5983/Cube: a Play in Four Dimensions

Cube: a Play in Four Dimensions
Date of Scene:	19 April 2021
Location:	A mysterious cube at Happy Harbor High School.
Synopsis:	The group find more questions than answers.
Cast of Characters:	Hank Pym, Michael Hannigan, Susan Richards, Xiomara Rojas, Roland Livingston, Damian Wayne, Nick Lytton, Roxanne Spaulding, Morrigan MacIntyre, Nazo Sarwani, Colette O'Connail

---

Hank Pym has posed:
A portion of the lawn outside HHH has a large crater. Sitting in the middle of the crater is the remains of the abstract sculpture Hyperkub3. Several of the cubes making up the sculpture are now missing and the remaining cube show the scorches of lightning strikes on its shiny aluminum sides. It looks much as it did on Friday when the exterior of the school shook and boomed like Audrey 2 was on its way or the rapture. The thefts discovered soon after by Dr. Pym and Sayeed the engineer. Each edge is delineates by a thin glowing blue line.

Wait. That's new. The glowing is new. Dr. Hank Pym, the newly minted Fire Ant, looks over a scanner, his face shield retracted and a pipe stuck in his mouth. A look of extreme concentration is on his face, if the pipe is not clue enough.

He was actually smoking the pipe to give the Wasp her powers, for comparison. As he works a crowd gathers round, as crowds do. Even when they are the super-abled or skilled.

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Playing Watson to Pym's Sherlock, is Mike- Wait, that can't be right. Isn't Pym the doctor? ... But then who is sh-

Carrying on.

Mike is at the school. After the bank robbery that happened on the weekend that ended with a dragon coming out of the bank vault that... seemed like a topic Morrigan might be interested in. And being she's principal, that's more or less reason for Mike to swing by. That and he probably should check up on the paperwork that got dropped off during that Dumba- *ahem* Dumas situation.

Either way the cube and Hank's pondering look is reason enough to stop. "...This is going to be one of those weeks, isn't it?"

Susan Richards has posed:
     "You look like Charlie Brown taking a test, only you've got a pipe in your mouth instead of a pencil." Susan Richards could not resist a chance for a mild jibe at Hank, one brow quirked and the corners of her mouth tugging upwards in a smile. She was just one of many who had taken an interest in the ongoing Hyperkub3 saga. She's taken up a post by the cube, should containment be needed on the fly. "Find anything yet?"

Xiomara Rojas has posed:
    XIOMARA, who is better known as CRUSH to such an extent that she would be hard pressed to remember the last time anyone actually *called* her 'Xiomara,' has been absent for so long that there has been discussion as to if someone not in the military can be formally declared AWOL. No classes, no social functions, no extracurricular activities - but she did use her school email address. Once. To register for a site called - well, it doesn't matter what it was called, and it doesn't matter that she used a teacher's credit card for it, either, and it *definitely* doesn't matter that the site was immediately hacked, and that said teacher has spent the last seven months trying to explain that no, in fact, he did not buy a boat in the Keys.

    But she's here now! So, really, it's best not to even think about where she spent the last year, and, honestly, there are a *lot* of people who could be the champion of the illegal metahuman pitfighting scene in the Pacific Northwest.
    It's also, probably, best to not think about exactly what she thought was going to happen tonight. Because she has (and where did she even get?) a gigantic Coke-branded cup, a bag of popcorn, and a box of All-Pink Starbursts hanging half out of her jacket, and is saying, to the pink-haired girl with whom she has arrived, "... so yeah like the computer stuff? All lame, and like, the plot isn't super good - and there's not really a bunch of plot anyway, like, it's just people in rooms doing stuff, whatever - but, you know, it's not like, *bad* bad but it isn't *good* bad either, it just kind of, it just kind of *is*, I guess? And it's supposed to be, like, this big mind freak about quantum Bayesianism and participatory realism but, like, I don't think the director really knw anything about Qbism so it's, like, it's still just traps and stuff *really*."

Roland Livingston has posed:
After his eventful day, and some time spent with his lawyers talking to the Gotham PD, Roland decided to unwind a bit by working on a lesson plan at the school. He still needs to teach his magical history course at some point, after all. Wandering the halls as he dictates into a small digital recorder, the young fellow finds himself facing the hypercube and the people surrounding it, "Whereupon the dragons, not to be confused with the species Fin Gang Foom is a member of..." He trails off when he realized he looks like he's talking to himself. Plus, it's kind of rude not to bother attempting to greet the other folks. He does this with a wave of the hand.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "Doctors Richards and Pym." Comes one of the young talents of the school, Damian Wayne.

