View source for 2918/The Doctor's Doctor Is In

{{Log Header
|Date of Scene=2026/01/23
|Location=Entrapta's Lab
|Synopsis=Mamoru goes to Entrapta for help and science, and also psychic perception and science, and maybe psychic protection.
|Cast of Characters=38,281
|pretty=yes
}}
{{Poses
|Poses=:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>First there was a text to Penelope and Entrapta from Mamoru, letting the latter know that he would be arriving in ten minutes and knocking on the lab door-- so maybe this time when he knocks on the door, Entrapta will have enough forewarning and reminder that nothing will explode.<br><br>Ten minutes after the text, Mamoru arrives with a bag of hot popcorn chicken for the scientist, knocking on the lab door but not taking the food inside. "I'm here for you to test psychic energy," he says cheerfully. "But you should eat eight little pieces of fried chicken first."<br><br>A beat.<br><br>"The two are only related in that I won't let you test anything until I'm positive you've had some protein today," he clarifies.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>Entrapta, at the door and only mildly frazzled, looks out with goggles on. She looks past Mamoru on the right, then on the left, and then pokes at his chest to ensure that he's not a projection or a residue on her glasses.<br><br>"Oh! You're here! Come in!" She seems honestly surprised, though obviously she had time to prepare. Inside the place is...different! The walls are a different colour, and the place seems subtly changed. The actual difference IS subtle; she's added depth to the walls, allowing her to use them to install machinery out of sight. Probably happened when she was out of the laboratory. Automated systems.<br><br>Taking a piece of chicken and popping it into her mouth, Entrapta removes her goggles and reaches out to grab a wrench, without moving her arms. Was that her hair, moving on its own? The wrench is in her hand now, and she didn't go to get it. <br><br>"I haven't properly tested human mental energies, so this might help me pin down the few issues I still have remaining in my overall theorem. I appreciate you coming!"<br><br>Okay, seriously, how is her hair moving like that? It's like, almost like it's alive.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>Mamoru gets the faintly bemused look he always gets when he steps off the rollercoaster of life onto the high-speed merry-go-round of Entrapta's thought processes, but it melts swiftly into the expression of enjoyment he always gets thereafter.<br><br>And her ''hair is moving''.<br><br>He's absolutely fascinated. "Your hair is extra prehensile limbs for you," he says in wonder, "you just reflexively use it. Does it give you tactile feedback the way skin does? Does your proprioception extend to where your hair is at any given time?"<br><br>This as he continues to hold the open bag of popcorn chicken for Entrapta, and also comes in as directed. "And it's my pleasure. I love feeding your enthusiasm, and what you're doing is so important! Where do you want me to go?"<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>"Proprioception..it's so nice talking to someone who can actually use words appropriately," the girl says as her hair nabs the chicken container and holds it, no longer subtle now that it's in play.<br><br>"Installed surgical grafts tagged to neuronal receptors allow full interactive connection, I can feel through it as well as a person could through their standard appendages. It's infused with Etherian magic, so it functions largely within this domain of emitted energy," she motions to the walls around her. "I've felt like an amputee since arriving. It's been...annoying." Likely so.<br><br>Eating another piece from the food supply, Entrapta rises up on her hair and dangles over a machine, where she types quickly codes that bring it to life. "This set of crystal matrices will best connect to the broad spectrum, then we can move to more specific tests once it's given me some data to work with. Can you just begin to use your abilities please? Anywhere will do really, this entire area is now wired for sound."<br><br>A lie, a blatant lie! The area is not in fact wired for sound; it was left out by necessity when adding all the other forms of testing equipment, and she decided that it was unlikely to be a major component until she could miniaturize her gear to fit more inside. However she knows that it's part of the human lingo and that it would, probably, make sense in conversation.<br><br>Honestly is it any wonder that people find languages difficult to parse sometimes?<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>"...wired for sound...?" echoes Mamoru a little blankly. "I mean, okay," he says, relinquishing the container of chicken to its intended recipient cheerfully. "I don't know what sound you need to pick up, there aren't any ghosts in here, and I'm not sure that works anyway." A beat. He clarifies, "Sound is unnecessary for my psychic abilities."