Allure City Laboratory
Ryan Xercial had been having a good shift, so far, before he had received a call from his wife on the clear screen that rested above his desk, connected to it by a thin band of Veranite. It wasn’t like her to call him in the middle of a shift, but when he answered, he knew it was her voice, from the frantically spoken words that she said as soon as he had answered. “Ryan, I know you’re at work, but do me a favor, and turn on the news.” Ryan’s thin eyebrows, which seemed to not be hair, but darker skin resting where the eyebrows on a human would normally, furrowed in confusion. As she spoke, her higher pitched voice signaled to Ryan that she was almost on the verge of screeching, as it echoed in the laboratory office he had been given. The male began to speak, only to have his wife cut him off before the first word could leave his mouth. “Just do it, Ryan, please.”
Frowning, he leaned forwards, and his long digits brushed the glasses on his head, to turn on the electronic overlay that made work so much easier for him. The display on the inside of the lens flickered to life, and, instead of waiting on the main display to fully appear, he drew a hasty design with his eyes to bringing up Allure’s news network. His body went rigid as his blue skin paled even further. Allure wasn’t on Fortis anymore. Earth? He had apparently caught the broadcast that Margaret Iedereen had sent to most of the planet near the end. “Veronica, be careful and keep safe in the house. Alright? I’ll be home after a little while. Thank you, I love you.” He said, before she sighed, and responded. “I’ll be going to see if everyone else is okay. I love you too.”
And then, silence, so the dark-haired male turned both the desk display and his glasses off. God, he had just gotten this advancement. Did everything have to go wrong now? Especially when their shift was over in four more hours, and then it would’ve been another sector’s problem. Ryan slid his gray lab coat on over his shirt, the broad shoulders almost too much for his smaller frame, before moving towards the door that lead to his sector of the laboratory, where he was sure nobody else had seen the broadcast. The electronics in the work facility were generally restricted, except for the heads of each sector, who wore gray coats to signify that they were the Head, the one in charge of what they did for that shift.
The coats,stretching from the hood at the top to the floor, were also resistant to most of the materials that were more volatile until harnessed correctly, so Heads were more at risk of being asked to handle dangerous materials, such as Banurium, which was primarily refined to power new buildings until they were connected to the city’s power source. Unrefined, however, it was explosive, and could be used in bombs, as a single bar around the size of a Neurian’s head could be used to destroy a three story house. And Neurians were relatively large, around three meters tall.
As the door faded, when he neared it, reappearing after he crossed the threshold, the Head called to the rest of his sector. Ryan faced them with a calm look, though internally, his mind was anything but calm at the moment. If they focused on his eyes, and not just the way he was standing, they would see worry, and fear, reflected in their dark depths. His skin was perspiring, dark droplets of moisture causing him to appear darker than his usual pale blue. The droplets carried a sweet smell, almost like a flowery candle, but had an acidic component, as he had to resist the urge to take off his glasses, for fear of the moisture warping the frame.
“If anyone here has kin outside of Allure, on Fortis, I want you to take a break, right now, and go try and contact them. The situation right now is that we are on a new planet. Why? I’m not sure, but I’ll be spending the next few hours while you are out working on finding a solution. But when you get back, I need everyone here to be ready to research ways to get us out of this situation. Every stop taken out. I don’t care whether or not we’re supposed to be working on something. This takes absolute priority.” The varying faces of his sector nodded, and Ryan made sure to make a mental note of those who had reacted the strongest to his news, from the ways that their sensory sacs shifted, some bunching up where some species had their ears, to the skin itself of a few races flushing a neon green, like they were about to be sick. He knew that a few of them lived outside Allure, and so their various kin were probably more than worried sick. With a swift turn to his left, he turned on the display to his glasses, as people had begun to rush out in what was almost a frenzy, to contact their loved ones. He had a few calls to make, but they weren’t personal. Now was the time for him to show why he had earned his position among his colleagues.
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“Once more unto the breach, it seems.” An Alluran scientist spoke, softly, as he walked through the brightly lit hallway, passing other workers as they moved past him. As one of the more fluid workers literally opened up and passed him, leaving him slightly disoriented, Ryan shook his head at the being's antics. Ryan and his team had been at work for the past twelve hours, and working for the past eight of them. Not all of them needed full sleep each day, able to put half of their brains at rest while the other continued to work. Such extended periods as what they were doing now was frowned upon, as it could have negative effects, but this was not a normal job.
