milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The door swings open and in, letting in the tail end of a conversation.

"…wasn't the nicest guy, sure, but Jerry didn't deserve to go like that. Not at the hands of a homicidal talking computer system."

Mulder steps in, long-limbed and languid. His spine straightens as he sees where he is, a keen excitement overtaking his features.

"Scully. Hold the door."

He disappears from the bar again, ducking out of sight. Seconds later he's back, suit jacket abandoned, sleeves rolled back, armed with a camcorder. It looks brand-new but that's relative—it probably came with a manual that looked something like this. He boots it up right away.

"This is it. Evidence of the Bar Abduction Phenomenon." Swivelling the recording end at his partner: "Smile. We're making history."

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Mulder is too busy filming to notice the glowing blue alien above them. Scully, on the other hand, is a scientist, and that smell is ringing alarm bells. She looks up slowly, and her eyes go wide.

"Um, Mulder?" Fox is too busy interviewing a human male in his late fifties to notice her query.

The creature has tentacles. And multiple sets of eyes. They're all blinking at her.

"Hello. I'm, uh, Dana. Scully, Special Agent Dana Scully. Do you, speak English?"

Mulder is never going to hear the end of this.

^__^

It whistles, lifting one forward tentacle in a gesture not entirely unlike a wave or a thumb's-up or something like that.

She glances over at Mulder again, unable to wave to get his attention because she doesn't want to frighten or offend the creature.

"So you understand English? How do you, I mean..."

She's clearly confused, wondering just how this creature is communicating, if she's missing something. She's suddenly wishing she'd listened more to Mulder's long rant on all the ways in which a first contact situation could go horribly awry.

"I'm sorry, I've never met an," she pauses again, realising she doesn't even know what this thing is. She does get, very clearly, that it's non-threatening.

Or is it? How would she know?

Damn it, they never covered this at Quantico!

That's all right. It's currently a little more fascinated by something else anyway. When you can pick up on the Covenant battlenet despite being on board a human ship traveling at what's ostensibly a safe, undetectable distance from the nearest Covenant vessel, you stand a very good chance of picking up on other forms of signal, and the human is carrying some seriously ancient technology.

Agent Scully, the friendly neighborhood tentacle monster has taken an interest in your pager.

She sees that he's floated down a little closer to her and that he's now studying the small plastic device at her waist.

"Oh, this? Is this what you're curious about?"

She unclips it and holds it out to him.

Eeeeeee! It gets to play with the stone knives and bearskins!

It should be noted at this point that human witnesses can testify to the fact that a lone individual of this species was able to disassemble a human-built vehicle's engine, reconfigure it in at least three different but still functional ways, then reassemble it in its original configuration in the space of less than five minutes. If Agent Scully doesn't hold onto that pager it's going to get taken apart at an equally swift pace- and reassembled in several different configurations while the creature tries to figure out what produces the most interesting results.

"Mulder!"

The name comes out as a hoarse whisper. He's still talking, completely oblivious of this amazing creature and the crazy bizarre things it's doing to her pager.

...

Wow, that's just impressive.

Blast. There doesn't- oh, wait, there is an LED in here, that should- hm, there's not a lot of focusing options, one can only do so much without crystalline elements... ah well. So much for reworking the device into a miniature laser.

On the other hand, it did find a number of unused connectors on the sound generation subsystem that produces the actual beeping. Polyphonic beep codes ahoy!

She is a scientist. She prides herself on her ability to face even the most bizarre situations with a rational, methodical approach, with a clinical distance that befits her position as observer.

He's good with electronics, that much is obvious. No, scratch that. He's amazing with electronics. She only flinches a little at the burst of musical notes that emanate from the pager.

(He's also floating mid-air. And her voice isn't shifting to a higher pitch. Something is not quite right with this.)

"Whoa, hey, will that still work with my pager number? Because I need that for work."

Oh, it will work fine. The Huragok pokes at a number of controls, verifying that all the functions appear to still be intact- these primitive machines get so touchy- there, see, everything is exactly as it was, save for the improved sound quality.

Again, she baffles at him. He just ran the little device through its factory settings like the tech did on the day it was issued to her. (She didn't really catch them all then, either.)

"Thanks."

She takes the pager back from him and clips it back on her belt. Mulder seems to have drifted off interviewing other patrons; she can't even see him in the crowd any more. She casts a somewhat worried eye back at the blue alien.

"That's an impressive skill set, Mister...?"

It tips forward a little, not much more than one might expect from a bit of bad balance. Then, with a cheerful trill and a wave of one tentacle, it drifts upward again. Somebody left a rather complicated bit of positively paleolithic pulley-work in one of the rafters and it wants a crack at the bearings.

She watches him go, still gaping like a fish out of water.

And then she turns to go and find her partner, who is so going to get an earful for disappearing like that.

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