Sorting party!

[for_good_taste]

Millitimed shortly after this conversation, still in progress. Open until it falls off the front page Unfortunately, the mun is away all next week; no new tags please.

Sasha is not an untidy person. No, let us rephrase that. Sasha is an obsessively tidy person, when he has the time to be. The trouble is that he's also the sort of person who is only content if he's overbooked by at least 150%, and he's capable of tuning out the mess for months on end in the name of getting all his projects done.

Bar just gave him a wake-up call.

Sasha has therefore hauled all of his cardboard boxes and miscellaneous laboratory clutter into Milliways, and commandeered a side room to sort it. This room happens to have a very large table, neatly marked off with grid squares, and he's carefully taking things out of boxes and piling them in different squares.

Come help! Or "help." Or just gawk at the gadgets and crystals and other implements of mad science psychic research.

Comments

[pullsneedles]

Lucas could probably do the latter two. Especially now that the bulk of his work day is done. When did he get so busy, anyway?

But there's time. He's not exactly on a long-term schedule, after all.

He passes the side room, freshly clean from a shower and looking to make a similar setup with a couple of books in one of the corner booths. But once he sees Sasha, well, he's just got to say hi.

"Oh, Sasha! Hello," he greets with a wave.

[for_good_taste]

"Lucas! Dark Dragon!" Sasha is as visibly delighted as he ever gets. "How have you been? I couldn't find a door here for some time, and then second thing after I get back, Bar decided to remind me that my lab is a mess. And I have no time to sort it all back at home, so ... as you see."

[pullsneedles]

We come bearing remarkably good news, the Dark Dragon says.

"We've been well," Lucas thinks to answer, though. "But y'wouldn't believe it. Someone from my world came here, my friend Duster. The same Duster from the same world and time and everything."

This place is truly a marvel, allowing such a reunion.

[for_good_taste]

"That is good news. Was he from your same village, or did you meet him while traveling?"

ooc: am on my way to bed, apologies

[pullsneedles]

"He's from the same village. Our families've been friends, and Duster's dad even stayed at my house a while. And now Duster's staying with us while he's learnin' the ropes here."

He gestures a little with his books.

"I've been goin' through my daily stuff in the meantime. I asked Bar for some books about the world before Tazmily some time ago, so I try looking through 'em after working outside."

ooc: no worries!

[for_good_taste]

"Well, I hope I'll get to meet him too."

The books catch his eye.

"What have you learned so far from the books? May I look at the one you're not reading?"

[pullsneedles]

Lucas grins at the prospect. Duster will surely be glad for friends that are closer to his own age than the ones around Lucas's age.

"I learned a lot from both of 'em so far, but they aren't that easy to read."

He holds one up, the very Victorian titled The Strange but True Account of Our Otherworldly Abduction and the Secrets We Risked Our Lives to Learn.

"This one's a diary. There was some alien thing in my world's 1880s that kinda started the spread of people knowing about PSI, and this guy George was one of the first humans to start teaching it. My friend Autor's from about the same time as George, so he's helping me weed through the words."

He holds up the other book, a very plain-looking scientific journal.

"This one's got a lotta inventions and writings by Dr. Andonuts, who made stuff for the Pigmask Army. I have some trouble with the writing, but I recognize some of the drawings. I bet you'd have better luck with it than me."

[for_good_taste]

"Aha, so your islands were in a possible future for Earth, and something happened in the 1880s that put them on the track of your history. That explains why things from other patrons' worlds may seem familiar even though the history you know is different."

"Certainly, I can look through the journal." He moves several boxes aside to clear chairs for himself and Lucas.

[pullsneedles]

"That does make a lotta sense. I didn't think about history bein' diff'rent."

When he thought of history at all, that is.

Lucas takes the offered seat and thinks a moment about both books since both are sorts of journals. But he did offer Sasha the one by Dr. Andonuts, so that's the one he gives.

