video

[outstandingbalance]

[The woman who appears on the feed might be familiar to a few people. She's sitting at a table or a desk and facing the camera, composed, but a little worse for wear. She looks tired.]

You sure know how to make a girl feel at home. [Not that she's faced frost giants or dark elves before, but dropped into the middle of a fight she wasn't expecting and wasn't prepared for? One that probably should be left to gods and super soldiers? That is familiar. The last two days haven't been boring] Is that normal?

[Natasha taps the table in front of her twice, drawing a slow breath as she considers how she's going to play this. If putting her face on the network is a mistake, then she's already made it.]

I think I'm ready for the welcoming committee now.

Comments

Re: text, private

[hypoxic]

Looking forward to it.

[ That might be a lie. He might be in a panic about the state of his desk. It's been nearly a year since the Widow last seemed him important enough for a personal visit. He's more than a little seized by an old yearning to do well and not be an embarrassment to her expectations. But either way, he'll make sure the lab is fully cleared out whenever she arrives. ]

action

[outstandingbalance]

[Natasha arrives more or less on the dot. It seemed like the kind of situation where it's better not to be early—she doesn't assume Agent Fitz doesn't like surprises in general, but none of them can be blamed if they don't have the most patience for them now.

And he did pull a gun on her last time.

She comes in the lab and looks around, taking in the lay of things, any signs what they're up to in here.]

Hey. Not interrupting anything, am I?

Re: action

[hypoxic]

[ The lab itself seems fairly disparate. There's a blend of mechanical parts and chemistry, a comingling of motherboards and beakers. Fitz is working on something that looks mostly like a wristguard, visibly harmless. There seems to be four stations, with differing projects on each.

He's sorry about the gun, as it happens. It's a jumpy kind of time. ]

Not at all, Agent. [ he swallows hard. She's being so polite when she doesn't have to be...! ]

You mentioned having some questions...?

[outstandingbalance]

Well, you can hardly blame me. [Professional, agent. She's being professional. With everything thrown into turmoil, first the Accords and now finding herself here, being professional is the best thing she has to fall back on.] It'd be more surprising if I didn't.

[hypoxic]

[ It's a level of professionalism that isn't normally available here, especially when Avengers are involved. Agent Barton was hardly as proper. ]

That's fair. We didn't have much time to touch base when I saw you last. Have you been here long?

[ It doesn't seem to be the case, but he wouldn't put it past her to have been here for months and simply stay in hiding. ]

[outstandingbalance]

No, we did not. [He shouldn't. Natasha did consider not making this post, laying low a while longer. Maybe a lot longer. Didn't seem like that would do her a lot of good, though.

It was her run in with him that pushed her over the line to posting.] I got here not much before I ran into you. A few hours.

[And she opted to get right to work.]

Which makes this day three.

[hypoxic]

[ Because that's what heroes do. ]

In that case, I'm sorry about the welcome. It's not common for people to be brought here during an event, but it's been known to happen.

[outstandingbalance]

[Natasha would call it less heroism and more running damage control.]

Don't worry about it. [Stressful situation, they were all tense, it was a surprise. Natasha gets it. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't take it personally.

She crosses her arms, leaning against an open tabletop as she faces him, then glances away.]

You could make it up to me by explaining that bit about coming back, though.

[That would be a start.]

[hypoxic]

Coming back here, you mean?

[Of course that's what she means. His lips press together, eyes dropping away and falling back on his work. He fiddles while he talks. It's easier to speak when it's less directly.]

You were here before. Twice as far as I'm aware, maybe some other time before I arrived. The general understanding is that Wonderland is forgotten as soon as we've been set back home. The memories created here aren't always cached properly and returned when we are. It's a theory that's difficult to test.

[Because magic is bollocks and he hates it a little.]

[outstandingbalance]

Apparently.

[If what he's saying is true, not only has she been kidnapped, not only are people being pulled from different times, but someone's also been messing with her head. She does a good job keeping just how badly that makes her skin crawl off her face.]

Do things like that happen often? People leave and come back, and don't remember? And you know for a fact it's the same person, from the same point in time... or however it is this is supposed to work.

[She very much doubts he knows it for a fact, but she has to ask.]

[hypoxic]

Only the idle hopes of those who need something to cling to. It's an issue that some of us intend to test -- you can imagine some of the worst-case scenarios, I'm sure. What I can confirm is the evidence we've discovered is a low-level disruption of memories following events. If we can confirm what was lost, it would be interesting to see if you've retained it due to a late arrival...

