Let's Go [Closed]

[whaaaaat]

Dr. Jillian Holtzmann lands flat on her back, a stunned smile on her face. Whoops. She was not anticipating such a dramatic reaction. An exhilarated giggle escapes her, part of her brain already buzzing with the adjustments she'll need to make to prevent another blow-up like that. But she doesn't get very far before she registers, through her soot-smeared goggles, that there's open sky above her. Oh, shit. Was she actually blown outside? Good thing no one else was in the lab, but god, the collateral damage -- her toys...

She heaves herself up into a sit, one arm cradling the prototype for a new-and-improved PKE meter. There's an unseasonable nip in the air, sending a pulse of surprise surging through her. Is this... did she actually make it to Michigan? Her free hand shoves her goggles up onto her forehead, clearing her vision, and she sighs at the familiar skyline. Still New York. Michigan would have been a hell of a story to tell the rest of the team, though.

Then again, this is shaping up to be a pretty decent story in its own right. She's nowhere near headquarters. Whatever just happened, it sent her all the way to Bryant Park.

... It is really cold out. Granted, dicking around with the PKE meter was pretty distracting, and she didn't check the weather this morning, but this seems extreme for September. But hey, it's a short walk to Grand Central. She left her phone and wallet on her work bench, but Abby will take a collect call. It'll be hilarious. Collect calls are still a thing you can do, right?

Hell, worst case scenario, she can just walk. She's farther from HQ than a standard (survivable) explosion could send her, but she's not that far.

She looks down at the prototype. It's in a sad state, all blackened on one side, but most of the damage appears to be cosmetic. Once she's back in her lab (presuming it's not a smoldering ruin, but she's not seeing smoke or hearing sirens from that general direction, so that's promising), she'll have it patched up and polished in no time.

Holtzmann gets to her feet, not even bothering to brush at the soot coating most of her front (with the exception of a prototype-shaped clean spot where the PKE meter took the brunt of it). She probably looks like some kind of dystopian chimney sweep. Oh, well. She notes a passer-by's startled glance, and gives them a wry grin and a salute. "I'm okay!" she yells for good measure. "I'm a professional!" A few other strangers look her way, so she adds, "Don't try this at home, kids."

Well, there's the PR for today wrangled like a boss. Holtzmann flips the PKE prototype up to rest on her shoulder, then swaggers off towards Grand Central Station.

Comments

[etherthief]

It is not difficult to spot new rifties under normal circumstances. Unseasonable (sometimes completely insensible) clothes, wide-eyed fear or confusion or, occasionally, excitement, that sort of uncertain meandering. The dirty jumpsuited blond carrying some unrecognizable tech is another story entirely. Iman zeroes in on her like a dog smelling food. Jumpsuit! Goggles! Haircut! A queer scientist, possibly a mad queer scientist, is like a long-overdue gift she'd forgotten she'd even ordered arriving suddenly at her door in a battered box. She practically trips over herself in her haste to catch up with the wayward woman.

"Hi! Hey!" She waves as she finally comes up to the newbie, her cheeks flushed from the cold, her grin a little bit too cheerful. She doesn't have a plan for this, and it's been a while since her last disastrous effort to welcome someone into the fold (poor Kirk, she still hasn't checked in on him, she's such a mess), so when it becomes clear to her she doesn't have a prepared follow-up statement, she just wings it: "Hi, I'm Iman, dimensional physicist, empirical alchemist, I recognized your-" She accompanies this with an extremely vague gesture encompassing the whole of the woman before blundering on, "-science. Are you aware you just jumped into a different plane of existence?"

This is so exciting. She should probably stop grinning now.

[whaaaaat]

Oh, hello. This wouldn't be the first time she was recognized out on the street post-apocalyptic thwarting (messiness aside, the jumpsuit is kind of a giveaway) but the novelty hasn't worn off, yet, and Holtzmann grins right back. A fellow scientist! A cute fellow scientist. She is entirely on board with this, up until the point where Iman announces that she's swapped dimensional planes.

"... I did?" she asks, sounding far more fascinated than skeptical. Hey, different planes of existence aren't news - it's just that she would have expected a lab blowup to send her somewhere significantly more phantasmal, as opposed to just 'New York but on the nippy side.' Which plane of existence is this?

Good thing she's just met a dimensional physicist. Holtzmann shifts the prototype over so she can shake Iman's hand. "Holtzmann. Nuclear engineer, proton wrangler, ghostbuster extraordinaire." Iman's giddy expression takes on a potentially new connotation, and Holtzmann's eyebrows shoot up. "How did I get here? Was it you?" If so: holy shit.

[etherthief]

"Me? Oh gosh, no." Iman snorts and waves her hand as if flattered at the suggestion. She's still so giddy over proton wrangler she's having trouble finding her conversational feet. "I only do that to me. I mean that's how I got here. It was a whole thing. Most people get pulled in by the rift." She eyes Holtzmann like she might study a specimen, waiting for a reaction. Did she know about the rift - perhaps not what it was, but that some phenomenon existed? Was she messing with it from the other side? When is an appropriate time to ask if she did some reckless maneuver that wound her up here? Iman would put money on that, and it would make Holtzmann a scientist after her heart.

"Can I buy you a drink?" she says brightly.