<br><br>Then he crouches down on one knee and puts his hand on the floor, and it starts to glow a faint gold; his other hand comes up to offer it to Entrapta.<br><br>If she takes his hand, she'll be able to see what he's seeing: he's essentially stretching his awareness away from his physical body and pouring it into the floor, and from the floor into the walls and then down, down, into the ground, and then out-- he buzzes "past" all his connections to other people, getting glimpses of what people like Usagi, Chibiusa, Kazuo are doing; he carefully keeps them away from the ley lines; he checks in on cities, on mountains, on rivers and hamlets and towns; they 'see' animal burrows and warrens that they pass, little pockets of life in holes in the Earth; they 'see' the insides of boreholes and steam vents at the bottom of the ocean floor...<br><br>...and then he brings them back, out, up, past the underground rivers, the stressed bedrock of the Pacific Rim, the pipes and wires and train tunnels and steam tunnels and everything under the city, then the building, then the floor, and then eyes the same color as the ocean from space are regarding Entrapta seriously. "All the psychic stuff I have any control over is touch-based."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>"No, I...language use is imprecise, I apologize for my use of metaphor. I will try to be more precise." Entrapta sighs, sitting on her own hair instead of a chair, which supports her as if it was meant to.<br><br>She doesn't register the need to hold Mamoru's hand, not until he says that it is touch-based, so much of his event is monitored largely by the devices at play instead of Entrapta's direct experience. She spends much of the time adjusting levels, focusing on the energies that are now present and pinning them down in the available thaumic fields.<br><br>Her hand touching his is experimental and timid. A touch, drawn back, and she looks at her instruments. Then and only then does she actually take his hand.<br><br>She is lit up like a spirit of wind, in Mamoru's eyes. Her eyes are glowing portals, drawing inward rather than waiting to passively collect as she watches with an active mind, analyzing data constantly.<br><br>Then there's her hair.<br><br>Alien fibres, grown from her own DNA, he can see their history and it is astoundingly complex. She literally cloned herself with mutated additions, growing each individual strand while using her own cognitive self as a connection. Nobody has ever done this, taken the time inside of a single dark room connected to a growth medium long enough to grow themselves new limbs. You'd have to be indoors, locked in a single room, for years....<br><br>Very lonely. A deep, dark thing, but one that was birthed by the genius that glows within. Entrapta is so patient that she was willing to be locked away for a decade, and brilliant enough to make it worth the time.<br><br>Holding your hand like she's nothing. And watching you look at her, and squirrels and the ocean in the same breath.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>"Oh don't worry, just please be consistent. If you're literal most of the time, which you seem to be, I won't expect you to be metaphorical," explains Mamoru, then laughs and says, "Metaphorically speaking, of course~!" <br><br>And then Entrapta takes his hand while he's in the middle of things, and the snap-to split of his attention floods her with the weight of the planet's regard before he pulls himself the rest of the way back into his own head and he's ''just'' looking at Entrapta, not squirrels or the ocean.<br><br>And she looks like a spirit of the wind-- a spirit of the air, to Mamoru, as magical to the last nerves at the tips of her hair as anyone else might be in henshin, but so focused on gaining knowledge of everything that it looks like she's trying to connect herself to everything, plug herself into reality to make herself real...<br><br>To the boy whose whole ''being'' is about making and strengthening connections, grounding people, finding or making links between people and places, it's a true joy to see every nerve in her system bent toward finding and growing links, too-- for herself, to this world, this dimension.<br><br>He's inspired to show her what he sees and the way he sees it, the way he perceives her nervous system, the clusters of brilliance in the warm house of the crystalline mind-- overlaid on the mental image of a textbook picture of a nervous system, with convenient labels. He's inspired to show her the connections she's grown with other people since the time in the Shed that he did something like this, that he healed her-- strands of light, like the leylines he can also sense, between Entrapta and her mental models of other people, faint but present if he looks ''with'' her--<br><br>Holding his hand like she's nothing, and he's looking at her with no little awe and admiration. "I like being by myself," he murmurs, "but not being ''alone''. Would you miss people if you tried that now?" A less damaging way to ask 'what about her friends?'