fandomhigh | Science Classroom; Tuesday [ 08/02 ].

Science Classroom; Tuesday [ 08/02 ].

So there it was. A large chunk of rock sitting in the middle of a laboratory classroom, waiting to be researched. Jane wasn’t entirely sure it wanted to be researched, though, with all the elusiveness and mystery it was giving off, but, then again, geology was hardly her area of scientific expertise, and she had a feeling it wasn’t quite Miss Granger’s forte either.

Thankfully, that was why they had their brilliant and inquisitive students to help, yes?

Goodness, she hoped so! Either way, a ~~handwavey~~ message had been sent out to the student body, encouraging anyone who was interested to come on in and help them out today.

“Hello, students,” she gave them a bit of an uncertain smile. “Thank you all for coming and giving us a hand with this most mysterious piece of rock. It’s so good to see so many of you eager to help, but Miss Granger and myself must ask you to take the utmost care. Clearly, we are uncertain what we are dealing with, so we must be careful.”

"Yes, please. I wish we had more information to give you," said Hermione, and don't think that wasn't bothering her. Of course, she'd also decided that if there was some strange mysterious rock that no one knew anything about, she was not going to be touching it unless it was absolutely necessary. At least without gloves. She knew that was probably just paranoia. "If there is anything you can tell us about it, don't hesitate to speak up."

“We’ve got gloves, microscopes, goggles, you name it,” Jane offered, “and also plenty of books for reference. Let’s use our resources and try to figure out what we can. Consider everything; even if you find something that’s just minutely interesting or different or strange, it could be useful.”

"Now, if anyone has any questions, we'll answer them as best we can," Hermione went on. "But let's get started and see what we can find, shall we?"

[[ written, obviously, with the fantastic

smartestone and for all you sciencey types; ~~please wait for~~ the OCD is ready for examination! ]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Really?" Marshall asked, looking a little closer at it. "How warm?"

He got back to setting up an array of reagents in test tubes. "Could you cut me a slice?" he added. He'd noticed the squishiness, too, and hoped that it would make it easier to get samples for him to work with.

"Gimme a sec," Claudia said~~, stalling while waiting for an answer on the rock's sliceability in the OOC thread~~. "And very. This sucker has to be doing some seriously exothermic reacting, here."

Marshall nodded, pulling a series of thermometers out and placing them in the test tubes. "I think I saw an infrared thermometer here, somewhere," he suggested. "We can compare the exothermic reaction to temperature changes with the reagents, see if anything jumps it up or down."

"That could help us figure out what it's made of," Claudia agreed. "It seems pretty metallic, though I've never seen metal that color before. I've never seen anything that color before."

"I'm not even sure it's a colour." Picking up a glass rod, he gave the rock a poke. "It is seriously way too soft. I mean, there are definitely malleable metals, but this is ridiculous.

"Do you know, has anyone measured its magnetism yet?"

"I don't think so." Claudia managed to slice off a small piece with her scalpel and offered it to Marshall. "I've never seen a metal this close to a plasma type state. It might make a good conductor, too."

Marshall nodded as he took the piece, placing it in a petri dish as he took another scalpel and cut it into three. "We should check that, too," he agreed, before placing a piece in each of his three test tubes -- water, aqua regia, and sodium hydroxide -- and waiting to see if anything happened.

"... Is the aqua regia cooling it?" he asked. "Look, the temperature in that test tube isn't going up as fast as the other two." Marshall grabbed his notebook, jotting down that the rock reacted differently to an acid reagent than it did to water or basic reagents.

Claudia leaned in to get a closer look. "Huh. That's kind of . . . different, right?" She was a physicist more than a chemist, but she was pretty sure that was different. She turned back to the rock as a whole and started setting up coils to test for an eddy current. She tilted her head as she looked closer at the spot where she made the cut. "Hey, check this out: the bit that's newly exposed to the air looks like it's . . . tarnishing or something."

