tampered | Log; Ongoing

He shrugs. No easy answer to that. "There was a huge search that turned up nothing. Of course. Because it wasn't meant to find anything. There have been..." He pauses; essentially summarizing his life's work.

"She was taken as part of a project, a secret pact between the government and alien colonists... experimented on. I thought she had come back to us, once--" He takes another sip of his beer. Mulder is surprisingly calm, considering the topic of conversation. "But it wasn't really her. There are clones. I don't know how many. But the real Samantha... I have no idea."

It's why he keeps going, after all, in spite of everything against him. He picks up his cue, returns to the table without seeming shaken. "I thought at first that by devoting my life to the search I would be able to prove myself, even if I couldn't find her. That by proving the existence of extraterrestrials, I'd make it impossible for them to deny what I saw that night."

He shoots, sinks another ball.

Tosh sits quietly as he talks, well used to seeing people manage a detached calm despite the difficulty of the topic at hand. After a while, you either learn to divorce yourself from it, or you fall apart.

"You should talk to Ianto sometime," she says softly. No more than that, because it isn't her story to tell, but she thinks the two would find a lot in common.

She waits until after the shot, then adds, "I'm sorry. That they took her, and they won't admit what happened. I've seen something like it, and it's not...there's no decent resolution. I think sometimes having just a memory and wondering is better than knowing the reality. But it's easy to say that when you're not the one in that position, isn't it?"

Gwen found out the hard way that the truth isn't always what a person needs, but Tosh isn't sure she could stand no knowing either. It's why they do their best to create a believable story, to make sure there's a body, whenever something happens that has to be covered up.

"I'm really sorry."

"It's all right." Maybe he should feel more vulnerable, sharing this knowledge, but he doesn't. People don't usually accept it so easily-- and maybe they shouldn't, at that-- but he's told it before, will certainly tell it again. "That's what my father said when she-- when we thought she'd come back; that you accept not knowing, get used to it. I don't know. I've never stopped looking."

He shifts around the edge of the table, going for a better angle. "So what made you want to chase little green men? Or, uh, space-whales, as the case may be."

"Not sure anyone ever does stop looking," Tosh murmurs. "Can tell you one thing, though -- don't ever underestimate the ability of people to deny what's right under their noses. Even if you had proof you could broadcast over every media outlet in the world, it'd still get carefully explained away. People mostly don't want to know."

And she doesn't blame them for that. There are a couple of things Tosh kind of wishes she didn't know.

With a shrug, she takes a swallow of beer and then glances up at Mulder with a self-effacing grin. "Prison."

"Sometimes people don't want to know, sometimes people don't want it to be known. I keep trying, anyway..." It's a normal life to him, always on the road chasing something.

He shoots, sinks a second ball, and takes a moment to weigh the options for his next shot.

That's kind of a shocker though, and he raises an eyebrow. "Prison?" She doesn't exactly look like the ex-con type, after all.

"Nothing wrong with that. Someone has to, don't they?"

Tosh purses her lips thoughtfully at the table. If Mulder sinks a third, she's going to have to step up her game and stop letting herself be distracted.

Nodding, she says, "UNIT -- Unified Intelligence Taskforce. I stole a set of classified schematics from the archives at Lodmoor and used them to build a sonic resonator. Except that at the time I had no idea what it was, or why they wanted it."

Up until this point, Tosh's tone has been pretty nonchalant, but now she lowers her eyes and frowns. "They -- and don't ask me who 'they' were, terrorists of some form, I suppose -- were holding my mother. Thank god for UNIT's team showing up when they did, or I'd have been dead instead of locked up. And then Jack showed up and recruited me."

There's nothing good for him this time, though; he shoots, and though the angle's not bad, the ball rolls to a stop short of the pocket. Mulder steps back and grabs his beer.

"Sprung you to get you on his team? Hmn.. What's a sonic resonator do?"

With a little sigh of relief, Tosh hops down from the stool and sets aside her beer. He didn't leave her in the best position, but she thinks she can nudge the three into the side pocket.

"Yep. Said I've a gift with technology, and pulled some strings with UNIT. All I had to do was agree to give him five years, and no contact with my family." She chalks her cue and lines up the shot. "It emits sonic waves -- audible sound waves as opposed to ultrasonic waves -- that cause a lot of pain and I assume eventually death. It's alien tech."

[ooc: And because I am braindead today, pretend Tosh called is a "sonic modulator", which is what it is actually called. >.<]

"Obviously the kinda thing you want floating around on the market," he says, nodding. "Tough bargain, but I guess it beats the other option."

He leans on the wall and watches her aim, glad they're not playing for cash. Since he's relatively certain she'll make this, although he wouldn't, in her position. "So you're mostly on the... defensive side of things, I guess? Rather than investigating."

"It was treason, and I'll admit it, but what else was I supposed to do?"

She falls silent for a moment to take the shot, smiling with the ball drops gently into the pocket. Pool is all about velocity and angles, which makes it the perfect game for someone with a love of physics.

