PHD 229: Film Appreciation
Film Appreciation
Summary: Bothered by the transmitter incidents, a group of pilots take a wild shot - going through CAP tapes for signs of the device's appearance or owner.
Date: PHD 229 (3 December)
Related Logs: MxM, 42, etc
Players:
Matto..Roubani..Legacy..

Kharon - Ready Room

It's dim in the ready room, most of the light coming from the lowered projection screen at the front of the room. The glow creeps over a few rows of the seats, casting shadows over the rest of the room. Roubani is sitting in one of the front center black chairs, his attention on the screen as it has been for hours. A laptop's open on the chair to his left, showing a diagram of the Kharon's port side with several red dots marked on it. On the screen is the same, though not a particularly helpful picture of it as whatever took it was a bit far away. He's clicking it forward a few frames by few frames, thumb tapping the remote buttons.

The hatch opens a crack, and then a little further once Kisseus has peeked in to see whether the screening's already in progress. He steps in and shoulders the edge of the hatch, opening it just wide enough for him to step through, then keeping it open with his shoulder to let the Legsykitten in behind him. He's holding a large water bottle filled with mess hall tea by its holder strap in one hand, and he's got a few protein bars under the other arm.

Thea slips in behind Matto carrying two bottles of her own. One tea, likely, and the other one coffee. Matto got to handle the hard stuff. For a moment, she simply watches the screen and Roubani, head canted to one side.

Roubani's head moves a fraction as he presses his fingertips into his left eyebrow, watching the screen between ring and pinky fingers. His eyes have a slight squint, dry or just tired, and the vertical lines that appear when his brows tense are a couple steps further towards permanency. The screen jumps forward another frame, passing over the port side of the Kharon but at a very awkward angle, and he exhales softly through his nose, looking down at his laptop screen. The crack of light creeping doesn't make him turn around. "Kisseus?"

"It's me," the Kissybear answers, keeping his voice low, as if the nonexistant sound of the show would be disrupted by talking too loud. "Legsy's here, too. Said she'd lend us a couple extra of eyes," he adds, wandering down the center stairwell and slipping two seats in on the row behind Nadiv, leaving the one next to him free for his Captain. He leans over to squint at the laptop screen from the row behind, and there's a foil-sounding slat of a protein bar slipping loose and falling to the floor. He doesn't bother fetching it, just yet, though, intent on parsing the image on screen.

"Yes, Kissy found a stray in his wandering around the halls," Thea replies, tone a little dry with just a touch of humor added in. "We come bearing tea." She moves to settle in next to Kissy and, yes, she reaches down for the dropped protein bar.

"Sir." Roubani's thumb hits fast forward as the craft moves away from the Kharon's port, scrolling through footage at 2x now. Stars. A Viper going by. Stars. The edge of the Kharon's bridge, approaching starboard. "Anton will be back after his CAP." More stars, and now the camera isn't even remotely in the vicinity of the red dots on the diagram on Roubani's laptop screen. One dot is the place where the transmitter was found. Th others, who knows.

"Thanks," Kissy mouths to Legsy as she picks up after him, giving her a quiet smile as he sets the tea jar down and finagles the rest of the protein bars from his armpit without dropping them all over, setting them in on the pull-out desk, instead. "What are those dots?" Kissy wonders. Since he doesn't know, but presumably Nadiv does.

"Excellent," Thea says quietly, busying herself pouring the cups of tea. Apparently she's going to let Kissy - or Roubani - do all the talking for the time being.

"Closest interior-exterior access points." Roubani murmurs, shifting his shoulders. They move with awkward stiffness; he's been sitting like that a while. "Red are airlocks, blue are utility cycling vents and otherwise."

"Oh, good idea marking them," Kissy murmurs, less outward flattery and more just murmuring to himself. His eyes skirt to the date marker on the film. "How far back did the records go?" he wonders quietly, while they're still waiting for the next pass, eyes on the screen as he regards the ship.

Thea slides the tea down the line toward Roubani, settling in to study the screen a little more closely. "And do we have a mark where the first device was found," she asks, keeping her voice quiet.

Roubani picks up a printed sheet, handing it over his shoulder to Matto. It's got the list of tapes and dates printed in a long, daunting row. Then he nods. "Yes, sir." Setting his thumb on his touchpad, he rotates the semitransparent Kharon diagram to show Legacy the starboard side now. "Where the X is, there."

