A Memory Faded

[Morosz]

"Research materials belong to labs. Not personal quarters. Now tell me. Where did you get it? And for how long did you expose yourself to it?"

[Spectre]

"Why do you think it's locked up?" He sighed, annoyed but contained at the fact that someone had gone through his quarters.
"I picked it up in Minor near Toledo. We stopped to pay our respects when the Order were towing us, and I combed through some of the wrecks to try and locate some of the other guys who didn't make it. A lot of them had family back here, and I wanted to make sure they had comfort knowing their loved one wasn't a damned zombie."

He sat up, hands firmly placed on his own knees.
"As for 'exposure', I had Norm look it, and he said it's harmless on a physical level. Mental.. it'll drive you crazy if you let it talk to you for hours on end, but it's just another rock with weird.. 'powers'.."

[DarkTails]

Nova looked through the transmission logs, seeing the transmission to 'Reaper' but cannot pull the contents of them. Now who is this? A new lead in her investigation, perhaps a link to keep eyes and ears in Liberty, or something else. There was no way for her to know but question the crew.

"Do you know of an individual named 'Reaper'? I have a scrap of a record from a transmission but cannot recover it's contents." Nova continued to look over both the battle data and the transmission logs. Although her investigation was going smoothly, she couldn't help but feel a sense of dread, not helped with the fact that her mind now drifted to the mysterious stone when not focused.

[Spectre]

"Yeah.. I know him... You remember how Cap said 'you can thank the primary'..? He's the reason."
She took a seat in Hemlock's desk chair. "'Reaper' was under the strict impression we were defecting. While, yeah... it seemed like it, given where we were, who we'd been talking to and what had happened.." She took a slow breath, sitting back and exhaling with a bit of a shiver.

"That.. 'person'.. widowed Milly.. he killed three of my best friends.. Cap took it even worse.."

[Morosz]

"So you admit that you exposed yourself to it."

[Spectre]

"Admit? What is it, a crime? I'm not under any kind of alien influence, if that's what you're implying, 'Admiral'." He gave him an increasingly annoyed glare, his fists clenching a bit.
"I'm more than aware of how to deal with things like this. Hell, half my damned adult life was keeping people away from it all."

[Morosz]

"Still you deliberatly exposed yourself to an alien artifact's effects knowing that it and i quote "Will drive crazy if you let it talk to you for hours" end quote. So we cannot dismiss the possibility that the behaviour you showed to us so far is caused by the alien artifact."

[Spectre]

"I was exaggerating. The stone won't drive you crazy. If it did, I'd been in the looney bin already. I only mean that the damn thing never shuts up."
He lets his fist go, sitting back again. "I'm acting like this because the Navy has so far shown to me that they're more than willing to send covert operatives to shoot up a warship's crew sent out on a humanitarian mission. I don't need to show you kindness when I myself have been at the ass end of the Navy's respect since day bloody one of leaving for Freeport 11."
He drops his hand on the table, creating a rather audible thud. "If you think that for one moment I'm going to respect a Navy that does that to it's own people, then you can think again. I'd rather listen to the spiel that those Auxesian scrubs dish out than live that kind of life."

[DarkTails]

"Well, I suppose I better get this stone to the lab for analysis... I really hope those two aren't close to blows, but in all honesty, I don't really expect much different." Nova quietly took her leave, taking the two operatives as her escorts to the conference room, going to retrieve the keys to the locks. She looked concerned about what the XO had said about 'Reaper' attacking them and killing their people.

[Spectre]

"Erh.. dammit.." As Nova left, she seemed to follow in close proximity, closing up Hemlock's quarters and tailing them. The look on her face expressed worry, as if she'd felt that they were already at each others' throats.
As they neared the room, they would be able to hear Hemlock's hand thud against the table, followed by his dulled yelling..
"If you think that for one moment I'm going to respect a Navy that does that to it's own people, then you can think again. I'd rather listen to the spiel that those Auxesian scrubs dish out than live that kind of life."