Disclaimer:
This is not a real life story. Please do not expect the situation depicted in these pages to actually work out the way it does in this story. It is fictional though the ideas expressed in this story are fairly ideal considering the situation and the strange amount of how perfectly things work out in it. The idea that a Sextant should – let alone can – be used in any navigation that is not nautical is completely made up and not expected to actually work the way this is depicted.
Again, this story is fictional and not expected to have actually worked out if someone tried it in real life.
Grimmjow wasn't all that sure why he'd thought it would be a good idea to drive that night. A country road with hardly anything but miles of desert and nothing else surrounding it on a night when the sky was filled to the brim with only stars. Grimmjow had never really liked nights when there was no moon to speak of; they always held an eerie quality in the back of his mind. In northern Nevada, we happen to have what 'experts' call black skies.
He scoffed. The skies were hardly ever black as they claimed, the stars littering about the inky darkness of the sky like lightning bugs trapped in perfect synchronization. They never blinked, never really moved much in his mind and all seemed to stare at the people tauntingly. It was especially true in the virtually unlit areas between Battle Mountain and Belmont, Nevada. Then again, he distinctly remembered his two group mates claiming they'd have to make Spring break be real useful and go up to Umatilla Forest in Oregon or all the way to Canada's Wells Gray Provincial Park or Willmore Wilderness Park or Glacier National Park.
Then the nerd claimed that it would be less out of their way to just stay in state and stare at stars from a known black sky area. So they were stuck with the same old constellations, not that they saw many in Reno to begin with, and it was less out of the way than it should have been to simply stare at the night sky for unreasonable hours.
He rolled his eyes at the memory of the arguments between his two classmates, both planning on becoming doctors at some point. He really only saw one of them getting there since the other, the ginger, felt this strange need to study mythology in his spare time. At least they wouldn't be going all the way to Gabbs or too close to Death Valley – though Grimmjow had always wanted to go to Vegas.
"You're the immature one who sits in the back of the hall aren't you?" Uryuu had asked when they'd all been grouped up.
Grimmjow had sneered at him while he pushed his glasses back into place on his thin nose. The ginger, Ichigo, had simply stared at them both with a strange disinterest that made Grimmjow's blood boil. Grimmjow liked being the center of attention but he'd never been able to get Ichigo to bother glaring at him.
Now, he found himself on a country road, kicking the tires of his car half-heartedly – it had been with far more gusto an hour prior but he'd gotten winded thanks to the added cussing and damning the contraption to hell and back. At this rate, he would not only be amazingly late, his group mates would be getting tempted to rip him a new one. Why he was scared of the two was a bit beyond him but he'd seen the ginger get teased before and was not in the mood to have to deal with his deceptive upper body strength.
"Damn," he muttered as he moved to pull out his phone from his pocket.
The GPS in his car had basically proved itself to be a bust; he was ruing the day he did not update the stupid thing enough already so he was trying to not dwell on it. He held up the phone to find it was searching for a signal, killing its battery in the process. He had an overwhelming urge to throw it into the desert about him with rough bellow of irritation. Instead, he gripped it in a white knuckle hold for a moment before turning it off with a hiss curse through clenched teeth.
What else could possibly go wrong today, he thought ruefully. I've already taken care of the copying crap for the posters and handouts that good old Uryuu had demanded we had to use. However…now I'm lost and have nothing to get me the hell out of it.
He whacked his head against the top of his car in frustration. He wasn't going to be getting anywhere today was he? Or should he be saying tonight? He sighed again. He was irritated beyond belief about this stupid crap about astronomy or astrology – whichever; he really didn't care which he called it since he had been hoping that he wouldn't have been saddled with any work since he had the two smartest kids in the class in his group. Though, he wasn't all that sure why he'd thought he was going to get out doing any work when he had those two in his group either. Ginger head was going to rue the day he made Grimmjow stay out in the middle of nowhere to do some last minute gazing and then go and make copies in some little dunk town.
