INTRO LOG
Who: ideograms, disinters, and all new arrivals.
What: The new arrivals get their first experience of their new environment.
Where: Drawing room, the old Dixon house.
When: October 1st 1928, not long after midnight.
Rating and Warnings: PG?
Notes: If you haven’t read the OOC game start info, you can find it here.
( Human bodies are heavy. Never so heavy as when they’re dead weight. )
What: The new arrivals get their first experience of their new environment.
Where: Drawing room, the old Dixon house.
When: October 1st 1928, not long after midnight.
Rating and Warnings: PG?
Notes: If you haven’t read the OOC game start info, you can find it here.
( Human bodies are heavy. Never so heavy as when they’re dead weight. )
But Captain Becker is also sitting in some kind of house in the 1930s where he shouldn't be staying in, and this is even more problematic than anything else. Order. He has to maintain order. Location, situation, weapons can come in later (though he moved his hands on his side -- the sig sauer was definitely there, but he's not really sure whether sig sauers existed at this era and whether these guys would know where to find ammunition for it, which also means that he's hideously underpowered), maybe ... food? Though that can come in later, too, when he has better answers than just being in some grandmother's house.
"Not what you've just given me, Mr. Aldrich," he replied. "Though that can hardly be helped." It's not like he had that push-button thing on which year to go when summoning an anomaly. Actually, that just reminded him of something. Helen Cutter had one of those, didn't she? And she came from various points in the past, and Danny and the rest of them had gone after her. Becker stretches, stands up straight and begins to examine the room from where he is, quick little glances on the shadows here and there. Careful, now. He's going to have to say as little as he can without dropping her name.
"I'm guessing this isn't London. Were you off trying to communicate to us? Is that why we were summoned here?"
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"Not...the date I've just given you? Are you really saying that you were expecting a different time? And you don't look in the least bit surprised by this."
And then an odd little smirk tugged at his lips and a look almost like excitement began to emerge. A glance was thrown at his colleague before back to focus on the man in black once more.
"Which implies that you are familiar with situations like this. Are you...a time-traveller?"
Focus, Taylor, there were other questions to attend to.
"This isn't London, no. Not even England. You're in Arkham, Massachusetts, and we weren't trying to contact you. At least not intentionally if contact was made."
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But back to the subject of Time-travelling. How the hell is he supposed to explain that? He only knows the shorthand version of the long lecture about multiple points coalescing in one place and time and opening up portals .... and then dinosaurs walk in. His job was to contain and secure, not .... travel; no, travel was reserved in the ARC team for those who are familiar with whatever the hell they're supposed to do other than contain and secure. "Rank amateurs good at their jobs", isn't that how Lester put it? And he doesn't really know this man well, or his colleague, only that they have some sort of familiarity with this whole entire time-thing, but not, Becker assumed, at the same level that he and his friends are.
Still, Helen Cutter left contacts with other people in her troubles, and he's had to fight a knight at one point in time, which means that the portals do open to certain places with people in them, and not just the dinosaur era or the future. This might be one of those places. At the same time, he could've walked into a trap. How stupid of him not to consider that earlier. But if it were a trap, it's an elaborate one, and one a little more convincing considering the man facing him .... was too weak, yes, he'd appraised him earlier.
So why wasn't he still convinced? Probably because he just hated the whole thing about traveling when really, he has other more tangible, concrete ways to do his job. One of which does involve travel, but not through time. After a pause, he looks at him again and says, "Massachusetts is damn far where I'm supposed to be, but if it opened here, then I suppose I'll have to wait until it appears again. As for me, I'm not a traveler, I'm a soldier. How are you in possession of an --" They may not know, they may not know .... "a portal?"
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"Doesn't hurt to check. You all fell through what appears to have been the result of an accident, so we have no idea who any of you are, nor where you've come from. Given the look of each of you it seems like you're not all from the same place even, does that seem like a fair guess?"
It was true, the whole thing had been an accident, a mistake. There had been no agenda behind what he and Elias had done outside of trying to prevent something terrible. Perhaps an unspeakable terror, but they would never know now. There passes a moment where Taylor is quiet, looking quite pensive before shaking his head.
"Well, at least time-travel hasn't damaged your sense of geography. Yes, we are quite far away from London, I regret to say. I assume that's where your unit is based? And...the portal--the gate--well..."
He glanced over his shoulder toward Elias once more, wondering what to say about it exactly.
