Silly Plots 3: With government backing we can make it very silly

[5a Violista]

Marin has no choice but to concede that point.
She could deny it but would probably get easily seen through or be seen as evasive.
"...yeah," she says. Marin turns her head sideways and dips her head halfway into the water, in order to decide which of her thoughts she wants to say and which she doesn't want to say yet. She then lifts it up a bit, so her mouth isn't half-submerged (it's awful to talk when your mouth is half underwater).

"I...'ve had some bad experiences in the past, and I have to be careful to stop it from happening again."



The spirit doesn't see the difference between magic and whatever this 'type of medicine' is. "I see," the spirit says. "I would not have expected thee to be able to give something to me, anyway."
It's okay.
She's had this for a large portion of her life.

[Recaiden]

Honeysuckle ducks mostly under the water and nods.
Marin doesn't know if she can trust them. Which is fair, honestly.
She isn't sure she can trust Jade or Marin, not really. Just had a few things happen that make her less worried about it.

When she pops back up, all she says is "Got it. We all have, right?"

[bc56]

"Do you mind if I speak with my friends for a bit?" Jade asks? But she doesn't wait for an answer. She heads over to where Marin and Honeysuckle are. "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

[5a Violista]

The spirit doesn't mind Jade leaving. She says so.



Some people can trust people easily.
Other people can't.

Marin nods at Honeysuckle, then says ('cause she doesn't know if Honeysuckle can actually 'see' nods or not), "Yeah. I suppose everyone has."

But!
Then!
Jade comes over. Marin turns her head to look at the approaching Jade. "Good news, maybe?" she suggests. It'll help give context. "About that ghost, right?"

[Recaiden]

Honeysuckle might have been able to figure it out if she were paying attention at the time. But she wasn't. All she knows is that Marion moved somehow?

"Bad news." Honeysuckle declares straight away.
And she sits up a bit to listen to Jade's report.

[bc56]

Jade thinks for a moment, before deciding to go with Marin's request. She did reply first, after all. "Good news is, she's not a ghost. She's a living, breathing woman, who happens to be in the past, but somehow interacting with our time. The bad news, is she might not be a living, breathing woman much longer. She's got a disease that's preventable now, but serious in her own time. If we could get her some antibiotics somehow, we might be able to save her." Of course that begs two questions. Won't that cause a paradox, and how do you send antibiotics back in time?

[5a Violista]

"Oh."
Marin blink, trying to make sense of that.
"So she's not a ghost, then?" she repeats, before thinking about it more. "Or, wait. If she's from the past, she probably still is a ghost, just not here."

So.
"Um." She turns to Honeysuckle. Honeysuckle's smart. "What should we do, then?"

[Recaiden]

"Know she's not a ghost who died of that disease and is reliving her last days?"
"And wouldn't that mess up our past? Like, chaos effects and so on? There'd have to be some stable offset-based time connection."
Honeysuckle's ears fold back a bit. This seems like it could be a terrible idea.
Or maybe whatever they do is going to end up always having happened in the past?
"But judging by the steam, just give her the medicine as an aerosol. If it handles that, anyway."

[bc56]

"It has to be ingested," Jade explains. Aerosol is not an option. "We can't just let her die!" Jade feels strongly about that. Letting someone die that you could have saved is as bad as killing them yourself, in her mind.

[5a Violista]

That's a good point, she could just be a ghost who is confused.
But also that's a good point, if she's still alive we can't just leave her.
But also also there's another good point, where it could mess up everything with time travel technobabble.
But also. . .

Marin is about to say something that's entirely unhelpful because of how unsure she is on what they should do, but then she remembers something: "Hey, I've heard about aerosolized antibiotics before. Not sure if they work better or worse than the pill or injection kinds. . .or even where we could get them. Not sure if they just keep them in stock at the pharmacy." Okay, so what she said ended up being pretty unhelpful, anyway.

[Recaiden]

"Chill, Jade. No one giving up."
Honeysuckle tosses her head, baffled.
"Probably get some of those from HALO's medical lab, then." Pretty sure time-medicine is a valid research subject.
"Otherwise, teach her to purify antibiotics with whatever they got in the past."
"Less one of you has a time machine you never mentioned?"

