"Knowledge of the universe wasn't exactly restrained to a single universe," Daniel replies seriously, looking at Topher halfway over the tops of his glasses. "Time and boundaries worked differently up there. We might not have had complete free reign and our access was restricted but there was definitely...crossing."

He shivers a little as he says it, almost imperceptibly, and looks away and hunches his shoulders a little more securely around himself. It's still not the most comfortable thing to talk about, ambiguous as most of his memories of it are, and he's unclear how much Topher knows about it either way. Ascension would be a difficult thing to depict on the visual medium, what with a higher, often undetectable plane and all.

"Knowledge was always the motivation there," he says, quietly. "If there were ethical objections to multi-universal breaches they wouldn't have cared one way or the other." Morality was also different up there, after all. And extremely centric on a set of foreign, non-interference principles.