smartass_captain | Scientific Progress goes 'Boink'

"Sorry, Dr. McCoy." She can be polite, really. And she'd like Jim's friends to think well of her.

This is strange for her. She's starting to act like a normal person.

"So he is always that hyper?" That's good to know. At least she doesn't have to worry it's too much sugar or coffee because she does love piling both on when she can.

He'd be walking on his hands, like all good circus folk. He's perfectly content to walk on his feet, though, falling into step with the rest of the group.

"Has he, uh, seen a therapist at all? I know a couple'a times I died, talking helped." Oops. That was an overshare.

"I'm glad t'see him making some friends that aren't me or the hob--his first officer." Best not to give them a wrong first impression of Spock. Even if it's right and they'll find out for themselves soon enough anyway. "If you can convince him to eat and sleep like a normal person you've got my blessing t'keep him."

They're not heeding any direction Clint remembers form the last time he was here. Medbay is skipped entirely and so are the crew quarters. The doctor goes rather quiet rather quickly when the topic of dying comes up. He's not even scowling. If anything, he seems kind of at a loss.

"I don't talk about my patient's medical history, kid. But if you're Jim's friends, I will say this. He don't open up to anyone. Best not to take it personal." He doesn't talk about it any more than that.

Everything in the future is lights and ~~lens flares~~ colors and bright. Also by the time they even get to the lifts Verity has seen at least ten different species giving her and Clint the side eye. Visitors are rare, and Doctor McCoy's gruff demeanor is somewhat infamous on the ship.

"We're working on it." She's wondering if she can get some alone time on a computer here long enough to look up what happened on Tarsus. She promised not to bring it up with Jim, she never said she wasn't going to try to find out on her own.

Verity could live without the lens flares, but mostly she's wondering who started giving iPhones steroids. The looks don't bother her. She's used to it.

"He'll open up when he's ready."

Clint's the guy who stands between a billionaire in robot pants and a literal god, carrying a bow and funny arrows. He's used to side-eyes.

"He'll come around," Clint agrees. Noticing that this isn't anywhere he went before, he asks, "so, uh, where we goin'?"

Bones stops at the turbolifts and gives them both a small smile. They didn't even hesitate to affirm they weren't giving up on Jim. Maybe these interdimensional past-future people weren't so bad for him after all.

There's computers everywhere Verity, the trick is getting into one without being detected. Might be safer to snatch a PADD and do the future equivalent of a wikipedia search. Much simpler to hide. And considering that tidbit of information is something pretty much only Bones knows about, much less likely to get you unwanted questions.

They get a rare but sincere smile from the doctor.

"You kids are VIPs today." He snorts. "We're gonna go get Jim. Might want to stay by the lift when we get there though." The there in question is the bridge of the Enterprise. Banks of computers run along the perimeter of the circular station, manned by a small bridge crew who seem intent on the tasks at hand. Spock's there, if Clint looks around.

"Officer on ze bridge!" Chirps the youngest of the bridge crew, and holy cow he really is just a kid. Doctor McCoy heads straight for the chair in the center of the bridge, leaning over it to mutter something.

Sure enough, Jim Kirk gets up quickly, all serious and business until he spots his companions by the lift. He breaks out into a smile.

"Spock, you have the con."

"Aye, captain." Musical Captain chair gets taken. Jim and the doctor hurry back.

"You guys made it. Good. Thanks for bringing 'em here, Bones."

McCoy gets a small answering smile from Verity. She's too stubborn to give up on her friends this easily, and someone has to look after these two idiots.

She'll stay by the lift, but oh, she wants to have a proper look around the bridge. It is shiny and interesting, and being off-limits only makes it more appealing. (Not everything Loki brought out in her would be considered a good thing.)

"Hey, Jim. We need to get you a phone. Passing notes is so junior high." She'd give him a hug if he weren't being all captain-y right now.

Clint smiles, too. He's not a quitter (except when he is, but let's not get into that). He's a little better-acquainted with control rooms, but he still looks around with appreciation. The junior officer announcing McCoy's arrival gets a murmur to Verity, "my god, he's Kate's age."

Jim gets a wave when he approaches. "What's the word?"

"The hell is a phone?" He says that the way your eight year old neighbor asks what a fax machine is.

"Your comm, cornfed hillbilly." Bones rolls his eyes in exasperation. "Can I leave you alone with these kids without some kind of emergency so I can finish my shift?"

"Sure. We're gonna be in the prep room." Jim waves Verity and Clint to follow him back into the turbolift. The hallway they exit into is much less interesting than the bridge, sadly. Jim smiles and greets every worker he passes by name, while playing tour guide as best he can.

"So that was the bridge, pretty slow alpha shift today. Promise I'll give you the grand tour, but I figure we've got more important things to do at the moment. Remind me though, when we're done, to take you guys to the observation deck."

The prep room is like every conference room ever created except futuristic and in space. The wall mounted computer panels are neat and all, but it's still a meeting room. Not everything in the future can be cool.

"Take a seat guys. I'll grab us some coffee...." Where the hell did they keep the mugs and shit? Jim doesn't usually do this kind of thing when there's mission briefings going on. That's why Starfleet has Yeomans.

