Literally Pirateninja (shadowcat) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-04-01 09:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, clarice ferguson (blink), jemma simmons, kitty pryde (shadowcat) |
Oh… oh my
Who: Kitty Pryde, Jemma Simmons, and Clarice Ferguson
What: Kitty and Clarice take some time to rip off the bandaidintroduce Jemma to the super powers, and purple dragons named Lockheed who fly off to pester Stark employees old friends.
When: End of March
Where: Stark Industries
Rating: PG-13
Jemma was, well, she didn’t quite know what to make of her conversation with Kitty. She had seen plenty of things mentioned on the network, and had even had her own dreams, but she still didn’t know what to make of what she had read and been told. Objects showing up, people gaining abilities. If it were just Kitty, the scientist probably would have assumed that her friend was just trying to pull one over on her. New country and all of that, much like senior pranks that occur at schools.
But Jemma had been seeing things like that mentioned long before Kitty told her about what she had experienced herself. Which meant that Jemma was that much more inclined to believe her.
So here she was, in her lab, waiting. Not that she was being idle or anything. Goodness no. Instead, she was simply working on an analysis for a project she’d been working on.
There were a lot of items Kitty could have brought. She was overly protective of the Shi’ar tech, so instead she’d dragged out one of her swords. She thought one of her costumes would be a bit much, though. So it was street clothing for her and Clarice. Besides, the fact that Clarice was pink with glowing green eyes and there was a purple dragon on Kitty’s shoulder should be enough of a shock.
A portal opened up in Jemma’s lab in a splash of pink and white light, and the two women went through it.
“See?” Kitty said, walking through Jemma’s table. “Do I know how to make an entrance or what?”
The light was the first thing that caught Jemma’s attention as she was working at a microscope when the two arrived. So first she looked over, only to see Kitty walking through the table.
“Oh… oh my….”
Because really, what was one supposed to say to that?! It was something she had never seen before (obviously) but Jemma was still stunned. Yes, Kitty had said she could do so, but to see it. And the purple dragon. And the pink lady.
“Well. Okay then.”
She was trying at least? But Jemma was still mostly in shock. And by mostly, she meant completely.
“I think you broke your friend.” Clarice looked around for a safe place to lean against and decided to just stand straight.
“It’s easier to believe in crazy things if you throw it all at once.” Or perhaps overwhelming, but Kitty held out her hand. “This is Clarice, but almost everyone calls her Blink, for obvious reasons. And the little grumble here is Lockheed.”
Lockheed yawned, then lifted his head and peered at her with intelligent eyes.
“I dreamed I found him, or he found me, when I was like fourteen and lost in space.”
It would be improper of her to run a diagnostic on herself. Perhaps all of this was actually some very elaborate dream. Perhaps she had dreamed about the conversation because that was what people discussed and it had seeped into her subconscious. Unlike her actual Dreams that she had hoped that to be the case.
She was spiraling. Internally because Jemma Simmons was a master at internalising her reactions and feelings to focus on that which never betrayed her, science. But that was it. Her mind was racing trying to connect all the pieces together. Trying to make it all fit. Things she had seen people discuss on the network, things Wendy had said. Like how that PhD in Xenobiology would come in use here when it would nowhere else…
“Pleasure.” She could still be polite! In shock, but Jemma still managed to be polite in the brief introduction of Clarice...Blink… oh this was confusing. Fascinating but confusing and overwhelming.
“Yes. The so called band aid approach.” Children disliked pain, all people disliked pain really or mostly, so instead of peeling the band aid off slowly, it was all done quickly so it was over with. That was quite similar to what was happening right now. But how to respond a dragon!?
Lockheed choose that moment to flit up to a light fixture and perch there. He gave a fiery little belch, before taking off again and shooting out the door. Kitty didn’t look all that phased. “I got stuck once. I couldn’t turn my powers off and I was going to ...dissipate. So I got to stay here in a little chamber while some people figured that out. Lockheed kind of spent the whole time spooking people.”
Maybe they could have done without the dragon. Kitty decided to take the scientific approach with Jemma. She figured that would be the best approach. “Want to know what it feels like? The phasing I mean. Going through things. I can take people with me. Some objects. A helicopter once, but that’s exhausting. It might be a good little test before we try teleporting you anywhere. I uh.. know this is kind of a lot to take in at once.”
And...the dragon was gone. What the… Hopefully it didn’t cause too much of a disturbance with the workers there. True, Kitty said she had been at Stark Industries while they tried to figure something out so maybe Lockheed flying around wouldn’t cause too much of an issue, but who knew.
