Room 307, Thursday Evening

[dollpocalypse]

Fact: Research sucked.

But here Topher was, doing it anyway. Because Peter had told him to, and that was enough, most of the time, to get him to do things. Sad but true.

And... maybe Topher was a little bit more inclined to do as Peter said this week in particular for another reason too. Which would be the need to appease him in light of the terrifying possibility that maybe, just maybe, Karla had blabbed the contents of their conversation the other day and now Peter wanted to kill him and get a new tech person and not be his friend anymore and and and --

Anyway.

Researching.

It was hard, with the siren call of meta for Skyrim beckoning to him, but Topher was managing.

[[open door, open post]]

Comments

[dollpocalypse]

Topher shook his head. "Nah, I've got this," he told Kenzi with little inflection, reaching new heights in his self-deluded arrogance. "I got a message from the future. So. We're good."

Sure enough, one of the many windows open on his screen was a paused video, and a pair of well-worn headphones snaked from the jack in the laptop down to the floor.

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

"Oooooooo." Kenzi perked up, leaning up. "Who from? Show me? Did they say when we do stuff to fix this whatever-the-hell-it-is?"

[dollpocalypse]

"Tooooooony."

Were you that shocked, Kenzi? Well. Maybe.

Topher went back to his desk and made the video full-screen, pointing. "See, see, look. See. That's him." With a dorky expression on his face that was half-grin, half-lipbitey, he looked to Kenzi for confirmation of Tony's hotness.

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

"Whoa, he's so old. He looks like his dad." Howard Stark could put away the Jell-O shots. Kenzi tilted her head. "Is he losing his hair?" Now she was just messing with him.

[dollpocalypse]

Topher's dorky expression turned to a gaping look that could only be described as "scandalized."

After emitting an aghast noise, he sputtered, "Wh-- bu-- no, he is not -- he's -- his hair is fine!"

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Kenzi chortled, and leaned back, popping another kernel into her mouth. "Seriously? Okay then! It is pretty cool for him to be sending messages from the future and all." She elbowed Topher. "Maybe he won't be dating anyone in the future."

[dollpocalypse]

And that would be Topher dissolving into a fit of giggles totally manly coughs. Yep. No giggling at all.

...she believed that, right? No?

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

That eyeroll would argue otherwise. As long as Topher wasn't stalking this Tony any more, she wasn't gonna ride him about it, though.

"So what's he say happened?" Kenzi asked, reaching to poke at the screen.

[dollpocalypse]

"The real version or the dumbed-down version?"

He had to check.

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

Kenzi stuck out her tongue. Thought about it. "Dumbed-down. But I might ask questions." No reason to freak about stuff she couldn't even understand.

[dollpocalypse]

"Fair," Topher said, pulling up the scans. "Okay, so look," he said, making the window big so she could see. "This first set here's the atmospheric readings. Different atoms in the air, that kind of thing." He scrolled down, occasionally pointing out particular numbers in the different columns of data. "So it's pretty consistent, right? But then you hit the six-hour mark..."

And then the numbers went from being fairly consistent to wildly sporadic, fluctuating high and low and all over the place until eventually all the numbers were zeroes, and then finally, a long line of ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.

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"Holy jeebus." Kenzi leaned forward staring at the numbers, and a thumbnail crept up to her mouth to be bitten. "How long did that take? I mean, between the weird and the whole Universal Error Screw You, Scientist message?"

[dollpocalypse]

"Few days, looks like," Topher said, scrolling back up to check the timestamp. "It doesn't mean anything, though -- there are other scans on different stuff, and they all started messing up at different paces."

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

Kenzi blinked at him. "Wait, what? I mean. Are you saying different... chemicals went poof at different times? Or in different places? Is that-- that doesn't sound scientific."

[dollpocalypse]

Topher gave her a withering look. "Tell me something I haven't been staring in the face for seven hours."

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

Kenzi folded her arms, making a face. "I don't know enough to know what I don't know, okay?" She frowned. "So does it help, that FutureTony told you all this? Does it tell you what to look for?"

[dollpocalypse]

Well...

"No," Topher admitted. "But it tells us for sure that whatever it is isn't the science from my world, 'cause it doesn't make sense with any physics or chemistry that I know. And I don't know how the rules are different in other people's dimensions, so I can't just sit down and figure out a whole new system, you know?"

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

"So it's... magic shit?" Kenzi grimaced. "So does that means someone's, you know. Doing this?"

Kenzi hadn't heard Principal Winchester's announcement. When she did, it would make more sense.

[dollpocalypse]

"Not magic," Topher corrected her, holding up his hands. "That's, like, for video games and books. This is just someone else's science."

That was almost poetic, Topher.

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

Most of the time, Kenzi did not feel dumb around Topher. "You just lost me. What's the diff?"

[dollpocalypse]

"I just don't like that word," Topher nitpicked. "Like, 'magic.' It doesn't even mean anything. If something works, it's science."

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

Epic eyeroll. "Okaaay, so, someone else's science, that you haven't run into before, maybe, is doing stuff to take out universes..." Gulp. Shiver. "So that's. Bad."

[dollpocalypse]

"See, at first I was like, 'maybe it's not anything that anything's doing,'" Topher mused, pulling up another scan that fluctuated even more wildly than the first one. "But it's too crazy to be something passive, you know? Like, no matter what your system of science is, I don't care, there's no way you get crazy squigglies like these unless you threw a wrench at something."

[regretiz4suckas.livejournal.com]

"Who would do that? Why?" Kenzi was waving her arms, popcorn spilling out of her bag. "Who throws wrenches? Without even sending a threatening ransom note first? C'mon!"

[dollpocalypse]

"Right!?" Ugh. People sucked. Or things sucked. Whatever this was, it sucked, and it had Topher throwing up his hands in frustration. "Like, dude, I can't figure out why someone would do that! Something! Whatever! That's, like, that's Peter's thing!"