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WHO: Qubit, Kanaya, Science Friends, Karen Starr later (probably)
WHERE: the lab at Starrware
WHEN: Sept 8 & 15
WHAT: maybe getting one thing, and then breaking the other thing.
WARNINGS: horrible nerds, questionable lab safety, and probably a tantrum

(Starters below, but here's some setting-)

The lab Qubit's been borrowing from Karen is pretty good-sized, although a lot of the floor space is taken up by counters, so he's had to get a little creative with where he puts things. The counters themselves are littered with electronics equipment, instruments stacked up on top of each other and wired together in ways that probably look random and haphazard to anyone who's not an electrical engineer themselves. They're a little more futuristic-looking than in the pictures, of course, but the mess is real. What little counter space isn't taken up by working devices is occupied by parts of them instead, and there's at least one decent-sized stockpile of old and broken electronics that don't appear to have anything to do with the rest of the equipment.

But the centerpiece, with as much space dedicated as he can make for it, is the portal itself. It's a little bit of a monster - a nine-foot-tall trapezoidal archway, metallic green, with that sort of blocky retro-future aesthetic its inventor gravitates toward. It's attached to the rest of the machines by thick bundles of cable, some snaking across the floor, others draped like vines over, under, and around the other equipment in whatever way lets them reach. The computers are turned on, but the portal itself is still dark... for now.

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[It's nine at night, and Qubit is probably going to be pulling yet another all-nighter. It's not entirely insomnia - his sleep cycle got thrown severely out of whack after twenty-odd weeks in the heart of Gehnom. Granted, the insomnia and nightmares didn't help, but still. Rather than trying to power through the jet lag (space lag?) and force himself back into sync, he's spent the last month or so just rolling with it. He'd sleep when he was tired, and work when he woke, and sometimes that put him in line with normal business hours, and sometimes it didn't. Tonight, it didn't.

Staying in the building after hours was kind of a non-issue. By now it was pretty much standard operating procedure for him to 'port in and out at whatever ungodly hour he pleased. The overnight janitor and security guy might have complained a bit at first, but buying them coffee every now and then had smoothed that over before too long.

The other nice thing about working later than everybody else? If you feel like music, there's nobody around to complain about it. So he's got the radio going while he works, tuned to the local classic rock station. As for himself, he's seated in a regular old office chair, leaning back with his feet up on one of the tables. Several monitors, both physical and holographic, are set up around him; the largest one contains the actual code he's working on, while the others are filled with data models and graphs and test outputs in both textual and diagrammatic form. A wireless keyboard rests in his lap, though at the moment he's thinking rather than actively typing, fingers laced behind his head.

Now, for Kanaya - he'd caught her a little earlier in the evening, and wasn't too surprised when she already knew he wanted to see the nullifier. Though she'd been occupied at the time, he'd invited her to drop in at his lab whenever she got a chance, and that he'd be here probably very late (as he often was). It's not terribly urgent, at any rate. So if she comes by tonight, that's fine, and if she has other plans, that's no big deal either.]

Edited 2015-09-20 22:14 (UTC)

[ It's before Kanaya leaves for the night that she stops in his lab. No point going home first, especially when she'd have to take off her nullifier to do that in any reasonable amount of time. The nullifier's the whole point of the visit.

She forgoes the portal entirely, at least not one that goes into the lab, instead appearing outside the door and walking in like a normal person. She does it mostly for his sake, people expect others to walk through doors instead of opening dimensional gates to step through. But, if he finds himself curious of what is being nullified exactly, she'll be open to discussing it.

She regards his odd metal doorway with some curiosity, but that will wait. Better to get the matter at hand out of the way first. ]

Mr. Qubit. Before I relinquish my nullifier to your study, I would like to discuss what intentions you have for the information.

[Ah, there she is. Hearing her enter, Qubit takes his feet down and turns the chair round to face her, setting his keyboard on the table in the meantime (though not without locking the screens first).]

Good evening to you too, Kanaya. [Jk, jk.] That's understandable. What are your concerns, specifically? I'd be happy to address them.

[ Sure, yes, she probably could have done with some pleasantries. Or she could just play like it wasn't anything she overlooked. ]

Primarily, I can't endorse any study that would result in the development of a countermeasure. A nullifier like mine is the only meager measure taking against imPort criminals. It's a fragile and inadequate system already, breaking it entirely would be unacceptable.

[ Though it might illustrate to the government how weak their solutions are, the potential for civilian casualties in such a demonstration isn't worth the risk to her. ]

[Ah. He's heard a little about that issue - not enough to form a complete opinion, but enough to know what she's talking about.]

Believe me, helping criminals is the furthest thing from my mind. Frankly, I'm more interested in finding out what the government's nanites are capable of. As I mentioned to Jacob, I'd thought they were able to nullify our powers without any external devices. So mostly I'm curious whether the device itself is what does the nullification, or if it activates something already present in our systems.

