Tayammum 1: Anyone home?

[xp_dust]

With the Medlab a lot calmer, Laurie has recruited some help to see if Sooraya can be reached.

A large and motionless pile of sand on an equally large table, a few grains glistering just a little in the harsh lighting of the lab, stood out in the lab in the midst of the various machinery and screens in the lab.

The reality of mutant powers was that no one really and truly understood how they worked, there was a stream of papers and ideas coming out of Muir Island that sought to quantify and explain it but even the specialists there couldn't explain all the phenomena that they saw. Sue had no doubt there was a scientific explanation for it all they just hadn't stumbled across it yet. The tray in front of her was a prime example of this, the layer of sand that had once been a bright and kind woman now seemed inert and lifeless. An electrical probe was gingerly extended as the blond bit down on her lower lip carefully, "Do you think that her electrical pathways might have been disrupted? That she needs some kind of jumpstart?"

Molly made a face. "Dunno. I'd hate to find out what would happen if we were wrong," she said. "Maybe we should try to figure out what we do know first?"

Laurie for her part had been mostly silent, pondering the pile of sand in front of them as she rifled through the various options they might try. Sentient sand creatures had not been something they typically covered in medical school but given Sooraya had been at the mansion for quite some time, they'd had more than enough time to work up baselines for her physiology.

She spent a moment tapping on the medlab tablet she held in the crook of her ruined arm before flicking several records to the others. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't be sharing personal records with anyone but her fellow doctors, HIPAA standards being what they were but given the circumstances, she supposed this counted as emergency access for qualified individuals.

"You should all have access to the relevant records now. We need to establish if Sooraya is still 'there' to be helped first, it does none of us any good to waste time on someone who is already gone. Who do we have nearby who can detect thoughts or emotions?"

"Oh, I think we can find someone." It had been one of the steepest learning curves of her arrival at the mansion, finding out that there were people who could actually read your mind, sense your emotions. That those powers weren't really the proviso of myth and fairytales. It was odd, so much so that she almost expected to turn around the corner and find vampires and werewolves battling it out in the halls. Well...Logan's friend Sabertooth was kinda werewolf-like now she thought about it.

"Does anyone know if Dr. Grey or Topaz is in the mansion today? We can probably convince one of them to help out with this."

"Not sure where Doc Jean is but I saw Topaz in the Library earlier," Molly said. "I can call her."

Digging out her phone, she put in Topaz's number and listened to the phone ring. It took a surprisingly long time to answer, and when she did finally pick up, it was to the sound of her shushing someone laughing in the background. "Molly? What's up?"

Molly paused curiously. "Uh..." she cleared her throat. "Are you still in the mansion? We have a code 'holy crap' and we were wondering if you might be able to help."

The change in demeanor was instantaneous. "Yeah, I'm upstairs. Be there in a minute."

She was mostly true to her word, stepping into the med lab about a minute and a half later. "What's going on?"

"As you may be aware, Sooraya was brought back to the mansion still in her deconstructed sand form, and while she has shown a great deal of ability to remain in that form for hours at a time, this is the longest she has been inert without reverting to the standard human baseline. We require your services, or that is to say, we require your empathy abilities to tell us whether she still yet remains as a thinking creature, and thus able to be saved."

Laurie's voice was not robotic in its dissemination of the currently available information but nor did it convey any particular emotion either. It was a statement of fact, without judgment or compassion.

Topaz bit down a comment about checking Laurie next for the same thing. Not the time. "Right. Hm..."

She closed her eyes feeling carefully around the room. The others were vibrant and easy to push aside. That wasn't what she needed. She was looking for a fifth person. A fifth consciousness. A scared one, probably, because being stuck like this must have been terrifying. There was a buzz here and there, but...

"Nothing," she said, opening her eyes again. "Not anything I can get a solid hold on, at least. It keeps slipping away."

"At least she's still there. If you can sense her, even a little that means she's not gone, that there's hope." A single finger tapped against her lips as Sue tilted her head to the side, considering the pile of sand on the table. "If she's still there, even if there's a faint trace. We just need to figure out how to get to her. There has to be something, someway she controls the sand." Crystal blue eyes flicked over towards Laurie. "Do her medical records say anything?"

Laurie scrolled through, looking for anything that might jump out to explain why Sooraya hadn't come back but it wasn't until she got to the records for Sooraya's initial training when she first came to the mansion that she noticed something interesting.

Holding up a hand to indicate she might have found something, she turned and walked out, headed toward the science labs not far from the medlab before coming back several moments later with a small device that appeared to have a red stick on a wire attached to it.

She fiddled for a moment with settings and then started running the stick across and through the sand, watching the meter flick upwards slightly.

"There, see? She's in there. It's an electrical current, just like I surmised from the early tests that were done with her powers."

"So," the other blonde looked triumphant, "If there's a current then she's in there, and if there's a current it means we can communicate with her. Currents can be measured, manipulated, we just need to figure out a how." It might be a little bit of a long straw but...there were worse things for them to grasp at to help the woman. Anything and chance were better than none.

Molly gave Sue a light, hopeful grin. "Dude, it's a start," she said, lifting her hand up for a high five.

"Okay, so this might be really weird but...what if we put her in an EEG machine? Like, put electrodes there, see if we can measure brain waves that way?"

"No, it's not the kind of thing that would work here," Laurie murmured, mind already working the problem like she'd been taught through hours of study and practical experience. "What we've already seen with the meter means she's in there, but we need someone who can reach her. If she's electricity, then we need someone or something who can talk at that level, and I think I know just the person."