The Adventure

"Water table, water schmable! That's an engineering problem that I'll handle! You all just keep digging!"

C8: "SCREEEE!!"

"You do not need your joints lubricated! I built you better than that! Enough shirking!"

C8 bounds away to a far corner of the yard, then glances over his shoulder with a mournful expression. But he does join the other robots in digging.

Eliza now notices you all. Smirking, she wipes some grime from her face.

"Hard to find good help nowadays, huh? Glad you're here...and you've got a new member? Hmmmm...."

Usually, she would scan Rebound, and then pester him with questions. But something is clearly on her mind...and her glance keeps moving to Small Fry. She picks up an iPad-type device, taps it in silence for a few moments, and then finally speaks:

"So, Lily...remember I scanned you a few times during our...friendly conflict yesterday? Well, I decided to review the data again, and...yeah, I know it sounds stalkerish, but you know I'm always curious...so...uhhhh...."

"Did you shrink down really, really small for a really, really long time?"

"I knew it! I fuc...frickin' knew it!! Ughhh...all you size-shifters should be required to read Boyd's Quantum Paradox!"

She facepalms, and kicks some loose dirt around in her frustration. But after a few seconds, she softens, and does her best to offer a sympathetic grin.

"I'm sorry you had trouble connecting with folks, Lily. I know someone else like that...."

"But...well, lemme just rip the Band-Aid right off...you're out of sync with our reality."

She pauses to let that sink in.

"Nobody should stay sub-atomic that long...well, unless they have god-like powers. You don't. There are forces down there you can't comprehend. Weird energy buffeting you. Quantum parasites. Time can get wacky. It's even speculated that if you go small enough, you can easily jump to other realities. Or some say you just reach, like, the end...which is basically limbo or a void."

"But I digress...bottom line, you're outta whack. Your situation is...well, it's like going outside mid-summer without sunscreen. A few minutes, you're fine. A few hours, you get sunburnt. For days? You'll get second- or third-degree burns. If you refuse to change, skin cancer risk rises. Etc."

"It's not the best analogy, but...yeah, decades down there? Not good."

"The universe (actually, the multiverse, in this case) isn't sentient, but if it was...you could say it...doesn't quite know where to put you. You were 'gone' for so long...do you belong here, now, in this reality? Or do you belong to some other reality, since down there you were possibly 'closer' to it than the reality you know...."

She frowns at whatever's on her iPad-thing again, but then glances up at Small Fry, and forces herself to beam at the heroine.

"Sorry. Doom n' gloom, not very comforting, huh? But good news: this isn't a critical situation. Yet. In time, you could shunt to another reality, like a magnet sliding off a fridge, but we're not there yet. Just...uhhh...try not to shrink too much until we've got this sorted, yeah?"

"If you mean the World War II Nazis, yes, they lost. But certain people still do Nazi salutes today, and neo-Nazis are a thing...so...uhhh...make of that what you will...."

She would try to pat Small Fry comfortingly on the shoulder, either with a hand or a pinkie, depending on the shrinker's current size.

"Don't worry, Lily...I'm pretty sure this is the reality you've always known! Like I said, you're just off-kilter. You're like a guitar that needs tuning! I'm also pretty sure we can get your quantum frequency signature stabilized, and your temporal phase variance eliminated! And...well, I'm getting too science-y!"

At this moment, Sarah steps outside of the house, carrying a tray of drinks. She appears less timid than before, and grins at everyone. If she's annoyed at Eliza's excavation and ruckus, she doesn't show it.

🎵🎵"Who wants lemonade?! I made three different kinds!"🎵🎵

"UGGGHH! Mooom! You know I hate that stuff! It just makes me more thirsty! And your timing stinks!"

Muttering to the team: "She's been on total Loving Mom Mode since you 'rescued' me. Just humor her. Once I get my underground bunker built, I can avoid her."

But if you look carefully, you'll notice a microscopic smile as she watches her mother approach.

"My condolences, Small Fry... No. Lily. Three decades. Christ." She can't imagine being isolated for so long. People have been driven insane by far less.

"I'd love some lemonade, ma'am. Thank you." Rocketeer smiles at Sarah as she accepts a nice cool glass. She might not have bore witness to Eliza and Sarah's previous situation, but she's glad to see that they appear to be getting on just fine. In a way, she's jealous of Eliza, but she pushes that to the back of her mind. Her lack of a conventional childhood is a wound that scarred over long ago.

"This is equal parts concerning and fascinating. If you ever need a hand with understanding Small Fry's condition—not that I expect you'll need it—I'll gladly help. I don't want my teammate inadvertently blinking off to another reality or out of existence or anything." She chuckles wryly. "I've been wanting to study her anyway. I can see it now... A missile that shrinks its victims!"

