Back to Work (Who else?)

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke had never teleported before, and to spite how good the Inventor was with it, he would not be good enough to remain on his feet after such a surprise. After all, it would have been hard enough if he teleported straight to the ground, but no, he found himself standing on naught but air when he reappeared, and fell the 3 feet to the ground with an unceremonious thud.

"Ugh...You and your games." He said, getting up and dusting himself off. He looked around to find himself in a very familiar building, glass doors and weird nick-nacks and all. He smiled.

"It's good to be back here, I missed the place and all it's eccentricities." He said with a grin. "Oh while I think of it, did you ever manage to find that William girl you were looking for?" He asked inquisitivly.

This was going to be a good day, like he expected.

[Ϛ The Inventor]

"Games? What games?" said The Inventor with a bright smile. He had somehow gotten a hold of an apple and he took a bite out of it then, still smiling like he was a kid in Disneyland. And he, unlike Locke, had appeared on his feet, though he was standing on the counter. Though he wasn't there for long; he dinged his bell with his foot and a small wisp of green smoke replaced him.

A split second later, the doors to the Workshop itself opened and a wave of noise filled the small reception room to the brim with dissonant sounds. The Inventor waved at Locke and said something, but over the din in the room, it was unintelligible. Seeming to realize that would happen just then, The Inventor clapped his hands and the noise stopped instantly.

"Hm... Sorry about that," he said, sounding a little puzzled but still smiling broadly. "I was saying hello, and that it's good to see you, and that I'm glad to see you're on time as usual." For once, he left the doors to the Workshop open. Through no logic he'd as of yet made known, he'd decided that today, Locke would get to see the work area.

When the William question hit his ears, he didn't miss a beat. "Nope. And now I've moved halfway across the world from where I last saw her." But he didn't sound remotely upset about this, in fact, he was still smiling.

The fact of the matter was, he'd used the laws of probability and a relatively new adage to sooth his concerns about never seeing her again. Since he was an eternal being, and so was he, he could extend the time period to infinity, and thus be perfectly sure that eventually. they would be together again. And 'time flies when you're having fun' had convinced him to not spend the time it took to get her back brooding; having fun would make it all go by that much quicker. So, until he defeated his own logic, he was content.

"Anyway, where did we leave off again?"

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke's eyes (And ears) perked up as The Inventor reached for the workshop doors, and this time he was prepared for the noise, though it still pushed him back with the sudden force. Even when the noise ended Locke's ears were ringing, and he only heard the tail end of the sentence.

"On time? Oh yeah, of course." Locke replied shaking his head quickly to dull the ringing. At his remark about William Locke couldn't help but wonder. Was he just faking being content, or had he figured something else out? Oh well, it was irrelevant.

"Well, if you have all the time in the world, I guess it's only a matter of time, which you have plenty of. So then no loss eh?" Locke nodded, the logic making perfect sense to him.

"Ah, when I was last here...we left off with..." Locke said, wracking his brain. As one of The Inventor's rules, he didn't tell anyone what happened here, and that included writing it down. At the time of the last meeting, he hadn't been able to memorize by voice either, too bad.

"I don't recall." Locke admitted "But I DO have something I was interested in looking into. Trying to imitate gifts with machinery. Like the elemental kenesis skills and such. It seems like if you could break down the brain wave pattern that controls the element, you could create a device to emulate it. There are modern inventions now that do similar, but far less complicated things. Like robotic limbs those non-gifted use if they are injured badly. They can connect to the nervous system and intercept a certain brainwave, converting it into the desired motion. If it could be determined what brainwave certain gifts used, it might be possible to make a machine to emulate that brainwave...maybe...."

Locke was in full speed now.

"Maybe that's all 'The Artifact' was, if it really existed. A machine that altered the brainwaves of whomever came into contact with it. Hmmm, what a theroy..." He said, slinking into his train of thought.

[Ϛ The Inventor]

"It's a good quality to have. Punctuality," The Inventor said distractedly, as if he was actually deep in thought about something else entirely. This may or may not have been true; he had a strange way of sounding distracted even when he was thinking of solely one thing. Of course, there was also the chance he was really never thinking about just one thing, and was always distracted, but in the end, the answer mattered very little.

"Have you developed telepathy?" The Inventor asked quizzically, even though it was highly unlikely the boy could have sorted through his thoughts and find the ones on William even if he had developed and mastered mind-reading abilities. However, he didn't do much more explaining than this. He figured if Locke couldn't figure out why he was asking, he didn't deserve to know.

