bigapplesauce | Don't Panic [open]

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Don't Panic [open]

Iman practically drags her new friend to the East Village, wandering with intense focus until she finally comes across the bar Jodie had recommended to her, which looks just like it sounds, a proper English pub. It's been ages since she went to an English pub. She's looking forward to it. A little hysterically, actually. No wait. Scratch that. She does not get hysterical. She's a scientist.

"Here we are!" she says brightly, drawing Daniel in. Oh wow would you get a load of this place. The lady behind the bar is in costume. Adorable.

"Wow you can kinda tell it's for people from an alternate universe, can't you?" She snorts and takes stock of the people, looking for someone to talk to, or someone whose brain she (they) can pick. It's pretty early for anyone to be drinking, so there's not too many people there, except one guy who is drunk, slumped over the bar. Looking exactly like she feels, or rather how she wants to feel in an hour's time.

"That one," she says decisively, not bothering to check if Daniel's with her on the idea of approaching a drunk stranger and asking him questions about their mutual cosmic misfortune. He's probably not. She doesn't actually care.

She goes straight to the bar, assuming Daniel will follow, sits herself on the stool next to the guy, and nods to the tender. "I'll have what he's having."

[[ooc: Daniel's just gonna be here for the initial thread, but Iman will be here all day! Say hi if you wanna.]]

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Ho-lee shit.

"Daniel, I swear to god, if you don't shut up, I'm gonna punch you out," says Iman, and boy, she means it. She loves this guy. He clearly needs to be looked after. Like a baby. He will just crawl right off the raised surface without any hesitation if someone doesn't stop him. "I can do it, too. And know that if I do, it'll be for your own good."

She wants to grab him by the shirt and shake him and shout you're offering yourself up on a fucking platter, you idiot, but he should be able to FIGURE THAT OUT ON HIS OWN, and she's starting to get the sense Nick doesn't need any added incentive. Who knew drinking could be such a strenuous activity in this universe?

Lucifer looks over at the doctor like he's a very unusual specimen of moth that's wandering dangerously close to a bug zapper. He tilts his head, a curious and almost bird-like gesture.

"I might just be misunderstanding you, but it really sounds like you're asking me to do something terrible to your organs. Usually when I take requests, that's... not what I get."

People who ask Satan to go to town on their insides are usually a very special brand of crazy cultist that he doesn't get involved with.

"Do you think you might want to reconsider your lack of self-preservation?"

Daniel seems to finally have caught onto how what he's doing is, in fact, an awful idea of tremendous proportions. To his credit, he at least has the sense to shift backwards.

"I didn't say that," he says slowly. Thin ice, Daniel, thin ice. "And if it's all the same to you, I'd really rather you didn't. I'd just like to know more about what, er, who you are. That's all."

Self-preservation might not exactly be among Daniel's skill set but he's had quite enough of dying in recent years to last him a while.

Iman pulls back slowly, still eyeing Daniel through narrowed eyes. Thin ice indeed. Watch it, buster.

She goes back to sipping her drink, glancing between the two men like someone might watch a particularly deadly sporting event.

"Is that all? You've the strangest way of asking."

Because it had really sounded like Daniel had basically said 'come at me bro' to the Devil.

Backpedal, backpedal, backpedal.

"Yep. That's it." He keeps his tone light. Nonchalant. No big deal. He's in no great rush to get his insides refrigerated. He's already had the oh-so-pleasant experience of getting them fried with high-energy radiation and he has no desire to round out the experience.

"Well," says Iman, slamming her palms down on the counter. "This has been a super great meet cute, well done everyone." She picks up her glass and clinks it against Nick's bottle. "Kanpai." She knocks it back, oh dear god that was a lot of whiskey in one go, slow down girl.

"So Nick, what do you do when you're not performing parlor tricks," she says. "Daniel and I are scientists."

Lucifer watches in mild bemusement as she clacks her glass against his bottle and drains it; for someone who doesn't have a supernaturally enhanced liver, she's sure going after that liquor like a champ.