<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>Entrapta begins to speak in order to answer the words, "I'll try..." getting out of her mouth before he mind is flooded with information. Her mouth goes dry as she begins to try and decipher...herself. The fingers of that one hand tighten so as to not lose the connection, and her other hand reaches up to stroke a strand of her own hair, visible by both as it brightens in response to her touch.<br><br>Seeing the areas light up is data. She barely registers his words, filing them away almost visibly in the parts of her mind kept for verbiage and other partially translated data. He actually sees her do it, how words fall into areas where they're kept for collation and partial knowledge, while actions take up fifty, a hundred times more space and processing talent. She knows words second-hand; science is queen.<br><br>This all fills something, something powerful. A hole in her heart, a desperate need for knowledge that was sharp, edged like a hole surrounded by glass. Seeing the interactions of the universe in a deeper fashion heals something deep inside, a need for growth and understanding that she's had forever. And she dares easily, without the remotest hesitation, to look out on other branches of the magic. To expand herself.<br><br>This. This is the essence of her. Learning, evolving and evolved. As her magic tries to become able to see on its own, she says, "Nobody's ever alone," but with a depth of understanding. The links, they're always there. And she's starting to see how to find them.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>The black-haired teenager's hand is steady when it's grabbed onto tighter, and after a while, Mamoru just smiles and stops trying to show specific things, and lets Entrapta explore her nervous system and expand her understanding, and ''watches''. Every discovery she makes, every connection that snaps into place for her or becomes clear, prompts another bubble of happy-for-Entrapta in Mamoru's feelings. He doesn't try to keep that from her, it's another data point she can catalogue later.<br><br>And he can see the information soothing the jagged edges of her voracious need for knowledge, can see her relief at this dizzyingly vast other level of perceptual reality ''existing'', can understand that kind of need. He's grateful and honored, and she can see that too, that he could help soothe an ache that deep-seated, however incrementally.<br><br>But the connections, oh the connections. Threads of relative placement, threads of relative strength, parallel and then bending in convergence-- heart to heart and feeling to feeling, place and emotion and association and correspondence... "That's right," he finally says, because Entrapta isn't wrong. "Not truly. But it can be lonely if you don't know the connections are there, or can't feel them."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>After a while Entrapta takes a gasp. Not a breath, but a return to breathing that she hadn't been paying attention to. "I've never had magic," she says with that one breath. Then another, and more. "I always watch, from the outside. Learn from observations, not experience."<br><br>She reaches out and touches a ley line directly. It's not interactive, but it's there. The response of her hair is instant, and while she doesn't smile she does seem to receive joy.<br><br>"I knew theoretically that these ...might have existed? How accurate to reality is this imaging? Is there some way to test it, and create modeling for re-creation? I have to be able to gauge levels if I'm going to..."<br><br>She pauses. Her mind snaps into focus, visibly. Grasps concepts and directs resources towards them, her brain coherently arranging concepts into a whole.<br><br>"The framework is local. Psychic connections form a virtual imaging format but are influenced by reality, allowing the mind to comprehend a universe that has likely even more data to process than this! This is just our minds' limitations on an unlimited data set, there's even higher levels to grasp once this is assimilated!"<br><br>She grins then, allowing that there's a challenge to address still. "How can I help? I was meant to be testing this for ways to use it, to help resist a mental attacker."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>"... until you can create a way for yourself to see like this," says Mamoru gravely, his hand still steady and warm, "I'm willing to show you again and again." His consciousness is still half-sunk into stone and clay in order to better see those connections, since they're all through the Earth.<br><br>Then Mamoru starts grinning himself when she starts by asking questions, then pinwheels into a kaleidoscope of more questions and ideas. "In order," he laughs, reeling back through them in his head, "The imaging is exactly what I'm perceiving through the filters of my knowledge and understanding. So if you were perceiving them directly, they might look differently. Next, I don't know how you would test or model it but I'd like to find out... and finally, what I was showing you was ''awesome''," he says without worrying about how arrogant it might sound, "it's ''how'' I was showing you that was psychic. You... you should definitely come to the Dreamscape. It's another layer of reality that we're all connected on, that can be attacked by the same kind of magic that's currently streaming in with the leylines."