thisavrou_log | with scarves of red tied 'round their throats

It takes Sans a few beats longer than usual to parse the metaphysical implications of her gesture. He blinks a few times (and takes another drink) in the space of time it takes him to respond.

"Like. In a cosmic sense, or in a Moira sense?" Sans tipped the bottle in her direction, winking. "'Either way, yeah. Who doesn't?"

"I don't know," She admits, taking a long sip. "But it feels like they're out there. I feel like I've talked to them. People who don't look back."

Alice fiddles with the glass.

"Or forward, or sideways." She's rambling, but she doesn't stop, doesn't care to filter. Sans clearly drowned his a while back — what's the point? "I just. Cosmically. If everything's coincidence, if everything's possible, somewhere. Then everything's alright somewhere."

"But we're not in that one. And I just start wondering, is that anything we can even change?" Alice bites her lip. "Maybe this is the one where we just keep fucking up forever. Is that crazy?"

What she said made sense. Maybe a little too much sense for a guy up to his collarbone in ketchup and feeling the weight of the world closing in.

Sans coughs, or at least does a very passing impression of someone with lungs.

"... Shit." He finally says, rubbing at his eye socket and looking a few years older. "You really laid it all out there, didn't ya."

At some point over the last few moments, Sans eye sockets went an inky black. He doesn't even seem to notice.

"I'll let you in on a little secret, kid. Time? Is just a bunch of little bars of light vibrating across a whole lot of nothing. And we're just the chumps along for the ride until we either die or the timeline dies. Whichever comes first." He holds up his hands, talking with them as a man he used to know once did. Sans can't remember his name. Probably not important.

"Y'see, every moment in time is just an unfathomable number of electrons are hurtling through space, existing in several places at once. The only way to actually know where they are is to look for them. And that, my friend, is like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of the sun with only a few math problems to help you."

He took another drink, not bothering to wipe away the ketchup dribbling down his chin.

"So yeah, we can't change a thing. Trust me, I tried."

Edited 2016-03-21 00:33 (UTC)

"I'm glad I found an optimist." She downs the second shot, points at Sans. "I just want to make sure that we're on the same page here. Or timeline. Or nexus point, or whatever."

He's been too weirdly specific to be much else, but he's also drunk — and she could've sworn that a second ago his eyes weren't that deep shade of void.

"When you say you've tried, when I say I've tried. We're both being as literal as possible. Physics, not philosophy. Not. Not some wibbly point where they meet."

She lays her fingers down, counts them out on the bartop.

"Because I mean. If you accept all that's possible, and I kind of think we have to? On an interdimensional spaceship? Then why would we be stuck in a single timeline? We'd only be making new ones. You should be able to make a new one. It's just, it's just bullshit that you couldn't."

Alice sounds mostly like she's trying to convince herself.

As if someone flicked a switch in the distance, Sans' eyelights blink back to life as she speaks. Curiosity mingled with thoughtfulness, culminating in a cocktail you couldn't order at this particular bar.

One of the many downsides to giving up is the way thinking stopped mattering. Problems were accepted as permanent and trying to solve them became a waste of energy. Things were what they were, with no drive to change and alter them in any way. It's the way Sans made a conscious choice to live his life. It's the way he assumed he would die -- the way he did die. Shrugging and shuffling away, refusing to give someone who thought they were above those intangible inevitabilities the satisfaction of watching him turn to dust.

Which made hearing Alice work through conceptualizing something wholly new... well, it activated a part of his mind long since left dormant.

"Making a new timeline, huh? Do you know how much energy that would take?" Sans took another drink. "... 'Cuz I don't. Not without doing a lot of math. But experience tells me somewhere between a hell of a lot and a metric butt-ton."

Sans winks, tipping his drink in Alice's direction.

"Hope that's not too much jargon for ya."

"We use imperial butt-tons," She deadpans. "So you might have to translate. But look —"

At... Alice ordering another drink, apparently. This time, she just motions for the bottle.

"— I do know how much it takes, I mean. To just move between worlds. Small-scale. And that's huge." She pushes her fingers out by the side of her head, mimicking an explosion. Boom. Mind blown. "Something like the Ingress? Something that moves this many people, across this much time and space? Even if you can't fix the controls, it's still got to send out. Like."

She shakes her head, she's losing it, the big picture she had in view. Alice thinks she understands what Penny was doing, the base mechanics of it, if not the execution. But how it fits into anything bigger? In a universe where, guaranteed, most of those rules won't apply?

A little lamely:

"Well. Back to a hell of a lot of energy. And something as broken as it is, I don't buy that it's all contained. That you couldn't harness some of it."