She takes a sip of lemomnade. "So what else did you need, Eliza? If this was all you wanted to discuss, you wouldn't have asked for the entire team."


Meanwhile, her droids are fraternizing with Eliza's robotic animals. They even begin to help out with the digging, carefully excavating large clumps of dirt with rays of light that act as tractor beams.

Eliza's jaw drops. If she had elastic powers, it would hit the ground, and maybe roll a few feet away.

"How can you be so cavalier about this?! I say you're outta sync with reality itself, and the general response is, 'That's cool! Anything else you need, Eliza?'"

"Maybe I should've said it was a critical situation, embellished things a bit...fear is a good motivator...."

"I asked everyone here because I planned to do what I do best: build shit! With everyone's help, I can build a machine to 'reset' Lily! Call it the Quantum Frequency Stabilizer 9000! If it works (and it will, of course), we won't have to worry about her sliding across the multiverse! And once the machine is built, we can use it again if Lily ever gets out of whack."

Here she'd attempt to pull Small Fry aside, for a private, whispering conversation.

"That is, if you even want to remain in this reality, Lily. Decades alone in a sub-atomic world...I'm sorry you didn't have anything 'up here' to come back to. Maybe you want to bounce across different realities, rather than being tethered to this one? That's an entirely different engineering challenge, but I'm sure I can come up with something...but there may be downsides."

"So...what's the plan, Lily?"

Sarah would break into the possibly private convo, arching an eyebrow at her daughter.

"My Mom Sense says Eliza is possibly being a bit pushy, Lily. I don't pretend to understand all this multiversal-quantum-sync stuff, but I know this is a lot to process for you. Please don't make a snap decision. I'm sure Eliza can occupy herself with something (like this giant hole in the yard...not that I'm complaining, it was part of our deal) while you mull it over."

"Grrrrrr...trying to stall science...acting like out-of-sync shrinkers are a dime a dozen...."

She furiously pokes at some of her gadgets while waiting for Small Fry's, or the team's, response.

"Keep hangin' around superheroes, Jimmy Z. On a long enough timeline, everyone's chance of getting exposed to superhuman bs approaches zero." he said with a salute as the rocker started moving inside, casually leaving out the mortality rates associated with those meetings. Of course, Rebound wasn't going to discourage anyone from origin chasing, as far as he was concerned everyone should get a chance to try this stuff at least once. Power to the people 'n' all that. Once it became clear no one was going to answer his question about Omnicorp, or Victor, he decided to just roll with it, bounding after the fliers in the group with a whoop and a cheer. It would hardly be the first time he'd had to learn on the job.

---

For his part, Rebound was listening to Eliza with one ear while watching her little mechanical friends go about their business. He stood just a little too close, trying to get a look at the way they moved not just with his eyes, but with his kinetic senses, noting some of the clever work she'd done on the joints without having to disassemble anything. Of course, there were always going to be things he couldn't sort out on his own, but looking at them it seemed like many were made out of the kinds of materials he was familiar with. Melted down and reforged, certainly, but it was clear that she was doing a lot with relatively little.

"Just remember to come topside from time to time." Rebound said familiarly when Eliza talked about completing her bunker, "I know how tempting it can be to just immerse yourself in the tech, but a change of venue can be the best thing to charge up your creativity. I'd also suggest a few therapy lamps if you're planning to spend a long time below ground. Underground living can give you something like seasonal depression, I've seen it a few times." he bowed his head slightly to Ms. Caldwell and he bounded over to swipe one of the cups of pink lemonade, a moonsault bringing him up and over the tray to land on the other side of her with a bounce on his heels. "Thanks Ms. Caldwell ... there anything around the house you need a hand with, or have you daughter's friends been taking good care of you?" he offered with a smile.

"...So, hey, not sure if this impacts anything, but in the interest of avoiding any bag-of-holding-in-a-portable-hole shenanigans, I should probably mention that I'm technically bonded to an otherdimensional rift." he paused to sip at the lemonade, "Oh, that's good."

"So far, it's been one-way, and the only thing I pass over is kinetic energy, but it's basically how I get around Newton's third law to amplify kinetic force on impact with another object and accelerate." he finished the explanation with some half-hearted jazz hands.

"I'm guessing that you need to source some components that you can't build yourself?" he added at the end, trying to bring the conversation back to Eliza's machine rather than the nature of his powers.

Sarah grins at Rebound, then glances pointedly at her daughter, as if to say, "Why can't you be polite like this young man?"