[And in either case, whether he can make something that duplicates the effect. But shhh just gonna leave that part out.]

It would be much easier, were that the case. Criminals whose powers could be remotely shut off would do quite a bit to reduce their threat. But I know from our short history no such system is in place, or certain events could have been prevented entirely.

When I was first arrested, there was still a devoted wing for imPort prisoners, where the whole area could be under focused nullification. Now that it is no longer available, they sought other methods.

[ She bends down, reaching for her ankle to unclasp something. ] After all, if we were no longer congregated in a single location, they would want to ensure at least that much limitation is in place. Something that could do the job wherever we may be.

[ She stands back up straight, approaching his work bench and holding out a thick black bracelet, its clasp opened, a state he'd never see from one possessed by a current probationer. Those are very much locked, but that was removed when they let her keep it at the end. ]

They achieve that with this.

[Makes sense. Unless they're saving that capability for something that's a threat to them, but he hopes that's unlikely. He takes the anklet and turns it over slowly between his hands, assessing it with a technician's eye.]

Interesting. I've encountered null fields before, but nothing this compact... [And it's not nulling his powers just by holding it, either. Infrared on the inside of the band would be his first guess, but he'd want to open it up to be sure. He glances up at her again.]

Why did they let you keep it? Why did you want to?

[ Her stance shifts, rubbing her arm with some discomfort as her gaze flicks downward. It's something she doesn't like discussing, but knows she ought to nonetheless. ]

On three separate occasions since February, imPorts have had their wills overridden and devastated the cities that house us. It wasn't their choice, but it was their hands, and that makes it their responsibility. I kept my nullifier because I won't be caught off guard to be used as someone else's weapon.

[ Not again, certainly. Though the first time it happened to her, the one that led to her arrest, was before either of those cases entirely, she was just as guilty of it in February. She doesn't care to pass the blame just because she was coerced, anymore than she believes that failing to take preventative measures is anything short of negligent. ]

They allowed it because they aren't about to argue when a reformed criminal volunteers to extend her sentence. At least, that's what I assume.

[Ah. That's reasoning he can relate to, actually. Qubit's had run-ins with mind control before, and had bad enough experiences with it that experimental brain surgery on himself to prevent it happening again was actually worth the risk. And even that hadn't protected him against the mind-altering effects at the swear-in. Or protected others from him. He'd almost taken someone's head off. So the rationale is sound - if you can't address the actual problem, the next best thing is to minimize the damage. Like treating a broken rib.]

Not much of a sentence when you can take it off at will, but I see your point.

... What were you in for, out of curiosity?

[ She gives him a meager shrug. Sure, it's not the same as being on probation, but the voluntary nature of it kind of necessitates that. There's always the possibility that she could be affected when she isn't wearing it, but it's her responsibility now. The best she can do is be diligent with it.

When she answers his question, it's with the flattest expression she can manage, just so he knows it isn't a joke. ]

Supervillainy.

[ Not the whole truth, sure. Brainwashed costumed thug is more of the real truth, but it isn't time to get into the details freely yet, not when the case is still open. ]

[Even though she's perfectly serious, Qubit's surprised enough that he barely believes it. He'd assumed it was for vigilantism or something, not... the exact opposite.]

Seriously? I wouldn't have pegged you as the type.

[ She lets out a groaning hum, and uncomfortable sound for an uncomfortable memory, to call it an unfortunate period in her life is a gross understatement. ]

It was a phase, and one I've put behind me. I've worked very hard to become not the type.

Well, that's good to hear. [He leans back in his chair, absently looking over the device again. She seems sincere, anyway, and given his experience with her so far he's inclined to extend benefit of the doubt.]

I'm sorely tempted to take a look inside, but I'm guessing you'll want it back with all its pieces. Mind if I run it through a quick x-ray, though?

[ She crosses behind his desk, glancing over his shoulder with an eyebrow raised. ]

If an x-ray will allow you to study its components without actually removing them, I will allow it. As long as it's still functioning once you're done with it.

I don't see why it wouldn't be.

[Of course, he doesn't have an x-ray machine just lying around, but that can be fixed. He gets up and heads to the scrap cabinet to grab an armful of junk, which he then reconfigures (with the usual lightshow) into a handheld gun thing slightly larger than a power drill. Then, setting the bracelet on a counter, he takes a couple of pictures with it from different angles; when he's done he hands it back to Kanaya.]

There we are. Thank you.

[It's time.

Qubit's only been on Earth-β for a little over a month, but he's spent a lot of that time in this room. To his credit, he's not literally living here, not the way he used to with his lab back home (up until Tony wrecked the place, anyway), but he may as well be. Despite some distractions - the August swear-in and its aftermath, for a start - he's been making steady progress, and now it's finally time. The hardware's all assembled, the software coded and debugged, the numbers crunched and ready to go.

