xp_logs | NOT ANOTHER TEEN DIMENSION

The wormhole could be an exciting and dramatic adventure; helping them map and explore the spiral of dimensions that existed just beyond this one. But it could also be incredibly boring, with long shifts at the monitors, detecting nothing and stuck simply watching the clock crawl. Tonight seemed like more of the same, needing barely a check as their pizza arrived for dinner.

"Uuuuuugh," Clint groaned, flopping dramatically into his rolly chair before sliding the box of pizza over between Molly and himself. "Mooooolllllllsssssss," he continued, fighting a grin. His eyes trailed over the various monitors, finding them just as they were when he left to get the pizza from the front gate. "I mean. No alarms are good alarms, right? So."

Molly quirked an eyebrow. "Dude, you better not have Macbeth-ed the wormhole," she said with a laugh as she grabbed the box and snuck a slice. "It's like saying 'it's quiet,' cause then it gets NOT quiet."

She stared at the slice of pizza. "Mmm, cheesy."

"Oh God, why would you say that word - not once, but twice??" Clint lamented, dragging a couple pieces of pizza out of the box and then folding them over one another so he could cram them in his mouth as fast as humanly possible. "We're gonna die tonight and it'll be all your fault!" He was joking. Mostly. But he was definitely finishing off his half of the pizza before things blew up.

"What?" Molly's mouth dropped open. "You started it by saying 'no alarms are good alarms,'" she said, mocking his voice while pretending to shoot an arrow that she did not have at that moment, but just to further sell the bad impression of him.

"If anything happens, this is all--"

The alarms started blaring and Molly dropped her head against her chair. "Great."

Clint's shoulders fell as he shoved as much of his pizza into his mouth as possible, dropping the rest before rolling to the area controlling the alarms. "'kay," he said, chewing and swallowing as fast as possible. "'ooks 'ike w'got..." he paused after silencing the alarms, rolling back toward the consoles displaying actual data. Swallowing the last of his food, he asked, "What're you seeing? Cause I've got... a pretty large anomaly..."

Molly leaned forward, studying the monitors a moment before her attention flickered toward the rift itself. "Yeah, same. But it's kinda...different. Like muted? Not like the others we've seen before," she said.

Tossing the pizza crust back in the box, she nodded. "The pizza gods demand a sacrifice, and it's apparently us. You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Drones to see if we need full suits, then we hop through to check it out?" Clint asked, noting the readings confirming Molly's observation that there was something different about this rift. "Hey - it's not just muted. It's getting larger - like, slowly, but still. We've only seen that once or twice." It seemed to indicate that the problem in the other dimension was actively getting worse.

"And both times that wasn't good," Molly said, chewing on the edge of a pen. Hopping up out of her chair, she removed the cover from where her drones were charging.

"Alright, wakey wakey boys and girls. It's time to work."

She turned back to Clint. "Can you prep the suits just in case everything's good for us to go?"

"On it," Clint agreed easily, heading for the armory-slash-wardrobe where the team's preferred weapons and suits were stored. He went over Molly's full suit and his own, checking to make sure none of the pieces were compromised -- not that Molly really needed the armor, but her mask and goggles were important, since she was still susceptible to airborne toxins and disease transference, plus the eyes were always a vulnerability. He laid out a taser for her, just in case she wanted it, and finished prepping his own gear as well as making sure their gauntlets were in order.

"We're good to go in here," he called, walking back out to the main observation room. "What're your babies telling you?"

"Normal air, normal gravity. All quiet on the--" Molly leaned in. "Holy Sunnydale High, Batman," she said, nodding to the screen.

"Looks like a school. Guess it means we won't need the suits...unless they want to think we're weirdos."

"Probably best if we check things out as lowkey as possible," Clint said, nodding. "Let's see where we come through on the other side and move in from there to try and figure out what the issue might be. I'm texting Matt so he can handle comms and alert others if there's another signal or something goes really wrong while we're on the other side. Also, here's your gauntlet. Really gotta work on finalizing those blueprints and schematics Forge left for making these things smaller..."

"Until then, long sleeves it is," Molly said as she put on the gauntlet and hid it under her jacket, then grabbed the taser (just in case). She glanced up at the portal.

"Give me a sec to bring the kids back through the portal and we can go through," she said. A couple of minutes later, the drones flew back through the portal and went back to their regular charging stations.

She turned to look back at Clint. "Off we go into the wild school yonder?"

Clint double checked to make sure he had quarters in his pockets, secured his gauntlet, and then nodded. "Yup... and Matt's on his way from his office," he said, activating their portal so it could connect to the anomalous reality. "In three, two, one..." However much he might have wanted their portal to look like the ones on Stargate, it didn't. There was a barely-there ripple, like the fabric of their reality really was warping or tearing, and then when he reached 'one,' he and Molly both stepped through.