"I was in the middle of a very prolonged family dispute before I got here," he says, and that is not a lie but is probably the top candidate for the understatement of the year award. "Resolving it took up most of my time."

Because resolving it involved an Apocalypse.

"What was your area of study?"

It's an indulgent question; human science is... quaint.

"Archaeologist, actually," Daniel mutters as Iman brings up the scientist thing, but he falls quiet after that. Yeah, he pretty much got way too close to screwing himself over just then. Ordinarily he wouldn't mind - Daniel practically has made a living out of throwing himself in front of the bullet, proverbial and otherwise, but this time there's no cause for it. There's no immediate danger, no call for needless self-sacrifice, and no need to go hurtling headfirst into a situation he doesn't really understand. Not that that's ever stopped him before, but Daniel likes to think he's learning. Oh-so-slowly, but still. Learning.

"Sort of science," says Iman with a shrug. Archaeology is legit. Plus, dude's been in space. "I'm a... uh, dimensional physicist. I don't know if that's a thing here." She squints thoughtfully into the middle distance, then shrugs and sips at her new drink (this bartender is earning the shit out of that tip). "I was working on a way to move between dimensions," she says, "I came here successfully, and then, whoops! Rift thing. Doesn't let you go back. How fucking terrible is that." She sighs heavily, drooping a little. "Guyyyys, I'm so piiiissed."

She means it in the American sense of the word. But the British sense also applies here.

Archaeology may have been 'legit', but it is also incredibly dull. What does Lucifer care about past human cultures? Short answer: he doesn't. At all.

But someone who studies interdimensional travel, while he is stuck in another dimension that he certainly doesn't want to be in? That's interesting. That's useful. Much more useful than knowing about the burial habits of some long-dead mud-monkeys.

"You successfully and intentionally moved between universes?" And now Satan is interested in you, Iman. congratulations. "How did you manage that?"

Daniel raises his eyebrows. For once, he agrees with Nick - he's actually really interested in dimensional travel. The few times he's managed it have been deeply traumatic, nigh irreversible, utterly horrifying, or all of the above. And if there's any chance he could find a way home...

Ever the optimist.

"Mm. I did," Iman says, coming off another sip. "Once. Coming here. It's complicated. Technical. There's things we can do in my universe that I don't think you can do here. I mean I've only been here some a few hours, but everyone flipping out about me crossing over is sort of an indicator."

She shrugs, thinks about showing them her hand, and decides no fuckin way. Not if Daniel's right about whatever Nick is. "It's sort of a mental interface. That sounds like bullshit magic but there's technology in place to create the pathway, the electric signals from your brain to the electromagnetic force in the, you know, the universe, and if you really, really know what you're doing, you can kinda... bend the rules. A little bit." She giggles drunkenly. "So you could say the rules of physics don't apply to ME, either. Sort of. Except they do. I just... know how to rewrite the rules. Briefly. And locally."

She takes another big drink, then slumps over and smiles up at Nick. "If that, you know, clears that up for you."

"The manipulation of physical constants in localized areas to stabilize traversable wormholes between parallel universes caused by curving spacetime during quantum tunneling."

For a human to have gotten so far in their understanding of the physical universe is surprising, to say the least. Where he came from, they hadn't even managed a complete unified theory yet, nevertheless the ability to traverse between universes at will. They hadn't even managed the technology to get out of their own galaxy.

"I'm familiar with the concept."

Daniel sits up a little straighter. Traversable wormholes. That sounds like stable wormholes. As in gates. This thing can't know about those. It can't. Can it? Shit. Shit.

"Are you, now?" Daniel says sharply, suddenly desperate to know how much this thing knows about stable wormholes. If it could travel to any universe - his universe -

Shit.

"Uhhh, yeah." Iman lifts her head, squinting at Nick with mild suspicion. "Pretty much exactly, yeah."

