video | first

[spacerhyme]

[ the video feed flickers onto the face of an older gentleman; unflattering low angle, poor lighting, eyebrows hanging heavy over his eyes and lips tightly pursed. he's wearing a nice, heavy coat over a hoodie and a t-shirt featuring a sick ass space shark, though much of the ensemble's coated in a fine yellowish dust. looks like it could use a wash.

not his main concern right now. ]

Really? [ one corner of his mouth quirks up, wry. ] Cast across time and drifting lost and alone amongst storms of raw negative energy, but you've got social networking. How very... human, I bet a human knocked this up. D'you call it Spacebook or something?

[ original dad joke, do not steal. no apology is forthcoming.

the camera swings round, losing sight of him for a second as he sets the device down on something solid. re-adjusts it until it's centered properly on his face, steady now. ]

Hel-lo, Avagi. I'm the Doctor. Yes, just the Doctor. I arrived on your quaint little space station only recently — not the worst I've encountered. Well done. Probably... well, possibly not even in the bottom ten, but I mourn for some of your equipment. Someone made off with two-thirds of your laboratory, you realize, and ohhh, the state of your computers...

[ briefly aims the camera up at one of the aforementioned storms. ] But I must say, the open-plan observation station is a bold design.

[ casually tossing topics out as he rapidly approaches the actual purpose of this broadcast. this time he points at the screen, seriously, ]

Has anyone established themselves as your de facto leader yet? I'd like to know who to ignore.

The rest of you, tell me about the Ingress as it was, and the planets you've visited. Any of them.

[ over and out. ]

Comments

[spacerhyme]

Oh. That one.

[ one hand reflexively reaches for his collar; reassuring himself there's not a bow tie there. phew.

he takes a moment to rack his brains, gaze wandering off to the side... ]

Sorry, don't recall. But that's not unheard of.

[ryuuzaki]

No. It certainly wasn't unheard of where I was before. The trouble there was a malfunctioning faster-than-light drive on a ship, rather than an Ingress. But it's the same as here... sometimes people would leave and then return with no memory of having been there.

[spacerhyme]

I'll be sure to write everything down in my diary, this time.

[ he sounds pretty flippant — he doesn't like to think he (or clara) could have forgotten something like that, but he doesn't feel that sort of significant gap in his memory. no way to confirm it, nothing he can do about it.

he's not kidding about the diary, though. ]

[ryuuzaki]

Do you think you'll have the diary if you end up in some kind of time loop, or an alternate dimension? That seems to be what happens. The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory really is just a theory where I come from -- truly -- but these situations tend to imply that it was an accurate hypothesis.

The Ingress operators who operated this complex when it was part of Kauto, before anyone called it Avagi, used to claim to be searching for signatures to put us back in the universe we came from.

[spacerhyme]

I should hope so, but I haven't tested it here yet. [ re: the diary. ]

If you've met Clara and I before, you might know this isn't my first rodeo. I can attest, from personal experience, there really are an infinite number of alternate dimensions. I've been to a few. Parallel universes, bubble universes... Also, stuck in my fair share of time loops.

If the operators really were, I wonder if their research still exists somewhere...

[ryuuzaki]

I didn't know you well. She's talked about your travels a bit, though. She thinks highly of you.

If their research still exists, and it's in a reasonable place, it's in the library or somewhere in the computer systems, or a little of all of it.

If not, it could be anywhere -- hidden in some barely accessible area, or just gone. Do you think you could make something of it? There were journals, in the past, but they were the journals of a man who experimented with Ingress phenomena and didn't come out the better for it.