Divided part 1
by Vanessa S. Quest
Hadji sniggered, walking backwards he turned a corner, once passed a small explosion rocked through that portion of the hallway much to the teen's enjoyment, he spun around to start a sprint as an irate red haired girl followed.
"HADJI!" She screamed letting her voice trill, he merely offered his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Don't…"
Hadji let a dark smile turn over his lips.
"Hadji- don't… don't say it!"
Hadji smiled outright, he flicked his wrists up as he said, "Say what? Sim Sim Sala bim…!" Jessie rose from the floor, looking very cranky for the wear.
As she brooded, midair, Hadji let the levitation drop her back on the ground, graciously, not even with a thump! "You know Jessie, you really should lighten up." Laughing Hadji went on his way to the kitchen for a snack.
She glared coldly. "And you know Hadji, you should ask Pasha to find you a personality."
Dr. Quest looked back and forth between the bickering pair but decided ignorance was blissful, especially so long as the explosions indoors kept to a minimal, with today's tally being one, it was looking to be a good day.
"Kids, do you want to help out in the lab?"
Jessie's eyes lit up while Hadji continued to chastise the girl with his very presence. "Really? We can?" Light shone behind her as if she had instantly ascended to the heavens in the grace of Dr. Quest and the notion that she could play in his lab- by play she meant working fully scientifically and NOT playing god, really. She had no urge to… oh… get Hadji back with some local dyes from Pygmy country, really. That was located on the third shelf from the top in the farthest corner back of the stock room, she knew that to avoid it. Yup. Not a cruel thing on her sweet little mind.
"Of course. Are you both game?"
They nodded happily. Once Dr. Quest's back faded into the kitchen Jessie let out a low but well measured, "I will destroy you."
Hadji laughed at her expense, "You have a smudge." He mentioned while demonstrating with a flick of his wrist, sending a bottle of open jelly down her shirtsleeve.
"HADJI!" Growling she narrowed her eyes, "Be smart and levitate the knives OUT of my reach." She stormed off back to her room to get dressed for the lab, or so she would tell Dr. Quest when he asked why she was now wearing something else.
Inside the lighthouse Dr. Quest leaned over the computer panel as he set up his prototype of his Quantum Regulator, he had written a theory on other dimensions taking up a different frequency of energy possibly overlapping their own, he even let a few colleagues suppose it to explain certain 'ghost' phenomena though that was in limited cases and around highly magnetic areas. All things considered there was so much potential inside that concept that he had to build a device to see if he could actively measure it, he was intrigued, his thirst for knowledge whetted and he was not the sort of man to let things that peaked his interest go understudied.
Dr. Quest rarely put 100 into just one project but he had sunk himself into this project since finding an application to the theory he had developed four years back. He had put the project on hold after the… incident… by time he was able to go through all his old notes the papers jumped at him begging for his sole attention to the one project. Race would have a paroxysm if he knew this was Benton's new project, but he couldn't help himself, it was simply too fascinating even neglecting the possible implications.
Looking over his office section of lab he spotted his favorite arm chair and lowered table, normally he'd find himself lounging about reading a case study or field research of colleagues to submit a critique to some trendy science magazine, he also spotted a familiar photograph, as per tradition, and meandered towards it ready to collapse into his chair in meditations.
His hands quickly found what his eyes had and gathered up the image looking at the family photo, he smiled warmly, Jessie stood in the center fixed in a hybrid of school uniform and street clothes, her bootleg blue jeans, an ashy long-sleeve turtleneck and her unbuttoned short-sleeved summer uniform and hiking boots, a baseball cap fisted as she laughed at Jonny to her side as he was giving his other son Hadji a rather dirty look. Hadji smiled innocently even with his hand still tracing mud, he was forced into wearing a new wool sweater, a sharp sweater as he recalled that still served the teen as a portion of wardrobe, gray with a red vertical stripe down the center between the left shoulder and neck opening, two inches thick, khaki dress pants and sneakers with more telltale mud. Race stood at the edge very upset to have a wet handprint of an irate blond down his new shirt's front, and a trail of mud from the remainder of the boy's impression. At the slight left, the entire scene came unfolded as Jonny was regaining his balance, death-glare fixed at the Hindi, traces of dryness on parts of his faded black denim pants, his black three-quarter mock turtle neck was stuck to his body and his matching black denim jacket fixed itself to his elbows and up, soaked with spots of mud from a mud-ball impact. So it wasn't a traditional family photo, it was a real one though, one of his favorite pictures, they had the brilliant idea of going on a hike through the woods and that was the chaos that followed.
He sighed inwardly then put the photo down, he had to prepare for the experiment.
Jessie knocked on the outermost door to the lab, a good practice for all things considered. Dr. Quest typically answered hastily if he was working with anything dangerous that could, oh, say, rip you limb from limb and render you dead with a press of a button… or more importantly without a press of the button which tended to be the safety-control device.
"Come on in, everything's ready to go."
