Pre-Jump Earth Literature

[aestrix]

It's a new term, and the end of the break between terms most students have been enjoying. But time marches ever on, and so at 1:00 PM, just after lunch, twenty-six students all around the age of fifteen are finding seats in an obnoxiously decorated classroom. It's one of those classrooms that tries very hard to be peppy and inspirational, and only succeeds at being very out of touch, and kind of creepy.

Soon it will be time to read about things long-dead people wrote.

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, we're on Beta Colony so I should probably blame it on some sort of subconscious desire to punish me for my defective skeleton, but actually I think the real culprit is his sense of humour."

[poll_the_stars]

"Aha. The most dangerous culprit of all on the subject of names."

[thisvorlunatic]

Giggle.

[poll_the_stars]

She smiles. "My family has a cat. My sister named him Croissant."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Okay, that's more surreal than Fat Ninny, but arguably less demeaning."

[poll_the_stars]

Giggle. "Yeah. She wanted to name him Toast but my parents wouldn't let her."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I think Toast is an adorable name for a cat."

[poll_the_stars]

"She thought so too! And now she plans to name any pet she has after the breakfast theme, because my sister."

[thisvorlunatic]

"That's very cute."

[poll_the_stars]

"Atrociously adorable!"

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles giggies.

And: "I feel like playing with magnets next, do you want to go play with magnets?"

[poll_the_stars]

"Yes, let's go play with magnets," she laughs.

[thisvorlunatic]

The magnets are nearby and very impressive. Hovering things! Shiny black liquids which you, yes you, can cause to form interesting shapes! Model trains! A fantastic contraption in which small steel balls can be induced to fly around in intricate trajectories!

Miles is immediately drawn to the contraption. It's so contraptional.

[poll_the_stars]

Gosh, it is! Yvette is also tempted by the contraption, but thinks it might be wise to maybe give Miles space at it.

She instead lets herself be drawn to the shiny black liquids that she can make interesting shapes with. Sure, anyone can make some squiggly shapes, but she is going to make complicated things. Such complicated things. She starts trying (unsuccessfully) to make a shiny black liquid into a suitably lace-like form. Hmmmmm. Hmmmm.

This is hard.

(And also fun.)

[thisvorlunatic]

There are a few children playing with the contraption, and at first Miles shares it with them happily enough. But the kids drift off, and he stays, darting back and forth around the perimeter of the massive glass-encased machine to fiddle with this or that set of controls.

It seems like the steel balls are supposed to run their course and then drop into one of the receptacles around the perimeter, to be fed back into the machine from one of the eight starting points. He plays with it for a while to see if he can get one of them stuck in an endless loop. Before he manages it, he drops two of them out of the rotation completely - but that's no big deal; there are three rolling around on the floor in there already, if he climbs the railing to look in. Still plenty of ammunition to play with.

His third attempt is successful. He has to scramble between two adjacent control stations three times in quick succession to change the course while the ball is still in motion, and the timing is very tricky, but evidently not impossible: there's the ball, going up and down and around in a twisting course with no escape. Well, no escape until somebody comes along and changes it, that is. Nevertheless, Miles beams triumphantly.

[poll_the_stars]

Yvette, meanwhile, is learning the exact limits of the shiny black liquids and their potential shapes. Suspending them in air is simple, but there's a bit of a technique to making them into shapes. Oh, sure, you can mold the entire thing into whatever shape you like, but creating lots and lots of little tiny holes is much more difficult. She figures something out involving pulling it in three separate directions to get it apart - she tries it with two, and while it's possible, it makes an unpleasant splattering pattern when that occurs. Three's more controlled if the force pulling isn't as strong. She tries with four, too, in a hope that she can neaten it up even more - but this causes it to explode in a hilarious fashion.

She cracks up when this occurs, and glances at Miles half out of pride for her hilarious explosion and half to see what he's doing. She notices the ball flying eternal. ".... Huh. That's cool."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It's probably not supposed to do that, but if they didn't want me to, they should've designed their machine so I couldn't," Miles says cheerfully. "I wonder if I can get another one into the same loop?"

He starts fiddling with the controls again.

