milliways_bar | (no subject)

Ray had a fairly disquieting thought earlier today and wound up spending most of the afternoon in his room. He comes downstairs in search of food and actual conversation, since let's face it, it's a mess up there.

[Summary: Martin Miggs comes around and talks to Ray about food. Because, well- FOOD. But not pixy sticks.

Scribble the baby raptor comes by with her toy! There is tug-of-war and then the rope is torn to bits, so Ray deploys one of his flashyballs and gets himself some protection against pointy bits, and then there is feeding time for the ickle Mesozoic deathbringer.

Lysistrata also pops up, and there is some discussion of things like rings and faked deaths and Spartan idiocy, and on the idiocy theme Ray reveals that he's currently having an envy/jealousy problem, and can't quite seem to get over it. Even though he knows it's stupid.

Scary scary Tim Hunter comes by to ask about borrowing a PKE meter. Ray is somewhat reluctant at first, but when he hears what happened to Ace, he hands the meter over without a quibble.

Hurley comes around to ask Ray what he knows about freakydeaky numbers and good / bad fortune combinations. Ray adds another item to his research queue as a result.

And finally, Akito turns up, and there is discussion of ID cards and communications gaps before Ray boggles a little at the name of Nergal Heavy Industries. Give the man a break, he's been studying Sumerian for the past week...]

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"That would be me, yes," said Ray with a small smile. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Hurley," he said extending his hand for a shake.

"Would you know anything about why a string of seemingly random numbers would cause anyone who plays them good luck, and then really, really bad luck?"

Ray shakes the hand firmly. Hurley might, or might not notice that there's a broad band of shiny pink burn scar tissue across Ray's palm. "Depends on the numbers, I would expect," he says. "The right combination of significant digits and ordinals has always been the topic of numerological speculation by both scholars and conjurors through the ages- I mean, going back to Pythagoras you had mysticism and number theory combined. It's possible that a particular combination might be exactly right to invoke some form of old spell or other, half-forgotten but still in existence somewhere, and then bring about a backlash. Spells have a tendency to do that if they're only partially invoked, from what I understand."

"Oh, interesting." He then paused, noticing a scar on the man's hand he didn't feel like asking about it, afraid to know where it came from. "Do you know anything about any specific spell involving a random combination of numbers and the South Pacific."

"... oh, God, are you from that island too?" Ray winces. "With Claire and Seth and Charlie and Liam? I don't know about random numbers figuring into it, but I've had the plane crash scenario described to me. The place is... I haven't been there yet, but it makes me really nervous just to hear about it. That island needs investigating, soon."

"Yes, I'm from that island too, and I sometimes think perhaps I was part of the reason why I crashed in the first place.

You see a few months before I ended up there, there was this crazy fellow I knew. He kept muttering a series of random numbers, and one day I used them to play the lottery, and won over a hundred million dollars. However afterwards bad things happened to everything I touched.

I did some investigating and turns out that the insane dude got the numbers from someone he had been stationed with in the army. They were at some kind of post, listening to random radio frequencies for aliens or something. They heard nothing but static, except for one night when someone repeated the numbers over the air.

His friend played them, had a similar streak of bad luck, and moved to the Austrailian outback. I went there to visit his wife, and on the way back, the plane crashed."

"I see," Ray murmurs. "Insane, you said. Out of curiosity, do you happen to know if he went mad before or after the signal with the numbers came through? I have some suspicions about the island, you see- most of which have to do with alien beings and dimensions, and quite a few of those are the sort that have a certain degree of power to drive people insane if they make too much mental contact. If the numbers were part of a spell or key passed to this world by the beings I'm thinking of, it would make perfect sense..."

"Definitely afterwards. There was no way he would have been in the army in the condition he was when I met him. There was also another woman on the island, who was there before we were. She and a group of her collegues heard the numbers on the repeater, came changed them, and then she went nuts. No one is really sure what happened to her collegues, or the long lost child she claims to have."

"Oh, man." Ray rubs at his temples. "Yeah, Charlie said something about other people being on the island already, but I didn't know about that part of it. Damn... I'd almost ask you what the numbers were, but I've already seen the stuff I study drive one man completely over the edge. I have no desire to follow him." He pauses. "On the other hand, you seem perfectly sane. At least so far, anyway."

"I understand about you not wanting to know the numbers, some wizard I met here said I shouldn't repeat them in putlic because they might be dangerous. But if I see them coming up I'll let you know." He paused. "I was on the brink of losing it before I ended up on the island. No one believed that the numbers were cursed, and that I was unlucky, when it was obvious."

Ray nods. "Fair enough. Tell you what- I've got some books upstairs that might have some more information in them on numerological magic. I'll start in on researching the situation and let you know as soon as I've found something, okay?"

[ooc: no problemo.]

"Thanks, I'll be checking in," he said as he walked away.