Arc 1-Session 4-Mini 4 - Daphne/Prof. Cooper

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking of Shade, she and Daphne are on the roof, working on the brand new solar panels.
Apparently Shade can set up some sort of permanent field of light-bending, which helps significantly with panel efficiency. She's laying out light-repelling energy in the defined pattern Daphne calculated out while the other lens of her smartglasses compares the notes she got from the Lady of Twilight on how to technologically harness the supernatural/spiritual energy of the sun as well as the ordinary photons. While saying 'screw you' to the First Law of Thermodynamics is hardly new in a world with superheroes, if Daphne can pull it off on her own rooftop, she's probably going to be pretty proud of herself.
That said, as she's working on this, Daphne notices something odd in the early morning sunrise. There's a woman with a labcoat and some sort of device in her hair - zooming in with the glasses lets her see it's some sort of endlessly turning gear mechanism (huh) - carrying a clipboard and walking around the dorms in the area. She then turns around and walks past the dorm again. As she passes each one - except yours - she points to it, then at the end of the trip she checks her clipboard and seems very confused about something.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 3:48 PM
Daphne looked in confusion, zooming in with her glasses and running a facial search program.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 3:51 PM
Stage name "Doctor Tesseract", superheroine and dimensional physicist, real name Becky Cooper, KIA in Jerusalem. So what's she doing he- riiiiiight. Doctor Tesseract had a constantly-rotating planetary hairpin with an orbiting moon that drew power from other worlds as part of her costume - or, well, the one from your dimension did.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 3:55 PM
Briefly, Daphne found herself pondering the applications of dimensional doubles. What happened if you got Techno-Paladins and Causalities from multiple dimensions to brainstorm together? What if you summoned multiple Avatars to tackle a threat as a team? What of alternate Daphnes?
For now, though... Hesitantly, she approached Doctor Tesseract.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 3:56 PM
By the time Daphne gets downstairs and through the building - the disadvantages of spatial compression - she might worry that Doctor Tesseract is already gone. But when she reaches the front door, she sees Doctor Tesseract continuing her patrol, pointing to the dorm to the right side of your dorm, walking right past yours, and then pointing to the dorm on the left side of your dorm.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 3:57 PM
"Um." Daphne fidgeted, as was her wont. "Er... Excuse me?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 3:59 PM
It takes a bit for her to notice you. She thinks very hard. "Excuse me," she asks. "How many dorm buildings are on this side of the walkway? I was told there are five, but I keep counting four." Okay. That's another weird feature your new supergroup base has, apparently. This one is probably also the result of Shade's meddling.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:01 PM
"Ah... I'll, uh, see if I can help with that." OK, something that messes with people's minds to keep them from noticing the HQ is kinda amazing, but also seriously not OK.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:01 PM
She then blinks. "Oh! Huh. I ... diiiid not see that there. Funny."
Well, keeping people from seeing things is sort of Shade's whole 'deal'.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:02 PM
Daphne nods. "Excuse me, but, um. Ah... Are you Doctor Tesseract?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:03 PM
"Oh, please, no. I'm Professor Cooper. Doctor Tesseract was - someone else, I think, would be the best way to think of her." She catches Daphne's disappointed expression. "I'm sorry. Were you one of her friends? I - I'm sorry."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:04 PM
"We never met!" Daphne hurried to say. "But, um, I read some of her papers."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:06 PM
"Well, I hope they were good papers." Professor Cooper looks around. "I, um, I take it the building you're in has features other than the compressed space I noticed from my office? Which is why I had so much trouble finding it, it seems." Well, the mail and food gets here fine. Apparently it's a selective effect that only applies if someone is looking specifically for where weird superscience lives. "Could you be a darling and invite me in so I can see it?"
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:08 PM
"Su-" Daphne's smile freezes. "...Just a sec."
Seconds later, a message was sent to dean Carroll. Just to confirm that the woman Daphne was considering bringing inside a brand-new high-security facility was, in fact, someone authorized to be there.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:12 PM
A message a very awkward minute later. (Dean Carroll has trouble typing.) <Becky's there? Check the gears in her hair. There's printing on each one that can only be picked up with optics like in your glasses - Ceres/Vesta/Pallas/Hygeia.>
After a quick verification, this seems to be her, or someone who's stolen her face and her hairpin's design. "Security, hmm? Well, I guess it's a lot more of a concern here."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:14 PM
"I'm, ah, honestly kind of new to having security concerns." Daphne had always been fairly confident that she'd make a fantastic hacker, but had also been too honest to put it to the test. "But, well, this is cape stuff. Anyway, sure, I can give you a tour. We're kind of putting the finishing touches on this thing."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:16 PM
"Oh, all I need to see is the front door." She reaches inside her lab coat as she steps inside - wait. Daphne's object-recognition program does a double-take. Is that vaccuum tubes in the LIDAR sensor she just pulled out? Vaccuum tubes? ... Granted, they're incredibly small vaccuum tubes that seems to have been constructed with nearly nanoscale precision, and theoretically that makes them more efficient than transistors... but... vaccuum tubes?
