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"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."

- Lord Ernest Rutherford

Makise Kurisu was standing in front of a recently wiped whiteboard, marker pen held close to her lips. Seeing someone capable of holding such deep concentration made Mayuri feel a strange emotion situated somewhere between fear and respect. She kind of wished she could do it herself, then she could dazzle everyone with her super-concentrating skills!

Okabe and his perverted friend had left for groceries, giving Kurisu some free time for experimentation. For a self-proclaimed mad "scientist", Okabe seemed to have next to no understanding of the scientific method. Kurisu felt gleeful. It was time to show that megalomaniac jerk how real science is done.

The previous incident had definitely shown that time travel, a phenomenon that ran in the face of everything she had thought she knew of physics, was actually possible. Much as she didn't want to admit it, in this case Okabe's vigor was perfectly justified. If anything, Kurisu was the more excited of the two, even if she had the self-control to not let it show.

Kurisu started to scribble something on the whiteboard. Mayuri didn't dare to disturb her when she was thinking so intently, but she sneaked in a few glances in-between her knitting. Not that she understood anything Kurisu was writing on the board. Just looking at all the complicated words was making her head hurt.

Scientifically, Kurisu would have to begin by independently replicating the results of the preceding experiment. Luckily mister airhead had left his phone on the table, so she was able to start immediately.

Kurisu walked over to the microwave, crouching to reach the buttons. Let's see… first the fat guy had set the timer to one hundred and twenty seconds in reverse spin mode. There. Time for the next step.

"Mayuri-san, could you give me one of the bananas?"

Mayuri raised her hands in excitement.

"Ooh, is there going to be electricity again? It's a bit scary, though…"

Kurisu smiled a bit to herself.

"We'll just have to see, won't we?"

Mayuri danced over to the microwave, dropping the banana inside it. Kurisu closed the door and turned the device on.

"You might want to step back a bit, Mayuri."

Kurisu's eyes were filled with a strange determination that Mayuri didn't dare to disturb.

Next, she would have to open the door while the tray was spinning. And then, she really didn't want to do this, but…

"Mwahahahaaa!"

Kurisu's sudden burst of laughter didn't sound very convincing to Mayuri, who was getting very confused. Was Kurisu also a mad scientist…? That would explain why Okarin seemed to like her so much.

"Um, Kurisu-san, why are you laughi-"

Mayuri's question was interrupted by the tremors emanating from the microwave. The electricity was reflected in Kurisu's expectant eyes, giving them a mad glow. With trembling hands she sent the message.

"Now!"

The electricity stopped as the timer reached zero. She hurried to check Okabe's phone. Yes! The message had been sent to the past! The banana had teleported back to the table as well, transformed into green jelly, just as she had expected.

Kurisu was starting to calm down. Suddenly she seemed to realize something, blushed, and coughed a bit while closing her eyes.

"Ah, you see, I had to replicate the experiment exactly, so I was forced to imitate Okabe's laughter… I mean, there was a small off-chance that the laughing was involved in the time travel effect somehow…"

Mayuri was chuckling with a mysterious smile on her face, and Kurisu hurried to the whiteboard, embarrassed.

Now that the experiment had been replicated – at great cost to her sense of personal pride – she had to distill it into a simple sequence of actions that would reliably reproduce the time travel effect. Kurisu was getting reasonably certain that mad laughter was not needed for time travel to occur, and there was no way in hell she was ever trying that again, so there was one part of the process she could immediately trash. Thus, the current method consisted of five steps:

1) Set the microwave on reverse spin

2) Set the timer to 120 seconds

3) Place a banana into the microwave

4) Open the microwave door and wait for the electricity

5) Send D-mail to the past

All Kurisu had to do was to try to eliminate or vary each step in turn. Compared to experiments in particle physics or cognitive science, this was going to be refreshingly simple. A well-defined set of easily controlled, almost binary variables, with no need for statistical analysis of the results: either the time travel worked, or it didn't. Rutherford would be proud.

It seemed unlikely that the banana was necessary for the effect to manifest, so Kurisu decided to make that the subject of her first trial.

