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[He appeared suddenly, from behind a wall, a bit of dust and detritus disturbed. He looked around, tugging down the edge of his vest, then looked around. Well. Not radically different from the usual. And, oh, scientific papers laying about.]

[Naturally be picked up a sheath, starting to examine them. He frowned, reaching into a pocket, and pulling out a fountain pen to start making his own annotations, not even noticing the man not ten feet from said notes he had picked up]

Gamma radiation...well, there's a thing you don't see every day.

[Naturally, Bruce bolts upright at the very unexpected arrival, once he speaks. He sizes up Tesla with a look that says he's two beats from bolting out the nearest exit.]

[And then he notices he's editing his work. He stands quickly, bumping the table and reaching out to steady the fragile spread of glass across it before coming around to confront the man.]

Ow. Hey! What are you doing?

[He looked over, only briefly, before going back to work]

Correcting some of your assumptions - granted for a theoretical exercise you are working in unknown territory, so I suppose I can forgive it. Honestly, anything absorbing this much gamma radiation would be most extremely dead.

[He frowned, adding in a few variables just here, and just there.]

You're not taking the properties of the physical cells into account enough, it seems - this only could work with a higher than normal durability.

[Bruce wants to reach out and snatch the papers away and tell the now-unwelcome arrival to go away however he'd arrived, but the last thing he wants is a confrontation. He stops, looking cross but restrained, with an open hand out, palm up for the papers.]

I'd like my notes back, please.

[He looks at the outstretched hand, then the man behind it]

I'm only making corrections, you know. [He hands them back. Don't worry, there's others he can look at all over the place] You'd think you didn't want my help.

[Bruce takes them back, worriedly looking over the changes with a sigh and a shake of his head. He turns his side toward Tesla, maneuvering back over to his desk. There's no way he can keep all his notes from prying eyes, he's been in a frenzy today so the place has papers and printouts everywhere. Even so, they're at least in organized piles and not askew across every surface.]

Alterations based on your own assumptions. [Bruce mumbles absently and then looks back up at Tesla, confusion working its way into his expression.] How much do you know about gamma radiation?

[Help, it's a word he doesn't hear much and this man, whoever he is seems to know enough to think he can fix Bruce's equations. He's desperate enough he can wave off the mystery of this man's appearance for the time being.]

[He was, by then, looking at some sort of apparatus - an early attempt to cure his condition, perhaps.]

Oh, I tinkered with it in the forties, never really went that far with it. But I worked with Villard and then Rutherford so you could say I've a working familiarity - and these containment arcs are thoroughly inadequate, and they cross too close to the coolant systems for my liking.

[Out came the pencil again]

[Bruce blinked and shook his head, his version of boggling at what he'd just heard.]

Vil-Villard? [Tesla's put Bruce off-balance so thoroughly that he didn't even notice the pencil coming out again. By his tone of voice, he really didn't believe Tesla, but he wasn't about to call the man before him crazy.] Paul Ulrich Villard?

[He looked at him for a moment as if he'd taken leave of his senses]

Do you know another? [He went back to looking at the diagram in front of him] A modest man, let Rutherford take more credit than he deserved...but his later dosimeter work was sublime. Good old Paul.

[He turned to Bruce, finally.]

Nikola Tesla. And you are?

Uh, Bruce Banner. [He just stared, jaw open a bit and not quite certain he believed him. He blinked and then regathered himself.] That, that can't be possible.

[He worked his jaw a moment and then spoke again, setting his hands on his hips.] How? Villard died in January of 1934 and Tesla in 1943.

[Bruce would be a shame to gamma research if he didn't at least know a few things about his predecessors, and other like-minded individuals of that time.]

Yes, he did. I attended the funeral.

[He arched an eyebrow at the man]

Of course I didn't, else I wouldn't be here, now would I? And let me tell you, faking your death is a lot harder than it looks. At any rate, bit immortal - don't ask, long story.

[Bruce sat on the edge of his rickety desk, careful not to make his glassware rattle too much as he did. He took a moment, processed this and then gave Tesla a once-over. Immortal. Well, Bruce was the Hulk, so who was he to be a nay-sayer.]

Wow. [Give him a moment. Then he was standing up again, walking around the room.] Okay, either the radiation is finally getting to my head, or Nikola Tesla just appeared in my apartment.

[He blinked, turning to finally look back at Tesla.] I think I'm going to hazard on the side of 'this is really happening'.

[He paused for a moment, about to chastise him for not keeping up when he belatedly heard what he was saying]

So you've survived exposure to that much gamma radiation? And you're intact? I'd have thought you'd be a horrendously mutated lump by now. Someone certainly has the special cells.

Edited 2012-06-15 04:42 (UTC)

A highly functioning lump of horrendously mutated cells, actually. There was, uh, a machine malfunction. The dose was higher than it should have been, and there were other complications that I wasn't informed of until after the incident. [He runs a thumb over his eyebrow and points to the battered scope across the room.]

There's a blood sample under there right now. Just be careful, it's radioactive.

