Blink Who: Gor (solo) Where: multiple places on deck When: afternoon and early evening (with a lunch break in between)
Gor leaned back in his chair, his fingers massaging his closed eyes. His head hurt. There was nothing like a riddle you couldn't figure out. This was the worst sort of riddle: no clues and no logic. There was nothing to pick apart. One minute the sun was here and the next there.
It hopped around randomly in the sky above, following seemingly no pattern at all.
But that wasn't the most disturbing thing. The most disturbing thing Gor had discovered that afternoon.
People had often accused Gor of being an egghead, and they were right. Rather than recognize the unknown, get drunk or high or both, laid, and kiss the world goodbye, the youngest of the Jones had set to work making the unknown make sense. In the real world, everything made sense if you looked deep enough. There were patterns, spiralling outwards in that surreal perfection nature presented. Mermaids were reflections in the water and vampires bloated bodies. There was no such thing as monsters.
Gor had constructed one of those eclipse watchers. Poke a hole in a piece of paper and fix it above another sheet. You could watch the sun's movement without actually blinding yourself. Eyesight was very important to Gor. Besides, he needed to be able to measure and track the sun. He made a little scratch on the page with his pencil and wrote 0:00 beside it.
After fifteen minutes of careful observation, Gor found that the sun hadn't moved at all. He added 0:15 beside the original mark. He continued in this way for an hour. A little column of numbers was written beside the single scratch on the paper: 0:00, 0:15, 0:30, 0:45, 1:00
Exhausted from both the careful observation, as well as from his exposure to the sun itself, and frustrated at his lack of progress, Gor had leaned back in his chair to rub his eyes. When he opened them, the sun had leaped dramatically to another quadrant of the sky.
Gor stared up at it in confusion, then looked at his paper. Tentatively, he marked 1:05 down beside the new scratch. Once again, the tedious work began.
1:05, 1:15, 1:30, 1:45, 2:00, 2:15, 2:30, 2:45
By the time Gor pulled his eyes away from the paper, his internal clock and the paper showed that he had been watching the sun for nearly two hours, and it had not moved. Once again, it conveniently waited until he looked away (this time, Gor had disappeared inside for a quick bathroom break) to move.
What the hell?
It didn't matter how closely Gor watched the sun -- it never moved until he looked away. With this fact established, Gor tested his theory by watching it for a little while, then looking away. Regardless of the intervals, the sun usually moved. In total, it moved about 93% of the time during this test. It was not 100%, but it was the majority of the time. If one factored in the number of people possibly looking at the sun at the exact moment Gor looked away, the number was an acceptable one.
So, what did that mean?
It meant they were stuck in an episode of Doctor Who, and the sun was probably feeding off of their potential energy. Come to think of it, that would also explain the disappearances -- except that, of course, the sun looked nothing like a Weeping Angel, and it probably wasn't a sentient being -- an alien -- that lived off of humans. That was all just rubbish, because there was no such thing as monsters!
And no conclusive proof of alien life, either.
Although he had proven nothing useful, he had certainly proven something...and that meant he had made some sort of progress today. Until he could determine which direction, precisely, that progress pointed, it was probably time to get ready for dinner.