Where There's a Will, There's a Mess

[Narrator]

Sometime after the explosion, there's an arrhythmic pounding on the door to the lab Ashlie had been using.

[Ashlie Minamida]

The workshop is still at medium-disaster following the Will-splosion. Ashlie has fixed the burned out wiring and cleaned up the worst of it but is not double-checking some of her other projects, stripping length of deformed metal from some kind of tubular array.

"Come in!" she calls, trying to keep her frustration to a minimum. It's rare that she struggles this much with even the fundamental approach to a problem and trying to focus on something else has not yielded the desired results of distracting her enough to disengage from the issue and attack it from a fresh angle.

[Samantha McManus]

Sam walks into the lab, looking pained and a bit unsteady.

"Headmistress, and I'm saying this with the utmost respect and courtesy, but what the hell have you been doing in here?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Toying with fundamental forces that are - apparently - beyond my ken." she mutters loud enough to hear, followed by slapping down a several feet long metal strip, bend and crooked in multiple places. "Or to be more specific, blowing Will out of proportion in an attempt to restore some ephemeral connection to a larger whole."

She turns around to face Sam. "You know, at first I thought Will's peculiarities about their shifting are psychosomatic. That it works how they think it works because they're capable of almost anything. But I've run the data on the remains of this experiment..." she says, gesturing at a gathered up pile of debris. "And I'm beginning to think I'm wrong. They don't break Physics, the fundamental rules of reality work differently for them. Perhaps for every mutant."

[Samantha McManus]

"Whatever you've been up to, I felt it, and it felt... well, wrong."

"Ephemeral connections tend to be... well, just my life, aye?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Presumably because it didn't work. Or maybe you, like that whole layer of reality, objects to the scientific method on principle."

She draws in a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh.

"I tried to translate Will's shifting into an electro-magnetic field and force a direct interaction with Spark Space."

[Samantha McManus]

"So you tried to do what Conduit did. Which was... well, it was bad to begin with."

"Look, I know you're not going to sign on to what I think it is. I get it. All that shite was kind of walled off from you before you... well, you're made of meat now. I can kind of, almost reach your mind now."

Now that Sam's this close there's a bit of a whiff of whiskey on her breath.

"But okay. Science. Science, science, science. This space is hard to reach on your own. It's like a mindscape, but... not. Telepaths can kind of brush up against it, but to really get their hands in they need someone who can get there on their own. Someone like me."

"And this is... well, it's an important place, even if we don't agree on what makes it important. It's necessary, so is it that strange to think that people would emerge in the population to be able to do that? To bridge that, and to help things get back if they get lost here among all the meat?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie quirks an eyebrow at Sam's rambling.

"So what you're saying is that your natural affinity for this place is better suited to interact with it than machines. Because you're 'meant' to. I'd posit that none of this is 'necessary' but a side-effect of unobserved-quantum-states coming into contact with human believes and interpretations, but... truth be told, it doesn't matter what came first, chicken or egg. It has taken on a life of it's own since perhaps the beginning of time."

"Regardless, I can't imagine that you're meant to facilitate things in this direction. Disentangling a quantum-field signal from dead 'meat', sure. Let's assume that for a moment and ignore the fact that it would mean we're this close to being able to measure and quantify a 'soul'. Ensuring the dead move on to whatever lies beyond is a great deal different than coaxing 'the divine spark' into the meat to begin with. You frown at what I did here, but that's just as nebulously blasphemous."

[Samantha McManus]

"Look I'm not... I'm not here to read you the riot act. I'm not choosing to call it wrong, or blasphemy or..."

"It just feels that way. It feels like forcing something a way it doesn't want to go. It's wrong in a way that I can't seem to tune out or ignore. And believe me, I've tried when those feelings come on."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Is that where the whiskey came in?"

[Samantha McManus]

"That was more... well, Will's hurting and I don't know how to help. Miriam and I tried, and I could tell he was trying to be polite and all, but something's wrong, isn't it? Or he wouldn't have come to you."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"He didn't. Not directly anyway. I noticed them holding a meeting of sorts in one of the empty workshops."

"But yes, apparently the shape you two put him in isn't conducive to reabsorbing or dispatching them. I think it was more desperation that led them to agree with my idea. And as far as I can tell it's not a subconscious block or anything you did wrong. It just doesn't work with a book." she shrugs slightly. "Wrong metaphor, they basically said? But I'm starting to think it's more than that. His shape doesn't inform his capabilities based on what he thinks, reality literally works that way for him. How that makes sense in regards to things subject to interpretation I couldn't possibly tell. Why does his power work the way it does? How does a reactive quantum energy decide a mirror works but a book doesn't?" she shrugs almost dramatically.

[Samantha McManus]

"Metaphors... well, they're important. And when so much is optional for him, and he's very literal with his metaphors... well, it could be just that."

"A book's... a catalogue. A chronicle. You can add to it, you can tear pages out, but it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. An order. Everything's always on the same page as before so you can find it."