[bc56]

"Nope, no time machine here." Although Jade doesn't have a time machine, maybe there's one nearby though. "Hmmm. Something's got to be causing this temporal disturbance. Maybe there is a time machine here, just not one of ours."

[5a Violista]

Marin doesn't have a time machine.
...
She does have a sonic screwdriver, though. Over in the locker with the rest of her clothes.
"Sorry, I haven't got one either."

"Would they have the right tools to make antibiotics themselves?" the catgirl asks, having no idea about what exactly you need to make them. She imagines it's got to be pretty hard to make.

"You think there might be one underground or underwater, or something?" Marin asks Jade. She sits up, to look around at the pools to see if there might be one deep enough to hide a time machine.
Although there are some of the pools deep enough to potentially hide a time machine, there's not actually anything hidden in them, unless it's very far underground that you'd need to swim down the source and through an underground hot river or something, to get to. No, the only manmade things around here are the tileworks, the pottery, the changing room, and the pathway here. And also the lighting that'll come on at sunset.

[Recaiden]

They might have the tools to make antibiotics in the town. It doesn't sound like this spirit would have them herself. Although who knows what a priest of the whole town has access to?

"Hey, stay still a minute." Honeysuckle instructs.
Then she sinks herself deeper into the water, squashes her ears down under her hands, and pays close attention. To the water, the air, everything, really. And several moments later, she pops up with an answer.
"Those weird pots. The holes through. Don't line up. Holes going through time too?"

[bc56]

"You mean..." Jade runs over to grab one of the weird pots and bring it back to the pool her friends are at. "If this is a magical time machine, how do we operate it?" She hates dealing with magic. It never makes sense to her.

[5a Violista]

Marin stays as still as possible after being told to.
.
.
.
"Oh!" She looks over at the pots. "They do look weird."

And, when Jade brings one over, she looks at it closer. She can't really see anything particular about it. So she gets closer. "I...don't really know," she says. "Maybe I could ask the ghost if she knows. I mean...time-traveler. Or whatever." She gets up to head towards the spirit.


Interestingly, as soon as Jade grabbed that pot and brought it here, something happened.
First of all, the spirit suddenly moved to a different pool - one with different minerals and that's bubbling - the instant the pot was picked up. It's not like she got up and moved; instead, it's more like she teleported. Or was just somewhere else. Or something along those lines. Also, the air and temperature and wind and time of day beyond all the other pots' holes suddenly changed as well.
And,
the one that Jade grabs: its hole now seems de-synched from the others. All the others seemed to have a consistent environment beyond their holes, but this one is now different. It's as if all of them together had some sort of effect based on the pattern they were in, and now that the number of pots in the pattern changed, the magnitude of the effect had changed. As if...it now connected to a slightly different time. Since the priest is still there, it can't have changed the time travel too much because she's still alive.

And, of course, since the spirit is no longer in the green pool, Marin can't immediately find her and looks around for where she could be.
While looking around, she has an idea: "Hey, what if we put something in that pot?" she suggests to Jade. Which obviously shouldn't work: the time-effect seems centered around the holes.

[Recaiden]

"AAH!"
Honeysuckle is horrified by Jade suddenly going over to pick up one of the pots. Observing the holes in all of them change like that was disconcerting too.
"Don't pick it up! That could have thrown us all into the past! Look at em now! Back. Back where it was!"

And at first she's concerned that the spirit is gone, because the steam rushes back in to fill that space.
But no, there she is.

In a moment she'd realize the implications, but right now she's too shocked by someone casually fiddling with an unknown time machine.

[bc56]

To be fair, Jade thought each individual pot was a time machine, not that all of them together were. She didn't expect time stuff to happen just by picking one up. She puts it back. "Moving them changes the time alignment? Interesting." They could probably use that to their advantage. "Sure, I can try that. What should I use?" Jade doesn't have anything on her to put in the pot. Bikinis have a significant lack of pockets or any other storage space.

[5a Violista]

It's got to be safe, right?
People wouldn't just leave a dangerous time machine laying around, right? If there's a chance that someone would mess with it, then it wouldn't be dangerous.

Overhearing what happened, Marin waits and stops looking for the spirit. Once Jade puts the pot back, things go back to as they were before and the spirit is back in that green pool, so Marin sits down to talk about the pots. After a bit of talking, apparently the spirit says they were recently put up, only a couple years ago. (From the spirit's perspective, of course.)


