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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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?"

“I have a few theories. It’s not like I can call the Moon at any time to confirm them.”

Her reaction puts a record-scratch stop to his lecture. He squints suspiciously at the rascally look on her face.

“Just because we aren’t glitching doesn’t mean we should assume there’s no risks.”

"We really should be able to leave messages for the Man in the Moon, shouldn't we?" Stacia says thoughtfully. "I'll put it on the list."

She adds a note about finding a way to keep in better touch with Manny to another part of the blackboard.

"I imagine it's something to do with magic; but the hows and whys of that have never been my specialty. I'll leave that to you and the other science nerds." She waves a hand. "And obviously we shouldn't assume that there's no risks. That's when the risks get you. But if we're not running into the risks you'd expect us to with your experience, don't you think there might be some other risks we might not know to look for?"

“Like what?”

He’s not so impressed with vague points. He needs examples.

“There is some trifling with this reality that’s necessary for the mission, but starting to stick our hands in things outside of fighting Kuk and his forces is inviting trouble.”

It may not be Canon Events, but whatever else is holding this reality together.

"Off the top of my head? Maybe since this reality isn't rejecting us, it's incorporating us," Stacia says. "We're already no longer meat-based creatures, given that 'meat' tends to be things like 'visible and tangible to most people'. Maybe the longer we stay here, the less likely it is that we'll be able to slip back into our old realities without things getting weird."

She shrugs. "I don't know that that's the case here, but I know that back home it's possible to change the level of reality you or a given object exist on; and sometimes you can't change it back. Is that something that happens where you're from?"

"No, not usually. You carry the signature of your original universe no matter where you go. Trying to tamper with it is a good way of turning your molecules into brightly colored mist."

The corners of his mouth stiffen, disliking the implication of what Stacia was saying. No wonder she was being so stubborn about defending Dan's Time Meddling if it was a common practice over in Werewolf Land.

"You never really 'incorporate' into another dimension. You can stabilize yourself with a device." He gestures to his watch. "Temporarily."

"Your guess isn't wrong, but this dimension could also be more flexible, or the process of being turned into myths could be a cloak instead of a permanent change. I don't have the equipment here to give us a fast answer." he adds with some weariness to his voice. He's been doing the best he could with the magitech, but it still lacked.

"Well, count me as moderately reassured," Stacia says. "I was trying not to worry about it since there's nothing I could do about it anyway; but it's nice to hear that there are alternative explanations. However!"

She points a finger skyward, at him, and then back at her chalk board. She taps the words our side in the phrase our side of the multiverse.

"I am not distracted from my point. Given your use of these words, is there a part of you willing to admit that there is even the slightest possibility that things don't work the same in other parts of the multiverse?"

She leans forward. "I'll tell you a secret: if you're willing to give me that much, I'll get out of your hair for the rest of the day."

He's already agreed to apologize to Dan, that was the urgent part. She's willing to let the rest of it simmer in the back of his head for awhile until he's more willing to discuss it.

He frowns stubbornly.

"First of all, I don't need your permission to boot you out of my lab."

As much as he was entertaining this entire conversation with Stacia, Miguel was still Miguel. There's a certain amount of Pushing Around he can tolerate before he stops listening and goes into territorial scientist mode.

"The real answer is we don't know the rules of this universe for certain, which means we should exercise caution. There's not enough evidence to give yourself free reign to do whatever you like." he says. "Even if it doesn't work identically to the worlds I've studied, that doesn't prove the opposite."

"No, you don't need my permission," Stacia says agreeably. "But it is easier if I leave on my own, content that we've reached an accord, yes? Given that we're both reasonable people seeking cooperation among this gaggle of misfits and weirdos."

See? "Reasonable". You want to be a reasonable person, don't you Miguel?

She snaps the fingers of both hands, transforming the motion into finger guns. "I'll take "we don't know the rules of this universe"!" she says, and then scrawls it on her chalkboard in big sloppy letters. And then underlines it for good measure. Yes, it's just chalk and he can erase it easily, but it's less easy to erase the memory; and the act of erasing it will be another memory he has to deal with.

She'll get him yet.

Miguel's face is creased with thin lines of irritation as he watches her draw on the chalkboard, the friction squeaking just enough to be offensive to his ears. Yes. It was a very effectively grating part of the conversation, he'll give her that much.

But as much as he was willing to give Stacia a pass for being upset on Dan's behalf, he wasn't about to give up so easily here. One of them (see: himself) had an elaborate powerpoint presentation on their findings and the other had vague conjecture. Those two things are not equal!

"I believe I've explained my reasons enough." he says. "My other point still stands."

No screwing with the timelines!

Edited 2024-04-05 17:06 (UTC)

Stacia drops the chalk back into its little storage trough and dusts of her hands.

"I'm sure that, as long as you don't hurl abuse at people for not having a doctoral level of education in your extremely specific field, most people will be willing to listen to your advice," she says. Once they've both had time to cool off, she might even come back and let him chew over the effects of pulling two people (her and Elle) out of the same timeline from two different times and having them interact. That might be fun and enriching for him.

But also: he's not the boss of her. She's not even remotely spider-y.

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

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