3148/20,000cm Beneath The Sea (With Added Lurkers)

20,000cm Beneath The Sea (With Added Lurkers)
Date of Scene:	29 August 2020
Location:	Sub-Basement - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	No description
Cast of Characters:	Donna Troy, Victor Stone, Kate Bishop, Damian Wayne

---

Donna Troy has posed:
    There had, briefly, been a scare about Supergirl. She'd last been seen heading over the bay carrying a malfunctioning laser cannon, and an emergency underwater search had been triggered. This is something the Titans are pretty well equipped to handle, particularly when you have radar traces of flight paths, sonar scans, magic and an Atlantean on the other end of a T-Com. No trace could be found of sunken Kryptonians, and the efforts had proven to be a dead end. Presumably, Supergirl was no longer under water, just missing in a less immediately dangerous fashion.

    However the scans of the bay had brought up a curious anomaly. A few miles out and at a depth of 656 feet, there's a an old shipwreck that dates to the civil war, and at some point since the last sea-bed scans were done, the shipwreck appears to have split in half and moved some twenty or so feet. It's not the most exciting of anomalies, but it has been a long time since the T-Sub was used and it's an excuse to take a couple of the new Titans along for a test drive.

    A day after the search had been completed, the sub had been thoroughly checked over, given the okay, and was ready to go. Robin and Hawkeye have been given a crash course in how not to crash it, and are seated at the controls. The pair sit in the two foremost seats in the sub, Robin steering and Hawkeye on the weapons console. Behind them, Cyborg sits in the large central chair, usually occupied by himself of Caitlin, surrounded by control panels and with easy access to the engineering section in the rear. Seated above the three in a raised chair that gives her access to the observation blister on the top of the sub, Troia's job is observation and navigation.

    "Everyone double-checked their diving gear?" She asks. "Not that we want to leave the sub except in a serious emergency. We're going to hit a depth of 650 feet, and unless you want to spend a week in decompression after we get back, we really don't want to depressurize the sub."

    Donna flicks a control on the panel in front of her, and two powerful searchlight beams stab out through the waters of the underground docking bay beneath the tower. "When you're ready, Robin. Submerge to a depth of five feet and take us out. When you've cleared the tunnel, take a bearing of... one-oh-six and descend slowly, keeping us well clear of the bottom."

Victor Stone has posed:
Did Vic build the bridge of the T-Sub to resemble the famous command center set of a specific legendary science fiction show? Well, to truly know what was going through his head, you'd have to ask him -- and by doing that, you'd run the risk of having to listen to him rattle off the specifics of some control panel that was only shown in season 2, episode 5; or the odyssey he undertook to find a specific sort of vintage light bulb that would give the translucent buttons just the right warm glow.

Regardless of whether it was intentional or just a case of convergent design, Cyborg is seated at what is most definitely the engineering station, metal fingers dancing over an interesting mix of solidly built analog control surfaces and modern keyboards and touchscreens. From here, he can monitor the status of the submarine's systems, and issue remote commands to nearly all of them.

"I don't know if you've got the same news alerts I do, but there has been a lot of weirdness going on in the oceans lately," he warns the others. "Not in Metropolis, yet, but I've got sonar at maximum range, just in case. I'll call out a heads up if I pick up anything."

Kate Bishop has posed:
"While I am scuba certified.. which comes in very useful on family trips to the Carribean.. I definitely do not want to exit the sub at this depth. Jesus that would suck a lot..." she just shakes her head. "Also not a good idea with my ribs the way they are still..." she thinks. Maybe she should have stayed back. Still a chance to take the t-sub was so hard to resist. Choices were made. Maybe bad ones.

Still she checks the controls and goes over all the functions in her head, having gone through some danger room simulations in addition to some hands on instruction here. She is pretty sure she has it down at this point. I mean lets hope. "I am definitely excited about potential treasure hunting and not just relying on Aqualad..." yes she is thinking national treasure style antics not anything dangerous at this point.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Nightwing had given him access to a myriad of movies for his birthday. This was and was not a huge mistake. Damian was seated at the helm, his Robin uniform sans cape due to the underwater scenario. "Aye, all hands, prepare to dive." He started to work the controls, a klaxon telling the whole vessel to rig for dive. The T-sub took itself out of the sun-basement, and once out of the area of the launch, had assumed its proper course. "Depth at five feet, bearing one-zero-six, speed at fifteen knots."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna would never dream of asking Cyborg if the resemblance was intentional; partly because she knows him too well, partly because she missed a lot of that stuff and wouldn't notice. True with people like Vic and Gar around you can't be entirely ignorant of classic Sci-Fi from past eras, but her knowledge of these things is limited to say the least, and she probably thinks that DSV took place four seasons before DS9.