  He was dressed in a white dress shirt, green tie, black vest, black slacks, and black shoes. All bespoke, and looking all of the Billionaire heir he is. "Who is this Charlie Brown?" He asks Susan, before being...entranced by the now glowing cube.

Nick Lytton has posed:
    Well, Nick has an opinion on art, of course, being a professional artist as well as the newly-minted art teacher at Happy Harbor.
    *Finally* having settled everything at the studio to ensure he has the necessary 'free' time to also teach, he's finally taking the necessary time to familiarize himself with the campus.
    Which has, unexpectedly, got a new piece of public art in it.
    Which, of course, he has got to examine.  Strictly professionally, of course.  So he sits nearby with his tablet, making sketches, occasionally moving so he can capture it from another angle, and sometimes because someone is blocking his view.  He takes some photos, but that's not as much fun as sketching it.
    Note to self: he really needs to find out who created this.

Roxanne Spaulding has posed:
ROXANNE is here and looks like she has SWALLOWED a BUG. Something yucktacular is ruining her entire face right now, and sure, Crush is talking a lot? Like it's hard to get a word in edgewise? But that's just when you let your face make your case for you, and Roxanne's case is 'oh my god this is awful'.

THE OUTFIT: Roxanne is wearing a pair of fitted blue jeans, a pair of EXTREMELY KICKASS STOMPERS, an undershirt featuring a picture of Kirby, but like Kirby's got Squidward's face from when he was Handsome Squidward? The shirt reads "KIRBAE". It's hilarious. She's hilarious. It's ironic, see. Roxy's also wearing a giant anachronistic FLANNEL and SIDEWAYS BALL-CAP.

She's a trendsetter.

Anyway, Crush finally topped going up her OWN ASS about SCIENCE.

"Yeah, okay, sure? But you're saying all that and I'm seeing Tron, and that's about the end of it. Like Jeff Bridges is here somewhere, watching. Waiting. He's going to throw a computer frisbee at some guy and go to JAIL about it." Roxy hasn't brought starburst or popcorn. They will all go straight to her ass. What she *has* brought is one Red Rope.

It is a fifteen foot long Red Rope. She's carrying most of it in her purse, but the end is definitely in her mouth.

"So - this isn't the movies, Crush." She does pause upon arriving at the scene. It is a cratery, sad, sciencey place.

"Ohmigod, it's like a refrigerator graveyard, this -bites-." She is whining with her eyes.

Morrigan MacIntyre has posed:
Morrigan's assistant had called her over to the window when he'd noted that there was a crowd gathering. And that Doctor Pym and Mike were out there looking like Sherlock and Doctor Watson. "Oh that's no good." the Irish woman states as she shakes her head. She moves over to the desk to pop another pain pill and readjust her sling that's on her arm before she heads for the door to her office.

It doesn't take her long to click her heels down the hall and out the front walkway. "What in the name of the Gods is /that/ doing." she points with her good hand. "Nothing good ever comes of glowing cubes." she mutters to herself. She's also not going anywhere near it. Because that's really not her idea of a good time. She's already been stuck in another dimension this month, not wanting to go for round two.

Xiomara Rojas has posed:
"OMG," says Crush. She actually says it. She makes a noise, and it is understood to mean 'OMG.' What that noise is, absolutely no one will later be able to replicate or even describe. But she can also talk in space, so this is - really, this is nothing. "Not everything is Tron! Like, yes, *most* things are Tron, but -"

Clearly, this isn't a movie. There isn't even one of those gigantic inflatable projection screens anywhere. It's just, this big cube? And there's other science stuff?

"Oh. Ugh, look - I checked my email for the first time in, like, eight months? Because I don't really *go* here anymore? And I saw something about a hypercube? So I kind of, you know, I just *skimmed* it, I thought I got the, you know, the uhm, the bullet points, right?"

Crush unwraps and eats a Starburst. The wrapping immediately becomes litter, and she insists on talking even with candy in her mouth.

"So I don't even know what any of this stuff is. But it's pretty cube-y so like, probably a tesseract or something. When you get into higher-dimensional manifestations there are so many vertices, edges, cube cells and tesseract faces that it's, like, it's kind of a sphere that's also a cube?"

