synopsychic | (no subject)

Not even close. I even risked trying my magic, and it had absolutely no effect at all.

[For what that was worth.]

Did we ever find out why they're bursting open in the first place? I can't imagine one of us would have caused something like this....

[She wasn't saying she was blaming the Trumps. But she was blaming the trumps.]

Trumps. Jinx.

Seriously, though. If a ragtag team of people with no experience in portal creation can learn to open them without any tutors, it's not impossible that some other people in the worlds we visit might know about them. The ships aren't exactly making me feel the aster right now, either...

[He's not creeped out. Much. Bodies in a reactor, Synthetics seeing terrible things, machinery not obeying commands...]

Thinking this might be on the verge of a disaster, super heavy on the dis.

[She almost smiled at his initial response. Almost. Still, it was good to know that they were on the same wavelength in certain areas.]

That's actually a really good--if slightly disturbing--point.

I mean, we've all gotten abilities that seemed kind of Jaunt-specific before, haven't we? [She didn't outright think about the Ganymede Syndrome incident, but it was close enough to the forefront of her thoughts that Robin may or may not have received a glimpse of it.] So what's to say some of the other things we've picked up along the way haven't come from other Jaunts as well? Maybe this is just one instances where we caught the ability before we made it to the related Jaunt.

Except no one from here really seems to know how or why they're opening, either. Or if they do... they're keeping really quiet about it, which really doesn't bode well if one of the infiltrators is somehow doing this on purpose.

Mind control.

It wouldn't be the first time a Trump got to an Infiltraitor mid-Jaunt. They'd gotten to me before.

Maybe... If that's what's happening, we might want to look first at any infiltrators we know are marked and see if that gets us anywhere? Or maybe that's just a waste of time. I don't know.

We might be able to stop the portals if we can get the ships to drop down below lightspeed, since that's when they started opening... but that might not be the best plan if our end goal is everyone surviving this.

Umm...for the record? I'm infiltrating, and I'm marked.

I mean, you can go ahead and still check if it'll make you feel better, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the one causing any of this. Like, 90% sure.

For the record, neither am I. Unless I'm doing it by accident, which could be the case. Anyone been keeping track of the marked infiltrators if they're causing any problems around them? I think there are at least three of them on the Empress.

[She was starting to get a mental whiplash, going back and forth between voices in her head like this.]

[It reminded her so much of home.]

How do you know? You haven't been portal hopping between here and the other ships, have you?

... Maybe?

And you didn't invite me along?

You're not still feeling unwhelmed over the whole cabinet thing, are you? 'cause I'm mostly over that by now.

[Mostly.]

I'm just whelmed, okay. Completely whelmed. No overs or unders.

... And 'mostly', huh?

You heard me.

[And that was all you were getting in response, Robin. Interpret at will.]

I'll take both your word for it. Keep an eye on each other, maybe. You've got different Trumps, right? So if you're doing it by accident... it's probably only one of you.

[ Probably. ]

I haven't been keeping track, but... I really need a better list of who's actually marked. A couple on the Corona, I think?

Ambrose is there, yeah. Haven't kept up with everyone else... It's too bad we don't have some ability to ping where the marked people are, though it'd probably have to be a magic-user to make it work anyway.

Aaaaand Zatanna's powers are still going haywire, aren't they? ...no offense, Zatanna. It's not your fault, but I don't think I know enough about magic to pull it off, and I don't know anyone else who might.

Though it might still be worth figuring out sometime...

I haven't been able to accomplish anything, either, but I don't usually close portals, so I thought maybe I just didn't have the right finesse for it.

[But if even magic isn't working, well...]

I haven't heard anything other than speculation, but I haven't been able to follow everything either, so it's possible someone's come up with a theory besides the obvious.

How did they close before, then? On their own?

[She'd only seen people open them a handful of times in the past. But it dawned on her that she'd never seen anybody actively close one, either.]

What kinds of speculation have you heard? Maybe we can compare notes.

On their own, yes. The ones I can make only last a few seconds, so I've never worried about closing them behind me.

Not a lot. From other Travelers, mostly that it's got something to do with the Trumps, although... I'm not sure I agree. They meddle in things, but this would be showing their hand a lot more than they usually do. And you'd think they wouldn't want random people wandering into Liminal Space.

[What with the problems they've had in the recent past]

I don't know what the natives think of all of it, though, or even if they have a consensus opinion.

Well, the good news is that a bunch of them are all a bit distracted with the ship going haywire and the hallucinations and everything.

