"So far I am just going with that assumption that there are ten for now. But you could be right there might be more then ten but so far there are only two females I have seen. So I am not discounting that in my mind" he said and was glad that Taika at least had the same thoughts as he did. They were acting diffrantly then a covenant since they rarely attack there own that was with Class IV and under. But the thought of mercenaries did bring an interesting thought to him. Since most mercs would not reveal there tech to people. But agreed that kind of tech would be way too advanced at the moment or in the near future. This time he quickly leaves his office area and makes haste while walking to the director's office . He gets there and sees that it is empty and places it on his desk and quickly gets out. Not wanting to privy in a serpent's nest by poking around and disturb anything since the man was a paranoid son of a gun.

Ashley then gets back to Taika and hears on what should they do "What do you think would be the best bang for our buck as those americans would say. Since we have a limited amount of these crystals fragments here. And I agree that the results will be very interesting" said Ashley as he too wanted to find out more on these things. Since if it was something that they could make in the lab then they could replicate it. If not the results would tell them on what the stuff is.

“Ok. First things, we need to figure out what this dissolves in. Is it polar or nonpolar? That will take some trial and error, but all crystals would be recoverable. Ummm… we can do x-ray crystallography, but honestly, that isn’t my area of expertise. It would be our best option though for determining atomic and molecular structure,” Taika says, moving a chair back and forth.

“If we could make friends with someone who wouldn’t ask too many questions or wouldn’t mention it, that would be great. NMR would be our next best option. However, if you really are concerned with preservation of samples, we can go low tech and look at it under a microscope with polarized light. That wouldn’t give us near much information though,” she says. She suddenly stops the chair movement as she asks the big question.

“So the question is do we think we can afford to lose everything on one big chance or do we play it super safe for the time being?”

Ashley starts thinking when Taika started to explain the tests on what they could do with the crystals. If they played it safe they would not get that much information. But they would still be around, although if they stayed around too long then they would be a problem as it would be evidence that they stole some of the shards. Since Ashley did not want to get caught red haded with the evidence. But the other was just as risky....although they would need one more person for this. "Lets take a gamble, scientists like ourselves take risks for our research. If we are going to need someone to help us. We are going to need someone that has no loyalties to the Director to the point that they hate the man. Like they want to get revenge on this man. That or I hate to sound like a evil mastermind from a anime, but someone that we can easily control" he said looking at the shards. If he was going to do something that could end job, might as well go full bore into it.

"I think after this though we are going to be finding more things in the future. Its just an odd feeling I am getting" said Ashley since for all he knew it was going to be the truth in some degree. Or not but it was a gut feeling he was getting after seeing those crystals today.

Taika is entertained by the idea of throwing caution to the wind as soon as they got started. But it wasn’t like she hadn’t gotten caught before... “If only we had a post-doc…” Taika muses.

“Hmmm… anyway we can access which projects have been recently rejected? Or who has been continuously rejected? I’m not sure where we’d be able to find the list of proposals.”

She laughs a little before continuing, “Actually, do you think can mail these to Siberia? There are some pretty angry people out there from what I hear.”

She nods in agreement about finding out more things. “I don’t want to say I am also optimistic about more big discoveries seeing as these things come from large attack sites. However, 3 attacks inside a week is a little weird of Tokyo. I don’t know why we are getting a spike in activity like that, but I’d expect more to come. And the Sailor celestial bodies… Hopefully, they’ll show up again.”

"Ok you want to test this now since we both are curious on those crystals" Ashley said and laughed a bit on the fact of mailing them to Siberia. To all of the men and women sent there and he just shook his head "A lovely idea but not something we should if we want quick results. We should be careful with those that might be too loyal to the Director. Even then.....I am going to wait on digging into those files" he said and looked at the crystals just for a few seconds while ploting the next move. But it was evident that it had to be analizing the crystals soon with all haste. "They will be showing up again.....shall we go then" Ashley spoke while stretching several times to get the kinks out of his system.

“Alright. Let’s go to the microscope and see what we can… Since it doesn’t require us losing any of the crystals, it’s a solid place to start. Then, probably prepare a few different solvent mixtures to figure out whether it is polar or non-polar. Use something with a low boiling point so that we can recover them easily. Then, once we have a mixture that it can dissolve into, we can put it in an NMR tube and run down to the big machine.”

Taika gets up and starts toward the door. “You may want to grab something to take notes on.” She yawns a little and mumbles to herself, “And who really needs to sleep anyways?”

Ashley quickly steps over to a safe he keeps in his office and fiddles with something and takes out a tablet computer. "This will suit our needs I can then send it to my computer. And I agree with you there on starting small. So lead the way" he said and takes out a blue tooth ear piece and checks it to see if it had power. It did and was looking over to Taika "If we can learn anything about it then all of this would be worth it" he said as his mind was going like clockwork on the possible things that could be done with it. Ranging from an energy source or even a stronger material to make things out of it. Although hears Taika yawn "I can make a mean pot of coffee if you like" he said knowing that they would be both out of energy soon.

