An impatient tapping of feet. Pursed lips. Furrowed brow. Vocado waited in the front office of the research lab, being given an automated, repeated 'thank you for your patience!' by the tinny voice of the robotic receptionist. How annoying. How very annoying!
Try as he might to stay calm, something had him on edge. He'd requested another meeting with Cheri barely a week after their last, and labeled the message (or rather, messages) urgent. Each one was, of course, exceedingly vague, and insisted that they meet at a location with advanced research technology on-site. He wasn't sure this would be the proper place, but regardless, he awaited.
"C'mon, c'mon..."
Why was he so anxious? Even he wasn't sure. Sitting on the cold steel of the bench, he turned over the strange capsule case in his hands, careful not to open it in public. Something about that artifact was... Interesting was the wrong word. Curious. Engaging. Mystifying. Enticing? No. None of them worked. He'd ask Cheri, and the first words out of her mouth when she saw them would surely be the exact words he had in mind but couldn't quite place.
Vocado checked his watch, and then suddenly remembered he didn't wear a watch at all, and instead tapped his Scouter. Rolling his eyes as he read the time, he waited, and waited, and waited...
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 2:44:51 GMT -5
”Warmaster Vocado,” Chancellor Cheri’s voice piped over the external speaker, so perfect in its clarity that Vocado might have first thought that the tuffle was right in front of him, ”you’ll have to forgive my lateness, I was held up having a meeting with your queen. From what I remember of our last interaction, you said we would ‘catch up’ when there was progress. I regret to inform you that my project is not yet finished. So, on your end, having read your messages— I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve come across something of note, are you? Answer that in person. Come in.”
There was a buzz, and the doors opened.
There weren’t many tuffle scientists around, which was why no one was around to let Vocado in. This was, after all, a public holiday, celebrating some ancient Plantian federationship that ostensibly represented the start of the tuffles as a singular political body— the realities of history were a bit more complicated than that, as they always are, but it made for a good holiday. Instead, light-up arrows on the floor would point Vocado in the right direction.
When he found his way, Cheri would be waiting for him, reading over notes her scouter had taken from her meeting with Zuqetta. She’d close that tab upon his appearance, her full focus on the Vegetan. ”Try not to mind the scarcity. It’s a public holiday, after all.” She was leaning against a laboratory table.
Vocado made no attempt to reply to the loudspeaker, and instead eagerly (or perhaps impatiently) awaited the doors opening. The moment they slid open, the Saiyan shoved through, eyes darting to and fro as if he were in possession of a highly illegal, or perhaps highly dangerous artifact. Perhaps he was. The problem was that he didn't know for sure.
Nodding at Cheri, he finally calmed some. Seeing her here, in the flesh, gave him some small sense of comfort. Her knowledge on things out of the ordinary might very well give him the answers he needed.
"Chancellor. I apologize for the intrusion. I think I may have found something that might pique your interest."
Producing the case from under his arm, he placed it on the table. It was a small thing, fit for something around the size of a pair of sunglasses. With a click, the case popped open, revealing a set of earrings. Golden orbs dangling off a simple chainlink arrangement, ending in a hoop. Their glassy material shimmered in the dull glow of the overhead lights.
"I found these on a distant world. Fringe planet between jurisdictions. Hanging off the ears of a skeletal corpse, rotted to dust and tatters. Everything else in the cave was eroded as well. Save for these."
Vocado looked over to Cheri, hands on his hips.
"I know its frivolous, but there's... Something about them. I can't shake the feeling. Do you have anything that can scan their makeup? Detect what their purpose is, or at least what its made of to withstand years in an eroding cave without so much as dust on its surface?"
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 3:47:05 GMT -5
Her eyebrows narrowed by a noticeable degree. ”Oh?”
Then Cheri saw it. Now, phrased like that, you might think that Cheri had a moment of immediate recognition, but, no, sadly not. Cheri would be ashamed to admit that it took her a whole tenth of a second to recognise this style of jewelry from something she’d seen once or twice multiple years before.
”There’s something rather peculiar about distant worlds and what can be found on them, isn’t there? You, with this… shinjin jewelry, I believe, and Yangcong with his ‘blue flower virus’.” Yes, she did recognise it. The ones she’d seen before were green but, yes, unmistakably, she’d seen this before. ”Did you run any diagnostics or tests on this skeleton, or its ‘tatters’? Better yet, have you brought any of either with you? Perhaps there’s something to learn from the wearer’s height, if nothing else.”