    "Old wrecks move around sometimes," Donna says. "So reports of weirdness or not, we shouldn't be expecting anything too exciting on this trip. Just an excuse to stretch our submarine legs. Garth hasn't reported anything unusual in the immediate area."

    The sub moves out into the channel of the Delaware, gradually dropping deeper until it's coasting over a surface of sand and gravel at a depth of 60 feet. Enough light comes down through the water to make vision clear for a decent distance at this depth, and the searchlight beams give a good view of the seabed below. The plexiglass blister domes give a great view into the underwater vista, of schools of fish swimming past, and crustaceans crawling along the seabed below.

    "We're not expecting anything too exciting Hawk," Donna says with a grin. "Or we'd have brought Gar and Garth along. They're the best equipped for deep-sea work. If we do see anything that requires a closer look, we'll head back to base and rethink things, okay?"

    After a few minutes the waters get noticeably darker, and Donna calls down to Robin. "We're out of the channel. New bearing is... one-seven-one. Approximately one point five miles ahead the seabed will start to drop away pretty dramatically, but it's pretty rough for a while, so keep us at current depth for about a mile beyond that, then cut forwards drive and descend."

Victor Stone has posed:
Vic glances toward the fore stations and snickers. "Isn't he calling himself Tempest, now?" he asks Hawkeye. "You know -- a little more Prospero, a little less Lucky Charms?" He might know the Titan's preferred alias, but that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy poking fun at him for giving himself a 'serious business' codename upgrade in the first place.

Robin's enthusiastic recitation of Hollywood naval lingo just gets a slow shake of Vic's head and a gentle "hoo boy." He doesn't know the story with the birthday presents, of course, secret identities being what they are. Still, it's easy enough to pick out the likely source for the nautical theme party being thrown in the young Titan's diction: too much TV. It's a chronic condition for so many people on the team. Still, the bearing from true north is accurate enough; they are headed roughly east-southeast, and Donna swinging them southward once they're a little farther from metropolis makes sense. So long as folks aren't just making up numbers!

Not that he minds making up numbers and shouting them out to sound official. He would just be hurt that he wasn't invited. "We've got the sub drones -- Robert and Ballard," he reminds Donna. "We can do some fun stuff without our fishier friends."

Kate Bishop has posed:
"Hey don't harsh my zen Troia... if I want to hope for sunken treasure or daring 7000 leagues under the sea ... that is the name of the ride at disney right.. whatever... adventure we should be encouraging it not crushing people's dreams and all." she shoots a grin over her shoulder to Troia though.

Then she is looking back at the controls. "Man this is some sort of military operation... and yes I think you are right Vic.. Tempest... or well Garth... though it is way to close to Gar... so confusing."

Okay Kate is in a mood.

"I did practice with the drones in the simulator... hmm.. do you think we can fire a weapon.. for science.. even if there isn't any exciting treasure to be found?"

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian found himself in an abundance of joy, not that any of his facial features, minus the small smile on his face would convey that.

  Robin kept at the controls, the touchscreen interfaces were working excellently. He commented, low in his voice, though it was not Damian's voice that came out. It was the sound of a legendary actor. "When they trembled are the sound of our rockets, now they will tremble at the sound of our silence."

  To the surprise of ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, Damian had found his favorite movies just so happened to involve the military and war themes. Luckily for him, these themes are aplenty and had been Hollywood's bread and butter for decades. "Adjusting course One-Seven-One, cruising speed of twenty knots, depth holding..."

  After a short while, Robin reports. "Seabed is dropping." He was a consummate professional, even if he was getting to experience the fun of being in a submarine, and one that looked like the bridge of a certain science fiction franchise. It was a little too surreal, even for the angry bird.

  "Seven thousand leagues is over twenty thousand miles. The Marianas Trench is only seven miles deep." Damian adds, bringing science into this, how dare he.

Donna Troy has posed:
    When the names of the T-Sub's drones had first been explained to Donna, she had thought it clever. Named after a diver famous for discovering a ship called the Titanic? Ideal! It was only later that she found out the aforementioned ship had become synonymous with maritime disaster and become sceptical, but it's was too late by then and that's not a debate she's going to restart, if only because Vic always has far too many counter-arguments for these things and it's just exhausting. Whgen the drones are brought up, she contents herself with an amused "How could I forget, Vic. How could I forget."