Matto looks over the daunting sheet, one brow lowering as he looks up again to the date on the screen. "Y'know…" he begins, "If we wanted to cheat, we could skip right to the tape in the middle and see if it's there, or not. Then if it is we can look at the half-point between now and then… and if not, we can look at the half-point on the other side. And so on and so forth until we've pinpointed it. We might miss something else exciting, but if we want to get straight to the point where it appears, that'd probably be faster."

Thea studies what's on there, then grins, shaking her head. "Working smarter, not harder," she asks Kissy, quirking a brow a bit as she sips her tea. "I'm just here to watch the tapes. This is your all's show."

Roubani holds the remote up over his shoulder, should Kissy want to take over for now. Who says men never give those up? "If any of them are close enough to see it at all." The thing was only the size of a textbook. "It may not have been blinking when it first went out, so it may look like nothing more than a spot. Who knows at this point."

Matto leans closer, taking up the remote. For everything else you could say about the Kissybear, he seems at least to share the stereotypical male fascination for anything with buttons to push. "Yeah, you're right," he does note. "If we don't even know what we need to be looking for there's no quick spot-check." And so, having claimed the control, he simply hastens the CAP vessel camera around to the quarter of the vessel involved, probably taking a bit too large of a chunk of it, but not wanting to miss anything, easing the visuals into a more slothful perusal as he leans even further forward, as though simply leaning in would make the CAP camera move closer.

Thea's lips twitch a little as she looks between the two men for a moment, then back to the screen. "You both did excellent work. I know you've heard me say it before, but it bears saying again."

Roubani takes the opportunity to rub his eye. The left one's getting irritated, the white a little bloodshot. "Thank you, sir," he replies, after a long moment of slightly awkward silence. "Everyone did. Which sounds terribly patronising, I know." He seems to notice the tea around then, trusting Kissy to keep eyes on the screen as he looks away long enough to pick up the beverage.

Matto does seem unbearably fascinated by the process, slowing the feedback down to a frame-by-frame crawl with the gleeful abandon that will certainly wear off after the next couple of hundred times he does it. "Is that it?" he asks, "Or, wait, maybe that's it…" Kharon's hull isn't exactly uniform, and at this distance every little bit of panelling that's shaded oddly by the lights jumps out at his eyes. It's a thingie! A FIENDISH THINGIE!

Thea's lips twitch ever so slightly as she glances over at Matto, then shakes her head. "We probably need to figure out if we can zoom in on each thing. I dare say it's possible with our technology."

"You can take a cap of a frame." Roubani twists his shoulders, reaching over the back of the chair to point at a small button on the remote. "It will save it down to the laptop, and we might try to zoom in on it when more memory is free." Photoshopping Kharon ftw.

Button. Pushed! "Slick," Kissy approves of the feature, then is busy thumbing through the frames, biting at his lower lip, watching the ship drift by. Err. Jerk by. Bit by bit.

Thea shifts in her seat, tucking a leg beneath her to get more comfortable. "The only tech I know well? Birds," she comments to the pair, eyes studying the screen. "How about there on the bottom left? What's that?"

"I'm not sure…" Roubani squints dry eyes at the screen, then hits a few keys on his laptop. The diagram spins back to port and rotates so he's looking straight down, following the angle of the guncam. "…no, it's too far away. I think that's shadow."

Matto shifts his wrist, looking to the underside of the remote, then to the computer screen as Nadiv adjusts the angle. "So if that shadow there," he pulls the little trigger on the underside of the remote, a red spot appearing on screen where he points out, "is right there on the diagram… we should be looking for something," his mind twists to try to square up the geometry, "… around… here?" he moves the pointer a little.

Thea just grins at Nadiv and shakes her head, taking a sip of water. It's a brief look at the man before she goes back to the screen, lips pursing slightly.

Roubani just sits there looking at the screen for a few blank seconds. Then his intelligent contribution. "That has a laser pointer?"

Matto tosses the remote and catches it again, upside-down, holding it forward, "It's down here, hiding up against the bump for the batteries," he answers. Squeeze, squeeze. The red dot shows up at the inside of his elbow for two short moments.

Thea chuckles quietly as she glances over at the pair, eyes crinkling at the corners. She doesn't say what she's thinking, about how cute the two of them are - separately as well as jointly. It's merely telegraphed on her face.