Crush unwraps and eats another Starburst.

"Math is stupid anyway," she solemnly declares before taking a drink.

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym looks up from his scanner to give Susan a sour look. "I never knew of any other place to smoke a pipe Dr. Richards. Mr. Hannigan... every week of my life has been one of those weeks. Now the good news... a blue glow is usually better than a green glow when not dealing with power rings. As it happens this scanner is registering nothing except this blue light. That in itself is remarkable. No power, no radiation... the interior seems solid. Solid what? The dang thing is incredibly heavy, about eight or ten times what it should be. If this is performance art I will shake the man's hand."

At this point Sayeed, the chief custodian, comes running up. "Doc-Tor MacIntyre... I called Damage Control. They say they are behind schedule. A man had an origin and a fight with two heavy hitters is running longer than they expected. They also say if this is not hazardous we get full bill for a containment and transport service call." He takes a large swallow of coffee from the mug in his hand.

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Overhearing the mention of dragons, Mike turns his head. Giving Roland a curious look, he makes note to possibly talk to him about the bank incident. As Morrigan comes up though, he turns his attention to the principal. "I'm not sure. But right now this is the second weirdest thing encountered this week behind the dragon at the bank."

He looks back over to Hank at the description. "...Ok, so you mean we've just been idling around this thing when there was a potential for it to have radiation? Nothing roped off at all?"

Susan Richards has posed:
     "If this is performance art, I'm left to question the artist's taste, rather than their skill." Susan wrinkles her nose at the very thought. Honestly, who would be foolish enough to place something like that so near to a -school-, for pity's sake? It rankled every maternal instinct she had, and then some to boot. "So. To recap, we have a cube letting off a blue glow, appears to be at least eight times as dense as it ought to be, doesn't appear to be giving off radiation as we know it? Is there anything on what the cube itself is made out of? Is it a known element? A composite material?"

     Glancing over at Damian, she allows herself a light smile, lifting her chin in a faint up-nod. "I see part of your education in pop culture was neglected. Remind me to fill in the gaps when this is all done. Or look up Snoopy."

     Turning back to Pym and Michael, she coughs lightly. "If there -is- any radiation, it wouldn't be difficult to put up a force field around it, and buy some time for something a little more permanent to be created."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "I trust you have performed a metallurgical analysis?" Damian adds in, now taking more of an interest in the cube.

  Damian begins to roll up his sleeves, approaching closer to it, while looking to Mike. "If it was radioactive on a hazardous scale, we would already be up to our asses in government suits. The crater shows that this was not just teleported here, it landed. And if it landed, it bears to reason that early detection systems would have noted such. And if it were that radioactive, you've already had too much that your days would be numbered."

  Susan's answer receives a shrug. "There is only so much 'popular culture' I can stomach before I get bored. This...this is much more interesting."

Morrigan MacIntyre has posed:
Morrigan and her assistant share a look for a moment and then the sunglasses wearing woman just shakes her head. Then she looks to Hank and Mike, "I don't mind breaking the bank to get it moved. Just don't need another eventful week of the school." she laughs at that. Because the grounds were still being fixed over the last one they had. She gives a nod of greeting to Susan and others that she recognizes, "Sorry that we always seem to be in the midst of things when people show up." she muses.

Then Delia wanders over when she sees shiny light and Morrigan's brain has a stroke, "Delia if you touch that and disintegrate your parents are DEFINITELY going to bury me alive." she whispers towards the red head teen.

Nick Lytton has posed:
    Nick tucks his tablet under his arm, and takes a couple steps closer to the intruding artwork, with an inquisitive expression.
    Uncertainly, he raises a hand, feeling for any unnecessary thermal radiation from it.  It's not anything he's really tried before, other than to feel that a glass furnace was up to a proper operating temperature, but he can try.  I mean, what's the worst that can happen?
    At that, he remembers being replaced by a doppel in the Recent Unpleasantness.  The worst can suck a lot....

Michael Hannigan has posed:
"Peanuts." Mike adds to Sue's recommendation, glancing over to Damian, "The comic strip was 'Peanuts'. Charles Schultz."

Doesn't know Goonies. But he knows about a dog that pretends to be a World War fighter pilot and a kid who deals with kite eating trees.