Dr. Andonuts's work is nothing short of scientific genius, almost frightening at times. Marvels aside, some oddities exist in the journal. The earlier entries are dated to the 1990s and were written in a location called Winters, Foggyland. Once his focus shifted from mainly machines to mainly chimeras, the entries have no years.

[for_good_taste]

"Some of these sound very useful. I may have to see if I can replicate this 'Instant Revitalizing Device'. On the other hand, chimeras ... we sometimes get people trying to do things like that in my world, and it never ends well.

"Also, it's interesting that only the earlier entries have dates and places. Was 'Foggyland' a place in the Nowhere Islands?"

[pullsneedles]

"I don't think so. We musta gone all over and never seen a place called Foggyland. But that fits with what Leder said about the world that was."

Leder also mentioned a device called a Time Distorter, the Dark Dragon adds. That is likely in Dr. Andonuts's work as well.

[for_good_taste]

"Time distorter ... time distorter ... yep, here."

Sasha stares at the page for a long time.

"Did this work???"

[pullsneedles]

It seems so. Leder spoke of those plucked from other times. We have a transcript of his story, provided by Autor.

"Oh yeah," Lucas goes, opening up George's diary. Tucked in one section is a small stack of pages in neat handwriting. "Autor was there when Leder told us the story. He took notes and then wrote it out with help from a bug that repeated it all."

Autor is meticulous in his work. They should be accurate.

[mindofathief]

Duster has spent most of the day exploring the rooms around Milliways, making sure to only enter those with open doorways to avoid the embarrassing possibility of walking into someone's bedroom. So when he notices activity in coming from an open door, he heads towards it.

There seems to only be one man inside, busy with unpacking boxes filled with some unfamiliar mystical or scientific objects. Duster's a bit wary of scientists after all of the run-in with chimeras, so he hangs outside the room looking in, hoping he isn't spotted.

[for_good_taste]

We regret to say that Agent Nein notices the nervousness before he even looks up and spots Duster.

We also regret to say that he gets exactly the wrong idea about its cause.

"Oh dear, is this your space I'm borrowing? I'm afraid it would take me very nearly as long to pack my stuff up and clear out as it would to finish sorting, but all the little figurines and things are in their boxes in the corner over there" (he waves at a pile of boxes outwardly much the same as all the other piles of boxes) "and I promise I'll put everything back exactly as it was when I'm done."

[mindofathief]

Shit. He should have made less noise, and now he's faced with explaining himself to Agent Nein.

"Oh, no. No. I'm not usin' this! I'm just..." He sputters out reflexively without thinking. Once he catches himself, he takes two seconds to decide what to say.

"I'm new here, and I saw that someone was in this room, so I came over here to see what was goin' on." A pause. "If you're busy, I can leave."

[for_good_taste]

"I'm fairly new here myself. Found it only a few months ago, and then promptly got locked out again." because the mun fails at life "Agent Sasha Nein, of the Psychonauts. This is all normally in my lab, but I brought it here to sort because of the time-stop effect. I'm busy, but that's no reason you should have to leave; talking makes the work go faster."

[mindofathief]

"I'm Duster," he limps into the room as he greets Sasha. The sheer amount of things in the room is staggering; how did this man get all of these things inside?

"If it won't bother you, I can help with that. It'd make the work go even faster."

[for_good_taste]

"I'd be glad of the help. Let's see ... these boxes should be all full of file folders. If you could sort them into those piles, by year, that would be great. Files that don't have a date go in that other pile, and anything that isn't a file goes on this cart and I'll look at it."

(Most of the boxes do in fact contain file folders, each clearly marked with a date and a code phrase, e.g. 1958-06 ORANGE JERICHO. Duster will find at least one random item per box, though: blue crystal arrowheads, Boy Scout-esque merit badges, peculiar tools, that sort of thing.)