The Inventor finished his apple and teleported it to a crow's nest while he waited for Locke to finish remembering. Or trying to remember, by the looks of things. Trying and failing. The Inventor found this odd, because he was pretty sure the child had some power that let him remember everything. Then again, he could have just been imagining things.

However, he pushed the line of thought at least mostly out of his head as Locke went on a mini-rant about which he would like to learn. The Inventor listened to the whole spiel with the closest anyone would ever get to his full attention, and there was a smile on his face that was not-quite-impressed, possibly pleased I suppose. At any rate, it was relatively clear he liked what he was hearing.

"I like where you're going with that, but let me help you hash it out. When someone gets a robotic limb, what's it doing? Converting their brainwaves into an action, sure, but the machine has to have the capability to move in the first place, or else it would be useless. So even if you find the brain activity that leads to a power working, you need a machine that could use the power. The brainwaves are all about control; it's the body itself that is the conduit for the power, or even the physical aspect of the brain. If we could build a machine that brainwaves could use to levitate, we could just as easily make it levitate on its own, just like we could move a robotic arm without it being attached to someone's brain. In fact, it's easier that way."

Of course, saying this so plainly would be far too straightforward and sane for the Inventor, so he didn't. For some reason we will probably never know, he pranced around the room, alternating flapping his arms like wings and dancing like a ballerina. There are many possible explanations for this beyond simple boredom, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was probably some unique version of Tai Chi and the like; a sort of exercise he did to help him clear his mind and calm his body.

The Inventor hopped onto his counter and sat when he'd finished speaking, obviously refusing to go on. It's pretty easy to tell why he did this, at least; he wanted to see if Locke could follow this new train of thought and come to the conclusion he himself had.

He was still beaming, too; he had actually never thought of all this before; he had his own, unique way of imbuing machinery with Gift-like traits. It was rare he got to think about something new, and he was reveling in the feeling.

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke watched the Inventor's antics, already used to them. He was quite eccentric, but Locke supposed after living for so long you were allowed to be a little crazy.

It's why he never gave Faeries any trouble about their flighty attitudes.

"So wait a minute..." Locke said. "You are saying that instead of building a fake brain, we should build a fake body first? Something that can respond to the brainwaves that activate the kenesis gifts? But how could we do that? To do that we'd have to be able to isolate the brain wave that controls the kenesis power, and emulate it....either that or." He pulled his finger to his cheek thoughtfully.

"Copy them from someone with the power..." He said letting his sentence dangle for a moment. "If you had a person with a certain kenesis power manipulate their power in a set way while you recorded the brain activity, you could use that recording of the brainwave activity to design a machine that would cause items to react in an identical way. In effect, a new body for the gift."

Locke started ticking things off on his fingers, not sure why he was doing it.

"So the true manifestation of gifts is not just the brainwaves, it's the body that is able to convey these signals...or maybe there is no change in the brainwaves, maybe the change is just in the bodies receptors to normal brainwaves that serve no function. Or rather, a function that the body normally cannot relate to. Which would mean that the Gifts ability for even powers controlled with your mind would be grounded more in the bodies composition then anything else."

Locke was on a roll now, and the train would keep on going unless something stopped it.

[Ϛ The Inventor]

The Inventor more or less nodded along with what Locke said. There was a good deal more silliness involved than just that, but it was nothing really worth noting, and amounted to the same thing as if he had simply stood still, so I won't waste any time explaining it. The gist of the thing is simply that he seemed to agee with what Locke said.

The last thing the Inventor wanted to do was to interrupt Locke's brainslide, but... well, actually, it wasn't the last thing, but he didn't really want to except he thought he should clarify and such, or at least put in a few words edgewise so Locke didn't forget he was there.

"If you hook up something that simulates the brain activity of a Pryokinetic shooting a flame from their finger to a regular robotic hand, the hand wouldn't know what to do with the signals. It wouldn't suddenly develop the ability to create fire, and even if it did, it would be far easier to simply build a flame thrower."

He felt as if he'd more or less said this already, but he was no longer correcting Locke, he was simply assuring the boy he was on the right track and making sense of everything he'd said. He was pleased to have found an apprentice who was so intelligent, as he rarely had the patience to deal with less-than-bright people. He was also glad that the boy seemed to be doing a good job of keeping his personality flaws in check as requested.

