Time and again, p.10
Time & Again, page 10
"Okay," Lisa said, as soon as she was sure Friday and Kara would hear her without any need to raise her voice. "So there definitely is somebody asleep on the sofa. And, like, Yumi isn't being ridiculous when she says there's a real, non-zero chance that person is Lady Vengeance."
"No way," Kara said, not even bothering to look up from the console she'd been adjusting the dials on for several minutes. "Lady Vengeance lives in Seattle."
"And yet," Yumi said back.
"And yet." With one hand on Yumi's shoulder for balance, Lisa bent down and slipped her shoes off. She frowned over at the others as she pulled her phone from her pocket and scurried away from them, back across the sitting room floor. They watched as Lisa pointed her phone toward the sofa and captured a moment of silent video before shutting the phone off and sliding back across the floor toward the others.
"Why'd you take a video?" Kara asked before she even looked at the screen. "That's kind of creepy."
"Because my phone makes a sound when I snap a photo but not when I make a video," Lisa answered her. "So since I didn't want to wake her up, I took a video."
"It's still creepy," Kara said.
"Yeah, well," Lisa said, "I'll delete it. It's not like I want to keep it. But I think you should look."
Kara took the phone from Lisa's hand and looked at the image that was still on the screen. "Damn, you're right, that does look like Lady Vengeance. But I still don't think it's her."
"Why not?" Yumi took Lisa's phone from Kara. "You do know I know her, right? Like ... I slept in her bed one time."
"You what?" Lisa asked, her face suddenly screwed into a frown.
"She wasn't in it at the time," Yumi said. "It was at ... you know what? It's complicated. I'm just saying I know Lady Vengeance when I see her, and I'm pretty sure that's her asleep in there."
"Lady Vengeance lives on the other side of the country," Kara repeated, finally standing from her seat. "She has no reason to be on this coast, let alone on that sofa."
"But she--" Yumi began again.
"You know what?" Kara pulled her phone from her pocket. "I'm just going to ask."
"What?" Friday asked, finally drawn into the conversation whether she wanted to be or not.
"I just texted Miss Killingsworth," Kara replied. "I asked her."
"You what?" Yumi asked.
"You heard me," Kara said. "I asked her. I said 'hey, did you know there was someone asleep up here on the sofa, and should we send you a photo because it might be Lady Vengeance?' And I left it at that."
Friday shook her head, as did Lisa. Yumi turned back around to face the sitting room as Kara's phone chimed with a message.
Kara picked it up to read the screen and shrugged. "Huh. Well, will you look at that."
"What?" Lisa asked.
"Looks like Yumi was right," Kara replied.
"I was?"
"Yep." Kara nodded and turned the phone around so Yumi could see the reply for herself.
"I know you're working," Yumi read aloud, "but let V sleep if you can. She has trouble with time zones. I'll make sure she's up in time for her flight back to Seattle." Yumi looked away from Kara's phone and back into the sitting room. "Holy shit," she said, trying to contain her volume, but unable to contain her enthusiasm.
"Yumi?" Lisa said.
"Holy shit!" Yumi exclaimed again, louder this time--she really couldn't help it.
"What part of 'let V sleep' didn't make sense to you?" Kara asked.
"Like--" Yumi said. "Maybe you don't understand. But Lady Vengeance was probably my first girl crush--certainly the first one I was aware of and figured out. And, like, no matter how many times I've met and talked to her, I still have never managed to keep any part of my cool around her. And now I'm supposed to be working, figuring out this super complicated equipment so we can maybe catch some time-traveling bad guys, only she's asleep in the next room. It's going to be a little hard for me to concentrate."
"Asleep on your boss's couch," Friday reminded her.
"Yeah. Oh. Um." Yumi looked over at Lisa, who was watching patiently. "I mean--"
"Babe." Lisa shook her head. "You're so cute. And ridiculous."
"Listen," Friday said, also standing from her chair. "I get that she may be partially responsible for your queer awakening, or whatever. But as far as her awakening, I think we want to put that off as long as possible. I'm only guessing here, but I figure someone who goes by 'Lady Vengeance' might not be the best person to wake up before she's ready."
