11413/Tempus Figgeritout

Tempus Figgeritout
Date of Scene:	05 June 2022
Location:	Meeting Room - GIRL Headquarters
Synopsis:	Iris brings the gang together to start brainstorming ideas on why she's aging faster than normal. Brains have been stormed!
Cast of Characters:	Irie West, Vivian Vision, Nadia Pym-van Dyne, Kaida Connolly, Keli Quintela

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Irie West has posed:
    Iris had been putting off talking to the rest of the GIRL crew about her aging problem for a while now, kind of hoping that going back in the past kind of made the problem resolve itself. Look at how /that/ turned out. So, it was time to pull the trigger. She sent out a general call to all GIRL members to meet her at GIRL HQ to see if they could sort this mess out once and for all.

    She paces back and forth, waiting nervously for the others to arrive. She's got the place decked out for an official GIRL meeting, too. Snacks galore! Popcorn, and cookies, and chips of all kinds. Pizza and soda! All the good stuff that hungry young brains need when brainstorming problems that would make most physicists curl up into a ball and whimper just thinking about.

Vivian Vision has posed:
Given she has no need of sleep or beds Vivian Vision is often found at GIRL when she's not attending school. The closer she is to the computer systems the less lag. And the easier it is to respond when one of the other members comes up with a scheme that might potentially destroy the world and need distracting with home made cupcakes.

Of course today it looks like feeding the team is taken care of. So the synthezoid puts a pause on Project S.P.A.R.K.Y (it's not an acronym it just looks more science-y when you write it that way) and heads into the meeting room.

No bothering with doors. She just phases and walks through the nearest phasing-safe section of wall. It's more time efficient that way.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Since the recent revelation that AIM has likely not only made it to Rann but also cut off communications with and Zeta travel to the planet, Nadia has been spending a lot of time at GIRL's other more secret base in Upstate New York preparing the Tereshkova for another trek to Alpha Centauri and a possible major conflict there. That is, of course, when she hasn't been in Wonderland accidentally becoming the messiah of a cult.

Thankfully though GIRL's secondary base is only a Zeta Beam away. The elevator dings announcing her arrival to the meeting area and out steps Nadia dressed in her mostly form fitting black and red Waspette armor minus the helmet, while wearing her favorite lab coat draped over her shoulders like a cape. "Okay Irie, so what seems to be the problem?" She pauses looking around as if not seeing their young friend. "Irie?" Then she sort of peers at Iris and looks at Vivian. "Where's Irie? Did her older sister come back from the future now, too?"

Kaida Connolly has posed:
"Nope, that's Irie." Kaida states simply put as she casually pulls a piece of pizza on to a plate. She shifts the crust up and starts rolling it along the length of the pizza slice, turning it into a huge pizza roll as she goes. She looks to Nadia.

"Besides having seen it already. Somethings up with her and she needs our help." She casually finishes rolling and starts slicing the rolled up slice into pieces and then looks to Iris.

"If she hadn't brought it up herself, I was gonna..."

Keli Quintela has posed:
    Keli hasn't really met a lot of the GIRL folks, since she's been spending most of her time making sure that she can pass her classes at Happy Harbor. She did just fine, but coming in from another country was nerve-wracking for a bit! But now, here she is, wearing a Titans-branded t-shirt and jeans. She grabs a bag of popcorn and comments, "I should some some of you how to make arepas. Nothing better for figuring out a hard problem than arepas."

    She peers at Irie as Kaida notes that /that's/ Irie. "Ohh do you have magical aging technology too? Can you make me look 18 so I can get a summer internship with Stark Labs?"

Irie West has posed:
    "Ooh! Cupcakes! Thanks Viv!" Even being older can't dull the enthusiasm for cupcakes for Iris. "These are really good!"

    She watches as the others filter in and shakes her head at Nadia. "No. /I'm/ Irie. I have a twin brother, remember? Anyway. Yeah. That problem that I had about suddenly growing older happened," she says. "So if I were to guess, physically I'd be around 25... 26, maybe?"

    She shakes her head, "This happens from time to time to be and my brother. It's why I'm only six years old and I look like..." she gestures to herself from head to food, "Well, like this. I was hoping that it would slow down after being sent back in time, but it doesn't look like it."

    She turns and gives Keli a wave and a smile and shakes her head. "No, no magical aging technology. Well," she amends, "I mean, the Speed Force I guess is kinda magical. We don't really understand it all that well. That's kind of my problem. Me and my brother were gestated and born in the Speed Force so it's kind of a deeper part of me than it is for the other Flashes."

