bigapplesauce | Like a guest; like a ghost [OPEN]

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Like a guest; like a ghost [OPEN]

At first Rashad assumed that his coworkers were failing to notice his presence because he is naturally taciturn and their senses are naturally lacking. It isn't just that Maureen cut in front of him at the copier, though, or that Bob and Rob didn't include him in their watercooler chatter (they don't normally anyway, and he believes it has something to do with the slight feeling of derision that usually emanates from them). It was when Maureen tutted and came into his cubicle to shut off the computer he'd still been using yesterday evening that Rashad realized something more was at play.

This morning they seem entirely unable to see him. He finds this rather inconvenient, as it is difficult to do his work when he is assumed to be absent. It is not until several hours into his workday that the benefits of his condition occur to him and he helps himself to a tour of the building, slipping in and out of offices to spy on their inhabitants and exploring restricted areas with increasing confidence.

Later, when he has explored enough, he ventures out into the city in search of sustenance. It will be easy to get close to anyone he finds in the throes of an emotion. They'll never even see him coming.

[Anyone with business at ROMAC can find Rashad poking his nose where it doesn't belong...if they can see him. Otherwise he'll be on the prowl, stealth-nomming people's emotions.]

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Rashad dutifully joins Iman at Bill's abandoned workstation, but many of the symbols on the notepad to which she points are unfamiliar to him, and the annotations might as well be gibberish. Once again, what Iman describes in scientific terms sounds more like magic to him -- not thaumaturgy, but one of the old magics, on a grand scale. Once again he wonders if the rift is an unknown archon to have this kind of hold over the people it brings to this place, but once again he dismisses the thought. He would be able to communicate with it, or at least sense it. Bill's distress regarding his lost pen is eyed impassively as he waits for Sara to either put the pen back down or be required to be made to put it back where she found it.

"ROMAC's purpose in this city is to maintain order and protect the people living here," he says slowly, thoughtfully. "If they have not acted on this information, that means either they are deliberately not living up to their purpose or they do not know how. How complete are his notes, can you tell? Is there a counter en -- a counter science?"

They're talking about science and only science. Obviously.

Is this guy for real? She narrows her eyes at Rashad, as though trying to get a better look at him. "In my experience, the organizations who want to 'maintain order' are usually doing it for their own benefit," she says, "because they have something to gain from it. Usually because it means they're in control."

She reaches out and taps Bill's notes aggressively, causing his hand to slip, leaving him with a seemingly unwarranted scribble of ink on the page.

"There's nothing here about how to fix it, just what it is. And I mean, look around us. If they were working on a solution, this place would be swarmed. Bill here, the other two, they're monitors. Waiting for it to blow over. Maybe they have reason to believe that it will reverse itself, but in the meantime, no warning, no explanation, no communication. Does that sound like something an organization that wants order would do?"

She's not overly interested in changing Rashad's views on this. She shakes her head, eyeing another scientist, who appears to be doing something with test tubes. Rainwater, she realizes. A sample for semi-controlled conditions. She clicks her tongue.

"We're all just canaries in the coal mine," she says. "They don't care about us, they care about themselves."

She recognizes that she's getting riled, a little too much so to act rationally, but hell, these people could stand a little chaos. Abruptly, she steps away from Rashad, moving across the room to the test tube scientist, leaning onto his workstation with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

"What's this?" she asks brightly, pointing at the rack of tubes. "Is this important? Huh?" She leans forward until her finger brushes against them, then pushes ever so slightly, sending them crashing to the floor.

"Whoops!" she says, straightening up while this guy, Bill, and the other guy all jerk with surprise, this guy swearing under his breath. She looks over at Rashad with an innocent little pout. "Clumsy."

No. They do not need chaos on any scale. While Sara has many good points about ROMAC's failure to respond to the situation and come to the aid of those affected, Rashad sees no connection between that realization and her decision to take something very neatly organized and labeled and turn it into a lot of broken glass on the floor. He can tell she's angry, of course -- and this is why anger is one of his least favorite emotions ~~except when it's his turn to feel it~~.

