nightlogs | "So you agree? You think you're really pretty?"

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"So you agree? You think you're really pretty?"

Who: Stacia and Miguel
What: Stacia bullies a grown-ass man on behalf of a loved one. Like she do.
Where: Miguel's Spider-Cave
When: after this, before Valentine's Day.
Warnings/Notes: to be added as they come up.

Stacia's plan for confronting Miguel is pretty fluid: corner him, be firm, and logically explain to him that he's a fucking dumbass who should know better. Usually when she's doing this kind of thing, it's with another Garou, and she's allowed -- nay, sometimes even encouraged! -- to smack them upside the head and antagonize them into a full-on Frenzy. But she can't do that here. So it'll be a fun and interesting personal challenge on top of it all. Keep a level head, ask extremely pointed questions, deploy a armor-piercing "do you need a hug" as needed.

She's certainly going to be able to do a better job at this than Elle is at the moment.

Usually when Stacia enters Miguel's Spider-Cave, she steps inside and looks around to see if she can't spot Miguel or Catalina. This time, she doesn't break stride, heading straight for Miguel's (extremely nerdy) chalkboard. She's got a good idea how to summon him out of the darkness right quick:

"Hey Miguel, your math is wrong! Don't worry, I'll fix it!"

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He wants her to get to the point? All right then, fine. Stacia clasps her hands behind her back.

"The correct answer to my question is no, you don't know how my reality works," she says. "You seem to be working from the assumption that all realities work the same way the ones you're familiar with do, and that's the error in your math I was talking about."

She tilts her head to the side, holding eye contact.

"Do you want to know why I'm so certain that you're the one in error here?"

His eyebrow raises. Miguel is impressed by the audacity of Stacia just deciding she knows better, all of a sudden. But really, that's about the standard arrogance he expects from any Alchemax pencil pusher encroaching on his territory. The real novel thing was that this particular self-assured teenager was admitting she didn't have much experience up front, and yet - there she was?

"Got a whole hypothesis worked out, huh...?" he remarks sarcastically. He may defer to Stacia in other matters, but this was ridiculous.

"I want to know what sparked this to begin with. Actually picking through any math will be a very boring afternoon for you, trust me."

He does earnestly want to know. And he'll need more specifics.

Stacia breathes slowly, shallowly, keeping herself centered. Focus on the message, focus on how to reach the future-to-be that she wants from this situation.

"You've hurt people," she says in answer to his question. "By failing to ask other people about how their universes work and adapting your special knowledge accordingly, you've been careless and you've hurt people. And I expect better than carelessness from you, which is why I'm expecting you to fucking think."

She steps forward into his personal space. She can't exactly loom over him, given that he's got almost two feet in height on her, but something about the way she's staring at him indicates that his superior height gives the wolf in her access to a lot of exposed belly.

"Now ask me why I'm sure."

The intrusion seems to be the point where it finally begins to sink in. Miguel’s expression falters as she gets into his space. Stacia is properly pissed off for something more serious than simply bluster, he could tell that much.

“This isn’t about Gwen.” he mulls to himself out loud. It couldn’t be - he knew the ins and outs of their universal neighborhood rather well. And for all their issues, they’d reached something of a peaceful impasse.

“It’s Dan, then…?”

Was he convinced that Stacia knew some secret to the multiverse than he didn’t? Not really. Not even close. But he wasn’t very happy with how his conversation with Dan turned out, and isn’t thrilled that other parties were possibly getting in on the fracture between them.

This is why he refrained from touching the subject unless he absolutely had to. It turned out like this too often - messy. The worry begins to gnaw at his nerves, and the second question comes out with a stronger breath behind it.

“Did something happen to him?”

Good, he's finally taking her seriously.

"Dan is going to be fine," Stacia says instead of pointing out that Miguel happened to Dan. "I noticed something was wrong and got him to talk to me, and cleaned up the worst of the mess you left."

She'll leave Elle out of this for now, but it's important to be clear that Dan's not going around talking shit about Miguel. Piling more miscommunications on top of this situation would be stupid. Now she waits to see if he's going to ask the question she's told him to ask, or if he needs more time to make his way over to it.

