taxonomites | [visual | location: the owlcave] grooving to the beat radiating from a police scanner

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[visual | location: the owlcave] grooving to the beat radiating from a police scanner

The technology in this place was fascinating. Not only was it interesting but in general Dan found it helpful to concentrate on something positive to get his mind off the fact that he had been kidnapped. Add that to the fact that he had found his bunker from back home and that he was naturally inclined to keep to himself, Dan had socialized very little since his arrival.

He had been tinkering with his tablet when he heard the static. Dan liked to keep his radio on for background noise and usually didn't pay it much thought, but the interruption of the norm had caught his attention. When the voice started he dropped the screwdriver from his hand and froze. He couldn't understand the language, but whatever it was it seemed ominous.

After the music clicked back on Dan raced to put his tablet back together and sent a visual transmission to the city.

"Tell me I'm not going crazy. Did anyone else have their radio on just now?"

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"And here I thought I was the crazy one. You heard a voice too?"

"Yeah, I did. I couldn't understand the language though. Did you hear the whole thing?"

"No, I think the voice was halfway through before I realized it wasn't just a song or talk radio. But it was definitely no language I've ever heard before."

"Well, the voice started out quietly but other than that I don't think you missed much. If no one here can understand the language I'm really torn between thinking if this was accidental or deliberate."

"Do you think it could be the native language of the aliens?" She pauses, then adds, "Sorry, I'm Amy. Should have led with that. You are?"

"It could be. It sure sounded alien to me, but it might not be the aliens we know about." Dan gives Amy a smile and shakes his head. "Oh, don't worry about it. I'd honestly forgotten about introductions myself. My name's Dan."

"Hey, yeah! Maybe some other alien race out there knows what the hamsters are doing and are trying to rescue us!" It wasn't that far fetched a notion, what with all the crazy things that happened on a near daily basis in Taxon. "Nice to meet you, Dan."

"Not that I'm an expert in anything alien, but that didn't seem like rescue to me," he then quickly added, "not that I don't think about getting out of this place myself."

"Same to you, Amy. Have you been in Taxon long?"

"Well... maybe they were broadcasting to the aliens. Like 'You let them go or we'll rescue them ourselves.' Maybe."

She frowned at his question and tossed her head back for a moment. "Faaaaaaaaaaaar too long. Half a year so far."

[Mattie is still getting the hang of these tablet contraptions, but she feels obligated to attempt to respond to the question, if only because it seems impolite not to.]

What is a radio?

[Well. That wasn't a response Dan was expecting. From her manner of dress he assumed that this girl wasn't having him on. Now how to explain a radio?]

It's, um. It looks like a metal box. Usually people use it to listen to music.

[Of course radios have other uses too, but he doesn't want to make things too complicated to start off with.]

Do you mean a music box?

[Seems silly to make up a new word when music box pretty accurately describes a metal box people use to listen to music, but there are a lot of things people do around here that make no sense.]

No, it's not a music box. It's like- [hurm]

Imagine that you wanted a lot of people to listen to something. It could be yourself talking, or maybe a song. Anything that a person can hear. Using special equipment you can send that sound to anyone who also has a radio.

Without knowing if they want to hear it or not?

[Seems pretty rude, mister.]

"Yeah, I did," Fitz replied. He was digging a knuckle into one ear in a futile effort to get the feedback-induced ringing to stop. "What the hell was that about?"

"No idea," Dan replied honestly. "Sounded like some kind of rallying point. Is this what the aliens sound like?"

Fitz considered the question, then dropped his arm and shrugged. "Nah, I've only heard them a couple times and they were perfectly friendly, for kidnapping bastards. And they spoke English, which that obviously wasn't."

A rallying point in an incomprehensible language. Growing up, he'd heard way too many speeches like that on the wireless to be comfortable with it turning up here.

Dan scrunched his face in sympathy. The loud ringing had bothered his own ears, but it seemed like this man felt the effects much more strongly.

"Just because it's an alien language doesn't mean they're our aliens," Dan mentions. He doesn't mean it in a nagging way, he's only thinking of the possibilities at this point. "Hell, I just called them 'our aliens.' I hope they don't, I don't know, smite me or whatever it's called."

Underneath his desk Dan takes a cautionary knock on wood. It couldn't hurt.

The rock and roll life (plus being too close to too many explosions) leaves Fitz susceptible to tinnitus. He'll be fine in a moment.

"Don't worry about it, they'd probably be flattered," Fitz informed him with a wave. "And they haven't directly...smited anyone that I know of, they're more fond of shaking the ant farm and watching us all scramble about."

Which sometimes resulted in the ants turning into zombies and Fitz still wasn't thinking about that, so he lit a cigarette to take his mind off it and moved to a new topic.

"Just one of the exciting features of what I gather is your new home, yeah?"

Narvin was much in the same sort of area, which was to say, hiding in the closest thing he had to home (his office, which had remained thankfully, much the same, with some disappearances of certain doors that led to secret passagways, obviously), alternating between trying to figure out the complexities of his tablet and searching through his databases for some magical information that made sense of the whole thing.

