Author's Note: oh em gee and what not. When it says 'equals' with a bracket, read it as the equal symbol, and the the equations read in three seperate lines, but the stupid punctuation laws on this site don't allow me to present that. Dammit.
Rating: M for swearing
Genre: Humor
Characters: Leon, Sherry, ARK :D
Parings: none
Summary: Ark swings into town and leaves a certain kind of 'mark' within the Kennedy household. Gives a whole new meaning to 'bathroom read' as far as Sherry's concerned.
--
Intestinal Dysfunction
By: Mazzie May
"Ah, hell, I don't know…"
Sherry was holding up her science book to Leon in hopes of help with her homework.
Unfortunately, atomic nucleuses were on the hazy side of his memory. To get him back into the swing of things, he thought reading the chapter start would be a good choice.
The decay rate, or activity, of a radioactive substance are characterized by:
Constant quantities:
half life — symbol t1 / 2 — the time for half of a substance to decay.
mean lifetime — symbol τ — the average lifetime of any given particle.
decay constant — symbol λ — the inverse of the mean lifetime.
(Note that although these are constants, they are associated with statistically random behavior of substances, and predictions using these constants are less accurate for small number of atoms.)
Time-variable quantities:
Total activity — symbol A — number of decays an object undergoes per second.
Number of particles — symbol N — the total number of particles in the sample.
Specific activity — symbol SA — number of decays per second per amount of substance.
(The "amount of substance" can be the unit of either mass or volume.)
These are related as follows:
t1/2 [equals A [equals SAao [equals
λ [equals
τln(2)
dN
dt [equals
λN
dN
dt t[equals0
[equals λNo
Where ao is the initial amount of active substance — substance that has the same percentage of unstable particles as when the substance was formed.
Leon stared down at the shiny paper and let a huge brain fart fly. What the fu… It wasn't that long ago that he was in school. He must've been learning all the same things Sherry was. So why the heck did all of it look like another language? He could figure out complicated train controls to escape a zombie infected city, he found his way around a laser in Spanish to remove the Plagas, but 3.14 was kicking his butt.
He gave Sherry a weak shake of his head with a shoulder shrug and she sighed, dropping her pencil. They stared at nothing for a moment until a floosh came from down the hall. It was then they remembered that Ark was in the apartment.
Ark Thompson had swung by for a visit and the weeks when he came around were probably the best weeks of Sherry's life—next to the ones she got to spend with Claire, of course.
Ark wandered into the living room and fell face down onto the couch. "God," he groaned. "I feel like I just gave birth…"
Leon rolled his eyes as he closed the book and Sherry covered her mouth to keep from laughing.
"Whatever," Leon said, setting the textbook back on the table before standing up. He made his way for the kitchen but Ark called him back.
He reached out for the duffle bag he brought with him and started feeling around inside a side pocket. Sherry had since reopened her book and held it up, over her nose and mouth, watching him.
Having found what he was looking for, he said, "Strike one before you go in there, man," and tossed the matchbook to Leon.
Leon caught it, his jaw dropped in amused disgust and pocketed the item as he turned into the kitchen, shaking his head, a weak "duuude" following behind him. Sherry's face was green around the edges from trying not to burst into a fit of loud giggles.
"What?" Ark asked her with a slow grin, and she dropped the book, cupping her hands over her mouth and nose, and leaning into the table, shoulders shaking. "C'mon, Sher-Bear, if your rocket left that much smoke, I'd want you to give me a heads up."
--
After Sherry calmed down and Ark felt as though he could sit on his butt, she asked him for help with her homework.
He took one look at the problem, said, "Sixty-eight years," and Leon threw his Twinkie wrapper at him.
"How the hell did you know that?"
He just shrugged. "I remember what I read."
"Bullshit," Leon scowled. "You never went to science, and you never took something this complex. Ever. You hardly went to any of your classes."
"Ya mean, we hardly went to any of our classes, cohort." He smirked as Sherry stared up at Leon in surprise.
"You ditched?"
He rubbed the shoulder that never really got over its bullet wound uncomfortably.
"…Sometimes. Yeah, I did." She blinked, a little shocked. He shifted. "It was earlier in my school life, not really high school, and besides," he pointed. "Ark skipped so much, some of his teachers though he'd changed schools."
Ark grinned as though he'd been flattered, but Sherry asked, "How did you pass?"
"Bargained my way through, mostly. I did really well when I went, so a lot of teachers loved my 'untapped potential' and all that." He took a quick swig from his beer. "Oh, and I fucked two of 'em."
Sherry's admiration for him grew more and more as Leon snapped, 'Ark!"
"Nah, it was three…" He looked at Leon. "Kennedy, c'mon, readjust the tampon. She's like, what, fourteen?"
Leon sighed loudly as she shook her head, saying "Eighteen."
Ark looked at her for a minute. "Oh," and then shook his head, "You look fourteen. And what I says goes." She opened her mouth with a smile but he went on. "And I was droppin' Acid at fourteen. She can handle some 'big kid' words," he finished while making quotation marks.
Sherry watched Leon give Ark the 'we'll walk about it later' look, but she wasn't put off by it, like usual. It's not that Leon didn't want her to hear stuff like that (he swore just as much), he just didn't want her to hear that stuff about him.
They went back to her homework.
--
The next morning, Sherry couldn't find her book. Chances were, she wouldn't need it, but it wasn't a good thing to loose a hundred and ten-dollar hunk of paper. She scurried around her room and down stairs, trying to find it.
Leon had already left to go do whatever it was that Leon did all day, so she parked herself outside the bathroom and waited for Ark to get out so he could help her look.
Floosh.
She looked up from her spot on the floor across from the door as it opened, and Ark Thompson stepped out, her science book in hand.
Mortified, she stared up at him.
"I needed something that would last as long as the war, you know?" He closed the door behind him. "I've already gone through the bible. Twice."
Her eyes held onto the book for a long moment as he went on to say something about how he thought that after having nine of Jose's Jalapeño Burritos he himself did battle with the Dark Lord an hour later, and a thought occurred to her.
"Is that how you knew the answers to my homework?"
He didn't hesitate. "Yup—" he halted.
Ark's free hand went to his lower abdomen and he stared hard at her, or really, through her. Then, very promptly, he turned one-eighty and went back in the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
Sherry scurried over to the door, banging on it, yelling, "Wait! Don't use book! Please!" to which he replied,
"You'll get it when I drive you to school." A pause. "In an hour."
She groaned.
"Just deal, Sher-Bear," he called to her. "Brother Ark has to add his own psalm."
--
Author's Note: Because no one's ever too old for bathroom humor. Ever. I hope we all enjoyed my latest attempt at getting my ass in gear in the writing department. I'm going looney tunes trying to get something down and when I finally do? It's jokes about loose bowels. Yeesh. Seriously, though? I just can't get myself to touch magazines and newspapers and whatever once I find out that they serve these purposes. Wonder what Sherry's gonna do. By the by, typing the basic RDecay equation was no fun via fan fiction dot net. I'll kindly punch the neck of whoever deicded that equal signs shouldn't be allowed anymore. Same for indenting and proportional spacing. Fuck.
And I know that the basics of this subject aren't nessecarily as difficult as it seems to Leon and company, but for anyone who hasn't taken at least a quarte of the class, it probably looks a little on the harder side. Cheers!
R&R like always, and any commentary is appreciated.