applesaucedream | A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Current Music: April 3, 2013

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A Day Late and a Dollar Short

As far as dreams go, this seems surprisingly...normal. True, the dreamers of Manhattan and beyond will find themselves stranded in the middle of the ocean on a fairly deserted rocky island, but it's nothing so unusual as the labyrinth from last time, and no one appears to have become an animal or reverted to an insane past (or future) version of themself. Besides, well, rocks and grass, there's nothing here but an abandoned lighthouse, the doors and windows broken, and the spare furniture worn by the weather. You can go up the spiral staircase to look at the view, but there's nothing to see but the endless ocean. One might almost think tonight was a night for simple socializing via the telepathic current.

As if anything to do with the rift is ever that simple, you silly bumpkin. How quickly each person realizes what is unusual about tonight's dream will depend in large part on their personality. Some might go the entire night without noticing (except from the distress of others, naturally), but some will find out the instant they open their mouths to converse with another dreamer. You see, each and every dreamer will be completely unable to tell a lie for as long as the dream lasts. The truth might be evaded by omission, but any attempt to say that which is untrue will result in the corresponding truth emerging instead.

Good thing it's just a dream and everyone's going to forget in the morning, right? Right??

[Mod note: As usual, players can choose to have their characters remember or forget anything that happens in the Dreaming. As per usual party rules, both members and non-members are welcome to play any character in this post, regardless of whether that character is currently in the game. Unlike usual, tonight's theme is not optional; all characters will be subject to the enforced truth-telling. Have fun!]

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'What, spontaneous... species-switching? Ok, you're gonna have to give me the science behind that, because I can't even begin to imagine how that works. Even if it's not spontaneous, if it's intentionally implemented, if you're, I dunno, introducing foreign DNA into a subject's genome, surely that would take time? A gradual transformation rather than a--' she snaps her fingers-- 'just like that.'

Again, she seems to catch herself rambling, and gives a little smile of her own. 'And here I completely forget to introduce myself. I'm Cosima. I'd offer to shake hands, but possibly that would be kinda insensitive under the circumstances, huh?'

Handy grins. "You could shake my hoof," he offers, lifting a foreleg...his left foreleg. It's been a while, alright? I'm the Doctor, he says cheerfully. Except what comes out instead is "I'm a meta-crisis duplicate of an alien called the Doctor -- not again!!"

Looking aghast, he forgets the spiel about genetic tampering into which he was about to launch. "Forget I said that," he ~~pleads~~ requests. "And try to lie to me."

Cosima's about to take the proffered hoof, but before her hand makes it halfway there, the pony freaks out. Her hands shoot up in front of her, palms out and fingers spread in a calm, please, calm gesture, and she furrows her whole face at him. A meta-crisis duplicate? She has no idea what that means. Alien, all right, it's hardly weirder than talking ponies, but Cosima likes to know everything; she's going to be asking about what a meta-crisis duplicate is later.

For now, though, the pony's second request is sufficiently odd that it takes precedence.

'Uh,' she says intelligently, 'ok, right, sure.' It's like when someone asks you what you want for Christmas; even though there's probably a dozen things you want, in that instant, they all flee your brain. So it is now; none of the infinite silly, pointless little lies she could try to tell come to mind. Instead, she says, I'm a regular human being 'I'm a clone.'

Immediately, she claps a hand to her mouth. 'Shit, fuck, dude! How did that--' But Cosima thinks like a scientist, and multiple experiments are easily done here. I'm a vegetarian 'I totally love red meat,' I'm from Munich 'I'm from San Francisco,' The solar system is geocentric, 'The solar system is heliocentric.' None of the lies will come out; it's like the link between commands from her brain and the muscles of speech have been scrambled somehow, and Cosima exhales a long breath.

'Ok, so that's bizarre.'

Handy gasps at her first admission. Alright, he said lie to him, not attempt to cover up what must be her deepest, darkest secret. It's not like he was out to get even with her for accidentally revealing his own origins, however vaguely. The rest barely registers, though he makes a face at the comment about red meat.

"This happened in Equestria as well," he says to explain his earlier outburst. "Zetta -- that's our resident evil overlord, but he's absolutely pants at it -- made a trueberry bomb and dropped it on the town." I got to the bottom of it, though. "I questioned him a bit and then went into hiding."