"I won't spy on you, I promise." She sweeps the sensor over the front. "Hm."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:17 PM
Daphne blinked. "Whoa... are you from some kind of dieselpunk world...?" She then blushed at the realization that she'd said it out loud.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:19 PM
"Sort of," she confessed. "Miniaturization was far more effective there than here, and Babbage's work found funding, and Ada Lovelace wasn't too proud to disguise herself as a man..." Well, that's a fascinating story implied in the space of a sentence. "But my real passion has always been alternate worlds."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:21 PM
"...So many questions I don't even know where to begin," Daphne mumbled. But then, this was the girl who'd reverse-engineered exotech based on information publicly available online.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:24 PM
"Well, that's what I like to hear from my students. If you're in the hard sciences, I'll be looking forward to getting a chance to teach you." She screws up her face as she looks over the LIDAR, then switches tools to some sort of glass level bubble vial. She sets it on the ground (which your glasses tell you is flat) and then notices it quickly move from the center to one of the edges. "Hmmm."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:26 PM
"Um, what subjects do you teach?" Daphne asked. "I mean, I'm a technologist first and foremost, but..."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:26 PM
"Interdimensional Transportation and Physics, Theory and Practice." ... Daphne is probably in that class.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:28 PM
"Right, right," said Daphne. "I, uh, actually managed to install a dimensional portal in the HQ. I, er, still haven't tested it extensively. It's not really using much in the way of new ideas," she admitted sheepishly.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:30 PM
"... It'd be wrong if I gave you extra credit for letting me use it from time to time, wouldn't it?"
"Well, you did build it yourself. So."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:36 PM
"The only modification I did was in setting up the dimensional guidance. I mean, normally, you spend ludicrous amounts of energy every time you open a portal, and then you have to aim it very carefully so you don't accidentally get the wrong universe or something," said Daphne. "But, uh, one of my teammates can block light at a supernatural level, so, I figured if I had her use her powers to cool down the dimensional compass to quasi-absolute zero temperatures, it would act as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and then I could have it exist simultaneously across multiple dimensions. So, the gate is kind of in a superpowed state of being open and not-open, so instead of spending tons of energy every time, we just maintain it hovering between being open and closed, and collapse it on our desired location whenever we want to travel."
She paused. "So, same end result, but cheaper."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:38 PM
There is less than five seconds worth of pause.
"And when are you going to publish?"
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:39 PM
"Uh, well, I figured... once I had the time? And, uh, actually attended classes. Seems a bit, um, presumptuous to publish before at least finishing one semester.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:41 PM
Professor Cooper is very firm with you as she says this. "There are hundreds of people who will seek to dismiss you and your work without a glance. You shouldn't help them do it."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:43 PM
Daphne blinked. "Er. Well. I, er, guess you'd have more experience with acadmics than me." She paused. "Still, this isn't exactly an approach that could be mass-produced... well, unless one found a different way of cooling the compass down within a billionth Kelvin of absolute zero. Which I'm sure there are ways of accomplishing without a goddess of darkness on your side. Somehow."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:44 PM
"Do you have any idea how much of our research isn't reproducible? The important thing is the idea, not the invention. You can share ideas." ... That's an odd way of looking at things, but you suppose her dimension has different rules around science. "A goddess, hmm? Is she the one who did this spatial compression? That would explain one thing, but confuse me about another."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:47 PM
"Different teammate, actually. Her name is Miss Trial. I, uh, I think her abilities are also mystical in nature? Something about taking the very concept of laws, as in, from the legal system, and projecting them on physical reality."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:47 PM
"Ah! Then that explains everything." ... It does? Well, she is the expert. "I know how it works now. I suppose I have time for a lesson, if you're as curious as you say you are."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:49 PM
"About a lot of things," Daphne nods. "I, uh, I study exotech. A lot." She paused. "Er, I don't know if that word means the same thing where you come from."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:50 PM
"It obviously wouldn't, right? I mean, whatever's in those glasses of yours is 'exotech' to me. And this-" she holds up the LIDAR "- is exotech to you. Even though I bought it from a hardware store."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:51 PM
"Right, but, I mean, there's classificiations. You've got alien technology, and technology from parallel worlds that have followed a different developmental path, and cryptotech that's designed specifically to be hard to understand, and... um, sorry, I'm rambling," Daphne blushed.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:53 PM
