...They Will Come

[Ashlie Minamida]

Will - or one of them anyway - being doubtful does little to discourage Ashlie. Yes, she has plenty of other work to do and at some point she needs to tackle that efficiency problem, but she owes Will a great deal and they're clearly torn up about the situation.

"A connection." she taps a finger on her workbench. "I wish I had more data-points than the accounts of two people who are both shapeshifting telepaths, but being aware of one's connection to their or others' powers does seem to come with a certain... spirituality. One that for all intents and purposes seems too accurate to be dismissed. And direct access to the Spark dimension has dissipated, at least by the technological means previously used." She pulls up her expansive board of interlinked data and musings on the nature of mutant powers on a holographic screen that expands to a good 10 feet wide. She swipes her hand through it and sorts it by various factors. Commonalities, hard data, associative groupings until finally settling on a timeline.

"They made the mirror before the proverbial door closed. If this foot in the door was pulled away..." Speculation. But not entirely unfounded. She no longer has the purified lump of MGH that Will retrieved and set them on this multiplicative course in the first place, but the readings from Tosh's 'Power Scanner' show complete cessation of activity the moment blood or other biological samples are removed from a body. Will not withstanding because they operate on their own logic first and in Will's case that means taking out a piece or turning inanimate still includes those in whatever criteria Will's power uses to define 'Will' as it's recipient? User? Master? "Note to self, ask Will about how they see their relationship to their power. But overall the Sparks have narrowed what they exert their influence on. Returned to normal, perhaps. Whatever that exactly means." She runs her hand through her hair, sweeping it back. She's still not used to having to cut it now.

None of this is helpful. In fact it's the opposite and tells her helping Will might have been moved beyond her current means. But she wouldn't be who and where she is now if she accepted her own limitations. "Will's connection to his power has always been deeper than most, for better and worse. If that is the connection they felt then that line between them needs to blur and tearing down the dimensional walls with quantum physics no longer works. Telepathy still might but they somehow couldn't reach commonality in their metaphors... And Will's understanding superseded all others. That makes sense, it's ultimately their power at work."

She sighs. This isn't really getting her anywhere. Outlining the situation is one thing but she's found no actual inroads. She does have the harmonic pattern of Will's power, if it could be amplified and transmitted maybe it could travel back along the same route as Will's power is flowing into them. She swipes her hand across her notes and with a couple of gestures brings up the blueprints for Cerebra. "Maybe. Maybe..." She expands schematics, pulls parts of it out, notes the corresponding code segments, rearranges them. New components, crude sketches slowly being filled with intricate designs. "Flip the psi-panels, rewire the system to invert the polarity, less focusing external patterns in. The Psi-Feedback Array can go and I replace it with the fractal algorithm. Note, build the adaptive framework for that first. The chamber fluid already works as a transductor for electromagnetic energy. I'll have to tear out the internal coating, replace it with a field array for better fine control in directing the currents. Oh! Ask Will about mixing him with the Cerebra fluid. A single-phase substance filling the chamber would simplify a lot of things. Okay, a lot to do. Phase-testing and field calibration can happen at the same time and that'll generate data I can use to start working on the algorithm!"

She hurries over to the various projects and testing equipment, prototypes and proof-of-concept models. Finding one in particular she lifts the heavy piece of equipment and hefts it onto a workbench. Roughly three by four feet with a spherical assembly in it's center about two and a half feet across. A miniature reactor chamber. She starts opening panels and unbolting segments. Somewhere along the way she fishes her phone out of her pocket and places it on the workbench while it connects to the Will Storage Room.

"I think I'm just about ready for a volunteer!" she informs them.

[Will]

It takes a few minutes for anyone to make the short walk from the room to Ashlie's lab - a few minutes longer than would be expected under normal circumstances, when a Will would likely be bounding their way down.

But, eventually, the door slid open and Will walked in, hands in his pants pockets as he looked around. "You have something, then?" he asked, curiously.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"The beginning of something. Maybe. I won't lie, I made some assumptions, or educated guesses, as to what that connection you lost might be. But one of you mentioned it being almost more of a spiritual thing and everyone who has felt the actual connection to their power describes it in religious terms. Granted, that sample-size is very small, but it makes sense. Not going to go into guessing at definitions, as far as I'm concerned personal views of the Sparks ring truer than Physics. The important part is that if that is what you experienced, then we have at least some options. The fact that your multiplication was catalyzed by concentrated MGH in the first place supports that."

