Lt. Commander Ayiana Sevo - Every Place Has Rules. You Just Have to Know Them.
Aaron Schimmel
((Moss Fields, Gateside Dimension))
So apparently the dimension’s flora were watching them like cameras. Possibly. Vylaa had noticed that a part of the sapling near them that looked like a bunch of fruit moved with her hand movements. Ayiana checked herself with another bunch, and sure enough, they moved with her hand motions. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was vision-related; there could be other reasons.
Sevo: Well, it seems like every life form here is part plant, including the animals. Maybe this…plant uses these berry-looking parts to “see” and it just instinctively moves towards nearby things; kind of like how normal plants in our world move their leaves along with the sun.
zh'Tisav: I'll take your word for it, I don't think Andorian plants actually do that...
Kairis: Assuming evolution even exists in this place; wouldn't that mean there's a distinct survival advantage in being able to see and move toward things?
Sevo: ::Shrugging.:: It’s just a hypothesis. There’s no way to know which it could be. We’d better be cautious, just in case something is watching us.
zh'Tisav: Agreed, because we still need to find the freaking gate among all this.
Kairis: There is that.
Ayiana noticed Vylaa roam her tricorder around. The sound of the sensor chirping indicated to Ayiana’s tricorder-enthusiast ears that it was set to passive. A wise choice, considering it had been proven time and again that the flora here reacted violently to the energies emitted by active scans.
zh'Tisav: Hmmm, the EM density changes. ::She moved the tricorder, taking a few steps in one direction, then reversing and going in another.:: There's definitely a pattern, it's stronger in only one direction.
Kairis: The only problem is that the direction they're coming from could change at any moment.
Following the others, she checked her own readings yet again. For a fleeting moment, Ayiana hoped that the after-market, more powerful and sensitive components she installed would detect something the others couldn’t, but she wasn’t getting any better results.
Sevo: Don’t know how the EM readings correlate.
zh'Tisav: Well, the plants have a metallic component, just like on the other side. Faraday's Law states that a changing magnetic flux through a conductor induces a negative flux in the conductor, meaning an EM field creates an equal and opposite EM field. I'd theorize that the gate's energy field is inducing a field in the nearby plantlife, and those plants are then inducing fields in plants further out, in a decaying pattern.
Ayiana was familiar with the Law in a general sense as it pertained to basic scientific theory knowledge, but she had little experience in the usage of it. This was also assuming such a physical law applied here. But after a few moments racking her brain, dusting off the theories of electromagnetism, she started to follow Vylaa’s hypothesis.
Kairis: Oh, that's— ::she nodded.:: That's clever.
Sevo: I think I get what you’re saying.
zh'Tisav: We could follow the density patterns back to the gate. Even the moss we're standing on is a plant, it's like we're standing on a giant EM antenna.
Kairis: This could also mean that the landscape changes, but the plants are... like an anchor, maybe? Or a skeleton? Everything changes around them.
Sevo: It’s a fascinating hypothesis. I wonder how it evolved, or else was built. And for what reason?
It was a strange thing to consider; an environment that shifted around its fleshy bits rather than the other way around. And what about the physical mechanism behind it all? Was the entire environment from the plants to the rocks made of cells that could be shifted around? Nanomachines? Something else?
zh'Tisav: Response
Kairis: That could be how all the teams lost track of each other. Step off the main fungal corridors running above and below ground, and the land becomes much more malleable, people are easily separated when it shifts.
Sevo: We need to test this and figure out a way to reliably detect this “fungal network.” We tried it before with a subsonic pulse back in the outpost, and the flora did not like it.
zh'Tisav: Response
Sevo: If the plants are induced by a magnetic flux, is there a way we can trace them? Or perhaps detect them via their metallic components?
zh’Tisav / Kairis: Response
Sevo: We need to devise something that can propagate reliably along the network, detectable passively by our tricorders, building a map as it goes. Perhaps introduce a variable to change the flux pattern as it travels down the flora.
zh’Tisav / Kairis: Response
Ayiana was feeling hopeful now. No matter how different a place acted, it acted on rules, just like their own world. You just had to figure out those rules.
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Lt. Commander Ayiana Sevo
Mission Specialist
U.S.S. Gorkon
V239109AS0
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