The bad news? ...a bunch of them are a bit distracted because the ship's kind of going haywire and several of them are hallucinating.

[Then again, none of this was news to anyone. Unless they'd been hiding in Liminal until then.]

I'm thinking it depends on what kind of meddling. And who's the one doing said meddling. Based on past experiences I've had with them, they're not above arguing amongst themselves in front of us. Sabotage wouldn't be unthinkable.

I've been pretty distracted with those things myself, so I can't say I blame them...

[And it's really getting tiresome. He'd like his brain to be his own again, thanks.]

Hmm. I hadn't thought about it like that. The last time they seemed to be fighting, we knew it, so the thought that they might be doing it now, a little more out of our sight, hadn't occurred to me. I guess it's that, or they're not the only ones who know how to work this trick.

Kind of makes you wonder, if that is the case, what finally set them off?

[Her mind went back to the name of the two ships. Empress and Corona. She'd joked at the time that it was because whoever was in charge of the Jaunt had taken a liking to one (or both) Trumps, but maybe there was more to the tribute than mere coincidence?]

It's a good question... although at least personally, I don't feel like I really understand them well enough to even guess.

Who does?

That's not going to stop us from at least speculating. Maybe we'll get lucky and guess right.

Hm. I'm just used to working with facts... I usually leave the speculating to other people. I just wish we knew a little more...

We all wish we knew a little more. And if some answers are what you're waiting on...you're gonna be waiting a long, long time.

Well, I've been waiting so long now that I can't remember how long it's actually been. I guess waiting a while longer won't kill me.

At least, not permanently.

You're way more patient than I am, then.

I think I'm just very used to not knowing what's going on, unfortunately.

[That had certainly been a recurring theme for most of his childhood, anyway]

...unfortunately, you're not as isolated in that sense as you think.

And I still say you're way more patient than I am.

Well, maybe. But being a little impatient might end up being better--if we all did things my way, I don't think we'd ever get anywhere at all.

well, as long as you're aware of that, I guess.

Though, if I were you, I might want to consider trying it a little differently at some point. Who knows? You might even come to like it.

Ah, maybe. I guess I'm just not very ambitious.

Does anyone even know how to close them once they've been opened? For all the people who have learned how to create them, I have never heard of anyone reversing the process.

The ones I've made have always closed on their own shortly after I make them. I've never had one stay open all on its own, so I've never tried to close one before.

As have mine.

I don't think these are deliberate, though it's possible they're the side effect of some deliberate act. Their manifestation appears to be entirely random.

It could be possible that opening them is deliberate, but whatever's doing it doesn't have the control to do it in anything other than a random nature. A side-effect does seem like a reasonable explanation, though. But if it is, what is it a side-effect of? The storm?

Perhaps. Although - the potential connection between superluminal travel and interdimensional travel has long been the basis for thought exercises in my own universe. It's possible that it's not the effect of one single force, but rather the combination of multiple factors: our speed, the storm, perhaps even our presence, as entities with a connection to alternate planes of existence.

Oh, I see. We don't have technology like this where I'm from. No one's made it off the planet in a very long time, and even when it was possible, I don't think they could get very far. Given how little anyone knows about these ships, or what we're actually running from, I guess that's something we can't dismiss as a possibility.

Unfortunately, there aren't many possibilities we can dismiss.

I would give a great deal to have access to an academic library at this point - or an extranet connection.

That would certainly help a lot, wouldn't it? I guess it's a bit much to ask for from a couple of salvaged spaceships, though.

Bound from a prison world, no less.

[There's the impression of a sigh.]

Even the shape of Liminal Space doesn't seem to reveal anything - at least, not to my eyes.

I didn't spend long looking at it, myself, but I couldn''t make any sense of it. The clues are usually subtle... but these might be too subtle, if it even means anything at all. The fact that anyone could see it... I'm not sure what influence that might have had.

Too subtle, or tuned to a specific frame of reference. I suppose we are both outliers - if there is a message, we may not be the ones intended to catch it.

That's a possibility... Well, hopefully someone else can catch it, if that's the case.

Yes, hopefully so. And hopefully the presence of so many natives and Infiltrators will not have skewed the - language, for lack of a better word - toward their cultural context.

I've been trying to figure it out, but I haven't really been having any luck. I wish I knew why they're not closing on their own like ours do. And why they're a different color too...

It's possible they're operating on a different...wavelength, for lack of a better word than our own portals do. That might also explain why Infiltrators can pass through them, but not through ours.

That, or perhaps the portals we generate are still in part under the control of the Trumps, and so are subject to their security measures.