2014.06.19 - Bruce Banner makes a House Call

Word has been gotten to Dr Banner that there's an Avenger who might could benefit from his expertise, and he was given directions on to where to find the Avenger in question. Not that she's hard to miss, once you know where to look. In this case, where to look is a complex of Stark Industries warehouses, one of which has been modified to be a place for Tigra to live while she's too big to fit in her apartment. She's currently outside the warehouse itself, sitting down with her legs stretched waaay out in front of her, back against the building itself, as she watches the sky beginning to darken. She's a big kitty at the moment, over fifty feet tall, and with a somewhat heavier build than before.
 
Bruce whistles low, walking into the warehouse room. There's a duffel bag slung across one shoulder, which he carries with a slightly lopsided stance. Both hands are jammed into his labcoat, which he wears over a pair of hawaiian shorts, a t-shirt that reads 'NERDS DO WITH WITH FREQUENCY', and a pair of flip-flops. 
"They reall weren't kidding, were they?" he remarks, stopping a dozen or so feet from the giant cat. He pulls out a little doohickey from his pocket shaped like a small wand and opens it with a snap of his wrist, a little green light flickering on the end of it. A sound between a hum and a whirr fills the room, then goes silent when he snaps his wrist again. He lifts it up and looks at the diode, then scrunches his brow. 
"Welp, that's what gamma radiation can do," he remarks, looking Tigra over. "Oh. Oh! Sorry. Bruce Banner, nice to meet you," he says, offering a diffident wave to the giant Tigra.
Her senses are still incredibly sharp, but at her size, things register differently, and she doesn't always notice things as quickly as before. So it is that Bruce approaches as closely as he does before she turns to look at him, curious as to who her visitor is. When he starts to scan her, she can't help but smirk a bit. "Am I dead, Jim?" she asks with a soft rumble. When he finally introduces herself, she nods to him politely. "Tigra, which you figured out obviously. I'd offer to shake, but, well..." she gestures with her outsized hands. "I've actually read a little of your work, Dr. Banner, but most of it's pretty far beyond me."
"No, and I daresay you'll even play the piano again someday. We can get you one of those big keyboards from the movie Big," Banner quips, unshouldering his duffel bag and letting it thump against the ground. 
"So I got a call from our mutual friends, and seeing as how I'm 'the guy'-" he makes air quotes "-regarding gamma exposure, I thought I'd do someone a solid." 
"So how did this happen?" he asks conversationally, removing a few heavy boxes from his duffel bag and setting up a pair of tripods, moving with efficient, practiced motions.
An amused snort comes from her at the piano joke. At least she's in good spirits. "It actually wasn't gamma rays," she says, a bit apologetically. "Believe it or not, the Joker did this to me. He injected me with something that made me get great big like this. Said he wanted to one-up Attack of the Fifty Foot WOman. Lucky me for being the best way for him to do it."
"Whatever it is, you're definitely leaking something that picks up like gamma radiation," Bruce comments, examining his little device again. "If it wasn't gamma ray bombardment, it's pretty similar to how it manifests otherwise," Bruce explains, continuing to set his equipment up. "Basically, whatever this toxin is, it's caused a massive increase in your mass." 
Bruce sets up a scanner and aims what looks like a lamp at Tigra, looking at a tablet in his hands. "Same thing happens to me when I go green," he remarks absently. "Because E=mc^2, with the right process, you can essentially convert energy into matter. If you know how to do it," he amends. 
"The upside is, this is eminently fixable. All we need to do is reverse the process- turn that excess mass back into energy," he explains to Tigra.
"Really?" Tigra asks, looking curious at Banner's explanation, her tailtip thumping against the floor with soft thuds as she considers what he tells her. She nods in understanding when he says 'if you know how to do it.' "I know enough to know that's something that's much more easily said than done, though," she notes. "I'm hoping you wouldn't mention this if you didn't at least have an idea how to go about it, though?" she asks, well, hopefully.
"Not a clue," Bruce says cheerfully, fingers still tapping over the tablet surface. "My math tells me that if we just cut it loose, all at once, it'd release something on par with 900,000 megatons of TNT. But that's if we just cut it loose in one burst. Gamma radiation's funny stuff. It defies most of the laws of physics, including Einstein's formulae," Bruce explains. He sets up another remote scanner and aims it at Tigra. 
"I think the short-term solution is going to be an anti-particle bombardment," he tells the woman. "Sort of a negative gamma ray. It'll soak up that excess energy and neutralize it effectively, with pretty limited side effects. It won't be /easy/," Bruce cautions Tigra, reeling up a wire and putting it into the duffel, "but I imagine I can have a working solution inside of a week. I'll need to talk to Stark Technologies about borrowing one of their collider arrays to generate enough anti-particles for this."
"And that's even when we -are- dealing with gamma radiation," Tigra points out. "It was drugs he injected me with, but I don't know the details of them. Hell, for all I know, it was just LSD and I've just been hallucinating all this. That -would- explain the spiders," she says absently. She considers his short-term solution. "Makes sense, assuming something like that can be generated. I mean, all I've got is a BS in physics, so when I say this sounds -way- out there, I know I don't have the same perspective you do." She pauses a beat. "But this sounds -way- out there."
 
Bruce huffs out some air. "Well, I could get six gauge syringe and see if a few hundred gallons of chemotherapy radiation over the course of a few months would bleed it off," Bruce offers, spreading his hands. 
"You might lose all your hair, and feel weak as a kitten, and god knows what that'd do to your metabolism. Engineer. Not a medical doctor," he reminds Tigra. 
"But," he says, wagging a finger in the air and turning back to his gear, "I /do/ know physics, and I do know lasers, and I am a firm believer that lasers can fix almost anything."
Tigra makes a face at the thought of pumping gallons of chemo drugs into her. "As eager as I am to get this situation taken care of, I'm not -quite- that desperate. Yet. If we don't cure this soon, though, I may very well be," she says with a grimace. "Being this big is -not- good for my system." And now she can't help but grin and ask, "Do you mean lasers or do you mean," with visible air quotes, "'lasers?'" A good natured shrug of too-broad shoulders. "Sorry, couldn't resist."
 
"I requisitioned the sharks, but SHIELD kept going on about not having an aquarium on the ARGUS," Bruce says with a cheery grin back at Tigra. He finishes packing his gear away and shoulders the duffel bag across his chest, reaching into a breast pocket inside the labcoat and producing a vapor stick. It does not smell like regular tobacco, and after a few long drags, a slightly glazed expression crosses his face. "So we're groovy, baby, yeaaaah," he says, in a really terrible British accent. "My people will call your people. Person. Cat," he says, turning around and ambling away. "Kitty!" he remarks, over his shoulder. 
"I'll be in touch!"
Tigra smiles broadly when her joke's played with, and snickers at the Austin Powers impressive. "Stay cool and froody, daddy-o," she bids him as he turns to walk away, for once not minding nicknames from someone she just met. It's only after he's gone that she realizes he said 'limited' side effects. Oh dear. Well, it's better than what she's facing currently!
Category:Log