As Damian speaks up about the radiation, he gives a tilt of the hea. "... Alright. Good to know..."

The expression darkens a little as Morrigan seems to hint to wanting to retrieve the dragon. Maybe he'll wait til AFTER this cube thing is settled before continuing on that topic.

Nazo Sarwani has posed:
Paperwork. It was always papers. Paper this. Paper that. Even though they also want so much stuff on these computers of theirs. Go to the computer. Decipher what the computer wants since it was made by someone who had only heard rumours of people, read a book by someone who'd read a book on them, and designed the screens based on those understandings.

Then you had to print that out...PAPER...and use that to fill out more paper.

All this to get fully registered as an adult student. Having to take half a day off work to do it. (Thankfully the employer understood and let her take it as a sick day.)

And then something hits the grounds as she's walking out of the administration building. Nazo pauses, looks over. ~It's none of your business.~ Her feet take her that way. ~There's people dealing with it already.~ She peers at the object curiously from behind the crowd, beginning to squirm her way to the front to take a look. She peers out from behind the niqab that covers the lower half of her face, trying to get a good look.

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym starts swinging the scanner in a shooing manner. "Young lady... get out of this crater now or I will have an ant escort you! Mr. Lytton... there are plenty of nasty mechanical surprises that would not show up on a scanner. Don't touch it. Maybe I can shrink and find a crack to enter... though I somehow doubt it... you with the red hair... BEAT IT!" Bo the ant gives a loud "K-k-k!" at the errant teen.

He closes the scanner. "I did a full scan on Friday, Michael and left a couple ground sensors. There was no radiation. This is not my first rodeo. As for artists... if Doom is doing this... my hat is off to the man. But I'll figure it out. Okay I suggest we get some barricades up arou..."

There is a flash of blinding blue light, followed by darkness. A moment of compression and stretching. The experience is nauseating. Everyone comes to their senses on a rough metallic mat.

You find yourself in a cubicle painted and finished in white tones. The cube is six meters square on each side. Each wall has a circular iris valve about 3 meters in diameter. A rough tacky material for climbing or footing runs from each circular door in four strips to the adjacent walls, floor and ceiling.

You are standing on a mat of metal mesh that occasionally emits a harmless blue sparkle of light. Consoles stand against the 'South' wall. A screen shows the structure spread out in 2-dee and provides the directions, going by conventional map.

The North door is colored blue, the East orange, the West green, the South yellow. A ladder in the northwest corner leads up to a hatch. A similar hatch in the southeast corner is set in the floor.
"Ugh... matter mitters... low rent teleportation," Hank mutters.

Hank Pym has posed:
You wake up in a small room about 20 feet square... errr cubed https://imgur.com/SNeJVvZ

Morrigan MacIntyre has posed:
The bright flash manages to blind one particular ginger and sends Morrigan stumbling backwards. She loses a shoe over it. Which SUCKS. "What the hell..." she hisses out and tries to blink the sparkles she's seeing away. Then she realizes that people are gone. But some aren't. Then she realizes WHO isn't there, "Ah fuck." she states ever so eloquently as she bends to snatch up her shoe.

Meanwhile, Declan and Delia, the ginger twosome of terror have been teleported in with the group. Delia's brown eyes lock onto the colors of the walls and there's a giggle as she runs off to start touching things.

TOUCH. ALL. THE. THINGS.

Susan Richards has posed:
     All the sensors and barricades seem to do those gathered little good, as one and all are drawn into... well, whatever or wherever this place was. Susan perhaps shakes off the nausea a bit more readily than some, taking a moment or three to look about and take stock of where they all are. "Everyone alright?" she calls out, looking about to see if anyone was injured or in need of immediate assistance adjusting to the current situation. "Hank, would you be willing to make heads or tails of those consoles over there?"

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian's bright green eyes squint at the blinding light, and now in this...cube.

  He doesn't freak out, he doesn't yell, only a frown growing on his face as he realizes what has happened. Beyond a stagger or two after the fact, he doesn't even show signs of the nausea that he is indeed experiencing as a result of the transport.

  Almost immediately, he walks to the console, trying to gain any knowledge he can from it. Not asking if everyone is ok, not looking over people for wounds. He wants to know what the hell is going on, and he will get the info himself if he has to. "STOP!" He commands the two gingers. "You two could kill us all doing that."

