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| Scene Title | Homework |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Richard finally tells Harmony what's going on. She takes it surprisingly well. |
| Date | September 3, 2018 |
Raytech NYCSZ Branch Office - Harmony's Suite
Given the state of things in the Safe Zone, Raytech Industries offers corporate housing to its employees and their families; the apartments are spacious but fairly spartan, with little in the way of furniture provided beyond what the residents themselves bring in. Still, there's heat, air conditioning and power, and while the water is rationed - those amenities are more reliable than elsewhere in the Safe Zone, and the security can't be beaten.
Outside of the Yamagato complex, of course.
There are a few apartments with an extra room for those with children, and it's on the door of one of those that Richard knocks, standing just outside in that black suit with the red shirt he wears around the facility pretending he's an important executive.
Material possessions and the best living conditions have never made Harmony's list. After all, just look at the places that she's lived in in the more recent years. There was the broken library after all… The thumping of small excited feet can be heard running inside after an expressive "I got it!" as locks click and the door opens to no one at eye level to Richard. Instead, a shorter youthful head with tousled brown hair and sparkling eyes peeks out, eyeballing the person standing on the other end carefully, "Hullo?" Ricky inquires.
His discovery at who is there makes his face light right up, and he jumps, "Dad! Hey it's dad!"
"Well, Ricky close the door or let him in, silly." Mom's voice comes from within the apartment. When he realizes that he's taking too long, Ricky does open the door the rest of the way. Youthful exuberance.
"Hey, kiddo," Richard laughs as he steps forward, bending down in a swoop to heft the boy up in his arms and against his chest and shoulder, "Gotcha." One foot catches the door to push it closed behind him with his heel, grinning at Ricky, "You opening the door for your mom now, are you?"
'Yay!' is practically what Ricky is saying, which means he was probably pretty bored until just a second ago. Poor kid lives with two brainiac girls and is a boundless fountain of boyish energy. His reflexes are on point in how fast he adjust to being scooped up, getting barings and hanging onto his dad, "Yeah! Mom and Lil are doing their homework. I had some but, theirs is way harder than mine, and they really take their time on it. I just like to get it done! Mom took the time to help me with it, so I was being quiet while she does hers." he nods affirmatively.
Inisde the apartment is relatively clean, all of Harm and the kid's stuff arranged to be relatively cozy. In the main room is a huge dry erase board, and around the general area is the most cluttered part, with books and papers strategically strewn about in a 'work nest'. Harmony is the at the core of it, marking diagrams on the board that make almost no immediate sense, but it looks like a lot of math. Lili is tucked in the corner of the couch with a school book.
"Well, isn't that considerate of you?" Richard steps along into the room easily as he carries his son, chuckling, "Your sister's even smarter than I am, so, that makes a lot of sense…" Carrying Ricki over towards the dry erase board, he peers over her shoulder, "Do I even want to ask what this is, Harm, or is it going to make my head hurt?"
Long distance to Atticus: Richard grins. Hope work wasn't -too- bad.
Ricky noddles, cause he's a good boy and he knows it. Lili, the future skeptic, doesn't make a move away from her book and spot until she actually sees Richard. It's all good after that, as the girl drops her book to the side and scoots right on off to hope over to Richard, "Daddy!" she jumps over to latch onto his leg. Lili is a child past her years, but even she gets herself reduced to a little girl when it comes to Richard Ray.
"Possibly both." Harm turns with a smirk. She's not glamorous or anything, having her hair all pulled back, wearing a pair of painter's overalls and a blouse with the shoulders missing. "The technical stuff can spare you the headache, but I'm just kinda doing my part to save the city, the world and whatever else. I'm of course thinking of the issue of power supply and resources. Perhaps thinking of the possibility of petitioning for a reactor construction, if it ever gets to that point. But of course that takes some doing. What I'm doing right now specifically is the design of a safety system like control rod, safety logic and the simulation in the PLC/SCADA, etc. The design of various sensors which can withstand the high temperatures and pressures, simulation of various safety systems in the PLC." she gives a shrug, "Kinda hoping to make something like this my thesis for my Masters."
Compared to him, she is a bit under dressed. "You're dressed all fancy, going to a party?" she asks.
A warm laugh as his leg's latched onto, Richard's free hand dropping down to ruffle his daughter's hair fondly. "How's my little genius? Doing your homework, I see…" Then he's looking back to Harmony with a grin, admitting, "Just got off work, haven't had time to get out of the monkey suit. Kaylee and Val'd kill me if they saw me walking around the offices in my civilian clothes."