"We do some investigating too, a lot of on-scene response, but usually that comes with the need for some kind of defensive action too. The Rift makes Cardiff a very busy place, as far as aliens go."

Mulder is more accustomed to situations where the laws of physics don't apply. "Nice," he says appreciatively as she makes it.

"I tend to go all over the States, myself... And occasionally outside. After a while you get a reputation, and people start asking for you when they encounter weird stuff."

Tosh glances up and grins. "Thanks!"

The next shot is an easy one, and she manages to put in two balls, giving a pleased nod when she steps back to survey the arrangement of what's remaining.

"We have sort of a reputation around Cardiff, but mostly it's for being into what Gwen's friend Andy calls 'spooky stuff'." Tosh cocks her head at Mulder. "Hey, you're supposed to be the one entertaining me, remember? You need to stop giving me reasons to babble and tell me another story."

"Spooky stuff." He laughs; that's his nickname, after all.

"That's true, stories were on me..." He pauses to pick something, sipping his beer.

"How do you feel about baseball?"

Tosh laughs too, and shrugs. "We're a little infamous, the police don't like us very much."

While Mulder is pondering his story, Tosh sets herself up another shot, sinking it but leaving herself in a completely impossible position for the next.

"Well, I guess that's you. Um...I guess I don't have anything against baseball. Don't know much about it really, we're more into cricket, you know."

[ooc: I have completely lost track of how many balls are left so uh...forgive me if I wind up with too many or too few. >.<]

Baseball is one of Fox Mulder's secret passions. "In 1947, a man named Josh Exley set a home run record, and mysteriously disappeared. Played for a team called the Roswell Grays. A lot of people don't know about it, since he wasn't in the major league..." He trails off and stalks around the table; he's not too far behind, but easy shots are getting rarer.

[ooc: we've sunk three stripes and five solids so far, I believe. :3 so she has 2 left, and then the eight ball.]

Tosh moves away to let Mulder have his go, eying the arrangement and thinking that so long as he didn't have a run of fantastic luck, she could beat him.

"I never really learned any sports, except for basketball. We used to play a little, at the Hub." She watches him curiously. "Roswell, that's the American town where the aliens were supposed to have crashed. Bet UNIT's got a file on that. Do you think his disappearance was alien-related, then?"

[ooc: You're awesome! <3]

He smiles. "Yeah? Next time we'll shoot hoops." He picks his best option, and is silent for a moment as he sights down the cue.

"In a way, yeah... But I'm thinking more of his appearance than his disappearance."

A solid clack punctuates his sentence as the cue ball makes contact, sending the yellow-and-white across the table. It bounces off the bumper and neatly into a corner pocket.

[ooc: just a little OCD, haaa~]

"Sounds good, maybe we can start a pick-up game. I tried to talk Luke into letting me teach him, but we never got around to it before he left."

Ooh, it's a nice shot, and Tosh applauds. She's definitely caught by the story, too, and leans forward to listen. "So what was unusual about his appearance? Had something happened to him? Time differential? Aliens lay eggs inside him?"

"He really was a Roswell gray," Mulder says almost offhandedly, taking a moment to re-chalk his cue.

"I heard it from a man named Arthur Dales, who was a cop there at the time. Assigned to protect Exley. There had been threats on his life from local Klan members who didn't appreciate his talents..."

He leans over the table with a slight frown of concentration. "Dales walked in on Ex one night and found him... out of uniform."

Tosh's eyes widen and she sits up a little straighter. "He was a sleeper agent? Do you know what for?"

Of course, it's possible he was just one of those aliens who tries to pass and lives a perfectly ordinary life among humans. But Tosh has yet to actually meet any of those types.

He pauses in the middle of lining up his shot, and looks at Tosh, face expressionless. Maybe just a hint of amusement in his eyes.

"He was a baseball player."

Tosh cocks her head and eyes Mulder skeptically, trying to decide whether he's pulling her leg or really serious.

"An alien came to Earth disguised as a human just to play...baseball."

"No." He shakes his head, turns back to the table. "I'm not sure why he came."

He shoots, but the ball misses the pocket, and Mulder steps away, grinning. "He stayed to play baseball."

There's a pause, and then Tosh laughs delightedly. "What happened to him? I guess after he was found out, he had to leave or go underground. Maybe he's playing somewhere else now."

It's kind of nice to hear a story with a 'happy' theme, and it reminds Tosh of something she told Mary. "There really are commonalities that connect us all, aren't there?"

"He told Dales that baseball was the first useless thing he'd ever done." He takes a seat, smiling. Though he's not sure he wants to tell the rest of it, not only because it's not such a happy ending, but because it's... weird. Even for him.

"Exley threw a game to keep out of the major leagues-- couldn't risk having his nonexistent background looked into. But his own species wasn't big on the idea, either... He was targeted by them, too. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they'd started the threats."

Log; Ongoing

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