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[OOM: Ray, Jhalak, and a bunch of scientists meet with the Lemurians off the coast of Oregon.

The Lemurians have much, MUCH more important news than previously thought.]

When Ray opens the door, he has a laptop computer under one arm and a five-armed alien on his opposite shoulder. "Has anyone seen Agent K or Agent Zed?" he says to no one in particular. "The Lemurians say we've got a sleeper..."

He doesn't wait for an answer, but heads for the Bar. He needs some of that green stuff, or possibly the quantum blue. Jhalak is getting all the kiwifruit and carambolas it can possibly eat.

[OOC: Warning for probable slowtime, but I'll tag whenever I can!]
[tinytag: Long-Reach the Jotok]

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"They taught themselves English from every textbook, regular book, and scrap of magazine, newspaper, and mail to go over the side of a boat for the past several hundred years," Ray says. "The Lemurians are some of the most erudite cephalopods I've ever seen."

"Huh. Smart."

"And something we probably should have expected. How good a look did you get of them? Any apparent physiological similarity to the Deep Ones?"

"No similarity whatsoever," Ray says. "They're genuine cephalopods, not tentacle-headed fish-men. The scientists I had with me even pegged them as family Cirroteuthidae, although they couldn't specify the species. And if what I have on this computer is to be believed, 'Lemurian' is a political designation, not a racial one- they implied that the Lemurian Empire is a confederacy of multiple species of octopod and possibly teuthid that've achieved sapience."

"Confederacy...."

"Raises a lot of questions, but the cultural aspects can wait. Were you able to find out whatever it was they wanted to communicate?"

For all that he's been through, Ray can't really do a grim face. The closest he gets is a flat, thin-lipped sort of expression.

"Point Nemo. 48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W. I'll give you three guesses what's sleeping there and the first two don't count."

"Stirring?"

"The Lemurians have been trying to keep it asleep since about two days after they realized it existed. They don't know how much longer they'll be successful."

"How long ago was that?"

"The only chronological reference that I could get out of them was 'a time before the singers moved in the waters'. Assuming they mean humpbacks or other rorquals by 'singers' that places the date sometime in the mid to late Miocene period."

"Hell of a long time to keep a lid on something. So why a crisis now? What's changed?"

Ray rubs at his temples a moment, thinking. "They said it's not entirely physically present in the world yet. Hang on..."

He flips open the laptop, turns it on, and calls up the log of the text-message session. Aloud, he reads:

"'Dr. Ambassador'- that's what they called me, pretty much every time- 'that which sleeps at the farthest point in the waters has been stirring. The currents of the waters have been flowing in its favor for many years now. They grow stronger. The currents of the land are weak and broken, for all our trying to feed them from the waters. We do not know how much longer that which sleeps will stay asleep. If it wakes, your people and ours and every other people that may be will not have the mercy of the stunning before the jaws snap closed. You must make ready. We cannot do this alone any more.'"

Zed sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose.

"Tell me they aren't talking about global warming."

As if that wasn't causing havoc enough.

"Actually, I'm pretty sure they're not," Ray says. "If only because of that 'currents of the land are weak and broken' comment. That's nowhere near an accurate description of prevailing wind and air patterns over the Pacific Rim landmasses, after all."

That's something at least.

"Any theories as to what that could mean?"

Ray leans back in his chair. As he stares at the rafters he says, "Psychokinetic energy isn't a simple matter of static field and point discharge, Zed. It moves, it manifests, it flows. All or nearly all the terminology that you apply to electrical energy can be accurately applied to psychokinetic energy as well. Humanity's had names for this kind of thing for as long as we've had language. Telluric energies. Dragon paths. Ley lines. Qi currents. The songlines of Australia, which've been shattered clear to hell and back..."

"Other planets, same story. Not always, but enough to lend some credibility to what you find on most Earths. At least the ones we know of."

"All right, so PKE is going haywire. Are you in any position to do something about that? Because PKE still falls well outside MiB's tech capability."

"We may or may not be," Ray admits. "There aren't a whole lot of individuals on record who have the know-how to manipulate PKE fields over the long term. Individual psychics, mediums, people like that, sure, but only for as long as it takes to generate an effect and discharge it. Ivan von Stabbington demonstrated a limited knowledge of how to channel PKE into a standing matrix, which is how I wound up body-swapped with my daughter for a while that one time. Other than that, we'd have to start by talking to the Australian government about the possibility of contacting every surviving Koori man of high degree, and then..."

He briefly steeples his fingers.

"I know of exactly one named, confirmed individual with the ability to redirect lines of psychokinetic force for the long-term. He's dead. He did, however, have close to a thousand followers when he died. Nobody bothered to keep track of where Ivo Shandor's cultists went after that... or what became of his paperwork."

"So the fate of the planet may rest on your ability to track down whoever has Shandor's papers now. Or finding whoever might be trying to take his place in the cult."

"'Course, the way these things work, we might be talking about the same guy. Assuming Shandor himself hasn't found some way to come back."

Ray nods. "There's a possibility that the government has his records in an archive somewhere. Remember when the Ark of the Covenant got stolen in my world? It turned out to be a fake. There was a note inside it, written in German, signed by 'Roosevelt's top men'. The paranormal effects that kicked in whenever it was moved from its appointed resting place were the result of its being a massive PKE capacitor. I got a look at the thing's construction very briefly, and it made use of a lot of the same metallurgical techniques as the Shandor Building. Cold-riveted steel bars with selenium cores, specifically, at least as far as I could tell."

"And on the cult end of things, Peter and Dana traveled to the Caribbean a couple of months ago. Dana had nightmares in the hotel that prompted Egon and I to start doing some research. The hotel they stayed in was built not long after Shandor's death- around the same time that several very large batches of steel compounded with selenium were ordered from foundries in Bethlehem and Allentown, Pennsylvania."

"Any luck tracking the purchase orders? Probably buried behind layers of front organizations, but a little ground-pounding might get around them."

"Egon thinks we're gonna have to go to the Bahamas ourselves and do the research on the ground before we get a real answer."

Zed winces at the mental pic of Egon standing on a beach in flip-flops.

Like Zed should talk.

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