[Plot] That Boy Ain't Quite Right. No, More Than Usual

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, if you're looking for someone to try to shove between dimensions, I think you already know my answer."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's still polite to ask." she says and steps aside to allow Will to climb onto the workbench.

[Will Stanton]

"Sometimes, you can get better reactions from an unsuspecting subject. Better to ask forgiveness, right?"

Will positioned himself carefully on the table, setting the bucket next to him. You know. For safe keeping.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's truly a mystery how you could have possibly ended up being plunged into a black hole." she says as she adjusts some settings and positions the three lasers to accommodate Will's size compared to the small metal cube.

Then she flips a switch and the lasers whir to life. Th don't exactly hurt as they proceed to zap Will in some very specific frequency, but there's a sensation vaguely similar to when he loses control of his shifting due to sonic waves. Except instead of his clay softening physically it's like a feeling of floaty "looseness" spreading out from where the lasers are hitting. And once the feeling encompasses all of him everything suddenly blurs. The workbench, the tools and components nearby but especially Ashlie. Everything looks like it has a cloud of afterimages around it, growing fainter the further from the central body they are. Within this frozen split-second he can occasionally see the densest part spread out and an almost separate instance of Ashlie peels off the main body but the moment it separates too much it simply disappears from Will's perception, leaving only the main Ashlie-cloud behind.

And then everything snaps back into focus, his butt and bucket sinking an inch or so into the workbench with a kind of buzzing numbness.

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, I got blasted into a black hole being very brave and defending the ciiiiiiiiiiiii..."

From Will's point of view, everything twisted and distorted as the dimensions shifted around him. His senses going crazy -- afterimages, and aftersounds and aftersmells echoing and canceling over one another. The very air itself felt thick, charged -- like static before a storm, as Will grappled with understanding and processing the sheer amount of stuff that was going on.

His voice, still trying to complete his sentence, overlapped and delayed upon itself, as the water in the bucket boiled and frothed as it was shunted between the gaps of dimensions. His body shook -- quivering, spasming, almost seizing, if Ashlie didn't know better. This was not a process people should be going through!

And then it was over, and Will was stuck inside the bench as the dimensional possibilities resynched themselves into one.

"...ttty. Woah. That was....you don't want to do that without proper protection," he gasped after a moment.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I would imagine." she says, sweeping a handheld scanner across Will and the point where he's not intersecting with the table. "Did you see anything?"

[Will Stanton]

"It's foggy to remember, as if it happened quite some time ago...

A blur of afterimages. Things overlayed over each other, poorly..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Overlayed blurs of afterimages? Could be side effects from how photons interact with your out-of-phase eyes but... regular physiology would struggle with functioning in this state to begin with and I suspect that your senses are more true to reality here. Hmm... This doesn't line up with being shunted into a 'nearby' universe, that should show as separate but distinct images. It almost sounds more like potential. Alternate realities that aren't... separate... enough..." she slows down and trails off as a realization dawns on her. She swipes the nearest holographic screen clear and starts writing out equations and shorthand.

"If the 'distance' to another universe isn't large enough to be pushed into overlapping frequencies to produce a rift, then that would imply there's a minimum threshold for accessing them but since accessing minor alternates is increasingly less likely this leads to a mathematical cutoff and because it all derives from the same quantum principles that means it functions the same in reverse." she rattles off as the equations spread out and then begin to condense as she resolves them. "Which means that without sufficient divergence those realities cannot fully form to begin with and remain uncollapsed superpositions on a macroscopic scale!" she finishes with a firm tap at the finished equation.

"Everything exists like an electron cloud but because everything is constantly interacting with one another it acts like matter in specific spots! Alternate realities are possibilities that exceeded the boundaries of being sufficiently similar to 'quantum tunnel' into a new universe. Or timeline. Or.... whatever you want to call it."

[Will Stanton]

"Yes, I've always thought as much," Will agreed. "Reality isn't nearly as real as we'd like to claim."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I need to do more testing before I try to put it into such philosophical terms." she chuckles distractedly. "I wonder if this might explain the Mandela Effect... Though some of those are certainly more than minor divergences. Hmm."

[Will Stanton]

"That's a bit beyond my paygrade, I'm afraid. I've only been to the usual handful of alternate realities, so I can't give you nearly a large enough sample size to determine anything."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Not if your friends' theory is correct."

[Will Stanton]

"Alright, correction. I've only been to the usual handful of alternate realities. Other mes may be different."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"A fair point, but it may be irrelevant whether you personally visited them. You may well still be entangled with them on some level. Any other person, aside from the fact that they would never survive what you went through, would lose any potential connection to their other selves even just by slowly replacing their constituent atoms through metabolizing food. But your body follows it's own logic. For instance, you retain the signature of your home dimension even after decades of living here."

[Will Stanton]

"Millenia, technically," Will pointed out. "I'm much older than you are."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Most people are." she smirks ever so slightly. "Still, it's possible you retain some level of quantum harmonics due to your unique physiology."

[Will Stanton]

"You don't supp...

No, that's stupid, even for me, forget I said anything," Will said, pausing after thinking for a moment.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Don't suppose what? I've learned to stop dismissing things that appear stupid at first glance."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, quantum harmonics, right? Sine waves, at fundamental frequencies of one another.

I'm a trained singer and musician. Harmonic tuning is a thing I've practiced countless times. Just intonation and pure intervals, vibrating in the same multiples of frequencies as everything else. Maybe it's not just physiology."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I really wish I could dismiss the idea of you singing yourself to another dimension but I just witnessed a self-propagating musical function causing localized reality warping. Hell, if you believe String Theory all quantum objects are just the result of vibrations."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, I'm pretty sure the massive black hole had more to do with my dimensional trip than any sort of aria, but you never know. The world is a vast and mysterious place."