"It's... Well, you can get to it via the basement of this building, so we discovered recently. I should perhaps come clean and admit that we are...at a bit of a loss ourselves about what has happened tonight really, but it seems as though you seem to have a decent amount of knowledge here so far. Perhaps we'll be able to help each other."
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"The basement. So it's closed?" He's not entirely sure if there are primitive ways of closing an anomaly. Most people don't know what it is -- he remembers the knight and his mistaken 'dragon', for one -- perhaps this is a .... different kind of anomaly? In which case, he's definitely not the right person to help out. But he can definitely observe and learn -- perhaps take notes for later on -- and then send them in to Lester or something when he returns. He won't be entirely useless, then, and he can certainly suffer a minor paycut. "I can offer help," he finally replies, a little after a pause, "but like I said, I'm a soldier, not a scientist. My job is to contain and protect, not necessarily to theorize about these things."
Especially when he .... can't really figure out what the hell Connor and Abby do sometimes with those samples and stuff.
He withdraws his hands to look around at his chair, and then pats his hip for his gun. The sig was there, sure enough, and some of his pockets still are full. But the backpack .... "Whatever you sealed in that portal can likely come out and bite us in the ass when it opens again. You're sure that you haven't seen my weapons?" He'd feel a lot more secure with that mossberg, if it were here.
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"The basement itself isn't closed, no, but it leads to a network of tunnels that run from here toward the university." Taylor gave the solider a steady stare for a moment "If you would like to see it that can be arranged, but it will have to be tomorrow or the next day sometime. I'm not sure either of us are really in the mood to head back down there again just yet."
He lifted a hand then to wave it lightly as an initial response to Becker's agreement to help "It's fine that you're not a scientist, all we need is to try and figure out how this happened together, because at the moment we really don't know how you all managed to come through that gate or how to get you back through. The surface of it was strange, kind of like an opal, but it was solid like glass when we attempted to touch it. It seems to be a one-way tunnel at the moment.Is that something you're familiar with?"
There was a realisation then that Becker may not necessarily be speaking metaphorically when he spoke about containing and protecting, or things coming to 'bite them in the ass', and this made Taylor's eyebrow raise slowly. Did he know about the kinds of unspeakable and unimaginable truths that those cultists and others like them had tried to bring forth to the world?
"I'd have remembered seeing a weapon on the floor somewhere--we came back and forth a few times, don't forget. So yes, I'm quite sure. What kind of thing are you expecting to see come out of that portal, aside from people like yourselves?"
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Wait.
Hold on.
a) He fights dinosaurs. This makes Becker the man in possession of The Coolest Job Ever.
b) Dinosaurs are extinct. This is besides the point, because the Anomaly has its own .... magical methods of bringing them back to life and wreck havoc on the streets of London, but the fact is that dinosaurs are already extinct and have been so for the past thousand of years.
c) He is talking to a legitimate archaeologist. He's going to assume that the man has credentials from the University he mentioned. This means that he's a little on the more dubious side here. While the response, "well you see, I detect anomalies and fight dinosaurs" might've worked on Lester, he'd really rather not try with this man. Lester, after all, was already in the business of Anomalies. This man wasn't, whatever it is that he's supposed to be working on in the basement downstairs.
Cue a very awkward Becker attempting to swallow the words he'd started with. Perhaps if he feigns a sort of closed-up attitude towards the question of what kinds of things was he expecting out of the portal, he'd think it's something really horrible and he'd come off as some tragic figure or something. Maybe.
"That's not the kind of portal I'm familiar with," said the Captain Becker, smooth as a hedgehog's hide as he awkwardly shuffles to another topic. "'Like glass', maybe, but not solid. Tell me when you are ready to venture down into the tunnels. Like I said, I'm no scientist, but I'm more than capable of taking down men twice my size." Or dinosaurs.
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"Then at this stage perhaps it's safe to say it may not your kind of portal," he commented lightly "Which would make sense since the impression we're under is that it's the result of something occult-based. The feeling from you so far seems to be that occultism isn't exactly your area. But we can certainly arrange for an opportunity to go there and take a look. Even if you're not a scientist you may be able to give some insight, just like neither of us practice the occult but we managed to do something.
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He tilted his head then curiously.
"You didn't actually say what time you were supposedly from, did you?
"As for relating this to Poe. Hmm... Yes, I guess so. A bit. Kind of. Well, not really. Less ravens and psychological distress and more...cultists and rituals. But apart from that, yes."