"Uh, yeah, I guess," Yumi said. "I just ... I can't even--"
"You're right, you can't," Kara said, shutting off the screen of her phone and sliding it back into her pocket. "And you won't. If she wakes up and comes in here, then it's up to you whether you hold your shit together or decide to go full fangirl. But unless or until that happens, we're here to work. We're trying to get things set up to catch whoever's been tampering with spacetime, and now that we've got the equipment to do that, we should get it all networked together and calibrated so we can actually do what we were hired to do."
Yumi frowned, but she went back to her seat.
"Going to get my own water now," Lisa said, half-smirking at Yumi. "Should I bring you one?"
Yumi spun her chair to face the console of the machine where she was sitting but nodded.
Learning the machinery proved to be interesting, and occasionally wildly frustrating. It didn't take Kara long to figure out that these contraptions were little more than glorified prototypes. Several of them might not even qualify as "glorified". It was clear from the user interfaces these machines had been designed by the professor for his own use and documented in such a way as to allow him to make a later version more usable and less unwieldy.
Hours into the process, with Lady Vengeance still sound asleep on the couch in the next room, the bunch of them decided they couldn't handle another moment in the technological quagmire without having something to eat. Yumi, in her continued exuberance for using their expense account, suggested trying to get a table at Two and Two, a hip downtown restaurant that would ordinarily have been a good bit outside their price range.
"Trust me, babe," she said to a dubious Lisa. "It's on point."
Lisa seemed hesitant. "And you want me to call?"
"Totally," Yumi said. "Do your thing."
Using her best customer service voice, Lisa made the reservation for four. The other three watched in awe as she managed to get a table with no apparent trouble. They were divided on whether or not she misrepresented just how come it was they were coming from the Ruby Tower, but none of them were particularly bothered by it.
Lunch took long enough that they were still at the table when Kara got a reply to the email she'd sent off to Dr. Kummerfeldt, explaining a few of the many eccentricities of one of the machines she'd found particularly baffling. And by the time they all made it back to the penthouse, Vivienne Cain was no longer in evidence.
Yumi, who'd made no secret of her hope of running into Lady Vengeance when they returned, was audibly disappointed by her absence. Soon enough, she was able to distract herself with the wiring of Professor Kummerfeldt's Geiger counter while Lisa synced a few of the other devices with their borrowed atomic clock.
Not all of the machines came online, but a few of them worked, at least. And as much as "some" was an improvement over "none," Kara suggested it might be worthwhile to bring in some help with the technical workload.
"Some help?" Yumi asked. "You mean your robot?"
"Babe," Lisa said. "Lumien is a sophisticated AI powered by extraterrestrial technology. Be nice."
"Yeah, I mean Lumien." Kara bit her lip, considering.
Kara had left her robotic sidekick at home for this job for a number of reasons, but the team welcomed his efforts to comb the internet for clues now that she had her employer's blessing to task him with such. Having him working remotely also meant he could be on task twenty-four-seven without disrupting Kara's need for sleep or focus. But having computing power added to the team's ability to understand the workings of their loaner gear might be worth the other inconveniences.
"Tell you what," Kara said. "Let's take the weekend, and we'll assess our progress before making a decision as to whether to call in robotic reinforcements."
"Why?" Yumi asked. "It's not like there's nothing for him to do. Plus, I've never met a robot--" She noted Lisa's stern look. "--advanced AI, uh, person."
"That's just it," Kara said.
"You mean about the contract?" Friday asked, lifting her work goggles up onto her forehead.
Kara nodded. "Miss Killingsworth knows Lumien exists as an entity, but my impression is she has little to no understanding of his actual nature or capabilities."
"And you'd rather not go into detail on that front if you don't have to," Lisa said.
"Exactly. Not to mention that anything Lumien finds gets passed along to Cassidy for deeper investigation. And I'd hate to foul that piece of the plan by bringing him into the building or onto Miss Killingsworth's network."
