5654/Science the Portals Please, Brick.

Science the Portals Please, Brick.
Date of Scene:	26 October 2018
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Colette fills Brick in on the latest portal antics and Vorpal's state of mind is discussed. The two appear to have come to similar conclusions about their feline team-mate's problems, but that doesn't stop them fighting over the noodles (they didn't fight over the noodles).
Cast of Characters:	Brick, Stardust

---

Brick has posed:
Brick Marsden is not to blame for the random portal earlier. There is no way whatsoever his experiments into permissivity of trans-dimensional fields when approached obliquely through a cascading sequence of alternative dimensional vectors can in no way be blamed for any sort of temporal/psionic leakage, especially none that has rainbow-aurora edges and doesn't attach strongly to the more structured masses. That's just absurd on the face of it.

Maire Boit seemed to think it was important enough to cut his sleep period short though. All the sensors on the roof of the Titans Tower went off, and Brick left definite directions to wake him even if he was dead when that happens.

He was not quite dead. He didn't even smell dead after the second day in the decontam/regen tank. Still. When he shows up, his hair is wet, he's got a faint scruff, and his one-piece shirt thing is unsealed at the neck, and he's shaking a sport bottle of something green.

Stardust has posed:
When Brick arrives, the emergency seems to have died down. There's nothing on the roof. There's not a lot happening in the Tower at all. It's perhaps rather anti-climactic to be roused for, but at least he wasn't dead. Being roused from the dead for the sake of an apparently empty tower with nothing really going on would be anti-climactic indeed. Lazarus had all sorts of adventures, after all.

    The Tower is not quite empty. Stardust is still up and about, tidying the living area of the remains of a Chinese takeout. No pizzas are in evidence. This in itself should ring louder alarm bells than any mere portals. Perhaps the portal has torn open the barriers between realities, and this is one where Titans eat Chinese.

    Or Vorpal was bored of Pizza.

    "Brick. I didn't hear you arrive," Stardust says. "Normally I hear you arrive. Have you turned boom tubes into shhh tubes? Because that would be useful. There was a thing. On the roof. Did you make it? We thought maybe made it, because none of the magicky people claimed responsibility. Though in all probability not. Because then it started speaking to us, and it said non Brick-like things. I could understand all the words, for a start."

Brick has posed:
Brick shifts into French. //(We will use single quotes.)// 'I can always switch to another language if you find me difficult to comprehend. I am pretty sure the terms won't be much simpler, but you might be more comfortable, no?'

He has pulled a device from his wrist and is collating data from the copious sensor devices he's placed.

'Could you please describe to me what occurred? Is this the first such incident?'

He'll explain where he's been later. There is always some confidentiality when trying to tell about working on one of Star Labs' more ... remote ... facilities, and the Mercury lab is as remote as they come, and ideal for the kind of research Brick was doing.

'Apparently I missed an alarm, but Maire Boit finally got me to wake up.'

Stardust has posed:
    'It's not the language, it's the science,' Colette confides, replying in the same tongue. 'In fact, it's the same to me if we speak English or French, I have lived here half my life. It's quantum mechanics I don't speak.'

    Colette looks down at the cartons of takeout. 'There's some steamed vegetables and some noodle left, if you're hungry.' She gestures at a couple of the cartons with a spare chopstick. 'Third incident'.

    Giving up on the cleaning task for now in case Brick wants to do some polishing of the dishes of his own, Colette parks herself on the large sofa. 'About a year ago, we had a portal open in the tower. Something came through which cast a shadow and showed up vaguely on thermal vision. I went through the portal briefly, and it appeared to be a duplicate of the Tower. It happened again a couple of weeks back. This time they sent a drone through, but it broke. Robin took it to study. Those both opened on a wall. This time it was on the roof. Raven tried magicking it and something got her..." she stops and glances in the direction of the dormitory corridor. "Raven was upset by it. Then a shape appeared in the middle of it and talked to us. Told Raven not to poke it. Mentioned something about what Raven feared might happen. Then told Vorpal that he had to remember something, and that a cat could look at a king, something like that. Then it vanished.'

    Colette gives a shrug of her shoulders, and a dismissive wave. Like the portal, her interest in discussing it seems to have vanished. 'It wasn't around long. So, I wanted to ask something of you. You keep reminding us that you are not an official member of the team, and I think that's wrong. You have more than earned an equal place. I know you have ties to Star Labs, but then Robin has other ties too. I don't see it's an issue. And I don't think there is a single member of the team who would disagree when I say I'd like you to become a full member. Will you accept?'

Brick has posed:
PING!

Oh, right, Maire Boit has decided to insist that Brick remember how to "human" when he stops being the research drone, and he hasn't gotten his necessary sleep back yet. So, answer the question, Bale Richard.

'Yes, I changed the boom tube entrance and exit slightly. It reduces the range to only planetary, but it cuts the resonant overlap by eighty percent, and that makes it less intrusive.'

