ArchivedLogs:Trust the Stars

Trust the Stars
Even when you cannot see
Dramatis Personae Isra, Sebastian, Shane	2013-12-28 Comfort, advice, and a bit of science.
Location <XS> Isra's Room
Clean and spartan, this room appears even more spacious than even the average staff accommodations. What furniture it does contain has been pushed against the walls or into corners. Framed prints of galaxies and nebulae adorn the walls, but no other decorations are evident. A sizeable computer tower sits beneath the desk, hooked up to several high-end peripherals and three LCD monitors on rotating bases. It is a quiet night on campus, half-way between Christmas and New Year, and a Saturday to boot. Not much stirs in the teacher's hall. The strains of a six-voice fugue from J.S. Bach's Musical Offering drift out from Isra's room. Within, all lights have been snuffed saved for the projector on the desk, throwing the gigantic, vividly colorful image of a nebula onto a screen drawn down over the opposite wall. Isra sits in bed with a wireless keyboard in her lap, long fingers moving almost imperceptibly over a large blue trackball. She wears a violet tunic--one of the line she has designed and sewed--and her legs are folded primly beneath a much-worn black corduroy skirt. Her cursor moves over the image, and she clicks at seemingly random intervals to obtain pop-ups filled with long strings of numbers. When the music swells, her tail swishes and sways, then drops back down onto the sheets as it subsides. Isra may not know it, but she is being HUNTED. There are two small sharks on the prowl, dressed today identically in long-sleeved henley shirts (black) and cargo pants (khaki) and hiking boots. Even indoors they move quietly, softer lighter steps than might be expected from teenagers moving in boots. There's a quiet scritching at Isra's door, sharp claws tracing against the wood. A snuffling. A quick exchange in Vietnamese: "{She in?}" "{-- yes, smells like --}" Scritch scritch scritch, before there is finally a proper /knock/ at the door. One of Isra's ears prick toward the door, and the corner of her mouth curves up just a little. "Come in. It is unlocked." Click, and another string of cryptic numbers appear in a sort of flame orange patch of the nebula. She cocks her head ever so slightly and hits a macro on her keyboard that calls up a spreadsheet from the background. The number gets pasted into its own cell before she tucks the spreadsheet window away and turns expectantly to the door. "I have hot chocolate and cookies, if you would like some." One huge gray wing stretches out to indicate two large golden tins sitting on a bookshelf. "/Spicy/ hot chocolate," she adds, "quite spicy." The door opens, two smallsharks /tumbling/ in in a rush, pushing the door closed behind themselves and hurrying over to -- well, one of them is clambering right up to tuck himself beneath outstretched wing. The other plops down on the mattress in front of Isra, legs dangling over the edge of bed so that he does not put boots on the coverlet. "-- Spicy?" Beneath Isra's wing, Thing One perks. Thing Two says nothing. He flops down backwards, slinging a hand across his eyes. "Not hungry," he demurs. "You're always hungry," says his twin with a frown. "We came here to hunt." "Caught our quarry." Thing Two gestures with his free hand towards Isra. "It contains cayenne pepper and cinnamon, among other spices. Evidently this is a traditional method of preparing chocolate in certain parts of Mesoamerica." Isra's wing curls in over the shark boy and squeezes before relaxing. She has grown strong in recent months, and her wings no long tremble with the effort of such movement. "You were hunting /me/ when you could be hunting food?" Her hairless brow ridges arch with an expression that only those familiar with her would interpret as bemused. "Why, I must try to make for you a more difficult mark next time--tuck myself away in some odd corner of campus with a telescope. It would be a fine night for that, and perhaps a warmer one than we will have any time soon." Bright green eyes drift back to the colorful threads of plasma sprawled across the projector screen. "Yet here I am dallying with old light. Ancient light, as a matter of fact--over 5,000 years old." "Hunting you so that --" "-- we /could/ hunt food." "But also just to hunt you," Thing One admits, eyes closing as he nestles into the squeeze. "It'd be nice." Thing Two looks towards the window thoughtfully. "Can we?" "Look at stars?" Thing One peers around Isra towards the window, too. "Stars are nice. They --" "... make sense." Thing Two's arm is still slung across his eyes. He peeks out from under his elbow to look towards ISra. "What do you do when nothing makes sense?" "It is all well if you had fun tracking me down, but there /are/ quicker ways to contact me." Isra tips her head at the massive smartphone charging on her night stand. "We can most certainly--go stargazing /or/ hunting, though I would need a more significant wardrobe change for the latter. I picked up my old Dobsonian from my parents' house when I visited last week, and it might be nice to break it out again." She looks down at Thing Two, ears pressed back. "I...I suppose, in the past, I just ignored everything that made no sense and turned to the heavens instead. Gravity and light almost always make sense, save under very specific circumstances. Now?" Her hand leaves the keyboard and brushes over Thing One's prickly head. "I suppose I have found some other subjects that make sense. Love isn't exactly astrophysics, though. It has a language of its own, and I am not fluent." Thing One closes his eyes, gills slowly fluttering at the brush to his head, calm and happy rather than quick and agitated. "Are you in love?" "Love makes /no/ sense," Thing Two opines with a frown. "Yes." Isra stares down at the trackball beneath her left hand