entranceway | Text - Private to Rick Sanchez

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Text - Private to Rick Sanchez

[It's been almost a week since Ford vanished from Wonderland (again) but this time Stan hasn't taken to the network at large about it. All of Ford's stuff is here, including his owl, so there hasn't been a need to announce it to everyone in the mansion. He's kept a strong face for the kids, but...there's a slight snag, and he's pretty sure he's the only one who knows about it. Ford might be dead at home, and if he's a dead man, who knows what's gonna happen when he comes back? If he comes back.

For the first few days, Stan tries not to worry about it. He'll know for sure in a week, right? But he hates that it's brought him to a standstill, and by Saturday he's itching to do something here. Unfortunately, there's not a lot he can do by himself, and they're all extra screwed if Ford either doesn't come back or can't help once he does.

Luckily, Stan knows a guy.]

[Text - Private to Rick Sanchez]
SO WHAT IF I TOLD YOU I MIGHT HAVE A TICKET OUTTA THIS DUMP?

[He figures a straight-forward attention-grabber's probably best here.]

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Yeah I'm not answering wi-with text, I hate the text function on this stupid thing. D-Doesn't even compensate for inebriation, I mean, what kind of next-gen text messenger doesn't t-t-take that into consideration? Goddamn.

Also you, uh, you have my attention.

[He's certainly not sold, though, considering his own portal gun doesn't work no matter what Rick has done to fix it.]

[Stan actually switches to audio too, once Rick does.]

Yeah, yeah, me too. Plus my fingers are too damn big for the buttons!

[TEXTING IS THE WORST, but moving on.]

I'm not about to blurt it out over the network like a chump though. I've got some sciencey crap to show you. Where are we meeting? The bar?

[No judgement or anything; Stan just wants to cut to the chase already and it's a pretty decent guess.]

AKA my second home? Be there in ten.

Ha! See ya there.

[That was easy enough. So Stan grabs what he needs to grab, stuffs it in his suit jacket. Ford's owl whines a little when Stan leaves the room but he has important things to do, and Lee is just going to have to get over it.

He books it for the bar so he can grab them a table to themselves. He also grabs a bottle of whiskey because hey - he knows his audience here.]

Surprised you haven't just moved in here already.

[This is how friends greet friends - like assholes.]

[Rick's already there, since he was only kind of joking about this being a second home. He also already has a bottle of tequila. He plunks down in a seat across from Stan, snorting at the dig.]

W-Who says I haven't? I've got a full bar in my room already, this is, is more like a summer home. Man, you know what we gotta do again sometime? Velocitinis. That shit was wild.

[Stan laughs.] Yeah, that was somethin' else. You sure know how to party.

[Tragically, partying is not what they're here for tonight. Casually he looks up past Rick to make sure no one's paying attention to them (and they're not), and then gets right to the point, dropping his voice a little.]

Alright, look. I'm givin' you the shortest possible version of a really long story. Back home, my brother built a trans-universal gateway - said the thing punched a hole in a weak spot in our dimension. Shit happened, we fought, and I... [Vague hand gestures.] ...kinda knocked him in it by accident. The thing broke and I spent thirty years fixing the damn thing, but once I got it goin' again he waltzed right out of it. Point is, we know it works back home, and back home ain't exactly known for dimension-hopping. We get it workin' here and we might be able to rip a hole in Wonderland and get the hell outta dodge.

Of course I do. Ain't no party like a Rick party.

[Stan starts talking and Rick listens, not very attentively since he's tuning out some of the details. At least Stan knows how to sum things up without going on a tangent or whatever. He has to kind of snort laughing when Stan mentions he pushed his brother into a goddamn portal.]

Wow, so he's not even a, a trans-dimensional traveler by choice. What a loser.

[He must have taken to it like a duck to water if he survived among strange dimensions for thirty years. Rick's been stuck wandering worlds before, but never for that long. He's mildly impressed with that much, though of course he won't admit it.]

[More impressive is that Stan rebuilt a portal like that, since while Stan is clever, he's not exactly...science smart. That takes a whole different skillset than thinking up ridiculous bullshit like the Sascrotch and getting people to believe it's real.]

S-So okay, first off, yeah, I can totally build something like that if, if you really want something that goddamn crude. I mean holy shit, punching a hole through a weak point in the universe? Y-You wanna talk about brute forcing something that you could easily do with, with just folding. I mean. Jesus. That's just shoddy craftsmanship.