[whaaaaat]

Holtzmann takes in Iman's explanation, an assessing gaze over a faint, dreamy smile. A rift, huh? The rift, in fact, which suggests it's a well-known phenomenon amongst the scientific establishment, if not the general population. Holtzmann sucks on her teeth for a moment, wondering what the odds are that all their ghostbusting-related activities could have echoed beyond the specific dimensional rift they were dealing with.

"Could've sworn we plugged that thing up," she muses. Enough time has passed for the denizens of New York to calm down (though she wouldn't say the proverbial cat was back in the bag), but that's with the dubious advantage of having some idea of what's going on. If they accidentally tore a hole in someone else's spacetime, you'd think a graceful adjustment would take a bit longer.

It does occur to her that this could be some kind of offbeat prank, but if so, she's pretty curious to see where Iman's going with it. Points for originality. Bonus points for involving both the great indoors and (presumably) booze. Whatever dimension she's in, it's fucking freezing.

She pauses long enough to at least give the vague impressions of things like 'caution' or 'discernment' (impressions that will be shattered inside two minutes if science starts happening, but eh). "Have I landed in a booze-free dimension?" she asks, for clarity's sake. "Because if not: yes. If so: slightly less enthusiastic yes." But only slightly.

[etherthief]

"Heck no," says Iman brightly. "Come on. We'll figure out where to park you and your equipment for your stay." A little too friendly and fun for how shitty Holtzmann's new situation is, but she's having trouble mitigating her inappropriate glee. She leads Holtzmann down another street, heading toward a bar that won't balk at the fancy science shit. Iman's in there often enough.

"So, plugged it up, you say," she says with an incisive stare. "I can almost guarantee that whatever rift you're talking about isn't our rift." One brief guess at how attempting to plug that asshole up and she's already suffering a brief, unwelcome surge of bad memory, ghosting pain in her arm, fear of imminent lonely death. Hahhhh okay enough of that. She shakes it off rather visibly and says, "They might have been connected though. Tell me about it."

[whaaaaat]

Holtzmann flaps a hand: oh, you know, the usual. "Some guy felt the need to shatter the barrier between our universe and the spectral plane, flooding New York with ghosts and bringing about a gooey apocalypse." It's always a shame when the smart ones go that way. "We had to sacrifice the car to close it back up again. Hell of an implosion, but it worked."

She gives Iman a wink. "People are already forgetting it happened." She'll take that as a sign of a job well done, as long as it doesn't stop the calls from rolling in. They've enjoyed a nice spike in business over the last few weeks, and she likes tangling with ghosts. Just not, y'know, all of them at once.

[etherthief]

"Wow, damn," says Iman mildly. "Don't you just hate it when guys go around shattering barriers to the spectral plane? I mean, really." Like she's some beacon of responsible science, but this sounds more of a chaotic evil gig. At least she does things for chaotic good.

"The problem with our rift is not so much opening or closing," she says. "It's... cooperation, I guess. Not really its forte. It's kind of a vindictive bastard. Here, let's get a drink in you and I can give you the rundown on what to expect. Some of it's fun. Some of it's not." She directs Holtzmann to the easily missed bar entrance, where she throws a nod at the bartender. He gives Holtzmann and her equipment a brief, dubious glance, then rolls his eyes at Iman and just shrugs.

"That's Vinny," she says. "We're best buds. Here, you want a booth? More space."

[whaaaaat]

See, here's someone who gets it. "Such a drag!" Holtzmann agrees, as if they're talking about something way less interesting than science, like an inevitably shitty performance from a sports team they both have the misfortune of liking. If she hasn't actually traveled to an alternate plane of existence, she's introducing Iman to the whole team.

She's never been to this bar before, so its existence doesn't tip the scales either way. Maybe it's always been here, and she's just never been down this block before. Maybe in her universe, it's a dry cleaner's. She'd be taking notes if she wasn't tragically without her camcorder. Or even a notepad, for that matter. Despite her awareness that multiple planes of reality exist, she has failed to prepare for the possibility that she might get blasted into one apropos of nothing a small-scale explosion. It's... actually kind of embarrassing.

She gives Vinny a nod, then slides into the booth, sets down the tarnished PKE meter, and gives it a tender little pat. Don't worry, mama's gonna fix you up. But first, mama's gonna get a handle on things, and also drink.

"So when you say opening and closing isn't the problem," she starts, unable to even wait until they've ordered, "are you suggesting it's always open? Is it invisible?"

[etherthief]

"Yes and yes," says Iman, folding her hands neatly on the table. "It's more than a rift, honestly, if I had to try and describe it in Euclidean terms, well... I think of it more like a dome. It has barriers that keep us within the bounds of Manhattan. It runs the full perimeter of the island and cuts off on the bridges and the waterfronts. I know at least one person who's tried to fly out and that didn't work either. You can get hurt pretty bad if you mess around with the borders."

She grimaces faintly at that shitshow of a memory and quickly brushes it aside. "If you wanna get real anti-technical we could get away with describing it as a demi-god, or the guardian of this pocket dimension, which it treats like its own personal sandbox. We're the toys. I've gotten to the point where I think of the Rift as much more of a living entity than as a phenomenon. We're... I guess you could say we've got some history, it and I."

One of the servers chooses this moment to drop by the table, and Iman swings toward her with a sudden bright smile. "Sup Sharmine!" she says. "I'll have a campari and orange juice, seeing as it's still technically brunch, and for my lovely companion...?"