Mayuri, who had already returned to the couch, saw Kurisu's eyes lighting up as the new lab member strode towards the microwave with an impressive aura of renewed determination. Mayuri quietly sneaked up behind her, trying to get a good look at what she was doing. "Ah, Kurisu-san, are you going to make another experiment?"

It took a while for Kurisu to answer.

"Yeah. I'm going to see if the banana is necessary for sending D-mails."

"You want to take one? But Mayushii only has one left …"

"I won't take your banana, Mayuri-san. Don't worry."

"Yay!" she responded, her expression quickly turning quizzical. "But then, then… how can you do the experiment?"

"Elementary, dear Mayuri-san. I will try it… without the banana!"

She was trying to be humorous.

"Oooh, I get it! You're really smart, Kurisu-san. Mayushii is so amazed!"

Ignoring her new assistant's apparent lack of wit, Kurisu set the microwave on reverse spin, 120 seconds, and opened the door.

"Aah, it's working! How amazing!"

Sure enough, there were sparks flying through the air, and the room was shaking violently. Mayuri took a few steps back as Kurisu sent her message. The D-mail arrived as usual, and Kurisu couldn't help but smirk. She had successfully demonstrated that the banana was useless.

Well, technically not. It was a remote possibility that the banana would have been necessary in some other configuration, say if she had set the timer to 180 seconds. But that would have made the rules of the process very convoluted, and according to Occam's razor, a scientist should always assume the laws of nature to be as simple as possible. Therefore, with a determined slash, she crossed the banana off the whiteboard, while Mayuri returned to her knitting.

Next Kurisu decided to check whether the microwave door actually had to be opened in order to send the D-mail. After all, it was ridiculously dangerous with all the sparks flying around and the floor shaking, so it would be quite convenient if the door could be kept closed.

"Go!"

Sadly, the D-mail didn't arrive. But did she have to close the door in the first place? The result of experiment #3 was a triumphant no.

Was it necessary to set the microwave on reverse spin? According to the fourth experiment, yes. Kurisu thought it possible that that the important factor wasn't so much in the reverse spin as in modifying the microwave's settings in any way at all. To test her hypothesis, she tried to set the microwave to defreeze mode instead of reverse spin, but this seemed to abolish the time travel. Reverse spin: necessary.

What about the timer? Could its value be safely changed? In the sixth experiment, Kurisu set the duration to 180 seconds. The sparks appeared, the D-mail was sent, and at first Kurisu was going to leave it at that. But then she happened to glance at the date of the message. In all previous attempts, the mail had been sent precisely five days into the past. But this one was dated 7 days and 12 hours in the past! Kurisu felt like a miner who had just struck a vein of gold, and her pace grew more and more frantic as she repeated the experiment with various timer values.

Mayuri had been dozing off a little bit, and was only barely aware of Kurisu's work going on in the background. And she certainly didn't notice the thumping from downstairs that was growing steadily louder.

A powerful knock on the lab door snapped Mayuri out of her daze.

"Open up! What the hell is going on there, you weirdo!? You'll break the floor at this rate!"

Mayuri's eyes darted to Kurisu, but she didn't seem to be listening. Her eyes had that same glint as Okarin's whenever he was making a new gadget. Kurisu was a mad scientist for certain. The thought made Mayuri smile for a second or two, until she remembered why she was looking at Kurisu in the first place. She was so involved in her experiments, so that meant… Mayushii had to answer the door!?

Mayuri went up to the door, but a faint voice within her – perhaps it was her long-lost common sense – prevented her from opening it.

"Uh, umm… Okarin is not here right now…"

"Eh? Then what the hell is causing all this ruckus? Can't you stop it?"

A sideways glance at Kurisu. Mayuri tried to keep her voice down:

"Kurisu, Mr. Braun is asking you to stop…"

No response.

"Umm… No?"

"So he left some crazy device on and just told you to deal with it? If that bastard thinks he can wreck my apartment… I'll be wrecking something alright…"

Mayuri sighed in relief as Mr. Braun's cursing voice receded downstairs. Soon, Kurisu returned to the drawing board, and Mayuri got back to her knitting.

