17176/SCIENCE, Magic and Cereal

SCIENCE, Magic and Cereal
Date of Scene:	13 February 2024
Location:	Main Room - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	Donna, Nadia, and Irie all happen to meet in the main room of the tower, where the intersection of magic and SCIENCE! is discussed.
Cast of Characters:	Irie West, Nadia Pym-van Dyne, Donna Troy
Tinyplot:	The Four Treasures

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Irie West has posed:
    It's getting on in the evening, and Irie has gotten tired of doing homework. She thought it was bad enough with high school, but college is a whole other matter! So it's distraction time! She's currently sitting in front of the, let's face it, ludicrously huge screen that's in the living area sitting cross legged on the sofa with a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal in her lap, while watching some old cheesy 50s scifi film that happens to have a silhouette of a guy and two robots in front making snarky remarks.

    She's dressed in her lazy day wear: Yellow sweatpants and socks, an oversized tee with the Flash logo emblazoned on it (She has a ton of these. She gets a discount at the Flash Museum.) and her hair is pulled up into a high ponytail.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    The elevator ride up from the secure Zeta facility in the subterranean levels of the tower takes no time at all. Even when exploring deep space in the name of SCIENCE! one can only go without pizza or Caitlin's baked goods for so long. It is fortunate then that the Tereshkova has a mobile Zeta facility of its own allowing its crew to beam back to Earth in the case of just such a hunger emergency.

    The elevator doors slide open and Nadia steps into the common room. Having just been aboard her ship, she's still wearing the cool and stylish Space version of her Waspette bodysuit, minus the helmet. What exactly the difference is, save perhaps for minor adjustments to the color scheme, remains unclear but it certainly accomplishes looking cool.

    "Oh, hi Irie! How is school going?" She asks as she walks across the common room area to raid the Titans refrigerator.

Donna Troy has posed:
    Nadia's appearance at the tower pings an alert to Donna's T-Com. Nadia has been away a little while and Donna wanted to talk to her about something -- not urgently enough to interrupt her on her space-going mission, but enough to giver her an alert when Nadia uses the Tower's zeta pad to return.

    Thus only a few moments after Nadia arrives in the main room, so does Donna -- carrying a gong. Not a large and exciting one, but a small table-top sized gong. "Hey Nadia! How was the trip? Hey Irie!" she calls out as she crosses over to the breakfast counter and sets the gong up there.

    Leaving the mystery musical instrument for a moment she walks over behind Irie, ruffles her hair, and steals a Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bomb from Irie's bowl with her fingers.

Irie West has posed:
    Irie cranes her neck when the door of the elevator wooshes open to see who it is, and a wide grin spreads on her face when she sees who it is. "Nadia!" And then, "Donna!" as she arrives shortly after. She squinches her eyes shut as she gets her hair ruffled.

    "Oh, you know. It's a lot of busywork for the most part," she says with a long sigh. "It'll be a couple of years before we really get into the fun stuff. But, you know, you gotta get those credits in the fundamentals before they let you //do// the fun stuff." She makes a face, "That and you gotta do those writing classes." She shakes her head. "I think the thing I learned the most in high school was that sometimes you just have to do the boring things."

    "How about you?" she asks, unfolding herself from the couch and bringing the bowl of cereal to the kitchen area, setting it down next to the gong. "How's it going in space?"

    She stares at the gong, takes a spoonful of her cereal, then looks up at Donna. Then back at the gong. "I'm gonna ring the gong. It's not going to, like, open up a door to hell or anything, right?

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia's progress towards the kitchen pauses as she turns to wave at the sound of Donna's voice. "Hi Donna!" She calls back with a bright smile. "It's going well. Doing some science, occasionally ducking the Lanterns who hate fun and interesting research." Especially when the interesting research is into how their powers work. "Are you taking up music?"

    She listens to Irie, expression going from understanding to skeptical. "Why would they do that? If you're already ready it makes no sense. I may never understand the regular education system." She shakes her head. "Space is good, lots to explore and research. Though hopefully we'll be back soon. The baked goods in space just don't measure up."

Donna Troy has posed:
    "The education system here is designed to cater to everyone, so it caters to nobody," Donna declares. She's clearly siding with both Irie and Nadia on this one! "I do understand that trying to educate fifteen million people at a time makes things harder than it was for my instructors who only had a single student to worry about, but they should certainly make more of an effort to modify things to suit each student."

    "I only did a year of high school in America myself though, and... well. My experience was not exactly conventional. There were areas where I were years ahead of what was expected of someone my age, and others where I was years behind. Well, perhaps we can arrange some extra lessons for you after school so you can get to do that fun stuff early hmm, Irie?"