Not a problem for me.

[He crossed to the sample, picking it up and observing it in hand before placing it under the scope]

Well this is very very bad for you. So what's the trigger for the metamorphoses? These cells are entirely too unstable for anything else to be a possibility.

[Bruce is impressed, and then finally he's just entirely slippin to science-mode.]

High stress, extreme emotional states. Specific triggers being pain, anger, and fear, generally speaking. The reaction is extreme and as far as I'm aware, irreversible once it starts.

It would be. Mutated cells like this tend to operate in an on-off state. The transformation will go all the way before it goes all the way back.

[He took a blank piece of paper, starting to write]

The transformative state being?

Um...[How do you explain the Hulk to someone who hasn't seen it before? Bruce goes to another pile of papers and pulls out a blurry photo taken from a security camera of the hulk from behind.]

Roughly nine feet tall, extremely powerful and highly resilient. The transformation is also accompanied by a loss of higher brain functions, leaving little more than basic reasoning skills motivated by extreme anger.

[He looked at the photo for a long moment, eyebrows rising in genuine surprise.]

Well, that's not precisely good for anybody in a forty mile radius, is it? A force of nature, then.

[He shook his head]

Now the question becomes 'how do we stop it?' - and since simply replacing your genes is out of the question...

That's what all this is about. [Bruce motions to the room, completing the sweep of his hand over the rickety setup of test tubes.] I've tried treating the gamma poisoning but the effects were limited to that single incident, with some slight inhibiting effects on the following event. So far the cells seem to react to treatment as if it were physical damage, repairing themselves and then activating the mutation.

[He looked thoughtfully at some of the notes for a long moment]

Have you ever considered that it isn't a poisoning at all?

Well, yes. [Bruce frowned. It wasn't like he had access to the formula Ross had given him, even Ross didn't have all the information anymore. That's why he'd set Bruce on the trail, but without the serum Bruce didn't have many avenues to pursue.]

But I had to start somewhere, and I thought if perhaps I could find a way to reduce the energy from the gamma radiation in the cells it might at least give me a chance to see what other damage had been done. Perhaps there was a chance of finding a serum that could interrupt the metamorphosis, anything to contain it until I can cure it. I just don't have the resources to do the level of work I need to find a real cure for this thing.

[He was quite a long moment, just looking off into the far distance.]

I'm not sure any damage was done at all. What I think is that you've actually reached a natural state, thanks to a massive dose of radiation. It merely awakened a dormant genetic code that has to be extraordinarily durable.

[Bruce just gives Tesla a look where Bruce isn't certain he just heard Tesla correctly. Natural state? He shakes his head and turns toward the table.]

No, I don't think so. [He so severely wants to believe he can essentially cut out the mutation, he doesn't want to deal with the thought that this could be permanant.]

I do. I've seen this before. How do you think I'm still around and kicking after 155 years? It's not through diet and exercise, I can tell you that much.

I think it activated a dormant part of your genetic code, a latent abnormal nature. It triggers with adrenaline, though perhaps there's a mental component as well. I have to assume you don't transform when you're just out for a jog.

[Have an annoyed look because yes, he doesn't just transform going out for a jog, unless that jog involves soldiers and guns.]

Then there has to be a way to reverse it, to put it back into a dormant state. [Desperation creeps into his voice, he doesn't want it, natural or unnatural.]

If it's part of your genetic code, it's a part of you forever - what you should work on is controlling it, holding the line. If we're lucky, we can manage to give you control of your alternate state.

I've spent six years trying to 'control it'. It can't be controlled. At best I can aim it at something, but it's only worked once under extreme conditions. [And it's probably clear why, because his tone of voice is growing short and irritated.]

Sometimes it takes a while, kid.

[It certainly had in his case. And you'd be amazed how oblivious Tesla is when presented with science to do.]

The trick is to remove the trigger. The cellular change is, I'm fairly sure, entirely irreversible. And without some sort of lobotomy, I see no immediate way to do that. Unless you suddenly take up Buddhism and cultivate the patience of a saint at the same time.

[Bruce purses his lips and sighs out his nose, looking away as he takes a moment to calm himself. He looks back over at Tesla and shakes his head.]

If I could remove the triggers I would. I've tried isolating myself but I have the added problem where there are people out trying to catch me so they can weaponize whatever it is inside me. If I get away from one set, I expose myself more to the other.

Ah, that old chestnut. Well, I'm not sure if they exist in this dimension - but I may know some people who could help.

I don't need to get more people involved. Someone always ends up hurt, or worse. [He shakes his head and tugs at the corner of a notebook.] There's a lot of power involved here, political and physical. Adding more people will just complicate things. You'll have to forgive me, but I haven't exactly had good luck when it comes to help.

Yes, well, you haven't had my help before. The advantage is now most considerably in your court.

[He picks up one of the test tubes, tapping it.]

Because I've come a long way since the 1940s, let me tell you - especially in terms of genetics and mutations. You'd be amazed what's out there.