"No, I don't need any help, but I thank you for offering. Anything that I can't do personally, Eliza or her robo-crew can handle. But if anything comes up, I know who to call!"

Eliza taps her foot impatiently as Rebound lectures her about going outside and attending to her mental health.

"Just what I need...another adult yammering away about what I'm supposed to be doing...."

But when Rebound mentions "otherdimensional rift," the girl genius locks in. When he's finished, she grabs something that looks like a modified Dustbuster. She presses a button, which shoots a red light out of the device's hole or eye. Walking around Rebound, she bathes him in the light, scanning him thoroughly.

After this, the data apparently transfers to her iPad-thingy, which she picks up and stares at intently.

"Uh-huh...yup...anomalous energy signature...Newtonian violation level is really impressive...one-way transfer only...dimensional echoes, as expected...."

"Your story rings true, dude! And unlike Small Fry, you're not out of sync! You're very much here, in this reality, while your power source is very much over there."

"Soooo...are you a mutant, or did you get your powers from one of those weird accidents that always turn folks into supes? Because if it's the latter, knowing how that happened to you might make this fix-Small-Fry-mission easier!"

"And please don't tell me it's some secret, that if you tell us some super-villain will destroy everything you know and love...because that's lame!"

Rebound cocked his head to the side for a moment, catching Eliza's low grumbling. He took just a moment, turned something around in his head, and then said.

"...You know what? You're right. Sorry Eliza, I'll keep my unsolicited advice to myself." he swirled the lemonade around in his cup, watching the pulp moving within in before knocking back the rest of the glass, "Spent years looking out for a techie who couldn't seem to take care of himself, so, I fell into some old habits. You're not him though, you deserve a chance to figure this stuff out on your own."

"As for my 'secret origins'..." he started, snapping his finger and spinning Ms. Caldwell's cup on the tip of his finger, the light brush of a thumb accelerating it faster and faster though it didn't wobble at the end of his gloved finger. "Did you hear about the SERPENT attack on the Boston Dynamics Science Expo last year? Well, I was there, helping with one of the demonstrations. A so-called "perpetual motion machine"." he took a moment to make air quotes with his offhand, tossing the glass up and letting it land against the back of his knuckles, letting it roll up along the back of his arm, "I tried telling him that tapping kinetic energy defeated the entire purpose of a perpetual motion machine, but he starts yappin' about how our understanding of physics is a moving target these days, which necessitates an evolution of our understanding of what is possible." he popped his elbow, hopping the glass which he started spinning on the tip of his nose ... along the lip of the glass, spinning it like a hoola hoop along the small rise, which gave his voice a slight warble at a certain point of the orbit.

"Anyway, there's some time I can't account for, seeing as how the whole front of the building exploded, throwing rubble everywhere. I got thrown back into the perpetual motion machine, woke up really glad we'd decided to use acrylic sheets instead of glass to show the mechanisms at work, but the kinetic siphon's fallen off of its mount, squeezing me down against the floor. Still active, but the energy is just kinda buffeting around randomly and without direction." bending his knees slightly, he hopped up to spin the glass off of his nose, whipping his head down to headbutt it with its forehead and send it into a tumble. Kicking out his leg, he caught it before it connected with the floor with the toe of his shoe, popping it up to bounce off of his knee as he pulled a few quarters out of his pocket, walking them in sequence across the backs of his knuckles as he shuffled the glass from foot to foot like a hacky sack.

"That's when one of the League of Evil Scalies comes slithering over the wreckage, hunting for the inventor in the chaos. I didn't get a good look at who, but the smart money is on Shockodile. Most people in the super space mistakenly believe that kinetic energy only applies to physical objects, but lightning strikes are rated at about a billion joules of energy ... it's a little too fast for my reflexes to control, but the kinetic siphon ripped a peel of the stuff right off of him ... while I was in contact with it." bouncing the glass off of his heel, there was a sharp tink! as he flicked a quarter into the tumbling glass, as it flipped over his shoulder a second tink! reported, flipped with a spin from his offhand. "Best I can figure, something about the dimension that was being tapped twigged to something in Shockodile's lightning ... and decided an organic host was a better option than waiting for the unstable siphon to close the portal." the last coin flicked against the floor and then the ceiling before impacting the bottom of the glass and driving it into Rebound's upturned hand.

"Absolute freak accident. The original inventor is still 'enjoying' SERPENT's hospitality, the original machine is in a police evidence lock-up. Shockodile? I catch a flicker of him from time to time, but I've never managed to pin him down. I wouldn't even know where to start replicating the event." he settled the cup back on Ms. Caldwell's tray. "Sorry, nervous energy, fidget spinners don't really do it anymore."