Logs:Help Ticket

Help Ticket
Dramatis Personae Cerebro, Halim
In Absentia Joshua, Scott	2024-08-30 "I don't know if you've noticed, only we've a bit of a situation here." (Part of Mojo Plot.)
Location <XAV> Lake - Xs Grounds
Bright, bright, bright; the lake glitters wide and expansive here, stretching off into the distance. Sunlight, moonlight, starlight, it catches them all. Lapping at the rocky shore, its deep waters are frigid in winter and cool even in summer. A stone pier stretches out a ways into the water, wide and smooth, though often icy in winter. The water teems with life nevertheless, home to myriad species of fish that provide for ample fishing or just lazy watching on a slow summer day, for those who want to take a boat from the boathouse out to the center of the lake, or perhaps lounge on the pier and try their luck. In between terms, it's always quieter than it feels like it should be around the school. Even now with the last-ditch frenzy of construction and renovation prepping the new buildings for the start of term there's a very different vibe than there will be once all the students have returned. Even more quiet, somehow, than it usually, is, but maybe that's just Friday for you. Maybe. Out here at the lake, far from the tense-fraught atmosphere hanging uneasily around the too-empty mansion right now, Halim seems neither tense nor fraught, oblivious perhaps to whatever worries the oddly dwindled remaining staff might be having this afternoon. He's in bland grey t-shirt and jeans, enjoying his lunch (plain cheese pizza and a Dr. Pepper) alone on the pier, pizza set aside for the moment so he can turn a rock idly over and over in one hand. He's sipping at his soda, curling his hand in close to his belly where he sits before he uncurls his arm to fling the rock outward -- one, two, three skips. Not impressive, perhaps, but he nods in grim satisfaction to himself before he picks his pizza back up to munch. Alas, Halim's peace and quiet is coming to an end. One of the school's hive of bee drones is buzzing quietly out and circling down to land on the edge of the pier. "So." Cerebro's voice sounds even more clipped than usual. "I don't know if you've noticed, only we've a bit of a situation here. What with most of the resident faculty members missing. And the term beginning next week." His speech smooths out abruptly, the radical shift in his cadence probably the result of a new or adjusted function in his speech generation programming. "I realize it's a long shot, but you wouldn't happen to know where they've all got off to, would you?" "Your faculty keep strange schedules." Halim takes another bite of his pizza, munching it slowly without turning to look at the bee. There's definitely no trace of offense in his flat voice as he adds, dismissive: "I wasn't invited." The bee does not reply at once. It sits there cycling through its admirably lifelike idle animation for just under nine seconds, which might as well be an eternity at his clock speeds. Finally, still very even: "Many of them keep rather predictable schedules, strange or no, but they're not on those schedules any longer, to the best of my knowledge. They all vanished at once." "Many of them are vigilantes," Halim replies immediately, unfussed, and licks a stray speck of tomato sauce from his lip. "Who vanished?" "Not all of them." Normally, this would probably be the point where Cerebro starts getting performatively exasperated if not outright snippy. This time, he pushes a database file at Halim with the names of the missing and the times of the last pings his network received from their phones. "And they've never run a mission with that many people without planning or gear. You don't know Scott Summers like I do." "Oh," Halim hasn't actually been tense, but he is huffing with a slight dismissiveness the very instant this file hits his mind. "Joshua." He finishes the last tip of his pizza, licking at his fingertips. "Were they drinking? Could be anywhere." He reaches for his soda can, but hesitates with his hand on it, only here finally turning to frown at the bee. "What have you come out here for?" "Some of them were probably drinking." There is something like an uncertain rising pitch in Cerebro's reply. "But none of them have contacted the school since, and that's wildly out of character for several of them if they're to be missing a very vital day of work. Even if they did go voluntarily at the outset, they might be in trouble." The bee rotates its head -- unnecessarily, given the excellent sensors in its compound eyes -- to look back up at Halim, and it's almost five seconds before he manages, a little stiffly, "I would like your help. Locating them. Please." "Oh." Halim turns back to the water. He lifts his soda, slurping down a long gulp. His mind is expanding, rapid if only distantly, abstrusely sensible to Cerebro where several of the old drones he's commandeered are floating around the grounds. "Where have you started?" Cerebro grants Halim admin access on his network -- a bit anticlimactically, after weeks of bristling. Maybe he just doesn't have the spare cycles to bristle with anymore. I know you don't need root and you never did This is so I don't throw errors only Cerebro points him to the web-indexing subsystem. There are hundreds of processes dedicated to this search, each focusing on an area like "relevant behavioral patterns" or "digital footprint metadata" or "news that might be about them". "I've got ungodly amounts processing power," says the bee, primly and only a little envious, "but I haven't got your bandwidth or access. None of their phones, faces, or logins have popped up anywhere I can reach." Halim's eyes cut to the side, his eyebrow hitching minutely at ungodly processing power. He doesn't reply, though he does give a very quiet hum. "Might take time." He slurps at his soda, which is just about finished; somewhere in the mansion, a drone is stirring in the kitchen to get him another. "Not many places on earth I can't reach." "Well, maybe it's not 'ungodly' to you, but more cycles and less latency never hurts." The bee grooms its antennae; Cerebro re-allocates most his system resources for Halim's use and appends a long list of off-site servers, as well. "From what I can tell, your power simulates massive parallel architecture. So does mine. It's not on the same scale, but I'm still quite a lot bigger on the inside than the specs suggest." It's hard to tell if he's being defensive or assuming Halim is (politely?) (dismissively?) not looking at his core processes. "I know it might take a good long while." Several seconds pass -- and this time Halim can see some of Cerebro's more arcane subsystems spooling hard -- before the drone says, "And we might not find them even then. But I hope you're right and they're only on a bender somewhere." Halim is (politely? dismissively? who is to say) not actually addressing Cerebro's maybe-maybe-not defensiveness. All he says, somewhat dispassionately, is: "Didn't say that." He taps a finger against the side of his empty soda can with a hollow tink, and then sets it aside. "Said they could be anywhere."