Stupid doctors and their freaking emergencies. A few hours of gazing he could do, he just had to sleep in his car until his phone went off – which it apparently wouldn't have done any way not that he thought about it. He probably would have ended up being jolted awake when one of the two knocked on his car window. He was actually fairly surprised he even got Ichigo's text message that he and Uryuu were going to be held up. He was still a bit surprised that he had forgotten that their fathers were both doctors and were always letting them help out on things. He knew that they needed to get things together for the presentation that was in maybe eight hours or so and they needed him to make copies for them.
Now, he found himself lost and fairly irritated.
Actually, he was beyond irritated. He hadn't wanted to even do the project and somehow, the other two had managed to talk him into being the bearer of all their equipment and notes. He was surprised that Uryuu had even listened to Ichigo when the ginger had made the suggestion. Of course, the fact the suggestion was even made was downright heart stopping. Grimmjow could only thank whatever god there was that it would all fit in a well sized duffle bag and would survive should he half to walk – though that sextant thing was rather heavy.
"Are you really that damned inept?" Uryuu had asked the first night out. Grimmjow had nearly snarled at him in return.
"Ease up a bit Uryuu," Ichigo murmured as he stared up to the skies. His brown eyes were glazed over with interest, a faraway look that could only be explained as 'dazed' in Grimmjow's opinion. That expression never showed up in class.
"Just because it's not rocket science to you doesn't mean it's that easy for me," Grimmjow groused at the glasses wearing force of nature. Uryuu sighed and shoved his glasses up again.
"It's really far simpler than you think," he said. "You basically reflect light through two mirrors, in succession, and then use angles to find your position. As soon as the celestial body is 'on' the horizon through the scope, you move the arc to the arm. Then you make adjustments until the body is brushing the horizon. Then you note the time in seconds, minutes, and hours, the body's name and the altitude."
Grimmjow had stared at him blankly; he huffed again and bent down to the ground to pick up a stick and began to draw out a diagram, explaining it once again. However, he wasn't using layman's terms and Grimmjow just let him ramble on – the diagram making less sense by the second.
"Of course there are errors to consider," Uryuu was saying. "First off, you usually use a sextant on a ship which means that while you're taking the measurements you're moving which can make your errors greater. Note that four seconds equals one nautical mile which is about 6,076.12 feet, 1.15078 miles, 1,852 meters, or 1.85200 kilometers."
"He's not listening," Ichigo called as he began to hold up his hand as if to touch the stars, his brown eyes still focused on only the inky blackness that was dotted with fireflies above their heads. Grimmjow wasn't sure what to think of him at that moment; he was too busy noticing that Uryuu hadn't heard Ichigo speak.
"The errors include index errors, dip, refraction, the parallax, and the semi-diameter," Uryuu continued. "Index error is instrumental and the way to fix it is to make sure that the horizon is exactly at 0°." He drew another couple of diagrams:
"The one on the left is a sextant set at 0° on a horizon split. The one on the right is what the image will look like when the index error is corrected for horizon to be level," he explained. Grimmjow's head spun again. "If you're over 0° you add the difference; if it's over, you subtract it form the observations obtained.
"Dip is the adjustment made for the height of the reader's eye above sea level. It's usually 0.98 times the square root of that height in meters multiplied by 3.28. The equation looks like this-."
"No one said anything about math!" Grimmjow yelled in horror.
"Put up with it," Ichigo called back as he began to write something down in the notebook he'd gotten specifically for this project. Grimmjow scowled at him as Uryuu wrote out the equation with a chuckle.
"That's way too complicated," Grimmjow muttered.
"Meters are about 3.281 feet or one hundred centimeters," Uryuu deadpanned. "It's really not that difficult a conversion – especially not with a reliable calculator."
"Just because you can do that crap in your head doesn't mean everyone else can," Ichigo laughed as he held up his hand again before returning to writing something down.
Grimmjow had never heard him curse before.
"Whatever," Uryuu muttered dismissively. He turned back to his diagrams. "Refraction is the bending of light through a medium such as air. I believe the Nautical Almanac has the allowances for it…I shall have to get a hold of that sooner or later. The parallax is the displacement in the position of an object depending on the line of sight. Again, I think it's in the Almanac I think. The Semi-diameter is in there too I believe."
