taxonomites | [text: everyone] ch-ch-ch-changes

Do tell.

I'm fascinated. Tell me more.

No. Really. I actually care.

Were you expecting that this place would leave you alone?

You are aware that it is the middle of the night, right?

Pause.

Do you want to get a drink?

Jammer? -SH

Meet you there in fifteen.

See you there. -SH

Sherlock does not meet Selina there in fifteen. Sherlock does not meet Selina there in twenty. In fact, it's a full two and a half hours before Sherlock bothers to turn up at the Dodgy Jammer: a rather eventful two and a half hours, all things considered, but that's a tale for another time (and another thread). He walks through the door looking wired, a little frazzled, and very pleased with himself for one reason or another and looks around for a table.

[ooc]: feel free to have Selina NOT wait around for Sherlock for two and a half hours and continue this text message conversation long-distance if you so desire :P

Strangely, Selina walks in /after/ him. Was she here in fifteen minutes? Was she going to keep him waiting? Hard to tell, exactly, what is going on with her but the leather catsuit probably indicates some of it was involving potentially illegal activities. Did she follow Sherlock? That seems... far fetched, doesn't it?

The leather creaks softly as she sits down at the table with Sherlock with a small smile, "Time really does pass strangely here."

If Selina did follow Sherlock, in fact, she'd have seen him disappear into the mist at the northern edge of Taxon for a few hours: alone and unequipped, which would seem unwise, but back from his little reconnaissance mission he seems more upbeat and charged-up than ever. There's a manic glint in his eyes, and although he may not be interested in talking about what he's been up to--not yet, anyway, not without some further data--there's clearly something brewing.

"Coffee," he tells the Extra waitress with a flick of his fingers. He's probably already had enough coffee. Then again, according to Sherlock, can one really ever have enough coffee? "How long have I been gone, Miss Kyle?"

"I'll take a coffee too."

She was thinking about a beer or something clear with a punch but this doesn't seem like that sort of conversation. She'd like it to be, really, but it isn't. "A few weeks. The weirdest part is I didn't notice untilyou came back that you'd been missing. That really kind of pisses me off."

Sherlock drums the tips of his fingers on the table while the waitress fetches them both coffee. He scowls a little at the mention of his absence, which still bothers him, but the face he makes is clearly directed at the ceiling and, by metonymic extension, their captors. "Some sort of memory tampering," he says after a moment. "The things they do with us--well, no matter."

It's far from no matter to him, but it's just clarified his resolve to master and escape this place one way or another. "The city," he gestures, "has it shifted before? In your memory?"

Selina doctors her coffee with cream and sugar. It isn't what she always does but she has the feeling that this is the cort of coversation that calls for that sort of thing.

"Not other than to add or substract buildings when people have come and gone. There has been some of that but nothing like this, no."

"Perhaps," says Sherlock with a frown--the personal vexation over his flat's gone for the time being, replaced by a deeper sort of preoccupation--"we weren't being entertaining enough as it was."

The theory's thin, but they're all thin. There's nowhere to start with theorizing when it comes to Taxon. There's no ground to stand on, no established facts, no assumptions for the formal proof. The idea that Taxon's shrinking and gaining more dangerous aspects for captors' personal amusement seems as valid as any. The idea of it compressing into some sort of enlarged gladiatorial arena seems unpalatable, and unfortunately also highly plausible. "I'm afraid the likelihood of virtual reality is growing increasingly high."

"Well, it does make more sense than having the entire city on some sort of tracks or materializing things quickly from a subactomic level. Or being a city in a jar."

Not that she's seen these things. Oh no. She takes a sip from the cup of coffee before starting to pull the clawed gloves from her fingers and place them on the table next to her. "The question is are we actually here interacting with the VR or are we somewhere else and think we're here?"