She stops herself and looks up from her work. "Sorry, I'm rambling. Point is, I wonder if we can send a signal the other direction, along the conduit of your power. If we can get that point of contact you might be able to tell if it is what you're missing at the very least and we can go from there."

[Will]

"Send a signal from me out to...somewhere, you mean?" Will said, his face scrunching up as he tried to understand.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Yes! To the place your power comes from. Well, 'place' is relative, but you said it felt like something more, right? Mutations are like a 'power-shaped' opening to somewhere beyond. Power pours through and through many factors is shaped into something we can understand and control. Generally. Samantha seems to naturally be able to trace back that connection to it's source but what if you did too. Reached back through that connection and touched the wellspring of your power." she explains, drawing a vague diagram of what she's talking about on her holographic screen.

"Your power resonates with you. Perhaps more so than most. I think maybe while you were the mirror it wasn't just a one-way street."

[Will]

"Sam's power is, of course, based in mythology and legend and all that good stuff. There's certainly a there there to be touched.

I'm not certain how that would manifest for me. Though if you have an idea how to try it, I'm certainly willing to give it a go."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Excellent. I do have one question. I know you tend to absorb properties of substances that are mixed into you. Are there degrees to that? Ratios that shift it one way or the other or is it more that whatever property you absorb propagates through you?" she asks as she finishes taking the last panel off the machine, revealing hollow space inside, the inner wall a pale but perfectly polished coppery surface.

[Will Stanton]

"I've never done extensive testing on the subject. It depends a little on the substance itself -- some things mix more readily than others," Will said, considering it.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"We'll see if we have to adjust the ratio then. Just so you know what to expect, the plan is to put you in here." she points at the open (and empty) reactor core. "And add an equal amount of the immersion liquid we use in Cerebra. It's oxygenated and highly receptive to electromagnetic fields. We'll start with you just being immersed in it and move on to having you absorb it. Either way I'll be applying an electromagnetic field. No direct electricity, only indirect induction. For starters I want to see what if any signal exchange we can manage. I'd expect it to read rough physiological parameters easily enough but I want to see what else I can isolate or induce."

[Will]

"Right, step in the goo so you can shock me. Seems fairly straightforward enough," Will nodded. "Bit of a tight squeeze, but then, I suppose I can be compressed."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"If you don't mind." she says, taking a step back to give Will room to climb into the machine.

[Will]

Will bent over and crouched down, slowly working his way into the coppery chamber. It was a very tight fit, indeed, and an occasional pop of a joint dislocating itself and a grunt of effort was all Will said for a few moments, as he tried his best to squeeze into the central chamber. He remained in a human form throughout, though it required bending at some angles pretty specifically impossible for regular humans.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You know, I would have figured clay would have been more comfortable, but this works too." she says, sounding vaguely amused. "I'll see you again soon." she says and places the panel back into position. After a moment there's the distant whirr and vibration of bolts being screwed back into place. For a couple moments nothing happens, then a valve opens somewhere with a click and the slightly viscous Cerebra fluid begins filling what little room in the chamber isn't occupied by Will. There's a vague sense of weightlessness that comes from being submerged in the liquid and it's a bit like floating in a sensory deprivation tank. If there was enough room to float anyway.

For a couple minutes, nothing happens, then there's a faint hum that runs through the whole machine. It builds up in pitch until it passes normal hearing ranges and just becomes more of a feeling. Like bass vibrations but more 'sharp' than 'blunt'. And then the electromagnetic field snaps on. Both fluid and Will are pushed inwards, away from the walls, then it inverts into an even pull. With the pretty uneven shape of a human body it ends up spinning him around a little towards a point of equilibrium, though that shifts any time he moves even a little bit, making him rotate around like a malleable, three-dimensional compass needle. It cycles between push and pull a couple of times and then the effect stops being evenly distributed. One area of the sphere pulling, another pushing, attempting to smoosh him into basic geometric shapes. Cube, cone, pyramid, cylinder, cuboid, torus...

[Will]

Will coughed and sputtered as the fluid filled the small space that had been provided for him. 'Filled the space' included it going inside of him, with him swallowing a significant chunk of the fluid. That is, of course, how Cerebra worked and everything was designed, but it was not exactly the most pleasant situation in the world, and this particular Will hadn't been optimized for such an event -- the problem with being a focused piece of Will and not a full representation of the whole.

