Scene #2297: The Fibonacci Chamber

Owner	Pose
Entrapta	So it seems that getting people out and about is part of their care and feeding. This was not something that came intuitively to Entrapta, but it's in all the literature so, she's compromising. "I have no idea if this will actually work," she insists, "But it's based on your theories and computations. I had a lot of free time." They're looking at what appears to be an outside inside. Or an inside, outside. They are technically still in the shed, but things are distinctly warped, in what looks like a tunnel of sorts. The walls, ceiling and ..I hesitate to call it 'floor' are all kind of bent around us, visibly. "I'd move it outside to use it properly, it's kind of a test area right now. This uses the systems of the shed to give us a slightly controlled area we can use, that doesn't interact with anywhere else."
Rashmi Terios	"...How?" Rashmi blurts, trying not to look at the warped-ness of the 'shooting tunnel,' instead looking wide-eyed at Entrapta. "I was always afraid to throw up a Barrier in here, I had no idea how a pocket dimension would react to being shifted away from its anchor dimension!" Taking a moment to stare at the fruits of Entrapta's -- genius? Madness? Mad genius? -- efforts, she resolves for at least the third time since meeting the girl, that Entrapta should probably never be taken to the Gates of Time except in the most dire emergencies. The worst possible thing that could happen would be that she attempts to fix them, and somehow succeeds. Pausing, she shakes her head. "Well whether or not it serves your purpose, Entrapta-chan, this is astounding."
Entrapta	Entrapta gives what might be a smile, either of pride or some other emotion. She nods, standing a bit taller. "I can explain if you want. It's not really another pocket," she explains without waiting to be told that she can explain. "The Shed itself has some flexibility, you've probably noticed it change sometimes." She pokes at the edge, where it's all bendy, and her finger bends visibly. She pulls it back. "Okay, that tickles.." "But it's just an extension of the existing field, I applied a thaumatological field to let it cascade toward a gravitic center. It's not a lot different from the storage device you lent me, except that this is a lot simpler and thus, actually safer to use." She looks at her finger. "I'm looking forward to finding out how it reacts to energy streams. Or non-energy ones."
Rashmi Terios	By the look on Rashmi's face, she's following most of the basic concepts that Entrapta is talking about... but clearly looks a bit woogy upon seeing Entrapta's finger bending in ways biology shouldn't be able to support. "...Huh... Okay," she says slowly. "Well... I don't have much in the way of streams, but, Barrets could be useful for a lot of low-level testing, at least. I even have a couple thermally-aspected variants... the cold ones seem to be able to emulate physical mass well enough, to boot." Once again, she casts her eyes over the funhouse-mirror visual of the walls of the tunnel, and cannot help but laugh for a moment, under her breath. Sometimes magic is so wonderful it's insane. "So how can I help, Entrapta-chan?"
Entrapta	"Well, I'd start by throwing a rock down it," Entrapta says. "But then, I generally don't test things by going full-scale." She looks at Rashmi with an odd look. "Do you?" She then grins, and raises an eyebrow. "I mean, it would be an incredible first test though! We could possibly get something down the other end to shoot at since I forgot that part entirely." She rubs her hands on her coveralls, looking around. "I just tested the walls, first time there. It looks as if anything hitting the edge should bend back in on itself, which makes this a pretty cool physics experiment in any case, but not necessarily something I could recreate away from the shed. Using its own rules to make this happen at all, after all." Wait, she used her own finger to test the walls? Wait, she wasn't sure what would happen? No, definitely don't let her at anything actually powerful.
Rashmi Terios	Oooof, that was the first test of the structure? Rashmi tries to hide her wince, but has to admit, as small-scale tests go it was... small-scale. Not something the more safety-minded Devicer would attempt, but... "Huh... well I tend to run simulations until Nicomachea's satisfied he's gotten the parameters I've outlined, then find an out of the way place to test under Barrier. ...And most of the time I'm field-testing them, with Chrono and I shooting at each other." As she talks, her eyes stray back to the walls... and willpower fails, she pokes a inger through as well. The sensation startles a squeak out of the redhead, and she hurriedly jerks her finger back, shaking her hand. "Well even if you can't move it out of the Shed, that might still come in handy," she says after a moment's thought. "So we'll want to put together targets with their own sensors, next... but for now, if it's just us Nicomachea can make targets."