    "I don't know what sets it off, and up until recently me and my brother would age up at the same time, but the past couple of times it was just me." She grins and rubs the back of her head, tousling her red hair, "First time by myself I went from 10 to about 16, and when me and dad were testing out my abilities I got stuck in the Speed Force and landed in the past. Er, your present. And then, in Wonderland, I think eating the shrink me cookies triggered it again, and aged me up." She shakes her head. "That's the only thing I can think of."

    "I've run some calculations and if I keep aging at the rate that I've been going I'll die of old age three years from now." She glances at the assembled members of GIRL, worry clearly evident in her eyes. "I... don't want that to happen. So, yeah. I called in the smartest people I knew and hopefully we can put our big brains together and come up with a way to fix me."

Vivian Vision has posed:
"Do we have any samples of those size change cookies remaining?" Vivian wonders aloud. "Also does everyone consent to be recording the meeting so I can distribute notes at the end? It'll also allow those who can't be here in person to contribute to the research efforts."

She glances around to make sure no-one seems uncomfortable with her suggestion.

"If there is some environmental factor was can isolate it'll perhaps allow us to come up with a strategy to reduce the chance of encountering the trigger. And perhaps offer some clues as to how we can prevent it from happening."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"Keli, if you want to get into Stark Labs I can ask Tony. Or just talk to Caitlin, she works there."

Nadia makes an 'Ohh' face, internally chiding herself for having been too busy and scattered to notice what happened to Irie, and also quietly kicking herself for not getting to this predicament sooner. But then there always seems to be something, whether it is an invasion from a classic children's book, evil science goons from the future, or alien planets in trouble. She pushes those self-recriminations aside though because it is time to help Irie..s..Iris!

"Hmmmm," Nadia settles into a chair with her proverbial thinking cap. "So time as we know it isn't really a thing, or at least it doesn't flow unidirectionally and shares a relationship with Space. Local Time is a concept where time can vary at small scales, this is part of how my micro-lab works and I can get a day of work done while an hour passes here." At this point it is just a stream of physics as she is thinking about loud. "The drives of the Tereshkova are unique, they don't work like anything Val's Dad made, rather I took a theory my father came up with and managed to implement creating Pym Fields which can expand and contract Space/Time. It could be possible, purely theoretical, to wrap Irie in Pym Fields and alter her own flow of space/time as she approaches the speed of light." For the sake of her equations Nadia is just assuming Irie can achieve Light Speed, she doesn't actually know how fast Flashes go. "Perhaps we could even use Pym Fields to isolate this 'Speed Force' she talks about."

Kaida Connolly has posed:
"Or, and just hear me out here, we try not to capture an entire force of nature inside of a single field." Kaida originally thought maybe Nadia thought just a portion of it but then she realized it is Nadia and she might really be considering capturing what is a force of nature. Maybe even beating it up. These things are unclear.

"However, I am interested in blood samples, tissue samples, and the like!" Kaida nods her head, "I can use that to see what kind of biochemical interactions are taking place, at what pace, and perhaps why things are sped up." She casually downs one of her pizza roll bites before looking to the others briefly and then back to Nadia.

"I do like the idea of looking into relativity and how Iris's own flow of time is happening in relative to others discounting for distance from the center of large gravitation fields." Kaida then blinks and stops, "Hmm, gravity and the speed force..."

Keli Quintela has posed:
    Keli frowns worriedly but deposits herself in a chair with her bag of popcorn. "I mean I was going to go to the Hall of Justice but I don't even think they do internships. I... mmf. Not important right now!" She tosses some popcorn into her mouth, as if to stop herself going on about the subject.

    "So ummm... pretty simple question, maybe, but... how do you Flashes /not/ age differently than everyone else anyway? I mean, I'm guessing the 'Speed Force' means you're not really subject to relativistic problems, y'know, 'go near the speed of light and you age more slowly.' You're not really 'moving faster' in the normal sense." She nods over to Nadia. "Like, if she's approaching the speed of light she'd be experiencing /less/ than we do. Time would be slowing, for her. But like... you move faster than everyone else and you /experience/ it, which is kind of inverse to relativity, so I'd think then you'd age faster normally /anyway/. Right?"

Irie West has posed:
    "I consent," Iris tells Vivian with a certain nod. "I don't think we saved any of those cookies," she says sadly. "Would have been neat to keep some around, but it's from Wonderland so trying to apply logic to them would probably be impossible."

