Template:Featured Articles/51-2023

Moment of Awesome - Clint Barton/Hawkeye: Over lunch with Gabriel Cohuelo, Clint tries to explain the wormhole in the basement. "You lost me at physics," Gabriel half-joked. He'd somehow forgotten what a nerd Clint was. "Hold on, I don't want the rest of this conversation to be interrupted." He waved over the woman who co-owned the restaurant, who greeted him with a warm smile. He ordered a handful of dips, a mountain of pita, some falafel and a chicken kebab, knowing she'd likely provide something extra. The perks of being a regular. "Sorry," he said after she'd left. "So, wormholes elongate you out of existence," he ventured, because that was his best of understanding. "This bridge thing, whatever the hell that is..." He picked at his cuticles as he considered. "No, sorry, I don't get any of that." "No problem," Clint said, reaching for the napkin dispenser. He pulled all the condiments toward himself and then unfolded the napkin so it was as long and then as it could be. "Okay, so that's our wormhole in the wild. You go in one end and, theoretically, maybe your molecules come out on the other side." He slid the ketchup and the mustard bottles to either side of the wormhole. "There's no guarantee you'll make it from point A to point B. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge -- we can call it the rainbow bridge for now, cause that's what the Asgardians allegedly call it -- has a definitive beginning and end." Reaching out, he put the ketchup and the mustard bottles atop either end of the napkin. "So the rainbow bridge is stabilized in space and time. You go in the ketchup side, you come out the mustard side and vice versa. Theoretically. The question we're trying to figure out is what would happen if, say, there was a catastrophe of some kind and the ketchup end stayed stable, but the mustard end didn't." Removing the mustard, he shoved all the other condiments in the general direction of the unanchored side of the napkin. "What's that unstable side doing now? Where's it gonna connect? Can it connect at all? Are we looking at a possible permanent connection to a completely different world? Or is it just gonna flap around in the space-breeze hitting other realities or universes all willy-nilly?" Gabriel's head hurt. He wasn't sure if all of this was beyond his grasp, or if Clint just assumed he knew more than he did. "I don't understand," he said slowly, "what any of this has to do with the mansion?" He was missing something. "There's a wormhole... in the basement?" After glancing around to gauge how close the nearest other patrons were, he lowered his voice a bit and said, "Yeah, in the Chapel's subbasement. The deal with it is that we used to have a pocket dimension entrance in the subbasement that led to what amounted to a really old, magical storage unit. That storage unit, we're pretty sure, was stable on either end and was somehow positioned directly in the middle of a rainbow bridge, since it had another side that opened onto Glastonbury Tor in England. There was that whole Halloween thing that happened, though, and the pocket dimension collapsed, Topaz got trapped inside -- all that. "When Topaz came back, and we're still not entirely sure how that happened except for magic, we discovered that our entrance to the dimension was still stable. But the other end... really is just sort of flapping around. We kept it monitored for a while, but then Kitty, Kane, and Molly came up with not only a better modeling/mapping thing to help predict what we've started calling anomalies, but also with a safety mechanism so that, if we hop into the rainbow bridge, we have a way to get back. "That sort of changed eXcalibur's entire purpose," Clint continued. "We shifted pretty much everything we had involving magical and/or weird stuff over to X-Force for Wanda and Amanda when Topaz transferred there, which left us with a good bit of time on our hands and the ability to figure out how to fix the anomalies. You with me?"