"So ideally, we want to concentrate on a power that technology can't already duplicate. Well, at later stages anyway. I suppose we could start with a kinesis at first, because it would be easier, but we would want to move on to something more worth our time, like perhaps a device that gives the user your memory advantages."

He began to walk back through the Workshop's double doors, into the curiously silent and impossibly large room they contained. He slung an arm over Locke's shoulder and brought the young boy in with him, still talking as he went.

"Either way, what you want to do is either create a biological conduit for the power, or a mechanical medium through which you can manipulate the human body to use the power." He swept a load of rubbish off a worktable and jumped up onto it, smiling benevolently at Locke as he did so.

"Of course, for all we know, the power has to be coded right into the DNA to work, in which case we would have to go into gene-altering serums, and they're just a pain to work with. All sorts of nasty side-effects and whatnot..."

He sounded as if he spoke from experience. Terrible, sour-tasting experience.

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke was half listening to the Inventor as he contemplated his ideas. They seemed possible in theory, but that was just theory. All of a sudden Locke heard the Inventor, and how he spoke. Had he done this already? it sounded like he'd tried it before...tried and failed? Maybe given up?

Should he ask him about it? Oh hell, might as well be blunt. "..You've worked on this before haven't you?" He said simply to the Inventor. "You've done things like this, but in a different way. Do you already know the answer and just want to see how I would do it? How far a human can come with the limited scopes of our lives?" He questioned him.

Or maybe it was the problem Locke ran into now and again. When you know everything, breaking it all down into bite size chunks can be difficult. Maybe the Inventor had problems seeing the individual trees in the forest, hence why he'd never succeed at it? That would of course imply he'd never completed whatever idea it was.

"Machines are one thing, genetics another...and I'm..." He paused. "Not terribly fond of genetics."

[Ϛ The Inventor]

"Yes, kind of, and not really," The Inventor said with a smile, as if these answers were top-notch stuff that Locke would be glad to hear. However, the fact that he went on to explain them further betrayed his lack of confidence in their ability to get the job done by themselves.

"Yes, I've worked on this before, though in a different way. I know some of the answers, but not ones that would help you very much, and I'm very interested in how you would go about it. As for seeing how far a human can come within their lifetime... well, I'm not terribly interested in that. It shouldn't take even such a short lifetime to figure this out anyway, if we really work at it."

He kicked his feet gaily beneath him, clearly having a wonderful time. And he still wasn't finished speaking, either.

"As a Djinn, I have a unique ability to transfer Gift-like abilities to inanimate objects, so I've been doings things along these lines for awhile now. It's what I do, but that doesn't help you at all. So I wouldn't need to do things your way, but I'm still very interested in it."

He whistled, and a squirrel appeared seemingly out of nowhere, scrambled across the floor, sniffed Locke's foot briefly, and climbed up The Inventor and onto his shoulder. The Inventor gave him a small scratch on the head, which the squirrel replied to by letting a small puff of smoke out of each of his ears.

"Especially when it comes to biological entities. You see, I can't use my powers on living things, so I experimented with gene serums that could give living things powers. Flick here volunteered to test one of them for me, and... well, let's just say pyrokinesis didn't work out too well for him. I'm not trying that again any time soon. Poor guy."

Flick didn't seem to mind terribly, to tell the truth. He did occasionally swat at the puffs of smoke when they came too close to his face, however.

"So I guess you could say I'm not terribly fond of genetics either. A mechanical proxy solution would be much better."

Flick stared curiously at Locke for awhile, so The Inventor pointed at him and said, "Locke. Protege." The squirrel didn't seem to understand, so he tried again. "Er, apprentice? Student? Pupil?" Somewhere along there, the squirrels seemed to get it, because he started ignoring The Inventor's words.

"Sorry. He hasn't quite grasped manners yet," The Inventor said, a little bashfully.

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke laughed at the little squirrel. "You really, experimented on that squirrel? Oh I wonder what he could tell us about it, Kiri would have a field day with this one." He said, looking over the animal.

He returned to his train of thought immediately though. "So your saying that what we are doing, or rather what we are going to attempt to do, is something you have no idea how to do the way I could do it, is that right?" Locke placed his chin in his hand thoughtfully. The Inventor probably didn't deal with things he didn't know about often.

"Well, for one thing, I don't have any gifts that could be easily emulated like that, and you aren't human. So we'd need data from someone else, preferably a baseline human so that we can get the basics of the differences from them and normal humans. I mean, I'm human but..." He poked his ears. "Never did find out where these came from, so I'm not sure I am the best 'control' of the experiment..." He said letting it trail off.