"Someone must be in control," he points out, though he's rapidly becoming convinced ROMAC might not be up to the job after all. "But it should be beneficial to us as well as them, I will grant you that. Now that we know what is happening, it falls on us to do something about it. Please do not break anything else."

Iman wasn't planning on breaking anything else, really - there's not much more to break that would have such symbolic satisfaction, and really, these people don't need any reason to believe they have a poltergeist. The fact that they're studying this very phenomenon makes them uniquely placed to put two and two together, after all.

But, as she watches the labcoats scramble around the mess, one of them laying blame all over the poor guy she picked on ("Goddammit, Hector!"), who's really just at a complete loss to how this could have happened - she turns her narrow-eyed gaze on the self-important one (his nametag reads Marcus). Marcus isn't helping Bill or Hector clean up the mess. He's just gesticulating and pulling rank. He reminds her of one of her most awful academic advisors.

"I won't," she says peaceably, to coax Rashad. Now's not the moment to fuck with Marcus. She needs to wait until the three of them are separated again. The glass and water cleaned up, Hector thoroughly and unjustly reamed out, the three drift sullenly back to their respective stations.

"I don't know that there's anything we can do about this," she says. "If these douchebags aren't working on anything, I don't know what we're gonna accomplish, sans know-how and wherewithal."

She trails after Marcus. He was the guy who noticed the door opening. What's he working on, anyway?

Oh, he's like some kind of supervisor. They can't be in the lab without him there to 'supervise'. He's playing computer solitaire.

"What a prick," she says under her breath. To Rashad, she says, "We should probably scoot, actually. I just want to try one more experiment."

She reaches out with steady hands and plucks Marcus' glasses neatly off his face. A risky measure, but man, curiosity and cats, etc.

"Woooo~," she says, waving the glasses around.

Marcus blinks, squints, then goes to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, an automatic gesture. What? They're GONE? But how.

This is so much more entertaining than Bill with the pen. Watching the sheer confusion as someone realizes that they've somehow lost their glasses, weren't they on his face a minute ago? and he looks over at Bill and Hector, but no, too embarrassing, after the mess Hector made - they must be around here somewhere. Iman holds the glasses up, watching him with a small smile. She knows she's being childishly mean, but it's just for a minute.

To say that Rashad is disappointed in the mortal institution to which he has pledged his (temporary and conditional) loyalty would ascribe a reaction to his new knowledge that simply isn't there. It would be more accurate to say that he is reassessing his decisions and the path he must follow in future. He knew at the start that no organization of mortals could truly aspire to be to him now what his superiors in the Heavenly Host were to him before his fall, but he was never made to create his own agenda. This was the first time in a very long time he had been reasonably sure he was being put to use for a worthwhile cause, but Sara is right. These scientists are doing nothing to intervene. Their work (and by distant extension, his work) is not serving to do anything more than to increase the knowledge and power of ROMAC.

While Marcus yells and Bill and Hector clean, Rashad relieves some of his own sense of wrongness with the world by sorting Bill's pens by color and size. "It should not be necessary to shout at them," he notes quietly in the midst of Marcus's tirade. Shouting at mortals rarely results in long term improvements.

He steps away from the desk (later Bill will reach for a pen and be very surprised to find the one he wants on the first try) and strides over to where ~~Iman~~ Sara is tormenting the supervisor. "This serves no purpose," he informs her. "We should leave here and spread word to the people likely to be affected."

So saying, he plucks the glasses out of her hand and gently but firmly puts them back on Marcus's face.

Iman is about to come back at Rashad with some sneering remark of the no duh variety when he surprises her by taking the glasses from her and putting them on Marcus's face.

Marcus looks so fucking surprised by this, and so much more gaslit than Iman would have ever considered, slowly touching his face and then looking around nervously, uncomfortably, as if to ensure no one saw him suffer this mild personal crisis - for a moment she can only gape incredulous at her companion. Then she starts laughing.

She doubles over, laughing so hard for a moment no sound comes out. When she finally straightens up again, he still looks as blank and impassive as ever.

"You," she says, but doesn't even know how to finish. She shakes her head, settling down, wiping tears from her eyes. "Oh man. Come on." She slaps him on the shoulder and proceeds back toward the door, holding it open.

