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Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, S.H.I.E.L.D's certified technoscientific geniuses, are examining the Tesseract. True to its name, it appears to be capable of manipulating spacetime in more than the usual 3+1 dimensions. That goes part of the way to explaining why it emanates a tetrahedron of warped space whose edges crackle with the blue light of energy rushing down some sort of hyperspatial gradient, but Bruce is still very surprised when it hits him.
Original flavor Bruce Banner has some learning experiences
- and falls the rest of the way in utter silence, one hand locked around her harness and the other full of candy that she's forgotten to throw.
She remembers on the bounce, though, and because she's steeling herself to time it right, she flings it before she sees the man on the platform. Right into his face.
That will NOT stand unchallenged.
"Nolita!" Trashfire booms from below. (He's practiced, hard, to get his voice that deep. Vocal lessons and all.) "Nolita, you will shut your trap or I'm gonna shut it for you."
take-the-wheel
Bruce flinches at the faceful of candy and then flinches again at the raised voice. "Uh, sorry for barging in on this--" he looks around and takes an optimistic guess "party? If someone can just explain how to get to the airport from here I'll get out of your hair . . . "
Bruce is thinking that he got fantastically lucky. Given the power of the Tesseract it's a stroke of luck (or a deliberate choice) that he landed on Earth at all and not at some random point in the solar system, and on top of that he's not in the ocean, and not in the wilderness, and he's somewhere they speak Eng . . . no, actually, he appears to have picked up another language, and not one he recognizes. It doesn't seem related to English or Portuguese or German or Latin or Japanese. That's awesome except it means the Tesseract edited his brain, which is creepy as fuck and he should get himself fMRI'd as soon as he gets back to New York to find out what else it did.
Nolita, being median to begin with, doesn't have to fuss around with switching to summon the right response.
"...You want to get to the airport? I - uh - mister, are you...all right–" okay okay what do you do for someone in the Underworld who seems like they might be disoriented to time and place, "- can you tell me where you are and what the date is?"
- oh and you also get help. That part's important.
"Hey!" she calls. Raising her voice is always effortful but it comes easier now because it's both Allowed (everything is allowed here) and also Correct. "Hey guys! I think - something - problem–"
Shucks.
"Hang on, Noli, I'll be right there!"
Numeria is the one who jumps - which helps a lot, Veth hates heights - but, by the time she's bounced twice, it's mostly Veth, median, in control.
take-the-wheel
"I have no idea where I am, I" wow his actual explanation of how he got here is both implausible and classified, shit "am super lost. It's April 11th New York time?" Neither "April" nor "New York" is easily translatable and the creepycool brain dump doesn't seem to have come with a calendar package so that last sentence is an awkward linguistic salad bowl.
Oh dear this guy is super not oriented to time and place.
"Guys! I said we have a problem!"
There's a right tone of voice to use but she's not very good at it. She starts hauling herself up her bungee to reach the man, though.
For fuck's sake.
This calls for Atlas, and Veth is super ticked off about it, with her current architecture it's easy to shift back and forth from median but she needs a whole ritual for getting all the way from Law to Chaos in a way that doesn't hurt.
Atlas has reflexes for this, and in a split second it's Veth!Atlas fully in control. It feels a bit like a bucket of water over the head.
"Just hang in there, Noli - I'm coming up - hey guys, cut the crap down there and help us out!"
"Somewhere random, right now. I'm sorry, love. Get your ass up here."
A little out of breath, Veth!Atlas reaches the stranger's ledge.
"Hey. I'm Veth fronting Atlas, Lawful. Can you, um. Maybe move back a bit from the edge or something?"
take-the-wheel
He steps well back from the edge. "I'm Bruce Banner and I don't know what Lawful means in this context but I'm not planning any crimes?" The mismatch between his semantic and conceptual vocabulary is like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth.
Concern!!!
"Are you on the Surface right now," she asks him, because you're not supposed to ask 'do you believe X'. It confuses people, makes them feel like it's a trick question. Believing just feels like X being what reality is.
Layne is still so disoriented! He hates it when this happens. The last thing he remembers is holding hands as they reached the elevator. Usually he gets a good bit more than that, nowadays, he's been working on it with his therapist, but that was a really abrupt switch.
He starts climbing. Tries to lodge in a mental note that if this isn't a real emergency, Antat should throw a pie in Veth's face later.
take-the-wheel
"No, I appear to be in some sort of very large artificial underground space."
She thinks he's having some sort of neurological problem, probably, which is very reasonable of her but he doesn't think so? He knows what coming out of being the Hulk is like and what waking up from general anesthesia is like and this is very different from either one--no break in subjective experience, no congnitive impairment, just a hyperspatial inversion coming at him and then this place. Or the Tesseract completely scrambled his brain and all his perceptions are garbage but if so it's a very coherent scramble, the language has consistent grammar and everything.
"And you don't, um. Recognize it or anything? ...Do you remember how you got here?"
Maybe he has her problem. The weird confusing embarrassing one that she still hasn't told anyone about except Layne, even though she knows this is kind of irresponsible, but she thinks she has it under control where it matters...
take-the-wheel
"So, uh, I realize this is very implausible and I don't expect you to believe me but I think I teleported."
'Teleported' is a very Lies to Children way to put it, it conflates so many known or speculative phenomena, but most people don't care about the distinction between a hyperspatial inversion, a wormhole, and a scan-destroy-transmit-reconstruct even when it doesn't touch on (ugh) classified information.
"I didn't do it on purpose."
This feels so incredibly awkward to say but -
"Teleport is, uh, a pretend thing. Not a Surface thing."
She has literally NEVER had to say that sentence out loud with her actual mouth to someone over the age of six and it's awful, it feels metaphorically like when her mother whacks at their family dog with a broom until he runs back to his kennel.
Oddly enough, Ronda fronting Iskill is pretty sure this calls for Nuts. Nuts is...not very good at a wide range of things. But they're very good at picking up on - which other people are inhabiting a children's world.