grin.
Then Euphemia has placed something slick and wet in his hand and his face tells more of a story than words ever could. Takashi frowns. It is an epic frown. It is a frown that has legendary status.
"...This. is. not. helpful." he says, sternly. And that anger is welling up quickly. "My familiar was not a bunch of hairs at the BOTTOM OF A POOL!" Takashi suddenly shouts, tall bishonen towering over Euphemia, black energy tendrils in his hand before he catches himself and calms down.
"I... don't know if this is acceptable on your world, but even if we are a backwater... this is not. I will ASSUME you meant this well, but..." he looks at his hand and the ball within with a disgusted face.
- Euphemia Barchetta has posed:
Euphemia tilts her head a little, "I wouldn't be like me?" Something clicks, "Oh well yeah it'd suck if I wasn't like me."
Takashi mentions intercepting chunks of the ship and knocking them out and her grin turns almost impossibly wide, "Exactly! -Excatly-! We have exactly the same idea. That's what we've all been working on. Like, we have spells that can transit through Dimensional Space already, right? Dimensional Transfer; we all use it. It's crazy powerful. It slip between entire dimensions like you're on the universe's coolest water slide. It's hard to tell here since this planet is locked off from the rest of the universe, but if it wasn't we could jump between entire worlds with it, no problem."
She makes gestures with her hands, wiggling her arm through the air and then throwing both wide in a gesture that's supposed to show someone happily arriving at a new destination. "But since there's that dimensional instability or whatever around this place, your spell jams up and fails." She makes the same wiggly gesture and ends up punching her fist into her other hand instead. "I'm sure you also know that Dimensional Transfer creates stable portals as long as you keep spending the mana to keep them going; that's how I got in the ship that brought me here in the first place. Someone left a portal open and I hoped on."
She waves her hand because even she realizes she's starting down a tangent, and she's actually excited about work for once, "Point being, it's a really powerful spell. It can rip holes right through space time but because that's such a dangerous," finger air quotes there, "thing the spell was created to be really specific with a lot of lockouts."
Euphemia gives Takashi a beaming smile, "So I got rid of them! I'm not sure what I'm going to call it yet, but I'm working on a spell based off of it that's going to rip open a hole straight into the distortion that created the Subspace Incident. And since I have all kinds of data about the effects the distortion has on things," a motion to herself, "I found out pretty quick the resonance of dimensional space I was trapped in."
The cyan haired girl gives him a grin and a thumbs up, "Long story short, I'm going to make a weapon that can rip a hole in space big enough to bring chunks of the ship out. And since I'm the one using it -we- will be there when it happens. We can have a whole team ready to cart off whatever we carry out, and a defense force ready to stop kick the butts of whoever comes to stop us." She looks positively giddy, "And they -will- come to stop us. This is exactly the kind of thing TSAB was created to stop. They really don't like weapons that affect spacetime directly for some reasosn. Anyway! The Jewel Seeds are unstable power sources that have their own connections to dimensional space, right? What set off something like that they're going to react? Best part is I should eventually be able to attune the explosion to the Jewel Seeds themselves; that's why I wanted to get at your frequency data so bad."
Of course even with all that awesome stuff she just said she seems to have angered Takashi with her gift. It's not helpful? The girl tilts her head a bit and gives him a curious, confused look. Then she perks up. "Oh! Well yeah of course not. She was a chunk of your soul and a fox. But these are her hairs! It's like a memento?" She makes a face and holds her chin between her thumb and forefingers, "Or... do you not do mementos here? I guess if you don't want it you can throw it away or whatever."
Euphemia shrugs widely and turns her back, walking a few steps away and for the most part just lets Takashi's anger blow over her. "Besides, it -could- be useful, if there's a bit of her magic left in it. Or you needed her DNA. I donno."