Which admittedly haven't changed much since he lived in the ruins of a library. They just get more dry cleaning these days.
"I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'll take your word for it," he admits in dry tones, "Physics aren't my forte, which I suppose makes it kind of ironic— well, anyway. It's going well, I take it? Kids haven't been giving you trouble?" A mock-suspicious look between the twins.
Harmony has to laugh, "I never thought that I would see a day where I would 'Warren' you. What's really ironic is that at this point I could understand a fraction of what he would go on about… or has gone on about in the past." Which she contemplates momentarily, "Thinking back, a lot of what he said makes sense to me now." And that makes her frown, "Am I losing my edge here? Trading in the sports car for a— Well actually, I already traded that in for a mini-van… Am I a soccer mom? Oh god, is gentrification happening to me?"
Ricky looks surprised at the insinuation of causing trouble. Prides himself on being a good boy, Lili just knows better, "Hah," harmony chuckles, "It's going well, and at this point I can't exactly get rid of them can I?" she heads over to put a hand on Ricky's head, "They kind grew on me. Started out as an itch and I scratched it." she teases, kids snickering.
At that, Richard can't help a grin, his head shaking. "Is Warren a verb now? God— you know he actually busted into a meeting with some kind of shitty telepresence robot he made out of junk and hid in a closet somewhere? My brother, I tell you…" He leans down a bit to set Ricky down finally, straightening then and smiling affectionately down at the twins, "Alright, you two entertain yourselves in here for a minute, alright? Harm, I need a few in private…"
"Mmm, nope, doesn't surprise me one bit." Harmony purses her lips and gives her head a shake, "As brilliant as I might find his ideas to be, and that I think he'd be the best chance I have at getting this thing built, I'm avoiding him until absolutely necessary. Have a suspicion that when he finds out I kinda 'get him', he'll start bringing up the past and start awkwardly hitting on me." Yah she'd rather much avoid that, "Ok you two go on ahead and go play in your room, I'll get dinner ready in a little bit." she adds, doing the mother bit, sending them on their way. It's not too much of a bummer for them to leave him, they could just go to his apartment when they want to, being so close. "Need anything?" she offers to Richard, finding her way to the kitchen area,
"No, he's pretty devoted to Elle these days," Richard admits, "So I think you're safe. Anyway, he's in Detroit, so you'd probably be talking to him over a satellite connection…" As the pair scuttle away, he looks after them with a smile… which fades away for a more serious expression as he steps into the kitchen. "No, I'm— actually, something alcoholic. You might want something too."
Ruefully, he admits, "This is gonna be a bit to take in."
"Oh thank god…" Harmony whisper a hushed sigh of a prayer. Since getting in the motherly way, and getting into education, Harmony as totally taken to romance like a vampire to sunlight, she is what you might call determined. "Ohhh… one of those." Great, either bad or dire news. "Wine it is." She goes over to the cabinet, reaching all the way back to take out a bottle of unopened wine, "You know, I was supposed to have this at my celebration graduation dinner, but I wasn't feeling so celebratory. So I saved it. Yay, right?" she has to use cups rather than glasses.
Richard leans against the counter in the kitchen area, one hand coming up to rub against the nape of his neck. "Well, it's… good news, really," he allows carefully, "In one sense, at least, it just might be a little— shocking." The cups are regarded for a moment, and then his gaze lifts to look at her and states simply, "Liz is alive."
She goes and opens a drawer, and starts knocking around utensils and such looking for the opener, "I know it's in here somewhere…" she mutters. Everyone has a mess drawer. But before she finds it, she gets that little bomb dropped. Now maybe he was expecting an emotional reaction like when he told her she was dead, but she kinda slams the wine bottle down on the counter a bit firmly, "Richard!" she gets a bit juiced, "RichardRichardRichard, I— " and then she gets this really purse-lipped determined face, pointing at him, "You… oh my god you have no idea." It is good news, but she's taking it like he just told her that she had a sickness and now she doesn't. She chuckles, and then drops into a chair with relief, chuckling bigger, "Ok, so let me pose this to you. Granted, my powers a nuclear based, and aside from learning more about them, did it strike you as odd or out of place that I'd choose nuclear engineering all of a sudden? Like— a bit outta left field? Radiation, sub-atomic particles, stuff like that? How I've never once told the kids that Liz is dead? On the contrary, in the fairytales about their godmother, I always said that she was somewhere watching them? In a place always thinking about them?" There have been hints here and there. And Harmony's feelings about Liz being gone have been about missing her, rather than mourning her. "I didn't want to stress you or Jared with frustration or otherwise so… I kept that to myself. While secretly, I've been trying to learn as much as I can to hopefully— " she's getting excited, "Nevermind… I wanna help!" Harmony jumps up, smiling, "I've been preparing for this very instance for years. God, I'm not crazy for feeling or thinking like that. You just validated that I'm not a crazy woman."