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Mike slowly blinks as the bright light and upsetting feeling hits him. Not expecting the transport there wasn't really time to prepare for the sudden switch over. Upon arriving. He crouches down for a moment, The knuckes of his scarred arm pressing upon the mat for balance. "Oh geez."

Once he gets his barings he looks around. A square room. With doors to each side. Eyes narrow, thinking to a few choice dreams hes caught glimpses of around Halloween. "...Oh hell no."

Nazo Sarwani has posed:
It's reflex, really. Something happens that feels or sounds like an explosion or some other such attack and Nazo goes to pieces. Billions of them. Tiny scraps of silicates that fill the mesh of the floor, and form a small discreet pile. She waits, getting a feel for her situation before stealthily creeping (as a pile of sand) to one corner, coalescing there, watching the people warily while her eyes scan over the room.

"Is this normal in this school?" she asks

Nick Lytton has posed:
    Nick hadn't planned on touching it but that seems to not matter as reality shifts out from under him.  "Jesus f--!"
    Wait, there are students here.  "What the--"
    No, that's not going to be any better.
    He grumbles something under his breath as he shakes his head clear.  Lipreaders might pick out 'This is why I didn't want to do the Spandex chain-gang.'  Aloud, he goes with, "What the f-fffhell just happened?"
    Working in a school is clearly going to be a challenge....

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym scrambles to a sitting position on the floor, "For fuck's sake! Don't touch that! Have you no sense of the common sort? I... Susan... please mother those two little... mothers! God almighty... gingers... oops." He notes Morrigan was yeeted in and huffs and replaces the pipe in his mouth."

Michael Hannigan has posed:
"Wrong place. Wrong time." Mike sums up for Nick as he starts to stand back up, giving a bit of a groan. He looks around, "You get used to it after awhile."

He looks over to console. "storyofmylife." He mutters under his breath. He slams on a practiced smile. "Alright. So. Anyone here have a summary for where we are that doesn't involve referencing horror films?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette had been minding her own business and just watching over the crowd with something vaguely approaching an air of responsibility. She had no desire to poke at mysterious cubic artworks. Especially ones that were glowing in a mysterious blue fashion. It is therefore most unfair that she finds herself snatched up in the flashy-glowy-transporty light.

    "FU...n. Fun," she says getting to her feet and looking around at the strange chamber. "Cubic rooms with doors on every face. We might be inside Borges' Library of Babel, but there's a shortage of books," she suggests in response to Mike's question. "Or alternatively we're inside the artwork. Hypercube, right? Presumably whichever door we go through will lead to an identical room. Great."

Susan Richards has posed:
     The ginger terrors soon meet one of the more formidable barriers to their explorations yet. And the most frustrating part? It was not one they could even -see-. But oh, they would be able to touch it to their heart's content.

     Susan snaps around as she hears the twins getting into mischief, maternal instincts turned on full as she raises her hands, focusing on the area immediately around the Ginger Wonders. With a brief shimmer of air around them, a forcefield is brought into play, hopefully arresting their explorations. "Come on, you two," she calls out. "Enough of that!"

Roland Livingston has posed:
"So we're in some manner of science cube?" Roland asks as he takes a long look around, shaking his head for a while. "Could have been Elucidar's Extradimensional Egress that sent us here, but I don't think that's the case. No particularly strange smells of any sort in the air." His hands slide into his pockets to help him avoid accidentally touching anything that surrounds them. Looking at the troublesome twins getting stopped in their tracks he says, "You should listen to the woman. I'd hate for you to grab something and then get turned inside out. Or worse."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "Fucking hell, I hope they did not just do something irreversible." Damian adds in, before snickering about the hunger comment from Hank.

  "Well, six sides, all the same dimensions. Yes. This is a cube." Damian responds rather...dryly.

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym goes over to the consoles and begins perusing them. "What the actual hell... Susan come look at this analogue gauges, zoetrope displays and... my gosh... an Amiga running the whole show? This stuff is over twenty years old and unless I miss my guess... this is a tesseract. My old teacher -Professor Halbstrom tried to teach me about this but I left the dimensional physics to Reed. I'm trying to remember what he said about the darned things. The Cosmic Cube is built around a tesseract... they're a sort of storage pod of the gods."

https://imgur.com/RXyxUT6

Morrigan MacIntyre has posed:
Delia and Declan were going to have a grand old time! Until they come up against their most weakest point. A mother. Declan bonks his head against the side of the force field and there's a huff from Delia as she blows a curl out of her eyes, "We'd be fiiiiiiine." she pouts. But they cheer up quicker than normal kids. Maybe they drink coffee...or do cocaine.

