smartass_captain | Scientific Progress goes 'Boink'

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.

Clint cackles at that idea--there's no other word for it, he just laughs like a wicked madman for a moment. The idea of Reed having to deal with the thought that one of Clint's relatives did all this... it's too perfect. Also, they've all been under a lot of stress.

"That's perfect, that's absolutely perfect. This is gonna be so great, you will definitely get pictures." But Verity raises a good point. "And sleep. Time to put the coffee down, bro."

That's not fair though. Everyone is attracted to Steve Rogers. Even if only a little bit.

It's the Vulcan eyebrow technique. Jim does not have enough coffee reserves to mount a defense. So he opts for distraction.

"Sure, but a promise is a promise. I've got some other good news for you guys. Follow me." Jim does set the coffee down. It's really no difficulty there. He'll lead them out of the prep room and back to the turbolifts. This time to a much quieter part of the ship.

The observation deck is something of a hang out for Captain Kirk, whenever he gets the time. He doesn't have any smart mouth introductions, any quippy statements. He just leads them inside and dims the lights so they can see the space all around them.

Edited 2015-09-26 04:51 (UTC)

This is true. And how could Verity not be attracted to someone so fundamentally honest?

She's familiar with the technique, having been on both sides of it before. So although her eyes are narrowed, she'll allow it. For now. But this doesn't mean she's forgotten.

The view might mean she's forgotten. "Oh, Jim. It's so beautiful. Where are we?" Verity's up as close to a window as she can get, staring out into space with as close to childlike wonder as she's ever managed in her life. Nobody mess this up for her, please.

Clint's not going to spoil it by being more dignified than Verity, that's for sure. He's right up against the glass, too, trying to see it all, with an appreciative, "woooooow!"

Them Iowa boys sure is eloquent, mm-hm.

"There was a transmission that originated somewhere around here. Spock's doing some scans with Uhura to try and pinpoint the disturbance. We were heading toward Makus III with a shipment of medical supplies picked up at the last StarBase we were sent to."

The one where they got into that nifty bar fight even. But that wasn't IN the StarBase, Jim would have been recognized there. Which isn't always a bad thing.

"Either it's an anomaly in the radiation coming from one of the nebula nearby, or there's something out here. Either way I figured it wouldn't take long to drop out of warp and let them poke around. PLus it means I can show you guys this."

That doesn't really answer her question, and she has no idea where Makus Anything is anyway, but whatever. It's so pretty. She does shift her attention away from he view to focus on Jim's reflection in the window.

"Look at you, planning things like a real grown-up," she remarks with a smirk. "You might just convince me you really are a captain at this rate." She's only teasing, but Jim doesn't need his ego inflated any further.

"How long until you're due to deliver the medical supplies?"

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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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http://tinyurl.com/o2ouqxv

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