[Plot] Kids with Guns

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Alright then," he said with a shrug. " How about one of you step on the X I taped to the floor so Dani can see for herself that it's harmless. It doesn't even emit anything on the current setting."

[Will Stanton]

Will number four nodded, and trotted out to the X. "Right here good?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Perfect," he said as he moved to the controls.

"I need you to use your powers a little. Nothing too dramatic, just enough to strengthen the readings."

[Will Stanton]

"One little power usage, coming up," Will 4 said, with a mock salute, before rapidly dwindling in size.

Will #1 (Brown-haired Will) just rolled his eyes.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Not quite so small, please. That's throwing it off."

[Will Stanton]

Will #4 gave a tiny sigh, and shot back up to something approaching his regular height.

[Narrator]

As Will #4 is shrinking and growing Tosh would note that it appears the actual size doesn't have as much to do with it as the expression of power itself and he picks up a unique frequency from Will that stays the same regardless of shrinkage or growth.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Huh. Interesting, your shifting changes nothing. Must be because your power's never off."

"You're up number two. Let's see if you look the same."

[Will Stanton]

#4 and #2 high-fived one another as they swapped places, like a couple of frat bros passing in the night, causing #1 to roll his eyes. "They're just excited to be in the lab," he explained to Danny, and anyone else who might be listening.

#2 repeated #4's shifting regimen, shrinking and then returning nearly, but not all the way, to full size.

[Danielle DiScivolare]

And lo and behold the readings are identical.

Meanwhile Danny continues to look uncomfortable and focusing her attention on the least-mutant-looking Will. "Guess you're the one I met at the park then?"

[Will Stanton]

"No, actually," Will apologized. "Well, yes and no. It's complicated.

It's all me, after a fashion. I'm fairly strange even by the baseline normal we have around here. I kind of...shoot out parts of my personality, and get them back together when the day is done. So it's all me, but it's all different.

I need to print out pamphlets or something explaining all that."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Yeah, sometimes I feel the need for that when I have to explain my multiple selves. It seems simple, me but not me, but it gets complicated trying to explain how I'm not just... nuttier than a fruitcake."

[Danielle DiScivolare]

"You split apart, you... I don't know, I guess you've got DID." Danny simplifies it for herself. "No pamphlet needed."

[Will Stanton]

"Oh sure, if you want to be all simple about it," Will #1 said, with a slight grin. "You make having an X-Gene sound so simple."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"So, who's next? Number one or the skeptic?"

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, you're doing the tests, this is kind of your show," Will #1 said, a bit pointedly, but took his place on the X anyway.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh started the machine again and monitored the readings closely, gears turning in his head. If the X-Gene and MGH weren't requirements to be affected, how was a connection to a "spark" being altered or even established? Some kind of subcellular dimensional rifts? Were they still open?

[Narrator]

Running through all the various people present Tosh obtains a solid chunk of data.

Drake: Unique pattern (possibly similar to what it would have been before?), waveform very jittery
Baseline Will: Similar to Tosh's own but in a different pattern
Lasered Will: Different pattern but much closer to Baseline Will than Tosh, waveform is very jittery
Danny: Different pattern and similarly jittery as Lasered Will but occasionally the waveform cuts out or spikes like crazy

The intensity is more or less the same, although it goes up when people are actively shifting while Danny's sits at a constant average level. And on at least one occasion Tosh had seen a "spark" manifest without a body, it's feasible that the bedrock the Stone-Hand Monster emerged from was partially transformed into MGH to facilitate the power. Will was certainly able to over-produce his own MGH and there are powers that shift biological material into inorganic ones and vice versa. Why or how a Spark would manifest inside solid rock in the first place is another question, but it's theoretically possible. And by the same token it's extremely possible that the non-mutants hit by Conduit's gun show a similar effect, their exposure to the Spark having led to a forced formation of MGH, possibly even altering their genes.

If mutants have, over time, evolved to be able to tap into whatever power-source the Sparks are, then apparently sudden exposure to that same energy accelerates the process significantly. How the Sparks know how to do that and their particular expression is another question entirely...

[Will Stanton]

"So, give it to me straight, doc. Will I ever be able to play the piano again?" Will #1 asked, deadpan.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Could you before?" he asked, playing along.

He overlapped both of Will's different waveforms and had the software remove the parts that were the same.

[Narrator]

And the program returns a modulation formula! One step closer to success! How the waveform differs can only really depend on the MGH structure and since the sequence of amino acids is the same between people it has to be some kind of epigenetic or folding adjustment. But with enough computational power it might be possible to figure out the differences and how to adjust them. Theoretically all it would take is a couple MGH proteins folded to the 'correct' shape for a person with an added prion sub-domain to give it the ability to refold the erroneous proteins to it's own corrected shape.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Yes!" Tosh exclaimed, excitedly throwing his arms up.

He composed himself and cleared his throat. "Okay, so I think I'm onto the solution. Just gotta run some calculations and simulations to be sure."