"No, you're— " Richard is a bit bemused by the entire outburst, one hand raising half-way as if to calm her down, "— no, you're not crazy, you're… alright, calm down." He breathes out a chuckle, picking up the cup of wine and stepping over, dropping himself into a chair. "I guess this'll be easier than I thought, but there's a — lot to go over.. So, the black hole that Magnes created, that the other me fired the Mallett Device at… I guess what it did was shunt them both into an alternate timeline, a different superstring if you've been reading about all that stuff in school. The one where Phoenix failed to stop the virus."
He takes a swallow of the wine, "Some of the kids— you remember Brian and Gillian's kids, from the Lighthouse? The orphans? Yeah, they found a… tape, that seems to have fallen through worlds, so to speak. Magnes was working on a way home on it." A grimace, "He didn't succeed, though. I know that because I traced the progress through an old prophetic song of Else's… they're going to go through four different worlds before they get home. That one, one where Arthur Petrelli won, the one where evil me came from, and a world where Apollo failed - a flooded world. Um. Now we're going to get into some weird shit."
It wasn't weird already?
Harmony starts to shuffle a but, doing an in-zone dance and drawing congratulations onto herself, "Oh yeah! Who knew it? I knew it! That's right! This was not a waste!" she does like being right, and it's a big deal when a big part of your life is shown to be the right decision. "Oh! You're right." she stops abruptly, "Sorry. It's just— Yeeahhh. I mean, I had a little—" she gasps and blinks, remembering something and then running over to her work area to start rifling through papers, "Keep talking, I'm listening!" It's like Christmas and her birthday here with this news.
"Brian, Gillian— yeah, yeah— uh huh." Frantically she shuffles through file after file. "Well I've had my speculation that the sci-fi theory that a black hole could be a portal rather than a calamity, and we are talking about Varlane here. It's an Evo black hole right? I mean, it makes no natural sense for our powers to work how they do. I'm a nuclear factory because my cells are like millions and millions of mini-reactors, and radiation doesn't damage me like it should. So who's to say Varlane's powers aren't equally as weird. I mean, black holes are still a mystery ro begin with!"
She finds it what she was looking for. "Ah hah! Okay, so this is all coming together, like— yeah…" Harmony stands up, tucking a paper behind her back, "So— a prophecy, and four worlds? That's a lot of travelling. I wonder what it feels like. It can't be comfortable to travel that way. Anyway, you finish first, then I'm gonna show you something."
Richard can't help a smile at her enthusiasm— if only because it reminds him of him when he's come to sudden realizations and discoveries like this. Their kids are going to be something to deal with when they're older, he's sure of it. He leans forward, one hand resting on his knee and the other motioning with the cup of wine he's holding. "It's a lot of travelling," he admits, "And… well, I've been doing some digging into things, and I've found out some things too. Someone was working on travel between worlds like this, back in the early eighties…"
He draws in a slow breath, straining, "Michelle Leroux. She was working with Edward and this other guy, Richard Schwenkman. The first time she turned on the device, there was— some kind of accident. The Company agent on site panicked, Michelle ended up hit by a car, and Edward got away. With me. Because apparently I'm not even from this reality. Another Michelle, in the world that became flooded… that was my mother."
"Wait…" Harmony hesitates, "You're… not from here? You're— a traveler?" That one actually stumps Harmony, "So like— you're saying that you're very possibly subject to slightly different meta-physical laws than the ones here? That there is a small possibility that your kids could be some kinda reality hybrid with some wonkey kinda genes or some such?" she wiggles her fingers through the air. "Oh my god, Richard…" As a scientist herself, she is prone to all sorts of possibilities in theories. "Ok, um… keep going. Don't let me stop you I'm just— a little blown away."
Richard brings his hand up to rub between his eyes. "No, it— Harm, it's literally the same as here except for a few decisions that were made. It's not like I come from some alien dimension where everything is different, my genetic code is exactly the same as it would be if I was born here." He can't help but chuckle, his head shaking, "So our kids aren't alien hybrids or anything, no, thank God."
