"Is that so," he says, one hand rubbing beneath beneath his chin thoughtfully. "Well. I won't deny that's promising news. From a scientific standpoint."

Arista says nothing. Two stranded individuals succeeding in forging a way through the great indefinable constraints - it had to have been fair fucking brilliant on their part, no doubt, to have torn through that unrelenting force and through it wrought a way to - wherever it is they wished to go. Home, or however they may have chosen to define it. That thing Rush lacks. Destiny would not be waiting for him, should he attempt to return to it. There would simply be empty space, continuous and ongoing and bereft.

"Though it may be," he notes, willfully shattering that particular trajectory of his thoughts, "considerably more difficult to make any significant headway without access to ROMAC's resources." As asinine the organization was in both theory and in practice, it did have its infrequent uses.