"Thank you, Doctor." Someone had to say it. (Verity is starting to wonder why so many people call her a kid. Is it because she's short?)

Verity looks around while they go, probably looking like some kind of silly tourist, but she's also paying attention to where they're going and how things work. Just in case. Thank goodness this future is in English. That makes it a lot easier than visiting Obichen.

"So this is about... the stuff?" Reed Richards math and so forth. She doesn't ask until they're in the prep room and she's sitting down. It's a sitting-down sort of subject for her. He can muddle through making the coffee on his own, or ask her for help if things get really dire.

The "cornfed hillbilly" line gets a quiet "hey" from Clint, mostly out of reflex. That stuff's usually directed at him. "Thanks, doc."

He, too, is keeping track of where they go and how things work. Once an Avenger, always an Avenger (as one zombie-themed villain learned very much to his dismay), and looking out for trouble and being ready for action are part of the whole superhero package.

So are meetings. You wouldn't think so, but they are. Clint takes a seat at the conference table with Verity, putting in, "good news, he asked hopefully?"

Everyone's a kid to Bones. Or Darlin'. Or an infant. Jim's been all three in varying degrees of sarcasm, but usually just 'Dammit'.

It's his preferred title.

"It is, yeah." Jim found mugs and a carafe, awesome. He also is working the replicator. Less awesome. But there is a tray of coffee and sandwiches brought over to the table. Might not be the best tasting, but it is probably the most precisely nutritionally calculated things they will consume.

Jim grabs his PADD and takes it over to one of the wall monitors. Passes out one of the devices to each of them, mostly for ease of following along.

"Good news? That depends on your definition of the phrase. This is one hell of a mess you have going on."

None of those is a great option. She really doesn't want to fall into the "dammit" category.

Verity's game to try just about anything once, so despite what she's heard about it, she'll take a sip of replicator coffee. Then she puts the mug down at stares at it for a minute. Now she understands why he likes her coffee so much. This is a travesty and needs to be fixed.

But oh look, she has a PADD now. She'll be waiting for an opportunity to see if they still have Wikipedia.

"Is there any chance of saving his world?" The idea of trying to save hers doesn't even cross her mind. She saw the numbers.

Are they going to do the coffee version of the "Arthur talks to the computer about Tea, and it thinks very, very hard about that instead of the current crisis" gag? Classic, I'll go get the flowers, who's got the sperm whale?

Clint takes a sip of his cup of liquid regret. Still not the worst coffee he's ever had, but he thinks fondly of the good stuff he's got at home. Then he takes his PADD, surreptitiously checking it for a Stark logo.

"And Verity's?" Clint is ride-a-jetpack-into-a-spaceship-while-on-fire levels of tenacious. Also, he doesn't understand the numbers so well.

Yeah, no. There's no good way to jump into this topic. Kirk turns around, looking rather surprised Clint even asks. The look on his face is answer enough, but Jim pulls up the holo anyway.

Several parallel planes come into view, lined up side by side. There's a bunch of math going on on Jim's PADD. With a lot of notations.

"Unless you know a guy who can beam a whole planet to the other side of it's orbit....no. We can try for evacuations, getting people into the Nexus, but then what? And how many would go?" With a drag of his finger he animates the image, and each parallel plane pinches inward toward each other.

"You've literally got a singularity ripping universes apart. Our warp technology can't come close to this kind of accuracy, and this is across parallel universes. Universes Clint. The total overall energy of the universes are being manipulated such that it's changing the shape and colliding key areas together."

Jim shakes his head. "Short of an evacuation, I don't know what else we could do for Verity's world. And that's not taking into account the entire other world on a collision course with it. A world form a universe I don't even know how to get to."

She's... resigned. "We have no way of knowing which one is coming next, or how many more there are. It's just not feasible to try and evacuate tens of billions of people in less than eight hours."

Moving on.

"Let's focus on what we might still be able to save." Please let there be some good news, Jim. She could really use some right about now.

Clint's disappointed. He really hates not saving the day. But he's not-saved the day often enough that he can accept it. The enormity is just a little much, yeah (although really, Ultimate Earth, you had that many helicarriers, why not load them full of civilians and evacuate?).

"Sorry, Verity. Okay, yeah, what can we still save?"

"Well, there is some good news." Jim swipes his finger across the figure and it shifts back the way it was. There's a bunch more math showing up on both of their PADDs, also annotated. Jim owes Scotty a hell of a favor for this.

"We know what's happening. You've got a disruption of the net total energy of these parallel universes. The target universe is left with total net energy of 0 as it normally is. This makes the universe flat."

He points to a couple of the adjacent universes.

"By manipulating the total net energy of the universes on either side, whoever's wrecking shit is basically free to manipulate the shape of the neighbor universes however they want. Accurate enough to slam planets together with their counterpart planets, just to be that much of a dick." It would be one thing to smush universes together, but to go out of one's way to be such a huge asshole to line up parallel Earths across neighboring universes such that they smacked together?

That's pure asshole.

