1964-08-22 - Don't Worry About the Pill, Act II, Part I
Summary: Vesper does some investigating after finding an in
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vesper remy-lebeau 


Another dollar, another day, another shift at the lab in an effort to crack those DNA secrets that Vesper is trying to wrangle. Progress has been good and there's a feeling that maybe, just maybe, they might be on to something. Even from there, from the moment they finally are victorious, it will be years of testing via the FDA to get the drug approved. So why the rush?

This particular morning as Vesper is in the lab, things seem pretty normal at first. Her coworkers are chipper, Rooney is chipper, but after a couple of hours she'll notice the same shady man from the interview is apparently meeting with Rooney again. And the Professor's face is decidedly dour. Clearly he is frustrated from behind two plates of glass.


Maybe, maybe onto something. Vesper lives in a world of possibilities, a place of unknowns where even the understanding of cutting edge human understanding barely grasps at terra incognita. She is reaching through the mists of ignorance to feel out shapes and comprehend their meanings. There will always be fumbles and cuts, hypotheses trashed, but the girl is focused with the wit and knowledge gleaned at the knees of experts. Progress may be good; nonetheless, she's not satisfied, even while her fellow students are digging through their findings and edging around explanations. She can pursue harder and further than some. So why the rush?

Answers matter. She needs to get ahead of people, doctors and students, and interpret what lies out before her. It's her only way to leverage something and throw up road barriers where necessary, occlude findings and build in her own traps and failsafes. It's an ugly business. Espionage of the highest order is part of her life now. She brushes her fingers along her jaw, staring into the darkness through the microscope. Weakness; there's so much she could wish for. She peers down and makes her notes in the backwards cipher that doesn't mean much. Da Vinci mastered this business. She might too. What are we looking for? What is the point of all this?

Questions without answers. While the coworkers are cheery, she wears the same faint smile but feels absolutely none of that joy.


The meeting seems to be wrapping up. Rooney looks disappointed as he leans back in his chair, and laces his fingers over his head as he appears to be deep in thought. The mysterious man from Vesper's interview exits the room and slowly moves out into the hallway. He stands a while in front of the glass that separates the hallway from the lab before he slowly begins to make his way towards the exit.


No time like the present, is there? She examines her work, laid out. There are results of the various analyses, those attempts to peer into the atomic structure of everything. It would be a thousand times easier if she had access to a hidden city, but is finding out the truth a risk to a nation she doesn't remember, a place she's never seen? It'll be a necessity to speak with her brother, in a few hours.

She gets to her feet, stretching out her arms carefully at her sides. The vitality restored to her day by day since her renewal doesn't conceal that she herself could be mistaken as sick, still. That she is slowly recovering from a kiss of death on the brow, perhaps. Her folder and papers gathered, she tucks them together and locks them in a drawer. Standard protocol, of course, for anyone whisking out. "I'm going to take some air and coffee, oui?" Nothing to shock them there. "Let me know if anything exciting happens." Then she's heading out of the room, her ballerina stride and upright manner stricken by a kind of grace. O mysterious figure, maybe he wants coffee too. If he doesn't, it really takes her no time at all to slip into an empty room - ladies' or otherwise - and dissolve. Or chat. That's an art among scientists, right?


But the man doesn't want coffee. He wants to leave. He hits the door and his gait begins to speed up. Clearly he's headed towards the parking lot, off towards a gleaming black sedan. The button is pressed and the cardoor pops open and within a moment, he's sliding into the leather seats and starting up the vehicle.

His journey is taking him west, across the bridge and into East Rutherford, New Jersey, and towards a smattering of warehouses kept in that area.


It's almost laughable how fast one can move when not restrained by flesh. Vesper needs only to stretch her hands out and her fingers unweave from their moorings. The thought passes and she is merely light, and perhaps not even that. Glass may be solid, but not for something as thin as she is. To the passing eye she's invisible. To herself, not invisible but simply a flash and a beam or a wave. Particle or something? She won't tell. The man drives far away from New York and eats the traffic churning over the road network. By diving and darting she can stay above it. It's going to mean spending an afternoon hidden in the wilds of upstate or the beachfront parks on Long Island but worth it. That man, stranger, ghost in the world. She's the ghost in the machine and stops to drop into one of the power lines adjacent to the warehouses he heads for. As soon as he shows a sign of entering one, the Inhuman girl has to figure out how to convert herself to fit into the wires and head inside.


As soon as he enters an older, brick warehouse, the man heads towards the office area. More remarkably the warehouse is filled with all sorts of jars of body parts, intensely large beakers filled with green goo, and suspended animals that look to have undergone some sort of modification. They are grotesque by any standard.

Milling about are men, clearly mutants, who are packaging something into a VW van.


Bioethics: it's a field almost without a name, the collision of philosophy and ethics upon the fulcrum of transformative change. Vesper studies that intensely. This warehouse personifies all the reasons not to act a certain way. She skims through the electrical wires, thin as a spark. The chattering signals pass through her ignored. Anything drawing on the current doesn't pull her in. She can peek out through the devices or sockets. Lightbulbs are good for that. Already feeding electricity into the bulb, the system makes it easy for her to lurk along the filaments. Would that ne'er-do-well be proud of her taking initiative or slap his hand to his forehead for the risk? Needs must. It's better than a life confined to a hospital bed.

So there are body parts. All human, not human? Do they have tags and titles, anything of note for her to read? That gives her a sense of what she's possibly working with.