They had been working to design something that, scientifically, was far above what was in the R&D department right now.
Not only was Ryan working on something to put Allure in its proper place, he was working on another machine that, hopefully, would work in returning the dead Spaniards to life. They, along with the victims of the beam that had suddenly broken through the center of the city, had been killed unnecessarily, and he was sure that they would be needed. This day brought nothing but carnage. Carnage on a scale that was unprecedented to this date, in Allure. A gigantic...no, not even gigantic was enough to describe the wave of water that was headed their way, though he was quite safe, due to the elevation shifting quite rapidly in Allure's tectonic plate. And thank goodness for that.
My, how glad he was that the Laboratory wasn't near the center of Allure. Better than that, his home, which was located in the downtown area of Allure, was far from what they had determined to be the epicenter of both blasts, and thus, he wouldn't have to worry about it being sectioned off. He could go home and see his wife, and make sure she was actually okay, besides the hour break he had just taken to go home and check on her. She hadn't blown the house's glass to bits with her voice, so that was always a good thing to know. Their race was rather prone to, in times of emotional distress, discharge their voices at such a frequency and power that it could shatter glass. Which also meant that they could hear higher frequencies as well, which was useful when testing things. However, none such as what he was doing.
As many of his team liked to remind him, to tell the higher ups, you couldn’t bring back the dead, but that didn’t stop Ryan from pushing both himself and his team to accomplish such a task. The Scientist in him was curious. His personal morals could be pushed aside, but there would be people who might abuse the technology, even in the government he worked for.
After dismissing the workers under him to check on their families, he had delved into illegal machines that had been created to restore health, or repair the body to top condition. Machines that, generally, had been misused by the people, and thus were labeled as a danger to society. The only danger to society, in his mind, were the people within the society itself, or the traders who came from far off planets to show their wares, which, even illegal, were still used by some of the city.
However, he hadn't been initially hired so he could debate over the politics surrounding such things.
He was pulled from his musing when the tablet that was held against his body vibrated. One, two, three pulses of vibration against the side of his body. Usually, it would’ve come from the glasses he wore, but, in the lab, he preferred to use older technology when it came to the outside world. Earlier was an exception, as he hadn’t let his tablet charge the night before work. Ryan bought the blocky thing at an antique shop, and upgraded it to be able to function with modern electronics, including the modern charging pads. He had picked it up from home on his break, as it contained most of his notes on Spatial anomalies themselves, and a few last minute notes. Ryan, picking up his stride, turned the screen on, weaving around the other people in the hallway. Quickly, his eyes glanced down at the tablet, with a glance stolen at the screen that was clutched against his left forearm.
Holo Meeting, Twenty Minutes.
Just that on the screen in big, blocky letters. No doubt sent from the higher ups. Sighing, he walked through the door to his sector, speaking out as he entered. “You better have something for me in the next Ten Minutes. Whatever you’ve got, I need. I’ve got a meeting with the higher ups.”
Hearing the crew behind him scrambling to comply with his demand, Ryan sighed, fixing his glasses, before proceeding to go to the machines that he had gotten from Allure’s confiscated stash, dark eyes narrowing in thought. Cell reprogramming. DNA splicing. Bio-organic grafting and regeneration. He had toyed with each of these ideas as separate entities, not knowing exactly how each machine worked. A couple of the workers had suggested that perhaps the regenerative machine could be made to work in mass, with enough power, using the same genetic splicing method to pull the DNA from a biological sample of each spaniard. But that was as far as they had gotten. There wasn’t a known way to combine the two machines, and so he had sent the idea to a couple of contacts in the engineering department, who still hadn’t gotten back to him. Ryan couldn’t blame them, honestly. He was asking for a lot. Not only were the machines never made with the intention of integrating them into others, there were also issues tampering with the sensitive technology altogether. So, while they had run into a wall there, Ryan had been pleasantly surprised to find out that a few of the other scientists had been tackling the other issue they faced.