Taylor had a thoughtful sort of expression on his face at the suggestion that this was a bit far afield for men of his and Elias' kind, but after a short while he gave a small shrug.
"Well, for some professors, perhaps. But when I'm not teaching I'm excavating skeletons and trying to surmise the rites and artefacts with which they were put to rest with. But this situation was actually tied to our work, an excavation of an artefact some years ago. It was recently stolen from the vault in the local museum and since then we'd been trying to track it down and were finally able to locate it, but when we did it was being used as part of a cultist ritual. So our work as professors is actually heavily linked to all of this."
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Becker tried to remember what he knew about cultists and rituals. There was that one part in his first day where he had to contend with a prehistoric alligator from the Nile, and he was forced to bow down to it (a sign of non-aggression, Cutter had insisted, but he'll take it as an insult anyway), so he supposed that was one of those things. There were, of course, the occasional lunatics heard in the news, but who the hell pays attention to them anyway? It's not like the whole furor about the world ending hasn't been prophesied often enough anyway; in his lifetime alone he's survived more than three predicted, not even counting the others that people have made.
Then again, when someone actually speaks the truth amongst their babble, who actually listens?
There's also the multiple coincidences that he's heard in his stay. A portal opening, something coming through that men couldn't stop, an artefact lost and recently stolen. But Helen Cutter was a scientist, wasn't she? While she'd succeeded in cloning her soldier multiple times to create an army (and seducing her husband's best student; the woman liked to multitask), he didn't think that was anything on the levels of Harry Potter. There must be some scientific explanation for that.
Not for once he'd caught himself wishing that he'd paid attention more to Connor and Abby's things.
"A cultist ritual, in this day and age?" 'Modern' would cover it, he supposed. "What were these cultists attempting to ... summon, or something?"
The words felt ridiculously awkward in his mouth. 'Summon'? Really?
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Focus, Taylor, focus.
"Ah... Cultists. Rituals. Yes. Yes, even in this day and age there are beliefs in the occult, and plenty who practice as well as believe. But as for what these cultists in particular were trying to summon tonight?" He shook he head "That is something I can't tell you. Neither of us can yet. Unfortunately, we just haven't had enough time or resources to determine many details at all yet. Unhelpful, I realise, but it seems being up-front about these matters is what's needed here."
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He frowns. Well, alright, there's always been that proverb about old habits dying hard. 'Modern' may apply to the technologies coming at around this era but it certainly doesn't apply to the religions and traditions that they still kept. Unfortunately it includes the ones which really should be let go of; but then again, how does one decide when to let go so easily of rituals and faiths? Especially with such a potential threat and ... power, yes, he hesitated to say it, but power. Especially with such power that their beliefs could bring.
"An investigation would be good, yes? Have you asked the cops about this?"
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He clicked his teeth thoughtfully at the question posed before lightly scratching the side of his jaw with the back of a knuckle.
"No. And I don't feel we intend to. Make no mistake, this is not an ordinary occurrence that took place tonight. We are not a town that is welcoming of cultists, or even one that is aware of cultists; we have not had any previous encounters with cultists, for that matter," he gestures briefly to Elias as he mentioned the 'we' "Not these kinds of cultists at any rate, not here.
"Arkham is a pretty quiet town. It certainly has it's petty crime, the odd burglary, issue with street gangs and the likes, but overall this is a respectable town of respectable people," this was said with a rather dry tone and an slightly lofted eyebrow to display the professor's cynicism over such things "The police have enough work going for them that they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but they're normal folks who are used to being called out over normal disturbances. In other words, they would be out of their depth in a situation like this, and when people are out of their depth they can cause more trouble than good."
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And there was the occult to deal with, too ...
"Of course, we'll need information regarding our enemies, if we are to stay and remain alive."
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"I think this is all definitely possible, or the possibility of possibilities is...possible," he frowned, that didn't sound very professional or reassuring "There are a lot of issues surrounding this situation, one of which is that we don't want to startle townsfolk, or even suggest that there is any reason for them to need protection. That said, it would be prudent to have some precautions in place, as you say. When we know more we'll definitely convene to decide how to pursue this, but there are a number of things Elias and I will need to confirm beforehand."
Information on the enemies was most certainly something Taylor didn't have access to and he knew it. Instead, Taylor decided to focus on another bit of information that he was neglecting.
"Sorry, I think somewhere in all of this I didn't quite catch your name."
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