The radio being on (in fact having a radio at all) had been some farcical tribute to Braxiatel, supposed the unqualified psychologist in the back of his mind. It was supposed to have been calming, and with the situation he was currently in, Narvin could have very well used a bit of calm.

What he got instead was voices he couldn't understand, a burst of static and an ear-splitting screech of feedback that was a stab to the eardrums no matter how Time Lord his biology was. Beyond that, however, the fact that even he had no idea what the voices had been talking about frustrated him. He didn't even have a clue as to origin. Could it have been code? Possibly.

That line of thought had been interrupted by his tablet switching on beside him.

"You're not going crazy," the Coordinator supplied dryly. "Unless we all are, which I'll admit isn't as improbable as I'd like."

"If we were all crazy then the welcoming greeting of kidnapping hamsters would have tipped me off." Dan shrugs. If he stopped to think about it, Taxon itself really didn't make any sense, even with hamsters removed from the equation.

"What was it you were listening to when that whole..." was there even a word for it? "business happened?"

There was a longish pause with a lot of slow blinkiing, in which Narvin's brain slowly wrapped around the words 'kidnapping hamsters'. He, however, quickly and wisely decided that his mind was not equipped towards dealing with that information for the time and attempted, hopefully successfully, to put it to the back of his mind, possibly in order to overreact about it at some later time, without an audience.

"Is that an argument for or against your insanity?" Narvin hoped 'for'. It was better to be insane on Gallifrey than sane and trapped in whatever this Taxon place was. It wasn't difficult to be insane on Gallifrey.

"Classical," he replied laconically. "Debussy, I think." It might have been at least a century or so since Narvin actually sat down to listen to music, so he was a little rusty in his recognition. "In any case, I don't remember many compositions having a burst of static and feedback, unless they were being wildly experimental, I suppose."

"More of an agreement that most people here probably have the same level of sanity. I'm not even going to start arguing for myself. That just looks questionable." Dan shrugged. Of course he thought himself sane, but he knew what delusional ramblings sounded like and he did not want to start going down that road.

"Sounds like the same thing was broadcast no matter what station people were listening to." If Narvin felt inclined to ask, Dan was listening to familiar music from back home. Not that 80s pop was his favorite thing, but it helped keep him grounded.

Narvin had probably given up his sanity the moment he took his position as Chief Coordinator to a President he absolutely despised. Everything he'd done after that had seemed rather banal in comparison. (Even the things he did during the civil war.)

And Narvin didn't feel inclined to ask, really, which was for the better, because it saved him having to pretend to care about it.

"Yes," he drawled, picking up the battered old-fashioned radio that fit in with his office about as well as a salad did at a party for carnivores. He felt himself desperately missing his old equipment, something that would give him the locations of the incoming frequencies with a click of the finger or an "Affirmative" (which meant he was missing K9, which was even more worrying than he'd initially suspected), but he had nothing. His desk terminal did not broadcast or accept radio waves (primitive as they were, after all), which meant he'd have to spend some time connecting the piece of junk he held in his hands to the highly advanced machinery that seemed defined by the very concept of sleekness.

"If they were broadcasting to all frequencies, they must have had something important to say. What a pity they couldn't find a decent language to say it in for anyone to understand."

Edited 2011-04-03 15:38 (UTC)

"Wasn't them."

River is looking a little frazzled, but compared to other possible reactions to strange voices and feedback she's doing pretty well.

"They use other avenues. With mouths."

"Who is it that you mean?" Dan wants to assume that the young woman is referring to the aliens, but he doesn't want to make assumptions.

"Hamsters. The mouths in question aren't legitimate." This is communicated as a very urgent bit of information.

"So... whatever this is is a lie?" That would pose a whole new set of problems, but one thing at a time.

River considers it, the concept of voices being lies, before deciding. "Sermons usually are."

He takes a glance at the radio. "I don't know what good these people thought a sermon would do. We aren't exactly persuaded."

"I heard it, yes," said the same man who'd greeted Dan at his arrival.

"I confess I didn't understand the language, though, which in itself is very intriguing."

"Oh, hello Mr.-" Dan pauses to take a glance at the tablet, "Long." He recognized the voice as someone familiar, but he hadn't yet mastered matching names to faces, much less names to voices.

Long's statement caused Dan to lift his brows. "You're a linguist?"

Long caught the slight pause and realized somewhat belatedly he was still on audio only-- it was his favored method for using the tablets but, he supposed, a bit inconsiderate to the more newly arrived. He tapped a button to switch over to visual.

"Hello again, Mr. Dreiberg-- Dan," he said with a diffident smile and a nod of his head at the other man.

"Yes, in my fashion. One of those things that began as a hobby and somewhere along the way became an obsession. One of the great joys of Taxon for myself is that I have now run into three languages previously unknown to me."

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[visual | location: the owlcave] grooving to the beat radiating from a police scanner

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