    Donna gives Irie a wink. She doesn't imagine Irie will be too keen on the idea after all.

    "It's not music, it's magic," Donna tells Nadia with a grin. "Actually I was hoping to talk to you about it, because it's potentially magic that you could science, and that would be very useful." As she talks she takes a small red gem amulet on a silver chain from her jacket pocket, and places it on the breakfast counter in front of the gong. From the back pocket of her jeans, she takes a small gong mallet and hands it to Irie. "No portals to any of the hells, no. It will make the amulet resonate with an odd light when it's struck though. Go ahead."

Irie West has posed:
    "Well, I mean, not everybody's a super genius like you," Irie says, waving a spoon at her friend, "who doesn't even /need/ to go to school to be a super scientist. I think, really, it's just to make sure that everybody's on the same page when they get to the higher levels." She nods as Donna agrees with her. "Besides. I'm gonna need a real solid understanding of Relativity before I understand how the Speed Force is able to give it a swirly."

    "Yeah. High School was kinda awkward for me, too, at first," she admits. "Because, as much as I love my mom and dad, homeschooling me in between adventures left and with our accelerated aging, they kinda wasn't able to cover everything. They did their best though."

    She watches as Donna pulls out the amulet and sets it down. "Odd light?" she asks, taking the small mallet into her hand. "Oooh, this'll be interesting." She reaches over and gives the gong a good solid *thwack*. GOOONNNNNGGGG

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Delicious baked goods and whatever else might currently be in the Titans' refrigerator is forgotten for now, as Nadia instead makes her way over to examine the small gong. "I thought you didn't think magic could be Scienced?" Nadia gives Donna a curious look. Not that it's stopped her from trying, even if the Color theory proved questionable.

    "I went to school, sort of. There was just a lot of added 'survival' training, and the academic side was mostly basic instruction in how to do research and then throwing as much raw information at us as we could handle and letting us do whatever experiments we could imagine. That way there was more time for combat and espionage skills and they could weaponize our ideas... still that singularity grenade was pretty cool." Her tangent is interrupted by the ringing of the gong and she looks towards the amulet to observe the forementioned odd light.

Donna Troy has posed:
    As promised, as soon as the gong is rung, the amulet shines with a reddish light that seems to flicker with the resonance of the gong. Donna picks it up by the chain and moves it further away from the gong and closer again, the brightness of the light increasing and decreasing a little with the distance.

    Donna flashes Irie a grin, sharing a little of the young speedster's enthusiasm in her gong-striking task. "You know Irie, you skipped a good few years of school if you think about it. You struggled a little at Happy Harbor at first but you got into the swing of things and got caught up pretty fast. When you consider that your fellow students had been going to school near ten years longer than you at the time, you did amazingly well, and clearly your parents did a great job of covering quite a lot more than most kids would know in that amount of time. Of course now I know who your mom is, that comes as no surprise."

    There's a revelation for Nadia!

    "Science is reductive in a way magic simply is not," Donna tells Nadia. "Science is understanding the way reality works when it is left to its own devices. Magic is how reality is impacted by will. That's why you'll never be able to fit magic neatly into the umbrella of science, but that's not the same thing as saying you can't Science it. The effects of magic on reality can often me measured. This light, for example, must be some kind of radiation. Perhaps it is simple electromagnetic radiation in the visible wavelength, just light. Perhaps it is something more. I'm hoping it's something more, that you could measure scientifically and detect from a distance.

    The echoes of the gong finally die down to inaudibility, and the light from the amulet dies too. Donna returns the amulet to her pocket. "The gong is a magical artifact I brought from Themyscira. It reacts in this way to traces of Fae magic, which the amulet has. If you recall we have a few fae artifacts to locate, and they could be anywhere. I am hoping that if this is producing some unique and measurable radiation rather than just colored light, it's something that would be possible to locate from a long range. If so, we could perhaps come up with locations of the missing three Fae treasures, and at least get their general location."

Irie West has posed:
    Irie grins back at Donna. "Oh, I wasn't complaining. Not really, anyway. They taught me a lot of really important things that they don't really teach you in school. Like how to tie a good knot, and which knot to use for which occasion. I mean. Sometimes all you got is a good length of rope. How else are you going to tie up bad guys for the cops to come get?"

