bakerstreet | The Attached Meme

The Attached Meme

Inspired by the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of the same name.

Comment with your character, specifying name, canon, and gen/shipping/smut preferences, and/or tag someone else.
You and the other person now have two problems. One, you're aware of each other's surface thoughts regardless of either of your wishes, and two, if you try to distance yourselves from each other you're struck with nausea and vertigo until you manage to get close again.
Optionally, roll for or choose details:
1. You've been captured by some hostile force and had devices surgically implanted into the backs of your necks in order to facilitate interrogation. The mental link between you and dependency on proximity are just side-effects. Can you escape under these conditions?
2. You've been cursed by a spellcaster or supernatural being who wants you to "learn a lesson". Whether that's a real lesson about each other made possible by forced openness and time spent together or just the lesson of "don't mess with me" is an open question, and figuring it out may be key to having the curse broken...
3. One of you has suddenly awakened to latent paranormal powers, or your existing powers are suddenly misbehaving -- perhaps due to unforeseen interaction with the other person's abilities, if they have them. Maybe you could solve this, or at least the part about having to stay near each other, if you could only gain control over your power...
4. You were both willingly part of a scientific experiment, whether one of your own design or something you both volunteered for, and this... was not the result you signed up for. The mental link may or may not have been a known goal, but the involuntary aspect and the inability to separate aren't things either of you expected. Can science undo what it has done?
5. You both came into contact with an unknown substance, whether by accident or simply because of mutual curiosity, and this was the result. Now if you're going to be able to have privacy relative to each other again, you're going to have to figure out what it is and why it had the effect on you it did in order to find a way to counteract it.
6. Your choice, or something new!
Have fun!

[Three days since the 0-8-4. Two days since they'd awoken, no longer alone in their own heads. Simmons has been immersed in her work almost exclusively following the latter, breaking only to eat and sleep, and even then only under an internally recited list of all the physiological reasons that doing otherwise would be unproductive.

In terms of scientific progress, in terms of the time it takes to identify an unknown pathogen, let alone an unknown pathogen of potentially alien origin, it hasn't been that long. Subjectively, it feels like forever, and not only because of the unfamiliar thoughts, the unfamiliar emotions - and the guilty certainty that her own thoughts are twice again as intrusive, lacking both the strict control and the depth of training to keep them directed.

Simmons knows the protocols for infected cargo, and there has been an internal clock ticking down from the moment quarantine went into effect, the quiet certainty that they are running on borrowed time. Even if it's only one person to one person, even if there were no chance that the links could spread further if given time and proximity to flourish, the pathogen's too dangerous to risk wider exposure.

She's buried the doubts under formulae, drowned them with neurochemical pathways and neuroimaging and real-time brainwave readings, but they're still there in the quiet moments, strengthened by every dead end.

Last night, she dreamed of plague. Tonight, she'll probably dream of infected navigational equipment.]

None.

[She forces a smile, sickly and half apologetic. Her own thoughts can't be comfortable company, and for her own part, she feels like a voyeur every time a wait cycle disrupts her concentration enough for her to be consciously aware of what's leaking through the connection.

Even if most of it is more than she'd ever wanted to know about how planes function.]

I can tell you precisely what symptoms we have, and what the likely cause for each one is, but isolating the primary effects of the pathogen is - is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.

The Attached Meme

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