"I wouldn't know how VR technology that advanced would work," Sherlock muses. For the first time--no, truthfully, not for the first time, not if he's being perfectly honest--he misses James Moriarty. It's occurred to him before that a perverse VR world is exactly the sort of cruel trick Moriarty would play, but Moriarty's dead and this world isn't quite perverse enough to suit his tastes: no, he would've made Sherlock suffer, not let him languish in boredom, comfort, and confusion. So he misses Moriarty because as much as it pains him to admit, this is a puzzle Moriarty would be better suited to solving. He might have even solved it already.

God damn him. He would decide to be dead just now. "We could be comatose and--" the science fiction terminology bothers him, but he goes on, "--plugged in to some sort of computer system. Or highly drugged and given hypnotic suggestion somehow. Or a mixture. It seems like it'd be easier to suggest a world of this complexity if we were allowed to fill it in, but that would imply a solipsistic dream-world of my own making: and I don't think that's likely. Not even my dreams usually feature characters that interact with this much verisimilitude." An odd sort of backhanded compliment from Sherlock--you're probably too complex to be a figment of my imagination--but it's the best you get out of him when he's on this sort of tangent.

"I've grown resistant to mind altering drugs and a little bit to hyponotic suggestions but it is still entirely possible. I'd go with the plugged in idea too. It seems the most likely but, well, that precludes magic and that... Well, I can hypothesize all I want but Magic is weird." Selina takes a long drink from her coffee cup looking at Sherlock over it.

She likes him, in a weird way. He's like... well, he's like a lot of people she knows and yet entirely a creature of his own.

Sherlock shrugs. "Yes," he says simply. "It is. It's weird because we don't understand it." He means 'we' in the narrowest sense here: clearly someone understands magic, although none of these someones seem willing to share this knowledge with Sherlock in Taxon.

Virtual reality--or hallucination--is certainly the most unifying theory he has, but it's hardly comforting. He threads his fingers through the handle on his mug and takes a sip of the cheap, partly burnt coffee. It tastes real. He can't remember the last time his imagination created something so... realistically mediocre. "What are you doing here?" he changes the subject abruptly, glancing at Selina. "Have you really got nothing better to do?"

"It is weird because it works differently depending on who uses it. That's frustrating," Selina says before shrugging. Why isn't this one of those places that has a pitcher of coffee on the table for refills?

"Is it really so hard to imagine that I might want to spend time with you?"

Sherlock, with a similarly empty coffee cup, comes to a different conclusion: he snaps his fingers, then claps his hands together sharply like he's summoning an errant dog until the Extra server comes by again with refills. He still finds the concept of tipping Extras to be intrinsically insulting; however, as his own income now largely depends on Extras tipping him, he's grudgingly considering it. But that doesn't mean he has to like it.

"A bit," he says with raised eyebrows. "I'm beginning to wonder what you're hoping to accomplish."

"Accomplish?"

Selina turns the word over a few times in her thoughts as she looks at him. The snapping of fingers and clapping of hands gets an arched brow. She's never been waitstaff but she's certainly been in a profession where others think of you as something of a service object. Still, she doesn't comment on that since she's not sure what she thinks of Extras yet.

"You interest me. You're familiar enough to people I know at home to be comfortable and yet different enough to make me curious." Also, well, she doesn't like losing and that score seems to be completely up in the air. At least if you were to ask her about it. Not that there's a competition of any sort happening at all.

Sherlock's opinion on Extras has coalesced after a bit of experimentation: they may be human enough not to kill or hurt, to be sure, but that doesn't mean they're human enough to be offended by brusqueness with respect to coffee refills. He shrugs off her allusion to someone she knows; people are always reminding people of others in Taxon, a symptom of the displacement and homesickness they all have, he supposes. He's not immune. He finds himself drawing comparisons all the time. It's comforting to their primal, amygdalic selves, probably. That doesn't mean he's interested.

"Some of my plants aren't salvageable," he says apropos to nothing. "They suspended me long enough that they went unwatered. The Phalaenopsis deliciosa likely won't recover."

