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Stark Industries, Monday

Ender had had his meltdown yesterday; he couldn't afford to have another one.

So he arrived perfectly on time at the shop in the morning, and set up. But instead of concentrating on his increasingly sporadic emails, he was going through a list of the information Ben and him had already collected, looking for a connection. This wasn't enough to make any real case just yet, and solutions were even further away, but he simply couldn't keep wallowing.

No matter how much any of this hurt.

He made a vow to himself to close up early and go back to the dorms, put up some more posters and see if anyone had added anything to the existing ones. There was only a limited amount of good he could do from here - and none at all, as long as he didn't have information.

[[ open! ]]

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Tara had never been inside Stark Industries before, and there was a moment of gawping just as she entered. It was very ... techy. But she figured that if Ender was collecting information about the disappearances, it might be worth hunting him down to tell him the Kennedy thing and about the theory she and Wesley had developed.

"Hey," she said with a little smile, once she'd picked out Ender. "How are you doing? Karla mentioned you had people missing" -- though she didn't yet know about Valentine -- "and I saw the posters."

[OOC: For SP, I fear.]

Ender offered her a smile in greeting, though it went nowhere near his eyes. "I'm fine," he said dismissively. "Thank you for coming." He nodded at a chair. "Grab a seat?" he said. "I'd offer you a drink, but I don't really have any."

Tara shook her head lightly. "I didn't need anything anyhow," she said, as she took the seat. He looked ... not-really-good.

There was a lot of that going around.

She swallowed and jumped right in.

"So ... I don't think anybody from my world is missing." From what she could tell after calling her father the night before, anyhow, and that might not be worth much because she didn't exactly have a lot of people to ask about. "But Kennedy's whole world is ... unreachable. By magic and by tech. Think that's connected?"

She did. It was too close for it not to be.

"It might be," Ender said, thoughtfully. If he looked not-really-good, he was not going to let that reflect in his demeanour - he'd sustained his ability to lead under worse pressures.

But no, under those layers of steel plating, he didn't look so good.

"I know something similar happened to Ben over a month ago. We lost contact with his universe, and we haven't heard from it since. Maybe the comms equipment has vanished."

"Maybe," Tara said, wanting to be supportive. She wanted to believe the idea the same way she wanted to believe Kennedy just lost her phone.

Still. She had to admit it wasn't a perfect explanation.

"But, um. Why wouldn't people build new equipment?"

"No, I mean all of it," Ender said, looking at her. "Or this 'disappearing people' issue has spread out much further than we're currently aware of, and the comms are simply inoperable by now, or at least can't stretch out from the boundaries of their universe. Or they really are gone. That's the problem - we don't have enough information to come to any conclusions juts yet."

"Oh," Tara said, sheepish.

"Well, we know it doesn't make a difference if a world has magic or not," she added, biting a thumbnail. "We know it's not everywhere, or at least not the same everywhere. But the connection's weird. It would be easier if the worlds that were" -- she didn't want to say gone -- "not in touch at all these days had something in common."

"You mean beyond that they're all worlds belonging to someone with some connection to Fandom," Ender said, "But that's a case of 'we can't see everywhere'." He paused. "Though, that reminds me - in my world, Valentine and I were the only ones who noticed anyone missing."

His voice didn't crack on his sister's name - he wasn't the type - but saying it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

"Right, the world without shrimp isn't going to ... you know, call us and tell us it's not there," Tara said, before she'd quite registered what he was saying.

"Wait, crap, your sister is gone? Sorry for just ... babbling at you. I really didn't know that part."

"She disappeared yesterday," Ender affirmed. He didn't sound... like much of anything, having said that. "But before that point, she'd noticed some of her friends vanishing. Everyone else acted as if they'd never been there in the first place."

Tara grimaced sympathetically, said "Sorry" one more time, then shut her eyes in thought.

"Do people there still remember her?" she wondered aloud. "Does Peter?"

Ender's Peter, the Peter at school, it didn't much matter.

"No," Ender said. "They don't. I found out when someone I called forgot about her practically mid-sentence. I haven't spoken to this Peter yet, though - we'll see if he remembers."

That might go a long way to explaining a few things.

"Do we know anyone here who's from Kennedy's dimension?"

Tara shook her head, frustrated. "I'm close, Wesley is close, there are a couple others who have passed through who were close, but ... we all seem to know these similar little pieces of it, but not the exact same place. I think."

There wasn't exactly a perfect litmus test for it. A cold finger was creeping up Tara's spine, anyhow.

"She vanished while you were talking to somebody about her? That fast?"

"Ho, Ender," Ben said, walking in at the usual time with coffees and sandwiches. "Have you eaten yet today?"

"I was actually on the phone with someone to get her clearance to take a portal here," Ender said, sitting back. "He walked off to arrange it for about three minutes, then when he came back, he didn't have the slightest clue as to who she was. Whatever - or whoever - this is, they work fast."

"I stole some of your nachos this morning," Ender said. Because that made a breakfast.

"Ew," Ben said, making a face. "That's not breakfast."

"Then give me the sandwiches," Ender said, mostly because he just didn't have the energy to deal with the fussing.

Ben passed the bag over--it also included fresh fruit in case the shop had neglected to provide any today.

"Anything new?" he asked, sipping from his coffee cup.

"Tara came by earlier," Ender said, taking a sandwich he'd in all likelyhood take about three bites out of today. "Her story about Kennedy sounds eerily like what's happened with your dimension."

The story made Tara go pale in sympathy for a second., and she was still vaguely stricken as she spoke again.

"I think it has to be a what," she said softly. "A big what. If it's a who ... they have to be a god. A real one. I don't know if we can fight that."

"Unless it's someone who's hopping universes, kidnapping people and causing fits of amnesia," Ender said. "With the right tech, it might be possible. Sufficiently advanced technology, and so on..."

Ender, on the other hand, was still busy setting a record for stoicism.

"No communication at all?" Ben replied, looking worried. "Scully said Peter Bishop was similar, but he left a message for Claudia that made it sound like he knew his goodbye was final--not just this blackout I've gotten."

Tara gave him the tiniest half-smile, without much humor in it. "If somebody had the technology to do that and not get caught, not to mention having a place to put everybody who's gone missing -- I think I'd almost rather take on the god."

"She says Kennedy's entire world is unreachable," Ender said, taking a bite of his sandwich. "She's tried magic and technology, but neither works. No explanation."

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Stark Industries, Monday

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