13124/You Rock My World

You Rock My World
Date of Scene:	20 October 2022
Location:	Operations: Triskelion
Synopsis:	Fitz wants to know what the heck is going on!
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Leopold Fitz

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Jane Foster has posed:
Nothing like an exciting level 2 (non-fatal) lockdown in R&D to keep things spicy. It of course helps that one Jemma Simmons -- not Fitz-Simmons, as many try to double barrel -- was present to deal with some of the issues at hand.

More problematic for the lockdown, the cause. A rock. Just a rock, turned over by Agent Johnson to Agent Fitz to figure out what to do with. It's perplexing to imagine a rock smaller than a dog could very much be responsible for wiping out the enjoyment of the 6-o'clock news, but there they are. Acquaintances and friends, colleagues and one extremely sensitive security guard probably have a good number of questions. A good number of people, incidentally, probably have been told to back off when it comes to dealing with /that/. That being, well, questioning what's going on.

SIGINT has been up all day and night. The R&D coffeemaker hasn't been stolen or rescued, though guards give it long, appraising looks. It might need securing.

Jane Foster, mastermind of none of this business, absolutely isn't sleeping at a spare desk in the corner. Resting her eyes, totally doing that. This time of day is one when she's usually awakening for work, anyhow. Or did, once.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
Lockdowns. Nothing better than getting a message on a wristwatch about your primary home being, essentially, under attack from within. Fitz knows about lockdowns, and for the most part, respects them. Unless, of course, it affects him personally. Then?

All bets are off.

Bright and early, Fitz is coming in, looking rather hurried in his aspect. The tie isn't quite Windsor'ed, there's a shirt-tail that isn't tucked in all the way, and the way he flashes his badge as he's headed down the hall brooks very little argument. The moment he reaches his hallowed halls, the badge is swiped, and he enters quickly, making sure the door closes behind him.

Blue eyes look around the room, checking to see what is in place, what's been moved, and what's been toyed with. He can trust Jemma to move things carefully, but setting them back in the heat of a moment may not be her primary thought. As for the coffee maker?

Heh. As long as his tea caddy is fine, all is right with the world.

Jane Foster has posed:
Nothing better than knowing SHIELD knows how to contain its own departments, floors, or even offices. Except the containment of the whole department being shunted to smaller venues once isolating the danger further relegated those who would have moved freely about to a particularly small group. A full log of any people identified within give some interesting names -- Jemma Simmons, Jessica Drew, Mary Jane Watson -- who are usual suspects, and several most definitely not in that common group. Monica Cheng tends to be more in Daisy's neck of the woods. Alexander Aaron, noted for doing exciting filing and stock duties. Someone has to!

The R&D area looks fairly normal, fewer people in the labs or the holding areas. Privileged senior agents can go back and forth, of course, and those lower on the pecking order need to prove reason to be there. Badges aren't especially reconfigured, since the threat level apparently registers between annoying and peculiar. No sense of "wipe it out." Otherwise WAND would be nuked on day 6 of the week. He won't find a pile of paperwork or what amounts to a disaster, other than things looking tidy. Exactly one anomaly can be attested to; Simmons' badge used to enter the contained area of his projects, Jessica Drew escorting her. Monica Cheng and a large Sigint chat attempt to make the most of what they've learned about mysterious signals that don't meet any algorithm they know of. He's tagged as a courtesy, since half the conversation running through that chat window amounts to 'No I don't know what it was broadcasting' and the imminent worry about rescuing the coffee machine. It's better than almost every other department. ARMOR is suspected of having designs on the poor precious coffeemaker.

No one touched the tea caddy. No one touched his desk. A few "No touch" stickers have been left on a couple objects outside; a computer terminal, a tablet, a wall of Hallowe'en decorations. Because SHIELD has a sense of humour.

The suspicious rock isn't tagged because the door is, and that door broached by Jemma was exactly 1 minute and 22 seconds after the last 'noise' heard from the rock.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
Most of the names, Fitz absolutely knows. The access to his lab, well... it almost feels like an intrusion. Monica Cheng isn't a name he knows, or rather, face to name. And Aaron?

Slowing down now that he's in the heart of his home, Fitz turns around in a slow circle, taking in what he can before he can before he's drawn to the rock. His rock. The one that Daisy'd brought home to him, that has had no little research put into it. Containments, readings, tests of different sound and light frequencies; nothing had touched it. But now?