She snaps her fingers and points toward Daniel without looking at him. "Yeah, I'm with him on that question," she says. "How are you familiar? And how familiar?"

Good job, Iman, NOW your guard is up. It took a while but you got there.

"I witnessed the formation of the universe," he says. "I have seen the interiors of black holes and stood in the shock waves of supernovae. I know how to move within, throughout, and between."

He pours himself another few fingers of whiskey and downs it, like this is a totally normal conversation to be having in a bar.

"So don't get short with me. Your advanced quantum physics is my common knowledge."

Daniel has to suppress a shiver. Yep, Ascended instincts were correct. This thing is old. Possibly Ancient-old.

"But instead of oh, say, going out and traversing said wormholes," Daniel hears himself saying before he can decide whether or not talking is a good idea (it isn't), "you're here. In a bar." Trying to get drunk, Daniel supposes, though Nick seems incredibly sober. He's guessing the alcohol-to-bodily fluid ratio works differently for...whatever it is he is.

"Oh, get you. Formation of the fucking universe. ~Ooooh~." Iman wiggles her fingers, rolls her eyes aggressively and sits back up straight-ish. "So, Mr. Common Knowledge, I suppose that means it must be a cakewalk for you to get back home, huh?" Yeah, she's with Daniel on this one, too.

"I'm stuck here for the same reasons as the rest of you."

He's not even going to dignify Iman's childish gestures and eye-rolling with a response.

"Except that I wasn't blindly hopping around to other universes; I was pulled into this one. And if I wasn't at a fraction of my true glory, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you."

He would have been out of there faster than you could say 'Sam Winchester'. Instead, all the inhabitants of Manhattan are stuck with a disgruntled, slightly intoxicated Satan who's recently received some very upsetting news about his family. It is not an ideal situation for anyone involved.

It strikes Daniel immediately after he says it ~~(took him long enough)~~, and his bad habit of thinking aloud springs painfully back into play.

"You're not as powerful here, are you?" he says, slowly, and with the creeping understanding of why Nick keeps issuing casual threats without actually following them up. "Parlor tricks, that's what you've been reduced to. You can't access the full range of your abilities. And thanks to the Rift, you can't do anything about that. You're stuck here like the rest of us."

It only occurs to him after he says it, of course, that he might want to do a lot less deducing out loud and a lot more shutting up.

"Ahaaa." Iman lifts an eyebrow. "So that's it. Sucks for you then. Lucky for the human race, I guess." She drinks down more whiskey, a little more gently this time. "Soooo, let me guess. Like everyone else in this city you want me to figure out how to send you home. Hmmm?"

She snorts and pushes his bottle at him. "Come on, drink more. You clearly need it."

"Not just parlor tricks. All the Rift has managed to do is keep me from leaving as I please and from turning the greater metropolitan area into a barren crater simply on principle."

He still has some power up his sleeve; or did, anyway, before the Rift decided, apparently, to punish him. But thank you, no one needs to know about that, especially not until he figures out if it's reversible or not.

"And if I can't leave here on my own power, I have little faith that you'll find a way before me. I just find it interesting that, in some universe, at least, your kind has managed to drag itself out of the dirt a little."

"Oh, we haven't just dragged ourselves out of the dirt." Daniel's enthusiasm and velocity of speech have both increased as he grows more confident in the idea that his insides will not be immediately turned to cryogenic mush. "We've come quite a ways. Us, humanity, we're out there now, exploring that wide-open cosmos that you," he says pointedly, because what little instinct for self-preservation he's held has apparently evaporated, "can't come near. We've advanced between galaxies, dimensions. And you're stuck in a bar in Manhattan."

Iman rolls her eyes again, even more aggressively, at Daniel's bright-eyed fuckin idealism party, oh man what a precious little putz he is.

"So you've gone from basically asking him to mess you up to straight taunting?" she says. "Do you have a setting for like, 'making good decisions', or are you always like this?"

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blah blah quantum blah blah

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