It still doesn't have any time-travel capability, of course, but better to make sure it works as-is before he tries to go and start adding new, experimental features. Besides, even without that, it'll allow him to at least drop in back home for a bit. See how things are going, make sure Kaidan and Gil are all right, get the ball rolling in the reconstruction effort - hell, maybe he can even reach out to the imPort community for help, speed things along that way. Even a handful of volunteers would be a godsend.

So, all things considered, he's in a very good mood. After their little gathering last night, he'd invited Newt and Hermann to join him for the test run. Newt had gone so far as to volunteer himself as a guinea pig, earlier, but Qubit had convinced him just to procure a few actual lab rats instead. As for Hermann, however, this was legitimately relevant to his interests both as a physicist and as a guy with teleportation powers, and honestly he was the one more likely to have anything pertinent to offer. Inviting only one or the other of them had crossed his mind briefly, but it just didn't feel right. They were sort of a unit. Lennon and McCartney, Abbott and Costello, Geiszler and Gottlieb. You took them together or not at all.

Qubit's flair for the dramatic meant he met them in the lobby, and by some miracle they managed to make it into the building proper without causing an international incident somehow. Presently he unlocks the door to the lab itself, and holds it open for them with showy politeness.] Gentlemen.

[They had the decency to mostly drop their taxi-ride argument (about the logic of naming the lab rats--You had to name them, Hermann, because people liked names in the history books. It wasn't sentimental. The Americans named their space-monkeys, the Russians named their dogs, etc.) by the time the pair of scientists had made it to the door of the lobby, then it was just a matter of politely chatting their way to the lab, which was doable. It was totally doable, even for them.]

Heya! Thanks for inviting us! [Us. Me, specifically. Newt knew he wasn't exactly needed or very useful (aside from rat transporter), so he was glad Qubit invited him along anyway. Newt let Hermann go through the lab doorway first, then gave a nod at Qubit and adopted a posh accent.]

Thank you, my good man.

[Porter Attempt 1. He was excited. Granted, this was outside his realm of expertise, but he had a general enough gist of what they were about to do and, if all else, he could stand back and look awed. Or, probably more likely, question and argue. He was good at that, but at least this was practical science and not merely theoretical. Less to argue about when you could just...do it and find out.]

So, Qu, I'd like you to meet Sam Beckett, Mrs. Frisby, and Charly. [He held up a cage housing three lab rats, their food and water. Mrs. Frisby was classic white with red eyes, Beckett was a nice tan color, and Charly was white from behind with his front half a blue-gray color, like he'd been dipped into dye.] They'll be your lab assistants today.

Edited 2015-09-16 23:35 (UTC)

One of them is married, apparently.

[Because he couldn't resist last dry remark on Newton's ridiculous choices.

Hermann ventured into the lab, carefully picking his way between stray wires and sweeping some out of the way of his cane. The porter itself drew his attention immediately, and his studies in engineering assured him he had an educated guess of what most of what the rest of the equipment's basic function was.

The physics involved were some months of study ahead of what he could currently perform, but he understood well enough to follow along. Glasses affixed over his nose, Hermann peered at some lines of code on a nearby display]

Impressive work.

[Straightening, he wandered a little closer to the device itself, curious and with a breath of anticipation. This hour itself held the very real possibility of solving the entire Import dilemma. If this succeeded, they would soon have a way home. The gravity of the moment was far from lost on him, and he held nothing but respect for the man that poured his entire being into the project, who had somehow managed to pull all of this together in only a few weeks]

Anything I could assist with, Mr. Qubit?

[Following behind them, Qubit takes off his coat (yes, it comes off!) and drapes it over the back of the chair. The fact that Newt named the rats when they are here expressly to take the bullet if something goes wrong isn't really an issue considering absolutely nothing is going to go wrong, but he can't resist poking a little fun.] "Charly"? What, did he bite you? [Qubit no that meme is 17 years old where Newt's from, come on]

[Anyway, he'll start making the rounds of the lab, switching things on, double-checking levels of this, that, and the other, making sure there's nothing he disconnected and forgot to hook back up, and so on. Measure twice, cut once.]

[Anything Hermann can do? Qubit thinks for a second, but...] Not at the moment, no. But I'll let you know if that changes.

For your information, Hermann, she's recently widowed. I would appreciate if you could be more considerate. It's a sensitive subject.

[But Newt laughs at Qubit's joke, though he's not sure what he's laughing at. Whatever the biting refers to, he doesn't know or doesn't remember at the moment. At least it wasn't a Charlie the Unicorn reference, Newt thinks. Maybe in a bit (pun unintended) he'll actually remember the small British children.]

Actually he's the better behaved of the three.