Who knows?

Nick Lytton has posed:
    "I don't *want* to get used to it," Nick grumbles back at Mike, but... well, hell.  Too late now.
    He makes his way closer to the Big Name Heroes, whom he expects to understand what's going on, because he sure as shit doesn't.  "I got no ideas," he offers, "but I can take directions.  And other than 'something weird', what the everlasting Technicolor hell just happened?"

Susan Richards has posed:
     "Mhm. Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn't. I'm not taking a chance on that with you two. So you're going to stay put, and -behave-. Got it?" Susan gives them the look to end all looks. It's... THE look. The 'mother bear' look.

     Even as she keeps the brunt of that 'look' turned on the twins, she calls back over to Hank, "Unless you want these two mischief-makers running wild all over those... holy moly, Reed would have a field day in here! So, if these are the 'storage pods of the Gods', what is this one meant to store? And why did we get tangled up in it all?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette peers curiously at the consoles, with their oddly primitive technology. "Looks like it's a /retro/ science cube, Roland. Which is probably the worst kind. What happens if this runs out of memory, which it probably will at any moment."

    She wanders over to peer over Hank's shoulder, as he seems to be the person who has most clue what he's doing. "If it's really a hypercube and we're inside some kind of three-dimensional representation of it, there should be 8 independent cubic spaces, I think. In one direction we'll come back on ourselves after four cubes, in the other two direction after two cubes. Maybe. Don't ask me. Unless the other rooms are full of books and it /is/ Borges' infinite library. I do literature, not math."

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym looks over the consoles lovingly. "Oh... magic smoke is coming out here... and here... my guess is a malfunction triggered the matter mitter to bring us in. So we're in a tesseract. The rooms tend to warp onto each other. Go in any direction and you end up here. Gravity may be variable... Susan... would you help me talk to Nadia sometime? Where was I? Oh okay... Mr. Wayne... help me get this panel off and have a look in here." He turns to Colette and says, "Please, call me Hank, I'm impressed. A very succinct explanation. You must have read Flatland."

Roland Livingston has posed:
"Extra dimensional spaces always bother me," Roland says to no one in particular. "I much prefer to be in a proper dimension, rather than one of these sorts of places." He wanders over to where Pym is looking at the science stuff and frowns at it. He turns then towards Colette and shakes his head, "Retro science cubes sound terrifying. We should probably touch nothing until the scientists here tell us to begin touching things."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian's gaze turns to Colette as she is here. Shit.

  The boy couldn't help himself any longer, he starts to climb up, not towards the green room, he quickly keeps pulling himself higher. He's looking to scout the purple room, wether he needs to monkey-bar it, or if gravity turns funky, and they pull an MC Escher on him.

Nazo Sarwani has posed:
While the others ignore her question in favour of looking at consoles, Nazo takes the more practical (to her) approach of investigating the hatches and doors, looking for means of opening and closing them, quietly flitting from one to the next in an attempt to work out how they differ and what they have in common.

Hank Pym has posed:
What does Damian find? The ladder is easily scaled

This room is similar to the central cube. However it is colored purple. A central climbing cage has padded beams reaching to the floor, ceiling and walls. North door is colored bue, the East orange, the West green, the South yellow. The ceiling door is colored red and the floor hatch is colored white. The consoles are missing. There are storage boxes around and a number of small animals looking like a cross between a Fennec fox and an iguana emitting soft cries of 'Yeep!"

The doors have a very scalable pad leading up to them. They open when someone approaches, such as Nazo.

Susan Richards has posed:
     "Be happy to, Hank, as soon as we can find a more permanent way of containing these little ginger wonders that isn't going to take my keeping up a forcefield around them!" Susan offers an apologetic smile to Hank. "Unless you'd rather they were turned loose to conduct their own experiments on things in here...?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Oh. Yeah, Flatland. Edwin Abbot Squared," Colette says with a wry smirk to Hank. Look, the lit major made a literary math joke. Her eyes turn from the consoles to meet Damian's gaze, and she gives him a faint nod.