"But a mirror is whatever you put in front of it. It can warp what it reflects, refract it, change it, but if you don't like what you see in it that's more on you than on it."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I understand the logic. It makes sense. And if it was down to Will and just an inherent block, like humans not being able to make their muscles snap their bones despite the fact that it's physically possible? Sure, that follows. But I think for him it's more than that. It's almost an immutable fact, like gravity. It's not his interpretation. At least not just."

"Who decides what interpretation applies? That's what drives me crazy about all this super-natural mumbo-jumbo. I won't deny it's existence and even importance. But how does something have such coherent rules based on things that have no 'right' answer? No solid foundation?"

[Samantha McManus]

"But nothing prevented us from turning him into a mirror, or a book, or... well, you loading him into your infinite Will sausage making machine... no offense."

"So it's not that he can't be those things, he just doesn't know how to wrap his head around how to use certain things, aye?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"That's what I'm saying, I don't believe he's lacking the knowledge or willpower to make the book work. I think it literally can't."

"Let me put it this way. Can you turn yourself into a chair? Do you think any amount of training or outside force could convince you and your power that you could? There's hard lines in each power and they seem to be non-negotiable. Even for someone as malleable as Will. He's just someone who has pushed so hard and so deep into his power that those lines begin to stand out as the not-quite-arbitrary limitations that they are."

[Samantha McManus]

"Honestly we wanted to try to just make him a mirror again at first, but our visitor really did a number on the mental construct and we had to, you know, do a controlled demolition and start again. Then, once we'd knocked down the walls he was... well, there was more of him in there than the last time we tried this. It was hard to corral him and think on our feet at the same time."

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie nods.

"If it helps, the one part of this experiment that worked is an algorithm that was able to sort out influences on his shifting. It might make the sheer amount of impulses vying for expression more manageable. All we need to do is submerge him in Cerebra. It wouldn't even be that much of a rework of the system, I used large parts of it's codebase to begin with."

[Samantha McManus]

"Did he say what worked particularly about the mirror? We didn't really have the luxury of that when we dumped him into a book."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"In terms of metaphor? Only vaguely. More broadly, he said the imposed structure helped him focus on other things and it held some kind of space in which all of him could exist. I suspect that had to do with the strong connection to something larger, but it's hard to tell. He called it the inside of the mirror so even if it was a pocket dimension or curved into Spark Space itself I think ultimately it was part of him. I think the space created itself in response to the frame leaving it the only option to expand into, but that's assuming everything else lines up correctly."

[Samantha McManus]

"And we don't want a bestiary of Wills. Too confining?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Too separate. Distinct pages were the biggest issue, I believe. He stressed that it's not separate versions of Will but that they're all him. One united whole."

[Samantha McManus]

"So a big bunch of... Will soup, in there."

She's clearly still a bit inebriated, but she's thinking on this.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"My initial idea was to try and retrofit Cerebra. Focus whatever 'connection' I might be able to determine inwards with the psi-panels and let my algorithm parse it into instructions. Too abstract to work, it would seem, but proverbially cooking the book in Cerebra Fluid may well work, but then you end up with primordial soup that still needs shaping."

[Samantha McManus]

"Well there was... you know, a thing with Will. And soup. Or more, cauldrons. A recurring theme. It's how we restored his powers, once."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I remember people breaking into the Royal Mint. I couldn't possibly know who that was or that they shredded millions of pounds of currency right here in this room."

[Samantha McManus]

"Aye, we've had to do some pretty insane things to put him to rights, but this one was... well, it was a bit more personal."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Yes, I had the pleasure of meeting Roland in the past. Of course, this might be precisely the thing he was worried about happening."

[Samantha McManus]

"I think we can agree what he had in mind... isn't an option, aye?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Of course not. But here you are, suggesting a... mythologically inspired approach while we have an unexplained tunnel to a more folkloric dimension sitting in our estuary. If an upheaval and unleashing of an 'age of gods' were to happen, this is certainly a confluence of factors that are well behind our ability to predict. All I'm saying is that perhaps we both need to be careful with the ground we tread on here."

[Samantha McManus]

"And I guess I'm... somewhat suspect myself, on that front?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You've proven yourself plenty trustworthy, Samantha. But I can't ignore the fact that you walked off with that strange young woman amicably and a section of forest ends up leveled. Not to mention the titans manifested by another version of you. I don't think you have any ill intent, especially when it comes to Will, and I'd be a hypocrite to hold any potential against you but this is precarious ground and I am too far out of my depth to determine how much or in what ways this could go wrong."

"I suppose what I'm trying to get to is whether you think we run any risk of any truly catastrophic consequences."

[Samantha McManus]

"I mean we absolutely want to talk to him... maybe even all of him to make sure we're headed in the right direction. But we're already in a bit of a catastrophe, aren't we?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"On a personal scale, certainly. Let's make sure it doesn't go beyond that." she says, nodding towards the door. "I believe most of them are still occupying Workshop 3 down the hall, let's see what they think."

[Samantha McManus]

"Worst they can say is 'no,' I suppose." She sighs, and heads that way.