It's Greek to Me: Poke It With A Stick

[x-hawkeye.livejournal.com]

Having called Molly in to check out the mechanical angle of the mechanism given her knowledge of advanced technology, even if it's a different type of tech, the two of them toss a few ideas about between them.


Clint stood with his back against the wall in the lab where he'd taken up residence a few days agao, head tipped slightly to the side as he looked at the mechanism on the counter several yards away. Comprised of hundreds and hundreds of gears in varying sizes, it was surprisingly well preserved, particularly when compared to the only other of its kind found thus far. That one was in a museum and so encrusted with with corrosive build-up that it was a miracle any of the pieces it had broken into were large enough to be worth viewing.

That said, it had taken Clint a few days of very careful observation and oblique communication with a friend from MIT who was more of an expert in metals than him to get the build-up on the one in front of him out of the way. Apparently pushing the button - he was pretty sure people were never supposed to push buttons that looked like that - had caused the mechanism to at least partially activate, which had dislodged a good deal of gunk from the interior.

"Any thoughts on the alloy?" He asked his current partner in scientific exploration. "It's similar to the tube Namor was in but it's not exactly the same. Not that I can verify that beyond a shadow of a doubt, given someone stole it and I have no access to the original data." Clint let out a frustrated sound, mentally running through what he did remember. He had notes scattered on the counter tops around them, rough approximations of the data he'd collected before leaving SWORD. He didn't have a photographic memory, though, so he wasn't comfortable drawing any kinds of conclusions based on them.

He'd been at this for long enough to have gotten frustrated with it. However, remembering Molly's experience with advanced technology, he'd called her in to take a look, see what she could make of it.

Peering through a pair of magnification goggles, Molly pushed back the sleeves of her over-sized lab coat. It was one she'd bought at a thrift store and sewed various embroidered patches onto.

"Not sure yet. It doesn't look like anything in the iron family, since there's bound to be evidence of like...degradation because of the age," Molly said, leaning back in her chair thoughtfully. Noticing the grunt, she shook her bag of Skittles wordlessly and held it out to him.

"It looks....familiar, but I can't really remember from where."

"There was some build-up, but the mechanism itself is intact - nothing fell off it when I cleaned the bits of it that needed cleaning." Taking the bag of Skittles, Clint popped a handful in his mouth and chewed for a moment before continuing, "I thought something related to silver given its the most thermal and electrically conducive metal but maybe this has nothing to do with conductivity. It looks like it's at least got some silver in it. Or platinum. Maybe." He frowned and shook his head. He'd had similar hypotheses about the crytotube, too, but he'd never been able to confirm anything. "And those symbols, the tiny ones on the gears... those are the same runes."

"Runes," Molly echoed curiously with a tiny 'hmmm,' turning to focus on the writing.

"Yeah, they don't look Asgardian either. But the way they're laid out kinda looks like a control---Wait!" She hit her head on the lamp above her head but didn't even bat an eye, reaching out to grab it so it wouldn't swing around. "I know what it looks like! It's kinda like....there's this place where you go when you travel using the bifrost. It's controlled by a guy named Heimdall. It kinda looks like a cannon that spits you out in other realms....It's massively huge. This looks like that...except smaller."

"What, like a... oh, wait, like little..." Clint trailed off, trying to envision it. "Isn't that place like a huge room, though, with different... gates that go place? Thor tried to describe it once but I was kind of drunk. Tell me about the similarities, though." He pushed off the wall and moved forward again so he was standing properly beside the counter with Molly.

"Sorta, yeah!" Molly said, pulling down her goggles to rest around her neck like a necklace since the magnification was giving her a headache.

"They didn't really tell me all about how it worked but from what I could tell the little cogs make up a machine that powers the gates. If they move fast enough and in the right sequence then they make a wormhole to another place. But the one on Asgard was so big that it could take you wherever you wanted to go with enough expulsion of energy....I'm guessing this one, if it does do that, is so small that it would need something to triangulate itself onto, like a receiver, or another machine on the other side to accept the call." Molly popped a Skittle in her mouth. "Oooh it's also kinda like...y'know that show Stargate? Like that."