    "That's 20,000 leagues," Donna corrects Kate. "Or 50,000 miles. To go that deep we'd have to come out the other side of the Earth and reach a high orbit on the other side." Obviously she's proving she can science too, lest anyone think she's still living in the iron age. Damian's film quotations provoke no response beyond a mildly baffled expression, case down towards Victor. This isn't the Robin they've been getting used to.

    There is, after all, not very much silence here in the depths. The hull creaks continually, though as Donna and Vic appear not to be bothered by this, it must be normal. The sound of breathing seems twice as loud as normal in the enclosed space of the sub, and the engines hum is far from quiet, setting the entire boat vibrating. There is at least the comfortingly Hollywoodesque pinging of the sonar depth indicator, pulses getting slower and slower as the seabed falls away rapidly, then a little faster again as Robin starts descending.

    "Okay," Donna calls out. "We're in the rough vicinity. Cut engines and descend to fifty above the floor, Robin. Vic, anything on the sonar yet?" She shifts the angle of the searchlight beams, and they punch down through the foggy water, faint spots of light dimly illuminating the sea bed far below."

Victor Stone has posed:
"Man, that's all we need: to fire off some wild shot and accidentally hit an endangered whale or something," Vic says with a wide-eyed expression of dread. "I can see the headlines in the Bugle now: 'Titans confess to humpback extinction event! Garth or Stormy or Waterboy or whatever he's called resigns! Superman gives most disapproving look yet!'"

He glances over at Damian with a smirk and adds, "After all, we are down in the ocean, and" -- cue garbled Scottish/Russian accent -- "Some things in here don't react well to bullets." He's not the only one who's seen the movie. True, it's not Robin's usual attitude, but judging by the grin he flashes toward Donna, Vic isn't put off by it. If anything, it seems like the rest of the Titans might be rubbing off on Damian a little as he spends time with them.

Then he snaps his metal fingers -- or clanks them, anyway; it does not create the usual gentle clicking sound -- and points at both Donna and Robin. "Both correct. Twenty thousand leagues, in the title of the Jules Verne book, refers to how far they traveled while underwater, not how deep they went. This has been your nerdy fact of the day." They can both science, and as it turns out, Vic can science fiction. Nerrrrrrds, all of them.

But as Donna asks for a status update, Victor gives another sonar ping and checks the readout. "Nothing so far," he answers, being businesslike for once, as he holds a set of headphones up to one ear like a DJ. "Active pings aren't showing anything big, and I'm not hearing any propeller cavitation."

Kate Bishop has posed:
There is a very deep sigh from Kate. Two corrections with science and one objection from sheer environmental horror.

"Lame." she notes. "If that is the case why did Disney even name the movie... or was it .. wasn't it based on a book... why did they title it 20,000 leagues under the sea. Did they not know how big the earth was back when the movie was made?" book written, you know, something before cellphones and streaming video.

When Vic corrects the whole through the planet, no, rather how far they traveled. "Oh.. well okay that makes more sense. I figured it had to do with how deep. Huh."

"Do we launch a drone and have it peer around then... or do we try to eyeball it once Robin takes us down?" she is looking at her screens. She adjusts one to pan around a bit which is really aiming the weapon it is attached to.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     The correction from Vic garners a: ">tt<" From Robin, the helmsman simply distracts by starting the dive. "Diving." He says, a little after they start doing so.

  The T-sub was a nimble little sub, not nearly as big as a military one. But plenty of space as well. The vessel angles down, not super steep, but enough that people would be leaning a bit as they stand.

  "What's the operating range of the drones anyway?" He asks, granted that he knew little about the sub. He never really had a reason to be so interested with it, now however, he was hooked.

Donna Troy has posed:
"Nerdy fact for the day number two," Donna offers up. "Jules Verne used metric leagues, that's four kilometers. So the voyages of the Nautilus were almost exactly twice the circumference of the Earth." Hippolyta would probably shake her head in despair if she heard her daughter talking that way, but Donna has been hanging out with the Titans longer than Damain has, and some things are inevitable.

    "I hate to be the practical one," Donna says as she plays the searchlight beams across the water. "But even if we can ensure avoiding endangered whales making Garth hate us again, those torpedoes are crazy expensive and Nightwing will sigh really /loudly/ at me if we can't give a good reason for firing one off."