[Holding his rats, he follows Hermann around, inspecting the work on the Porter like the math or the mechanics of it actually means anything to him. He just wants it to work. It certainly looks good. So he tries to stay out of the way. Qubit's in his element. It's always fun to watch a man of science in his element. Maybe there will be a Q&A later that Newt can...BS his way through.]

[He looks down from the porter to the cage and murmurs to them:] In retrospect, maybe I should have named one of you guys "Colonel O'Neil."

[[ooc: The Flowers for Algernon/Charly name drop is also very dumb meta joke. "Flowers For Charlie" is an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia (Charlie Day/Newt's main gig and the one episode in which Burn Gorman/Hermann has a guest spot). Pointless Trivia for 1000, Alex.]]

[Heaving a long-suffering sigh, Hermann leads Newton around the lab in a counter circuit to Qubit's rounds, providing the odd explanation for his partner's benefit. He wishes he had something to help with, but he doesn't touch any of the man's work despite the itch in his fingers to sit at a keyboard and review.]

I wonder if subverting 'Lachesis' will mean anything different when returning to our own dimensions. Will we remember this world and those we met here? It doesn't seem like there's any real reason we wouldn't. Interesting and potentially problematic, but I imagine we'll find out soon enough.

[[ooc: oh my god i looked up a clip and that's freakin hilarious lafjksdla]]

[More and more machines thrum to life in the ensuing minutes, including the gate itself, though it's just the preliminary start-up at this point. It's all surprisingly quiet, since very little in here is air-cooled.]

No, it shouldn't have any impact on our memories. No ghosts haunting this machine.

[Oh whoops here's something unplugged after all. He drags a stepladder over and hops up to connect it to the top of the machine.]

And you're right, that could present its own issues, but - fundamentally, the gate's still incomplete. Right now it can only span realities as they exist in "the present"... Of course, time being the relativistic little monster it is, all that means is I don't get to choose where any two dimensions intersect, temporally speaking. So that's the next order of business, inventing time travel.

[Just about ready! He comes back down and starts looking for the remote on one of the desks. (It is on a different one.)]

[He appreciates the explanation, even if most of it is only an overview and more in-depth explanations would require more background information than Newt has on the subject. Not that he hasn't taken a few physics classes himself! But that is enough to know didn't really know much about this topic at all. He has only scratched the surface.]

Oh, hey, if you're looking for the thing with the [figuratively or literally. He points to the desk he and Hermann just walked past.] Big Red Button, it's over there.

B-but wait. Okay, now, I GET what you're saying, that linking dimensions without a time-travel element means it's a crap-shoot where we get dropped off at and it's just as likely--no, Hermann, don't--it's MORE likely that we get unloaded into a time either before or after we left--posssibly distantly so! NOT THAT I HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST THEM, but I don't really want to end up with dinosaurs. So, yeah, the time thing is next. But that's not really my issue here.

My ISSUE is--how are we going to KNOW? Even if the rat safely goes through the portal and comes back without being eaten by a raptor or a Morlock, how are we going to know what time it was there? Because wouldn't it be fairly safe to assume that your math requires knowing the variable or some shit of where these two dimensions intersect to calculate how to move them along the...axis? [Hey, theory bothers him. Newt likes more concrete things. Sorry he's in here challenging your mathematics. It's what he does. He requires explanations and information and experience tells him this is one way to get that, by questioning like the asshole he is.] And 75 million years ago didn't exactly have newspapers.

[Looking over his shoulder] Ah. Thanks. [He'll just come and get that. It actually looks kind of like a keyless entry fob for a car.]

We'll know because once the rats get through safely, I'll go after it and have a look around. It'll be connecting to my home universe - I have the most data about that one, obviously. Enough that I should be able to piece together when we've ended up without much trouble. Hopefully, close to when I left.

[That reminds him, though. He grabs another device off a shelf and clips it onto the cage.] And - this'll be recording their trip. Basic environmental data, plus something to tell us whether we're looking at any time dilation. I did think this through, Newt.

[Invent time travel. Yes, that sounds a fair bit more daunting than traversing dimensions, (not to mention considerably more fantastical) but Hermann's prepared to spend the next two decades fully understanding both aspects of the phenomenon that brought them here.

But first, they have to ensure the portal's working. It should, given Qubit's extensive expertise on the subject.

He circles around to the largest display screen for read-outs and feels the buzz of anticipation and discovery all over again. Years ahead of his research, the keys to greater understanding lay here in this lab. Hermann clasped both hands over his cane to keep them steady]

I'd be more concerned about your rats drowning, Newton. 71% of the Earth's surface is water, after all. Provided of course, Mr. Qubit hasn't also factored that into his calculations.

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8 Sept, 21:00 [Kanaya]

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15 Sept, 10:00 [errybody else]

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