"The good news is, one of the universes is left with net 0 energy. It's left alone. It's the wall the neighboring planes are smashing into. Since your universe isn't ripping apart at the seams, Clint, you don't have to fuck with your world at all. We just have to figure out how to keep other universes out of your quantum everything. Which....would mean figuring out how to absorb or deflect borderline infinite amounts of energy."

Gee, sure would come in handy to have some of that Red Matter on hand now, wouldn't it Jim? Too bad it's crushed into a singularity with the rest of Nero's ship. Well fuck, it couldn't be easy, could it?

Verity is... mostly following along? The annotations help. It's still not great news.

"Or convert," she points out quietly. An oversight, surely, simply that Jim forgot to mention it and not that nobody thought of it. "Whatever's going to shield the universe is going to need an energy source, right?"

It would be an elegant solution, if it could work.

((Expanded. Sorry, was a long shift today, brain's a little fried.))

Clint has trouble following the math, but the general "universes are bending until they crash" explanation he can get. "That's a, wow, a hell of a thing. That was all in the stuff you got?"

He has no idea how to fight something like that, no idea what arrow to shoot at it (I have one skill, I'm damn well gonna use it). When Verity makes her suggestion, though, he blinks, then grins. "Verity, you're a genius!"

Edited 2015-09-26 02:13 (UTC)

"Yeah that would work too." Jim skips down to more annotations and nods at Verity's suggestion. He's pretty sure Scotty, Chekov, and he were talking about that at some point in the last thirty six hours of nonstop coffee and math.

Blink.

OKay, Jim's not a petty man, but he gets the most '1000% done with this shit' face and wanders back over to the wall computers. Giving the archer a smack on the back of the head along the way.

Friggin two days with no sleep, replicated coffee, and a hyperactive ensign chittering in Russian at you while your chief engineer makes borderline illegal math puns trying to stop the end of the universe, And Barton's impressed by the word 'conversion'.

Not that it's a bad idea, but this took some serious work here.

"We can get all of this converted back into data your devices will read, let asshole Skrull meat guy and your other best and brightest figure out how to implement everything we've done. And if this Reed guy pops an artery at someone out mathing him, I want it on video."

Technically cheating since future, but eh. Jim will take what he can get. All of this is directed at Verity quite pleasantly.

"Really not. But thanks." She was just going to point that out when Clint got smacked. Not that she blames Jim, but... Okay. Maybe it's a sibling thing. She's not sure if she should get involved.

"Thank you, Jim. This has all been so kind of you, and your crew, for dealing with your being so preoccupied. We'll have to find a way to thank everyone." Right, Clint? Now's the time to thank people.

"This must have taken a long time. When's the last time you slept?" This is probably not the kind of thanks Jim wants, but it's for his own good.

The smack startles a "d'ow!" out of Clint, but he recognizes the sentiment and agrees with Verity, "yeah. I absolutely owe you, all of you, huge for this."

"I just, what Verity said make me think of something, and you're gonna like it. The energy going into those universes, it's from the Beyonders, and Verity had the idea we could pull it out and use it for our shield thingie. Well, there's somebody who stole energy from a Beyonder before, and it's Reed Richards' biggest rival." He grins for a moment, then drops the grin as he admits, "and also the despotic tyrant of a tiny European country, but I thought you'd find it funny, Reed having to reverse-engineer his worst enemy's old stuff to fix what he couldn't."

Cheating is totally valid to save the world/universe. Clint once tricked Grandmaster out of enslaving Earth with what amounted to a double-or-nothin' bet on a rigged carnival game. Captain America was shocked.

"It's fine." Jim shrugs. There, recognition is all he really wanted. Jim never pretended he wasn't egotistical. He totally is. Have you met him? Jim Kirk.

Ladies.

Okay wow he needs sleep. There are no ladies here other than Verity and she is only attracted to gods of lies and police officers with no sense of humor. Speaking of sleep...

"Uh..." What day was today? He'd done two alpha shifts plus the work and--"Two days? Maybe? It starts to run together after a while. I've been awake longer." So that's why he's happily drinking the replicated coffee. He has no sense of taste anymore. He can probably feel his eyeballs rallying a mutiny.

"...Oh man. I almost wish i could be there to see his face." Jim pauses. Grins and oh man, that can't be good. "Tell him a relative solved it."

Hey! She's also attracted to that Steve Rodgers who took her on a date then didn't call. Or she was until the not-calling happened.

But he's right in that she doesn't count as a lady in his book.

"Tell him your alternate-future many-times-great grandson solved it. It will not be the weirdest thing he's heard all day." Otherwise, Barney will get all the credit, and nobody wants that. Nobody.

"I'd say we should get going because Jim needs to sleep, but I'm guessing he's not going to sleep without encouragement, so. Jim. What'll it be?" She's raised an eyebrow at you Jim DO NOT MESS WITH THE EYEBROW.

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Clint, stop being meta, you're bad at it.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qnd-hdmgfk

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Carl Sagan is my spirit animal

Mine's a honeybadger.

I got a rock. No, wait, a fox (it wandered off for a while).

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