standalonehuman | Recolle IC Inbox

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[And there's your phone call, ring ring ring.]

Togusa picks up immediately. "Tsushima? Officer Hitori Togusa," he is technically at work, but he is finding a quiet room to go into with a paper and pen. "Good to talk to you by voice."

"Shuji Tsushima, nice to talk to you too."

Texting isn't not talking, but there's definitely a milestone involved with talking face to face.

"Do you want to hear about the fiction side or the nonfiction side first? I'll warn you right now that neither of them have any definitive leads, but I did find a Recolle novelist, and Dr. Halliday's medical journals."

Togusa shuts the interview door behind him, and all of the ambient noise behind him silences. "There's value in the fiction, but start with Dr. Halliday." Togusa drops the pad on the table and has a seat to start writing. "One of the teams last month came across his name as memory researcher, and they saw what was probably his CV, but they couldn't bring it back with them." The recap is more to ground him self in what they're talking about than anything else.

"I found a handful of medical journals and the 'memory researcher' thing checks out - they were talking about his studies on memory-damaging diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia, that kind of thing, and whether they could be cured by deep brain stimulation. He talked about how deep brain stimulation of the entorhinal cortex - I probably completely mispronounced that, sorry - could possibly allow memory restoration without inducing anxiety as a side effect."

Togusa doesn't have to know that Shuji is looking at his notes for this, because otherwise he'd never remember half this stuff. He's better with fiction.

"It's all theoretical, and none of it is directly related to alternate lives or anything immediately Retrospec-related, but he's definitely a memory researcher, at least."

The scratching of a pen as Togusa keeps up to take his own notes. "Hunh. But I suppose that does explain why you didn't immediately go to the network with this. Not definitive but, there are definitely people who would want to look into this further. Whatever Retrospec is up to, it's probably nothing so cut and dry. But I can take this to our doctors and have them take a look." Togusa sighs. And he's supposed to get a head scan anyway.

"If there was something that was useful, I'd tell everyone, but it's nothing definitive. Same with the fiction side - there is one published author from Recolle, specializing in fantasy novels, and I've read all of his stuff now cover to cover, but there's nothing about unreality or memory alteration or anything that would immediately point to a connection or these kinds of events having happened before."

Shuji sighs heavily. "Sorry I couldn't be more help."

"You've been a huge help. And don't discount a work of fiction just because it's not a straight copy and paste of events that it could be related to. People can take inspiration from all kinds of sources and what they do in response to a work of fiction might not be exactly what the author had in mind. Similarly when an author is trying to write about real events, they'll have to change quite a bit in order to be able to approach it in a way that would make sense to other people." Togusa's own love of literature might seem at odds with his status as an officer by people who don't know him well. But he loves talking about this sort of thing.

"That's true, but it also makes it a lot shakier as a lead, especially when the genre is high fantasy to begin with. Lots of novels have their heroes having to solve riddles - the fact that some of our teams had to solve riddles doesn't necessarily imply that there's any connection at all. And I'm not sure if we can track down the author and say 'did you base this shapeshifting tiger on a real being'?"

If they did, they'd likely get the door shut on them.

"Or, even worse, if the author is still around, maybe they don't even remember what they based it on now. Which, okay." Togusa drops his pen and leans back in his chair, his voice gets a little lighter. "I know there's this possibility that Retrospec has tried this before on previous groups of people and we all just don't remember, but is anyone taking that theory seriously?"

"It's the first time I've heard the theory, but it's entirely possible. Sometimes people with Retrospec lose it and forget all about horses, and everything. It's happened during this... session, I guess you'd call it?"

Thankfully, not to anyone he's really close with.

There's a longer than normal pause on Togusa's end, a twitch in his cheek that still surprises him every time it happens. "...Yeah. I know what you mean." Maybe he should toss out an explanation for that, so he picks the one that's less painful to talk about. "We lost the guy who had been acting as our superior officer on this, keeping us all organized. He doesn't know a thing now."

He runs a hand over his face. "But. For future reference, what was the author's name?"

That sure sounds like a topic change from something unpleasant.

"Fred Auclair. Not super famous, but moderately successful."

"I'll keep him in mind." Togusa looks around. "I do have to get back to work, though. There's something I need to try."

With that, it would be two days later before Togusa would get back to Shuji.

Confirmed with the docs that there's no change to my brain function. So, I'm not sure what to do with this information from here.

That's what I expected. Sorry I couldn't find anything more helpful.

This was really helpful, though. Being able to rule out one way that they could be messing with us? That’s good.

We know that Dr. Halliday’s research was important to the people that founded this city. The link just didn’t turn out to be as direct as we might’ve hoped.

Maybe the weirder stuff just wasn't published? He'd sound like a quack.

Could he have found out about Retrospec before he was killed? I'll have to go back to Emil or Juzo, ask what they found, they were the team that initially found Halliday's name. Was Vanderweele trying to recruit him, or was he trying to join Vanderweele? That would determine whether his research had any weirder stuff to begin with.

How long has Retrospec been a thing? The research papers have publishing dates on them...

I honestly don't know. But I'll have to check with a few people who found information outside of 'reality' for lack of a better term.

...Do I want to know how far back the publishing dates are?

About 50 years ago, more or less.

So if the Founding Families, or at least if Vanderweele was interested in his work? Now we have a time frame for it.

I think. Does that sound logical to you, or am I wrong?

Sounds reasonable. If he published anything before then, I couldn't find it.

I can't thank you enough for this.

But I'm still unsure of where to go from here.

I've done more complicated research for term papers, you really don't have to thank me.

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