[The idea of truly seeing things from another person’s perspective has lost its novelty. L is tired, now, of living the lives and feeling the pain of people who have found themselves in bad situations. The fact that it gives him information is the upside, and with no one around to confirm that these newest insights are accurate, he’s not even sure it counts as that.

But he remembers that River Tam had been aware of the existence of the journals in the guards’ cabin before anyone had found them. Had something like this happened to her before it happened to anyone else?]

I’ve had another of those experiences that seem to involve members of the former crew of the Tranquility. To begin with, I’d be interested in knowing if anyone else saw the same thing, and if not, what they saw.

In terms of point of view, it was a man named Stephen who worked in the science department and was romantically interested in a woman named Arunima Biswas. They worked late nights together, and they sometimes had ethical debates about the work they were doing. She was troubled by it, while he wasn’t, and he thought that her behavior had been a little weird lately.

On the night this happened, she released some experimental subjects from a laboratory. She said that she had taken her job to participate in colonization, and she wouldn’t see the subjects--numbers, they called them, but they were human--tortured any longer.

They called them "number fours," but they were what we know as manticores.

Biswas seemed to understand that she probably wouldn’t survive the release. Stephen saw her smile before she was attacked, and he believed that the test subjects were eating her. He had shot a few, but he wasn’t able to kill all of them. In the end, he tried to get out, but he was also attacked, and shot himself.

[He pauses here. The sensation of pain when Stephen was attacked had been vivid, and if he's right in his suspicions, at least a few other people have also experienced all of it.]

It’s interesting: everything related the crew seems to involve somebody's violent death. One common thread, apart from the obvious, the location, was that both involved the idea of oil under the facial tissue, jaws that were unreasonably wide.

The journals we found several months ago included a reference to “numbers”--”numbers go out, numbers come back”--and the idea that it was “fucked up.” The room that those people seemed to be guarding had beds equipped with restraints, blood-stained blankets… someone had carved “Please end it” on the wall. It's been established that those were probably our experimental subjects.

Matine had seen bodies that had been eaten--if I were going to make a guess, I’d say that Arunima and Stephen might have been some of the bodies that she saw, and this might have been where it started. But it’s hard to determine the exact sequence without more information, and so much of it seemed to conflict last time… a matter of perspective.

Did anyone else experience this? Have I left out anything important?

It's hard to say how it ties in with anything else past what we know, but it's worth keeping as accurate a record as possible.

[EDITED @ 3:30 AM EST ON 11/22 TO ADD: Since this was posted, the mods have sent out a confirmation that the creatures Stephen saw were indeed manticores. The writeup of Stephen's memory was a little more ambiguous about what they were. L's narrative has been updated to reflect this. Any "but what about the manticores?" in threads up to that point is moot.]

 
Saw another memory. 

[Sam's voice is solemn, befitting the situation, but he hardly sounds thrown off by all this; he's unbearably used to visions by now anyway. This? This is similar enough. The added weight of feelings and thoughts make it heavier, and it's in the past instead of the near future, but it's still close enough.]

A woman someone called Biswas let a bunch of people out — experiments...? Test subjects used to try and... I guess mess with their DNA, make them better suited for to colonization. They all had numbers; she'd listen to them when she worked, sometimes, when they'd scream or cry for help. [He runs a hand over his face, exhausted suddenly by the thought.] She let them out, and 'Stephen' killed her. At least, I think he did; there was a gunshot, but...

[That's kind of where it ended.

His voice softens a bit, something cold sitting in the pit of his stomach.]

Anyone know anything about these people?

Worse off, do you think the numbers they had are like the numbers we had?

Are we — 

[He stops himself, frowning. Eventually, he just shakes his head.]

... I need to go for a walk. Keep me updated if you guys find anything interesting. I'll tell you what I can about what I saw in detail, if I can.

[And that's exactly what he does. Keeping an eye on the comms, of course, but also visiting the usual places: drink at the bar, resting with something to read in the gardens. Usually he likes the solitude — or maybe is just too screwy in the head right now to want company — but after seeing things like this... hard to want to be alone. He goes to the bar, to the library. He even combs over said library again, in vain. Like there'd be something new there.

Something about all this makes him too uneasy. Like something's going to happen. Not just the usual 'happen', either. 

He plops down and reads in the garden. Reads a downloaded, crappy story that was clearly half-assedly based on earth. Something about it being taken over and humanity being enslaved, or something. Very H.G. Wells, but with absolutely no accurate readings of earth, like an alien race guessed what the place was like. Funny how none of this makes him feel too much better.]

((OOC: omg ignore my delete i'm an idiot; also action brackets are okay with this post, if you're interested. I was gonna post a log, but this'll do :|b))