Experiments 7 through 15 had confirmed Kurisu's suspicions. The timer controlled the amount of time the message was sent into the past, with seconds on the timer corresponding to hours of time travel. It was a huge discovery, even though her swelling pride was somewhat checked by the fact that it was purely serendipitous.

As her excitement faded, Kurisu began to reflect on her discoveries. She had determined the minimal process: the microwave had to be set on reverse spin with its door open, while the timer controlled the amount of time the D-mail was sent into the past. In retrospect, it didn't seem to make much sense. It was like the tray was some sort of cosmic metaphor for the progress of time, and she could reshape universal laws simply by changing the direction and duration of its spinning. That was just completely ridiculous!

Still, her integrity as a scientist forced her to accept what her eyes were telling her, no matter how improbable it might have seemed. It couldn't just be some elaborate prank on Okabe's part, right? He couldn't have just reprogrammed his phone and… No, she had even seen the banana teleport! No matter what else he might have faked, that was just impossible to do without messing with the laws of physics!

Was there something special about the banana after all? She could try to put some other object in there. Were there limitations in terms of size or hardness? Now that she thought about it, large and organic objects like bananas were jellified, but what if she tried to use something really small and inorganic? She tried looking around the lab, but couldn't spot anything small enough.

"Mayuri-san, where could I find some small and hard object?"

Mayuri's demeanor brightened as she started to go through her purse, glad to be of help.

"I think I have something… Tada! It's a red Oopa!"

Kurisu rotated the toy in her hand. It was definitely small enough. The Oopa itself appeared to be made of plastic, which was an organic polymer, but there was also an inorganic, metal keychain.

"This will do."

Kurisu took the Oopa to the microwave.

"W-wait, you're not gonna put it in the microwave, are you!? It's going to turn into a jelly-Oopa!"

"This is for the sake of science, Mayuri-san," Kurisu explained slowly. And to put Okabe in his place, of course. "Don't worry. I'll buy you two."

"Aaww… Goodbye, mister Oopa…"

Mayuri was twiddling with her fingers, but she could see that Kurisu couldn't be swayed. At least the thought of getting two Oopas was a consolation.

Sure enough, the Oopa teleported and turned into green jelly, just as the banana had, but the metal keychain seemed to have more consistency than the completely melted plastic. Another experiment confirmed that there was nothing special about Okabe's phone, as Kurisu was also able to send the D-mail to Mayuri.

Now there was only one major mystery left to solve. Her message to Okabe had been split into two. Why was that? In the next set of experiments she sent messages of various lengths. It seemed that any message longer than 6 characters was split into two, and any message longer than 12 characters was split into three messages. However, any message longer than that would be cut off after three messages.

Someone was knocking on the door again. Mayuri bit her lip as Kurisu continued her research, unfazed.

"Hey, someone open the door. I'm getting hungry, you know!"

Mayuri's tension relaxed as she heard a familiar voice shout through the door.

"Daru! Tutturu!" The relief in Mayuri's voice surprised Daru a bit.

"I brought some chocolate too! Ah, Kurisu, you're still studying the time machine? Mr. Braun was getting really angry, I almost feel sorry for ditching Okarin back there!"

"I'm almost done. Just let me do a couple more."

Kurisu gave a curt answer, clearly not wanting to be disturbed.

"Could you repeat that last part? Emphasizing the d-"

Daru was silenced by Kurisu's sharp glance. He shrugged in resignation and began to go through the groceries with Mayuri.

Kurisu wiped the whiteboard clean one last time and started collecting her results. Reverse spin and open door led to electricity, the timer controlled the timing of the message, objects turned to jelly, the data limit was… she couldn't falsify Okabe's hypothesis regarding the time periods, but she still had a few minutes to figure that one out.

On a whim, she tried to send D-mails using non-Japanese characters. Sure enough, the limit was now 12 characters per message, 36 total. In other words, because Japanese characters took up two bytes of computer memory, that meant she was able to send 12x3 bytes of data at a time, discounting metadata in the message transfer protocol.

"Hey! I thought I told you to stop it!"

Kurisu smiled arrogantly as she finished the final experiment. Time to show the "mad scientist" what a real scientist is capable of!