Unfortunately, Marin doesn't have very many pockets on her either, so she doesn't have anything to fill the pot with, or whatever. Unless one of them wants to go back to the locker/changing room, pretty much all they have is the water or the other nature-things around.

[Recaiden]

Honeysuckle bets Jade would leave a ring of dangerous time machines around.

"Try just a rock or something." Honeysuckle muses. She doesn't have anything beyond what she's wearing either.

"Maybe if, shifting them just a little, can set them to the time first brought here?"
Not clear how that would help, though.

[bc56]

Oh come on. Jade isn't that much of a mad scientist. She wouldn't leave dangerous time machines around. But she would leave safe ones.

Jade doesn't have a rock on her, so she tries something else. She sticks her hand through the hole.

Okay, maybe she is a mad scientist. For such a smart person, that was definitely a pretty dumb thing to do. At least she didn't say, "hold my beer, watch this."

[5a Violista]

By sticking her hand through the hole, Jade disrupts the air flowing through it, so it has a similar effect to when it was moved. The spirit 'vanishes' and is moved somewhere else - which is a little weird for Marin, who was talking with the spirit.
.
.
.
Also.
Those who look through the holes (so long as you can look through it with Jade's wrist blocking the way) will still see her hand. Those looking around or over the pot won't see Jade's hand.

A rock would have been interesting, but using a hand is pretty interesting too.

[Recaiden]

"Your hand go into another time?"
Honeysuckle asks after a worried moment that Jade just lost her hand entirely.

[bc56]

"It's still attached. Looks like these holes function to control the time overlay." Jade is already inventing technical jargon for what's going on. "There might be a way to manipulate them to travel back then, but we could also just tell the sick woman where to look and put the medicine through the hole." No telling if it would emerge in the right time though.

[5a Violista]

Marin just overheard that Jade lost her hand.
She looks over.
...
Oh.
She didn't lose her hand. That's what they're talking about.

She moves a bit back over. "So putting your hand in it changed what time it goes to," she reasons. "So if we do put medicine in, we'd first have to figure out what time it is when your hand is through it, for when we put medicine through. So that way we can tell her when she has to be here to get it before it goes bad."
But how could they find out what the date is? Maybe they could do a test experiment? Or something. Or something else. Not really sure.

[Recaiden]

"No, just make sure she's still around somewhere once you've reached through."
Honeysuckle suggests.
"Any time could work, right?"

[bc56]

"She might not be there the whole time," Jade responds. "We can try though. One of us should explain our plan to her, while one of us gets the medicine, and the other..." She can't think of a third thing to do.

[5a Violista]

Honeysuckle proves that she's pretty smart with that suggestion. Definitely better than Marin's suggestion, and way simpler. "So long as she's there and not actually dying, then it probably should be fine," she agrees.

Marin thinks about it.
"Honeysuckle should be the one talking to her," she says, "because she could find her the easiest."
"And Jade should probably be the one to get the medicine because she has a better idea of what kind to get."
And. . .that leaves Marin with 'the other...'. Honestly, it's disappointing, but the simple fact is that the other two are the better choice when it comes to the important parts.

[Recaiden]

"I'll find her, you talk, Marin. Better at it."
Honeysuckles suggests.
For instance, right now/then, the spirit woman is over...there! She points.

"Think, get the medicine today, Jade?"
Honeyusckle did mention being able to get some, but she's not like, actually a doctor at all.

[bc56]

Caldas da Rainha

"Yeah, I can do that." It just means putting some real clothes on and going to a drugstore, buying some penicillin, and coming back. It sounds easy enough. There should be one in the town, after all. But it might not be as easy as Jade expects, given that this is a weird town that puts a time machine in their hot springs.

Erik's Eatery

It's a smallish restaurant a short distance off Market Street, its decor a mix of a viking longhouse and an old-fashioned diner. Seated at one of the corner tables, and a few bites into a fish sandwich, for which this restaurant is particularly well known, is Jade Fisher, a beautiful human woman with an impressive figure and shoulder length brown hair. She's just wearing a blue tank top and black yoga pants, having just finished going for a run and now enjoying a meal and a break from the usual weirdness that has infected her life.