    "So. Anyone going through one of those doors, be prepared for gravity to point in a different direction on the other side of the door," she says with a faint sigh. "How a three-dimensional gravity field in a four-dimensional space would work is not something I can figure out, if this even is a hypercube rather than a three-dimensional representation of one. But uh... the main point is not to fall. Because there's a chance that as soon as you go through one of those doors, you will."

Morrigan MacIntyre has posed:
Declan and Delia know 'The Look' and a switch seems to be flipped when they realize that Susan isn't putty in their adorable hands. The quiet down and start to move about with the forcefield if they can. Apparently they were different children now. Weird.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian pulls himself up, looking at the purple room, and to the fennec-iguanas. "Boxes and small...lizard-mammals."

  He pops his head out of the portal to the purple room, looking to those below. "There may be...items in the boxes." He comments before looking about. He will only linger a bit longer, taking action to check the boxes unless someone advises otherwise.

Nazo Sarwani has posed:
The first door opening has Noza leaping back so quickly, it seems that she turns into a smeared blur before stopping well away from anything that might come through it. A small yell of surprise starts with her leap, gets cut off, then completes when she stops moving, standing in a passable defensive stance (Damien would naturally have a thousand little corrections to suggest) under her abaya, eyeing the door as it closes when she steps off of its trigger.

"Doors are automated," she says, not bothering to look at anybody, attention focused on the hatch. "If you don't want them opened, don't get close to them."

If nothing follows through the hatch, she'll relax somewhat.

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym looks around for Damian. "WAYNE! WHERE THE Hell ARE YOU? Oh... see if there are spares for computers or consoles. Can someone help me with this panel?" The orange door whooshes open. The room beyond is also orange. Several black spheres pulsate in it, shrinking to almost a point and growing to man sized. As the door opens they begin drifting towards the white room and Nazo. "Bloody hell. Battle stations!" He stops fiddling with the console and closes his helmet.

Roland Livingston has posed:
"I'll assist," Roland says to Pym as he pulls his hands from his pockets, kneeling down next to the panel to try to remove it. He's got the muscle to, but he doesn't want to break anything inside of it. "Here's hoping there's nothing harmful inside of this machine..." Then the worlds 'Battle stations' reach his ears and Livingston gets more alert, ready to take on anything that threatens the bizarre peace of the inside of the cube.

Susan Richards has posed:
     "There. That's better. Come on, let's see if we can go help Uncle Hank." Susan smiles at the twins. She wasn't mad at them, not really. But this was no time for fooling about, either! Although initially she does move over towards Hank and the console he is working on, to render what assistance she may....

     ...the call to 'battle stations' immediately prompts her to draw the twins right next to her, and extend the forcefield to contain them, herself, and if she is close enough, offer some protection to the area including the console, Hank, and Richard. "Heads up!"

Nick Lytton has posed:
    Nick winces at the various explanations.  "I don't *do* math.  I'm an artist," he complains.  "Whatever happened, I want it to un-happen, Escher tribute notwithstanding."
    No such luck.  The nearest to an explanation he gets is the phrase 'Battle stations!' which really isn't much of an explanation at all when you think about it.
    It is more by reflex than anything else that the space in front of Nick suddenly becomes very, very hot.  Hopefully that's a deterrent.  He has no idea, but that's about all he can do under the circumstances that isn't running away, and there's really no room for doing that.
    "God damn it, I am not a fucking superhero," he mutters under his breath, but otherwise holds his ground about as well as a civilian with one meta never used in combat can.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette is half way up the climbing column, on the way to investigate what Damian has found and probably warn him not to try petting any unidentified life forms when she hears the 'battle stations' cry. She looks down again, and calls out "Maybe the force-field would be better employed on those things than the twins? Honestly I'm not certain which of them is the bigger threat."

    With this she keeps climbing, apparently more interested in the next chamber than fighting mysterious orbs. Her head sticks through the doorway and she whispers to Damian "Got anything sharp on you by any chance?" before climbing out into the purple room, to inspect the fennec-iguanas.

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Mike's head turns to look over towards Nazo. The sudden call to arms, causes for him to react, stance shifting a bit defensively as he looks to the spheres. Hey, maybe they're not agressive? The scar on his lower right forearm fades away. reappearing to the left as his expression shifts.

