fandomhigh | 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! ]]

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Scully grinned again and said, "Bets on whether its alive? Or maybe a rock with a symbiote, like moss?" New species! New species! Let it be a new species. She was cutting off a tiny sliver for herself to run tests on.

"Could be. It's definitely doing something, though it's possible it's just reacting to the air itself. Look, you can watch the changes happen where you cut the bit off."

Scully peered, fascinated, and watched it change color. "Reacts to oxygen. Or maybe exposure to inert nitrogen?" she theorized aloud for her record, and then said to Claudia, "That's so weird. Silver oxidizes quickly, but I've never seen anything that reacts in seconds. Even apples or other organic matter take an hour or so, not seconds."

"Yeah, I'm starting to think we're not going to find anything about this sucker that isn't weird."

"But it still has to follow physical and chemical laws." Scully paused, getting a mildly paranoid look on her face, her voice lowering. "...unless someone starts to claim it's magic, in which case they'll take it away from us and not let us study it."

No! Their shiny! Theirs!

"Everything follows natural and physical laws," Claudia insisted. "It just . . . might have found loopholes we don't know about, yet."

If Scully were a real sixteen-year-old, she would say Awesome! Instead, she said, "We could get a scientific paper out of this. Just an initial survey, but if we document everything closely enough, we could get it out there for others to speculate on." She shook these thoughts away and put her sample in a test tube. "Boiling and steaming first. Then the spectrograph. Which should give us the chemical make-up."

"And here I was just thinking I wanted to zap the sucker." Claudia was really more a physicist than a chemist or biologist. "I'm pretty sure the scientific community at large in my world would laugh any of the stuff we see in Fandom right off the planet."

"Possibly," Scully had to acknowledge, especially with how she couldn't put her real name on it. "But there are enough obscure journals to make it worth a try..." She carefully prepared a sample in water, and started to heat it. "...total failure to react to heated water," she said in an interested tone. "I wonder what its melting point is?"

"It can't be that high. It's not even completely solid, right?"

"It's more of a plasmoid, mostly," Scully admitted, watching the sample in perplexity. Maybe it was like mercury? Maybe the density was making it impossible for it to react at water's boiling point? "Maybe it needs a re-agent to get a reaction going, though." Not that she wanted to leave nothing for anyone else to do. Time to keep working on the temperature thing. "Maybe if it's in the oven, we'll start to see something." Get a nice ceramic bowl, cut off another teeny-tiny sliver.

Scully's fingertips were tingling again, but there was SCIENCE here. Her blood flow problems could wait.

Claudia was so used to getting tiny reactions from objects in the Warehouse when she did weekend inventory that she hadn't actually noticed any weird feelings from the rock, and she had picked the whole thing up to measure the volume of it, earlier.

"We could try applying fire directly, too. I think I saw some decent torches, earlier."

"Ooo." Another sample! Scully clamped it into place. "Torch! Acetylene, and maybe propane. We can get a much higher temperature that way." She put a ceramic dish underneath it. "I'd expect it to be about 300 degrees Kelvin, since it's already so... semi-liquid."

"You should try freezing it, too. We might have some liquid nitrogen." Claudia zapped the rock with a bit of electrified coil. Then she did it again. And again.

She might be resisting the urge to laugh melodramatically.

~~wtf, LJ? Grr.~~

Somewhere, Colin Clive was rubbing his hands together in scientific greed.

"What the heck is that doing?" Scully pointed her torch at the sample. Then glared at it as it ignored her and her shiny, shiny fire. "What?"

"Check it out, I can zap this thing from, like, a foot away. It's like a super low-tech tesla coil."

Scully watched it again, eyes widening, her sample's failure to melt forgotten for the moment. "What the... That's got to be incredibly conductive. It actually looks like one of those ridiculous disco-ball plasma lamps there."

Holy lightning, Ben Franklin!

"And it's totally absorbing it all, even when we ground it with copper plating."

"How... how..." Flail, Scully, flail! "If we can replicate this, think of the huge benefits! Completely safe power facilities! And cars! and..." And also, it was just darn cool. "Do it again!"

Oh, like Claudia needed encouragement.

*Zap, zap, zap* She even started trying to draw shapes with the bolts.

Electricity was fun when you weren't zapping yourself!

Claudia wasn't the only one wanting to giggle maniacally now.

"Okay. Okay. Look at this."

FLAME ON!

Rock: ha ha ha ha haaaa ha.

"Nothing!"

"So it's flame retardant, electricity absorbing, heat producing wonder metal possible from space."

. . .

Cool.

Science Classroom; Tuesday [ 08/02 ].

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