The mutants around the van are another point of interest. She'll slip through the ephemera of a building to find a better vantage, not directly overhead. No one ever says scouting is fun. But there's an awful truth. Be careful what you wish for. Wish to know more? Clearly this operation is far above and beyond…


There are humans, animals, and some that look like a mix in between. No tags or titles, nothing like that, unfortunately. Meanwhile, the mutant men at the automobile are simply packing unmarked boxes into the back cab. They're dressed like everyday people, but their mutants are the kind that you don't find in edgy fashion magazines. These are the type of people you wish you weren't.


The sorts who look odd. The ones who populate the fringes of the world. Vesper lacks horns and spikes as far as she knows, and there's a certain measure of horror. She waits; the wisdom for waiting seems smart. At least before she can follow out the van once it's loaded up. Or they all leave, but there still is an unaccounted patron and professor around. And that keeps her very much on edge.


The man she followed sits in the office on the telephone. His until now unheard voice is very loud and seems rather animated, but what he says is indistinguishable. With the boxes finally filled, the mutant men file into the van. One stays out in order to open the overhead door, but he's collected as soon as he closes it behind the automobile.


|ROLL| Vesper +rolls 1d20 for: 3


The emphatic point of getting out seems the point of wisdom. Vesper gives one last look over her shoulder to the warehouse, taking in what she can. The bombardment of signals through the electrical lines are hard for her to interpret, so she simply relays them in a fork to… well, the place it goes is probably a jarring note for Nexus, wherever he is. He probably will kick her for using him as an answering service. Her electrical state sends her zigzagging to the last point in the warehouse after the men in the vehicle. Then a second passes for her to drop again, back to her preferred point. Light, naturally. It's daytime. No harm, no foul.

…. Or one hopes. Wherever they're headed, she tags along, drinking up the sunshine while moving.


The van takes off, back towards the city. But rather than head towards the area of NYU, it heads towards Midtown instead. After a few miles it seems clear they're headed past midtown and to the east towards Mutant Town. Finally the van pulls towards a halt on the side of the road where a group of men meet them from inside a shop to help unload the boxes.


Hopefully this is going to amount to something worthwhile. Idle thoughts of a geneticist hovering among so different a world. Hovels and shacks, tenements and forgettable businesses. She curls up on the nearest fire escape and watches, but that isn't entirely satisfying. When they offload the boxes she drops down and slinks up over the shelter of the building. It shouldn't take more than a shake of a lamb's tail to find a crack and look inside. Right?


As Vesper tries to get a good look inside she'll see the dark office of some sort. There are no signs, and there are no bits of furniture. No front desk. It's not clear what this storefront is used for anyhow. The large window in the front is shrouded in shades, but she will be able to see a long row of stacked boxes that look just like this one.


As Vesper tries to get a good look inside she'll see the dark office of some sort. There are no signs, and there are no bits of furniture. No front desk. It's not clear what this storefront is used for anyhow. The large window in the front is shrouded in shades, but she will be able to see a long row of stacked boxes that look just like this one.


When and how an opportunity presents itself, she doesn't entirely worry about. If time is her ally then she waits for a chance to peer into one of the boxes to see what it happens to contain. The fact it's an empty warehouse full of boxes isn't helpful. Are they boxes of body parts? Do they chime when someone makes a noise? Has this man figured out how to make meat cubes to rid the world of overreliance on cows?


Finally all of the actors leave, giving Vesper the chance to get inside the store and inspect some of the boxes. As she takes a closer look she'll find that inside are large bags of a white powdery substance. Finer than flour. It is not cocaine, but it is the same sort of idea.

Meanwhile, back at the University, Rooney is looking surprised as the other students are explaining that Vesper just left for some coffee and never came back. He checks with his secretary, and then with people in the office at the other lab in the building. No sign of the young researcher.


What is it? That's not something she knows. And carrying off the substance for analysis is simply not a possibility. What one can do is limited on that front, but she all but forces herself to memorize the location from street level, the bird's eye view too.

Then she rises and scuds away for the university. Not so far away. It's easy for her to register some of the troubles while she drops into a ladies' lavatory on the top floor of the biology building. Awaiting until it's empty, she reconstitutes herself fairly slowly. It takes more than a few seconds. Heading out after washing her hands and going down back to the lab leaves time to mull over questions. First, does she have Remy's phone number? If so then that's the first step, telling him the address and letting him fill in blanks. Or deciding to meet at somewhere to do the same. The second, to head into the lab again where Rooney and the others wait.


After the phone call is finished, Vesper arrives, just as Rooney is going to leave the lab to go to his office and call the police. It's not like her to be absent, after all, and certainly not without telling someone. The Professor nearly runs her over as she walks into the lab.

"Vesper!" he gleams, "You're alright!"

"We thought something happened to you," pipes in one of the assistants.


"Sick." She touches her chest, giving no further indication. This is clearly not to be surprised; the girl is practically translucent at times. She does suffer in the congested atmosphere and coughing quietly - or even blood, if it's really bad - is not unknown. Her rueful smile is not unkind. "I think I should be okay for now. Though I may need to avoid excitement for the next few hours."


"Oh, honey, I am so sorry," Rooney says, moving to comfort her. "But we're really just glad you're safe." As the other students nod their assent, Rooney adds, "It's a pretty dangerous world out there and we wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you."


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