milliways_bar | (no subject)

After some in-bar discussion earlier, Ray retired to his room to check on some experiments and make up for lost sleep. He's awake properly now, and wearing the equations T-shirt. And he's got dinner and a couple of small grey possibly electronic things on his table, along with the creepy green opalescent soda stuff. Come say hi!

[Summary: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEBABYDINOSAURSEEEEEEEEE!!! Ray once again displays all the survival instincts of an eggplant as he finds first one, then two, then three baby Utahraptors clustering about his table. They get fed, watered, and played with, and then momma shows up, so she gets fed too. The babies get named Scribble, Kona, and Tiger, and Scribble decides that she likes playing tug-of-war with Ray, which is good, because he likes playing it too.

Donatello shows up at the sight of Ray's T-shirt, and there is discussion of general geekery, then ghost geekery, before Donatello realizes who Ray is. Then Ray breaks out the Map of Milliways Patrons' Worlds and OMG TECHNO FOO. Slowtimed for now.

And Lysistrata comes around, and she and Ray chat, and the possibility is planted in Lysistrata's mind of visiting New York City. Ray indicates that the status of women in his time is fairly high compared to Athens in Lysistrata's day. There is also much discussion of the fact that the Greek playwrights and philosophers are still remembered and taught in the schools in Ray's time, which pleases Lysistrata to no end.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He's fiddling and memorizing.

"It can overload, then? Does that happen often with you? Outside this place, I mean. I'm slowly getting the feeling to regularly get the phrase 'do not tease the patrons for you taste good with ketchup'. Have you tried anything besides a deuterium power source? Who's Tim and do you have a power scale?"

"I've only seen it overload once or twice. The explosion that results is big enough to take out a mid-sized sedan- of course that's only a worst case scenario. Sometimes an overload will just short it out completely and leave it dead. And yes, this was all happening outside the Bar. Once in relation to a parchment that had been exposed to the direct transfer of a spell to bring about Ragnarok, in fact- that's how strong the residual energies were. It didn't blow up when it was pointed at Great Cthulhu, but that was from a distance of several hundred yards and my colleage shut it off immediately after he saw that the big guy was completely off the scale."

He reaches for his drink. "Uh, we're working on reverse-engineering a set of power cells I recently acquired from a much more advanced source than anything we have back home in 2004. Hopefully that'll be less dangerous. Tim is the deputy head of security here, and he's technically the incarnation of magic itself or something to that effect, so he's a little more than the machine was designed to handle. As for the scale, it's logarithmic and runs one through ten, but we've encountered a few entities in the course of ghostbusting that simply defied all attempts at classification due to overwhelming power levels. Big C, of course, being one of them."

"One to ten? Basic scale. Hm. It doesn't do any sort of category division--no, no, you just have the single measurement gauge. Hm." ...Ghostbusting? He really knows he has heard that name before. He knows it.

"Anything categorical pretty much has to be looked up in one of our references, like the Spates Catalog or Tobin's Spirit Guide." Ray glances at Donnie to see if the term sinks in at all. "That's a matter for human interpretation. Or whoever's interpretation, around here, since there's so many nonhumans. Easier to build the thing that way. Egon didn't have room for all the analytical circuits he would've liked to build in there. Once you learn to interpret the readouts it's child's play, really. All amazingly intuitive, it's just that you have to spend an awful long time learning it first. Kind of like using the proton packs."

"The human mind can be an interesting place."

...ghost busting. Proton Packs. Tobin's Spirit Guide. Duh.

"...oh. You're that Ray."

Ray nods. "Yes," he says. "That Ray. And before you ask, Peter is here in the bar too; he's Bound. Egon and Winston, however, are back home and have never yet set foot through the door. On the other hand, Ecto-1 is out back, since I brought her here for some upgrades." He smiles a bit. "And you're not kidding about the human mind, although I don't know it nearly as well as Pete does."

"Not human. I have experience." He smiles down at the PKE meter. "...this is some place. I'm going to have to make a List of all the experiments I need to run. Just that window. And the bar. Now, people from other worlds...man. Just, some place."

He really wants to ask if he can play with Ecto-1. He really really really wants to because the siren!

Ray smiles faintly. "I have some notes here you might find useful," he says. "Hang on a minute."

He picks up the smaller of the grey things in front of him and turns away for a few moments, murmuring something before turning back. "I bought this from the Bar," he says, "at the instigation of a being from several hundred years in the future. I've found it really useful."

He touches a spot on the device's side, and above its flat grey surface a forest of silvery white lines springs to life. Each line sports one or more spherical bubbles along its length; every bubble is marked with a name, or a logo, or some other symbol or combination thereof. "Map of the universes from which patrons here hail," Ray explains. "The zero point on the grid is a low-PKE version of twentieth century Earth. Uh, the X axis represents general sociological development- it used to be technological but that's kind of deceptive- compared to that zero point, with the low stuff on the left and high stuff on the right. Vertical axis is PKE prevalence, again, compared to that Earth. And the Z axis, up and down, is time, but that gets played with a lot, especially since we just had several visitors from the Mesozoic period show up. Totally skews the time frame distribution. Although you might notice that for some reason, the vast majority of our patrons seem to hail from twentieth century Earth- that's this time cluster right here."

He's not kidding. The bubbles are clustered at that height as thick and close as frogspawn- Andrew, Warren, Raphael, Michelangelo, Barry, April, Bonnie, and so on. A sharp eye might note no fewer than four spheres with the Ghostbusters logo attached.

TOY!

"This is--is--is...is beyond anything of my century! I mean, I've wandered around some alien space craft and gotten to take apart a few hover craft, but normally I'm never able to make an in depth study but this is--!"

"A lean toward the twentieth century? Temporal flux. Mmmm. Mesozoic, that's...there are dinosaurs running around this place?" If they talk, Don will just die. Die a geeky, geeky death.

Yes. SHINY toy. HOLOGRAPHIC toy. That's how shiny it is.

"Twenty-fourth century technology," Ray says with a grin. "I've never yet tried to take it apart. It's just been too damn cool to risk ruining. Trust me, if you're here any length of time you'll find an opportunity to get at stuff like this yourself."

He nods. "There's people from quite a few futures, and from different pasts, and some from completely non-Earth related worlds- by which I mean some of them are from worlds that are flat and travel through space on the back of a giant turtle- but for the most part, it all warps towards late twentieth century Terra. And yes. Dinosaurs. I'm told there are four talking herbivore juveniles- different species- but the only dinosaurs I've met myself have been Utahraptor ostrommaysorum. The mother is as tall as I am and looks to weigh several hundred pounds, but she's got three chicks with her as of tonight. Very cute. Deadly as all hell, but very cute. The raptors can't talk, but I've given 'em names- the mother is Red, the smallest chick is Scribble, the darkest chick is Kona, and the other one is Tiger. They like raw meat, so if you get cornered by the mother, try to get to the bar and place an order for her. She'll go for that, instead of you."