The "science thing" on his wrist has finished pulling the data, and is going back through the last several weeks to the current time, collating a number of visual, vibrational, electromagnetic, tachyonic, and made-up-particleonic traces into what might, or might not, reveal what the swirly galactic talky thing was, be it portal or personage.

The invitation to full-timery is disconcerting as it pushes past his preoccupation with the particulate past.

'I, enh, don't have an answer yet to that. Give me a moment to think please.'

He recalls briefly hearing about the first incident. The second incident, he hasn't heard about. And Maire Boit is directing the thinkbots in their reconstruction of the portal's inception, perturbulance, and exclusion, so he has nothing to do with the long ten seconds but think ...

'I use the reminders as a way of warding off demands on my time, but that's unfair of me. I have offered my time more generously to our //Jeune Justice// operation, but that seems to be progressing slowly. I'll accept, but remember that I am limited in the time I can give on a regular basis.'

Stardust has posed:
Colette gives a sharp nod of her head. 'Time is not the issue - there are no specific requirements on our time. The act is more eloquent than the speech. You have done more than enough to earn the title. More than most of us. "Resonant Overlap"... I will assume that's Science for "Boom". That's it.'

    Maire Boite's collation of data is vague, intriguing and worrying in equal measure. Something has been disrupting space-time in a way that is either very clumsy or demonstrating extraordinary finesse in doing something that is impossible to make any sense of. There are trace particles present that seem to correspond to each other in a unique way, probabalistically entangled in a manner that doesn't make any sense if they come from the same dimension, as if the portal were opening not between two alternative dimensions, but many, or if a bridge were opening through a cascade of alternative reality-states. It's something Brick and Maire Boite could get lost in for hours, and really not that far from some of the areas of Brick's own research.

    'Oh, I remember now,' Colette adds, possibly unheard past the particleonic mystery. 'A cat may look at a king, but a king may talk to a cat. Something like that anyway. That's what the voice said to Vorpal. Any idea what that could mean? Also, he called Vorpal by his real name. He called me Stardust and called Rae Raven, but he called Vorp by his regular human name.'

Brick has posed:
There's a very fast visual miniature of the portal swirling open, and the interactions with other people. Maire Boit's ping-report explains that there's not enough data to create a full hypertube profile, but there's suggestions of the whole process being a higher-dimensional overlapping fold and ... Brick isn't listening to her. His eyes close and he murmurs 'Interesting. Maire Boit, please incorporate the exotic energy sensor traces. We should see Raven's activities, but if I'm correct, we'll also see a second and possibly a third. Also, yes, there's clearly a reality sort function of some form happening. Please archive a copy so we can play with it later, it might have interesting overlap to the slip field equations.'

Brick pauses and smiles to Colette, 'Yes. Resonance, like when a thing makes a noise and another thing vibrates because the noise is just the right pitch to make it shake completely. The Boom Tubes use a layer of resonant frequencies so that they don't act like a terrible leak, so that all the air or water doesn't punch through past the people trying to use them, and the broader the layer, the more it goes boom.'

The cat may look at the king and the king may talk to the cat. If this IS connected to that probable-Fae that's hiding in Vorpal's lower left medulla, then it's got the potential to be extremely dangerous.

'Has Vorpal explained to you why he is unable to use his rabbit holes? This may be connected.'

Stardust has posed:
    'He has been reluctant to explain other than that they are "out of commission".' Stardust doesn't translate the phrase, presumably a direct quote. 'In fact, he is very evasive about the entire subject. I am not convinced by his explanation. I suspect he is in truth scared to use them. Something traumatic happened to him in Scotland. He travelled somewhere that was not Scotland. My guess, something intercepted one of his Rabbit Holes and he worries that the same thing could happen again. But, this is just my guess.'

    Energy traces are hard enough to deal with when they obey some kind of law of physics, even ones that are a truer reflection of the underlying reality than the best approximations available to terrestrial science. When things move into the truly arcane, it's much harder to model. Will can bend reality in ways it was not intended to bend; that's a decent enough description of magic, but a poor basis for data-gathering. There are energetic traces that are recognizably Raven's, but it's hard to interpret much about them, other than that they seem to have interacted minmally with the field. Perhaps Raven was using a featherlight touch.

    'One more thing,' Stardust adds, eyeing the remaining food cartons. 'When I asked Vorp for his interpretation of the message to him, he dismissed it as nonsense. When Vorp dismisses something like that, it means he's taking it seriously but has not yet decided what to make of it. Are you going to eat the noodles?' She gestures with a chopstick again.

Brick has posed:
'It's not nonsense. Maire Boit sensed a secondary and independent emotion from Vorpal. Something did happen, and his body language around his fear of opening a rabbit hole strongly suggests he's afraid of someONE rather than simply chaos. And, yes, I'd be happy to finish off all the un-eaten Chinese food. I was wakened too early, I need more sleep, but I am now aware that I am starving.'

Brick moves simultaneously to collect and begin to consume the leftovers.