The push and pull of force began to have it's effect on Will, beginning to squash and stretch him. It was perhaps a bit tougher than Ashlie's calculations had provided for, with Will still being in his human(ish) form, but he was, afterall, still a malleable shifter, and slowly but surely, with some initial snaps and cracks, the pulses began to do their work.

It was probably for the best that the area was sealed off from view.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Hidden from view as he is, the feedback scrolling across her screen still tells Ashlie some of what was going on inside. Though the exact reality of the sudden spikes and dips in the graph remain unclear. As it evens out and the lag between the shape of the EM-field and Will's lessens she starts adjusting some of the parameters. Minor things first, accounting for the lag that does remain, efficiency tweaks to the field generator to account for miniscule variations of the interior surface. Things would be much simpler if engineering things to theoretical perfection was possible, but there's a certain satisfaction in successfully compensating for it.

"So far so good. The very basic idea works. Now for the trickier parts..."

The unique readings of each power don't neatly translate into any one thing. They're part dimensional manifold, part energetic state, part quantum probability matrix and a number of other factors. To apply them to an EM field and by extension the Cerebra fluid and finally Will they have to be transposed. She has a number of formulas prepared but ultimately she's flying blind, hoping that she'll be able to pick up any amount of resonance from Will. Like placing an ear on a safe and listening for any signs while working a nearly infinite amount of dials. Except without the tedium of having to actually do it herself. She sets an evolving algorithm to work, watching as it begins with simple transpositions and gradually increases in complexity.

"Tracing a fractal surface and guessing at the overall shape." she explains to nobody. Brute force meets self-improving fractal algorithm.

Inside the chamber Will finds himself being squished into shapes that start simple but swiftly increase in complexity. A Pyramid collapses away from the middle until a smaller one sits on top of three identical ones. Then they to collapse inwards into four more. And so on a so on, tightly winding until it reaches some threshold and the humming pressure lets him snap back into a different simple shape with which to repeat the process. Over and over, slowly moving from simple geometric base shapes to Klein bottles and Moebius strips that too are wound tightly into fractals. The more more complex the base shape, the more the subsequent transformations become less predictably identical but spread and flare and crumple wildly before once again snapping back to a more relaxed base.

[Will]

There's some more crunching and snapping sounds from inside the chamber, as Will was contorted into more and more complex shapes, the algorithm quickly finding the right patterns of force and pressure to manipulate the shifter's form with the least amount of resistance.

This, of course, was building off of previous work that had been done on Will in the past; which always helps when doing new studies. Even then, though, the algorithm 'clicked' faster than projections would have indicated; Will's very nature making him more amenable to being outwardly manipulated than models would predict.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie was fully prepared to focus on something else while the machine works, but it quickly becomes obvious that something unexpected is happening. Sure, her code is good, but the odds of it working this efficiently are astronomical. And more than that, it's almost as if there's something in the feedback from inside the chamber that is helping to shape the algorithm. She brings up sections of the code to scan as it scrolls past. Nothing seems wrong and the feedback is being analyzed and integrated correctly. It's just... accommodating, for lack of a better word. Reacting faster, providing responses that slowly change to be more easily integrated.

"No offense Will, but you're not that smart. I'm not sure I'm that smart." It has to be his power helping him somehow. Be it by providing extra-dimensional 'computing' or more arcane methods. Hell maybe it depends on the power and the mutant, in which case this would definitely fall closer to the later category. Which means it's working. Now she just needs to figure out how to widen that vector.

"Alright, Will, I know you can't hear me but this is going to be weird, no matter what." She hefts a single wall panel onto the table. The front looks plain. Slightly curved, light-grey or dirty-white color but pretty unremarkable if it wasn't for the throng of electronics and cables on the backside. One of the robotic arms unfolds from the ceiling and she attaches the panel. Hitting a series of keys on her terminal has the arm position itself so the flat surface of the panel faces the Will-Reactor. As the algorithm continues working Will over the panel swings and moves around the core, changing it's distance and relative position, always keeping the smooth surface pointed inwards.

It's only blips here and there but the panel detects hints of fluctuations in the psi-sensitive gel as it moves around, trying to intercept a seemingly always-changing angle.

