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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
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.
Aaaaaand back to the part of her that can act like a grownup, to deal with a really annoyingly out of place grownup problem. Nuts saw enough.
"- I don't think it's that."
take-the-wheel
"There is so much we don't know about physics. I can go over the math of how it's possible if you're curious but I should at least call the people I was with and tell them I'm okay and where I am first." (Surely they cannot classify the pure theory. Some of it is already on ArXiv. He'll just avoid anything about which of the possible things happened to him or whose lab he was in at the time.)
Oh, nice, maybe this will be more straightforward than she thought.
"What nation-state are you from, again? We can get you to a phone. And to an airport, if you want, but if it's anywhere on the Continent trains'll be a better bet."
....Okay damn it she cannot help herself. "Or, consider, if you wanted you could switch Chaos for a bit and we'll show you a night in the Down Under here in Kast. We got the best ballpit in the world. Won an award and everything."