    "Eyeball first, drone second," Donna says. "Once we've located it, we send in the drones because..." Donna suddenly jerks one of the spotlight beams hard to the side and plays them across a tall stack of rocks on the sea bed for a few moments. "Thought I... hmm. Careful of those Robin," she says unnecessarily, the stack being a good fifty feet from where they're descending. "Uh... yeah. Underwater tides. We don't want to get the sub too close to the wreck, so we send in the drones. Range for them is bandwidth limited. We'll launch them tethered so we can get decent video, so about a hundred feet. They can go further using Very Low Frequency comms, but that's limited use. "

    As the sub goes lower, the spots of the searchlight beams come into sharper focus trailing over the muddy seabed. Donna stops the beam on an unidentifiable lump of something for a few moments before moving them on. "Yell if you spot anything, people."

Victor Stone has posed:
Vic nods at Hawkeye. "Yeah, pretty much everyone assumes that's what it means at first," he says with an amiable chuckle. "It's pretty vaguely worded, to be honest." As for the drones, he flicks a few switches, then announces, "Robert and Ballard are in their tubes and ready to go whenever we are."

See, because on Space Trek, the shuttlecraft are named after famous explorers, and Robert Ballard is a famous explorer, specifically for his innovative use of underwater drones? Come on, Troia, he didn't wreck the famous ship! He /discovered/ the famous wreck! Amazons and their superstitions, sheesh.

"The range from which we can control the drones isn't so much a problem," Vic answers Robin, waggling one hand. "They're on cable tethers that can spool out -- yeah, a hundred feet or so. The issue is more that they move a lot slower than the T-Sub, so we want to be nice and close when we deploy them so we don't have to wait around all day for them to get to the shipwreck."

Donna's nervous focusing and refocusing of the searchlight catches Vic's attention, and he gives her a sidelong look. "You want me to check thermal imaging instead of just sonar, Donna?" he asks, raising the headphones to his ear again. It's not standard to do so; everything down here is usually pretty cold. The sensitive microphones feeding into his headphones, picking up sound from the great distances conducted by water, are generally a better bet, but the Amazon's twitchiness is making him a little edgy, too. He calls up the readout on a screen in front of him, without waiting for her reply.

Kate Bishop has posed:
Of course better safe than sorry, but Kate is kind of wondering why they have someone on weapons if they can't even test fire something to make sure the T-Sub is ship shape as it were. Of course she understands the wisdom and being frugal. You don't want Nightwing sighing at you and all.

She peers through the screens, still panning some of the weapons around since it is the easiest way for her to really eyeball things. Adjusting a couple of other controls now as well. "I'm not seeing much of anyting other than water here." she notes helpfully, turning the spots on she controls to assist with the aiming. "Has anyone seen the shipwreck yet?"

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian keeps the angle right, but he cannot help but interject. He turns in his chair, and stares right at Donna. "Nightwing...NIGHTWING does the finances?! You do know he..." He stops himself before he says something that is going to be less than ideal for identity's sake.

  He sees the stack of rocks, but keeps them away, and keeping his eyes peeled for what they are looking for.

Donna Troy has posed:
    "Ah it's probably nothing," Donna says to Victor. "Just saw something moving in the darkness, but you know. Fish. If we bother it, we'll probably get Garth berating us for scaring one of his buddies."

    She didn't quite go as far as to tell him not to check it out. There is something distinctly eerie about being at this depth that grates on the nerves, and apparently Amazons are not immune. A sonar scan of the stack of rocks produces a tangle of returns that are hard to interpret, but show up no obvious movement of anything of significant size.

    At this depth, there's very little light apart from the twin beams of the T-sub's spotlights, and the shallow pool of light cast from the blister domes. From time to time curious fish, ugly things you might not be best pleased to see served up on your plate, appear out of the murk to inspect the great metal intruder.

    "We have a fund," Donna tells Robin. "Which Nightwing manages. Investing it to make it grow, you know. I don't know if he does it himself or gets someone else to do it, but back in the day it made more money than we spent. It hasn't been touched in three years though, and things got a little tight. I've asked him to take another look at things. If you think... there!"

    The spotlights stop and move back a bit, picking out an angular shape in the darkness. Donna turns it sideways, and it spills out over the dim form of what is clearly the back of a ship of some description. Oddly sloping walls give it a truncated diamond profile. It's still a good hundred feet away, and detail is hard to make out but the surface seems pitted and accretions of rust cling to it in swollen mounds. For a moment the spotlight beam glints off something shiny, two points of light reflecting back to the sub, but whatever it was is quickly gone as the angle of the light shifts.

    "There we go," Donna says, her voice subdued. "Bring us forwards about twenty, Robin. Vic, when you're ready with the drones.