robot satan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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robothell2014-12-19 11:20 pm
robotsatan) wrote in robothell2014-12-19 11:20 pm
[ INTRO LOG ]
You don't know how you got here. One minute you were walking, sleeping, maybe dead -- then you're here, your feet suddenly carrying you down an empty street. Where's here?
Any Cybertronian would recognize this as their home planet, Cybertron, but it's not a Cybertron they've ever known. It has all the familiar hallmarks, but none of the specifics -- the city isn't one anyone here could identify, and even at a glance it's obvious that no one's set foot on the planet's surface in hundreds of years. The city and its surrounding areas all bear the marks of devastating war, of dust and rust collected over centuries. With no one in sight -- right at first, anyway -- there's plenty to explore. In fact, if you start walking, you'll find that your feet may just carry you in one particular direction.
A) The crater.
On one edge of the city is a massive crater left by some wartime weapon that seems to have taken out a large chunk of the surrounding metropolitan area. At the center of the crater it's broken through the surface of the terrain to reveal what looks like it might be a promising energon deposit. There is some strange but native vegetation growing around the edges, too, that no Cybertronian would be able to identify -- small, metallic, brittle-looking sprouts that bear a curiously organic-looking fruit of some kind that doesn't look like it's intended for consumption by any natives of the planet. In one rocky nook of the crater, light catches on the surface of a pool of water, which seems strangely out of place on Cybertron. On closer inspection, it seems that somehow an underground water source has formed a spring in the crater.
B) The center of the city.
If you follow where your feet seem to want to carry you, you'll find yourself in the middle of the ruined city. It seems that the center of the city was once home to a massive forum, and some of the pillars and structures still stand. At the very center of the forum is a massive, elaborately constructed fountain, although it has now long since run dry of whatever used to fill it. One of the low, inner walls of the forum has a terminal embedded in its surface, although it looks curiously ancient, out of place with the rest of the city, and unlike the rest of the technology still left around, there doesn't seem to be any way to power it on or operate it. There are a few scattered pools of water and a few of the strange metallic plants in the city, too, but they're not quite as plentiful as in the crater.
The planet was obviously once home to a massive network of communication relays, but those have all been long since destroyed. However, with the bits and pieces left behind and a few determined minds, it wouldn't be too hard to build a working, if rudimentary, one...
Any Cybertronian would recognize this as their home planet, Cybertron, but it's not a Cybertron they've ever known. It has all the familiar hallmarks, but none of the specifics -- the city isn't one anyone here could identify, and even at a glance it's obvious that no one's set foot on the planet's surface in hundreds of years. The city and its surrounding areas all bear the marks of devastating war, of dust and rust collected over centuries. With no one in sight -- right at first, anyway -- there's plenty to explore. In fact, if you start walking, you'll find that your feet may just carry you in one particular direction.
A) The crater.
On one edge of the city is a massive crater left by some wartime weapon that seems to have taken out a large chunk of the surrounding metropolitan area. At the center of the crater it's broken through the surface of the terrain to reveal what looks like it might be a promising energon deposit. There is some strange but native vegetation growing around the edges, too, that no Cybertronian would be able to identify -- small, metallic, brittle-looking sprouts that bear a curiously organic-looking fruit of some kind that doesn't look like it's intended for consumption by any natives of the planet. In one rocky nook of the crater, light catches on the surface of a pool of water, which seems strangely out of place on Cybertron. On closer inspection, it seems that somehow an underground water source has formed a spring in the crater.
B) The center of the city.
If you follow where your feet seem to want to carry you, you'll find yourself in the middle of the ruined city. It seems that the center of the city was once home to a massive forum, and some of the pillars and structures still stand. At the very center of the forum is a massive, elaborately constructed fountain, although it has now long since run dry of whatever used to fill it. One of the low, inner walls of the forum has a terminal embedded in its surface, although it looks curiously ancient, out of place with the rest of the city, and unlike the rest of the technology still left around, there doesn't seem to be any way to power it on or operate it. There are a few scattered pools of water and a few of the strange metallic plants in the city, too, but they're not quite as plentiful as in the crater.
The planet was obviously once home to a massive network of communication relays, but those have all been long since destroyed. However, with the bits and pieces left behind and a few determined minds, it wouldn't be too hard to build a working, if rudimentary, one...
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He sighs.