Molly wobbled slightly as she found herself mid stride, walking down the halls of the high school the drone had seen. A few boys walked with her, including one that looked a lot like Clint but if it were like...a teenager. She looked down at herself, finding what she'd been wearing before was replaced with a pair of purple overalls and a black zip up hoodie.

What the frick?

"I think we need to just recalibrate it." Tony Stark said, his oversized sunglasses which he thought made him look cool (they didn't) bobbing as he talked. "Pete, what about phase inversion?"

"It's tricky. I mean, Mister Banner tried that in his notes."

"Maybe he missed something?" Monica's braid was firmly in her hand, a clear scene she was nervous. "We only have two weeks to make this work."

"Well, we'll-" Tony led them into the room and stopped. "Um, what? I mean, what? Where is it? Where is it?"

Clint had continued walking by muscle memory alone, but as the others he was walking with stopped he found himself wobbling. Everything was hellaciously... colored? Maybe? Probably, yes. He kept blinking, expecting his usual grayscale to appear but it definitely didn't and his balance was weirdly off... and he knew... these people... but not these people. He caught sight of a teen who was... probably Molly, based on the hat and widened his eyes in alarm at her even as he braced himself against the nearest flat surface and tried to figure out what was up with his hearing.

Still thoroughly weirded out, Molly decided to lean into it and pretend like she belonged because no one was looking at her weirdly but Clint.

"Uh, what's missing...Tony Stark?" she said awkwardly.

"The prototype experimental power generator that uses gamma rays to amplify energy output. We've been working on it for weeks for the Science Fair." Tony bemoaned. Peter translated.

"It's that old prototype of Mister Banner's. Tony and Monica thought they had a breakthrough. That's what those equations they asked you to rundown were for. We turned it on last night, but nothing happened. We were actually going to ask you two if you had any ideas about it this morning and to collaborate with us, but... it's gone."

"It has to be some kind of prank. Some asshole trying to mess with one of you," Monica said, flushing slightly at the use of the curse word she definitely wasn't allowed to use at home.

"Wait, gamma radiation literally causes cancer and kills people, why are we not at least wearing lead... everything?" Because okay, Clint knew if Bruce Banner had handed a gamma tech thing off to high schoolers - especially these high schoolers - then he wasn't the Hulk, but that didn't mean something awful wouldn't happen. "Marie Curie? Those girls who painted clocks or whatever? But also, that door was locked, wasn't it? Who else would have the keys?" He tipped his head to the side. "Or be really good at lockpicking?"

"Ok, so unconstrained gamma radiation would have already vaporized us, the school, the world, and so on." Teenaged Tony was uncannily like, well, Tony Stark. "The containment field was fine. It's the amplification matrix that didn't, well..."

"Amplify." Peter supplied helpfully.

"Yes. It doesn't work but that doesn't mean it won't work. But without the prototype, we have nothing to work from. I did not come to school for seven am just to start all over again!" He was going to say more but the door opened and the other main science teacher. Mrs MacTaggert came into the room.

"Oh hi, kids. Oh, Mr. Banner had to attend to a family emergency, so there's going to be a sub covering his classes the rest of the week."

Molly gave Mrs MacTaggert a rushed thumbs up. "Okay, cool, bye! We need to do science stuff now." She never really met Moira MacTaggert before so it wasn't like, weird to see her. The focus though seemed to be on whatever this stolen tech was. If it was throwing off weird crap then that was likely what was causing the anomaly in this world.

Waiting until Mrs. MacTagger left the room, she leaned in. "Then we gotta find it. It's the easiest way. I say we make a list of suspects and do some good old fashioned Scooby Doo detective work."

Man she hoped this world had Scooby Doo, otherwise she'd have to do a lot of creative explaining.

"Right," Clint said, nodding his agreement. "Right, and if you show me the results from the test yesterday, I might be able to help figure out why nothing happened. Where are the notes and data?" Because somehow he doubted a gamma radiation project from Bruce Banner would just not function after Tony Stark started tinkering with it - the question became, though, whether the fact that it worked somehow caused the anomaly or if it was the fact that it was stolen.

"Sure, here's the notes." Stark said, handing them over.

"Okay, we'll bring them back when we're done," Molly said. Her attention flickered back to Clint.

"Clint, you got a sec?" she added, nodding her head toward the door. They had to figure out a way to get this back to their world when they were currently in a different body. (How did that happen?!)

"Yeah," Clint said, nodding as he headed toward the door with the notes. Once outside, he muttered, "Well, this... doesn't bode particularly well. Let's figure out how to get these notes recorded somehow and then head home. We're definitely going to need some assistance from some of the other teams... and probably some more recon with your drones, since we're high schoolers here..."