<br><br>The boy laughs again, shaking his head. "Sorry. Right: It was how I was showing you, because my psychic stuff is nearly all touch-based. Like you said, the framework is local. Hawkmoth, on the other hand, can attack psychically from afar. So our minds need gloves."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>Entrapta pauses, her right eye squinching til it's almost closed. She processes with all her might, attacking the problem now. It's fun to watch, as she gathers and discards ideas with a speed that is oddly mediocre until you look closer.<br><br>She's not looking at them and judging. She's running simulations on each. What is likely to happen, what can go wrong. Where outside factors can cause errors. Influence and balance.<br><br>"Unlikely to work," she says with a slowed response time due to lag. "Each power form is unique, and each person will either resist, forget, or find ways to become vulnerable to an active outside attacker. Someone will eventually cause a failure point due to inappropriate design, inattention, or unexpected responses to stimuli. We need to cause an overlay that has no direct interaction with the protected, or lay it instead on the attacker."<br><br>She's diagnosing, not being gentle.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>"Or use the swiss cheese method of protection--" in his head for Entrapta to see, there's an infographic about layering protections, all of which have flaws, all of which cover the flaws of the others. "To be refined or replaced later. The Crystal Heart, at the school, partly blocks the effect of the nightmare boss. I, being psychic, should be able to protect myself better against what's a magical attack against the minds of everyone in the city, since I have practice walling myself off internally... but... I seem to be ''more'' susceptible, not less. Every time one of these nightmares attacks, I'm a liability."<br><br>He exhales. "So, maybe you can start with a tailored stopgap for me?" He looks wry.<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>Entrapta stares.<br><br>She opens her mouth, then closes it. She visibly clicks into place, and blinks several times. Like, that moment when. When you know what to do.<br><br>"Have you considered being bait?" She raises a hand, already knowing that this is a terrible idea. But holding off on responses til she's finished.<br><br>"One: the enemy has a history with you. You're a known open point, a point where you can be targeted. They know it, they expect it and know that you can be used as an entry point."<br><br>"Two: they will come at some point. And you're the funnel, you're where they will absolutely guaranteed target as a first access point."<br><br>She raises an eyebrow, trusting in your mental capacity to know where she's going with this. But her mouth explains anyway. It does that.<br><br>"We trap the weak point. Rebound the attack when it focuses in. Mental attacks have one main problem: they're caused by a mind, and minds have limits. A properly directed counterwave can overwhelm one mind."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:38|Mamoru Chiba (38)}} has posed:'''<br>Mamoru's mouth opens to respond, a wry look already on his face, when Entrapta holds up a hand. His smile only grows, and grows more rueful.<br><br>He nods. "Of course I've considered being bait. It's selling the idea to my wife and boyfriend that's the problem: they don't at all like it when I put myself in deliberate danger... but your arguments might help. Since it ''will'' come after me, better I carry a booby-trap. I mean--"<br><br>The prince exhales. "I do anyway, but it's mine, so it's not strong enough for a creature like that."<br> <br>

:'''{{#var:281|Entrapta (281)}} has posed:'''<br>Entrapta stares, uncomprehending. "I have no idea why they'd have an issue, it's the most obvious option. We can manufacture something though." She looks around, trying to take stock of what she has available that might work.<br><br>"Look, let me work on it for a bit. I've never seen your type of wavelength before, but it's not impossible that I could set up a resonance array. Possibly trap the attacking wave in a frequency chamber, or reflect it back...I'll have to try a few things. See what's actually possible to achieve in a short period of time."<br><br>She sighs. "I should by all rights be able to hand you a portable device that would be useful, but my technology hasn't progressed at a pace that would support that. But the potential exists!" She smiles, then sighs. "I might be able to help though. Let me work on it."<br> <br>
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