"Who you remind me of, though, changes. Most of the people you remind me of are more charismatic, though, more's the pity." She isn't attempting to goad him, not really, she's just used to people who are so much larger than life that normal people are just flat our boring. After having twisted up Harvey and Eddie and, well, Bruce, normal people are just not at all interesting any more. And Sherlock reminds her of a number of them, without the flair.

"That's unfortunate. I'm not a big fan of plants. There is someone back home who uses them to control people."

Insulting Sherlock is a gamble, to be sure, but more like playing the slots at a casino: sometimes you end up with more coins than you were planning on carrying, but it's also depressingly easy to keep putting coins in and wonder if the machine's even working. The machine appears to be off at the moment. While Selina talks his face clearly broadcasts his reactions: IE, thinking about something else, thinking about something else, yes yes, going back to thinking about something else--wait, what?

"Sorry, did you say 'to control people?'" he says, momentarily stymied by the concept of Poison Ivy.

"Yes. To control people with some sort of amped up pheremones. She's a piece of work that much is certain," Selina says as she takes another long drink from her coffee cup. She really does not like, at all, being manipulated like that by anyone but by Ivy especially.

It says a lot about how long Sherlock's been in Taxon and how much he's come to accept what other worlds appear to think of the rigidities of "science" that he doesn't even say anything to the effect of pheromones don't work that way. (Though they don't. They really don't. Then again, neither do dinosaurs.)

"I have memories of an examination table," he says, looking up at the light overhead. "I can't say if they're dreams or not: they've got a dreamlike quality," but then again, doesn't everything? "My sense of time really has been warped. It's like I've had a very long, very bad trip."

She really doesn't care how the science actually works. She's still pissed off about the whole mind controlled and forced to be into girls or plants in Ivy's case, depending on how you want to take it.

"That sucks. I've been there," she says softly.

If Sherlock were in Selina's head he might have something to say about people who don't care how the science actually works. He isn't, which is probably a good thing in a number of ways. He lifts his coffee mug up to the light as if noticing it for the first time, then sets it back down carelessly as though he's bored of it. It makes a solid clink against the tabletop, like it's a real, solid thing in a real, solid city. Almost like.

"Well," he says in a curt voice. "Perhaps someday none of us will have to be there again." He stands and taps a few buttons on his bracelet--paying for his coffee, and yes, tipping the Extra waitress, although he still doesn't look happy about it.

"Then again, perhaps not," he says. "Good night, Ms Kyle."

".....Right."

Selina shakes her head and raises a hand to wave toward him. A soft sigh and she slowly, carefully puts her head down to the top of the table.

To whom are you addressing your strongly worded letter, Mr. Holmes?

This is a fairly good question, all things considered. Truthfully Sherlock woke up at 3AM disoriented and unnerved and had the urge to talk to someone, anyone, but he hasn't got a flatmate and Chatroulette and Omegle are unfortunately slightly beyond Taxonian innovation at this precise moment. Sherlock's addressing his letter to the aliens. Sherlock's addressing his letter to the universe. Sherlock's unhappy about something, and pointless as it might be, he feels a little better now that messages are arriving in his inbox and someone has heard about it.

Nevertheless:

"To: [ALL]" -SH

I see.

Might I suggest that a communique addressed to all might be better suited to hours when a greater statistical majority of the inhabitants are awake? It increases your odds of receiving a reply, and decreases your odds of waking others. The latter tends to result in a lack of replies, or at least, a lack of amicable ones.

What's happened to the city? My sense of time's been altered: is this happening to everyone or just me? -SH

A minute or two later:

It isn't drugs. Not this time. Not that I know of. -SH

There's a delay of a few minutes before Long answers either text. In his stone-walled suite at the Kelebek, Mayland Long is sighing deeply to himself, his strange eyes gleaming in the darkness, reflecting the tablet's glow, or perhaps glowing themselves.

He would rather like to go back to sleep. His bed is very comfortable, and he likes sleep.

However, it is probable that Sherlock will carry on texting unless he specifically asks him not to. Specifically asking him not to somewhat offends Long's sense of courtesies; or, at least, of subtleties.

