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A few months ago it would've been as much as your ankles were worth to try and follow Ray into his room to see anything of his; he had a much smaller room and had tried to cram so much into it that he was beginning to consider getting rid of the bed in favor of a hammock, just to get some floor space. He's moved now. The new space is of a decent size, and while it's still in the hotel room vein, it's a hotel room for two people (if the bed is anything to go by) and it has a desk and a few shelves of well-organized books and movies. There's a complicated chemical rig of some kind off to one side, by the closet, and plans for a Firefly-class starship pinned to one wall. It generally looks like the room of a geek who's making a desperate effort to be neat and civilized.

"The holocomp isn't from my time or anything," Ray admits as he leads the way in. "Q suggested I get it for tracking the different universes of local patrons. It's UFP-era manufacture and I don't dare take it apart to find out how it works. THat bastard's expensive."

Comments

[supersymmetry]

Fred looks around in awe.

"I had no idea you could get this kind of stuff in here. I think they left that part out when the Bar was being explained to me. Or maybe I just missed it in all the doom."

She considers for a moment.

"I wonder if they could set up something resembling my old lab? Not that I really need it here, but one never knows."

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"I actually brought some of this from home." Ray indicates the wire shelving. "That's from Ikea- the one in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Not that I've been Bound or anything but I like to keep my reference materials handy, you know? And the crystal rig is mostly from Edwards Scientific, though I had to get some of the parts from Bar and I usually buy my bags of silicates here too. It's paid for itself several times over, though. The other stuff-" He taps the plan on the wall. "Wash gave me that. Mostly because I was interested in the power plant. And the books and movies were partly acquired here, partly at home. Wish I could've brought some of the books from some of the universes I've been stuck in, though."

[supersymmetry]

"I am so having the next person from my world who walks through that door turn right back around and get my things for me before I say another word to them." she says with a tiny grin. It helps, to think that she might actually see her friends again, and to joke around about it like she would have with them.

"So! About those blueprints?"

She still looks entirely too excited. Fairly bouncing up and down with anticipation.

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Ray nods and rummages through the drawers of the desk before coming up with a flat object the size of both his hands together, and about half the thickness of a regular video projector for laptop presentations. "Hang on a sec," he says. "Security system."

Apparently his security system involves touching his tongue to part of the device, then murmuring into it for a while. Eventually, though, he nods and sets it down on the desk. "Here we go," he says, tapping the thing's controls and producing a three-dimensional rendition of the file system in midair over its surface. "Give me just a moment-"

A few taps and prods later, and suddenly the device produces a detailed wireframe breakdown of the physical structure of one of Ray's proton packs.

"This is the most recent version. It includes a fingerprint keying system that allows up to five people to be authorized to power it up. It'd be awkward to implement anything more secure than that, but these things are powerful and I don't want some schmuck accountant or EPA investigator blowing themselves to kingdom come because they couldn't keep their grabby mitts to themselves."

[supersymmetry]

Fred nods.

"Entirely sensible. There are plenty of people in this place that I wouldn't trust with them. In fact, I could probably provide a list of people that absolutely should not under any circumstances go near one of those, or anywhere near my world with one of those, and I really hope Andrew isn't recruiting any of them."

She studies the plans for a few moments with great interest.

"This is complex, but if we have a few days, I can probably manage. It can't be any harder to deal with than some of the crazy technology we've got back in my world. At least there's no magic involved here."

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He nods. "I've been big on security ever since I got yanked into an alternate dimension and spent six months in some seriously crackheaded situations. Possessed people should not be able to use high caliber particle beam weaponry or operate the containment unit..."

"Okay. The only thing that really gives me any trouble is getting the deuterium for the power cells. Bar doesn't like dispensing radioactives in more than a few dribs and drabs at a time."

[supersymmetry]

"Duly noted." Fred nods. "We could maybe just ask the head bartender in person, I mean, surely he'd get bar to make exceptions for impending apocalypses, right?"

She hopes. Never having met Bernard, she's not sure how good he is with news of apocalyspes. "Otherwise we have some time, I didn't get the impression that anyone was leaving tomorrow. We can get them mostly put together and then get the power cells working as fast as Bar will let us. We can't really do more than that."

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"That might work. I think Bernard's okay with that kind of thing. And it's just for power cells, not like we're making a hydrogen bomb or anything."

Never mind the part where four packs in close proximity to each other, set on simultaneous maximum overload, will leave a blast crater half a mile across.

"That sounds like a fair plan. Most of the rest of the parts aren't too hard to work with anyway, although these-" He zooms the display in on a particularly wiggy bit of routing in the thrower. "-could cause some swearing. That's from Anakin Skywalker, there."

[supersymmetry]

"..."

Fred blinks and nearly facepalms at the name. Yes, she's met Jedi here, and she's cool with that, but. She's just essentially been told that Darth Vader built a part of Ray's proton pack, and unfortunately, she has seen Star Wars.

"Anikin... Skywalker? As in... no, you know what? Don't tell me, I'm sure the explanation would make my brain explode in all kinds of messy ways. I'm just going to pretend that thought doesn't make me worry at all, and go right about my merry way in learning to assemble this thing."

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Ray smiles crookedly. "Sorry," he says. "We're talking post-Return of the Jedi, if it helps at all. It's a Milliways Dead thing. Um, it might be fair at this point to mention as well that there's a certain amount of engineering improvement contributed by the Men in Black as well. Admittedly, the Man in Black involved is that universe's version of me, but still."

[supersymmetry]

"This place is weird." Fred mutters.

"Okay, so, let me see if I've got all of this straight: talk to Bernard for deuterium, be careful of the part that Vader built, and uh... anything else? How will I know if I've done it right?"

Please don't let the answer be 'if it doesn't blow up.' Fred hates that.

[gone_byebye]

Well, there was a time when that would've been the answer, yeah. But Ray's had to do a lot of building lately and other people get so picky about that kind of thing. Plus, Egon nearly had a facial expression when Ray showed him the results Anakin's modifications had on the streams, so they've been working on improving the packs in a systematic fashion for some time now.

Ray taps a few more controls and a 'screen' appears in the space near the pack's wireframe. Numbers begin appearing in that space. "Energy output levels for each individual component need to fall within these parameters before any given subsystem is connected to any other subsystem," he says. "The combined unit parameters are at the end of the list. Get 'em all right, and with the cladding we're using and the shielding designed into the positron collider, it'll switch on fine. You'll know when you hear the sound, if nothing else. I'll switch mine on for you if you want to hear it."

[supersymmetry]

Fred nods.

"Yeah, that'd be good. Sometimes you do something all by the numbers and it goes kerblooey anyway. And in my world, that usually means you've then got an angry demon, a useless device, and some duct tape left over."

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"Well, in this case kerblooey would take out a space about the size of a Manhattan city block and contaminate the area with alpha and beta particles to the point of virtual uninhabitability for the next twenty years or so, which is why Egon and I are careful never to let it get to that point." Ray shrugs. "I've built enough of them by now to know my way around. It's not that hard once you've learned everything that could possibly be involved first."