"You're right," she concedes eventually, still grinning. "But I have one more stop to make first."

Now that she knows more or less what's actually happening to them, and that they've given these three dweebs more than enough reason to get suspicious after they start putting two and three together, it's high time she got around to finding wherever these security cameras are controlled.

Marcus's astonishment is palpable, and for a moment Rashad considers sampling it. Then, too, there is his companion's amusement -- but it would not do to lose control here, when there is the chance of discovery despite their apparent invisibility. He tilts his head slightly at the extravagance of her laughter -- is there really so much joy to be taken in another's confusion? -- and waits for her to calm down.

"We have made enough stops," he objects as he steps through the door. "The purpose is not for you to commit petty theft and vandalism, Sara. I will see you to the exit."

Because really -- even if ROMAC isn't the scion of order it should be, he is responsible for preventing her from causing any more damage or strife.

"Wrong!" she says perkily, raising a finger, still riding the high of his ridiculously serious-minded shenanigans. She swirls her finger around like a baton. "There's a big huge gaping hole in our perfect crime here, buddy, and it is those." She points directly to the nearest of the many little cameras dotting the hall ceiling. "No one can see us right now, but we're not invisible. If this wears off, they'll be able to look at these tapes and see us, both of us, being where we're not supposed to be."

She stops walking - Rashad's jumpy, this is no time to wander around and hope to accidentally stumble upon the security department. She places her hand against the wall and feels out the electrical hum of the internal wiring until she finds the camera circuit. Where's that information going?

"Fortunately for you," she says loftily, "I have the exact skillset required to get out us out of that potential dilemma. Follow me if you want to live."

She sweeps on down the hall, seeking a particular stairwell that'll take them down deeper into the Base, to the little room where all this visual data resides.

Rashad's gaze follows her direction to land on the small device affixed to the ceiling. It's very similar to the cameras used to capture images of registrants, but he's left wondering what she means by 'tapes' and why she is not doing anything to the cameras themselves if they are a problem. If their images have been taken, they should remove the images from the cameras that took them. He has some vague idea that if they open the cameras up the image will be inside in a form they can pluck out, and he's still looking at the camera she pointed out and trying to decide whether it is worth revealing his powers to get it down or destroy it while she starts walking away. He glances in her direction to see her leaving, and turns to hurry after.

"...Are you not going to do anything to the cameras?" he asks. "If we go deeper, we will only be seen by more of them."

"God, no," she says with a laugh. "The footage is transferring elsewhere, it's already been stored. Messing with the cameras would leave a trail, too. They'd know someone was down here and trying to cover their tracks. With my way, we won't leave a trace." She holds the door for him and then trots energetically down the stairwell. "Just trust me."

A few flights down, they reach a door with another keypad on it. Iman clicks her tongue and peers inside the little window. There's only one operative inside right now, and he's got a headset on, distracted, in communication with others. All right, they can risk it.

She places her hand over the keypad and performs the same trick as before, rewriting the code, preprogramming it to reset. She opens the door as slowly and quietly as possible, aiming not to draw attention. The guard does glance over, but his confusion is even briefer than the scientists upstairs - he turns back to his wall of monitors in a second, shaking the moment off.

Iman shakes her head, holding the door again for Rashad. "Don't touch anything," she tells him. She approaches the monitors, taking a moment to glance at each screen. There's so much to this place. Labs, archives, computer banks, training facilities, areas the purpose of which she can't even guess at - and a whole bunch of what look like prison cells.

"Take it in," she says to Rashad, gesturing around at it all. "These are the people you work for. Up there at the proverbial tip of the iceberg."

He could leave, or try to force her to leave, but she seems to have some idea what she's talking about despite the unfamiliar vernacular. Rashad resolves to follow her to wherever she is going before reassessing her apparent motives and deciding whether to do anything to hinder her. He glances about as they go, finally noticing just how many of those cameras there are throughout these lower halls.

He's never bothered to learn how television works, but Rashad rapidly puts two and two together when he recognizes scenes from the halls they just traversed on the bank of screens. There's more, too, all kinds of rooms and areas they didn't even begin to visit. The existence of the cells is not alarming in and of itself, nor many of the areas whose purpose he doesn't immediately recognize. There is quite a lot, though, he'd own to that.