Still, Vocado had some ideas, and Cheri was nodding. And not just nods of acknowledgement, either, but nods of thoughtful confirmation. ”Certainly. But first, I’ll tell you what I know: these are of shinjin make. Shinjin being a sort of… species of divine caretakers who administer the proper balance of the cosmos from the Otherworld— the realm of realms containing our Afterlives.” Cheri didn’t know how much of this Vocado already knew. It was likely either boring to hear, or utterly crazy. ”I met one, once, on Earth. A shinjin named Ward, who wore a pair just like this one, only green.” Cheri had good reason to be confident in her memory: she was a tuffle.
”But yes, I have a few tests I can perform.” She revealed that she was wearing gloves— programmable matter, only put there seconds before. ”May I?”
"Just a bit, yes." Vocado produced a small capsule, and offered it to Cheri. Inside were a set of vials. Bonemeal from the corpse, a scrap of cloth from the creature, and a chip of the rusted blade in its body. Things he'd collected on a chance whim after dealing with the disturbance on Mogu.
"Shinjin..." Vocado had heard the term before. Kai-folk, they were called. Higher beings. The sort of folk Lottus wanted to exterminate. Not the sort you'd run into on a daily basis, and certainly not the type to leave artifacts around.
"You don't think the color has something to do with their use, do you? Perhaps it denotes ranking in their otherworldly hierarchy?"
His hand rested on his chin, and a finger tapped on his lips in confusion and concern. Thousands-- millions of thoughts raced this way and that. Wonder and mystery and all those other words that imply fascination with the topic at hand.
"Just how many Shinjin are there, anyway. They're a reclusive folk, being extra-dimensional and such. I presumed they were myth, but if you say you met one, I hardly have reason to deny their existence."
He nodded, and slid the case closer toward her. Whatever tests she wished to perform, she could do without intrusion from Vocado.
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 4:38:33 GMT -5
Oh, good, Vocado had brought additional materials to analyse, Cheri was briefly concerned that she’d have just a pair of earrings to go off of.
She carefully handled the earrings and the additional samples, holding them up to the light one by one in case there was something to them she hadn’t seen in her initial glance. There was not. ”I’d love to tell you. Unfortunately, I know little about the shinjin beyond what I just told you, and I’m not entirely sure about all of that.” Her emphasis on balance in the role of the shinjin was inherited by Ward, the only shinjin she’d interacted with, who emphasised his particular concept of balance above all else— to a fault, and beyond. The idea had some merit, though: the colour might have represented rank, it might have been a choice of vanity, they might have represented different cultural divisions of the shinjin as a species, and they might have represented different magical states— perhaps, if Ward had died, Cheri theorised, the green of his earrings would fade to the yellow colour she saw before her. Or maybe it was like that but not intentional, and it changed colour like a banana might as it ripens and, in turn, withers. For now, though: insufficient data. Who could say?
First, she set up the earrings on a 3D microscope, so-called in that it was able to look through an object and see their composition as a whole, through the third dimension, instead of seeing just one 2D sheet of vision. Then, she took a sample of the bonemeal and placed it in a machine Vocado wouldn’t have recognised, placed the shard of metal under a light, and placed the cloth is a machine that looked like the exact middle ground of an ice-cream machine, a coffee machine, and a blender. ”Just one moment.”
There was a ding!, and then another ding, and another, and another, until it was all ready for her perusal. ”Let’s see…”
First, the earrings themselves. ”These earrings appear to be made of an uncommon mineral made of the usual gamut of elements, primarily sulfur. It’s not too far from what I’d confidently call a deliberately impure orpiment. I don’t imagine it’s impossible for such a material to have formed in our universe, though I suspect this didn’t come from here.”
Then, the bonemeal. ”No species match. The closest match appears to be to… apples.” Huh. Her first thought was that it was so far from anything else, genetically, and that it didn’t mean anything that apples happened to be the closest— but then didn’t make any sense, did it? Especially not when, looking at these results, apples were a startlingly close match. ”Strongly apples. A shinjin, I assume?” If Cheri were a tad less responsible in her science, she might have considered cloning the DNA sample just to confirm.
Then, the shard of metal. ”Oh, yes, quite old indeed. Eight thousand years since its forging— but it might have been an old sword even when our shinjin died.”
Lastly, the cloth. ”Yes, indeed. These clothes were last washed nine hundred years ago. Cloth type… not matching known records.”