What set it off?

Fitz approaches the door where his rock lies just beyond, and he sets his hands upon the glass, his expression thoughtful. He hasn't yet seen Jane, resting her eyelids as she is.

"What are you?" The soft brogue is leveled at the moon rock beyond. "An' why now? How now?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Monica Cheng, a hacker and one of the Black Widows. Yes, there are three. In fact many more than three in Russia, though that one has an interesting file folio.

His rock, how very exciting, is clearly of an igneous variety. Its dark surface shows the typical weathering one would expect in an atmosphere, above and beyond being on the largely atmosphere-less moon. That in and of itself is the strangest of all things, though the aeolian weathering would imply less water involved, and more chemicals and wind. Yet nonetheless, there it is.

Nothing has much changed from the outset. It's still a rock. It still has a basalt-dominant composition, and resembles something of a legless dog in size. Heavy, dense, and holding its secrets to itself because somehow /that/ rock with its utterly mineral composition blasted out broadcasts to go as far as New Jersey.

The rock is smug. It doesn't do anything to greet Fitz other than stare at him with a rock face.

A landslide of puns. Meanwhile, in R&D, Jane scrubs her eyes with the palm of her hand and returns to thumbing through materials. She's totally not lying in wait for Jemma.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
All the little things that Fitz had noted before and set into his files are all still present. The questionable weathering patterns, the make-up and the like. Tests had been made to determine if it had crashed onto the moon by a passing planetoid or comet, but the makeup was unlike what is known from those celestial bodies.

Blue eyes still stare at the rock, and it stares back in stony silence. Turning around finally, Fitz exhales in a sigh and heads to one of his terminals to see if he can't figure out the broadcast burst and check at least to see if there is a pattern in all of it. (Not to mention all those darned anomalies, just like the ones that didn't have anything to do with the pod effectively not registering any life functions earlier.)

Any clue..

Jane Foster has posed:
The rock very much belongs to what one would expect to find on the Moon, plucked from a lunar mare. It doesn't have the lighter composition of the pale grey igneous rocks, for the most part, other than the occasional speckle indicating some long-ago bombardment. The long ago atmospheric weathering piece is another curious factor; it's not /that/ old. Not the billions of years expected, but more like in the range of years. Samples nonetheless indicate the rock to be impressively old by mundane 'we have plate tectonics' standards, and not nearly so old as other samples hauled by Apollo missions in the past.

But then, those laughably primitive missions weren't much compared to what people get up to today. Fitz is left to peer at the rock, which remains stubborn while investigated. The only significant difference might be a lack of surface dust, shaken off to lie at the bottom of the box or whatnot he kept it in.

The other metallic instruments and items in the lab aren't so fortunate. Most of them /were/ shaken by high-frequency pulsations at irregular intervals lasting close to 15 minutes or so. The broadcast disruptions came at a steady pace and the amount of energy involved sufficiently can and did shudder metal objects about. None to the point of distortion or breaking though.

The source, then, of so much confusion and headache-inducing sounds. Ruiner of Duran Duran songs, which are now trending mildly in the New York area by listeners who have no idea why one Duran is needed, let alone two. Responsible for the falling of one innocuous bolt right over there.

One that's just barely holding on....

**Tink**! It hits the floor.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
Is Dr Leopold Fitz to the point where he's actually going to hold a one-sided conversation with a rock? He hadn't before, not really. More utterances as he was keeping score as to what tests were done and the results that arose thereafter. Now?

The good doctor is looking at the recording of the waves, and as he does, he's looking back and forth from rock to screen.. "What? You're talkin' to pigeons now?" He presses his lips together and runs a hand through shortened hair before he rolls his head back, and he's back on his feet. Instead of the screen, the engineer sets up a holographic account, and begins to render the polyphonic sound waves; the next to see what sort of cone wave, as well as directional.

"Sure, don't talk to me. I've been here all along, bein' kind, and y'choose to do this with my back turned. Ungrateful.." is murmured.

"Now," and he more begins to talk to himself, working his way through the equations. He can measure it by the towers hit; if it made it to Jersey, was there any specific amplification going on that was outside the rock itself? Does it have accessories?