It's getting away from the point, working through the details like this. But she doesn't mind. It's a nice distraction, and a nicer surprise to find Sans engaged with the idea. However faintly.

He's drunk enough to find just about anything she does funny, and her rambling explanation is peppered with chuckles from him. It's an interesting, if futile concept, to Sans' mind. But still, interesting is interesting. Even if interesting could be very, very dangerous.

Pulling a pen from his pocket, Sans unfolds a napkin.

"I think it's pretty safe to say we're working with terra electron volts, right? Right." Sans did some quick estimations, based on his own work with alternate dimensional travel as a starting point. The Core's output was always something of a limiter in his work. No matter how much one pushed it, getting it to run hot enough was nigh-impossible. Clearly, the Ingress didn't have that problem. "So you've got this thing producing impossible numbers of TeV, and..."

Subbing in some very, very loose math, Sans sped through a few of the equations he memorized by heart through his work. It comes as a bit of a surprise just how natural this is, after so long out of the game. Advanced quantum physics, it seems, was sort of like riding a bike.

"... Alright, so, conservatively? And I mean real conservatively. We're looking at ciphoning off something close to 7.8 TeV. Not that I don't think the Ingress has that to spare, and that freakin' terrifies me, but conducting that much energy safely is like trying to put a sleeve on a cup of coffee at..." Sans holds up the napkin, pointing to a number he's circled: 7.8x10^22. Like hell he's going to try and say that number aloud, not when he's this toasted. "That much times its boiling temp. Best case scenario you burn yourself, worst and most likely case scenario you wind up dumping the coffee everywhere and melting the entire ship."

Sans twirls his pen, grinning.

"And that's conservative."

Edited 2016-04-19 15:58 (UTC)

"Ok. Okay, fair, but." She’s intimately, unpleasantly familiar with the consequences of that kind of coffee, but even that had been on an infinitely lesser scale. Alice suppresses the feeling like she's being watched. "If it was a spell? You'd siphon it off into supplementary architecture, across multiple parties. Something to feed the excess into, like. Lightning rods."

"That way you aren't trying to hold it, just direct it." Alice taps the bottle, then neglects the glass to take a swig from it directly. She pulls a face as it hits her throat. Not smart. Not smart at all. "But you're right. Even then, something has to get fried."

How do you manage that without obliterating everything in the way? It’s not an easy question, even with people like the Hulk aboard.

"What if we tried pouring it into another Ingress." It's all theoretical, why not.

Edited 2016-04-22 06:10 (UTC)

Theoretical. Sans' second favorite word after 'crapulence'. How rare an occasion it was that both words could apply.

He takes another drink.

"I dunno if you've been paying much mind to how things are going lately on our travels, but every Ingress we've come across has also been broken. If we could fix one up enough to active with a big power charge, then we could just tweak the one we have and be done with it."

And another.

"--But since we're going hypothetical here, I guess, technically, we could create something new that's kinda like an Ingress and use that instead. Something that taps into dimensional rifts, a quantum particle organizer, a... heh, a time machine."

Edited 2016-04-22 06:27 (UTC)

Alice holds up a finger.

"The one on Ceta worked. Just randomly, intermittently. Busted the same way as ours, but it worked. It spat out the latest crowd."

So...what? It doesn't get them any farther, just means they'd need one hell of a synchronous coincidence. But they'd had that, hadn't they? Some of the new crew had come through on the ship as well.

A time machine, though. A way around the necessity of timing (and into a whole new mess of causal tangles).

"I've seen — stasis, over larger areas. Entropic reversals over smaller." It's easier on the second swig, this time she's expecting the burn. "To go back very far, you'd hit. Issues."

To put it lightly.

"But it sounds more feasible, honestly, than the rest." She still isn't wholly certain how Aqada ran it, faulty and patchwork as it turned out to be. "It's not like there's any shortage of genius engineers here."

"Issues. Heh. No kidding. More like a newstand."

There's a long period of silence, punctuated only by an airy chuckle that Sans seemed to wheeze out subconsciously. With a clink, he sets down his drink and wobbly hoists himself up from the bar. This is a bad line of thought. He's exactly one more wrong association away from putting himself back in his lab, banging his skull against the wall and wondering why he can't fix it.

"You're right about that. N' y'know, I think you'd be better off continuing this conversation with one of them." Sans grins, offering a quick salute as he stumbles down to the ground, clinging to his stool for balance. "I'm just the janitor around here."

Edited 2016-04-22 06:50 (UTC)

"You and me both."

But she lets it drop. There's an old pang there, the faint nostalgic sting of rejection. Still, Sans looks like he's about to tip over any moment.

"Here." Alice shoots a glance behind the bar, then slips the bottle beneath an arm. They won't miss it. She offers the other one out to Sans. "Let me walk you back. I don't feel like drinking alone."