Scientific approach, that was good. Jemma was good with a scientific approach. Admittedly her scientific approach was more the let’s analyse blood and tissue samples but that was maybe a bit invasive. If offered, she’d say yes but she had enough presence of mind not to state it outright.
“Yes, that would be good I imagine.”
The notion that she’d be able to phase through something was an experience Jemma most certainly wanted to understand, even if there was the part of her that thought this was all completely mental, or that she’d get stuck. But it would give her a better understanding and that was what she needed.
“Everything should be okay as long as we don’t pass through any unshielded electronics. I’m kind of a walking EMP.” Kitty held out her hand. “You just need to touch me. My hand, shoulder, it doesn’t really matter as long as you maintain contact. And you really, really want to maintain contact if you don’t want to get fused to another object.” As soon as there was contact, Kitty floated them a foot in the air (just to show off), then brought them back down to the ground, and through the ground. They emerged in another lab, and Kitty carefully floated them back up to Jemma’s lab. She set her down, and grinned.
“Yes, of course, that makes sense.” No. No it didn’t, but Jemma would go with it. She had already seen Kitty phase through her table so it wasn’t like she didn’t know it was possible. Now she just...had to figure out how to process it. And react. But doing so herself would probably help. That was the theory. But maintaining contact, sounded easy enough. Hand holding made more sense in that, more stable, things like that.
Wow. She was floating. And going through the ground. And then floating back up. That was a thing. That happened.
“Oh my.”
There was a good chance that would be Jemma’s reaction for the next bit while her mind processed everything that was happening. Stunned. Shocked. Thrilled. Terrified. There were a lot of emotions going on.
“Do you want a drink?” Clarice asked. She jerked her thumb in the general direction of ‘that way.’ “I could get you one.” She didn’t think the showing off was entirely necessary, so she’d probably teleport to 7-11, instead of Russia. For vodka. “I’ll probably need one if you guys start going into the science of it.” She shook her head. “I’m sure there’s a lot of math involved in what I do and how I don’t end up teleporting into walls. It could be chemistry, or something else.”
“A drink would be lovely, yes.” Because Jemma was still distracted, though the fact that science and chemistry was mentioned? Well that seemed to help. Because Jemma was Jemma, and when in doubt, there was science.
“I feel that part of it is certainly on a molecular level, to rearrange in a way to move through objects. And temporal displacement for the portals... Chemistry, biology. There certainly are a lot of facets involved, regardless.”
Which was what Jemma had wanted to figure out in the first place. Though really, she’d been curious about brain chemistry and how that made someone susceptible to the dreams in the first place. Now though…
Clarice nodded, and stepped back through a portal, though she went slower than usual, to give Jemma a better look. It did indeed look like 7-11.
“We’re mutants. At least that’s what we’re called in our dreams,” Kitty explained. “It’s a… gene. An evolutionary step. In my world, we’re kind of a minority, and have to deal with the usual crap. People scared of differences, extremists on both sides. I don’t know how it works with other peoples’ dreams. Not everyone seems to have a gene that explains it. For some dreamers, it’s literally magic.”
She rubbed the back of her neck. “And we’ve figured out that me and Clarice, and a few others. We’ve got that gene here too, now. Clarice dreams of a world where a madman took over and went all genocidal on non-mutants and all dictator on the mutants. We’ve both spent time visiting different worlds, so my theory about the dreams is some kind of bleedover. Quantum entanglements, overlapping timelines, that whole shebang. You can take some blood if you want. And I’ll forward the medical files that Dr. MacTaggert created a couple of years ago. She was studying this stuff but the County got a bit too much for her so she went back to Scotland.”
Mutants. Gene mutation. It made sense. Sort of, because while all of this could be theoretically possible, it was just supposed to be theoretical. Instead it was happening and Jemma just had to find a way to make sense of it all.
“I see…”
Quantum physics, that was always fun. Really, Jemma just did better with the biological sciences. She knew all the rest, she was just comfortable with biology and chemistry. So samples and medical files? Those were a lot easier for her to make sense of.
“If you don’t mind?” At least Jemma had what she needed for drawing blood. Who would have thought she’d have need of it in her lab?
Kitty rolled up her sleeve. “Clarice already consented, so you can get her when she gets back. Actually I’m curious myself, to see if there’s anything different between us. Or similar. What with all the teleporting and time-space stuff and some of my own experiences with that, it might be nice to know if Orange County is changing me further.” She wasn’t entirely going to admit to time travel. She figured that might be something she could bring up later when Jemma dreamed more, if Jemma’s dreams gave her some weird experiences.