Inside the chamber Will would catch glimpses of a flickering light. Always changing position and only ever flaring for a moment before winking out of existence again like distant star. It feels familiar and each time the bright pin-prick of light flares up there's the faintest murmur. Not a voice. Or not a single one at least? Like trying to make out the sound of a large gathering from several rooms away. Muddled, indistinct and too many to tell one from the other. And then it's gone agian, only to reappear with a different composition of sounds and voices, no clearer than before but somehow bringing to mind the feeling of lieing in bed as a child, listening to parents talking. A mix of safety and home, familiar tones but no real understanding, there but apart. Maybe even talking about him.

Will has been around enough telepaths to recognize the fuzzy nature of mind- or dreamscapes, but it's halting, stuttering, like a skipping film reel. It's frustrating, like an itch that's too deep to scratch the flashes seem to sometimes coincide with some of the shapes he's moving through but to hold on to them seem to require being a too many different things at once and it's never quite right even as the forces working on him seem to try to nudge him in the right direction. Just too slowly, never quite catching up for long enough.

[Will]

Whether it seemed familiar or not, safe or not, frustrating or not, was hard to tell from the outside -- the machine was just humming along, and all of Ashlie's sensor equipment indicated that everything was running smoothly.

Inside, Will was experiencing the faint sketches of whatever Ashlie was trying to get him to do. If this was the 'signal' being sent out, it was unclear where it was going, or even if it was going to the right place. The faint voices and sounds weren't familiar; this wasn't really anything like his experience as the mirror. This was all words and conversation, and that wasn't...

That wasn't right. It might feel right for a telepath, communicating mentally in words and conversation, but that wasn't...

Will was a doer. As much as he talked about acting and scripts and memorizing lines and things like that, the very nature of his power was physical, not verbal. Being in the mirror, it wasn't like he was having a conversation between hundreds of his selves or anything; it was all him, through and through. It was a state of being, not a state of communication. Of knowing rather than talking. It's not like there was a councilroom somewhere where different aspects of his self sat around a table and hashed things out; Will simply was. And now, being repurposed as a conduit for communicationthat was a different approach, for sure.

That being said, it was clearly doing something, and something outside of Will's history -- and that history covered a lot of ground, so an entirely new experience was something he hadn't felt in a long, long time. As a result, there wasn't much he could do now -- no proverbial muscle he could flex, no skill he could fall back on, to try to sharpen the signal.

And the sensors bore that out -- while Will's shape continued to match projections precisely at rates higher than projected by the model, the signal strength of the psychic connection remained frustratingly low.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie meanwhile at first seems optimistic. The algorithm is working better than expected thanks to Will. The psi-panel struggles to anticipate the signal fluctuation in three-dimensional space, but once she link it's code with the algorithm even that improves, though the movements seem entirely random to her. She even picks up a resonant energy that matches Will's power signature, visualized on her screen as two kinds of shifting fields. But they never quite connect and merge. As they get close they flatten against each other as if separated by an invisible pane.

"It makes no sense..." she mutters. "They should merge or cancel each other out or something." She double-checks the equipment as best as she can while it's running but everything is working just fine.

"Okay, I have you right here you elusive little energy field. Let's see if I can't give you a little push and initiate a quantum tunnel." She brings up the control for the psi-panel. Cerebra works, among other things, via directed quantum entanglement. It's simple enough to disable it's filter and set it to short-range indiscrete field induction and create a localized spot of perfect quantum alignment. It'll shred the panel, but that doesn't matter if it works.

[Will]

"Removing the filter" is always a dangerous option in any experiment. Ashlie was correct in assuming that the panel would be shred by this action. She may, however, be incorrect in her assumption on just how said panel would break.

For a moment after the filter was disabled, there was nothing -- no response, no further resonance with the mysterious energy field, no quantum tunneling effect. It was almost like, in absence of the directed quantum entanglement, the Will-reactor was maintaining it's last given directives. That was rather interesting in and of itself, and Ashlie would have about 10 seconds to consider the ramifications of that before the sounds of splintering bone and tearing sinews and smashing metal filled the room.

Throughout this entire process of being reshaped and twisted around, Will had maintained a humanoid form -- or what could pass for one when you're being divided and subdivided in fractal shapes over and over. And even now, he maintained a biological form as everything suddenly went into massive overdrive. A shard of what appeared to be bone -- but couldn't be, just from the sheer structural integrity of the spike -- shattered through the copper walls of the reactor core, followed quickly by several matching sets. What...might have been a leg kicked its way out of another hole, followed by another, and another -- limbs more than legs, appendages more than limbs, shifting and twisting and reshaping themselves as they wriggled in the open air.

