March Mingle Madness (aka SURPRISE it's another mingle)

[bryces_pup]

Who: Crew members and visitors of the SS Blue Fish
Broadcast: nope
Action: On the Blue Fish, naturally.
When: Throughout March!

[Another month, another mingle. Once again, any visitors on the ship should bear in mind that there are locks installed all over the ship, so someone on board's gotta let you in. Or you can just stand there. And stare. And hope someone takes pity on you.]

Comments

[dancingmd]

I know. Today is just... one of those days that's a little harder than others.

[bryces_pup]

I can only imagine. But I am here if you want to talk. About anything, whatever helps.

[dancingmd]

[She gives Riona a sad smile.] Thank you.

[Gesturing to a seat nearby:] Would you like to sit?

[bryces_pup]

I'd be happy to, if you're willing to have company.

[She takes the offered seat, relaxing against the back.

The... hologram catches her attention again. The concept of it is strange, but she steadfastly ignores it and focuses on the actual boy - man? - in it.]

How old is he?

[dancingmd]

Twenty-two. [She frowns.] It's strange to think that I'm another year older but he's the same and will stay the same until I return. Which... Who knows how long that will be?

[Allen and Ino have both spent almost a decade away from their worlds. And Jean-Luc - he lived an entire lifetime in twenty minutes. She hopes that's not the case for her but the possibility always looms in the back of her mind.]

[bryces_pup]

I still cannot fathom how that works: to stop time in one place but not in another.

[Even magic, what she knows of it, didn't seem capable of that. Then again, with the Chantry's suppression and containment of it, who knows?]

At the very least, he will not be worrying over you.

[dancingmd]

That is something.

[Though if anyone were to know she was missing, Wesley would be her best bet for getting home.]

And I would not want him to be brought here, no matter how much I want to see him.

[bryces_pup]

Because you would not want to see him trapped?

[dancingmd]

Exactly. And I worry that he would... stagnate here. It'd be too much, so soon after he's started truly finding himself.

[bryces_pup]

Stagnate how?

[dancingmd]

He's special. [She offers Riona half of a smile.] And I'm not just saying that because I'm his mother. Somehow, he's learned to tap into something...different within himself. I don't understand it all yet but he can manipulate time and space, travel into other dimensions. If Atroma took that away from him, right as he's beginning to learn what he is capable of...

[bryces_pup]

[Wow that sounds... kind of cool.

And also suspiciously familiar.]

...isn't that similar to what Atroma does with us? Bringing people from different worlds and points in time?

[dancingmd]

I suspect Atroma is someone who has similar abilities to Wesley, yes, but Wesley would never do something like this. The only person he’s ever pulled from one universe to another is me, and that’s because I was trapped in the wrong one.

[bryces_pup]

[Not even gonna ask how that happened. Just nope. This shit confuses her enough as it is.]

You think Atroma is only one person?

[dancingmd]

[Beverly's life is weird. Better just to roll with it.]

Could be. For a long time I thought they were an alien I know of from home who also likes to toy with people like this.

[bryces_pup]

You... know someone who's done this to other people?

[dancingmd]

Not exactly like Atroma has here, taking people from all different worlds and times and bringing them together for a supposed television show, but he did periodically show up to transport our entire crew into absurd situations, to see how we'd react. He claimed it was a test of some sort.

[bryces_pup]

He sounds just about as awful. Is that how your son wound up having to pull you from a different universe?

[dancingmd]

No, that time wasn't Q's fault. It was...complicated. I helped create an unstable universe with my own mind.

[She smiles ruefully, knowing how absurd that sounds.]

[bryces_pup]

...beg your pardon?

[She's going to regret asking, isn't she? Not because of anything to do with Beverly, but because, well, this parallel universe nonsense is complicated enough as it is. And she has a feeling her brain's about to hurt a lot more after this conversation.]

[dancingmd]

[She huffs out a little laugh. Oh boy. How to explain this, especially to someone with limited knowledge of warp drives?]

To be honest, I don't totally understand all of the details of it myself. Always was better at biology than I was physics. But... our ship, the Enterprise, has what's called a warp drive, which allows us to move faster than the speed of light - like the Blue Fish does, though the exact mechanics are different. Wesley was performing an experiment on the warp drive and ended up creating what's called a warp bubble. Basically a... distortion, a miniature parallel universe within ours. I fell into this warp bubble without realizing it, and populated it with my own mind so for a while I thought I was still in my universe, since it had all the same people and I was still on the Enterprise.

[That was... not helpful probably, and she knows it.]

[bryces_pup]

[Luckily, Riona knows a thing or two about parallel universes.]

I... see. [Kind of.] You created a version of your world in this bubble, like the different versions of Thedas that exist. The rest is beyond me, but I understand that. [As much as she is capable.] Is that what parallel universes are? Worlds that exist in these bubbles?

[dancingmd]

Not exactly. That universe was too dependent on my own to remain stable - the warp bubble could not be maintained indefinitely, so everything within that universe started collapsing. Conventional parallel universes exist independently of one another. Yet they are interconnected in that every possibility exists at once. In one universe, I choose to become a doctor, in another a dancer - in the grand scheme of things, there would be very little difference between those two universes, but my life and all the lives of those I’ve ever known would change. Wesley would probably not exist, but another child might. Someone might die because I wasn’t there and someone else might learn to dance because I was.

And that’s just on an individual scale. The differences start to become a lot more pronounced the bigger the changes are. For example, somewhere along the way, your world developed magic, while mine did not, and that changes… everything.

[bryces_pup]

[Riona doesn't consider herself stupid, but this is a bit much for her to swallow. She wants to understand, but there's still so much that she doesn't know that she's not even sure where to begin. Parts of what Beverly says makes sense. She grasps the... philosophical part of it, for a lack of better term. It's the mechanics that throw her.]

I don't quite get how these different universes exist alongside of each other. But then, there's much about universes I don't know.

My world has the Fade, which is where magic is drawn from. I... take it yours does not have such a thing?

[dancingmd]

[No, not stupid at all. It's a complicated thing to understand and physics isn't Beverly's strong suit. No doubt Wesley or Geordi would be able explain things much better to Riona, if they were here.

Beverly shakes her head.]

We do not. No magic whatsoever.