Mostly she wanted to know if there was a difference due to Clarice dreaming about different timelines, or if there was some similarities because of that and her own getting lost in the time stream. “Remind me to drag Logan down. He’s another one. Comes with claws and super fast healing and senses.”
“I do appreciate it.” Because permission was important, but for Jemma, so were answers. Or at least some attempt at understanding. Her understanding and answers just happened to come from testing and not just accepting things based on faith. Getting what she needed, Jemma drew some blood from Kitty so that she would be able to run some tests and analyse them. And then to compare to whatever files she could get.
“That would be good to know, the differences between abilities and how it would affect you.” At least she had focus now, moving about her lab with purpose.
“And noted. Remind you about someone named Logan.”
Who knew what her dreams would bring, but she already had two PhDs in Xenobiology from the dreams, which meant that these things probably weren’t completely out of the realm of possibilities for when she got further along. Why have degrees and learn about alien tech and biology if her dreams would be reminiscent of what, for all intents and purposes, was normal?
Well, Jemma had mentioned SHIELD in her post. “I admit I’m curious. There is a SHIELD in my dreams. I was once kind of an intern for them - they needed someone to debug the computer systems on one of their helicarriers.” Which turned out to be possessed by the spirit of an old samurai warrior, an Oni, who was using her as bait to get to Logan.
That was an explanation she didn’t want to give.
“Funny thing is one day I woke up wearing ‘Property of SHIELD’ boxers. They’re kind of like… an international organization that deals with super powered groups and individuals. There’s a sister-organization called SWORD that handles extraterrestrial stuff.”
Hearing that Kitty also seemed to know about SHIELD certainly caught Jemma’s attention. The one woman who had responded to her seemed to know about it, which had allowed Jemma to determine once and for all that her dream was a Dream and not just her subconscious tricking her.
“Really? Interesting. I don’t know much about them yet. I’m still in the Academy. Youngest one there, I apparently have a rival with the other youngest one there. Who is twenty three days older than me.”
Because Jemma was competitive in her own way.
“I’m not sure how that one will work out,” After all, Jemma tended to be very friendly and upbeat. To have a rival? Though it was an academic one, so maybe not so shocking. “I can’t say I’ve heard of SWORD though... It seems that SHIELD focuses on all of that from what I’ve read in the manual.”
“That makes you the youngest which means you win. Bonus points if you’re the only girl in the competition,” Kitty explained, her grin wide. “That’s interesting. Has anyone talked to you about dreaming of multiple versions of themselves? Like there might be the you you dream about now, and a version of you with different events unfolding.”
“Precisely!” There was a reason Jemma always seemed to get along with Kitty. She seemed to grasp the random competitive nature and well, if she was the youngest, even by twenty three days, she was still the youngest. Besides, now she was getting more information which Jemma had not been prepared for. She didn’t think she had seen anything about it even mentioned on the network, either.
“No, I haven’t.”
“We don’t always talk about it much,” Kitty admitted. She took a seat on one of Jemma’s chairs. “So it seemed like my dreams finished. And then I started dreaming about… well it was me, but I was a little different, and events played out differently. And it kept happening. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. One of my earlier dreams involved me and my friends getting lost in the timestream and visiting alternate versions of earth. What if Germany won world war 2, etc.” Kitty blanched. That hadn’t been a fun one for her. Not when seeing what they’d done to that Kitty Pryde. “And Clarice’s who mission was to fix broken timelines.”
From what Jemma had noticed, it seemed that some people were more apt to talk about their dreams than others, they had different ways of reacting to the person they were in the Dream and all in all, it was just different. So the fact that maybe not everyone really talked about the multiple versions as well wasn’t terribly shocking. Frustrating from a research standpoint, sure, but it wasn’t like she was actually doing research on this phenomenon. She wanted to, but she knew that it was probably beyond her scope.
“Well, that’s certainly something.”
Something, because what could you really say about it? Going through alternate timelines, alternate lives that seemed close enough yet different…
“I guess from a quantum physics level, you would need that person to go and fix the alternate timelines issue to keep things from collapsing in on itself.” Theoretically, yes, but Jemma was finding that theoretical seemed a bit more likely now than it would have been a month ago.
“That’s basically how it worked.” Clarice stepped through a portal and started handing out the drinks she’d gone to get. “It was a lot more complicated than that. Part of the problem was as we started changing things, started changing for us. We stayed in this place that was like the nexus between worlds.”