[He might have jumped to the end and left out some parts in the middle. She's welcome to ask him to backtrack.]

[outstandingbalance]

[He is definitely skipping a step or two, and while Natasha gets enough of the shape of what she's missing to know she won't like the answer, he's going to have to give her a little more information on that.

Especially considering that she is picturing those worst-cases.]

Pump the brakes there. [Her jaw tightens briefly.] What do you mean by low-level disruption?

ooc interlude

[hypoxic]

{ Man idk how this even happened but some tags ended up here I don't even know. THESE SHOULD BE HERE. }

[hypoxic]

We have an associate here who interacted with Thor during the London incident. We believe that was the root of this past event. When things are direct as those, they're fairly easy to pinpoint. [Perhaps too easy. The potential for a red herring is high.]

There's also the trouble of timeline divergences and spacetime deconstruction in general, though...

[outstandingbalance]

That sounds a little above my pay grade, Agent Fitz.

[She doesn't say that to scold him, but a nudge to keep him on topics that she might have something useful to say on.]

What exactly do you mean by divergences in the timeline?

[hypoxic]

[...Right. She may be an Avenger, but she's still ops.]

It's.... How can I explain it...

[Why should he have to explain it? He taps his chin lightly. UGH, the mundane educational system is putrid. He'll take a minute before pulling three differently-colored post-it pads from his desk.]

Pick one. Yellow, green, or blue.

[outstandingbalance]

[Natasha arches an eyebrow at that, then shrugs. Sure, she'll play along.]

Blue.

[hypoxic]

Now that was an active choice you made. As we understand time, it was the only choice you could have made. But there are likely parallel planes of existence where everything we know is the same, except you would have chosen the green one instead. From there, the timeline would branch off into a different collection of lived experiences. A color choice is fairly innocuous, but apply it in terms of battles, where you'd dodged left instead of right. A choice creates a point of divergence.

Now... these all exist in a parallel space and aren't intended to cross over, but Wonderland exists as a nexus perpendicular to these planes. [He drapes a string of wiring across all three pads.] As it collects us, it could take a version of you from the blue universe, while previous versions of you have visited here from the green or yellow ones.

[outstandingbalance]

Okay. I suppose I follow as far as that goes.

[She has other questions. What if she doesn't pick a color other than blue, though? What if she chose blue for a reason—because if she dodged left instead of right, there was a reason for it.

But that's a kind of academic question that she doesn't need answered.]

So what's the problem with them in this context?

[hypoxic]

The problem is that the crossover makes it difficult to develop a clear theory regarding memory loss when people are sent away and returned. It could be that your memory is wiped every time you return here. But it just as easily could mean that each visit is unique in itself, but that there's a very slightly different version of you who arrives each time. Each instance would present its own complications.

[outstandingbalance]

[Natasha nods slightly. All right, that makes sense. No way to know if there's slight differences between his world and hers. Or even major ones, if those slight differences snowball. No way of knowing if her memory was wiped or if she's from the same world. No way of knowing if versions of them from similar, closely related worlds are being affected the same by the memories they've lost.

Okay, but... ]

Assuming there is another world where I picked yellow or green.

[hypoxic]

Well it wouldn't be much of an assumption, but yes, let's.

[He was just explaining the likelihood of such a thing existing; it's not a difficult jump.]

[outstandingbalance]

As an example. [Her lips thin a little. She's spent more than enough time around geniuses to know when one wasn't impressed by her comprehension of a particular topic.] I just have to wonder how much proof we have that's what's going on. It makes it sound like the choice was random. Most choices aren't.

[hypoxic]

Well of course it wasn't random. There's no such thing as genuine choice.

[Doesn't everyone know this? He thought everyone knew this.]

[outstandingbalance]

That's more or less what I'm saying, yes.

[Or, not exactly. Natasha doesn't care that much about the physics of that statement and she cares even less about the philosophy of it. Natasha's interest is practical, based on what they have to deal with here.]

What I'm saying is that if the choice isn't random, if nothing is really random, do we know for a fact that there could be timelines that are that similar? Say I chose blue because I was thinking about frost giants. [She wasn't, but they're looking at the dumbed down version of things anyway.] To pick another way, I'd have had to be thinking of something else, which means how I showed up here would have gone differently, and so on and so on.