[poll_the_stars]

"Good luck," wishes Yvette, and she goes back to making shapes out of black liquid.

She doesn't purposefully cause it to explode again; while it was funny, she considers this an Unwanted Side Effect. She's trying to do a thing, and that thing is not 'cause various hilarious explosions.' She will make pretty things, damn it.

She continues making pretty things. If she twists the magnetic field just so and stretches it out like this she can get it to make little arches, and then if she turns down the gravity generator responsible for keeping the thing mostly weightless just a little she can pull those parts down far enough that she can turn the zero-g back off with the pattern still intact, and if she arranges magnetic fields like so the liquid makes little spiky bits on this part that can look sufficiently lace-like to match her specifications, and...

Was there an outside world besides this fascinating machine? She forgets.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles, meanwhile, has lost his infinite loop twice - once to the rest of the machine, once to the floor - but finally managed to get two balls travelling the endless circuit together.

Except... one of them is going noticeably faster than the other, and after a few loops they collide, knocking themselves out of the air. One is recaptured by a different set of magnets and the other one falls on the floor.

This gives him an Idea.

He sets up the endless loop again just because he can, and then he tries to figure out how to turn the rest of the contraption into a racetrack.

[poll_the_stars]

The technical details of making pretty and excessively complicated lace are - very fiddly, to put it mildly. After a few minutes of painstakingly exact movements of gravity and magnetic fields, she makes a version that looks suitably lace-like. Then she peers at it, and all of the hundreds of little imperfections make themselves apparent to her, all of the little ways in which it could be better. Without a second thought, she clears it and starts over. The second time she's faster, and the result is unquestionably better, but she's not pleased with this, either.

She starts on a third, convinced that while this one might not be perfect, it might look something like what she's trying to achieve instead of not.

[thisvorlunatic]

Figuring out what would qualify as a racetrack is the first problem. Finally he decides that what he wants is for two different balls to follow two different courses that are as identical as he can make them, and arrive at the same destination. He circles the contraption several times, estimating how symmetrical he can get it and whether he will have to sacrifice the infinite loop. It looks like he will. Sorry, infinite loop. At least he makes sure to undo the loop gently enough that the ball isn't lost to the floor like so many of its brethren.

A few minutes of careful construction and testing later, he has two long near-identical courses spiraling down and then up again from two adjacent entry points controlled from the same station. If they're truly identical, the balls will collide in midair, up near the top of the contraption; if one course gives better acceleration than the other, the winner will pass through that space first; and either way, both balls will hopefully be caught by the leftover contraption elements he set up for that purpose, but he can't be sure they won't fall on the floor until he tries it.

He releases his racers simultaneously into their respective tracks.

They pick up speed pretty fast - he thinks he might have underestimated how much acceleration they're getting from those long curving sections. In fact he's now kind of worried that—

CRACK. CRACK.



Miles makes enough semirandom changes to scramble his racetrack-railgun past recovery as quickly as possible, and then he steps away from the contraption's enclosure, which now has two spectacular spiderwebbing cracks in its glass walls, up high on opposite sides of the enormous cylinder.

[poll_the_stars]

It turns out that practice at a highly technical thing is extremely conducive to doing that extremely technical thing well. Yvette's third lace attempt is - well, kind of gorgeous, actually. There are little things she can do better, little things she wants to try, maybe she can figure out a way to make patterns that are more flower-like instead of the incredibly geometric vaguely flower-like patterns she currently has.

Either way, she's pleased with her third result. She's just finishing up the final touches of it, coaxing geometrically perfect spirals into something more organic when a very loud something startles her out of her fugue.

She looks up in alarm at the loud noises. She notes the cracks in the contraption's enclosure.

".... Um, Miles?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Hi, Yvette," he says, and is briefly distracted by her ferrofluid lace. "...That's amazing, first of all, and second of all I think we should go look at another exhibit now."

[poll_the_stars]

"Thank you," she says, briefly distracted from her slightly awestruck consideration of the spiderweb cracks to look at him and grin. What? She's proud.

Then she looks at the contraption again. "And - yes, yes, let us. Go look at another exhibit now. Molecular biology?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Let's go learn about molecular biology," he agrees firmly.