aphelion_rpg | April 25 // Open

Entry tags:

April 25 // Open

Date: April 25 (6 AM)
Characters: The Doctor, the Master, Sam, Robin
Location: Machine Room
Summary: Basically they are reversing the ~~polarity~~ mass.
Warnings: SCIENCE MONTAGE

The Doctor woke up uncomfortably hot and decided he had had quite enough of all this. Really, he was surprised it had gone on as long as he had. He'd tried his best not to interfere too much, he really had. After all, wasn't that the whole point of this stupid exercise? He'd thought for a while that the Time Lords might be running it as a kind of test, to see whether he could go for a whole week without meddling. Well, he'd had it. He was meddling.

He knew that the TARDIS on Morpheus was going through her growing pains, and that the adverse reactions occurring in the colony weren't really her fault, but he was still sick of the tropical heat and the gravity fluctuations. Things had reached a critical point; any further and their livelihood on this little God-forsaken bit of space debris would be compromised. The people who were stuck here deserved better than that. So he didn't feel too guilty as he stormed through the sleeping quarters at 6 in the morning, pounding on doors and waking people up. He went to the Master's room, Robin's, and Sam's - all the people he knew had been working on the problem with the computer systems for the past few days.

"If you'd like to help me fix this infernal heat and the gravity issue," he bellowed, "be in the machine room in ten minutes."

If none of them showed up, well, he would just have to do it himself. But he was pretty sure they would show.

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The Master had been awake for some time, but he waited long enough to ensure that the Doctor had passed farther down the hallway, out of earshot before he made his way out of the room. He'd gathered a few tools he'd been keeping in his room, including the sonic screwdriver he'd liberated from the Doctor a few days prior. He'd been passing the time by making a few key (and a few unnecessary but amusing) modifications to it, figuring it'd come in handy once someone finally got a move on with solving this problem. Not wanting to appear to be at the Doctor's beck-and-call, however, he turned and took the long way around the station, enjoying the peace and quiet before heading to the machine shop.

Sam had just gotten back from her standard morning predawn run and was getting out of the shower, when she heard the Doctor pounding on her door across the hall.
Wrapping a towel around herself she stuck her head out into the hallway and asked, "Then you've cracked it? You've figured out how to augment the micro-gravitational field generators in the mass detectors so they can counteract the mass of the TARDIS?"
A couple days earlier Sam had given the doctor a couple of her Mass detectors, as well as the schematics, and as much of the Asgard scientific theory as she had on her laptop. Their hope was to somehow augment the field strength of the devices in such a way to negate the mass of the TARDIS until it matured, and thereby alleviate the problem.

Robin, too, was already awake. As usual, he'd been up before the lights; today, he'd snagged a bite to eat in the kitchen before returning to his room to change. A few moments after the Doctor knocked on his door he stepped out into the corridor, heading straight for the machine shop.

((Fffff, notice how I am not at work. Stupid cold.))

The Doctor had already rounded the corner by the time Sam called out to him, assuming that she would be along shortly. He was waiting for the lot of them in the machine shop, sitting on the floor half-covered in wires, a normal screwdriver held in his teeth - he couldn't remember where he'd left his sonic one, or if the Time Lords had taken it at his trial - looking quite busy. The equipment that Sam had given him was scattered on the floor and counters around him in various states of deconstruction. He had taken off his coat, still wearing the rather ridiculous clothes he had been transported in, one sleeve of his white shirt singed.

"No, no, no this is all wrong," he muttered to himself, examining the blueprint that he had spread on the floor in front of him, "This won't work at all!"

The Master made it one step into the machine shop, then stopped, taking stock of the situation. Yes, this was exactly why he'd intended to take his time getting here. The Doctor looked like he was rewiring himself, and he'd probably already caused more damage than could be fixed.

"You can't be serious," he said, at a loss for an exclamation that would somehow encompass the mess, the Doctor's extremely unfortunate attire, and the fact that he was involved in this situation at all.

Robin arrived just moments after the Master, leaning to peer past where he was blocking the door. "Whoa," he commented, taking in the mess around the Doctor. "Uhh... looks like we've got a lot of work to do? ...How can I help?"