"I'll get it for you," Ichigo said. Grimmjow and Uryuu stared at him in amazement. "What? My uncle sails…."
Grimmjow sighed as he reached in to the trunk of his car to pull out the duffle there. He moved the binders filled to the brim with equations and charts into it, hoping that nothing would get damaged as he hiked his butt back to town. It was night so it wouldn't be too hot if he hiked himself back to the nearest rest station where he could bum a ride. Hell, if he was lucky he'd be able to borrow a car whilst getting his towed to a mechanic. He dropped the sextant on top of the binders a bit roughly – he didn't hear it break and there was a blanket there after all – before making sure he had his wallet and keys.
There was no way he was going to leave his car unlocked on some random road. No way in hell was he doing that. He'd spent enough time out there as it was; he wasn't about to risk leaving his car out for someone to simply stumble upon an easy grab. He wasn't that damned stupid; that was just around the complete rocket scientists in his classes who liked to show him up so often that he'd just given up trying to argue them into corners.
He was better at looking big and scary. It also usually played out better when he just looked like he was about to bash someone's head in when they started rambling off on some tangent that was over his head anyway. However, he hadn't been able to do that in this project since he needed the grade and wasn't about to listen to his parents' whining at him again. He was seriously tired of hearing that he could do better when he felt no real need to do better.
Being better wasn't exactly fun after all – that had responsibilities to tend to and he wasn't really one for responsibilities at that particular moment. In fact, he hated being responsible at that particular moment. All being responsible had done for him so far was get him in trouble. If there was one thing he hated more than being responsible – with anyone or anything – it was being in trouble; especially when the trouble was a result of the responsibility. He hated pressure yet he envied Ichigo who seemed to not mind the idea of being trapped in years of schooling only to find the pressure of the doctoring world. He thought Ichigo was insane but also fairly brave.
Something shifted and the duffle felt a bit too heavy on one side. Grimmjow sighed another curse and slipped the stupid thing off his shoulder to shift the binders and sextant. He almost roared a curse when he noticed one of the folders had lost its holders and had let the papers in it go all over the place. He scooped the papers up and moved them to a binder, noticing the diagrams on them. He recognized them from the conversation that had followed after Uryuu's rant on sextants and how they work.
It had apparently been Ichigo's turn to draw diagrams.
"You're forgetting about the Position Circle by the way."
Uryuu wrinkled his nose. "Even I don't understand that stupid thing."
Ichigo chuckled again and stood. He lifted the stick from Uryuu's hands and began to draw out yet another diagram.
"You use this to measure the altitude of the body you're using," he explained. "Your position on earth is 'z' which lies on the circumference of this small circle, or the position circle, the center being the geographical position of the body. The radius of the small circle is the true zenith distance or 'zx' and is expressed in nautical miles. The astronomical position line is this small arc of the position circle here." He dragged the stick over the arc making it darker and more noticeable.
"Depending on the size of 'zx' you can determine the miles. If it's small, the distance is about twenty miles. With that information you can plot your position on a chart with the circle on it without losing accuracy of your position. In general however, 'zx' will be large."
"How large is large?" Grimmjow asked, oddly interested.
"About a thousand miles large."
Grimmjow's eyes bugged and he shook his head.
"Also, your charts are usually not big enough to actually be all that useful. The position has to be found through confining methods on the plotting to keep the navigation around the neighborhood of the ship's position. That is called the intercept method or the Marcq St. Hilaire."
Grimmjow nodded again and glanced at the chart Ichigo had drawn out before their feet. He found he couldn't follow it anymore now that Ichigo was not explaining it as clearly as he had been. At least he could have said he'd understood it during the explanation; that would ruffle Uryuu's feathers a bit.
"So, what's this intercept method you were talking about?" Grimmjow asked trying to sound not as interested as he actually was. Ichigo had a way of making almost anything interesting. It was a bit irritating at times.
Ichigo smiled at him.
"It's a way to navigate," he explained. "It used to be called the azimuth intercept because you had to use a process involving the azimuth line to find intercept distances and all. It helps you find a line of position on which the observer is. Where the two or more lines intersect, is where the observer is and that position is called a 'fix'. Of course, it involves more math."