"Right," Yumi said. "That's tricky."
They all nodded in agreement. Having Lumien working off-site, and therefore able to pass along information to Cassidy, was a bit of a loophole in the magically enforceable NDA, but it was working so far.
Kara had been around long enough, and the others were quick enough on the uptake, to know better than to incite the wrath of an impossibly powerful sorceress, so the less they had to share about what was going on outside this building, the better. Making sure to neither stymie the work, nor out their intentionally anonymous colleague, nor anger their employer, was going to be a fine line to walk, but it would be worth it to get this project done and over with as efficiently as possible.
In the meantime, they'd just have to focus on these machines.
~
Over the course of the afternoon, the four established dominion over the setup and base function of some of the easier to understand pieces of equipment: two differently calibrated Geiger counters, an instrument that detected trace levels of specific isotopes, a small nuclear clock, and a set of power management and surge protecting devices.
Meanwhile, Kara kept the most interesting and complex piece of machinery to herself. It was a large and colorful contraption Professor Kummerfeldt had simply named "The Ometer," and it appeared to simultaneously track the displacement of certain atmospheric elements that the professor hypothesized would be momentarily affected by the sudden incursion of matter and energy from out of time.
Not only did Kara find it the most intriguing piece of machinery in the room, but of the four of them, she clearly had the best chance at understanding the apparatus and what it did. It was a sensitive and complicated beast of a thing, as large as an arcade racing game with a spool of paper and a set of needles that made it look like the overgrown bastard child of a polygraph and a seismometer. It was strange and interesting, Kara had never seen anything like it, and she was bound and determined to figure it out and get it to work.
It wasn't exactly her scientific forte, but at least she understood the mechanics--in theory.
And even the parts she didn't understand were fascinating. Fascinating enough, in fact, that she completely lost track of time fiddling with the thing. Jaccob had arrived to pitch in with the machinery in the late afternoon, just as the curtains that covered the glass wall of the room had begun to automatically open themselves.
By the time the crick in Kara's neck was bad enough she decided to take a break, it was already long past dark out.
"Was anybody going to tell me the sun went down?" Kara asked.
"I mean--" Lisa said. "The windows are open. Figured you could see."
"And we also all figured you were pretty much in charge," Yumi replied, "so, like, it wasn't really on us to tell you stuff."
"You and Stardust seemed to know what you were doing," Friday added. "We didn't think it was a good idea to interrupt what was going on to suggest that maybe it was time for us to be done, or have dinner, or whatever."
"Yeah," Lisa concurred. "We were mostly just waiting for the two of you."
"Oh. Yeah, well--" Kara shrugged. "Maybe don't do that? I have a tendency to hyperfocus, and if it's left up to me, there's every chance we'll be here 'til four in the morning sometimes."
"And to be honest," Jaccob added, "I was just tinkering. And I'd probably have kept tinkering until I got hungry, ordered a pizza from my phone, and kept tinkering until it showed up."
"Speaking of which," Yumi said. "I am kind of hungry."
"Yeah," Kara added. "Pizza sounds pretty good. You all want to come down to my condo, and we'll see who delivers?"
"You want Cicardi's," Jaccob said.
"What?" Yumi asked.
"Cicardi's," he repeated. "It's the best you're going to get in this part of town. Believe me. Mike and Chuck had us try every pizza in the zip code when we first moved in."
"Oh yeah," Friday said. "I forgot you live here. Well, not here, here, but ... you know."
"I do know," Jaccob replied. "And I'll tell you what. I'll spring for the pizza if you'll invite Mike."
"Oh, you don't have to do that," Yumi said. "Miss Killingsworth gave us an expense account."
"We had lunch at Two and Two," Lisa said.
"But inviting Mike is no trouble," Friday added.
"I'd really appreciate it," Jaccob said. "He's trying to be tough and all, but he's frustrated. He can't see his girlfriend, he can't go out, he can't even really work. We're only five days into this, and he's already bored to tears and lonely as hell."