"This has been a most informative foray," he acknowledges. Because he does not know what he will do with this new knowledge and because he does not trust her, he adds, "I trust you feel you have learned a great deal as well. What do you think you will do about what you know?"

It's a good question. She's not really sure yet. Her little burst of righteous anger aside, she's in no position to do anything as stupid and self-important as take ROMAC on in any capacity. She'd probably be better off keeping them close, getting an in if she can stomach it. She'll have to mull that one over.

"Sit on it," she says truthfully. "I don't have a master plan, here. I wanted to know what kind of people they are and what kind of resources they have, and that's what I got."

Her attention is mostly fixed on the bank of monitors. She hikes up her sleeve and reaches her left hand out to the console, resting it down carefully. She draws one breath in and lets it out steadyingly. This is basic work, but it's on a larger scale than anything she's had to do recently, and thoroughness is imperative.

"Give me a minute," she murmurs as an afterthought, then shifts all her focus onto the camera system. It takes a little less than a minute to bend the system gently to her will, seek out her own image and Rashad's, and essentially teach the system that no, that didn't happen. The images are replaced with standard empty corridors. The lab is a little more difficult, with so much movement and direct interaction, but she erases the two of them delicately, like a sculptor brushing away dust.

The next part is trickier. She has to convince the cameras, the entire circuit, not to record them for the next, oh, let's call it twenty minutes. This will require her to put out her own ether field disruption as she navigates out of the place, which means Rashad is going to have to stay close to her if he wants the benefits as well. She can probably convince him to do whatever, though, right? He's a pain in the ass, but he's also easy.

She tells the system, programming it in gently with her willpower and the complex circuitry in her hand, what her field disruption will look like, and how to ignore it. Pre-programming a blind spot. Again with a kick to forget everything, to remove any trace she was in here. Who knows what they check for.

Sometimes she thinks she probably should have been a spy, or a master thief. But who cares about political information or accumulation of wealth? Not this lady.

She spends a moment longer sifting through the system, checking for anything else they might have tripped - non-visual sensors, scanners, anything like that. Once she's convinced they've been cleaned out, she lifts her hand off the console and glances at the security guard. He continues to seem utterly unaware of their presence, which is starting to get a little creepy.

"Okay," she says, turning back to Rashad. "That should do it. I've set it up so we can get out of here without being recorded, provided we get out fast, and you stick close to me." She holds out a hand, and figures she'd better sweeten the pot somehow. "I can explain how I do this on the way out, if you'd like."

Rashad stands sentinel as his companion places her hand on the console and then does not seem to do anything at all. He shifts slightly only once when the guard does, face turning to look in case they have been observed, but they have not. In the silence Rashad stares at Iman, studying her face as though there are some answers to be gleaned there. Action without a purpose, information gathering without an end...he has engaged in these things himself, but it is not right that even an enemy spy is so directionless. He will find out where she lives, he decides, and he will recruit her to his cause as soon as he has one. She seems very useful, if unfortunately unpredictable.

Though it is not as though he has another way to go should he refuse her, she is right to offer information in exchange for his cooperation. Rashad takes her hand without the slightest hesitation once he hears the bribe, giving a curt nod. "It looks similar to something some people could do where I came from," he admits. "But I do not believe it is the same."

Iman nods thoughtfully as she leads them out and back to the stairs. "I've been getting the impression that a lot of worlds have limited their scientific study to just - study," she says. "Well, and experimentation and proofs and whatnot. But it's kind of a passive reading-and-learning relationship regardless. Even with the experiments, it's mostly facilitating events and observing results."

She pulls Rashad aside to make room for a pair of agents coming down the stairs past them, then she continues up, keeping a grip on his hand.

"In my universe we broke that barrier a long time ago. Most of our scientists have developed capabilities to directly impact, well, reality." She shrugs. She can treat this sort of explanation like she would talking to a non-scientific person back home - the scientific world was always very insular, and looked at from the outside as something weird and fantastical, but even the most ignorant citizen knew more about it than the people she meets here. She's never really prepared for how weird it all sounds to them.