But she looked to the earrings once again. ”But, no, there’s something… off, about those earrings, in a manner that dislikes the very notion that it could be described in such terms. I’ll need to perform a thaumatological analysis. One moment…”
She began looking through drawers, not familiar with this laboratory’s layout.
Vocado watched, attention at its fullest as test after test was performed. He was glad to know there was something to be gained from his curiosity. Even if it was as simple as an endlessly fashionable enchantment on the earrings, at least he’d know for sure.
”Apples? Aren’t those an Earth import?” Puzzling indeed. Vocado pondered the implication, but came up with nothing worth positing vocally.
An ancient sword, clothes with no origin point in the mortal realm, and fruit-based DNA. It almost felt like the earrings were no longer the strangest thing on the table.
”Do you have technology that can detect… Magic? Ki can be quantified and numbered, and that’s a spiritual force, so surely magic can be somehow studied as well, right?”
Madness. Madness and insanity. He wished he was a third party, so that he could laugh Vocado out of the room. But he couldn’t, and, unfortunately, “Magic” might be exactly what these earrings were. Ancient artifacts usually were such, anyway.
Perhaps the very thing Cheri was looking for was, in fact, a magic analyzing device. Who was to say, really? Tuffles were strange like that.
”Try to humor me, but you must have at least one theory as to what they could do?”
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 5:28:15 GMT -5
”’Apples’ are not from any world in particular. ‘Apple’ is a strategy, after all, like how ‘tree’ is a strategy. Many worlds have trees, but they aren’t related to each other, they fill the same niche so thoroughly that they end up becoming, in many cases, genetically similar.” She looked up from her work, to Vocado. ”You don’t find many of them nowadays, but Plant used to have quite a few.” There was an alternate possibility, though one Cheri doubted: it might be less that the shinjin are like apples and more like apples are like shinjin, and the origin of apples is found in this common source. This flew in the face of evolutionary records, however, hence the doubt.
”Yes, indeed. Observe:” Having just found what she was after, Cheri presented a strange device to Vocado. It looked rather like a tennis racket, except, instead of the usual grid of strings, its strings were A) shaped to resemble a pentagram symbol, B) vibrantly red, and, C), illusory and intangible. The handle had enough buttons on it that it could be reprogrammed to serve as an adequate TV remote. ”Thaumatology is the scientific study of magic, and this is a thaumatological scanner.” Thaumatology was a funny field, all in all, if only because it tended to attract the strangest scientists around. Sometimes they insisted on being called ‘wizards’.
”Oh, sure, I have one or two stray hypotheses,” she said, trying to turn the mechanism on, and focused rather strongly on that despite the subject she spoke of, ”The first is that these are the mechanism by which shinjin can traverse between dimensional barriers. The second is that they are simply enchanted to exude feelings of improperness and strangeness, as we have both picked up on, perhaps to ward off the unwelcome.”
Ah, perfect: a screen on the side of the racket lit up, showing that nothing was being scanned. Just to test, she brought a beaker to the racket and pressed a button, and suddenly it floated in place. The diagnosis: mundane. Correct. She pressed the ‘release’ button, and caught the beaker out of the air before it smashed on the ground. She then placed one of the earrings in and pressed the button, causing it, too, to levitate. The data came in slowly.
”So, first, keep in mind that I am not trained in thaumatology beyond the confines of a few lectures,” and her involvement with Nasu, but, shh, ”but I appear to have something resembling an answer: the magic of this earring in particular appears to be… pointed, rather strongly, to the other.” She motioned to the other earring. ”There also appears to be some degree of… well, if I’m interpreting this right, capacity for transformation and alternation. But details beyond that are difficult to ascertain.”
Vocado’s breath hitched for just a moment. Teleporting to Otherworld? Maybe someone like Ward was how Lottus escaped, or how Yangcong did. The afterlife was rather sacred to Vocado, so if that is what these were for, he would probably try to find someone to return these to.
”I can’t believe you have a scanner for that. Well, correction, I can’t believe magic is enough of an intrusion in life that you’d have needed to develop a scanner in the first place.”
Being a stranger to magic was, of course, not his problem. He’d run into plenty of magicians on the rare days off he had during the war, and one of the former queens of Plant, Rosemary, was literally a demon hybrid. Something about it all seemed so far away, even though he was directly interacting with these magical elements. This, though?
”Transformation? You mean like… like going Super Saiyan, or more like the Arcosians shape changing?” His focus returned to the earrings, watching them as if they were about to scurry off somewhere if nobody was looking.
”What if we… tried them on? Do you think they’re cursed in some way? Dooming us lowly mortals to eternal damnation for wearing them?”
