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Summary: Theo and Kisha talk about her mysterious disappearance and return.
Date: Friday, October 22, 2010. 5:32pm
Log Title: Mystery History
Rating: PG
Xavier Mansion - Garage
Home to various cars of teachers and X-men, the garage can house at least twenty vehicles. There is also an area that has a auto body shop set up so students and teachers and work on their cars. Almost any tool a mechanic needs can be found in this garage.
After school on a Friday is generally a quiet time in the garage, especially when the teaching staff who might be dropping in to collect vehicles are all so busy. Which is why Kisha has set herself up in one of the corners, sitting cross legged on the floor with what seems to be an arc welder close at hand and her laptop infront of her. For the most part the petite techno-addicts bruises have faded but her eyes still hint that she's not been eating or sleeping well for a while.
The pedestrian door to the garage swings open, and in comes Theo. He lugs Proto in his arms and goes straight to the workbench. Proto's normally lively form is rather silent. The boy pulls his backpack off, and the Stark Industries laptop comes out and is set on the counter next to the broken robot. He starts to go to the toolbox when he suddenly realizes who is in the corner. Strange schematics like that on a laptop can only be one person. He spins around. "Kisha!?" he exclaims. "You're here! You're alive!" He rushes over to her. "What-how-where —" He's at a loss where to begin.
"Take one step closer and I'll scorch…. Well no that won't work will it? I suppose I'd have to use plan B," Kisha snaps, moving her hand away from the arc welder and towards her crowbar. "And excellent questions. If at any point I locate what might be considered a plausible response I'll email you. Right now I'm researching the construction techniques of shovels in America for the last… lets call it two hundred years."
"Kisha," Theo repeats, but he doesn't come any closer. "You disappeared. I've been trying to figure out anything that would lead to finding where you and about half the rest of the school disappeared to. And you're researching shovels?" he runs his hands through his hair. "Where've you been?"
Kisha picks up the crowbar and gives Theo a pointed look. "Yes. I'm highly aware of this fact," she informs. "And as I have already said if I'm able to track down the information I'll let you know. But unless I follow what few leads I'm being allowed access to then I'm afraid you might lack for answers as much as I do. Hence shovel research. Because unfortunately my searches into the mystical significance of pumpkins has only led to the use of seeds for divination, Samhain and vampires. I mean /seriously/? I was tempted to DOS the website off the internet."
"Pumpkins?" he asks. "You're being weirder than normal. What do shovels and pumpkins have to do with all of this?" Theo asks. "Did you see the others? Are they okay? Are you okay? I'll be happy to help you research whatever you need." He just wants to figure out what's going on.
"If I have to say when I find out I'll let you know one more time…." Kisha mutters, scowling. "And /I/ am being perfectly sane. It's whatever has decided to bother the school which is being weird. You're happy to help? Perfect. My processing capabilities are being taken up by a fairly intense application of massive scale photo comparison technology but I need someone to search IRS databases for mention of Alaric Blackmoore. Claims to be a mage, but I'd expect him to still have some modern financial transactions from which he could be traced."
"The IRS?" the technopath echoes. "You can't just go to the IRS website and pull up stuff like that," he says. "You aren't sane if you're thinking of hacking their databases. There's less illegal ways to track a person." He walks back to the workbench, and opens the laptop. "Alaric Blackmoore?" he repeats the name. "Sounds like something out of a cheesy horror movie."
Kisha rolls her eyes. "Less illegal also being less effective. I was also fully aware of how their website works," she replies, relaxing her grip on the crowbar and resuming typing. "I'm perfectly sane. Just very very angry. It's entirely possible the name is fake too, which is why I was searching for any matching faces. Failing that I move onto voice patterns but that's not a priority as my audio quality for the event wasn't ideal."
"Why don't you start at the beginning," he says. "There's private I's, there's police databases, there's the DMV, all of which don't get you shot in a back alley without a trial." Theo picks up his laptop, and carries it back to where Kisha is sitting. He sits down cross-legged as well, facing the girl. "Where did you learn his name? Did he call himself that? Or did somebody else call him that?" the boy inquires. "You know, why don't you just start at the beginning, and say what you do know."
Kisha lets out a long sigh. "This is why I hate working with other people. The constant need to go over things I already know to bring them up to speed," she informs. "He called himself that during the night everyone is meant to have vanished. My computer was recording at the time, because I was trying to look him up, but none of those are likely to work. He walked or used non standard means to get here, if he even exists as a real person, indicating a probable lack of driving license. Police records are also statistically unlikely. The only thing which is certain? Taxes." She shrugs. "What I know about the time between is pure speculation. I awoke in my bed, with some sort of pumpkin based substance and an outdated shovel showing signs of recent use. My clothing showed signs of being near an open fire and I'd suffered severe bruising, plus malnutrition and mild dehydration."
