Scientific Method
Knowhere is a strange carnival of people, professions, and prophets, assembled from the dregs of the universe. Every road seems to lead there at its distant end; go far enough on any chosen path, and you'll reach Knowhere. It's a haven for criminals, naturally, because who would travel thousands of light-years just to punish someone for a crime, no matter how severe? Knowhere is exile, and most consider that punishment enough.
But it's also home to hundreds of eccentric, occasionally brilliant people, whose homeworlds were not ready to accept the changes they had to offer to social order or scientific method. Jane considers herself familiar with bleeding-edge science from at least two Realms, yet some of the things she's seen here blow them both out of the water. She's never been a biologist, but hang out with Bruce Banner or Helen Cho long enough, and it's impossible not to realize that experiments run on a Celestial's brain-stem or cerebral-spinal fluid are light-years ahead of any established procedures. Those afflicted with illnesses beyond what medicine can cure on any world come here for hope, and sometimes they even find it.
Knowhere's a rough place, where a wrong step can escalate to a deadly conflict. But that's not its essential nature. Every disparate person has brought a bit of their own culture to the party, pasting it in a spare corner and holding the line. You can wander from neighborhood to neighborhood and see where these patched-together communities have started to grow overlapping roots, where people have become interdependent...even loving. Families live there; children's laughter is as present a sound as laser-fire or the odd, muffled explosion.
When Jane isn't marveling over Knowhere itself, she has plenty to keep her busy. Being set at overwashing currents of space-time, reality seems to bend here, to twist in ways she's never seen, or even imagined. There are pockets of subspace out of phase with the universe they inhabit, and when things come through these distortions, no one seems very surprised.
A being with no fixed form, who appears nothing more than a collection of tentacled shadows through which intermittent flashes of light and color spark, arrived decades ago and decided to stay. It opened up its own bar, serving drinks spiced with something people swear is not from their reality. Despite its Lovecraftian horror, it's immensely popular. And why not? Once, it poured twenty-seven drinks at the same time.
Anyway. Jane's been roughing out a way to plot the appearance of these rifts by creating a scanner that measures minute differences in ambient neutrino levels. If her scanner works, she'll be able to send a probe through one of these rifts, possibly getting humanity's first readings from another dimension.
She's been engineering the probe with every sensor she can think of, as well as every possible protection against...things she has no idea the probe will even need protection from.
Her work hours are grueling, as her problems with this project are myriad and seemingly insurmountable, and Jane's never—ever—been happier.
"You don't have to come with me," she says, packing her various scanners into boxes and simultaneously running a structural integrity scan on her probe. "I've piloted a necrocraft before. I'm not even going to get too close to the distortion; my probe has enough thrust to travel 10,000 kilometers. I don't need to get anywhere near it."
"I am not letting you take such a risk alone," Loki stands firm, watching her restless hands settle and re-settle her gear, "Your intern was very specific in her instructions for how to mind you when you are in such a frenzy."
"Darcy?" Jane laughs, "Yeah, that figures. Sometimes I really miss her," Loki is a good caretaker, but he doesn't know Darcy's matzo-ball soup recipe. "But you've let me do my own thing before."
"'Your own thing' never involved solitary space-travel before. Some people would not call this wise."
"Some people aren't us," she says, finally snapping her crates shut. "You're not usually one for sensible decisions."
"Am I trying to dissuade you?" he tugs her close by her belt loops, "You know how...stimulating I find your scientific passions. However, in this case, I must insist upon accompanying you. Perhaps you may find it more palatable if I say I would not miss your joy should your experiment be successful."
She grins, running her hands up his back. "Oh? Are you saying I'm pretty when my hypotheses are proven correct?"
"You are beautiful at your worst, and breathtaking when you are right. If I were to say more, I fear we would miss the window for your experiment."
Jane doesn't want to justify his presumptions, but already her heart is beating a quick tattoo under her skin. "Yeah," the word comes out hoarse, "yeah, you're probably right. Well," she clears her throat, putting one cool hand to her flushed cheek, "if you're coming, you can help me load all this stuff. Work for a living."
He chuckles. "Of course."