Point is you've got, you've got two problems right off the bat. Wonderland doesn't have any weak points. I mean, the entire, the whole dimension i-i-is one big weak point. That's why people just sh-OOOOUUUUHHH-w up here. It's like a water slide. Like, usually motherfuckers are just traveling down it having a great fucking time in the pee-filled summer, but sometimes some asshole just, you know, climbs right the fuck back up that shit because fuck the rules, I dunno.

Also, uh, Wonderland can't be brute-forced? Like I've tried. I mean I've tried folding too, just generating a normal portal, like I've spent goddamn months trying to fix my useless piece of shit portal gun and nothing's worked. So if we did make some kind of...ugh.

[He ROOOLLLLLS his eyes.]

Big. Stupid. Stationary portal, we'd need to, uh. Find a way that doesn't brute-force it and doesn't fold it either. And one that doesn't totally shatter Wonderland completely which is, is also a thing that could happen when you're trying to punch through the fabric of spacetime, oh my god, okay, I can't just let that go, what the actual fuck, do you guys think spacetime is just, is just nice quality cotton you get from Joanns that you can just slice the fuck apart and everything will be totally fine? H-Holy f-uHHHHHH-ck. Spacetime is like rayon, like, if you fuck it up it is fuuuucked up.

[Stan can't argue that at all. He's definitely not science-smart (and he figures if he was he could have fixed that damn portal a few decades sooner) but he does follow along with what Rick's saying easily enough. He groans at the end though.]

Don't you "you guys" me. He's the one who holed himself up in Oregon with all his mysterious science shit. I didn't even know about it until he dragged me up there to tell me what a horrible mistake he'd made and told me to take his research and get out. All I did was put the thing back together to save his ass, 'cause what the hell else was I supposed to do?

[Not risk the entire rayon-y fabric of spacetime for one person, probably. But whatever. He already did it once, so he's kind of flippant about it now.]

Apparently it created some sorta rift that's causin' the end of the world or something. I dunno; it's ahead of my time at home, but if works here then who cares? We shove everyone through the portal and let this sinkhole world destroy itself! Then we never get stuck here again, as long as we don't screw up the exit.

[The way Stan imagines it is sort of like the inter-dimensional equivalent of walking out of a building and putting on sunglasses as it explodes behind you. It's a terrible plan. It's an insane plan, but it's not like they've got other options here. He reaches inside his suit jacket and pulls out a folded-up paper, and slides it across the table.]

Problem is, Ford disappeared again, and with the whole "apocalypse" thing goin' on at home I dunno if he's comin' back here in one piece or not. Without him I've only got a third of a blueprint to work with here. Sure, I fixed it the first time, but I didn't have to build the goddamn thing from scratch.

Fuck, your brother, man, he's a nerd but he's, he's one of the dangerous nerds who is too smart and ends up fucking up the whole world because of his smarts. Like Mark Zuckerberg.

[He's already thinking about all this, though. Thinking through equations and numbers and calculations. He's already built his own portal gun and had to repair it dozens of times already, but the trick is going to be making it actually work. For that you need a totally different understanding of reality on a quantum level.]

[Plus, yanno, magic.]

Thing about rifts is, they, they're like a big old--like a really shitty fucked up door. Doors open both ways or whatever. We make a rift in Wonderland, there's like, a 70% chance that we're also creating rifts in every single one of our realities. And I mean, C-137 isn't exactly the Ritz, but it's a really convenient dimension for me right now and I need it to kinda, kinda k-keep existing.

[He takes the paper and looks it over and...]

[Stares at it.]

The fuck is this nonsense.

[Stan, for various reasons, has no idea who Mark Zuckerberg is, but he gets the point. It's a point he's made himself many times since Ford came back to Wonderland, most notably that time the entire family got killed in that stupid old timey tavern event.]

You got that right, but that dangerous know-it-all-ness might actually get us the fuck outta here this time. I've worked with shittier odds than that before. And considerin' your world sounds like a knockoff explosive, those are prolly better chances for it in general.

[C-137, C-4, same difference. Either way, Stan's not that worried. They'll figure out how to fix it if they screw it up, after they deal with the more immediate problem of trying to get out of this dump.]