Smiling in thanks, Jemma took the offered drink and leaned against the worktable as she listened to what Clarice was saying. It made sense.
“Butterfly effect it sounds like.” Which really, who even knew what could have catastrophic effects on civilization and the way the world was and what wouldn’t. It was all extremely messy.
“What was the nexus like?”
Because Jemma and curiosity.
“Pink. Like it was built out of this pink crystal. It’s called the Panoptichron. It’s kind of a gigantic fortress or palace inside something called the M’krann Crystal, which is a really old and powerful thing. Older than time and the universe old. The palace is separate from all other universes and time lines. There were advanced computer systems that could track disturbances in the timelines, and my team would go out to fix them. Sometimes buying the last bagel in a shop was enough to complete the mission, other times required us to save - or kill - the right person. Sometimes one of us didn’t survive, and their bodies were placed in statis. Though we didn’t know a lot of this at first. We were just used, going from reality to reality without a break and only knowing what a voice in a wrist band was telling us, until we found out the truth and took the place over. We … sent a lot of the bodies back to their home earths, to lay them to rest. Dozens. More. We lost a lot of friends.” Clarice rubbed the back of her neck. “And then things got complicated after that.”
As if somehow that whole thing wasn’t complicated. Part of Clarice was still angry and bitter, most of her was just tired. “Eventually we started pulling heroes from their moments of death. That way their world wouldn’t be disrupted by their absence and cause more problems. Giving them a second chance.”
All Jemma could do was listen, because really, what was there to say to all of that? She didn’t know how she would respond to having to potentially kill someone just to set something right. Her whole goal was to find ways to save people. Heal. Saving the right person, sure. But having to make that call? She supposed there was protocols and the greater good but she didn’t know if she could ever be the one to do that.
Leave her with science, sure, but all of that?
“At least you found a way to give them second chances…” Even if it had taken time and exhaustion and all of that to do so. It was something. It had to be.
“I’ll always question if I did the right thing. That place exists. I’ve been there while awake. It pulled me back like it always did and sometimes I wonder if it’ll pull me back again.” Clarice grimaced. “Lets talk about something else. Kitty said you might want some blood?”
“Yeah, she’s totally going to go vampire on you.”
Well that sounded terribly dreadful, to have to worry about something like being pulled back into a place that seemed isolated and just used… Especially since it sounded like Clarice meant it had happened here and not just in the dreams. This really was going into different avenues of science that Jemma wasn’t as familiar with.
Oh. Bloodwork! Jemma could handle bloodwork!
“Yes, that would be quite appreciated.” And onto new needles and vials for said bloodwork. But it was something she at least understood. Once that was done, Jemma would have to make slides and cultures to examine and make note of, but that was something she was quite familiar with.
Kitty was playing on her phone. “You should have the files I mentioned on a secure server. Don’t download them onto any Agency computer. I’m not entirely certain they’re secure enough and this is information that could make some people targets.”
“I wonder how many other dreamers have been genetically changed,” Clarice mused. It sounded like something that Jemma might know more about, to her. “Or how it’s possible.”
“Agency?” Well that was the first Jemma had heard about that. There clearly was a lot to learn about here, much more than she had originally anticipated when she decided to move to a new country. It was exciting, and a lot of work. But that was fine.
“But yes, secure download.” Because the last thing she wanted to do was make someone a target, especially inadvertently while just trying to learn.
“That is the question though, isn’t it?” If Clarice and Kitty were able to do these things, surely their genetic makeup had changed. But how? And would she be able to actually figure it out or would it just be more questions? If anything, Jemma had her work cut out for her.
Kitty winced. “I meant Stark Computers but I’m sure you’d find out about the Agency eventually. I work for them. They basically keep track of the crazy.They’re kind of like SHIELD just a little less exciting most days.” Except for when someone let Natasha do something. Then things got exciting.
“You’re probably the first person in a long time that might be able to find that answer,” Clarice said. “No pressure.”
Well, that certainly was interesting. Not that Jemma really knew what she would do with the knowledge of the Agency. But between Kitty’s reaction, as well as her explanation… well, she probably wasn’t supposed to know about it unless approached.
“Ah. Got it. Mum’s the word then.”
Jemma was a horrible liar, but it wasn’t like she’d be questioned about something no one was supposed to know about. Right? Besides, Clarice was saying she was probably someone who could get answers… no pressure, indeed.
“I hope I do. Get answers, I mean.”