"Gotcha," Clint said, working a bit of sugar out of his teeth as he considered that. "Hm... triangulation would make sense from a functional point of view. So there'd need to be a... I don't know, a stationary point, right, one that never moves. If these are the types of gateways Namor thinks they are, I'm guessing that point would be Atlantis. No idea if that's actually correct or not. So then this one would be... what? The transportable one? And then the third point would... hm. Also be stationary? I wonder... but what's the point? I mean, okay, you take this one wherever you go, right?"

Glancing over at Molly again, Clint frowned at the mechanism, then began pacing as he continued. "That makes sense. It lets you get home from wherever you've gone, presumably in a hurry and assuming Atlantis is actually the stationary point and that's where you want to go. But then there's the third point and what is it's function? Or does it not actually matter - like, this little thing's - wait." Squinting, Clint shook his head. "Damn. I mean, if it functions like the cogs you were talking about, it's probable you can make this go anywhere, you don't even actually have to have three points, just the correct coordinates."

"Something that small allowing you to go anywhere? That'd be pretty cool but they probably need to have some idea of where they're going safely....Heimdall does that for the Asgardians, making sure people don't like...go inside a mountain or something. The third thing could be a relay mechanism, sort of like a switchboard. You've got the home base gate thingy....and then the one that allows you to go anywhere potentially and then the one that actually is able to pick the right place?" Molly said.

She tilted her head at the same.

"This is all like fun to imagine but right now it's just a pretty sculpture until we find a way to make it work. Do we wanna make it work? What if the Atlantis point doesn't exist anymore?"

"Which, like I said, assumes that our theories are in any way accurate. Might be able to answer some of these questions if Namor was at all inclined to actually discuss things," Clint said, picking up a random tool and balancing it on his fingertip as he continued to pace. "He swears this isn't completely broken, but I don't know how he knows it's not. So we're blindly taking his word for it - which, alright, that's fine. We can work with that as a starting point. So it's not broken. Point the first.

"Point the second... cogs in the machine, certain... what? Certain combinations of... something? The gears or the relay of energy..." Pausing, he flipped the tool up into the air and caught it with his other hand as he turned on his heel to face Molly. "We have to proceed with the idea that whatever we do, if we get it to a point where it's even partially functional - like, if this side is working but the other end or whatever is broken - we'll see some kind of change here. So we need different ways to monitor things - energy output or intake... crap, I wonder if this thing is radioactive."

Molly wrinkled her nose. "Man I wish I was in Asgard...they have all that stuff. But I'm sure we can get something to measure it. I bet they have things that monitor radioactivity and energy here at the mansion....I mean, people could give that off if they come here, right? That stuff was originally designed to measure objects, not people, so we'd be using it for it's original purpose."

"Yeah, a Geiger counter shouldn't be too difficult to come by," Clint said, frowning intently at the mechanism. "I'll check with Scott, see what he thinks might be available. I'm pretty sure there are redundancies built into the mansion's security to detect radiation and stuff, anyway. So alarms would've gone off ages ago if it was actually emitting anything dangerous." Letting out a slow breath, Clint shook his head and said, "Let's break for lunch, give our brains a rest. Poking at this thing will only get us so far until we get some instruments to check our theories. And y'know, maybe staple the Atlantean king to the floor so he can answer some questions."

Molly laughed. "Good luck with that...y'know, from what I hear." She hadn't actually met this version yet but the other one was kind of a jerk and from what she saw on the journals this...one kinda was too? Good to know things didn't really change.

"I like food," she quickly added.

"Cool," Clint said, nodding. "What're you feeling for lunch? I think there's some leftover Thai in the main kitchen."