    She watches in fascination as the amulet lights up, and Donna demonstrating how it interacts with the gong. She gets a spoonful of cereal into her and starts chewing thoughtfully. "Could be some kind of magical piezoelectrical effect. Piezomagical? Like, there's a stored charge of magical energy in the crystal, and the gongs vibrations are causing it to release some of it due to the oscillating pressure." She purses her lips thoughtfully, "You could always test it by hitting it with the mallet. See if the sudden compression causes a large disch..." she blinks as she realizes what she was saying. "I mean. No. Don't hit it with the mallet to see if it'll explode. Let's not do that."

    Shifty look left. Shifty look right. "At least not in the kitchen. Cait would kill us."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia watches the entire display thoughtfully. "It could be radiation, I mean it could be quantumly entangled photons or something similar also. But even if its just light there's likely some exchange of waves, even light has an electric field component. The question would be what kind of waves Fae magic uses, or if it is perhaps some novel form entanglement." The gears are turning in her brain, clearly this is going to require EXPERIMENTS! Hitting it with a mallet to see if it will explode is definitely added to the list of potential experiments.

    "I'm not supposed to experiment in the kitchen ever since I destroyed Dad's in a largescale chocolate explosion while making brownies... Experiments should be done in laboratories." She says the last part as if quoting her father and possibly Caitlin and Bobbie as well.

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna winces at Irie's talk of bashing the amulet. "Okay, just to make this clear up from. The amulet is borrowed, and we need to give it back /unharmed/ to the person who nicely let us take temporary charge of it. It is a... family heirloom for him, as well as being an immensely valuable antique. It is also /at the same time/ currently in some very arcane way we haven't figured out the Stone of Destiny, one of the four great treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan. It is not to be beaten with mallets, even soft padded gong mallets. It is not to be destructively tested. It is also not to leave the tower for now, not least because if it does so it will exit the area of effect of a spell Raven has cast and may become visible to the bad Fae that are hunting it down. Ideally that's something we should avoid."

    "However Nadia, we can take this down to lab to have that radiation, entangled photons, or whatever it is measured. If it's feasible to create a detector that can detect this radiation from long range, then by hitting the gong and comparing the frequency of any detections to the frequency of the gong sound, hopefully we can identify where on the planet the remaining three treasures are." Donna flashes Nadia a grin. "It may not be Sciencing the magic /exactly/, but it would be combining science and magic, and that sounds like fun right?"

    Donna's grin grows a little bit wider. "I've seen your father's kitchen, Nadia. You should have gone for a more conventional explosion rather than a chocolate explosion. It could only have made the place tidier."

Irie West has posed:
    "I mean, yeah. Of course," Irie says sheepishly. "No hitting borrowed magical artifacts with blunt instruments, no matter how well padded they are." She chews slowly on a mouthful of cereal as she tries to brain something more useful into being. "Do different frequencies change the color of the glow? Oh! Play some disco at it and see what it does!"

    She considers Donna's suggestion about how to find the other treasures seriously, though. "How do we know that the other treasures give off the same magical radiation? What were the other ones?" She squinches her eyes in thought. "A bowl or a cup of some kind? A sword? Or was it a spear. Aannnd. One other."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia makes an 'oh well' snapping motion with her left hand as all experiments related to hammers or testing the physical durability or explosive properties of the amulet are taken off the table by Donna. "Stone of Destiny? /That/ sounds interesting." A few other ideas popping into her head. "Isn't Danaan a yogurt brand?" Though she does seem to agree avoiding the wrath of bad fae is probably for the best.

    She does grin when Donna says they can take it down to the lab, a few extra tests won't hurt right? If it can alter Destiny maybe it will have some effect on the junctures that split the parallel realities spawned by different choices off from each other...

    "Combining them is also interesting!" Nadia agrees. "That's what Dr. von Doom does! Oh hey disco, we should try that."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna stares at Nadia thoughtfully for a little while, and blinks a couple of times. Nadia has grown up a lot in the years since she joined the team, but she's still Nadia. There are still some special Nadia-only things that you just don't have to deal with when talking to anyone else.

    "Yes," Donna says. "It's a yogurt brand. As well as being the gods of the Fae, the Tuatha de Danaan were famous yogurt-makers. The yogurt company probably named it after them." She says this with a straight face, maybe she means it?

    "The gong was created to disclose fae magic, and the artifacts are very powerful fae magic Irie. Obviously the magician who originally created it wanted to determine if things close by were fae magic, and would have simply looked for the light. We've already discovered that if the gong is sounded on the roof, there's a visible glow from the amulet even if it's in the sub basement. Hopefully the effect just gets lesser for things even further away, and with a sensor specifically designed to pick up this particular energy we'll be able to sound the gong and scan for the faintest of sources at much greater distances. Ideally hooking it in to a satellite so that we can scour the planet if necessary for the sword, the spear..." she gives Irie a nod. "And the cauldron. They won't actually look exactly like that though. They have had their magical essence transferred to conceptually similar mortal objects."