(Sasha himself is occupied with a small mainframe's worth of unlabeled circuit boards, which he is running through a toaster-sized cleaning device and then carefully inserting into metal racks.)

[mindofathief]

Most of the objects are very foreign to Duster, especially those gadgets that Sasha is busy with, but he's glad he only has to deal with papers. It's odd, after years of training and a brief life as a celebrity musician, his job is surprisingly mundane.

He's able to figure out that he needs to separate the folders based on the first four numbers in the sequence, but other then that, he doesn't sort the folders nor look inside them.

However, the tools in the boxes grab his attention. They're much more complicated than the Thief Tools he carries around with him, but without any knowledge of the technology, he can only guess what they do.

"Excuse me, Sasha?" He turns around with the Cobweb Duster in his hands. To him, it looks like one of the Pigmask's ray guns with some non-lethal protrusions from one ends. "What is this used for?"

[for_good_taste]

Sasha snorts. "Was that in with the files? I really must do a better job of putting things back where they belong. It's called a Cobweb Duster. The object you're holding doesn't do anything—go on, pull the trigger all you like, nothing will happen—but its mental projection can be used to remove what we call 'mental cobwebs' from inside people's minds. These form in areas of the interior landscape that are disused or actively avoided, which as you might imagine, is exactly where one needs to go to get to grips with a mental condition.

"Um.

"I didn't ever explain what it is I do for a living, did I?"

[mindofathief]

What a coincidence, Duster thinks, that the one thing I ask about is a kind of duster. He doesn't pull the trigger, but rather inspects it more closely.

"What's a mental projection?" For the second time since he's been here, Duster's blanked out halfway through someone's explanation after one too many unfamiliar terms.

"You said that you were an agent from the Psychonauts, I think. Is that where you use this?"

[for_good_taste]

"Mental projection is a psychic ability, one that I possess, as do many others in my home world. Essentially, it allows me to enter someone else's mind and observe and manipulate it from the inside, or vice versa. This has given us genuine cures for many mental illnesses, but at the same time, it can be abused to induce those same illnesses, or cause people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, or ... the list goes on.

"The Psychonauts are charged with finding people who would abuse their psychic abilities to harm others, and making them stop."

Sasha says this in a perfectly calm but somehow grim tone of voice.

[mindofathief]

"I guess I can understand. I have a few friends who are psychic, only I'm not sure if they can go into someone's mind. Read it, maybe, but I don't know. But then do you use the Duster with your mind then?

"I see...are there a lot of people in your world with psychic abilities? There's only three humans I know that have them, so we never really needed people to look out for them."

Duster's face falls. Of course there was Claus who was dangerous, but only because the mind controlling his body was not his, and poor Lucas was the one to face him.

"What do you do with the people that abuse the power?"

[for_good_taste]

"Most people experience mental projection as if they had been physically transported to what we call the 'interior landscape' of the patient. It's a little world in itself, whose structure and contents reflect the patient's personality, memories, and so on. The Cobweb Duster is designed to project itself along with you, so you have it in your posession while you're exploring the patient's interior landscape. And there, it does do something when you pull the trigger, namely, it sucks up mental cobwebs. Like a vacuum cleaner."

"It's uncommon, but not rare. I teach at a training camp for children who have just manifested their abilities - most of them are ten to twelve years old - we usually have about 20 students each year. Right now, my organization operates five such camps around the world, and there are others."

"... Most of those who misuse psychic power turned to crime for the same reasons anyone else does - poverty, betrayal, abuse. Most of those can be rehabilitated. I've come to believe that it would be more humane and effective to apply the same techniques to criminals in general, but it's almost impossible to persuade governments to put aside the desire to punish crime, even if they would save money in the long run.

"But there are a few whom we have to imprison, indefinitely, because they will not be persuaded that it is wrong to treat people as playthings. And sometimes even that does not work. Sometimes we have to kill them."

Sasha looks at his hands.

"I count those among my greatest failures."