fandomhigh | Club Fair, Gym, Friday Afternoon

Liara rubbed the back of her neck. "That seems like it could be helpful," she agreed. "I personally had to stop my biotic training because... well, because I found myself here by accident. I assume I would not be the only one with this problem."

Liara was a member of the most powerful species in her galaxy. She couldn't really wrap her head around there being any other reason not to receive training, even if she knew academically that turian biotics received some amount of prejudice among their own people.

"You're welcome to join us," Evan offered, smiling brightly at her. "My Uncle was training me with my powers back home, but that... stopped pretty abruptly last winter, and here I've only really had a chance to use my powers in that class about teamwork last semester. But knowing how dangerous this place can sometimes be, I'd really rather not let myself get rusty, you know?"

Liara nodded. "Though this reminds me," she said, "That I should ask Commander Alenko if he might be willing to train me."

She rubbed at her arm. "But you are right," she said, "and a lot of biotic training is repetition. It might be useful." She tilted her head. "What are your powers?"

"I have, um... a few," Evan admitted, getting slightly fidgety. If he started listing off everything he could do, he'd be here all day. "Energy blasts, shapeshifting, and some flying, mostly. Though I'm really no good at flying."

A beat.

"Well, I'm better at flying than at landing. I really need to work on landing. But I'm a really fast healer, too, so that helps. What are biotics, if you don't mind me asking?"

"It is a way of manipulating mass by generating dark energy," Liara explained easily. She had seemed unfased during Evan's explanation - she was used to quite a bit, and even if she hadn't met a shapeshifter before, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility...

...if you preserved mass, anyway.

"My species is naturally biotic. Others are incidentally so -- Commander Alenko is a human biotic, but the ability is rare in your people."

... Ahahaha, mass.

"There might be people from my world with similar powers," Evan mused, "but I couldn't tell you for certain if it's the same sort of thing or not. There are a lot of people who can do a lot of different things, back home."

"I believe biotics have something in common with what humans refer to as 'telekinesis'," Liara offered, "Though it's not the same." A pause. "I have heard that humans seem to be more... genetically diverse. It is very unusual."

"I think it depends on the world," Evan offered with a little smile. "There are some realities where humans never develop any powers at all. Mine just happens to lean the other way. Our club sponsor, Professor Lensherr, has a sort of telekenesis that's directed specifically toward metals, so maybe that'll be helpful to you!"

Liara frowned. "Only towards metals?" she asked. "That could be quite similar. I know magnetism is created by shifting electric charges, if I am not mistaken. Biotics are also created by a certain reaction instigated by an electric current..."

Pause.

"But I am not an expert."

Edited 2012-09-14 12:27 (UTC)

"But you know enough to prove that the science club is a good place for you to be," Evan laughed. "You don't have to be an expert to know a thing or two, right?"

[Fleeing for work! Back in a bit!]

"True," Liara said, clasping her own hands. "But my real passion is archaeology."

"Ooooh." See Evan. See Evan look utterly enthralled. "I've never been on a dig myself, but I've been studying anything I can find on ancient Egypt lately. I'm... not really well-studied in archaeology, but it is really fascinating, isn't it?"

"It is!" Did you hear that? That was the sound of a conversational dam bursting. "There is so much we can learn from our ancestors - what they were like, what they created. Most would rather look to the future as if many of the issues we deal with have never occurred before, but that is very far from the truth. Just look at your ancient Egyptians, who mastered perspective and facial proportions well before your western peoples rediscovered it."

Sure, Liara. Of course it would be the old parts of local culture you actually bothered to memorize.

"Looking at history, it seems like a lot of what we have now is the result of discovery, and rediscovery. It kind of makes you wonder what people will see when they look at us, thousands of years from now," Evan mused, thrilled that he'd found a topic they could both relate to. "Art, astronomy, things that we take for granted as basic, and things we don't even understand when we dig them up. Evolution really is about so much more than genetics, isn't it?"

Oh, Evan. Honey. Don't go and get hung up on evolution. It just couldn't possibly end well.

"Evolution has very little to do with it," Liara said, shaking her head. "It is not biology that drives us to change culturally. As a scientific concept, it is not applicable to the patterns of sentient culture. But... yes, our successes as sentient species are heavily reliant on so much more than simple biology."

"I suppose maybe it depends on the culture you're talking about," Evan offered, thoughtfully. "Where I come from, evolution isn't always the slow rolling process that comes from natural selection and slight mutations over time to adapt. Every now and again, a race changes drastically, biologically speaking, and the clash between the new genetic strain and the old can lead to some very significant shifts in the culture of the species."

Because Evan came from Special Land.

"But... even seeing how people react to something as severe as a complete genetic restructuring of their race can kind of indicate who they are, as a people. Where they stand, culturally."

"With a change so sudden," Liara mused, "The actual culture cannot be changing that much. There would be heavy clashes, of course, but they would still take place within the same discourse as the old species established. Genuine cultural change does not simply happen across a few years."

"No, of course not," Evan replied, "but one big change with clashes like that... they can cause ripples. Little things, little seeds that grow and get bigger as time goes on. Sometimes you can trace the growth of technology, of a cultural norm, right back to those clashes. Whether people are willing to accept the new, whether the new is willing to live alongside the old, or if one or the other has it in them to try to completely eliminate a group of people that could very easily be their brothers, their children..."

He frowned a little, not meaning to go on about something so unpleasant, really. He just... kind of got carried away, sometimes.

"We're kind of in the thick of something like that back home," he attempted to explain. "And we've had people from the future giving us different examples of the direction things could go, things that would irreversibly change the foundations of the entire species."

Liara paused, because something about that sounded odd to her ears.

"You had people from the future," she echoed. "There is a teacher here who claims to be from fifty years in my future-- is it something like that?"

"Nah," Evan replied, shrugging his shoulders easily. "We've got actual time-travelers back home. I mean, they're all pretty much always from the future, but they pop up from time to time. Here it's more a matter of parallel realities running at different speeds, or from different starting points. Which... we have some of that back home, too, of course."

A beat.

"You kind of get used to it."

"It sounds..." Liara groped around for a word. "...Bewildering."

"It can be," Evan agreed, nodding a little. "Especially when you get different people from different timelines, all coming back trying to stop some major event that left everything some kind of nightmare dystopia."

He was still trying to puzzle out whether or not there were any good futures out there. But he imagined that people didn't tend to travel back in time to change anything when the world was a happy place.

"...This is a frequent occurrence."

Funny how she didn't make it sound like a question.

"... Kind of, yeah." It was definitely an answer! "I don't know if any of my teachers at my last school haven't had some sort of experience with time travel in one way or another. We had a whole class about future history, in the spring."

Yes, he was aware that the phrase was weird and wrong.

Liara looked like her mind was making a few important adjustments. "Future history," she echoed. "The history known by those who live ahead of us. I... suppose that would be necessary. To have a class on, I mean."

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