    "I don't think that a gong is really the right instrument for playing disco though," Donna adds with a smirk. "Honestly, I think just striking the gong should do the trick."

Irie West has posed:
    Irie scowls and pulls out her phone. "There has *got* to be a disco song out there that uses a gong..." she mutters, doing a quick search. After going through a couple of results and not coming up with anything she sighs, disappointed. "Okay. No disco, then."

    "Ah, well," she says putting her phone down. "I honestly think if you're going to scour the world trying to find these objects based on their resonance to the gong... you're gonna need a bigger gong. //And// you'll need to find a way to distinguish whatever hits you get from the artifacts that we're looking for from //other// non-related fae artifacts that are out there in the world. There's got to be more than just this."

    She shakes her head. "Or maybe there aren't. I don't know. I'm not good at this magic stuff."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    "I should ask Janet, if anyone can score some authentic divine yogurt, it's her!" Nadia replies, at least seemingly taking Donna's words at face value. She then looks in Irie's direction, still contemplative. "Not necessarily. You would just need to amplify the output of the gong. Which could easily be another avenue for experimentation, whether it is the sound that carries the waves, or other specific vibrations, or something else entirely which needs to be amplified to trigger the magic at extreme range. I mean with the right setup we might even be able to make use of a satellite network like Donna said to both amplify the broadcast and detect the responses globally. But we'd still need to isolate what it is that causes the effect first in order to amplify it that way. Once the core mechanism is known though, it isn't that far fetched to be able to enhance it through various technological solutions."

Donna Troy has posed:
    "There may be no necessity to amplify it at all," Donna says. "That's something we're going to have to experiment with. I'd guess the gong is creating some kind of vibration beyond simply the sound that is causing the artifacts to glow, so it may reach far further than the sound reaches. "

    "Though even sound can be detected by sufficiently sensitive instruments far further than human hearing can detect it. The range of sound is really kind of the point that your ears, or microphone, is no longer able to differentiate between the small amount of sound reaching it and background noise. If the radiation caused by the gong is something unique, there may be virtually no background noise."

    "So I'd suggest detection rather than amplification should be our first angle of attack. If we're able to /see/ the effect, we know it's measurable. That's something science can handle. Amplifying the effect though, that may be something only more magic could do."

    Donna gives Irie a nod. "Yes, it's true. There will be a fair few Fae artifacts on Earth. However if we compare detections from the gong being sounded in several different locations, we'll be able to get a fairly accurate reading not just of location but strength of the signal. The Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan are going to be the biggest sources."

Irie West has posed:
    Irie finishes the crunchy part of the cereal and now has moved on to slurping up the cereal milk. "Alright. Makes sense. I mean, as long as they're not in some kind of led lined box or something."

    She finally finishes off her late night snack, and goes to the sink to rinse it off and put it in the washer and lets out a long sigh. "I have to get back to my room and finish my homework. I've put it off for too long."

    She goes up to Donna and gives her a big ole hug. "I'm sure you all will figure something out. Just say the word and I'll be there to help. Night, Auntie Donna!" She turns and gives Nadia an enthusiastic wave, "Night Nadia!" And with that she makes her way up the stairs to the girls dorms where her room is at.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia's original quest for baked goods is all but forgotten now. She nods in agreement with Donna. "If we can't detect it, we won't know what to amplify, so that makes sense. I'll go get some things set up in the lab." She's now walking towards the elevator again. She'll need to get back to the ongoing space mission eventually, but for right now there's SCIENCE to do! MAGIC SCIENCE! "Take care Irie!" She gives a wave to the departing Speedster.

Donna Troy has posed:
    "We'll just have to hope there are no lead-lined boxes involved," Donna replies with a laugh. Irie's hug is returned with interest -- Irie gets lifted off the ground and spun around a bit, but Donna's careful with her hugs. At least when it's not Kara, Caitlin or her sisters on the receiving end.

    Donna has decided she quite likes the whole 'Auntie Donna' thing. There are probably more ice cream and shopping trips in Irie's near future.

    Once Irie has headed upstairs to finish her homework, Donna gives Nadia a grin and a nod. "I'll bring the gong and amulet, Nadia. Hopefully this won't be too much of a problem, it's the first good lead we've had in months."

    Donna puts the mallet back into her back pocket, and picks up the gong. She raises a hand dramatically and declares "Now... to SCIENCE!"

    Nadia's enthusiasm is infectious!