"Well, it means that the acid inhibits whatever exothermic reaction it's undergoing." After jotting down a few notes -- including 'corrodes on contact with air' -- Marshall grabbed tweezers and pulled each of the three slivers out of the test tubes, place each one in a separate petri dish. "Or possibly it just doesn't contain whatever the stone is reacting with. If it's something in the air, then maybe that same substance is present in both the water and the sodium hydroxide." Which potentially meant impure reagents; Marshall was going to have to look at that more closely.

Something on the pieces of the rock in the petri dishes caught his eye -- specifically, on the piece that had been in the acid. "Are you-- Are those what I think they are?" he asked, using the tweezers to point at the designs now faintly etched into the piece of rock.

[Ohgod I hope I didn't screw up the science here. I haven't studied any chemistry in... seven years? Pay no attention to the man behind the technobabble!]

Claudia leaned in over his shoulder to look. "Okay, that I know is different." She was leaning more and more towards putting this rock into the "artifact" category.

[yeah, it's been even longer than that for me, hence Claudia being less than sure of the implications. I've been madly trying to look up how to test for conductivity online, here, myself.]

"It looks like Widmanstätten patterning," Marshall explained. "Which is, ~~according to Wiki~~ as far as I know, only found in meteoric iron, and some of the pallasites." Yeah, someone had been a little space-obsessed growing up. "I've got some books, I think, or the library probably does -- I know there's some other things that look similar that are Earth-based. But this might not be from Earth."

"I knew it. It's totally an alien egg. That . . . forced its way up out of the ground."

Right, the only way to respond to the trepidation that Claudia was feeling at that thought was to electrocute the rock with her eddy current testing coil.

Take that, possible alien life form!

". . . Woah, this sucker really digs electrical current."

"... Or it's a hunk of meteor," Marshall pointed out. "Are we at the 'alien egg' point already? I'm used to it taking a day or so for people to start in on the out-there explanations."

He looked at the rock.

"Or, y'know, alien egg. Maybe their species eats electricity?"

"Yeah, you stick around here long enough, and 'the island is molting' turns into an easily formed hypothesis. This thing could rival a really good lightning rod, here."

"Does it look like it's storing it?" Marshall asked. "Or is it just dissipating somehow? Or being converted?"

Please to not be poking it with a fork, Claudia, as that way lies sticking-up-hair and being-shot-across-the-room.

Please, Claudia had way more respect for electricity than that. She had to reshelf Benjamin Franklin's kite and key one time, and her hair hadn't calmed back down for days. . . .

"Hm, I'm not sure. It's not on a conductive surface, so I can't tell if it's redirecting it or not."

"Next thing to test, then," Marshall said, finishing up the last of his notes on the reagent test.

"What's the best conductive surface to try it on, do you think?"

"Copper plate, maybe," Claudia decided ~~while her mun pulled this crap out her ass~~. She poked the rock a few more times with her coil, then looked around to see if they had any iron filings to check for a magnetic field.

Mostly, she just liked seeing how far she could get a spark to travel between the coil and the rock itself.

~~Hey, that's no less than Marshall's mun is doing.~~ "I think I saw some copper plating in the closet," Marshall said, moving towards it. "Let me go grab it."

"Sounds good, dude." Claudia, in the mean time, carefully set her coil aside and started collecting watt analyzers to attach at various points on the plate. "Let's see if and how this sucker is distributing juice."

Pulling the copper plate out of the closet, Marshall set it up and carefully placed the sample on it. "So hopefully we don't end up shocking ourselves with this," he said, grinning at Claudia. He grabbed some of the watt analysers and began placing them.

"It's all part of the learning process, my friend." Artie would be having a heart attack at what they were doing right now. She set up some more of the analyzers, then picked up her coil. "Clear!"

*Zap*

Marshall stepped back. No electrocution for him!

"... And?"

Claudia frowned. ". . . Nothing." She tilted her head, then poked the coil at the copper plating directly.

The electricity visibly diverted to the rock instead of the plate.

"Huh."

"Huh," Marshall repeated, staring at the rock. "That wasn't supposed to happen."

Science Classroom; Tuesday [ 08/02 ].

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