Which, you know. Laser pointer > Humans at the moment. The maturity level of the front row continues to plummet temporarily as Roubani gets up onto one knee so he can see over the back of the chair, one arm wrapped around it. He pokes a finger at the demonstrated button-that-makes-the-red-dot-thing, then slouches back around to face forward again. "Mm. I didn't know that."

To be fair, laser pointers -are- pretty awesome. Kisseus brightens a little with a grin as Nadiv plays with it, then, when he turns back around, he reaches over to hand it back if the Poet wants it, "Do you want to…" Kissy doesn't go so far as to say 'play with it,' but, yes, Kisseus knows how to share toys.

Thea's just a hint clueless as to what wasn't known by Poet, but she glances at the pair, sidelong, briefly, lips quirking up into an impish smile.

"No." Roubani says, just a hint petulantly. Gosh, they're grownups, okay? The ready room might be missing its remote later, though. He nods to the screen, lifting a hand so his shadow finger points down to the bottom edge of the screen. "About there."

Matto lets the issue go with a little smile which fades when he looks back up to the still. "So, okay…" he tries to mark the spot in his memory, looking at where it lies in relationship to clear markers, then forwarding to the next still, "So it should be… there, now?" red dot points, waiting for correction.

Thea leans in for a moment, then shakes her head, pushing to her feet. "I'mg oing to leave you two to the work," she says quietly. "I have a Raptor that needs some TLC before bed." She lifts the cup to toast both men.

"Exactly there." Though exactly how many working shots of -right there- they're going to get off these tapes, one can only wait and see. Roubani scratches his fingernails through his hair, curls just now starting to grow back in from being hacked off. Rubbing the back of his hand at the corner of his eye, he glances half over his shoulder. "Good night, sir. Thank you."

"Night, Kitten. Say hello at the Foxbat for me," Kissy tells his Captain with a kindly smile before he's looking back to the screen. Blip. Onto the next frame, and again he plays spot-the position, taking in the visual cues and pointing the dot riiiiight—- "Oh. It's off-screen already."

Legacy heads through the exit labeled <O> Hallway.
Legacy has left.

"Mmhm." Roubani shifts in his seat, crossing his legs and reaching for his laptop again. "Well. There's…eleven freeze-frames to go over from this tape alone. Should probably do that before going on, no?" He glances over his shoulder at Matto.

"Yeah, let's take a look," Kissy agrees, looking back over his shoulder briefly to the hatch, and, when it closes, he vaults himself over the back of the chair next to Nadiv in one of those bursts of energy he occasionally displays, curling up in the seat next door to lean in and peer at the laptop.

Roubani taps keys while Kissy shifts himself around, bringing up the first of the saved frames. Lots of shadow, hooray. "I wonder if there are access logs from our airlocks," he murmurs absently. "Assuming whoever it was went out that way."

Matto peers at the shadows, eyes scouring the image for the contour markers he'd been using on the big screen. "I'm not sure. It'd be worth looking into, though. I don't guess they'd just let whoever cared to crawl out onto the hull. There's got to be protocol involved." He pauses. "They couldn't have done it from a Raptor, in any case. Not unless there are three of them."

"Unless it was someone taken out on a raptor for a repair walk, or something like that," Roubani murmurs, pensively. The picture sits on his screen, waiting to be manipulated, but he doesn't touch it anymore for the moment.

"I'll ask Legsy for the records on EV repair missions, see if there have been any in that quarter," Kisseus offers. Otherwise having scoured the image about as well as he can for the time being, he settles a less scrutinous look on it.

Roubani nods a few times to that. "That might be a good base to work off. Check the tapes around those times carefully." He rubs the back of his neck, rolling one shoulder. "What other explanation might someone have to be out there?"

Matto bites his lower lip, shaking his head, "Just needed to get out and stretch?" he posits a completely farcical guess in the absence of any real clue.

Roubani smirks faintly. "Right." He exhales through his nose and reaches over to shut the laptop. "Let's get that information from Legacy, then. Come back to this tonight."

"Had enough? Sorry I was late, I ran into Legsy, and… well, I thought I ought to invite her along. She's feeling as out of the loop on all of this stuff as you are," Kisseus briefly sounds as though his heart was aching on her behalf— but, then, he's always had a soft spot for his Captain.

"Chances are we're still going to be out of the loop when we finish," Roubani says, running fingers through the front of his hair. "It's going to be a long job. If she is willing to sit the hours, I am not turning away any eyes."

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