(no subject)

[gone_byebye]

It's morning. Ray's awake.

He's also got two fairly thick books on advanced aviation systems and advanced composites welding. If the 'USED' stickers on the spines are anything to go by, they came from a university or college bookstore.

He's going to get permanent wrinkles in his forehead if he keeps frowning like that.

Comments

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht wanders by, fringe busily working at a Rubic's cube. This particular puzzle has textured stickers.

"Good morning, Ray," he says. "New project?"

[gone_byebye]

"Huh?" Ray looks up. "Oh- hi, Naraht. Yeah, you could say that. There's an AI out back in a twenty-first century airplane and he's asked me to fix an injury to one of his wings. The material his body panels are made from doesn't exist in my time, but I can get some fabbed up here, I think. I just need to figure out how to work it. I can get his interior lines and stuff fixed up without much trouble, but the body's going to be a pain in the tuchus."

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

"Twenty-first century, you say?" Naraht puts the cube on the table for a moment. "Do you have a sample of the material? If I'm familiar with it, I might be able to help you in that regard."

[gone_byebye]

"I managed to snag an extremely small sample the other night for purposes of fabber matching," Ray says. "Hang on a minute."

He digs through his pockets and comes up with a plastic bag containing a quarter-sized bit of aeroelastic compound, bronze in color.

"The machine involved is from 2008, so this was probably developed sometime around 2006 or 2007, knowing the development cycle of the US military."

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht takes the bag and pulls out the fragment. He looks it over carefully.

"Hmmm...I suppose since this is your only sample it wouldn't be a good idea for me to analyze it by taste."

[gone_byebye]

((OOC: I don't think so. I don't believe the universe of the movie Stealth really flows into the Star Trek timeline, from what I understand.))

Ray nods. "Unfortunately, yeah. I don't want to take anything more or larger, because it'll hurt him- this is as much as I could get in order to get him a patch, kind of like taking a sample of skin cells from a human to grow them a new patch to cover burn tissue."

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

"Hmmm...not primarily metallic, but I detect some hint of titainium in the smell...other than that, it's completely new to me."

He snickers. "Better take it back before I'm too tempted to steal it and run it back home to our engineering department."

[gone_byebye]

Ray smiles. "If you did that I'd have to ask you to bring back one of the engineers. It's a little daunting having an AI from the future ask you to do repairs on its physical body. I've never seen stuff like that before. I'll have to ask Bar or Seamus to help me out with the supplies to fix him."

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

"Needless to say, you have access to my help if you wish it...although my expertise runs more to debugging circuitry. But I get by with structural repairs. Though, not knowing how to maniuplate this material effecively will certainly make things challenging."

[silverageflash.livejournal.com]

"Good morning, Ray. Long time no see." It's Barry, back on the ground, though still carrying his skaterug.

[gone_byebye]

Ray smiles. "Hey, Barry. How's it going? I was wondering where you were."

[silverageflash.livejournal.com]

"Oh, I've been around but sort of keeping quiet. Taking advantage of the lull before the changes in security get started." He takes a seat.

"How's it going?"

[gone_byebye]

Ray rubs at his face with both hands. "Busy," he says, deciding that the detailed report is not going to do anyone any good. "But New York is still standing and I haven't wrecked my rooms here yet, so it works out okay in the end."

[silverageflash.livejournal.com]

"Well, that's good." Barry figures there is a whole opera out there somewhere, but won't push Ray.

"Guess you missed the recent spate of parties then?"

[gone_byebye]

"Parties?" For a moment, Ray looks just a bit wistful. Then he nods. "Afraid I did. The wedding stuff happened at the same time as a seventy-two-hour stretch of unmitigated poltergeist activity in my world. I didn't get to leave until it was all over, and when I got here I wasn't coherent enough to do anything but sleep the clock 'round."

[silverageflash.livejournal.com]

"It was a nice wedding, but I suspect that Bernard and Tonks wouldn't have been upset that you were there, given the situation. Besides, given that almost everyone in the Bar was there, I don't know if they noticed.

"And then there was the rather noisy party that Mel and her new roommate threw last week. Not at all my cup of tea, but some good drinks and Mel was a surprisingly perky hostess." He flags down a wait-rat and gets a lemonade.

[gone_byebye]

"Didn't even know about that one," Ray admits. "What was that for? Birthday, welcome-to-the-room, something like that?"

He sniffs at his coffee suspiciously and starts doping it further with sugar.

[ushouldcwhatic.livejournal.com]

Johnny stopped by, since he hadn't talked to Ray in a while. He took note of the books.

"Building a plane?"

[gone_byebye]

"Rebuilding, more like," Ray said as he looked up. "There's a Navy warplane from 2008 out back with an artificial intelligence named Eddie at the controls. Eddie's got a hole in his wing that looks like a compound fracture would look on a human. He asked me to fix it, even though I've never actually worked on an airplane other than the little balsa-wood-and-doped-cloth kind."

"Good to see you again, Johnny. How've you been?"

[ushouldcwhatic.livejournal.com]

Johnny nodded, "I've only worked on the plastic model versions myself. Ended up getting more glue on everything else but where they were supposed to be."

He sat down, "I found out some things recently. My visions aren't such a fluke. I have reason to believe my father also had them. And I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't born with them after all." He was also concerned because what if he had passed it on to JJ?

[gone_byebye]

"Oooh. That's possible," Ray said, setting his books aside. "Psychokinetic talent tends to crop up in nuclear families more often than it does in similarly sized random groups of individuals. And there was a study done a few years ago of a family in Spain that didn't exactly have mental powers per se, but that seemed to induce the development of abilities in others- there was some kind of genetic component to the Ardais family that we were never entirely able to isolate, but that got called 'catalyst telepathy'. Tell me about your father?"

[ushouldcwhatic.livejournal.com]

Johnny nodded, "Well, he built much of our house. I recently had some sanders and refinishers in to repair the flooring. Custom wooden flooring, one of the guys figured my dad had to have cut and installed each board by hand. All the dust from the work somehow affected my dead zone, connecting me to my father. I found out that while he had visions, and they were from physical contact too, nobody believed him at the time. My mother ended up signing committment papers for him, and he died at Brockmore Institute. I was never told what happened to him."

[gone_byebye]

"Oh, man." Ray winced. "That's an innovative way to make contact, I'll grant you that, but wow does that ever suck to find out. The poor guy. What a way to go..."

[ushouldcwhatic.livejournal.com]

Johnny nodded, "Yeah, I was also getting strange nightmares from it, and Rev. Purdy, who knew both of my parents, sent me to the shrink who ended up recommending my father for committment. Purdy hoped I might found out some things about what happened through him."

"Got a look on the case file on my father, too." Though he wouldn't elaborate how he got a hold of it since he was lucky he wasn't jailed for it. "The doctor thought he was schizophrenic, and possibly manic-depressive. But his visions were real."

[gone_byebye]

Ray nodded. "Nobody ever said psychics weren't subject to the same biochemical imbalances as the rest of the population," he said. "He could've easily been mildly bipolar and it wouldn't have necessarily related to his visions in the slightest. At least, that's what most of the available data seems to indicate, to my knowledge. I can't imagine any treatments they might've imposed for the other diagnosis could've had anything like positive effects, though."