Besides that, he feels the usual irritation he feels whenever their captors see fit to suspend one of the inhabitants. The alteration extends not merely to the one affected, but to everybody; so that despite his ability to realize now that he has not seen or heard from Holmes in a month, he thought nothing strange of it during the time.

He dislikes the aliens meddling in his mind and perception, and can recognize that Holmes probably feels it more acutely, in the moment.

Long punches a pillow into position and sits halfway up, bareskinned in the darkness of the room, then types.

The city has been rearranged, it seems; it's been this way for some several weeks. You appear to have been... suspended; not only you but several others. I myself was not among them.

These hibernations, or whatever one would like to call them, have happened before. No ill effects that I recall. I do not think the city's rearrangement and your own suspension are necessarily connected.

Sherlock furrows his brow at the concept of suspension, but as much as it bothers him as well, it doesn't snag at his mind as much as the concept of the city simply being... rearranged. That's got a disturbing, vast, somewhat impressive dreamlike quality to it; a physical prison is one thing, but this is more like a simulation that the programmers can change with a keystroke. He tabs to his city map, then gets up from his bed (still in his blue housecoat) and looks out the window.

The pattern of lights looks decidedly different than he remembers it. He recalls cold light again and the shadows of uncertain, amorphous shapes.

There's something new to the north, I see. -SH

Already he's pulling on trousers and a shirt.

Edited 2013-02-09 09:41 (UTC)

Yes, it appears to be some sort of medieval landscape-- at least, I perceived a castle.

Long yawns massively in his room, shrugging his shoulders down into the pillow and drifting 1/4 of the way back to sleep. He'd been having a rather good dream when the tablet had rung; he tries to recapture details. Something about buzzing a herd of bison.

After thirty seconds he sits bolt upright again, eyes wide in his face. Quick typing:

Mr. Holmes, you had really ought to wait until morning.

He'll blame the sleepiness that it took him that long to realize what Holmes was likely doing.

The tablet sends off its little ping text alert while Sherlock's pulling a comb a few times through his hair (these things matter, after all) and shrugging on his coat. He grins at the message. If Long bore witness to the grin he'd probably have more reason to worry.

However, he does stop to make himself a cup of instant coffee. Would I? -SH

Yes.

In the first place, daylight creates conditions more conducive to observation, unless you can see in the dark.

In the second place, I trust you remember the dinosaurs, and that things off in that castle-landscape might be dangerous, and that going among them might result in injury while one is alone.

In the third place, it is three-twelve in the morning and it is damned cold outside.

I'm just going to go look. -SH

Long mutters something uncomplimentary in the privacy of his room and flops back onto the bed, forearm flung up over his eyes.

Sigh. He lifts the tablet and types again after a few seconds.

If you can restrain your curiosity until, at least, sunrise, I should be willing to go with you and bring along appropriate supplies, Mr. Holmes. An expedition is always better served by a hamper. Steamed pork buns within, perhaps.

The microwave beeps and Sherlock lifts the mug to his mouth, downing half the coffee with a wrinkled nose: just because he can't afford to indulge his standards on a street musician's "salary" doesn't indicate he doesn't have them.

Speaking of which, pork buns. Pork buns are admittedly tempting. Tomorrow at the Kelebek, 1100? -SH

Splendid. Sherlock will wait until a reasonable hour. Well, that's all nicely solved then, and he can go back to sleep.

Excellent. I shall see you then. Good night for now, Mr. Holmes.

...In many respects, Mayland Long is a very intelligent and perceptive person. That said, picking up falsehoods, or omissions, is something better left to one with more experience of human nature. And someone more awake, for that matter.

He puts his tablet back on the nightstand, mutes it, and happily rolls back over onto his massive and sinfully comfortable bed.

It's probably good for their relationship, such as it is, that neither of them is all that interested in what the other one is doing when they have something more appealing going on. In Long's case, it's sleep. In Sherlock's it is quite literally adventuring.

Sherlock pockets his own tablet and sets off for some preliminary bad decisionmaking.

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