"But I'd have to gather data on a person like this without your help, since they can't come here, and I can't tell them about this place. So the first little challenge is what kind of information do we need to acquire to design something to work with and begin to test it..."

Locke began ticking things off his fingers. "A DNA sample...a hair might work, something they've used their power on, in case it leaves a residual effect, age, race, all that boring data...hmmm, I wonder if anyone has done research on this already..."

[Ϛ The Inventor]

"Yes, I really did. I was a little doubtful, but he was surprisingly insistent. Apparently being able to control fire would present him with quite the advantage when it comes to things like escaping predators, competing for food, and mating. I think he's a little power hungry." The squirrel had either not heard or understood what The Inventor said, or else he simply didn't mind the adjective, because he continued about his business as if nothing had happened. His business which consisted of searching The Inventor's hair, presumably for food.

"Who's this Kiri, though?" The Inventor quipped. "Presumably one of those faeries, since it sounds as if... she? can speak with animals. Nice folk, faeries. Wish I could talk to animals. Would make a lot of this a whole lot easier..." The words he spoke were more and more to himself and less and less discernible as he went on, until he was basically just muttering nonsense. However, he quickly snapped out of it.

"Sorry, yes, you're right. Completely new. A novel concept for me, I must admit. It's a little exciting, really." He didn't generally keep food in his hair, but he didn't want to disappoint the scavenging squirrel, so he summoned a shelled peanut and stuck it stealthily in his hair when the squirrel was looking away.

The Inventor nodded his agreement with much of what Locke said, but he did at one point hold up his finger to make a correction. "You're correct in that I wouldn't appreciate my Workshop being advertised to the public as such, but that doesn't mean you'll have to do it alone. I can bring equipment to a more suitable location and help you with the proceedings. Oh, because we'll need a brainwave monitor as well as the things you mentioned, to look for abnormal activity in the Gifted one."

He began looking around, as if he hoped to locate such a piece of equipment on the very table he was sitting on, but didn't seem to be having any luck finding anything other than junk. The squirrel hung on tight as The Inventor's head swivelled to and fro, trying to keep its grip and eat the peanut it had found at the same time, no easy feat.

"Twins would be ideal, one Gifted and one not, but I doubt we'll be able to find such a perfect pair of test subjects," he muttered as he searched. "We'll have to try and find..." he held a prism up to the light before shaking his head and throwing it on the floor, where it promptly smashed "ones that are just similar."

He gave up the search for the time being, but his eyes still shifted occasionally around the room. "Any ideas?"

[Locke F. Herald]

Locke felt the need for a rebuttal immediately, that damn know-it-all nature of his.

"It's not just the Fae who are known to have that ability you know, my dad can speak to all manner of creatures. Well actually he can speak to anything that can speak back, but it's pretty similar. And he's just as human as I am." Locke considered the oddity of that statement, but let it go.

"Twins? Gifted and Non? I hardly think we could find such a suitable pair anywhere around here. I'm not the lucky type. What if we found two people with different...capabilities of the same gift. We'd be able to find out how the brainwaves change from the amateur to the experienced, and that would tell us about the brainwaves that effect that gift, it's a little round about, but probably a good deal easier."

He was glad to switch off of the topic of who exactly this name he dropped was, silently cursing himself for doing that, and pacing about before he looked up.

"Yes, I think trying to find two people with the same gift and analyzing the changes might be a better idea then trying to find a set of siblings like that. I don't even know anyone like that, so I doubt I could do it without drawing too much attention to myself..."

Locke waved his hand.

"I'm getting to much into the how of this. Perhaps we should go over what exactly we can do once we find such people, that might be the best course of action here, right? After all, we should do what we can, when we can."

He nodded, convinced it was so.

(Check your PMs)

[Ϛ The Inventor]

The Inventor was silent for a long time after Locke finished speaking, until he finally replied with, "Yes, that's what I thought." What exactly he was referring to he did not say, however. He made a strangish noise and held out his arm, and the squirrel promptly ran down the arm and jumped off of it, a la diving board, before taking off across the room to do who knows what.

"Let's go over what we can do..." The Inventor distractedly agreed, hopping onto the floor again. He swept off the table he'd been sitting on and unrolled a sheet of drafting paper. "Time to brainstorm. Put some things in writing."

And so they got down to it.

This a good enough fade to black for ya?