"More math?" Grimmjow almost whined.
"Yes. Tons more of it with cosines and sines," Ichigo laughed. "Trust me when I say it's a bit over my head. Also…the readings are usually taken in short intervals around twilight or some other time like it. If observations are taken for only a few minutes at most, the corrected lines of position by convention yield a 'fix'. If the lines of position must be taken for an hour or more, the results are called a 'running fix'."
Grimmjow's head was spinning again.
Grimmjow shook himself of the memory and moved the papers into a binder as gently as he could – no way was he going to let Uryuu get on his back for bending the papers accidentally. He'd had enough of a rant of getting the copies to be perfect hours prior and he wasn't in the mood for a rant on how he 'couldn't follow simple instructions if his life depended on it' from the kid who weighed less than he did when he wasn't soaking wet.
His hand brushed over the cool metal of the sextant once more and he lifted his head back to the stars, surprising himself when he managed to find Ursa Major with ease. He cocked his head to follow the line from Merak to Dubhe all the way to Polaris, the 'never moving star of the north' that Ichigo had praised as a great navigation tool, and finding the end of the handle of Ursa Minor's back.
He blinked. That had been way too easy. He distinctly remembered having issues even finding the images that had apparently always been there. Though, he also recalled Uryuu saying something about how the stars were moving out – Red Shifting he'd called it – and had probably been in different shapes in the beginning of stargazing. Something about how the speed of light having to travel over the complete emptiness of space made the stars' light late in getting to earth. It took eight minutes for the sunlight to actually reach Earth – which was mind blowing in and of itself.
"How do you know the brightness of a star anyway? I mean…they all look like they're the same amount of light from here so how can you tell?" Grimmjow had found himself asking one day, his head cocked upwards to gaze languidly at the stars. He was beginning to be able to pick out certain constellations but he'd always have to ask if he was right about the name or the legend behind it.
Ichigo had been laughing at him for days now.
"You find it through the magnitude scale," Uryuu groused. "That scale helps determine why things look bigger or smaller – brighter or dimmer – than they are. If something has a negative apparent magnitude then it is brighter – or at least seems that way. As it is, the naked eye can only see up to 6.5m of light."
"Apparent Magnitude?" Grimmjow growled.
"The magnitude as seen by a human on Earth," Ichigo cleared up. "Thanks to telescopes we can see things that are much higher on that scale though we've only gotten up to thirty with the James Webb Telescope." He gave a dismissive shrug and went back to star gazing.
"So…What's Venus' magnitude?"
"About…negative four-point-three 'm'," Ichigo murmured. His hand shot up. "That's Sirius." His hand dropped to his side again and he continued to gaze almost as if he were searching for something really important.
"Any way," Uryuu stated smugly, irritated that Ichigo had corrected him…again, "there's also Absolute Magnitude which is represented by a capital 'M'. Where apparent magnitude depends on distance, absolute magnitude depends on the luminosity of the actual star itself. So in actuality, Sirius – our brightest star in the sky – is actually dimmer than Betelgeuse when it comes to absolute magnitude. However, since it is closer and the light has to travel a shorter distance, it seems brighter to us."
"What's distance got to do with any of it though? Isn't the speed of light almost incomprehensible?" Grimmjow asked, feeling stupid for asking.
"The speed of light it 671million miles an hour," Ichigo stated. "That's maybe 173 astronomical units per day. The nearest star's light reaches us every four-point-twenty-four years. To cross the Milky Way would take about one hundred thousand years; forget going for 2.5 million years to get from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy!"
Grimmjow blinked at him
"That's…insane."
Grimmjow hefted the Sextant then, thinking that he may actually be able to get himself somewhere with at least trying to use what Ichigo and Uryuu had accidentally taught him. Oh, he could just imagine the looks on their faces if he showed up saying he'd managed to navigate his way off the country road with nothing but the sextant and the calculator they'd shoved into the bag at one point.
He grinned as he lifted the sextant up to align it with a body he recognized with relative ease – giving himself a mental pat on the back for even recognizing one of the millions of stars up there.
