Issue 1 Downtime

After a suggestion that they head to RRR, the convoy got moving.

Will, though, still hadn't, and was still flat and, well, rather immobile, though still warm.

"What happened in there?" Sara asks Taliesin after a while, one hand placed on her flattened husband.

"Hrm?" Taliesin said, looking up after being quiet for some time.

"To him. Why isn't he all squishy or back to normal yet?" she asks, trying to not sound too worried.

"Back to nor...

...you've got no idea, do you?"

"About what?"

"Sara...I'm sorry. I'm really sorry...

Nina got to him."

Sara's face sags at that, her attempts to not worry blown away.

"Wh-what did she do to him!?"

"My guess? Completely disintegrated his molecular bonds--he's not used to thinking on the sub-atomic level. Frankly, it's a small miracle he's in one piece and not scattered over the ionosphere right now."

"How is that even possible... Is he gonna be okay? He was still walking when you came back, that means he's not... you know... right?"

"Is he still warm?"

"Yeah, kinda..."

"Well, that's not a negative sign. Implies action, at the very least, or some kind of low-level activity.

Frankly, he should have been irrecoverable from the second Nina blasted him."

"Is that so. And you still let him run in there!? What if he had been... irrecoverable? What if he doesn't get better!?"

"I said it was a suicide mission. One down is a hell of a lot better than I thought," he sighed.

"It should have been none! And especially not him!" she shouts, reacting maybe a bit selfish.

"Well, hope remains. He's there, he's in one piece. Maybe we can work something with him. I dunno...he's, well, frankly, surpassed my expectations on where he'd be right now.

That being said, he probably has no real idea what's going on."

"So he's stuck in a shape he can't handle and because he can't handle it he's stuck. Could you be any less comforting?" she says, not looking at Taliesin as she talks to him, instead putting both of her hands on Will and trying not to freak out.

"What do you want, Sara? 'It's all going to be alright'?"

"Yes! Please!"

"And then if it turns out it's not?"

Taliesin sighed, and moved in the car to sit next to Sara.

"I'll do what I can to help, though..."

"You really think that'd matter then?" she sighs, still paying more attention to Will than to Taliesin.

"I wouldn't want to get your hopes up to see them crushed.

Here, lemme see him."

"And crushing them now is better?" she says quietly.

"False hope is worse than no hope, and much much worse than maybe some hope.

Lemme see him."

"Go ahead." she says, still not taking her hands off of Will though.

Taliesin poked, and prodded, the disk.

Then he punched it, producing a resounding thud.

"Hrmmm..." he said, resuming poking and prodding.

"How the hell i that supposed to help?" she frowns at the punch.

"Diagnostics. There was a reaction, kinda sorta...faint, really. Means there's still some connection out here. Means there's some hope of bringing him out of it, at least partially."

"Partially?"

"If we had an EEG machine right here, my theory--and it's only a theory--is that we'd get close to nothing on it. He's got no idea, in a logical thinking way, what's going on out here. I would imagine there's no higher thought whatsoever going on right now. It's more like...a plant, reacting to grow towards the light.

Hopefully, we can kind of work him out of this situation, but I don't know if we'll be able to bring him all the way back up, right? Heck, I don't know if we'll be able to work him out of it AT ALL, but at least we can effect him."

"Great... just great..." she mumbles, burying her face in her hands.

"Look, you want to just give up on him? Is that your plan?"

"Mind if I take a look?" Reaper asked Taliesin.

"Be my guest."

Reaper looked for anything that could be called a mind, for the mechanism that controlled Will's shifting.

If she didn't know better, she'd say the thing was dead.

It was only through deep concentration that she detected any spark, like it was miles away.

"Its just a mass right now." Reaper said "I can try to give it some shape. Unless you think it'd end up like that time in Prague."

"Well, the time in Prague worked, didn't it?

...Eventually, I mean."

"This time, it might only take a week."