realityshifted | 001 - A Bad Day For Everyone

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darker than black (da) misaki hirihara

001 - A Bad Day For Everyone

[Misaki Kirihara appears on the plane looking very, very pissed. Her Sig P230 is unholstered and leveled at…

…no one.]

Tch.

[She lowers the weapon, very slightly, taking in her surroundings. Or rather, the lack thereof.]

Contractor!

[She turns in a slow circle, tension wrapped around her like a creaking spring.]

Contractor! Show yourself. You’re being stupid. Using your power on a member of the NPA will get you killed. It isn’t worth the laugh.

[A pause. She’s starting to get angry again.]

Show yourself!

[She looks up, down, around at the stars, and a pained expression crosses her face. Barely audible, she mutters,]

You people… know how to be cruel.

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[he'll let it slide, though. she looks like she's had a long day]

Oh, planet you've never heard of, I imagine. It's very tropical. Lovely to look at, really. The residents have their ups and downs.

[She's intrigued, despite herself. Talk of outer space tends to have that effect--even if she doesn't quite believe him.]

We were working on interstellar travel, before the Gates appeared. We couldn't get anywhere after that, even if we tried. What are the... residents like?

[a little smugly]

Welllll, my people have been doing it for a long time. The residents are hyper-intelligent marine life. Dolphins, whales, sharks, squids, all those. The dolphins like lobbing things at me from the shallows.

[Intrigue gives way to disguised delight, both at the thought of free travel to other worlds, and at the thought of hyper-intelligent marine mammals chucking things at people. Even more disturbing than believing this place is real, she's beginning to want to believe it.]

Who are your people?

[smiles, catching the signs of her interest]

Ah, well, they're mostly gone now but...I'm a Time Lord. Exactly what it sounds like.

[She frowns thoughtfully. Oh yes, her interest has been piqued.]

Time Lord... You control time? How exactly do you travel? Is it a ship? Or some sort of teleportation?

[a bit amused but happy to see her so curious]

She's called the TARDIS. Stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. You might actually meet her around here. She's alive. 'Course, there's a lot to it. It's not just that my ship can travel through the vortex. Time is in my blood.

[Tries to imagine what it might look like for someone to bleed time. And then the rest of what he says catches up with her.]

Meet her? The vortex--is that a sort of access point, then? Do you have to give up blood to get in?

[She can't help thinking in terms of Contract and Obeisance.]

[laughs a bit]

The TARDIS can create realistic projections. She's here, too. Just be polite to her. She's not really used to...people. And the vortex is a pathway through time. I can get in easy enough but my biology has been tuned specifically to withstand this sort of time travel.

It has damaging effects on humans, then?

[On humans. On humans! Misaki Kirihara is talking to an alien and not finding it weird. There is something very wrong with this picture, she is sure.]

[the Doctor just loves how easily she asks that]

Not usually, no. I have human traveling companions sometimes. But it's thanks to me being alive that it works so well. The TARDIS and I are symbiotic. [he's actually rather surprised at how much he's telling her but he thinks she's trustworthy enough]

[She retreating into deep thoughtfulness, now]

Organic, symbiotic space travel. Not an option we considered, that I'm aware of... I wonder what Kanami would think...? The risk factor... But would something like that have a chance at getting past the Gate barrier? Potential for more definite results, but still, the risk...

[She goes on muttering for a moment then looks up, startled at the thought that she's broken off in mid-conversation.]

S-sorry.

[a little more seriously]

I'd consider going down safer paths, personally. Vortex manipulators are always good. Try to focus on finding the path. Then you can decide how to blaze down it, eh?

[She persists, despite his change in demeanor.]

But this vortex, if I'm understanding correctly, exists outside of normal time? Sort of like this place? Something like that may be our only chance of actually getting off the planet's surface.

Mmm, could be, yeah. The problem is I don't know much about your world. Mind giving me a rundown? Try not to spare the important bits.