"Well, we can definitely include him in pizza," Yumi said. "I can't do dairy, so we're already going to have to order more than one."
"Kara," Jaccob said, as the younger heroes headed out of the machine-filled room and back toward the elevator lobby. "Do you want me to stay here and see if I can crack this thing, or would you rather I not mess with it when you're not here?"
"Whichever is fine," Kara replied. She had to admit she kind of liked the fact he was asking. One of the reservations she'd had about taking this job was that she didn't want to be taking orders from Stardust. That he was willing to defer to her was a pretty nice turn. "But if you get it working right, you've got to promise to call me so I can come back up here and see it."
"What the hell are all of you doing here?"
The lot of them stopped in their tracks. Somehow, they had managed to forget their machine room was located inside Miss Killingsworth's actual residence, and that, at half past eight o'clock at night, there was every chance of her being in it.
"We're ... um ... just finishing up," Lisa answered her.
"We were about to go downstairs and order some pizzas," Yumi added.
"Oh, no," Ruby replied. "You do not want to do that. The pizza in this part of town is awful."
"Jaccob recommended a place," Yumi replied. "He says it's Mike's favorite. And their website says they have vegan cheese, so ... we're good."
"Mm-mm," Ruby sounded. "I've tried that place, and I assure you it's terrible, no matter what Jaccob says. He may be good at lots of things, but he knows nothing about pizza."
"It's still probably better than the pizza we're used to," Lisa said.
"That may very well be," Ruby said. "But the fact remains it's objectively bad. My kitchen doesn't go home until ten. I'll have dinner sent up."
"We were going to invite Mike," Yumi told her.
"Invite him," Ruby said. "What's one more?"
"Have you eaten?" Jaccob asked Ruby.
Ruby narrowed her eyes. "You know the answer to that, or else you wouldn't have asked me."
"What if I take us all out?" he asked her. "Mike could come to dinner, too, if we're all there, right?"
"What if we just call Mike to join us and have dinner brought up here for everyone?" she countered.
"That was easier than I expected," Jaccob replied, nodding his agreement.
Ruby sighed. "It's been a day. I don't seem to have it in me to resist my friendly neighborhood hero telling me to eat something."
"Well, all right then," Jaccob replied, smiling back at her.
It was a small victory, but he'd take it.
Maybe his feelings were about Ruby in particular, or maybe it was just his aversion to working with someone who didn't seem to like him very much, but he was hoping to make things a little more friendly. A casual dinner with the group would be a good start.
"And speaking of long days," Ruby said, turning to the others. "I'm not going to be an ogre about your work hours. But if you're going to be here after dark, I would appreciate a heads up. I do occasionally entertain in this space."
"Right," Yumi replied, nodding.
Friday rolled her eyes, and Lisa snickered.
"Am I missing something?" Ruby asked the group.
Yumi smiled nervously, looking back and forth between Lisa and Friday, clearly unsure what to do next.
"Just ask her," Lisa whispered.
"Ask me what?" Ruby asked.
Yumi didn't answer.
"Yumi, sweetie," Lisa cajoled, "just ask. We all know you want to."
"Um--" Yumi began, wringing her hands at her waist and shuffling her feet. "How, um ... How do you know Lady Vengeance?"
Jaccob perked up. "What's this about Vivienne?"
Yumi looked to him. "How do you know Lady Vengeance?"
"A while back, a demon got into my building," Ruby replied, as though Jaccob had never spoken. "Vivienne happened to be in town. I convinced her to help me get rid of it. Turns out we get along. So now we get together when we can. I take it you're a fan?"
"Oh, yes, ma'am." Yumi's cheeks were a little pink.
"That's one way of putting it," Lisa teased.
"Yeah," Friday added, "I'd say 'fan' is a bit of an understatement."
"I wish you'd said something earlier," Ruby said to Yumi, ignoring the heckling. "I'd have introduced you."
"Oh," Yumi said, "we've met. We've even teamed up a couple times. It's just--"
"Ah," Ruby replied. "I see. The next time she's in town we'll be sure to have you four over for drinks."