Jane Foster has posed:
As rocks go, it's not as charismatic as a gemstone or illustrious boulders used to crush Indiana Jones, cap the great pyramid of Khufu, or wipe out the dinosaurs. Pedestrian features do not indicate a lack of value, otherwise 99.9% of the human population (and 2% of the superhero population) deserves to be completely wiped off the map right then and there. Earth is not only for the spectacular and beautiful, which is a subjective matter anyway.

As an lab partner goes, the rock may be heavy but at least it's usually quiet. Usually. Except when it decides to shrill on loud enough for ten million people to hear it from every available radio receiver, speaker, and phone tuned to given stations. To interrupt Jack Speer! The man doesn't deserve to be interrupted, especially by an obviously less-ideal newscaster.

Fitz indeed has an ungrateful specimen on his hand. It isn't talking now, of course. Mum's the word around the man tinkering with his screens and machines. The polyphonic details that blew out a number of speakers -- the rest deliberately destroyed by panicked or pained agents foremost -- creates a pretty difficult range fo information to interpret at first. Mostly because the data thrown for more than fifteen minutes involves a variable number of frequencies, and he's going to have to backtrack against SIGINT -- Monica and Daisy in that pile of people -- to get a full run. Though if he dares to so much as touch a file, he'll have a pile of buddies eager to pile on in their lack of findings. And the mess of unhappy HAM operators unable to parse what the hell a rock was broadcasting, while the rest of the larger world just doesn't know and possibly doesn't care. HAM cares. To HAM, it matters.

Great splashes of sound form concentric rings, the majority of them pointed south and east. A distinct lack of splashiness veers west but enough gets there to disrupt Staten Island, New Jersey closest to the Manhattan shore. Since the most recent bits are the easiest to trace considering someone /was/, by that point, the interval of 3 second spikes being nearly the same form obvious peaks in eight separate bunches. Then behind that is a whirlwind of sound variation, blobs scaling into highly energetic regions that not even some poor moth could hear. Likely not a spider person either, not without cranial implosion.

However, it's not like finding the interrupted NPR broadcast or those from Z100 or half a dozen other major stations from Bloomberg to CBS is particularly difficult, and they all have the same miserable sounds at the same miserable points. Any definition is extremely modest, differences of fractions of a second if the transmissions came from further from the Triskelion as opposed to closer.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
This... this is what Leo does. He works with things that would cause other peoples' eyes to cross and in some cases, heads to explode. Once he's on a track, it opens up avenues that must be studied, assessed and either crossed off the list, or set aside as a possibility. As a result, his holographic display begins to look more like a spider's web than it does an actual single transmission feed.

When he comes to a pause, or rather, a snarl that might require a little more heavy-handedness in order to break through, the engineer is on the system, working his way through breaks. A couple of times, more than a couple of times really, a small divide has to be jumped electronically and theoretically before those crumbs can be picked up once more.

HAM operators, though? They're a (mostly) untapped resource that are usually more than happy to help with any of their observations. It's in their makeup. They have a geeky pride to being able to help those faceless other operators; and any benefit is celebrated within their circles.

Having, then, also recordings that have the sound variations, the pitches of the rising and falling wavelengths are studied, calibrated, and marked.

All this? It'll take time. And a cup of tea.

Jane Foster has posed:
Even for Fitz, this is a lot. For someone with advanced degrees and licenses in engineering, it would be a lot, because the lines and splash marks filtered in through fine-tuning data create what is, in effect, something so much fancier than a simple radio transmission. Sure, satellite radio and land-based broadcasts get noisy and complicated. Earth makes a hell of a racket in some places, but the overlapping rings create something of an annular disk around the central peak. That, of course, would be where he's standing in the Triskelion. Ricocheting lines ring out at an oblique angle, fixed many degrees above the horizon but definitely not pointed straight up. Whatever it was sharing with the world, a love of rock and roll streamed over Connecticut and down across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan. Poor Long Island happens to be in the way. More energetic projections most definitely overshoot the mark.

By a lot. Unless their goal was to broadcast to the antipodes, in that direction, the nearest thing might be, say, the African continent. Possibly Polynesia. Possibly they have a reason to shout loudly enough at Jupiter. If they wanted Jupiter to get the transmission in like.. 8 minutes.

NASA needs 44 minutes to hurl commands at its happiest orbiters and that's assuming those dragonfly craft are actually pointed /at/ Earth.