Taika nods, “Alright, the lab is sort of multiple labs. Each one has stricter biosafety protocol than the last. Honestly, the BSL 2 should be pretty deserted, and it doesn’t require me to swipe my access card a million times. So less chance of getting caught.”

“Well, probably try a few common solvents first: water, ethanol, hexanes, chloroform, acetone, and DMSO. Maybe some kind of mixture of two of those in 10% increments… See if anything works. This will pretty much be trial and error, unfortunately.” Yeah, it was going to be a long night of a lot work. “However, once we get that part done, everything else will be a lot easier.” The other parts of testing composition were faster and less tedious.

She looks relieved when Ash mentions coffee. “That would be great. Right now, I’m hoping I can drink 8 cups in exchange for 8 hours of sleep.”

"First lets get that coffee made since it looks like we will need it" he said and goes and gets his special roast that he particularly made. Ashley gets the machine prepped and then he gets the thing going. "Hoestly I hope that crystal can be found somewhere else. I hope that it could lead to something greater. But knowing my luck its not going to be that easy" he said and gets a rather large mug and fills the mug up and hands it to Taika. "Try a sip before adding anything" Ashley was proud of some skill with confections and some hot drinks. He made some good stuff when he had the free time at his house. "I made that roast myself so its going to be good" he said and was going to wait for Taika's response.

“It would be nice if there was a memo about where it came from. However, it is possible, depending on the substances in it, we could make more. And if this wasn’t going to lead to something interesting, this would be going to my desk, not the Directors,” Taika says, her eyes more on the coffee.

She’s already reaching for the creamer when Ash tells her to try it the way it is. She looks skeptical, but does so anyway. Surprisingly, not bad. “Damn, this is good. But now, I don’t think I can go back to shitty stuff that they stock around here tomorrow…”
She finishes her cup rather quickly despite it being sort of large. Too much work, and not enough hours in a single day. “Alright. Let’s get to work. Follow me.”

She leads him up a few flights of stairs and into a wing with minimally secure labs. The labs here use regular key locks rather than electronic key card access. She goes to a cabinet and begins to pulling out beakers and a number of solvents. “Alright, all we are going to do is try taking a small little piece of the crystal and place it in a beaker. We’ll pour in a solvent mixture, see if it dissolves. If not, we cook off the solvent on the hot plate and try a different mixture. That way we aren’t being wasteful. So basically, this is going to take a very long time.”

Ashley grins when Taika said that she would not be going back to normal coffee "I made it myself, I'll tell you when I make another batch of my special stuff" he said and made himself a cup. Then downed the coffee like a pro drinker and knew he would not be sleepy for awhile now. He nods and follows her to the lab area and gets his tablet device on and turns on the Bluetooth device and puts it in his ear. Ashley opens a program and tests the voice dictation a few times and it was working. "Alright lets do this" he said and got the items that were needed. Ashley takes twiesers and takes a small shard and puts it into the beaker. Then gets some gloves on and carefuly pours some of the solvent into the beaker. "This is Ashley Zelpher with Taika Lukkanen, Testing shard with first solvent" he said and the tablet device was typing down what he had said.

The science officer was very excited to see if something would happen with the first fragment they were going to test.

When the solvent combines with the dust, it seems to cause the fluid to shimmer and emit a faint glow after the solution settles and the mix was spread about evenly. It seemed to grant a sense of peace and a minor amount of warmth.

When Taika watches as the solvent and crystal combine to produce a glow, she swears. “So, I just lost some of the sample to a chemical reaction. However, now we know that when combined with that particular solvent it makes an exothermic reaction… I am actually really confused now.”

Taika looks back at Ash, and asks, “You wouldn’t happen to have spectrometer around, would you? We could measure absorbance… or something. I’m sort of a little confused right now what we should do.”

Ashley was mesmerized by the change and then looked at Taika as she was just as confused as he was. "I think so" he said as he was putting down some notes on to his tablet device. This was rather interesting to him as it just glowed like that and broke down in the liquid. Since it broke down like that, now they could find out what the stuff was made out of. "Is that the machine that finds out what things are made out of? Forgive me if I am out of it. I am just as surprised by this as you are" he said looking a bit sheepish.

As the two poked and prodded at their sample, another flash of light fills the room. This time, a restricted plate of samples begins to burn, as orange glows can be seen within the storage unit hey were in. Plant samples that were being researched since they seemed to be mutated from Obelisk influence, they each begin to have heat emitted from them and the blackened parts seem to be burning off.