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!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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)

"Nix the extra 'n' on Canon and you're golden."

A small correction while she's there at the board. Once it seemed like Stacia was actually paying attention, Miguel seems to relax some himself. He returns to address the more serious matters over the model of the collapse in front of them.

"I've showed you the basic gist of it. I want to believe there are ways to buy us more time, or to be able to revert the damage, but I haven't found it yet."

He returns to the general map, and the viewpoint falls over EARTH-1610, its node having an extra halo of red to denote some extra interest. Some of the web-threads look a little thinner than others. He narrows his eyes with a tense attention on the name of this world.

"And the stakes are too high to provoke disaster just for an experiment like that. I can't see any reason to - especially not personal reasons."

Miguel can't think of anything less selfish and reckless, in his eyes. He can't see his own mistake repeated.

Stacia frowns a moment, before scratching out one of the middle 'n's, and adds "canon?" to the end of the list.

"Okay, to summarize your already quick-and-dirty summary, you've got a..." she sighs, "forgive the phrasing, a web of realities that all have Spider-People in them. There are special events that need to happen, and if they don't, the reality collapses; and the reality collapsing can do bad stuff to the surrounding realities. You've been able to repair some realities, but you haven't been able to fix the underlying problem. Is that about right?"

Edited (html fix) 2024-02-26 23:48 (UTC)

"More or less."

It was close enough.

"I trust you will keep all this to yourself. The last thing that needs to leave this room is knowledge on how to do damage to the fabric of the web."

It is a little more robust than his attitude seems to suggest - he never mentioned what the events were and how to disrupt them, or how much wiggle room there was. He was hesitant to get into it.

Stacia got this amount of trust because they shared the same enemy and they'd gotten to know each other well for a time. Even if they disagreed here, it didn't change that.

"I don't see much benefit to sharing it," Stacia says dryly. "I can keep secrets."

She crosses her arms and considers the notes on her board for a moment before looking back to Miguel.

"So, did you find any realities that didn't have a Spider-Person in them?"

It's not a question from her note-board, no, but it's a good starting point.

He nods back. That answer seems to be satisfactory enough.

"They're out there. No one's physically traveled to them before we came here."

The reality that Miles' Spider came from, for starters, and however many other branches of the tree that they had yet to explore. He shuts off the map, leaving them illuminated by computer screens.

"Meddling in one reality deprived it of one and left it unprotected."

Another mess on the list to worry about until he can solve that problem, too.

"But all of the realities you've accessed have or should have had a Spider-Person," Stacia says, less a question and more of a clarification. "And the canon events; are they big-deal, far-reaching kinds of things? Landing on the moon, the failure or success of the assassination of a leader of a powerful country?"

It's got to be something like that, to take out a whole goddamned reality.

“It tends to center around the local Spider, so some of them have wide-reaching implications like that.”

Superheroes did tumble into their world-ending enormous stakes, from time to time. Even if their activity was mostly contained to one city.

“But it can be a marriage, or a death with enough significance to disrupt the order of things. It’s not quite so straightforward.”

He avoids the specifics, because Stacia wasn’t one of them and it wasn’t really her business to know.

“For another reality, I imagine it would be more like your examples. The principle is the same - interrupting the event has ripple effects with dire consequences that shouldn’t be toyed with.”

Edited 2024-03-05 23:49 (UTC)

As someone who also isn't telling everyone everything about the fundamentals of her own reality, Stacia doesn't push Miguel for further details. He's given her enough to work with that she doesn't need to push his limits, and respecting those limits will gain her more leeway elsewhere. Win-win.

"If a single marriage or a death is all it takes to break it, then those realities sound incredibly fragile," she says. "Where do you guys fall in the 'free will verses destiny' debate? Also, why do the Spiders have so much power over the very universes they inhabit?"

“You’d think so, but those disruptions only happen when anomalies from other universes start to meddle where they shouldn’t.” he adds.

“If we don’t get to them first, the glitching tends to resolve lingering hangers-on. Your molecules get scrambled from being in the wrong dimension until you blink out of existence.”

Both delicately balanced and very hostile to travel through, from his description. It’s just Rules upon Rules for him.

“It’s dangerous to invite catastrophe like that either way, regardless of how I personally feel about the idea of Fate.”

It’s not a philosophical debate for him, it’s just simple math. The needs of one vs the many. He continues:

“In a perfect reality, we’d be able to save everyone with all the resources at our disposal. But things are more complicated than that. We keep the balance, call it Destiny if you want, or risk destroying everything.”

His posture is straight and immovable, his conviction for this as sure as believing in gravity.

“In our side of the multiverse, those are your options.”

Stacia snaps her fingers and points at him.

" 'In our side of the multiverse', thank you, Miguel," she says. Her point has percolated through his headmeats and come back out of his mouth in his own words. Neener neener. She scrawls it on her chalk board and underlines it for good measure.

"You've noticed, I'm sure, that we're not glitching here, yeah? Why do you think that is?"

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

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