Difference between revisions of "V=IR"
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Revision as of 13:30, 13 June 2008
| V=IR | |
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| Dates run: | December 11-24, 2007 |
| Run By: | Nute |
| Read the logs: | V=IR |
Ohm's Law (V=IR): the electrical current between any two points is inversely proportional to the resistance between them.
When Forge discovers a plot to misuse a lost scientific discovery for ill-gotten gains, he recruits Doug into a globe-hopping adventure to unravel some of history's greatest scientific mysteries.
Contents
Cast
Timing
Plot Summary
While enjoying a night of study at the Tesla Club in New York, Forge encountered Francisco Milan, a socially-awkward young man who claimed to have invented a mechanical codebreaking device that by description, seemed physically impossible. Forge dismissively mocked Milan's claims, an action that would sow the seeds of a serious rivalry between the two.
Days later, Forge learned that Milan's purported codebreaking device was being referred for the Wardenclyffe Prize, an award given by the Tesla Club that conferred not only high status among the scientific community, but a significant monetary prize as well. Still possessing doubts about Milan's invention, Forge called in Doug for his cryptographic experience.
When viewing Milan's device, however, Forge was able to ascertain that it was a fraud. It was deduced that Milan, and his financial backer Fabian Cortez had perpetuated the hoax to gain access to a page of the Tesla Folio, an apocryphal document authored by Nikola Tesla, written in code and rumored to contain information about his "lost inventions", such as "death rays", weather manipulators, and other devices thought fanciful and impossible.
Doug was able to decode the page of the Folio to reveal a set of coordinates corresponding with a technical museum in Vienna, Austria. Armed with this knowledge, Doug and Forge set off for Europe to try and find whatever the Folio led to before Milan and Cortez could. Inside the museum, they discovered a theremin, a musical instrument that Tesla had created in 1909 - a full ten years before the publically credited invention of the instrument by another inventor. Doug interpreted further scribblings on the Folio as musical notation, and when played on the theremin, a countermelody was produced.
Treating the melody and countermelody as a set of encrypted and decrypted data, Forge and Doug were able to derive a mathematical equation giving angle and distance, but no known points to apply it to. However, making the leap of logic that Tesla was working at Wardenclyffe Tower in New York around that time period on his experiments with wireless power transmission, applying the equation to that location gave a very precise end point - the site of the 1908 Tunguska Event.
Wasting no time, the two mutant heroes traveled to Moscow, catching the Trans-Siberian Railway to Irkutsk to investigate the Tunguska site. While on the train, however, they were accosted by Cortez and Milan. It was revealed that Cortez and Milan sought the location of Tesla's rumored "death ray", an electrical weapon capable of wiping out entire armies. They offered Doug and Forge a bribe to work with them, but upon hearing that Cortez wished to offer the death ray to Magneto - Forge adamantly refused, ridiculing Milan's attempts to curry favor. Angered by the mockery, Milan summoned a group of Russian Mafiya thugs to deal with Doug and Forge, and the two had to escape by unhooking the last car of the train, stranding them in Siberia.
Managing to find a local village, Doug was able to negotiate for the use of horses (much to Forge's chagrin) to transport them to an airfield where they could charter a plane directly to Lake Baikal, and from there to Tunguska. At the impact site, however, there was no sign of any sort of receiving device for a wireless power transmission.
What they did discover, however, was that crystals formed by the Tunguska Event held an identical electromagnetic signature to the theremin in Vienna, proving a link between Tesla's Folio and the Tunguska Event. A leap of intuition revealed to Doug and Forge that their initial analysis of the data had been incorrect - as had Tesla's calculations back in 1908. The existence of the Van Allen Radiation Belts had not been proven back then, and thus the Tunguska Event was but an accidental side effect of Tesla's experiment. Applying the simulated distortion from the high-atmosphere radiation on the assumed power transmission, Forge and Doug were able to deduce the true destination of Tesla's great experiment - the inventor's own birthplace in modern-day Croatia.
Traveling once more into Eastern Europe, an analysis of obscured map locations brought Doug and Forge to a hidden tower in the mountains, cleverly disguised with antique electrical technology that still functioned, hiding the tower from discovery for nearly a century. Making their way inside, they discovered that the tower seemed to be some kind of conductor, with an odd sort of pipe organ wired into the metal walls.
It was at this point when Doug and Forge were ambushed by Milan and Cortez and the entire plan became clear. Milan was a mutant, with the ability to possess and control electronic devices, and had been tracking and eavesdropping on the duo for their entire voyage, through Forge's iPod. At gunpoint, Forge was subjected to Cortez's power, amplifying his ability to comprehend machines, and ordered to activate the "death ray".
However, with his enhanced comprehension, Forge discerned that the tower was no instrument of death, but rather Tesla's greatest experiment - a receptacle for the electrical patterns generated by the human brain, something that Nikola Tesla believed to be the human soul. Using the organ to activate the tower, Forge produced an electrical storm inside the enclosure, out of which walked an electrical entity claiming to be Nikola Tesla himself.
The strange apparition confirmed Forge's deductions, that he had recorded his own brain patterns and attempted to transmit them to this storage tower, so as to live beyond his own inevitable death. However, the failure of his experiment led him to leave clues for some brilliant scientist to continue his work.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Forge disarmed Milan of his gun, and a melee began with the four mutants. In the middle of the fight, Milan attempted to use his power to control Forge's cybernetic limbs. With Forge's own power amplified, the effect overloaded the young inventor's brain, sending him into a seizure. Confused and appalled by both his own non-mortal state and the violence inside his tower, Tesla summoned a bolt of electricity to blast Milan out a window, ending the fight as Cortez managed to escape.
However, Forge was seconds away from death, his brain shutting down from the trauma. Doug pleaded with Tesla to help him save his friend, and in a moment of noble sacrifice, the electric ghost of Nikola Tesla used his own electricity to restore proper function to Forge's brain, fading from existence in the process.
In the days that followed, Forge was taken to Muir Island for a checkup, but aside from minor burns and a slight concussion, was deemed fit and healthy. The secrets of Tesla's tower, now destroyed due to the fracas, remain lost to time and well out of the hands of megalomaniacal would-be conquerors.
Related Links
External Links
Trivia and Meta
Trivia
Each of the parts of this plot were titled with a specific scientific law that illustrated the theme of the section.
Meta
Plotrunner: Nute
The mannerisms of Tesla in this plot were taken from both the film The Prestige and the graphic novel The Five Fists of Science.