"In any case. Don't go around using these terms. That South Asian woman - what was her name? I only know what she calls herself - probably thinks she has the right to come up with her own names for all of these." Daphne probably doesn't appreciate Professor Cooper back-sassing Causality, especially like that, but she is a professor and she is offering lessons. "But the space 'between' dimensions, as it were, is called the Aetherial Sea. And like our sea, there's life inside it, most of which we don't really understand. But with life comes evolution. Lots of evolution."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:54 PM
Daphne nodded, suppressing the urge to take notes. That was what the glasses were for.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:56 PM
"Some - most, I'd say - of the beings other worlds call 'Gods' arose in the Aetherial Sea. They can influence the worlds that are 'near' them, and the worlds frequently reflect the conditions in the sea that they create. Your friend, Miss Trial - really? - must be from a world where Law is so powerful in the surrounding Aetherial Sea that the laws of reality become reflected in the laws of physics. That's why the spatial compression mechanism here resembles divine magic without actually being from one of the intelligent beings that are referred to as gods - she's drawing on the power of the Sea itself, not anything that lives inside it."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 4:57 PM
Daphne nodded. It was still challenging to understand - magic had not been part of any curriculum she'd followed - but it certainly was interesting.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 4:59 PM
She is apparently just empathic enough to pick up on your confusion. "Studying how other worlds study necessitates studying the way their scholars do things, of course. I don't think a library is complete without any books by the Lady of Twilight, personally. Post-ascenscion, her pre-ascenscion work isn't nearly as comprehensive."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:01 PM
"I, um, I've gotten started on her writing. She, uh, she's really amazing." To put it mildly. In life, the Lady of Twilight had apparently been a scholar, wizard and hero on Causality's level. After her death and ascending to arch-angeldom, she'd apprently remained just as active.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:03 PM
So, if 'Entropy' is an entity in this 'Aetherial Sea', that would explain a few things. Namely that it wouldn't be feeding off destruction all throughout the multiverse. Just nearby. Like here.
So there is a chance to stop it! Super.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:04 PM
Daphne resolved then and there that she'd be reading more on the subject. A lot more. And probably try to get the help of a real expert. Who was the magic teacher again?
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:05 PM
Lady Em- Astr- There are a few, actually! It's a complicated subject and a large university.
"I'm here to research one specific thing, actually, which is why I may need to borrow your gate from time to time."
She sighs. "The Dean is so ... heroic in her thinking." It's clearly not a compliment.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:06 PM
"Um, sure." If anything, it was flattering that someone on the faculty would need something she made. "Er, what's wrong with that?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:07 PM
"Well, she told me not to tell anyone about this, but I hardly share her paranoia. She's sending me on a great deal of effort to reverse one thing done to one dimension."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:07 PM
"Er," Daphne hurried to say, "before you say anything..."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:07 PM
"Someone - I suppose you would call them a supervillain - built a device that, well, sailed worlds through the Aetherial Sea. Moving them from place to place and thereby changing the laws of physics which they operate under. It's utterly fascinating! But she's demanding that I find a way to reverse it."
Doctor Cooper is hardly listening to you.
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:09 PM
"...I, er, I'm not exactly in the habit of keeping secrets from the dean," Daphne finished lamely. Smooth, Daphne. Smoo - wait, what?
"Wait, changing the laws of physics? How? How is that even possible?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:10 PM
"I know, right? We should be spending all our effort trying to find out 'how'. Not, not... not this foolishness!"
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:11 PM
"Er, seems to me we should be doing both. Unless it's somehow completely harmless."
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:13 PM
"Well, it's a fascinating case study. We shouldn't just get rid of case studies. Apparently neurotechnology became significantly easier, or at least certain applications of it." - eep. Doctor Cooper sighs. "But the Dean is extraordinarily good at finding people's weaknesses, so I will do as she says."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:13 PM
Daphne blinked. "Wait. Neurotechnology? How...?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:14 PM
"The dimension was moved directly towards an entity in the Aetherial Sea who was a strong proponent of neural research. Intersecting her completely, as I'm given to understand."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:14 PM
"That's... impressive," Daphne said lamely.
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:15 PM
"I know, right?" Doctor Cooper sighs. "I'll be in touch. If you have any questions, come by my office. My homeworld doesn't have email so I don't check my account."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:16 PM
Daphne nodded silently. "Er, um, do you... have anywhere I could access notes on that dimension, and what's happening there?"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:17 PM
"This is all 'top secret'," says Doctor Cooper, the roll in her eyes matching the turn of her gears. "But I'm sure I'll find something to slip you from time to time."
sun tzu (Daphne Miller) - Yesterday at 5:18 PM
"Ah. Well, um, don't break any rules on my account," Daphne shuffled her feet, "but, um, I'm looking forward to your class!"
Kyoko - Yesterday at 5:19 PM
"And I am looking forward to you. Another time." Doctor Cooper takes up her devices, walks out, turns around to look at the dorm, shakes her head in deep confusion, and then proceeds onward.