Holding it in his right hand, he made the sighting through the telescope, making sure that the horizon glass showed the horizon was where he would need it to be, with the body aligned with the horizon. One he was sure everything was in the right place, he rocked – Ichigo's words not his – the sextant to make sure he kept the stupid thing was being held vertically during his sight taking. Once that was done, he made a mark of the placement and the time. He noted the angle the arc was reading as well – in degrees naturally – and began to so some of the calculations.
He was a bit too far south than he would have liked but that was fixable right? He could see Polaris, all he had to do was align himself in such a way to follow it but also make sure he was heading to an actual town. He stowed the sextant away, carefully wrapping it the blanket it had been in for protective reasons, and then pulled out a road map. He aligned it with the North Star and rechecked the calculations to find that he was south of where he was supposed to have been an hour ago had his car not died on him.
A few minutes later he was finding that he actually knew what the hell he was doing, pulling the calculations to fit the map he had and figuring out how far it was from where he was to where he had to be in six hours – he decided he should try to rush a bit to make up some of his time lost cursing at the car and doing calculations. He was tempted to hop up and down with glee for proving he could do it – Uryuu made it look rigorously hard – and finding it about as easy as Ichigo had made it look.
He packed up the stuff, keeping the map out so he could try to make sure he was keeping track of where he was, and began walking a bit. As he walked he let his mind wander back to some of the conversations that had filled the hours of sky watching.
"Hey, what're you doing there?" Grimmjow asked while watching Ichigo draw lines in the sand as he cocked his head up to the stars.
"Trying to figure out the Parallax."
"The what?"
"The difference of the obvious placement of an object by looking at it in two different angles." Grimmjow gave him a blank look. "You know how your finger will 'move' when you close one eye and then switch?" A nod. "Think of applying that to finding the distance between stars and the planet. Where the two lines cross is where the star is and that distance it measured in parsecs."
Grimmjow rolled his eyes as he sat down next to Ichigo.
"What?" he asked with a bit of snark in his tone.
"Parsec…it's about three-point-twenty-six light years or nineteen trillion miles."
Grimmjow gave a low whistle.
"Far out there huh?"
"Shut up."
"Want to know the distance formula?"
"No."
Ichigo chuckled and wrote it out anyway. "It's distance, d, measured in parsecs, p, in arcseconds or one divided by the parsecs."
"Arcseconds?"
"They help you measure declination sometimes."
"Declination?"
"The angular distance from the celestial equator – measured in degrees."
"Now, you sound like nerd."
"Dictionary definition – my uncle made me memorize it."
"What the hell is this 'celestial sphere' Uryuu keeps yapping on about?"
"It's the ninth day into this and you're only asking me now?" Ichigo asked, not lifting his head from the telescope he'd dragged out there. Beside him sat a notebook and pencil, his hand making absent notes on the paper. They were amazingly legible.
Grimmjow blushed and turned his head away.
"You want to know or not?" Ichigo asked after a while. Grimmjow gave him a glare but he smiled anyway. "Alright, you know how the Earth has a fairly circular orbit around the sun?" A nod. "Alright…think of the stars up there basically staying put in one place as we rotate. Down here it looks like the sky is moving right?"
"The world was flat," Grimmjow said sarcastically. Ichigo kicked his shins. "Ow!"
"The world was not flat stupid; that's been proven."
"Yeah; by Columbus." Another kick. "Damn it! Knock that off!"
"Columbus had his math wrong."
"No way…how else would he have discovered America and whatnot?"
"He didn't discover America – the Vikings did that before him with smaller boats. He thought he found China or a shortcut to it. No one liked going too far away from being able to see the shore lines because they all knew about Eratosthenes who found the circumference of the Earth using shadows of a building and a well in two different cities, pacing out the distance between the two cities, and doing very careful math. He was off by one degree but for someone who lived in 276 BC to 194 BC. Hell, he's the father of geography."
Grimmjow frowned but knew better than to fight over those points.
"Alright…you were talking about the celestial sphere?"