[Will Stanton]

"So, what exactly IS up, then?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"The proteins in MGH are likely being fol... yeah, I'm just gonna say you're genes are being subtly distorted and, while my expertise in genetics isn't as developed as it could be, I think have a good idea what might correct that. As for Dani, it's a little more complicated but the same idea should apply. I'll have to run it by Doctor McCoy."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, how do we ...undistort them? And how did they get distorted in the first place?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Do you know anything about prions and protein folding? Or transdimensional quantum physics?"

[Danielle DiScivolare]

"Just tell me you can fix this."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I can't promise, but I'm pretty confident I can."

[Will Stanton]

"I know something about being shot with a gun, though.

There were weird snippets of music as we got blasted -- did you hear those, Danny? Maybe they had something to do with things."

[Danielle DiScivolare]

"I... yeah. Yeah, I did! I thought I'd imagined that."

[Will Stanton]

"It was, like...bits and pieces from the performances, but jumbled up, remixed together, recontextulized.

If you believed in mythic iconography, you could say that it was, like, a symbol of change, altering the expression of our abilities to go along with the change in our X-genes and whatnot.

And if you're more of a science guy, I suppose you could argue that they were the sonic vector that triggered the remutation."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Or it just screwed with your short-term memory and caused auditory hallucinations. But it's an interesting side effect."

He suddenly perked up and hurried over to the gun, looking for sonic components he may have overlooked.

[Narrator]

There's some parts in the mostly destroyed section that could be from a directional microphone of some sort. That's... the opposite of what he would have expected but it does mean that whatever Conduit's goal was, she seems to have anticipated an auditory component and was interested in capturing it.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Okay, that's... not what I was thinking," he said in surprise. Without explanation, he rushed to the computer to search the data salvaged from the gun for traces of audio recordings.

[Ashlie Minamida]

It's not much but he can find some bits and pieces. It looks like the gun itself wasn't equipped with much storage, presumably Conduit just yanked the data onto the tablet she was carrying as it came in, but he does find traces of audio recordings along with fragmented data that seems similar to his own readings of 'Spark Waveforms'. Clearly Conduit considered the two at least somewhat correlated.

And as Tosh is combing through the data, Ashlie speaks up, having quietly stepped into the room at some point.

"I think I understand it now. It's about quantum mechanics. Imagine the energy beam as Schroedinger's Box and the cat as the powers."

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh turned around quickly, only slightly startled.

"How so?" he asked curiously.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's quantum energy, right? Suppose it simultaneously exists in all states, pure potential energy. We don't know why but we know that quantum states collapse when measured. Observed. Like how light is simultaneously a particle and a wave but when measured always behaves like one or the other. Now imagine an energetic state that exhibits many more potential properties. Perhaps even all possible properties. It's a particles that are electron, neutron, quark, every wavelength of light, muon, photons, positron, Higgs boson, every sub-atomic particle at once, every kind of energy and state, existing in a separate layer of reality."

She pulls up a screen on one of the workbenches, in full teaching mode now, drawing just a solid area on one side and an approximation of Earth on the other, complete with not-to-scale people.

"Now imagine if through evolution a protein came to be that forms the tiniest opening." She flicks her finger across the dividing line a couple times, erasing bits of it to create gaps. "And in that moment the infinite potential energy is observed by this person."

She adds a couple of wavy lines passing through one of the gaps and leading to one of the people on the other side.

"In that moment the infinite potential is going to collapse into something stable. Like opening Schroedinger's Box, this moment changes the properties of this particle from 'Everything' to only a couple specific things. Things that could take any form. Transform matter, reshape physics. And it keeps being observed, it's part of this person now. This mutant. But that observing isn't just a simple yes or no, it's a complex process colored by countless factors. Environmental. Psychological. Emotional. Genetic."

She draws a whole bunch of arrows pointing at the person.

"And based on all of these factors, all this context provided by this person and the world around them, the particle collapses into a very specific waveform." she says, pointing at the read-outs from Tosh's scanner. "An energetic state that goes from being capable of anything to facilitating some very specific effects. A mutation."

[Will Stanton]

"Don't worry if you're not getting any of this," Will #4 whispered to Danny. "I'm half-convinced they're making this up as they're going along."


"So, assuming that's true," Brown-Haired Will said, "then what Conduit did was...alter one or more of those arrows," he said, pointing to the context arrows ASHLIE drew. "Change the playing field on which the energy is presenting itself, resulting in...a different expression of the energy?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"In a way. I believe what she did was punch an opening." she says, swiping a section of the separating line away with her thumb. "And forced a torrent of this quantum-potential through, which latched on to the most prevalent shared context. The music. Which is why none of these changes..." she gestures at brown-haired Will, "...or forced mutations..." she moves her hand to indicate Danny, "...fit quite right. Less control, less intrinsic understanding of how to use their powers, less natural fit for the person."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"If that's the case, recreating that context might help us lock on to the damage so we can repair it."