What are you doing right now?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Besides posting on here and replying to this thread. Original credit for this goes back to Fate and Nathan on MX.

[EndOfTheEarth]

Really? Any scans yet?

[nathan_p]

Keyboard was covered in reminder sticky notes and I had a million tabs of anatomy of the back open as well as my bigass copy of Gray's Anatomy next to the computer.

I remembered what I'd been doing after a moment, but still... my face must've been priceless.

Scans sometime this evening -- I'm on my way to class, and before I use the scanner I have to give it a few good smacks with a hammer ah, configure it.

[EndOfTheEarth]

Remember, nothing too gory. Black&white pencil sketches are probably the best idea.

Also, to check, how far is this period covering? As amusing as we'd find it, I'm sure that a 10+ page correspondence between Doctors ter Borcht and Mengele discussing medial procedures, or Janssen and Himmler ranting about whether or not a genetically modified person ought to be selected from the Lebensborn program, as interesting as it would be for the period.
Also, may I reccomend that anything that we have going on in that time period no earlier than late 1944, as it would probably be best to imply that the Nazi setup was only a springboard to start the original research, and that it was then moved underground while Itexicon was started.

By the way, do you know if Lendeheim is East or West Germany? If we needed to buy pre-Itex personnel more time to work on Genetics, we could always take advantage of the Soviets messing around with it? Alternately, it would make a useful way to fill in the time gap, so that the newest aspect post WWII would be 1988...wasn't ter Borcht already experimenting by then?

Damn, I wish I had my books with me.

EDIT: Yeah, ter Borcht's license was revoked in '01. I suppose then that the best place for us to start would be to write a backwards timeline starting with "Mid-2005, Itex Falls" and going back to, say, "Late 1944, Dr. Janssen secretly discovers technique to splice genetic code."

[Nighthawk]

I wish I had time to help... *sigh* So much effing homework. Not to mention D&D and painting, and I'm supposed to clean my room today. Looks like none of that's happening... >.>

[EndOfTheEarth]

EDIT:...as interesting as it would be for that period, not many people would want to spend time translating it all the way through...unless you want to shortcut and write in a translation on top of the document. "Translations by Dr.Albert Mayhew, OSS"?

[nathan_p]

I read all this on the bus and about passed out on my dash home to plan and post. hnng someday I will learn to eat food, but apparently today isn't that day.

The cover story I was planning involved an exchange student in Lendeheim accidentally befriending an ex-employee of Itex (I was thinking ter Borcht, meh) and being given a folder of assorted papers (sealed shut, natch) to keep safe until such time as his death or... some other cue.

A few weeks ago, she got her cue, or received a news clipping stating his death by suicide, and opened the folder to find what she thought were documents from an obscure biomedical corporation that got busted by the recession... and then she saw the Itex logo.

(This would explain how she got her hands on, for instance, an annotated anatomical drawing, printed out emails, and seventy-year-old Nazi files... our disgruntled employee took his personal papers, grabbed some other files that looked interesting / revealing, and busted ass out of Itex.)

I think I will use that guy as stand-in translator... makes it more real-looking.

Anyway.

Re. backwards timeline: yeah, that sounds excellent... except the stuff I'm working on dates to circa 1989 or 1990. Oh well. Something of roughly that shape sounds great, though. Specifically, I only have one idea for a more recent paper: in late 2004 some sort of havoc breaks loose involving the flock, and we get a few emails from then about instituting a coverup procedure... then in April 2005, a final note on the issue that the procedure has been successfully begun. The implication being that the books are a fictional coverup so that if any disgruntled employee went rogue, they'd sound like attention whores building off of a fictional teens' series.

Re. timing with ter Borcht: Late 80s sounds about right, depending on what you judge his age to be. His "early career" was in plant genetics before Itex picked him up. Make of that what you will.

Re. Lendeheim: ... it doesn't exist (and yeah, I checked most of a bigass map of Germany before getting the idea to Google), but East Germany would be a good spot to put it. The USSR got up to some seriously freaky shit in their day.

[Omega]

So, Nazi's AND the commies? Win.

So, throw in some Russian, too, methinks, somewhere?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Not so sure about that. German's one thing. Deciphering Russian Cyrillic is a tad more tricky.

[nathan_p]

That's where we could bring in another third-party translator.

Also, Itex files would probably be in English anyway -- when you are a worldwide corporation, especially one with fingers that deep in biomedical shit, English is widely used, rather than whatever local language (German, Russian, whatever). Files from smaller corporations, Itex's early days, or Nazi-era would be in German.

[EndOfTheEarth]

*excited*

The "don't open this envelope" idea sounds perfect. It might actually be possible to pull off the ter Borcht thing; maybe the kid is a cousin or something and got the envelope after ter Borcht (or some other Itex schmoe, but I figure that Roland would know where these files were) committed suicide before he could be tried by a Humanities court.

Since Max is born roughly 1990/91, it would make sense for the files to pick up again mid or late 80s. That would give plenty of time for Itex to start working on things, for Jeb, Roland, and Valencia to all be hired, and maybe for a messup or two before they actually get Max right, then another ten years for observations/comments on the other experiments.

I figured it wasn't real...but yeah, giving Dr. Janssen some time to stirr over there would be great, that way by the time the Berlin Wall drops, she has the technology and connections (Anne Walker) to begin setting up in the States, and the School could be up and running almost overnight.

[nathan_p]

Yeah, I was figuring ter Borcht (given not only my personal favoritism but also the fact that yeah, he's a big cheese in Itex), because he would have access to some very incriminating documents. I like the cousin idea. With the suicide I was considering implying that it was a murder covered up by Itex -- he knew too much and they wanted to make sure he couldn't talk. Possibly there was a trial upcoming / going on, and he was offered major sentence reduction if he would provide information on any crimes committed by Itex. (And then what they don't know is that ter Borcht knew they were coming for him and packed the most important files off to America with a distant relative.)

Sounds good to me... it'll be fun to try my hand at faking experiment records and email logs.

(What's deeply sad is that I pulled out an old atlas showing West/East Germany and looked for it for about ten minutes before realizing Google existed.) We could cast Anne as a refugee from the USSR / East Germany (since there were quite a few cases of each) who had connections in Itex.

[EndOfTheEarth]

It would be easier to have Anne already in place as an FBI agent, and just have her bought out by Janssen. I have a feeling that mansion in Virginia didn't come from government pay. Besides, it would be a little difficult getting a job with the Bureau if you'd just moved here.

For your amusement, I wrote a sample letter from Anne Walker to Dr. Janssen with this in mind. The only thing missing is a signature...because I suck majorly at making those.