"So. Yeah. Next thing is, we managed to make contact with that world briefly— we used a radio and some tricks, and… she's alive. My mother, in that same world that Liz is heading to last. Long story short, we need to figure out how to build a device to lock on to hers and create a stable portal, so we can bring Liz and Magnes home. And…"
He hesitates, "Our daughter. One of the contact points we made told me that shortly after the jump — nine months, about — she had a daughter. Aurora."
Well that past has her relieved at the very least. Kids are not alien, so good. "Alright. That's one worry off my head, I couldn't handle that surprise." Although, there are further reveals that make Harmony almost turn ghost white, "I— " and then she chuckles once, "Wow, um— just— " she takes out the paper and opens it up, taking a look at it. "One of the last conversations I had with Liz, we… spoke about her and you and having kids." while she stares at the paper, Harmony sounds very somber, "I noticed that—
well that she had the glow. I planned on calling her out on it when she got back. I wanted to tell her that night but I felt she wouldn't be able to do what she had to if she thought for one second that she might be— " Harmony purses her lips, "That was the initial reason why I never gave up on her being alive, because knowing that she and the baby would have died was just too much. Initially it was that and—" a long pause,
"Some time after the twins were born, and before everything went down, I went out for a walk in Central Park, and I met with a guy who draws the future so to speak. I mean— more like the absolute most ideal future. So ideal that it's more like a fantasy because it was only if every single thing went so perfectly right. Happy ever after." she looks up from the paper, "I don't wanna spoil it for you, but talking with him for a while, he drew me something that I've kept close. I didn't know who this sixth person was— this girl in here— until just now, because it makes sense." here in my hands is the perfect picture of you, me, Ricky, Lili, Liz and I believe this has to be Aurora at dinner. Maybe Christmas, or Thanksgiving or something. This was the other reason I kept Liz's flame alive. The man told me he drew things that lifted spirits and stoked the fires of hope. He drew what people needed, and I needed this." she smiles, "You can see it if you want."
"I'd… like to see that, yeah," Richard says with a faint smile, "I hope that's how this ends. I have faith, I… prophecy isn't certain, I'm proof of that. I've foiled it more than a few times, so… I just hope that she gets home safely."
He glances over to the whiteboard, "We're going to need some people working in physics once we get some more information, more of the calculations. I managed to get a message back to me from the wasteland, but it's all— partial information. We're digging in to find more of it soon."
"Well I can tell you that it's not how it ends exactly but— the way he described it to me is… If you have a result in your head of winning a million dollars, then the outcome is you winning a million dollars that is given to you over time, vs winning it all in one lump sum, with the luck that is almost like manipulating reality. The more likely event is the first way, what he draws is the second way." she reaches out to hand it to him, "Things have already gone into place that makes this not happen, but that doesn't mean that certain elements aren't there." she smiles, "I—I'm guessing they're about 20 something here. Look, look at how handsome he is." Harmony is practically glowing as she shows him. Practically? She is actually glowing. A gentle light. Just a small corona, "And the girls as so. Beautiful. And I don't think I've ever seen you smile like that/." the blonde laughs. "We'll make something like this happen. We're gonna get them back. The twins will be so thrilled."
She takes a look at her whiteboard, "Mmn. This was just my schoolwork. My theories and research on black holes that I've been keeping to myself? On the other side. But you got me. I'm ready to help anyway I can."
The picture's taken in hand, and Richard's smile grows softer; thumb brushing over the edge of the paper as he looks at it for a long moment. "I hope it comes true," he says softly, glancing up at her with an unsure but hopeful expression, "I'm doing everything I can to make it so. I want us to have this dinner, someday…"
He draws in a breath, handing it back and bringing up the cup of wine to finish off in a long swallow, eyes closed, "I'll get you with our other brains once we have everything."
"Good. There is actually one other important matter to discuss." Harmony nods with some resolve. "This one is a bit more lighthearted, but just as crucial, if you're asking me." A grin reaching her lips, "As you know. The twin's birthday is coming up in a bit. So we have to talk party. I am giving you first dibs before I mention this to their aunts who no doubt are having their own ideas cooking so far."
"Oh, shit, you're right— " Richard glances over to the twins' bedroom, then back to her with a wry smile, "We really should set something up for them all. Invite all the other kids, have a whole thing…" he chuckles, “I’ll start setting it up. It’ll be a nice distraction, because we all have…”
His gaze drifts back to the whiteboard, “A lot of homework to do.”