Entrapta	Beaming with pride, Entrapta watches her student (and sempai!) do her first test as well. She's so glad that the girl is finally getting into real experimentation. It's a step forward toward real practical science. Leaning closer. "You just had to, didn't you?" She grins. She understands. But also moves on. "Seriously though, the first test should be something simple. Go ahead, have Nicomachea make a target. I'm gonna go find a rock to throw at it." Then she walks outside, humming something to herself. It sounds kind of like 'thunderstruck' by AC-DC but backwards and upside-down.
Rashmi Terios	"...Yeah," Rashmi admits, chuckling wryly in answer to Entrapta's grin. But when Entrapta asks her to make a target and leaves to find a rock, Rashmi bobs her head. With a faint bwip! a golden disc appears at the far end of the 'tunnel,' etched in the style of a Device's spell-seal, and surrounded with rings that lazily revolve on different axes, like a gyroscope but with no visible connecting points. "Target's set up!" she calls... wondering for a moment how sound could be warped through the tunnel... or if it even escapes the gravity-warp at all.
Entrapta	"Oh is it?" the voice comes from behind. "That was fast." Entrapta returns, a pebble in her hand, then smiles. "I love this moment. The seconds just before the experiment on something you've built. It's unique, and you never get it back again. Not until the next time, and it's never exactly the same." Then she holds out the stone. "Care to do the honours?" She has a slightly odd pronounciation of the word, as if she's not saying it the same. Then she places a pebble into Rashmi's hand. "I'll hit the recorder, so we can see what happens in detail. Five seconds!" Then she's gone, slapping buttons on her ..gizmos. She sure has a lot of them in the Shed now..
Rashmi Terios	Rashmi blinks down at the pebble, then back up at Entrapta, faintly surprised. After all that time talking the moment up, then handing the first experiment over to Rashmi... ...Sometimes gestures are so meaningful as to move the heart, and Rashmi's just starting to wipe the tear from the corner of her eye, when Entrapta gives the five-second warning. "R-right!" Rashmi is not in possession of the greatest hand-eye coordination. In fact, were it not for Nicomachea's assistance, her first throw would likely go well wide of the mark, and instead they'd see what happens when a pebble bends like a finger shouldn't. However since Nicomachea is present, and active,the pabble is flung with solid, if not amazing, accuracy; definitely on a proper trajectory to impact the target, well on the other end of the tunnel.
Entrapta	When the chunk of basalt leaves Rashmi's hand, it stops. Right in the air, the instant it's left her hand. But it also keeps moving, as if it's leaving a trail of itself in the air behind it. Rock after rock after rock, all linked together, in a line. The throw twists, as well. It leaves her hand, and then moves in an arc, or a twisting of space. Then slightly more, and a bit downward. Then noticeably more, further along the arc. An actual arc, curving in toward itself, and from Rashmi's perspective? 144,89,55,34,21,13,8,5,3,2,1,1,0 A perfectly decreasing curve, and one that Rashmi has seen before. Mathematically perfect. The rock never touches the sides, even though it seems as if it should have, the spiral seeming to grow wider and wider. Until it impacts the target, dead center, with all the force of a thrown rock. And then just floats there, doing nothing, energy expended. Aside from that VERY WEIRD movement, which fades into afterimages very quickly, the rock didn't do anything spectacular. It was just a very funky way to travel in space.
Rashmi Terios	Math has never been Rashmi's strong suit. The calculations involved in playing cats-cradle with spacetime, less so. But when she releases the pebble, and it simultaneously stops in midair and continues forward, in a mathematically-perfect collapsing spiral? The redhead can only assume something went weird with gravity. Largely because it conforms to no other brand of weirdness that she's ever seen before, and one of the words Entrapta used was 'gravity.' Whether or not she's accidentally correct remains to be seen. "Uh... Entrapta-chan? Did... you see that? Did I see that?"
Entrapta	"I'm filming it!" her voice says, from behind amidst her many, many contraptions. "I got a definite reaction from the entire room! It fluctuated noticeably and applied a pressure to the object in travel! Also very weird," she admits, sounding no less excited. Then she wanders out, her machines humming merrily behind her, hands in her pockets. "So, what do you say? Needs more work before we use it for real?" She's smiling, knowing what the answer is, but willing to move forward if Rashmi disagrees. Ah, science. My fickle mistress, so much still to learn. That was the Fibonnaci Sequence, from her physics books. But why did it happen??? ^_^
Rashmi Terios	"...Well I mean, it's gonna need work," Rashmi allows, as Nicomachea throws up a few screens to show exactly, in mathematical terms, its opinion of what Entrapta's adjustment of local spacetime is. "...but it also looks like it's stable enough that a little applied magic shouldn't hurt?" Readings scroll faster up the screens, almost more frenetic... then slower again, ending in blinking yellow Midchildan text, as if the Device managed to sigh and shrug using nothing but sensory readings. At which, Rashmi bobs her head. "Just... One at a time, until we get that gravity stutter smoothed out." And with that, she summons a single Barret, mentally tweaks the 'striking power' slider down to its absolute minimum, and sets it loose.