Rolling his eyes (really, he got enough practice at this before that he ought to know better than try to talk himself up), he gives her what he hopes is a comforting smile and proffers the hoof again. There's something of an elephant in the...open air...now, as he's sure she wouldn't have shared that she was a clone if she'd known what was going to come out of her mouth. Fortunately for Cosima, meeting another duplicate is novel enough for him to give in to the feelings of camaraderie that rise up in him now. "You, too, eh?"

As far as deep, dark secrets go, it's not one Cosima keeps because she's ashamed, or because she's go some epic existential angst about it; it's for safety. Now that she and Beth and Alison and the German have become self-aware, they can't let on, until they figure out who or what is behind their existence. Well, that and the fact that nobody would believe her. But she's pretty sure neither of those things is a problem here. She's still rattled, but as much by the enforced honesty as the truth she'd let slip.

'Ok,' she says again, just verbal filler while she collects herself, shaking her head so her dreadlocks bounce, and then reaching to take his hoof and giving it a little shake. 'Wow, ok, I guess I'm gonna watch what I say from now on.' This may prove difficult; Cosima has a tendency to ramble somewhat, trying to translate thoughts into speech as quickly as possible.

'Yeah, me too. What're the odds?' Cosima huffs a laugh, and her lips twitch into a small smile, though it's more a reaction to awkwardness than an expression of happiness. 'Though you'll have to explain to me what you mean by metacrisis. If, I mean, if you don't mind. I don't wanna, like, extort anything out of you when you're incapable of lying. But I'm kind of in the process of trying to figure out my-- our-- origins, and cloning's still a pretty new science where I'm from, so hearing about other ways it's done would be awesome.'

Handy, on the other hand, faces no danger due to his origins. Well, he's got a fair bit of bad press back in Equestria, but that's as much to do with the speculation that's arisen out of his refusal to ever explain himself as it is to do with stigma attached to his actual situation.

"It's not exactly cloning," he replies, waving away her concerns about pressing him for details. Most people he won't tell, but a.) she already knows and b.) the more he hears about her being a clone looking for answers, the more sympathetic he feels. "And, ah, it wasn't something that was done deliberately." I'm a Time Lord "The Doctor is a Time Lord -- alien to you, I suppose, it's all relative -- and he and one of his companions had a sort of accident. And then, pow, instant me."

That's...really not a scientific explanation, is it? Handy might still be in dumbing-this-down-for-the-human mode.

That's not even dumbing-this-down-for-the-humans, that's dumbing-this-down-for-toddlers, and Cosima arches an eyebrow, looking over her glasses at him. If she'd been standing, she'd be in full-on, arms crossed, hip cocked sass posture.

'I'm in the process of getting my PhD in Experimental Evolutionary Developmental Biology; I'm far from stupid. And believe me, I know what talking down to the laypeople sounds like, I do it all the time.' That last bit she hadn't actually meant to say, but, well, takes one to know one and all that; she can own it.

It might be dumbing-this-down-for-ponies. Ponies generally accept 'it happened because magic' as a be-all end-all answer.

"...Good choice," says Handy after a moment or two of abashed, silent mouth-flapping. Giving an almighty sniff, he reviews his case and tries to decide where to start. "Time Lords have triple helix DNA," he begins. "The third strand governs a series of self-replicating biogenic particles, and when those get triggered, he'll undergo what's called regeneration -- everything gets repaired and reorganized down to the cellular level -- to a lesser extent in the brain, though -- and when he comes out of it, he's a whole new him. New face, new body, new personality to an extent even though the memories stay. Are you following?"

He knows she has to have been telling the truth about her course of study, but if she's going to ask for the scientific version, well, this is a bit of a test for her.

Silently, Cosima is amused by his flapping, as well as somewhat smugly vindicated. Any and all self-satisfaction gives way to sheer, blunt curiosity when he launches into his explanation. Briefly, she wishes she had a notebook with her, she'd love to take notes on this; but with no such thing to hand, she'll simply have to do her best to take it all in.

She nods along with him, eyes going wide and impressed when he describes the process of regeneration. There are creatures on Earth with what's called biological immortality, usually very simple animals that can regenerate cells, or that one jellyfish with the ability to revert to sexual immaturity before it dies and repeat the cycle over and over. But for something like it to occur in a complex, sentient being is astonishing.