    She reaches out and snags a couple of slices of pizza, "There didn't seem to be a common factor when it was just me and my brother aging up," she says thoughtfully. "Though stress might be a factor. I was... kind of kidnapped and bound when it happened the first time, which was emotional kind of stress, and maybe something about how Wonderland shrunk me put the right kind of stress to trigger it, too, though I've been shrunk before, thanks to Nadia."

    She watches as Nadia starts thinking aloud and purses her lips thoughtfully. "I don't know if I can reach the speed of light, to be honest," she says, taking a huge bite out of her pizza. "I mean, the last time I tried testing my upper limit I ended up sending myself back in time and I don't really wanna do that again."

    She nods at Kaida, "I kind of figured as much. You can have as much blood and tissue as you want. I'd be really interested to see what you find out." She reaches out and grabs some salt and vinegar potato chips and crumbles them on top of her pizza before taking another bite. "Mm. Better. I've been doing as much research as I can on relativity and kind of see how my own experiences with the Speed Force interacts with it and..." she shakes her head. "I'm smart, but I'm not /that/ smart."

    "As far as anybody can tell, the Speed Force interacts with space/time in a non-relativistic way," Iris says to Keli. "When we use it, it kind of envelops us to protect us from things like friction and that kind of thing. It's like it brings its own environment with it that can sustain us. We can extend this envelope to things that we carry. I do it all the time with Mads, and Bart and his rickshaw."

    "Speaking of which, if you need controls, I'm sure that dad and Bart would be more than happy to volunteer."

Vivian Vision has posed:
"Well if we think about it logically her metabolic rate must be thousands of times faster than any other Human," Vivian points out with a shrug. "To achieve even a fraction of light speed requires more energy than a Human form should really be able to generate even over multiple lifetimes. Even if she experienced less time than everyone else her cells should be dying at a staggering rate."

"Something strange must be going wrong or she'd simply combust generating all the energy she in theory needs to move like that." She frowns as a portion of her mind uploads all the relevant GIRL records for the topics being discussed and routes the information to projected holographic screens for everyone. "Let alone reach the point at which she should worry about forces like friction."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia taps her chin as she continues to think, and her fingers begin to fly across the keyboard of one of the stations around the table as she brings up what looks like a more sophisticated version of AutoCad and begins designing a machine in real time while simultaneously sending bucketloads of calculations to GIRL's Quantum Mainframe to crunch. "QUINN, give me a hand with this data please." She asks GIRL's resident Quantum Intelligence.

What takes shape on the screens is a sort of chamber with a number of field emitters to create a sort of containment via Pym Particles in their field state. "That is a very good point Kaida, we should probably conduct this experiment in space in order to avoid gravitational issues."

Keli Quintela has posed:
    "Well I wonder if..." Keli hums a bit, spinning her chair around one way and then back around the other. "I wonder if /maaaaybe/ all that extra aging you should be doing because of faster metabolism or extra time spent in the Speed Force or whatever... I wonder if the Speed Force kinda protects you from that, usually? And then maybe it's... not, and a whole big burst of aging happens at once?"

    She frowns, chewing on some popcorn. "That seems like a hypothesis to test with samples and stuff. Unless I'm /way/ off-base, but if the Speed Force protects you from friction and relativistic time dilation, why not aging too? I mean, if so, that would imply that your connection to the Speed Force is being interfered with when you do the rapid aging, which would mean we need to either make sure it stays stable or put something in place like an extra layer of insulation."

Irie West has posed:
    Iris looks uncertainly at Viv. "I don't know about /thousands/," she says. "I mean, I /do/ eat more than most people, but all speeders tend to do that. I mean, pound for pound, I think Kaida eats more than I do." She shakes her head, "I don't think it's /me/ that's generating all the energy. I think what's happening is that I'm channeling the Speed Force which is what is providing the energy. I'm just the conduit for it."

    Nadia gets her looking a bit nervous though. "Um. I don't think I can run very good in space. I have to, you know, touch the ground and everything. And I sort of have to breathe, too."

    She crunches away on her pizza as she listens to Keli speak. "I don't know... If that was the case, you'd think that being enveloped in the Speed Force would keep you from being slightly pregnant to babies in under ten minutes."

Vivian Vision has posed:
Vivian hums, deep in thought, then finally replies "Even so if you try conduct energy through something it gets hot. Just like electricity going through a wire. If the speed force is somehow shielding you from things like ageing it brings up a few possible causes."

One of her subroutines puts in an order for more coffee. This research session is likely to require an industrial level of caffeine.

