Rivers Will Flow From Scenes Unknown

[Ashlie Minamida]

Twenty-four hours after Ryn and Katarina's departure...

With the portal still active Ashlie has deployed a perimeter of sensors anchored in the sea-floor. Aside from monitoring for any changes they also track any potential objects entering or leaving the vortex. She would have liked to fully fence the area and drain the surrounding water in order to investigate, but even if she could deduce a solution to the water that would spew from the opening she'd rather not drain another universe's ocean. As far as the North Sea is concerned it'd be negligible, but extra-dimensional mass would accrue swiftly if she disrupts the current equilibrium.

As for the vortex itself it continues to elude her attempts to map it's energy flow and topography. Sure, she can describe the vague three-dimensional shape but for all the metaphor that tends to be used when dealing with these things such as 'portals', the actual manifold and mathematical formulas describing dimensional dynamics are significantly more complicated. Not that most people care to listen, especially those who actually traverse these things because nobody likes to think what happens to their bodies when entering dimensional rifts. Nothing as philosophically perplexing as the teleporter-copy problem, but nobody wants to think about their body being stretched across a Klein-bottle shape at the dimensional intersect. Except Will maybe, but they'd probably be too disappointed by the lack of noticeable distortion to even try to follow the theory.

Lisette listens to her ramble, but she's fairly certain this would stop even her interest. Or polite facade of it, she's still not entirely sure which it is. Regardless, she doesn't really have anybody to talk this through with and she's not desperate enough to contact the likes of Tony Stark just to talk shop. So instead she sits on a bench some distance from the actual portal, scrolling through data on her pad and, frankly, moping about the fact that there's no one to appreciate the beautiful complexity of this intersection of fluid dynamics, quantum functions and edge-case topology other than her. That and the fact that it seems too complex for her to make any progress on actually solving it.