When he pauses to ask if she's following, there's the beginnings of an avid smile twitching around her lips. Possibly that's inconsiderate? Given that the guy's telling her the doubtlessly traumatic tale of how he came into being, but that's just frickin' cool.

'Yeah,' she assures him. 'Like, um, transdifferentiation? Though obviously on a massive, massive scale. Was that a natural development in the species, or was it engineered?'

"Exactly." Handy breaks out into a smile. It's not often he explains this, and less often that he can explain it in any really meaningful way. 'Stuff happens and I'm new again' is usually the extent of it. "It's...well," he says, considering. Here's one point where telling the truth means he needs to pick his way through carefully, lest he start sharing some unfortunate historical facts. "Engineered, but in all likelihood building on traits that had been starting to crop up naturally. It's...complicated. Politically complicated."

He makes a face, as if to say 'and do we really want to talk politics?'

'Hah, I bet,' Cosima snorts. She's never been hugely interested in politics beyond the broad strokes, but it's not hard to see that any group of people which could engineer in themselves the potential for effective immortality would become a huge political presence.

She also makes note of the fact that Handy's able to evade giving a comprehensive history of what exactly made it politically complicated. So, you can't lie outright, but you can talk around the truth if you're careful. She doesn't prod any further in that direction; fascinating as it would be to learn the history of an alien species, she's focussed on the matter at hand.

'Ok, so, the accident this Doctor of yours had-- it induced regeneration?'

See, he's had practice at this. Of course, it could have turned out things were different here, but it seemed a fairly safe bet that the ~~spell~~ psychic field would have the same limitations as the trueberries.

"Oh, that wasn't the accident," he replies breezily. "No, that Dalek definitely shot him on purpose. No -- and it gets more complicated. There's a lot of energy associated with regeneration, as I'm sure you can imagine -- sort of a hodgepodge of energy forms, let's just call it regenerative energy, very useful stuff -- very volatile stuff. So, ah." And here's the part where he has to explain the hand, and that's really sort of embarrassing. "Well. Right after -- almost right after the last regeneration, he'd sort of gone and got his hand cut off." Swashbuckling and so forth, you know how it is. "Clumsy swordfighting, and you've probably got no idea where I'm coming from with this."

Handy sighs. "Not what I meant to say. But this hand was in a jar under the console of his ship -- don't ask how it got there, really, just don't."

Sort of gone and got his hand cut off. It's the most casual attitude towards dismemberment Cosima's ever heard, and both her eyebrows are up now. It's definitely true that she has little idea of clumsy swordfighting and losing hands, but she's drawing connections anyway, mind flitting from possibility to possibility as he speaks.

She huffs a wry little laugh through her nose at the embarrassment in his tone about the hand in a jar, and shakes her head a little. 'Wow, and I thought my life was complicated. Ok, so, lemme get this straight; this Doctor gets shot, which triggers the regenerative process, but-- the hand introduces an extra variable? Or--'

She can't really imagine how a severed hand in a jar would interact with an internal biological process in such a way as to produce a clone, even if the process is one which releases a lot of energy. Unless, and she exclaims softly to herself, 'Or, oh, oh, if the hand came into contact with the Doctor, then would all that volatile energy kickstart cellular regeneration in the hand as well? That, I mean, that's crazy, but, well, this whole thing kinda is already.'

Handy hasn't even thought to clarify that the Doctor grew the hand back. It doesn't occur to him that Cosima might assume he went about for an entire regeneration sans right hand; he was within the window of opportunity, so of course he grew a new one.

His eyes light up and he gives an undignified little prance at her deduction. "You're close!" he exclaims, delighted. "Really, that's very close -- it's along those lines. See, he aborted the process -- you can't see it now, but we'd got a good face and really good hair this last time round. Handy biological receptacle right there under the console, perfect match on the cellular level and everything, so he just...funneled the energy off. Normally stopping a regeneration will just kill you for good, but time it perfectly and bleed the energy away before the process can go beyond initial repairs to damaged cells, and you can heal without changing. The hand was only supposed to store the energy, let it leak out and dissipate on its own. But, well."

But, well, that was the painful part of the story, because it involved him only coming into existence because Donna had unwittingly put herself in harm's way. Maybe he didn't need to share that part, though. It ought to be enough that it had been an accident; Cosima had heard at least part of the mechanics behind the event. "Here I am," he finished lamely.

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A Day Late and a Dollar Short

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