Ruby REPL's errors and REPL freezing

Question

I'm new to Ruby and am currently working on a scraper on vsc (Windows OS). I downloaded the nokogiri, watir, and pry gems, and I've been opening a pry REPL to run a few basic commands that test my scraper. These are pretty fundamental commands:

require "nokogiri"
require "watir"
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:chrome)

^After this command, an empty browser does open, but after that my REPL immediately freezes and stops this was a couple days ago. I tried coming back to it again today, and alongside freezing, I also got the following error:

ERROR:ssl_client_socket_impl.cc(878)] handshake failed; returned -1, SSL error code 1, net_error -100

I attached screenshots below as well, and even tried taking a step down to try this on the irb REPL (no luck). Absolutely clueless on this and would love to put this behind me to continue creating. Would be incredibly grateful for any help I can get.

Thank you!