'The Mess'. Stacia will probably not be so friendly to him after hearing Dan's perspective of what happened. He would understand.

"I shouldn't have explained things to him the way I did. Dan didn't know."

Miguel is not entirely without self-reflection, and he didn't like that his own reaction left such a disruptive wake. He squares his posture and looks away, internally steeling himself for once again having to tread the rough waters of a subject that still hurt, even if he was good at hiding it.

"I have seen the collapse happen more than once, Stacia." he begins, tone more morose than upset. "Even if there are counter-examples, I just can't see any good reason to risk a repeat incident."

It's not how he wanted things to work. It's simply how things are.

"I'm sure you have, and I'm sure it was horrific," Stacia says, allowing her voice to soften with sympathy. "I don't remember much about repairing the hole in my reality because it would have melted my brain if I'd been that aware of things, but I still have nightmares about it. And the effects of the Stuff in the first other reality I ended up in were horrific. I can't imagine what it would be like to see a reality fully collapse. But you handled this really badly, Miguel. You need to do better. You need to start asking questions and testing what you think you know to develop a new baseline."

"You're right. You can't imagine it."

It's not the kindest thing to retort with, but this was a sore point. Miguel isn't quite sure how else to emphasize how serious a matter this was for him. Of course he wants to investigate, but this isn't a far-flung memory for him - it's quite vivid and the loss still burned.

"The first collapse was because of a mistake I made." he adds. "Not knowing is not an excuse. Not knowing didn't spare anyone's lives."

The thought of that calamity repeating itself stirs something fierce in his chest - but its a passionate and protective feeling. And a good amount of fear as well.

"Repairing holes are possible with some luck, but until we can find a surefire method, you have to understand why we must avoid any damage to start."

Oh, there it is.

"Stop being a fucking asshole, Miguel!" Stacia screams, and she is extremely good at raising her voice. Loud, good support from her diaphragm so it's not too shrill to be understood. It carries when she does this outside, so that everyone knows to come and see what stupid bullshit someone has done to piss her off. It sucks to be in close range when she sounds off, and she's very pleased with the flinch she gets as a result.

"Just because I agreed that you're traumatized doesn't mean that you can stop listening to me!" She continues at a much more reasonable volume, because she can choose to be merciful. "You fucked up! You fucked up and I'm trying to help you not fuck up again!" She plants her hands on her hips so that she doesn't shove him or jab him in the chest or otherwise initiate contact. She doesn't want to be the instigator of this turning into a physical fight.

"Our realities work differently because in my reality, you, Peter, Gwen, and even May would be unthinking, destructive monsters! Radioactive super powers don't let you choose to help people! You want to keep arguing that all realities work the same, fine; just know that you're arguing that I should gut you where you stand."

Edited 2024-02-20 17:39 (UTC)

“Right. I should listen to another kid about the nature of the multiverse, or else.”

He rolls his eyes, extremely unimpressed with the vague threat. Stacia will have to get in line with all the other animal-themed weirdoes that wanted to kill him, first.

“You’re upset because I hurt Dan’s feelings. I understand that, and I’m sorry. But unless you can give me convincing evidence of a better way, I’m going to err on the side of caution.”

He stays firm and steady. Miguel didn’t end up the head of his motley crew just on vibes.

“And for the record, my team is more experienced than you at repairing damaged worlds - each of which had their different rules, even within our network. You’re not telling me anything I haven’t already considered.”

"Another kid" is filed away to chew over later. Possibly with Elle; maybe Gwen too, since Miguel mentioned her when he finally tried to figure out his mistake.

"It's hard to be less experienced at reality-repair than me, given that I was an oven-mitt in the process," Stacia retorts. "I don't need an apology from you. You need to apologize to Dan, and you need to not make messes that I have to clean up in the future. Not too sure you're capable of the latter at this point, but at least I know that I can reassure people that they need to take the things you say with a grain of salt. I suppose I can count that as a win."

“What were you hoping to get out of this conversation? Aside from lecturing me about a subject you just admitted you know nothing about.”

He’s annoyed that he’s being challenged in this way - but he doesn’t want the rift to grow any deeper. Miguel doesn’t dislike Stacia, and they really can’t afford petty infighting right now.