She holds up a finger. "Hypothesis one. Your connection to the speed force could be cutting out. Causing the shielding effect to reduce which results in sudden onset ageing when you use your power."

A second finger is raised "Hypothesis two. The speed force usually takes the timeflow on your behalf but the process is reversing for some reason. In which case even if you never use your power again it could still make your age change."

"Hypothesis three. You're not actually getting older. Your body could have become temporally unstuck and you're actually swapping with yourself at some point in the future or even the past. Which is pretty unlikely as you would presumably have memory transfer but it'd be good to do the math to rule it out."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"Not in the vacuum of space!" Nadia laughs. Though it was probably a good point to clarify with her. "On the Tereshkova! We can fit the field generator into the cargo hold. We don't need you to actually get anywhere when you run, so Zero G is likely ideal beyond just calculations. There will be plenty of air to breath. I promise."

By this point Nadia has already blue printed a prototype for a containment field generator and moved on to something more theoretical that begins taking shape on another screen, "I wonder... if a localized Pym Field could constrain a Space/Time bubble around you and keep you from further temporal dilations..." At the same time one hand reaches over to another keyboard and absently makes notes of the various hypotheses being put forth.

Kaida Connolly has posed:
A hurry and Kaida considers all the things said before shaking her head. She eats another bite of food.

"A lot of this is going above my head. Not truly my area of expertise. Biochemistry and honestly biology and chemistry are not this exciting. I am going to need samples to move forward." She nods her head and shrugs.

Keli Quintela has posed:
    Keli nods rapidly to Vivian. "Yeah! Yeah that's all /great/ ideas! And we really ought to rule out that last one, y'know, 'cause... just in case and all."

    With samples being planned to be procured and experiments being pondered, she moves on to her best field: engineering. "We've also got to consider... okay can you just project the Pym Field from uhh, I dunno, a bracer or something? Would it show up like a forcefield? Do we make Irie a new suit? Ohhh, we could make you a new super suit!"

Irie West has posed:
    Iris nods along with Viv as she ticks off the three hypothesis. "Those make a lot of sense," she says. "Well, except for that last one. That seems particularly farfetched, and I just can't see how that would work at all."

    She grabs some popcorn and watches as Nadia works. "Right, but would I just be flailing my arms and legs out in space? Would you build a treadmill? How would I even stay /on/ the treadmill in zero G?" Aaaand Nadia is off in her own little world.

    "I don't know, Kaida. I think it's worth taking a look and seeing what's happening biologically. That might be a more practical approach than shooting me up in space and wrapping me in strange Pym fields. Maybe poke some cells and see if that triggers anything?"

    The subject of a new suit gets her to light up, though. "Oh! I /have/ a new costume! One that fits!" She zooms out of the room and is gone for, like, five seconds before zooming back, wearing her new costume. It's a more mature theme with black introduced with the yellow and reds, with a lightning motif emblazoned down the sides of her legs and her chest. Over it is a leather jacket that Donna had given her, and on her hands are a pair of red gloves. She's got a yellow half mask over her face, with a cutout for her red hair to flow out of, and a pair of red goggles to pull the whole thing together. "See?"

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"Huh?! What? Oh right, ummm we could rig a harness? Oooh a treadmill that could be neat, maybe with magnetic adhesion to keep you on it!" Nadia was clearly intent on the Zero G flailing though with every new idea her mind takes off in new directions racing fast enough to give the Speed Force a run for it's money.

Nadia ooooohs at the new suit. "I love it! Very stylish! Janet would definitely approve! If you want it augmented though, just let me know! Anyway! I think we have some good leads to go on for now, Keli and I have some engineering to do." She just sort of volunteers Keli to help her. "And you and Kaida should get those samples taken. Anyone else have anything to add?"

Kaida Connolly has posed:
"I don't have anything else until I get samples. I'll need to run it through all possibilities and I may need your help later, Nadia, to try to do some of your ideas on a smaller scale as we really not only need to check the biochemical make up of teh samples but also under various conditions." Kaida nods before smiling at Iris and leaping over to beside her and patting her arm.

"We'll get this all figured out in no time and have you, well, back to whatever normal is." She grins and winks.

Keli Quintela has posed:
    "Ohhhh, /nice/," Keli says to the new outfit. "A good superhero outfit is a big deal. I love it!"

    She leans forward to grab a piece of pizza and says, "We'll fix this, Irie! And you won't turn into an old woman. /Please/ don't turn into an old woman, at least not before I can teach you to make arepas." She grins at Irie.