"Right…" Ichigo glared. "As we move, the sky doesn't really change but since we don't notice the motion it's like the stars revolve around us – a geocentric universe of sorts which was thought up by Aristotle. There's another geocentric idea from Ptolemy that has the planets on epicycles to explain why Jupiter and Mars 'wander' over the sky strangely. However, he was wrong on quite a few counts on that so I'm not going to go into it.
'The celestial sphere is an idea that the stars actually are in a line around the entire solar system that goes around the plants and the sun as a whole. This is why we see certain constellations on certain months."
Grimmjow nodded slowly, his mind sort of wrapping around the whole idea. The planets moved around the sun, the stars didn't actually move but since the planets were rotating and orbiting they looked like they moved across the sky. Yeah….that made perfect sense.
"Then…the reason the moon changes shape is what exactly?" Grimmjow asked, earning a smack to the shoulder. "Would you quit hitting me?"
"Quit being an idiot and I will," Ichigo stated with a straight face. "It doesn't change shape; it orbits Earth which orbits the sun."
"And?"
Ichigo rolled his eyes.
"And," he dragged the 'a' sound out, "the moon is a quarter the size of the Earth and its gravity effects the tides and the wobble of the Earth. Without the moon, our angle of axis would change and then we'd have weird season changes. Anyway…the moon orbits around Earth every twenty-eight days or so but it also rotates on its axis at about the same rate – hence why we only see one side at all times.
"While it travels around us the sun remains in the same place and lights up the moon from right to left. As the moon comes around us, it begins to darken from right to left. Everything's right to left understand?" A nod. "Good. Now…apply that thinking to around one thousand years of thinking that way and you'll have a fair understanding as to why humans are so far behind in certain things involving space travel."
"Huh?"
"Oh Ptolemy's epicycle theory was so perfect for his times that it ended any more discovery for about one thousand years." Ichigo waved his hand almost dismissively as if it weren't all that big a deal. However, to Grimmjow a thousand years seemed like an eternity. He had had no idea how wrong he was.
"So…what's the myth behind that one?" Grimmjow asked as he pointed without any real aim at the sky.
It was night seventeen – why they needed so many days for a project like this was beginning to make him wonder but not complain – and Uryuu had had something to do so he was alone with Ichigo who seemed to be all too happy to fall into his own little world of star gazing unless Grimmjow bothered to ask him things.
Ichigo didn't seem to mind Grimmjow's attention seeking.
"You mean that one?" Ichigo asked as he pointed to one that looked like an incomplete triangle. Grimmjow nodded even though he knew he was lying that it had been what he'd meant. For all he knew, he'd meant another one but Ichigo seemed alright with the noncommittal nod.
"That's Andromeda the princess. The myth is that her mother, Cassiopeia who is that W-shaped one over there, bragged that she was more beautiful than the queen of the gods and the Nereids – nymphs. Neptune destroyed the coast with a sea monster known as Cetus in some perspectives but Cetus is usually seen as a whale.
"Now…Cepheus, Andromeda's father, went to an oracle of Jupiter only to find out that if Andromeda were to be sacrificed to the monster. Naturally, the virgin sacrifice had to be given right? Right. So, Andromeda was chained to a rock on the coast only to be saved by Perseus," he continued as he pointed to one that was near the triangle's left, "who had just killed Medusa and was on his way home to save his mother. He swore to kill the monster as long as he could have her hand in marriage. He kills the monster, they marry, and the story goes on with him saving his mother as well as living with his wife."
"Sounds boring."
"It is. Now Cassiopeia is a funny one." He was pointing at the W-shaped one again. Depending on which myth you read she can either be happy with the marriage of her daughter or opposing of it and therefore turned to stone by the head of Medusa. When she was placed in the heavens by Neptune, the god saw fit to humiliate her one last time."
"How so?"
"Her head points towards Polaris see?" A nod. "Half of every night, she's upside down."
Grimmjow started to sputter with laughter. He could just imagine the former queen's face when she found out that she was going to be eternally sitting with her skirts over her head for being so pompously idiotic.
Ichigo sat up suddenly and rooted about in his bag. When he lay back down, he had a small sky map in his hands.
