Xaviers!

"I mean yeah, of course, but this is still weird."

"Normalcy isn't weird, Robbie. It's...well, it's normal. Kind of definitionally."

"Judging by your daughter's reaction, green is normal. At least where you are concerned."

"Granted, we have a very flexible idea of normal around here."

"It wasn't always normal. I wasn't born with fungal follicles, Tosh. And I didn't have hair for, well, essentially 100% of my life, hurtling through space."

"I'm just worried that something I did changed your self-image. If you felt like changing your look before, then more power to you."

"I mean duh. You took out all the color. Metaphorically. And also literally cause." she throws out both her arms indicating brown-haired Will.

"I can increase the number, but I don't know if the new voices will include 'let's be green'," he said, "I'd have to have another Willputer to figure it out."

"Well you got the next gen Stanton two point oh right here." she says pointing at herself with two-thumbs before shifting into a computer herself. Her version is much more modern if not any less stupid. The attached monitor is just a clear, curved glass surface, at least till it starts booting up with excessive amounts of RGB patterns of flowers and hearts and swords and lizards moving across the screen until it settles on a pink desktop.

Will sighed a little, shaking his head. "Kids these days, am I right?"

"You look like a Tron bike," he smirked at Robin.

"I look like a computer from this century, my dudes." Robin's voice comes from the speakers while her face pops up on the screen.

"Just not this decade," he said, "Which is cool. I'd even be tempted to reverse engineer some future tech if I actually thought it'd work."

"Even if you have better tech knowledge than your father."

"Why wouldn't it work? It's just computer what's-its and doo-bops, right?"

"Stanton computers work a little different than real computers, Robin. Besides, do you really want a stranger poking through your guts?," he asked, wrinkling his nose a bit.

"I'm hardly a stranger, but I suppose I am being more than a little presumptuous."

"He says, before sifting through your brain files."

"I mean, I wouldn't have turned into a computer if I didn't want you using the computer."

"Well, yeah."

He cracked his knuckles and sat down to look for Robin's VMs.

There are no VMs running on the Robin-PC. That seems to be an uniquely Will problem. She does have some similarities in that there's personality files, skills and all that stuff but a keen observer might notice that any time Tosh switches windows or looks up something else, the previous thing he was looking at becomes garbled non-sense. And once Tosh notices that, other inconsistencies become pretty obvious pretty fast. The CPU, RAM and disc usage is all non-sense that's just made to look right as it's actively being observed. Where the Will-puter is janky but internally consistent, Robin makes more sense on the surface but it's because she's actively imitating how a computer looks and works. Will becomes the computer, slave to his own interpretations and rules whereas Robin not even remotely reaches that level of commitment to the role.

"Sorry Robin, but I have to take back what I said about your tech being savvier. I gotta give Will this on, on account of ludicrous levels of method acting."

"Yeah..." she says and the computer somehow manages to sag in it's entirety as she sighs. "He commits. You ask for a computer, you get a computer. He just... hey wait, what if he somehow keeps getting requests for all kinds of roles somehow from somewhere!"

"I do think he's getting something from somewhere. Or was. He seemed to stop after I reduced the voices."

"Lemme check something..." he said, going to his workstation computer to check his notes and enter the quantum signature Will was connecting to into an analysis program

The 'fake' signal has a quantum signature that matches that of the Crystal Computer. Digging through to the signal before it was modified by Will's BIOS returns an error message.

Code: Select all

Quantum state fluctuating
Unable to analyze quantum pattern
Estimated quantum signature exceeds 10 to the power of 100 to the power of 100 possibilities...
3↑3 possibilities...
10↑3 possibilities...
10↑↑↑10 possibilities...


...and then the analysis program crashes from being unable to estimate a higher number. It looks suspiciously familiar to when he and Acala tried to analyze the MGH molecule's dimensional manifold.

Tosh straightened up. He had idly hoped for such a connection to the "spark" phenomena but hadn't expected to actually find one.

"Good news is I may have found where the 'downloads' are coming from. The bad news is there's jack all I can do about it. Maybe Sam could but even then it'd require more playing goddess than I think anyone really wants."

"Don't ask yourself what you can do to Dad but what you can trick Dad into doing himself. I'm told that's what 90% of our Sam's trick is anyway. Not that I ever abused that, growing up or anything."

"Yeah, I'm sure you didn't," he laughed.

"So, any pointers on how to trick him into ignoring the executive meddling of a mostly unknown cosmic source of mutant powers?"

"You're saying his power is doing this to him?"

"I'm only theorizing, but it fits everything I've seen to say his MGH activity is in overdrive. And that is the conduit through which his 'Spark' grants power."

"Perhaps with Sam's help we can throttle the bandwidth, to use computer terms. I didn't find a way to."

"Well, then, what is it you managed to do, then, if it wasn't throttle me?"

"Yeah, I dunno... throttling his power doesn't feel right. Look at this boring fart." Robin says as she pops back into human shape, ending up sitting on the table, leaning forward with her forearms on her knees.

"I throttled what I thought was your excess inner voices. I treated the symptom. And not without unforeseen consequences."

"Okay so his power is extreme method acting. Kinda. And he's all juiced up and that'd giving him more methods to act. More acts to method? But if you take 'em away he turns into this lame-o cause the symptom's also what makes him who he is?"

"Basically, only he's dialed up well past eleven."

It's over nine-thousand!

That's bad, even for you.

"And now he's at oh-point-one. And I dunno, being all those things is him. We can't just restrict that. That's not the Xavier's way in this or any universe."

"In my defense, I was aiming for ten. And it is... essentially going to kill him... or at least turn him into a metaphorical vegetable if nothing is done."

"My Dad's made from sterner stuff than that..." she says, though some doubt is creeping into her voice.

"I don't think he's entirely wrong, Robbie. Trying to control any of this is...difficult.

I'm not sure the answer is 'get rid of everything', but 'leaving it unchecked' is a good way to lose who I am entirely."

"I'll be more cautious next time. But maybe I should talk to Sam about tackling this together."

Will paused for a moment.

"You know you don't...have to be careful, right?" he said, a fleck of green reappearing in his hair as he talked. "That there's very little you could do to...permanently harm me, especially when most of me is back up there?"

"Right. Sorry. I'm overly cautious by nature. Except when I'm a shark, a ferret, or a golem."

"So then, turn back into a hard drive and let's see what turning that number back up does."

"Alright, Tosh. And don't worry. Like I said earlier -- I trust you," he said, putting a hand on the boy's shoulder before clattering back to the ground.