"My field was empirical alchemy," she says. "Transmutation of information. The details are rather... nuanced." She's not saying you're stupid, Rashad, she's just saying she doesn't have time right now. "That's how I tell computers what to do."

"Of information?" asks Rashad, who has been listening carefully all this while. That that is the sticking point for him may be telling. It is strange to him that she sees this as science when it seems to him that she is speaking of the study of magic. "Not the aether?"

There, he's come right out and said it. He might as well clarify. "Where I come from, it is not called science," he says. "Science is a realm of study, and a person who does what you do would be called a thaumaturge."

She shoots him a surprised glance at the mention of the ether. "Well, it's... Yeah, it has to do with ether. And yeah, I can see how it would be magic in some universes. That kinda seems like what this universe would think of it. So maybe it's just like... my universe was able to apply scientific method to what other places would consider magical practices."

She smiles, pleasantly surprised that they have this in common, sort of. "I love that, how many overlaps there are, in all kinds of ways you wouldn't expect. The possible variations are limitless. It's breathtaking. This is part of what got me into dimensional physics. That's, uh, my other field. Crossing between worlds. That's how I got here, only then I couldn't turn back."

"So you knew of other worlds before you came here," says Rashad. He'd assumed when she compared her world to others she based her words on what she had learned since arriving in this place, but if she was already a traveler between worlds that changes things significantly. This is not a matter of planes, either, but of actual parallel worlds, something of which he'd been unaware until his arrival in Manhattan and the discovery that so much of what he had known back home was either absent or hidden from his view here.

"Perhaps your world is not so different to mine," he muses, though he's not willing to forward the possibility that perhaps her world is the same as his. She calls magic by the name of science, after all; while things may have changed in the past century and a half he doubts science will subsume magic in that manner...particularly because mortals' ability to channel the aether has been lessening, not increasing. "I have not met many people here who know more than what is possible in a universe such as this one. Were I a thaumaturge myself I might try to learn from you the differences between the practices."

As beneficial as such an arrangement might be, it is more prudent to pretend that he is magically incompetent. Only the angel and his pet demon know any better, and it is as well that it remains so.

"Well, you could tell me what you know," says Iman with a shrug. "I mean I'd love to examine that if I could, but I don't have much to work with right now." The only 'magic' she's seen so far was what Lucifer could do, and that's... not a road she's ready to walk down.

A few more flights of stairs up and they're back up to the office level.

"All right," she says, and releases his hand. "We're good now."

"I'm afraid I don't understand the mechanics of the practice very well," lies Rashad, "Though I might at least be able to give you some understanding of what is possible for such practitioners. Some use it to heal, others to injure with aetheric fire...or more direct means. I have seen thaumaturges animate objects as well. Are those things your science can do?"

He glances about as they emerge into an area for which he has security clearance, but of course they are still unnoticed. "I thank you," he says.

"Yeah, within certain limits which are probably different from yours," she says in a sort of offhand tone that belies her actual level of interest. "It's just a matter of figuring out how to bend the rules of whatever universe you come from - the physics vary from place to place, is what I'm starting to gather." Which is mind-blowing in itself.

At his stilted expression of gratitude, she looks up at him with a wry smile. "You are welcome," she says, echoing his syntax slightly. "I think I'm gonna jet outta here, if it's all the same to you. That's enough spywork for me today."

Also, he's creepy.

Were he to admit part of the truth he might pry more information from her, but she already knows more than he would wish her to. He withholds the comment that physics are similar enough here for him to do the same things he could in his home world, merely giving a stiff little bow instead.

"I will not tell anyone you were here," he tells her, "Unless you return and break more things, in which case I may."

She smirks, barely stifling a laugh. "Okay, Mr. Grumpy," she says, giving him a little wave. "Nice to meet you too."

Well then, mission accomplished, hilarious/weird/creepy contact made. Not too bad for a day. She swishes out of there, focus already reoriented on getting home, possibly getting drunk, and some light reading about meteorology.

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Like a guest; like a ghost [OPEN]

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