Can't hurt to be careful. Besides, there are kids on board. The figure shifts in size and form, taking on the intimidating form of-

A 26 inch tall raven.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian pulls open each box available in the Purple room, arranging them around the door to the white room. "Food, computer components, and tools, sundry supplies. Do you need any part in particular, Doctor Pym?" He calls down, obviously he wouldn't just toss those down, they were delicate.

Hank Pym has posed:
Hank Pym was about to send a fire stream at the balloons, to ward them off. He sees the flame stream stop a few feet from him due to the force field and cuts the flame blast. Safety first! Then he gets a pencil in the forehead. With his helmet open. "Goddamit! Uh yeah... I think the computer failed due to some fans seizing up. Get those if you find them. Otherwise we need some ice cubes..." The blooping tarry spheres move into the room and come up against the force field. Up above the Fennec lizards twitch their ears and regard Damian and Colette with sagely intensity.

Roland Livingston has posed:
Seeing as how he's on school grounds Roland is rather pathetically armed. No guns, knives or swords for him. That being said, he does have an aircraft grade aluminum tactical pen with a glass breaker on the end of it. It's quite pointy, as a matter of fact, and he's soon drawing it from inside of his jacket. Who knows how many might show, however? Might just be best to rip the panel off of the electronics so Pym can do his thing. So Roland does, grabbing the panel and muscling it off while keeping an eye out for approaching blob things.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Sharp things," Colette repeats to Damian. "Throw sharp things down. Not at Doctor Pym though. Things that might be useful as weapons."

    She peers curiously at the iguana-fennecs, and gives a slight shake of her head. "Odd things," she comments. "No nostrils. Possibily artificial. Could be anything. Might be worth seeing if they can talk." She stares at one and takes one hand from the climbing column to wave in its directions. "Hey! Fennec-looking lizard creature. Can you talk? We come in peace or something."

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Sharp things?

Oh. You got it.

Wings furl out as the raven takes a running start, hopping into the air as it, oddly flies with little difficulty in this foreign environment of potentially varying gravity. As he nears Sue's force field he closes his eyes briefly. With no visual confirmation of reaching the barrier he avoids involuntarily applying force at the wrong moment, allowing for him to pass through.

Emerging on the other side, the eyes open up again, bird's form arching as he u-turns to ram a bubble with the sharp point of his beak.

*pop*

That's- kind of anticlimatic.

Nazo Sarwani has posed:
OK, screw relaxation. This is time for action. And apparently revelation, though given the force fields and the sudden appearance of a raven this won't be too much of one.

A whirling storm of dust takes the place of Nazo as she explodes into constituent particles that whirl around an epicentre. The dust streams through the red door, scouring metal surfaces along the way (stripping paint, even) as she wraps one of the black spheres, pulling her stream into a thin, ropy shape that she uses to try to tear away the surface.

She feels its pull on her and starts to panic ... just as it *POP!*s out from under her.

She reforms in the room, away from the collection long enough to call out, "They're easy enough to break, but don't touch them if you can't break them. They're doing something funky that I really don't like the feel of!"

She's back, then, into the sandstorm and a second black ball goes down to her tightening abrasive rope while her senses scream at her to get away from that horrible feeling of being sucked dry.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian presses his toe down in that certain way, and releasing his shoe knife. "Yes. But that one is mine." Clicking a heel, the blade retracts. He finds some tools, a screwdriver, an ice pick, a bit so good knife. ">tt<" Damian retorts before he pockets the tools and hops down, landing and dropping the tools down. He scurries to the Orange room, pressing down his toes and releasing the knifes. "Open the field!" He demands, before he runs head first into the danger.

  Damian approaches two of the orbs, and backflips, striking an orb with his blade. *pop!**pop*

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Unfortunately for the plucky raven, the whirling sandstorm is a bit harder to ignore than a faintly shimmering and steady force field. The bird ends up getting pulled along in the direction of the particles, going where the flow. "WOAHWOAHWOAHWOA-"

And thus the raven finds himself flung through the orange door. WHEEEE! ORANGE BLUR! Now Red. The bird blinks as he looks to the red room. He looks around. "...Oh f-"

Susan Richards has posed:
     Unfortunately for the plucky raven, there are little ears in the general vicinity. And near those little ears, there are bigger ears, attached to perhaps one of the worst proverbial 'mother bears' known to mankind. Susan called out, as the raven was swept away into the next room....

     "OI! Language!"

Michael Hannigan has posed:
The raven bites back his initial choice of words. "-iddlesticks."