"See, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Theo responds. "Taxes aren't always certain, either. My dad had a friend who used to boast that he had never paid taxes in his life." He starts to pull up names of private investigators. "Maybe we should call Ghostbusters," he smirks. "And maybe we should try to see if there's a way to figure out what happened to you while you were gone. It's like something out of X-files." He stops typing, and begins using his power. It's faster. After a moment, he seems to have a sudden revelation. "Hypnotist! We could call a hypnotist and have them do a memory regression on you to find out what happened!"
"Money obsessed con artists and cold readers," Kisha counters, browsing through hundreds of pictures and discounting them a page at a time. "I had briefly toyed with electroshock therapy but there are some slight risks involved with putting electrodes into your own brain which are mildly off putting."
"No no," Theo counters, "I think they're real. The brain is a really weird thing, and hypnotism has been around for a long time. Hell, what can it hurt? I'll pay for it, even." After all, he's rich. He's getting paid well, and can't go spend any of his hard-earned money until after New Year's. "You gotta think outside the box. Not everything can be solved with a schematic or an equation. Maybe Addison would even do it with his weird telepath powers. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want him to mess with your head, though."
Kisha pauses to zoom in on one picture which almost has a forty percent match, before discounting it. "Either suggestion involves far more other people meddling with my mind than I'm willing to consider. If you really want outside the box thinking then I'd suggest you try asking Mr Stark to check whatever records of magic users he has for the mans face. Then again the longer I spend searching the more I begin to wonder if perhaps the mage was a lure, meant to pull the most powerful mutants together for abduction. Instead they got a bunch of students who didn't run fast enough."
"Tony's in Japan," Theo says with disdain. "I don't even know when he's coming back. I can try to convince him that we need this, but I hope he'll have the good sense not to tell the staff I'm looking for it." He continues his own search, and then pauses. "Wait, wait. I thought this Blackmoore guy was the one who did all this? You mean there was somebody else?"
"It's not clear. He was 'running' away from something," Kisha explains, making little quotation marks with her hands. "My records indicate he came to the school looking for superpowered staff because something was after him. Slowly mist built up in an unnatural manner, then my memory goes blank and my footage is unfortunately ruined because the camera is no longer kept in position. Some brief fight may have occurred as there were some odd scrapes on some of my tools."
"Okay, so something big and bad was chasing him." The thought makes Theo's blood chill. "I hope whatever it is has left," he adds. "Or if it's still around, it can be reasoned with." He picks up his computer. "I'll call Tony, see if he can talk to some of those magical superhero people," he says. "But I'm glad you're back." Even if she did insult Proto.
"Email him the attachment I've prepared too. Short voice sample and the best image capture I have available," Kisha offers, making a file from her main machine available on the laptop and sending it via a school mailing list. "That's not technically accurate. There is no evidence the pursuit was real. But it's hypothetically possible… I'm tempted to check the areas history for any matching reports and maybe compare a map of the school with missing people hotspots. There could be a geometric pattern involved."
"Hard to know where people were when they went missing," Theo says. "Not all of them were in camera locations. It's worth a shot, though." He checks his e-mail, and then forwards it on to Tony after a short message. "I hope we find them soon, and I hope even more that the rest of us don't end up abducted."
Kisha shrugs. "I hope that whoever is behind it suffers for an extreme length of time," she chimes in cheerfully. "Decades at the very least. But anyway the mage being chased while on foot did potentially imply that he came from the local magical community. Unfortunately they're not very internet savy /and/ I'm directly banned from revealing school details on the more public magic forums. Or, if the ones I've been checking are anything to go on, group therapy sessions for very crazy people."
"You know, you're kinda pretty when you're sadistic," Theo observes with a wry grin curling over one side of his mouth. "I'm gonna go run some work on these samples and see what I can come up with." He closes the laptop, and gets to his feet. He regards the broken form of Proto for a few seconds, and then decides to leave him there. He walks back to take his backpack, and puts the laptop inside of it. "Just don't get yourself arrested by trying to hack the IRS database," he adds.
"Why do you think I was asking you to do it for me?" Kisha notes sweetly. "And for what it's worth it's good to be back. I think… I can't really say, not knowing my state of mind in the time between. Although enforced starvation doesn't strike me as very fun. Anyway lets hope Mr Stark comes up with something or one of us hits upon a search angle which does something before the month ends. As no doubt there is some mystical nonsense concerned with the change of seasons."
Theo zips up the backpack, and pulls it across his shoulders. "Yeah, well, I'll leave mystical nonsense to the people who can't think rationally." He starts to walk back to the exit of the garage. "You and I can try to make sense of this stuff in the mean time."
Kisha waves her hand. "I'm sure if studied enough 'magic' would be proven to simply be another type of science using a stable line of mutant-esque traits," she ventures. "Anyway I better get back to my research. I've /only/ got a few hundred thousand pages to check today."
