Issue 1 Downtime

Carrying the tubes full of keys and the one containing Will Sara leads Natalya into the lab.

"Alright, try to keep your hands cold, I'll get something that should get them off..." she says, putting the tubes onto a table and hurrying off to grab something from somewhere in the lab.

Natalya's hands coat in frost, "That I think I can do."

"Great. Alright..." she says, carrying over what looks like a small container filled with liquid and a bunch of buttons and dials and other sciency things on it. puts it down next to the tubes and grabs one of them. It seems to be filled with some kind of liquid with a vaguely metallic sheen. She retrieves the keys from the containment tube and drops them into the liquid.

"Alright, just put your hands in there with them and hold still for a moment."

Natalya does as instructed, holding nearly perfectly still.

The liquid is slightly warm and slightly viscous. "This might tingle for a moment." she says, adjusting one of the dials and pushing a button. "It's a ferro-magnetic semi-fluid that should bind the nanites."

"Magnetic liquid thingy. Got it."

"Pretty much." she says, turning the dial up just a bit to be on the safe side and waits a minute.

"Alright, that's it. Grab your keys if you want to see if some of them still work. Just pull them out slowly so none of the liquid sticks to them or your fingers."

Natalya slowly pulled her hands and both her keys and Will's out of the solution, comparing them against each other.

Will's keys were still different -- they had been permanently altered by the swarming nanoprobes.

"Okay, they don't seem to have altered my keys, just his," she confirmed.

"Probably not enough exposure. How long would you say they were contaminated before you froze them?"

"No more than a minute. Long enough to compare them to Will's keys. He said his worked this morning and had stopped working not too long before he stormed into my office."

"Right, okay..." she says, taking some notes. "Just trying to narrow down how fast they act so we can get a better lock on how they spread around."

"Think we should uncork the Chateau de Will?"

"First I need to figure out how to decontaminate him..."

"Can't you use this stuff?" She pointed at the fluid.

"Not exactly, no. The reason why it works so well is because, well, they seem to have a certain affinity to Will..."

"Well, I'm kind of out of my element when you start talking nanites."

"Well they're programmed to search out any mention of Will so it's easier to get them to stick to Will. So it only takes a slight nudge to get them off of other things because they almost want to stick to something that's Will, even when it's shifted into, well, that." she points at the ferro-magnetic fluid.

"They have to have some means of accepting instructions though, right?"

"We haven't found it yet. And it's possible they are running on orders they received once and then distribute through the swarm. Reminding each other what their orders are, so to speak."

Natalya nodded, "Well, I'll get out of your hair and let you figure out how to decon Will. Good luck with that."

"Alright. Thanks for letting me know. Maybe we finally got all of these things, right?"

"I don't think it will truly be done with until we put and end to Black Air and I'm working on that. When you get him decontaminated, I need to talk with the two of you."

"Okay. I'll let Will know."

"Thanks," she said, stepping out of the lab.

"Alright then, let's see if we can get you cleaned up..." she says and heads over to a big centrifuge. "This is gonna get a bit dizzy." she says apologetically as she opens the containment tube and carefully pours Will into one of the centrifuge arms.

"Is this the biggest one you have?"

"You realize this has way more rpm than the ones they strap astronauts in, right?" Sara chuckles.

"Pfft. Look what happened the LAST time we headed into space."

"In you go!" she says and puts a lid on the container and turns the centrifuge on.

"Wait, let's t"*click*

*whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr* the thing went, rapidly increasing speed, and beginning to sort Will and the various Will-adjuncts into various layers based on SCIENCE.

After about 15 minutes the centrifuge slows down again and Sara carefully takes the tube of layered Will out. She quickly carries him over to an empty table and carefully pours out the top layer of grey goo.

It was a significant chunk, actually -- despite being nanoprobes, they added up, numerically speaking.

She takes a spatula and scrapes the top layer of 'Will' off along with the remaining nanites to plop into the already contaminated bath she cleaned the keys in before carrying the rest of Will way over there into the other corner of the lab and dumps him into a small tank of what seems like water. "There we go, just gotta make sure a handful of them didn't stick to you but we're almost done."

"What's this? Some kind of tub?"

"Nah, it's something I can't use on, well, anybody else to decontaminate them. At low concentrations of nanites a strong electrical pulse destroys them because they don't have neighboring ones to mitigate damage."

"Wait, what?"

"Sorry. It'll only be for a second." she says before pushing a button to send a burst of electricity through the tank.

Will shook and morphed some as the electricity coursed through his body, twisting into a variety of lewd and unnatural states, before dissolving slightly into a liquid.

Got those nanoprobes, though!