The core groaned and shrieked as it was pressed to it's limit, and then beyond, shattering open at any seams, joints and weakspots, as ripples of swelling, pulsating and twisted flesh burst its way out. Here and there eyes formed, opening and shutting, rolling around and darting across the room before they sunk back into the mass. Mouths orifices cut gashes into flesh; yowling, keening, howling before being swallowed back up. Boney protrusions shot their way out of the mass before muscles, sinew and skin wrapped its way back around them, as the out-of-control shifter continued to expand.

And yes, in the process, a limb kicked the panel. So, one point for Ashlie's predictions/

[Ashlie Minamida]

'Bad' hardly begins to describe the explosive expanse of flesh breaking the reactor apart like an egg. Ashlie backs away from the disaster she appears to have wrought and then, when the mass of flesh keeps growing, she runs. Not for the exit though. She grabs a plasma torch from one of the workbenches before it can be swallowed by Will and flicks it on as she runs for one of the walls. Not bothering to unscrew the panel that covers the channel set into the floor she melts through them before tearing it free to reveal the throng of cables that come together from all the workbenches.

With the growing mass beginning to bear down on her she cuts through the bundle of cables with the torch. As the sparks sear her hands the main lighting in the room turns off with a loud *chunk* and leaves only sparse red emergency lighting. The cables she cut fortunately include the emergency supply line so even when the main power breaker to the workshop is tripped, the thick cable she's pulling free from the floor still runs a current when she plunges it into the advancing mass of flesh.

[Will]

The electrical current danced over the blob of flesh, the smell of scorched meat filling the air as Ashlie held it in place. It quivered, rapidly pulsing and flexing as the electricity played havoc with Will's shifting center, but slowly but surely, the blob began to recede and collapse in on itself, shriveling up.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie lets out a sigh of relief and falls into a sitting position on the ground, carefully putting the still sparking cable down. A moment later an automated system detects the circuit causing the problem and shuts the broken electrical line down. Slowly the main power spins back up, starting with the fluorescent lights.

"I am terribly sorry about that." she informs the shrinking mound of burned flesh. She's not certain he can hear her and if so is even paying attention to anything other than what she just put him through, but it seems appropriate. She can always repeat it to his face if he recovers. She gets up from the floor, placing her hands on her upper legs in the process and only then does she notice the blackened skin of her own palm where errant currents burned her. How in the world did she not notice that? Especially now that she's aware of it she most certainly feels the searing pain set in. Adrenaline? A quirk of her physiology?

She shakes her head and focuses back on the blob of flesh sitting in the shattered remains of her test-reactor. "Are you conscious in there?" she asks with some amount of guilt in her voice. She kind of hopes for a lack of response.

[Will]

Ashlie did not get what she was hoping for, as a groan from somewhere inside the blob indicated at least a certain level of consciousness. A couple twitches, too, that seemed more intentional than the general spasming from the electrical current, as Will struggled to pull himself together.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Is there anything I can do to help you recover?" she asks, putting her unburned hand on a relatively smooth surface of Will.

[Will]

A quivering shake, as the blob continued to retract in on itself, shrinking back in from Ashlie's touch.

It wasn't reforming to a humanoid shape, seemingly more focused on just retracting everything -- too many limbs, too many eyes, too many mouths. Wipe it all out and start from scratch, perhaps? It was heading down more towards a sphere, as it shrunk smaller and smaller, heading towards a size that would have fit in the chamber, had it not been shattered into a zillion pieces.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Okay. Take your time." she says and starts cleaning up the mechanical side of the mess, picking out debris as it's uncovered by the shrinking Will. "This might have ended in disaster, but I think it resulted in some useful data. Especially if you'll be able to tell me your side of it."

[Will]

Eventually, Will had contracted down closer to billiard ball size, lumps and bumps and extraneous bits absorbed back into the whole.

A seam split open, gradually forming lips and a mouth. "W...well, as l...long as the data was useful..." it groaned.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Not... quite what I meant. I really do hope this wasn't too awful for you. If I'd known what would happen I would not have tried this."