"I am. Tell me, which Autobots are you familiar with, wherever you come from?"
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"I see. So you had never encountered Cybertronians prior to arriving here? You seem exceptionally calm about it," he says, perhaps a little skeptically. He bends down slightly, to get a closer look.
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"It's not like this is the first time I've been kidnapped, and as far as my personal safety goes, the functional difference between the threat presented by you and that presented by a human adult is nil." She was well aware that she was three feet tall and forty pounds soaking wet, and that quite recently an angry, morality-inverted Scarlet Witch had been threatening to kill her. Megatron had just been a bit brusque, and where she was from, that was so normal as to be practically unnoticeable.
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"Nope." But his phrasing implied that she should, so she cocked her head and waited for him to tell her.
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Megatron has literally no grasp of the idea that one might be expected to explain things to children in simpler terms than normal, or try to cushion them from potentially frightening realities, and if you tried to tell him to he would probably just scowl at you.
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Said the three year old human child to the multi-million year old robot warlord.
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Oh, nuts, extra dimensional space robots with questionable shared cultural referents. Further information required.
"...Earth years. I can give that to you in terms of a universal constant if you need it."
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"Hmm. And have your statistically improbable mental faculties offered you any insight into why you've been transported here?"
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"Usually when I end up in another universe, it's Dad or Dad's enemies' fault, but the fact your species has never even encountered my family makes that substantially less likely. I did just make a probability manipulator super-mad at me, but again, it shouldn't have any effect on you. The method of transport--specifically, that there was no perceptible duration of transition--rules out most methods I'm familiar with--"
She stopped as something new occurred to her. "No human-perceptible duration of transition, I should say. I assume your nervous system functions much closer to light speed than mine. Did you notice anything? ...You don't happen to know the speed of signal propagation along your peripheral nerves, do you?"
That second question had nothing to do with anything. She was just curious.
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"... not precisely, no," he replies, with what would be an eyebrow raised if he had eyebrows. Extreme statistical outlier indeed. "I can't say I noticed anything, either, though. Initially I'd assumed something in my own universe had caused this, but the more I see the more I think that this has been caused by something here."
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She cleared the screen and pulled a stylus from the side of the tablet, starting to scrawl notes and equations in her none-too-neat handwriting, which turned into much more legible text as the datapad converted it behind her.
"For most purposes, my local spacetime can be described as a 5-sphere within an 8-torus, all contained in a higher-order space with other 8-tori--I'm pretty sure it's a 12-sphere, but Dad postulates at least three additional dimensions to explain some of the observed features, which I think is just complicating things. Does that sound like your universe group?" Once again, she held up her datapad, this time with a slowly-moving two-dimensional projection of the geometry she'd described. 'Fiendishly complex' would not be inaccurate, and neither would 'what the hell, Valeria.'
At least she wasn't talking down to him, which was a feat she could totally pull off, despite being a tenth his height at best.
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"...I'm afraid I haven't had as much experience in cross-universal travel as it seems you do." He frowns. "Is this kind of thing common, in your universe? Because if your, ah, spacetime is particularly prone to these kinds of anomalies, perhaps that might explain your exceptional status here..."
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"That's not quite what I'm getting at, but you're on the right track. I ask because it's easier to move within the same toroidal space. That is, between largely similar universes. It's an alternate history sort of deal, usually--some influential leader who got assassinated in your timeline didn't in the timeline next door, that kind of thing. It's harder but still not difficult to move between tori within the local bubble, and you see a greater divergence in the nature of the various realities. Like...finding a place that's basically your own universe, except everything runs on magic instead of science." Or where people had no noses, or where the alignments of the factions were completely swapped and Rodimus had a hideous mustache. Just as a hypothetical.
"Either of those cases would be...not trivial, but not hard to resolve." Her hand went to her chin in unconscious mimicry of her father's posture when thinking. "Moving outside that grouping is when it starts to get tricky, and I suspect that's what's happened here, at least in my case. If I'm right, it means my intuitions about physical law are less likely to be correct. I can test them, of course, but that requires equipment I'll have to scavenge or build from scratch, and that will slow me down considerably."
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"Your Earth doesn't have interstellar travel, does it." Despite the phrasing, it wasn't a question, just the obvious conclusion from how he talked about the planet. "My Earth has contact with all the major starfaring polities. If you existed where I'm from and ever made an impact on intergalactic politics, I'd know about you."
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