Entrapta	Energy seems to move in a straight line, which belies the previous test. Perhaps its lack of mass... "Mass levels definitely factor into the distortion, the nearly zero mass of the energy device is if anything minimally effected, allowing it to function with what appears to be normalcy," Entrapta is speaking into her recorder. The attack strikes the target with all the force of a gently thrown pillow, and Nichomachea would register it as such. Beep! You are roughly as strong as an angry bunny rabbit. Woo! "Still need to calibrate for physical actions within. I know someone uses arrows, they might want it to not weird out on them when they try it. But then, that could also be hilarious." Okay, she has a sense of humour.
Rashmi Terios	"We-e-e-ell," Rashmi says slowly, as if knowing the thought is probably a bad idea, yet precision dictates... "...Wanna see what happens when we fling pseudo-mass around? The ice spells I've developed kind of stick and cling, it's like they make themselves 'heavy' relative to their impact point. And repeated impacts build up, too." Weird energy that mimics physical mass, only with a weird accent, but has physical persistence, in an as-yet-unknown gravitational anomaly? What could go wrong!
Entrapta	Moments later, we're set up to do more testing. How did we get there? I'm fairly certain that Entrapta did not pass through the physical space between here and there in order to achieve preparedness, and yet. Here we are. "Oh, I think we can arrange to do a few more tests," she says, almost vibrating with eagerness. She gets out her recorder, and then says into it, "It's going to be a long, and very fascinating night." And then she waves for Rashmi to begin, her smile threatening to crack her face.
Rashmi Terios	Somehow, Entrapta's excitement, and specifically the words spoken into the recorder, do not precisely fill Rashmi with the same level of excitement. Perhaps to do with Entrapta's version of 'fascinating,' in that one imagines that an explosion captured through an ultra-high-speed camera would be fascinating. Rashmi makes a mental note to introduce her kohai to some WeTube channels she's heard about. Taking a deep breath, she summons a standard Barret, then activates the thermal-inversion subroutine. A circle of rune-tape forms around the ball of energy, and with a screeching crack exactly like water flash-freezing into ice, the globe becomes a chunk of glowing, golden ice, almost crystalline in appearance as there seems to be no refractive gradient at all; simply two states, clear and 'opaque' -- if the term can be applied to a dubiously physical construct of pure magical energy, given form and temperature. "Launching ice-aspected Barret," Rashmi says for the cameras, and looses. The thing is, this particular spell is supposed to at least mimic physical mass. But it's energy. But it has an energy state completely at odds with is physical makeup. So when it's launched... It seems to try to do both things at once; fly straight toward the target, smack into it, and clump up... and take that weird, stop-motion stutter-spiral fibonacci flight path, that somehow is at its widest at the origin of its vector. It does both things at once, smearing its way through the intervening space, and both flight paths terminate only once at the center of the target. And Rashmi's eyes are beginning to spiral just trying to comprehend what they just witnessed.
Entrapta	Entrapta's eyes can't widen at seeing this. They were already at maximum. But she can and does try to draw what she's seeing/seen/had saw. "Impossible, two places at one time, multiple realities aligning, terrifying prospects if misused, possibility of changing time and space as we know it!" The fact that these statements might freak Rashmi out don't even seem to register, which is probably fair given the level of stimulation currently going on in her brain. "Possibilities of thermodynamic magic must be tested, alternately allowing for sonic versions which both have and do not have mass of their own! Does the effect happen with existing air particles present in the continuum or would further testing be best done out of doors where we can't break things?" There's likely to be much more like this, and possibly worse, but at least Entrapta is smart enough to know that this is still in the experimental phase and not to be taken full scale. Yet. And yet... Her next words? I mean, you had to know what they'd be. She turns, to Nicomachea and to Rashmi, and says the only thing she can possibly say: "Do it again!"