[She frowns, considering. Common knowledge seems to be the safest ground--there's enough there to last for a while. And this man does seem a valuable resource.]

I'm from... well, I'm from a planet called Earth.

[It is VERY VERY weird to say that, and she has to pause for a moment to get the ridiculous feeling of it off of her tongue before continuing.]

Eleven years ago, two abnormal spaces appeared--one in South America, one in Japan, where I live. The Gates. Heaven's Gate and Hell's Gate, we call them. At the time as their appearances, the stars vanished. The real stars, I mean. We still have them--imitations of them, that don't move at all. We tried sending rockets out, but everything that made it into the thermosphere just... disappeared. Completely. No signals back, nothing.

[She pauses again; editing time.]

Six years ago, the South American Gate--Heaven's Gate--disappeared as well. That is, the space for 1500 kilometers around it became impenetrable, and everything and everyone within that space... [She rubs her eyes.]

There were a few that managed to escape. Not many--and even fewer were willing to talk about what happened.

[smiles for a moment] I'm quite familiar with Earth. One of my favourite planets. Your Earth, though...

[pauses, thinking over what she said; he puts his glasses on, too, to help him along] So, these 'gates' appear, somehow creating a field around the Earth that actually blocks out the sky and sets up a replacement. I'm assuming night and day still work the same; sun rises and sets and all that. The sun is a star, too, though... [rubs his neck] That southern gate sounds like it's generating it's own field now. Some sort of spatial shift, maybe. Maybe it just malfunctioned. But that doesn't explain the rockets, unless the energy is just that high but you should notice if they disintegrated. [stops rambling for a second]

What have the survivors said about that gate incident?

[She ponders for moment. He's treating this so casually, she's not sure what to say.]

They were scared. Very scared. And the Gate didn't malfunction. It was sealed purposefully. South America all but vanished, and everyone living there with it. Some people were thrown free of the catastrophe. That's how they put it, in any case. Things have been off-balance ever since, and the Hell's Gate has been much more active lately.

Days still function normally, for the most part. If you look, you can see the stars when the sun is up. And the moon has disappeared as well.

[She pauses, waiting to see what he has to say about all that before offering any more.]

[nods thoughtfully to himself] So the moon's gone, too. Thought so. Sounds like the sun is breaking through a bit, maybe. Or just part of the projection. Oh, the tides. Are the ocean tides all right? Any different?

How do you know the gate didn't malfunction, though? Do you know where they came from? Or who created them?

[She rubs the back of her neck, coming to the border of what she's comfortable sharing.]

The tides seem to behave normally--though I'm no expert, so I couldn't tell you for sure if they've changed.

We don't know where they came from, who made them, or if anyone made them at all. As far as Heaven's Gate goes... There was a war. It was sabotage. A terrorist group. They sealed that Gate and tried to do the same to Tokyo. To all of Japan.

[nods] The tides are controlled by the moon. 'Course, those gates could be controlling them now but that could also mean the moon is just fine and dandy beyond that illusion.

[but then he genuinely looks surprised and frowns] They sabotaged it? Some great big dangerous piece of technology they don't know about and they mucked it up just to use it against people? Japan's gate survived it?

[Gah. Things getting complicated now.]

Not... exactly. They weren't able to complete the process in Japan. And they knew more than we did. Well. Than I did, at that point. They knew as much as the people who mattered, the people who controlled the Gate.

[notices her hesitation growing]

Misaki, I know this is probably all very classified and it's your job to protect it but I think I can help if you tell me about it.

[She's starting to feel very, very fatigued and gives him a smile that shows it.]

You do this sort of thing often? Sweeping in to worlds you've never been to and trying to put things right?

[smiles back and sounds quite happy about his work]

All the time. Not always worlds I've never been to, although those are fun and new. But can't tell you how many times I've saved Earth now. Not to brag or anything. [even if he is a bit. then he pauses, looking over her] A friend of mine sleeps here sometimes. Says it's quite comfortable.

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