That's what Ryan's for. She hesitates, then panders:

"Or walking alone. Really. Come on, we should both go with somebody."

Being drunk never stopped Sans from teleporting before, but that doesn't make it any less of a bad idea. Besides, Alice was good company, even if she brought out a side of him he thought long buried.

"Sure, why not." He takes her arm, stumbling slightly. "What deck are you on?"

"Mero," She announces, steps slow and careful. "Home of weirdly public showers, and breakfast-themed furniture."

Alice slips him a sidelong look as they walk.

"Hey — I've been meaning to ask. Ratchet. Small, furry, with the eyebrows."

She'd flutter a finger near her own for emphasis, if that wouldn't mean dropping the bottle. (Sans is about the same height, but that's hardly the point.)

"Great, you can drop me off at--" Well hey, she just went ahead and finished his sentence for him. It's enough to make Sans laugh, eyes alight with the sheer humor of it all. "Yeah, how'd you guess? Just pour me in his room, he'll know what to do."

As in, he'll know to just step over him on the floor and not tell his brother about it.

"What about 'im?"

"Can do." Alice knows her way to that room by heart. But seriously, Ratchet? "Are you guys, you know."

She's always known he was a questionable judge of character. It's probably why they're friends. It's just, you know, this is a little farther along than she was expecting. And she's a little drunk to question it.

(Some quiet voice reminds her that not everyone spends three months trying to get to the point of hand-holding.)

"Like. Together?"

"Well, right now he's in his room and I'm here with you."

Sans grins wider, luxuriating in vagueness as he leans a little harder on her for support. The lift isn't that far, but to his sauced up feet it may as well be ten miles.

"You'll have to be more specific."

"Dating. Courting. Going out. Whatever." Alice tips her head to the side a little, considering. "I mean, it's not like he ever talks about that stuff."

It's not like either of them does. Alice is pretty sure she's never so much as mentioned Guy, can't think if he even knows about Quentin.

"Why, you like him?"

Sometimes questions you know the answers to are the best to ask, and Sans looks positively pleased with himself as they ooze into the elevator.

"Nah. Just, you know." She resists the urge to elbow him. She'd drop the bottle. "That he's my best friend, and if anyone ever did anything to hurt him, I would turn them into a xylophone and donate them to the music class."

It's a little hard to give a skeleton a flinty look. She settles for rolling her eyes.

"Ouch."

But Sans is laughing, and not just because he's drunk. That's a solid burn. Top marks for creativity.

"I'll keep that in mind. You don't have anything to worry about, though." Because they aren't together, but actually spelling out what he means wouldn't be anywhere near as fun. "But..."

He shrugs, grinning up at her from where his head is pressed up against her chest.

"Seeing as we're now bosom buddies and all, I think you're honor bound to share some dirt. Nicknames, baby photos, tales of traumatic embarrassment -- no featherweight stuff. Give me something I can use."

Anyone but an apparently sort of gay skeleton would get their ass kicked for that move and pun. As it is, she settles for gently shoving him off, towards the wall. If he crashes, so be it. So. Be. It.

"Honour is for suckers. What am I getting in return out of this?"

Bless the inventor of the hoodie, they're fantastic for shock absorption. Slumping contentedly against the wall, Sans shrugs with his usual grace and aplomb.

"Ratch's unending humiliation, obviously."

This one time he was puking up blood, it was hilarious, Doesn't quite meet qualifications.

Shit. They really haven't had like, any fun have they?

"I don't know, uh. We used to know this guy who wore a lot of spandex, and a helmet everywhere?" She pulls the bottle out and takes a swig, considering, before offering it briefly in Sans' direction. She has no idea if he can even get drunk off normal alcohol. "Oh. Oh god, wait. You need to. You need to tell him you want to talk. In the shower. Tell him it's really important."

Whether or not he can or not isn't answered; Sans would take a bottle of motor oil from her at this point. Most of the contents of his swig winds up on the front of his uniform, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"Pfft, what?" He snorts, handing the bottle back. "Welp, alright."

Pulling up his MID, he's already half laughing as he navigates to Ratchet's inbox.

"Hey, uh, Ratch?" Keeping a straight face is one of his best talents, and he somehow manages to keep himself sounding mostly normal. Whether Alice and her clinking bottle is as talented in that regard remains to be seen. "I've got something really important to tell you. Can you meet me in the showers up on Mero? I'll uh, be...?"

He shoots Alice a look, nonverbally asking am I supposed to be taking a shower in this scenario?

with scarves of red tied 'round their throats

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a million years late, due to unplanned hiatus. please feel free to drop if it's been too long!

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