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 19:38:29 GMT -5
”While many in the galaxy would rather obscure and keep magical knowledge to themselves as a means of consolidating power, to the tuffle, it is just another avenue of discovery, and just another natural phenomenon to be understood. Magic allows for reproducibility and operates in predictable ways, allowing for experimentation. The arcane and esoteric become the mundane and exoteric.” Now, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. The tuffles had a scientific way of viewing the world, and it suited them well— and, even for magic, had its advantages, having resulted in the tuffle ability to create thaumatological technology and integrate magic with other tech— but tuffle magic was hardly world-class. It seemed quite likely that the likes of Namek, Konats, and Earth all had more advanced, better developed magic cultures than Plant, for a plurality of reasons ranging from the obvious to the counterintuitive. The big one was that it just wasn’t the focus.
One distinct flaw in the tuffles’ practice of magic, as a whole, is that while it was rather good at observing magic, it was not particularly good at getting it to do anything that hadn’t already long been worked towards. Most thaumatologists, for example, worked in the space of breaching dimensional barriers, mining minerals from the Demon Realm or picking up energies from the suns of the Otherworld, and it was really quite good at that one thing as practiced in a collaborative, ritual-based context, but good luck trying to get a tuffle ‘wizard’ to actually individually cast any spell in a hurry.
”It is… hard to say. But the ‘alteration’ quality does seem to be rather strongly tied to the ‘pointed at the other one’ quality. Perhaps it… disguises two wearers as each other. Either way, I wouldn’t recommend wearing them. I’m less concerned that we’ll be damned by some hidden magical quality we didn’t see coming and more that whatever the immediate, intended effect is not to our liking. And possibly irreversible.”
That did not rule out experimentation, however. ”But perhaps it might be worth the risk to instead try these earrings on something more expendable?” She motioned to a drawer labelled ‘Saiba Seeds’.
So they had some sort of pull toward one another? Curious. Part of him wondered if they became earrings due to this inherent pull, or if the inverse were the truth. He’d probably never know, but regardless the theories might assist solving the conundrum.
Vocado moved toward the seedlings, pulling the drawer open and grabbing a pair of pod-folk from a divot in the drawer labeled ‘variation #267’ Alongside a vial of green liquid, he took the sample of Saiba’s and scanned the room.
”Dirt? Surely you have a little plot in here somewhere.”
As if on cue, a little Machine Mutant with a rectangular head hovered toward him, sputtering down to the ground and planting its feet. Atop its metallic head was a little mound of dirt, seemingly freshly dug. Judging by its pigment, it was surely from the Beri Forest, or somewhere close to it.
”So, just two should be enough? We can always grow more, I suppose.”
He stuck a finger into the dirt, and then dropped each pod into the hole.
”You don’t think we’ll lose access to the earrings once they equip them, do you?” He shook his head, answering his own question. ”No— Kai’s are seen with them constantly, and the corpse had them on for ages. They don’t get absorbed into the being, I wouldn’t think.”
The liquid hissed as it made contact with the samples, and Vocado closed up the dirt pile. Subtly, he tapped his finger on his opposite forearm, stepping back as they rapidly grew.
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 22:23:38 GMT -5
Cheri wordlessly motioned to the Machine Mutant as it entered the room with a tray of saiba-appropriate soil— on its head, no less. ”Yes, we can, if we really must.” Cheri’s tone implied she wouldn’t be particularly keen to use more than they had to, or at least that she was opposed to wasting them/using them inefficiently. These weren’t just your everyday saiba seeds, after all: given how mutable and varied saiba were, you’d be unlikely to ever find a ‘standard saiba’ outside of laboratory conditions. Yes, these saiba seeds were designed and replicated to be ‘unmutated’ and ‘normal’, but differentiated in minute ways to allow for differences to be noted, which also helped prevent any accidents if a saibabeast turned out to be unexpectedly violent. Mostly they were for performing tests on saiba biology but, yes, they could act as labrats in non-saiba experiments just as well.
Cheri briefly pondered the plant-like nature of saiba. They would be substantially closer to the shinjin, genetically, than any mammalian species… Interesting.
Cheri heard Vocado’s concerns, but didn’t have enough to go on and so couldn’t reasonably reach any conclusions yet. ”I could not say. But, in the interests of caution and an appropriate methodology, I recommend: one earring on one, then two earrings on one, then one earring on each.”