“I’ll talk to Dan. I owe him that much.”

A hesitant olive branch, but it was from a true sentiment. Once the anger faded after their confrontation, Dan’s kindness still lingered in his thoughts. He did have to try and patch this up, somehow…

"I was hoping you'd recognize that you need to re-examine your biases," Stacia says evenly. "Right now, as far as I can tell, you're ignoring everything that doesn't fit into the framework you already established. Not reassuring when you're touting yourself as an expert, and have already tried to establish yourself as 'the guy in charge' once."

Yeah, remember how that went, Miguel? Stacia can make sure it goes worse the next time.

"I was also hoping that we'd be able to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again in the future. I'm invested in us fighting the things that are trying to destroy reality instead of each other. I've been dealing with that shit for years already, and I was already tired of it two months in."

She folds her arms in front of her. "And, yeah, I wanted you to apologize to Dan. I care about him. He's compassionate and kind and he's been through hell. He didn't deserve to take your trauma to the face."

Yep, she's using the T-word again. Deal with it.

He looks away from her, dead silent for a few moments.

"Start with that next time, instead of whatever nonsense it was you were doing." he grumbles out, hand waved in her general direction. A bit of sass, but at least he was chewing on Stacia's words without shooting them down right away. He was giving hints on how to improve the difficult art of Miguel-wrangling, it seems.

"I've been trying to find reliable ways to patch up quantum holes since I first began to jump outside my dimension. So, if you have anything solid on how your world was patched up, I'd like to hear it."

From Miguel's point of view, the high standard was necessary for something so drastic in stakes.

Stacia opens her mouth to retort, but manages to bite it back at the last second. She inhales deeply through her nose and holds it for several seconds until the urge to sass passes, then lets it out slowly.

"Noted, for the future," she acknowledges. As for his request on the topic of his specialized interest, she shrugs.

"I wouldn't use the word 'solid' for 'angelic intervention', but that's what happened," she says. "But our reality was broken by a higher power in the first place, so it was probably their job to fix it anyway. Michael was just being a huge dick about it."

His face is a picture of restrained annoyance. This is why she barged in to yell and draw on his chalkboard? Well, aside from his own fuck-up with Dan…

“I think you’re aware that there’s not much we can glean from a literal act of providence.”

Although punching gods or being involved with gods does sometime end up in the purview of a Spider here or there. It can’t really help him with his technology.

“You should try asking about what my framework is, before- ”

He stops himself from spitting out the ‘-making stupid assumptions’. Try not to be an asshole, Miguel! Minimize the assholery.

“-trying to take stabs in the dark.”

"You mean my reality, that runs on bullshit magic, doesn't work like your reality that runs on bullshit science?" Stacia asks, widening her eyes as though this revelation is a surprise to her. "I'm shocked. Wouldn't have occurred to me."

At least she's keeping the blistering sarcasm out of her voice, so it comes out deadpan.

"All right then, tell me about your framework. Besides the thing where the new reality tries to kill us all, which it clearly has not done."

Miguel is swiping at his wrist-goober while Stacia chatters, half paying attention to the words as he navigates to his most studied section of the multiverse.

"Do you actually want a run through of this? Or are you going to stand there and quip?"

His watch projects a volumetric model resembling a tree, made of an uncountable amount of dot of lights all neatly arranged together. With a gesture from his palm, the hologram adjusts the view to a particular branch of the tree. He always thought it a bit poetic that their end looked like a web hanging between the spires.

"Yes," Stacia says firmly. Then, with the air of someone granting a favor, she adds, "I'll even refrain from 'quipping' until you're done."

The light show does look very cool though. Stacia takes a moment to admire it before refocusing on the situation at hand.

"Just remember that I'm effectively a high school drop-out at this point, so you're going to have to adjust your highfalutin vocabulary to my level."

"I'm holding you to that." He sets the viewpoint to give them a good view of the initial tree-like structure.

"This... was everything. Our approximation of it, anyway, from before my arrival here."

The spindly white branches shift to center the web until it encompasses the space around them in a loose net of gold thread and the marine snow sifting between in the ambient soup of reality.