[Will]

"Just n..not as attuned to this as I normally would be. Part and parcel with my condition," Will groaned.

"What have you got?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Well, the good news is the algorithm works. It was able to run the electro-magnetic field well enough and better yet, you seemed to adapt to it in turn. Lag was down to 28 nano-seconds which beats out nerve-signals by a significant margin. Speed aside, it means the theory is sound. I can translate your shifting into measurable parameters like an EM-field and vice versa."

"And the field did create a corresponding signal from your power. What it did not do is let the two merge. By all means they should have, their resonant field pattern was in synch but instead they refused to touch like identical magnet poles. I tried to create an uniform quantum state between them, hoping they would bridge but instead... well... explosive growth."

[Will]

"I don't really understand quantum," Will admitted, in one of the least surprising comments of all time. "Nor what this EM-field or resonant field pattern actually are. What were you trying to do, and maybe I can help figure out why it went so wrong."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Okay, you said you were missing a deeper connection, yes? I suspected what you might have felt was the connection to your power not just being one way." she says, starting into professor mode even as she's holding her burned hand.

"Normally, powers seem to work by mutations allowing your cells to draw on an energy that normally exists apart from reality. Imagine each of your cells being plugged into a power strip. It provides you with energy formed to make a particular power work. Everyone has their own uniquely shaped plug, so to speak. I believe this is what Samantha's counterpart calls sparks. She looked down the length of the cable and her mind interpreted it as a spot of light shining through."

"Now, obviously there is no physical sign of this. Mutants don't walk around in a cloud of energy unless that's their particular power. This energy exists outside our dimensional boundaries and we can only detect it when it's present in a mutant because we figured out how to pick up on the fluctuations it causes in the quantum state of matter around it. Ripples in a pond after a stone is dropped. Or to get back to our analogy, your cells are the Christmas-lights plugged into the power strip and the light they give of is your power. The fluctuations would be the heat they give off. A ripple in all nearby matter that has patterns unique to each mutant."

"The algorithm let me establish a contextual link between your shifting and a tangible signal of our own, the EM-field, which I could then try to broadcast and tune to the frequency of the unique ripple of your power. And it worked, the source of your power responded in synch with the manipulations of the EM-field and, by extension, you. They simply never merged."

"The uniform quantum state entangles all matter and energy in a very small area to be identical in all ways. Move one particle, all affected particles move the exact same way. As far as the the universe is concerned, according to what we know, quantum-entangled matter and energy is identical. There is no discernable difference. By making particles act exactly the same they become the same for all intents and purposes. I thought if both signals got caught in that it might force them to connect on a forced common ground."

[Will Stanton]

"And instead, it exploded.

Maybe that's because it was trying to connect? But I couldn't, because I was trying to 'connect' to something outside of our dimensional boundaries?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's possible. The algorithm was supposed to be the go-between, help the translation between your physical presence and the outer-dimensional energy. And it did, right up until that point. There was just something... lost in trying to force it through the quantum lock maybe? It did still seem to be directing you to some extent... Feedback loop? Oh! Recursion of an error! Something didn't translate between extra-dimensional and physical and the algorithm got stuck on it." she snaps her finger and immediately winces but doesn't let that detract from her conclusion.

"Of course! It's not just the extra-dimensional manifold that provides contextual processing. It needs the right substrate. The mirror gave it something to be anchored in and trying to repeat the trick with a book gave it the wrong context."

[Will Stanton]

"I'm not sure that's it," Will mused. "Or at least, not all of it. Some of it, for sure, unless you want limbs akimbo all over the place, but..."

"I still think it has something to do with the lack of space. Enter the mirror, and you could walk, and travel, and explore, on and on and on. There was no end to it. Here, though..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Here is limited. I do think it's a substrate but more... conceptually. You're a physical person and quantum fields are not something that hold you very well. There's no theoretical difference between energy and matter but practically it's not that simple. For starters we don't have infinite space."

[Will]

"That does seem to be a pressing problem," Will admitted.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"And trying to force it blew your mass up. Maybe it did kind of work but going between energy and physical mass threw everything of and 'more' was the only thing that survived the translation. Some notion of an enormous mass?"

[Will]

"It was more...just a lack of control. That, I suppose, was the advantage of the mirror -- it gave a place and a framework for all that extra mass to go. Remember, I was taking up...significant portions of the lighthouse before the mirror was first crafted."