The saiba grew: first their heads were visible, which butted out of the dirt like a flower at the start of its life, but this ended up being substantially less pretty. Both being of ‘variation #267’, the two were genetically identical and, given their identical growth conditions, ended up indistinguishable from each other. The two saibarats were as you’d expect: small, green, four-limbed, and fibrous. Their heads were still bulbous, but violent instincts had been designed out of them, meaning their cranial acid could only come spilling with outside interference. They made slight ‘myi-myi-myi’ sounds. ”They won’t bite.” Thankfully, they had the pointed, obvious ears you’d come to expect from saibabeasts. ”Go ahead.”
Vocado was expecting the usual creature. Bulbous, clawed and speaking in its clicking language. But instead, he saw a rat-like alternative. Mutations like these weren’t uncommon, but it was curious to know that the Tuffles had specifically bred samples for testing purposes. Food for thought.
”Alright, then.”
Grabbing the earrings, he was careful to move slow. For fear of startling the saiba, or in concern for the durability of the earrings? Some mixture of both surely.
The rats chittered as the Warmaster approached, leaning close to clip one earring on the left rat’s right ear. He waited a beat, then another, and nothing. He should have suspected as much, but there wasn’t so much as a sparkle or ring of noise. Nothing at all.
Curiosity overtaking him, he clipped the other earring on, and flinched backwards moments later. Still, again, nothing. The rat looked up at him expectantly, as if he were waiting for a treat after sitting still. Turning to Cheri, he sighed.
”Should we try blasting him? Maybe they have some sort of defensive property attached to them.” He raised his hand, looking at the palm cautiously. Even with immense restraint, he was certain that he’d turn the creature to paste with any amount of Ki.
”Do you want to do the honors, perhaps? Try a few different variations?”
Post by Chancellor Cheri on Sept 16, 2024 23:11:03 GMT -5
On one hand, this was all very serious. Here they were, intruding upon the sphere of the gods with their technology, reaching towards the heavens with their Lab Rats of Babel. On the other hand, the potara earrings looked disproportionately large on these tiny little rats, and it was a hilarious visual.
”Not a ‘him’,” Cheri corrected, placing a little peace of fertiliser solid in front of the saibarat to nibble on, ”and not so soon. There’s so much we’ve yet to try.” For tuffles, the scientific method tended not to involve shooting things to see if it did anything new, but maybe that was a part of the Vegetan science culture.
Cheri brought her hands towards the already potara’d saibarat. It seemed concerned at the hand reaching towards it, so she reassured it with a scritch-scritch along the neck. Its guard down, it didn’t even seem to notice as the second earring was removed from it. She brought it to the other one, who sniffed it, smelled that it smelled like saibarat (having just been on one), and accepted that it must be good. Not expecting anything to happen, Cheri placed it on the second saibarat’s right ear, and—
”Oh, would you look at that: they’re glowing.”
The lighting in the room seemed to dim, almost distracting from the fact that the two saibarats flew towards each other, very quickly making nothing of the few feet between them! Upon making contact, there was a blinding flash of light, forcing Cheri to close her eyes…
… And, when she opened them again, she saw that the two saibarats were right next to each other, on the clean laboratory floor, rather confused and scared.
”... It… flung them towards each other…?” Cheri considered it for a moment. ”... Perhaps, if they were both shinjin, they would have… well, to borrow a physics term— fused? Absorbed each other?”
Vocado watched, taking a step back unconsciously as Cheri took her turn fiddling with the rats. Within moments, she elicited a reaction. Glowing lights, shifting bodies, and a mild surge of Ki. Having brought his arm up to shield from the glow, he’d only caught half of the scene, and was left wanting.
”Fusion?” He turned to Cheri, eyes still bleary. ”What in the world would Kai’s need with that? And using something so… ubiquitous. You’d think it would be performed with a ritual of sorts, no? A dance or chant? Maybe that’s what we’re missing.”
He plucked one of the earrings off the nearest rat, being careful to not startle or spook the little guy. Turning it over in his hands, his head tilted as he eyed the mildly candescent object.
”I hate to offer the idea but, what if… we tried? Maybe the Saiba’s aren’t compatible, or are too unaware of the situation for the magic to work properly?”
He heard himself say ‘for the magic to work’ and felt his innermost self retch at the prospect. Fairytales and folk legends were no stranger to Saiyan mythos, but “magic” needing to “work properly” sounded preposterous to his logical half.
”Or, for lack of a better term… maybe these things need to be recharged somehow. Batteries got low?”
Last Edit: Sept 16, 2024 23:59:06 GMT -5 by Vocado