"All the known Spiders."

The web's nodes are each labeled with numbers and readouts that would not have much to parse for Stacia. The visual snapshots of each dimension are the most interesting datapoints of note at a layman's glance.

"Earth-7085 is the variant of New York City that's populated by werewolves, if you were ever tumbling around in here and wanted to pick."

He swipes past Earth-7085, past the lively end of that multiverse to a hole in the web, with the lines severed and floating where a dimension used to be.

"...TRN-660." he says with a somber note.

Stacia is trying real hard to cordon off everything she knows about the Weaver and the Triat so that she doesn't fall into the same trap she's accusing Miguel of having fallen into. But Miguel's lecture and the visuals really aren't helping. Focus, girl, focus!

She's also not sure if he thinks her world is full of werewolves, or if he just thinks she'd like to visit somewhere where she'd be 'normal'. As if, but also a line of questioning for another time. She starts to raise a hand, then lowers it again.

"Saving questions for the end of the lecture," she says. "Go on."

"TRN-660 was the first observed dimension that collapsed-"

For the sake of the conversation, and for Miguel's own emotional state, he glosses over his personal involvement. The purpose of this wasn't to find common ground over their shared losses, anyway.

"-from disrupting too many of the key events its timeline - Canon Events - that keeps the connections of the web glued together. It doesn't just destroy that world in isolation. It has ripple effects that jeopardizes its neighbors."

The loose threads weren't that far off from other dimensions in the model. How accurately representative that is can be left up to Stacia to interpret, but he thinks it speaks well enough for itself.

"From traveling and observing the other dimensions in the web, Lyla's algorithms honed in on how to predict the Canon Events of each world. Down to within a few minutes, if needed."

He swipes to another gap in the web labeled TRN-013. The node has a lot more data than the previous one, and a little navigation pulls up a diagram showing the progression of that dimension's collapse.

"We were... too late to save this one." he remarks, managing to remain more neutral. "But that's where we first managed to deploy a team and try to stop it. We were able to save others with what we learned here."

The model starts at a pinhole-like puncture in space-time, which spreads outwards like a mold. The tech is indicated to be deployed in the middle, but it wasn't enough to stop it from getting to the final stages, where the lattice-like "glue" of space-time had been eaten away to tattered threads. It's at this point that the glitching appears - and Stacia is provided a visual sampling of what a world glitching out of existence might look like.

"If we catch it early, we've been able to stop it. But each time you disrupt the timestream, you poke another hole and risk it unraveling all over again."

He glances at Stacia to see if she's following.

Stacia's face is creased with confusion at this point, and she throws her hands up when Miguel looks at her.

"I should have asked for a pen and paper before I let you get started," she says. "I think I'm following, but I have a lot of questions." She turns to look over to where she'd seen Catalina scurry off. "Catalina, could you be a dear and bring me some paper and something to write with?"

Time travel and alternate realities, what fun!

For what it's worth, Miguel does look sympathetic. The point of this wasn't to drown out her concerns.

"What I'm trying to explain is that I've been working on it with other Spiders that had a mind for this, but things aren't so simple."

Catalina, who had been hiding in a corner, pokes out into view now that all the immediate arguing seems to have ended. Miguel doesn't really keep paper in his lab, outside of the books they were scanning for the archive...

But she finds another solution, and rolls down another slab of chalkboard for Stacia to draw on. This had half of its surface erased recently!

Edited 2024-02-26 09:55 (UTC)

"Things that are simple are usually bull anyway," Stacia says with a shrug. She cracks a smile as Catalina wheels over a whole blackboard, though. "Thank you, darling!"

She immediately starts writing on it, albeit awkwardly. And not taking full advantage of the cleared space, because it's set up for someone almost two feet taller than her, and she's not about to shift to Crinos for this.

She also doesn't write out full questions, just short notes so she can remember what the questions are. Some of them may more "quippy" than others:
What are lines between realities
How effect?
Size cannon evnt
Destiny vs free will

"Okay, brain-space freed up, you can continue."

Edited 2024-02-26 17:17 (UTC)

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cw: threat of violence

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