"Point at one," he said. "Let's see how rusty I am."
Grimmjow pointed at one he had always been able to pick out.
"That's Orion the hunter. Again, myths aren't the clearest things out there when it comes to his family. One says his father is Neptune and his mother is Queen Euryale of the Amazons and she was a great hunter herself."
"Talent runs in the family huh?"
"When you're talking about gods, oh yes. Now…he had a bit too much strength and an immense ego and declared he could take down any animal on Earth. A small scorpion stung him and killed him. The reason Scorpio is on the opposite side of the sky so they are never together at the same time."
"That's a dull one," Grimmjow sighed.
"That's only one myth," Ichigo laughed. "There's another that says he was a gift from Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury."
"No mother?"
"None. In that one, he falls in love with Merope, the daughter of Oenopion the princess of Chios. Her father wouldn't give permission for them to marry though – not even after he ridded the island of wild beasts."
"Are you kidding me? So much for Greeks being all hospitable."
"There's another one that says the scorpion was sent by Apollo who was worried for Diana's chastity."
"What? A husband worried over his wife's chastity?"
"Sister's chastity. Diana was the goddess of the hunt, forests and hills, wild animals, virginity, childbirth, and the moon. And actually, Diana's Greek name is Artemis. We're talking in Roman terms here."
"So…what's his usual depiction?"
"Look at you using big words!" Ichigo laughed. "Usually, he's fighting a bull with a raised club. Though sometimes he's drawing a bow. This star in his shoulder is Betelgeuse and the one here in his left leg is Rigel."
The rest of the night was filled with Ichigo explaining the ones he remembered and making random guesses at the ones he didn't. Some of the ideas they both came up with were actually fairly entertaining as hell.
"Holy good god you made it?" Uryuu was screeching. "I thought you said your car died!"
"It did," Grimmjow muttered as set up the poster. He'd made it to a small town fairly easily, his navigation skills apparently better than he could have guessed for they'd gotten him there with a few hours to spare and he'd even managed to bum a ride in a fairly well tuned car. His own car was going to be towed to a shop in the small town he'd gotten to and was going to be taken care of there – Ichigo had already promised to give him a ride up there to get it back – and he'd made it to the university with plenty of time to hit a store and get a trifold and a few more supplies that Ichigo had mentioned Uryuu had managed to forget about.
"How'd you get here then?" Uryuu asked sarcastically.
"Oh do shut up Uryuu," Ichigo sighed as he walked back into the dorm room he and Uryuu happened to share – the Headquarters of the group for the project since it was the most convenient place for them all to meet what with Grimmjow living down the hall from them. "He got here, he has the stuff, and he's had to walk for at least four hours nonstop. Cut him some fucking slack will you? God, you can be worse than your father sometimes."
Uryuu bristled at that but didn't even sputter a reply. Ichigo always won if he brought out the father cards. Grimmjow made a conscious effort to not laugh. He didn't need Uryuu throwing things at him. Not when he'd just pitched the best damned game in his entire life. He'd made it there in six hours – less actually since he'd apparently made it further down that road than he'd thought; thank god he didn't do the usual thing of following the proverbial yellow brick road he'd come down.
"Thanks Ichigo," Grimmjow hissed when Uryuu wandered off muttering about lucky pricks.
"What? Oh…" Ichigo murmured, waving a hand dismissively. "No big deal. Uryuu has something up his butt so just ignore him."
"That's a bit hard considering everything."
"His father's putting too much pressure on him. Ignore him. Besides, you used this stuff better than I do on a sailing trip with my uncle."
"No way."
"No…trust me…I got us lost so badly the first time I went sailing. My uncle however, was always checking the readings so he got fixed in a matter of moments despite how far off course I'd gotten us."
Ichigo gave him a smile and then began helping him with gluing things onto the poster.
School Assignments: The Most Irritating Things is open for one-shot/two-shot suggestions. For instance, you can PM ideas of an assignment that can be real or unreal (your choice), the setting, and if you want it to be a different set of people/pair/whatever. I'll do ones I think I can pull off - take a shot at a few others - but please note that it will probably be done sparingly. Thanks.