That nonsense is the only third of the blueprint we've got. He wrote these journals and each of 'em has one piece of it, because y'know. He's gotta be cryptic instead of just keepin' all the instructions in one place. [Eyeroll.] When you put all three together it makes a triangle. That part's easy enough but each page had all these codes and blueprints and circuitry maps so it's been a real pain in the ass just working with one.

[Especially without Ford around to fill in the blanks himself - and even then, he probably hasn't looked at it for thirty years.]

Me and Morty already Cronenberged one whole world, and y-you only get like three or four chances for a replacement, so I'd, yanno, I'd like to keep my universe at least mostly intact.

[Hopefully it's just a matter of ironing out design flaws. And anyway, if you're successfully folding space it's supposed to unfold nicely on its own. The problem is that Wonderland is rigid. Maybe unfoldable.]

[He stares at the blueprint, looking progressively more irritated and begrudgingly fascinated.]

Okay but even, even as just a third this is. This is fucking nonsense. Like, obviously these are sections of circuitry maps, and this, this is just some bullshit code right here, and these are, I guess they're meant to indicate dimensional coordinates? But like, okay. Half of this is. It's like. It's l-l-like if Tesla had an acid dream and contacted the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft via his dreams and Cthulhu himself was like "yeah y-you want a triangle right there" like what the actual fuck. I mean, your, your universe is supposed to be kinda normal, right? Just like, bullshit supernatural sasquatch Pacific Northwest type shit. But this is like.

[He props his chin in his hand and rubs at his forhead with his other hand, sort of growling into his palm.]

I mean, was he, w-was he actually talking with aliens, because some of these parts are, they're just beyond basic everyday human Earth scientific understanding.

[Ford's told Stan some of it, and he has his suspicions about other parts of it. he couldn't tell you what influence Tesla or Lovecraft had on the thing, but he does know a thing or two about it. Of course he does! He worked with one of the blueprints for thirty years, after all.

But Stan keeps his poker face up and his brother's secrets tucked away. He crosses his arms and shrugs.]

Hell if I know. You think that jerk actually tells me anything?

[It's not a total lie, which is usually the most effective lie. Stan's a layman when it comes to all of this science stuff (and even that's being generous) and anyone who's ever been around him or Ford knows they fight like cats and dogs these days. It's not a stretch to make someone assume Ford's been keeping him in the dark, and that he has no idea how Ford made these plans.]

All I know is what I've got, and it ain't much. I didn't even know other dimensions were a real thing before he dragged me into this crap, so uh. Yeah, I guess ours is normal comparatively, but I dunno what else to tell you.

Paranoid fucker.

[Rick is going to have to ask Ford about this when he gets back, because this has him genuinely curious.]

Anyway, yeah, I guess I can...can like, extrapolate from this a-and build onto it, make something at least f-UUHHHGRRNNN-nctional. I've seen circuitry kinda similar to what's going on here in, uh, in other dimensions. Can probably figure out what he w-was going for at least.

You're tellin' me.

[And Stan's going to have to tell Ford he kind of recruited Rick while he was gone. Whoops. He'll figure out how to cross that bridge when he gets to it. Besides, it'll be worth it if Ford comes back either unable or unwilling to continue working on the portal.

He grins when Rick agrees though. He had a feeling this science crap might grab his attention.]

Great! It'd take me light years to figure it out myself, and we don't have that kinda time. [A beat.] Well, technically we do but I don't wanna stay in this dump a minute longer than I have to, and I'm guessin' you don't either.

Yeah, light years is a unit of distance, not time, but uh, yeah.

[Some science things are just a matter of principle.]

When you wanna get this shit started?

[Stan rolls his eyes at that. Whatever, close enough. That's why he's not the one doin' the science shit.]

As soon as possible, but we oughta give it a few days at least. It'll give you a chance to look that thing over, and we'll figure out what happens when Ford gets back.

[You know, in case he comes back absolutely not wanting to do this portal anymore. It'd suck to get going only to have to move everything once Ford says no so they can hide it from him. Moving that giant portal sounds like a huge pain in the ass.]

Edited 2016-04-02 00:21 (UTC)

Sure, sounds like a plan. So long as he's not a huge d-dick about it. Well, whatever. I'll figure out how to, how to talk shop with him. And, uh, in the meantime we can get the barebones shit going.

Eh. Even if he is, it's not somethin' we can't handle. Sounds good to me!

Yeah, fuck 'im. Anyway.

[Insert drunken rambling about engineering shit here, along with some choice insults for Ford's design sensibilities.]

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