as if the round blue sphere contained all the secrets of the cosmos and the heart. "I think it makes its own strange sense--like quantum mechanics. You know that it describes the same universe as relativity, but it just does not seem to mesh, if only because we do not know how to unify them. Yet neither is wrong, in its own domain." She shakes her head. "Forgive me, I have no great talent for metaphors. All I mean is that...perhaps there is more than one /brand/ of sense for a thing to make." The twins exchange an uncertain look, before Thing Two sets his arm back over his eyes. "Do you like it, though?" "Not sure so many people would bother with it if they didn't like it," Thing One answers, though not particularly /certainly/. "It's just complicated. And then you start loving someone and --" Thing Two's gills are fluttering, too, but quicker and faster than his brother's. Thing One is quiet, for a stretch, watching Isra's hand against the trackball. "And it's messy." "I do like it. A great deal more than I ever expected to like it." Isra shrugs, both wings hitching up and then relaxing. "But then, I am a scientist. I am familiar with complicated messes. Sometimes you find an elegant formula lurking behind the mess, and sometimes you do not." Her fingers flutter over the keyboard, bringing the spreadsheet back out and saving her progress before she closes out the entire set of programs she's been using with a single command. Her desktop wallpaper is the famous Hubble image of the Hourglass Nebula. "You have to decide for yourself whether it is worth the struggle. For me--even if it all comes crashing down in the end--it is. Worth it." Both twins quiet again, here. Thing Two scoots a little bit closer to the others, worming against the mattress to move in towards them. "It's just hard when you love someone," Thing One says, "and they're --" "{fucking /stupid/,}" Thing Two says in unhappy Vietnamese. Thing One exhales a sharp breath. "What do you do if you love someone and they're hurting themselves?" "Or other people." Thing Two's claws extend and then pull back, gills fluttering quickly again. "Or lying to you or --" Thing One slumps in more against Isra's side. "Sometimes things feel like they're all crashing down already." "I think that the first and best thing to do is talk to them about it." Isra unfurls her other wing and gathers Thing Two over to her, setting keyboard and trackball aside. "The way to go about it, though...differ from person to person. I am not sure I know how to do it except to lay out what I have observed and ask them to do the same." She draws a deep breath, wings shifting out as massive lungs fill and push her scapulae outward. "If that does not produce a satisfactory result...I suppose it would depend on what precisely they were doing to hurt themselves, or others, or how precisely they lied. At best I would adapt; at worst I would terminate the relationship." "What if they're just. Gonna do something --" Thing One stops, uncertain. "Stupid and dangerous," Thing Two says without any uncertainty at all. "Everyone we know does stupid dangerous things." Thing One snorts, leaning forward to stroke his hands slowly down along the outsides of his brother's neck, petting gills back down into place. "Would you stop them?" Thing Two closes his eyes, leaning happily into the touch. Isra's ears press back against her skull. "If stopping them would be /less/ stupid and dangerous than what they are planning? Yes. But I would take care in doing so if I did not know the other factors. If possible, I'd tell them, at least in general terms, that I intend to intervene." She pauses for a moment, her eyes darting from one twin to the other, unblinking. "You are not speaking academically, are you?" "No," Thing One whispers, unhappily. Thing Two shakes his head. "We're just -- scared. The world's -- really --" Thing One frowns deeply. "/Really/ screwed up," says Thing Two. "Except the people you love aren't supposed to be the /screwed up/ part, it's not. He's never -- /lied/ to us before, it's --" ".. bad enough to lie about." Thing One's gills flutter now, rapidly. "No one is perfect, especially in such an imperfect world." Isra replies softly, the higher register dropping from her voice and leaving it almost inhumanly low-pitched. "The people we love are not exempt from this, no matter how much we wish it. They also get frightened and make mistakes." The tip of her tail where it emerges from the hem of her long skirt twitches a few times, then goes still as if by an effort of will. "But if you can show them these things, you may yet give them a chance to make amends." "Frightened and make mistakes is different from --" Thing One frowns deeply. Thing Two just sits up, shaking his head abruptly. "I don't want amends I just want people I can trust. Do you want to go look at stars? Can we do that yet?" For a moment the look Thing One gives to his brother is just deeply saddened. His gills flutter once, and then he pulls away from Isra. His fingers brush briefly against the tip of her twitching tail. "You can trust the stars, I guess." If the outburst troubles or confuses Isra, she gives no outwardly sign of it. "Even a trust betrayed is not beyond salvage...or building anew. At least not always." She rises in one smooth motion and fetches her heavy cloak. "But we can go--if you help me set up the telescope. It's a /beast./" Her hands pause in the midst of draping the garment across her shoulders and the wings folded down over them. "Yes. The stars are always there, whether we can see them or not." The twins both hop down off the bed in tandem. Thing One curls his arm around his brother's waist, squeezing close. "We'll help yeah. It's good to --" "... have something constant." Thing Two's gills are rapidly-fluttering, but they calm, with a press from his brother's fingers and the promise of stars to come.