"Oh, good, you're here," the Doctor said, clapping his hands together. He let the Master's mockery roll off him without comment, for now, because they had more important things to focus on than their little rivalry. He took the screwdriver from his mouth staggering rather inelegantly to his feet, gesturing with the very primitive tool at the blueprints. "I can't connect the two systems without finding the right wire. When I do the frame should work, but I also can't seem to get the power levels quite high enough." He sighed impatiently, putting his hands on his hips.

"Ideas?" he asked the other two.

Sam walked in on the heels of Robin dressed in her military fatigues, very useful for this sort of thing with older pockets, and her duffel bag.

Pursing her lips as she thought over the Doctor's statement, she said, "Perhaps we can use the gravitational potential well of the TARDIS itself to power the mechanism. That way the strength of the field will be proportional to the mass of the TARDIS, the more massive the TARDIS the stronger the counter field. Or maybe you could use the TARDIS itself for the power, but I don't know enough about TARDIS energy physiology to guess how you would do that."

The Master stepped carefully over the Doctor's tangle of wires--he suspected there was more order to the chaos than there seemed at first glance--to take a look at the blueprints. While he checked over the designs, he focused on Sam's question of power.

"I'd recommend against using the TARDIS itself as a power source at this point in its growth--her growth," he quickly corrected. He wasn't in the habit of personifying the TARDIS quite so heavily, but for the sake of its safety he'd decided to stick with the Doctor's rhetorical theme. "Most of her energy is directed inward while she, what would be the best way to put this..." He glanced over towards the Doctor. "Adjusts her multi-dimensional physical presence," he said, though way the statement trailed off it nearly resembled a question. In truth, he'd never grown a TARDIS before, and TARDIS horticulture wasn't something he'd ever studied. To him, it was all theory up until this point.

Robin walked into the room, crouching next to the Doctor amid the mess of wires and bits of equipment, peering at the blueprints and their corresponding real-life counterparts, trying to see if he could track down the right wire. "What about Sam's other idea? The gravitational potential well?"

"Yes, yes, yes," the Doctor said with distracted impatience, running a hand through his messy hair. "I wouldn't need an outside source of power if only I could find some way to boost the signal here," he tapped one of the mass detectors that Sam had given him, "because it's not working to its full capacity, not nearly, but I can't work with these primitive tools." He chucked the screwdriver into the corner of the room in a fit of pique, then looked rather abashed.

"Well, I, uh, I think we'd better go with what the Master says, regarding her growing pains," he muttered, getting a bit of a better handle on himself, "I don't know very much about growing TARDISes, I'm afraid I rather didn't pay attention that day in school."

Looking over the scattered tools and equipment Sam said, "Well I'm not sure what we might have in the way of more sophisticated tools. My electronics Kit has a voltmeter, but otherwise I'm not sure what we've got. What do you need exactly?"

Sam looked over the setup, "One thing I've been thinking about is, a lot of our problems have been caused by the TARDIS being so far off axis. If we can build this device so that it will allow us to move the TARDIS, it could save us a lot of headaches should the TARDIS act up again in some other way. Or if we need to deactivate the mass canceler for some reason." Addressing the Doctor she asked, "Do you think it will be feasible to have the device be mobile?"

"Here," the Master said, producing the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and tossing it to the Doctor, not bothering to wait for him to be ready to catch it. He'd already finished all he had need of it for at the moment, though the thought of the Doctor mucking around with a screwdriver more advanced than he'd otherwise have had for several more incarnations should have given him pause. "I took the liberty of improving it a little. Avoid setting 436." 436, predictably, did nothing, but as long as the Doctor was trying to figure that one out he'd probably manage to miss 587E, which would produce enough psychic feedback to knock one or the other of them out but was necessary to make setting 349B function. He turned he blueprints sideways and looked down at the mess again, a few potential wires in mind but more taken by the unusual technology.

Sharp eyes flicked between the blueprints and the mechanical detritus, then nimble fingers quickly sorted through the tangled wires. Robin craned his neck as he gently tugged on one, confirming where it was attached on one end. "...Doctor, I think this might be the wire you want...?"

((LOL, the screwdriver settings! XDD))

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April 25 // Open

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