How to correct the anomaly altogether, and put Allure back on Fortis, or bring Spain back to appease Earth’s inhabitants, in any case. A few of the theories themselves were crazier than he wanted to give credit for, and so he had disregarded them but encouraged the few that had given him such suggestions to continue to work and try and make a model for him, but he had been given a good idea on how to fix the problem. Spatial Displacement. It was the reason that they were in this situation in the first place, so the technology wasn’t the problem. The only problem that he kept running into was how they would do it. Not only that, but there were items he needed. Items from their planet, that were specific to their home world, Fortis, such as Dianium, Frigonite, and Cyanurum (***). Things that were generally used to trigger a massive space-time distortion. Taught about, but extremely rare, as Fortis had torn almost all of it from the planet, keeping it safe, far away from the main planet. Finding substitutes here would be more than time consuming, and weren’t guaranteed to work, assuming they could put together something large enough, with substitutes for the three materials, to either swap the cities back, or bring Spain's citizens back to Earth. And even then, there was no guarantee that they’d be able to pinpoint Fortis’s location from where they currently were on this new planet.
Power was no issue, theoretically, either, as they would be able to connect the machine with the same energy that powered Allure, but that also posed a problem. How would the bodies react with the energy? Would they be able to regulate it enough through an already sensitive machine?
He had also been studying past cases of scientists trying to revive, or bring back the dead, in case the machines themselves didn't work. More recent theories had come up that perhaps the dead cells could be cycled out, replaced with fresh, live ones, in a short time, with something pumping the blood through the body rather aggressively to give the heart and brain a jump start. He had disregarded these theories until it became apparent that something would need to tell the body how to function while the brain was still under reconstruction, or freeze the body in time. They didn’t have the Frigonite to channel power through for such a machine on this planet. And so, he had sent that idea to his engineering contacts as well, to combine the two machines with a freezing chamber, so that while during the reconstruction process, the body itself didn’t just fall apart.
No wonder nobody had gotten back to him.
Then there came the process of restarting the frozen bodies, and put one of the team members into investigating how such things could be possible. The member found his answer in the cases of those who had been heated back to a normal temperature from near frozen, and their hearts, forced to pump and circulate blood, which had begun to pump blood again when they were warm enough. It was successful, and the patients only suffered minor nerve damage from the whole ordeal.
Personally, Ryan said that minor nerve damage would be preferable to Death. He had drawn up diagrams to explain the process, but, today would be the first presentation to the higher ups of this idea. And, while it could be done with enough machines, he had to run tests with the animals of this planet before he would even consider doing such tests on humans that were grown in a lab. For the love of Cinzak, the beings of this planet were fragile.
Not to mention, how could they even begin to guarantee that they'd be fully grown? For all he knew, the machines wouldn't work together in the first place with the humans. If they did, there was no telling at first if they would be reborn as babies, and have to grow up again, or if the vessels would even last an extended period of time.
Once again torn from his thoughts, the research was pushed into his chest by the second highest person in the laboratory's sector,. Her dark, scaly hands felt like Snake skin against his hand, before she withdrew it, her scales turning a lighter shade as she drew farther back. However, instead of a collection of files or a hard drive, the research came in the form of a black cube. Ryan looked at the worker who had brought the cube to him, and called after her. "Thank you, Veran." A slight twitch of the floral buds on the back of her head signaled that she had heard him. She turned to nod her stubby head at him before retreating to her desk, where she remained..standing? It was hard to tell, since her tail was positioned in such a way as to allow her to put weight on it, almost like another leg.
When Ryan had left the sector, there were only seven minutes left. Two minutes to get to the black archway, five to get into the conference itself, early. Ryan began to flip through the research notes on the cube he had been given by the worker, his nimble digits allowing him to swipe at a greater speed, as his race was able to process things at a much faster rate than what was considered normal. It was why they mostly took the jobs that required quick thinking. The cube, itself, was a projector, constructed from Veranite, and designed to work in even these conferences, so that it was easier to transport files across larger distances.
All in all, He was satisfied with the progress they had made. Though, if he was being honest, there wasn’t much more than theory at the moment, and they might have an issue with that, but who could blame him? This was so far above anything that they had on file at the moment that could be done with their current machines, and perhaps far above Earth's capabilities as well. Using a cloth wipe to wipe away the perspiration above his brow, he swallowed, softly, before he put the cloth into the left pocket of his lab coat.