Nick and Stephen walked along the planks lining the water. They dodged several students and talked amicably with each other. A voice rang out from behind them, but was abruptly cut off, and they paid it no mind. However, it persisted in calling out.
"Professor Cutter! Connor Temple." A young man ran up and introduced himself. He was holding an armful of papers and was unfamiliar to Nick. The professor merely smiled and shook his head at the student.
"Never heard of it. I think you want Archaeology. If you go around up there to the right, and keep walking, it's on your left." He and Steven pointed in the direction of the department, much to the confusion of the student, and kept walking.
"No, it's-it's not a place, it's my name. I'm one of your students." At that, both of the other men stopped walking and turned to face him in surprise.
"Really?" Cutter asked. Connor nodded, thrilled to finally be getting somewhere with the teacher, despite the latter's obvious confusion.
"Well, why don't I recognize you?" he asked Connor. The student's grin fell, and he looked slightly sheepish as he glanced away briefly at Stephen, who in turn exchanged a glance with the professor.
"Well, I've never actually turned up for the seminars. Nick's face closed off at that and he nodded for several moments before obviously deciding he'd had enough of the slacking student and began walking again.
"Uh-huh." He said as Steven followed him. Connor watched in surprise as the two climbed the stairs, already back to their conversation. It was as if he'd never even interrupted them in the first place. Suddenly realizing how far ahead they were, he called out again.
"Professor!" He shouted as he dashed after them. He only caught up as they neared Nick's office. His office was filled to the brim with a variety of papers, bones, models, and chemicals. Nick opened the door and immediately warned his student to be careful.
"Don't touch anything. This is my laboratory technician, Stephen Hart." The two exchanged a quick greeting as Nick made his way to the other side of the room. When he reached his desk he froze as he saw a young, dark blonde-haired woman sitting in his chair making notes in a black leather book on a small Trilobite fossil she had in her hand.
"Nicole!" he exclaimed in surprise. "You didn't tell me you were coming." The woman looked up, and her lips curled into an amused smile. She had tanned skin- obviously from having been out of the country recently, given the current weather- and chocolate colored eyes. She seemed vaguely familiar to Stephen, but he couldn't place her name and her appearance to any memory.
"I didn't know myself, at least up until just a few days ago. My funding at the dig got cut, and up until Monday I had been trying to find a different sponsor. As you can see, I didn't have much luck with that, so here I am." Nick gave her a genuine smile and walked around the desk to give her a hug.
"Well, I'm glad for the chance to see you. It's been what, two years since our last visit?" he asked her. Nicole smiled at that and shook her head slightly at the professor. Neither paid much mind to Connor and Stephen who felt rather left out of the current conversation; the former even more so than the latter.
"Actually more like a year and a half. I still can't look at liquid nitrogen without laughing." They both burst out into chuckles at the shared memory and Connor's gaze flitted between to two of them before he spoke up.
"Um, Professor, who is this? A colleague of yours?" Nick suddenly remembered the other people in the room and turned to face them. Nicole's eyes examined Connor for a moment before they moved onto Stephen. A flash of recognition crossed her expression briefly before she smirked at the pair.
"Yes, I am a colleague of sorts. Besides that, my name is Nicole, though you can call me Nikki. I've known the Professor here for quite a long time." Nick began to tidy things up. He went around Nikki and straightened several items before scooping up a pile of papers and dumping them in the trash. Connor made a noise of protest, and the professor looked at him.
"Actually, that's my dissertation." Nick looked at him in mild surprise and he nodded as the professor removed it from the bin. Nikki stood and gave Nick back his chair, moving to sit on the edge of the desk as Nick began to flip through the folder. "Yeah. See, I argue that all life on Earth derive from organisms carried here by alien spacecraft."
Nikki raised an unimpressed eyebrow at that. Stephen continued with his work, completely ignoring the ridiculous student. Nick on the other hand, stared at Connor for a few seconds, as if trying to tell if Connor was joking. Finding that he wasn't, Cutter immediately threw it right back in the trash.
"It's a work in progress, really." Connor trailed off, looking at the papers in the trash. Nick shook his head and Nicole immediately passed over a fossil without him even needing to ask for it. The professor held it up and looked at Connor intently.
"Tell me what this is." Nikki glanced at it, and immediately identified it. Connor on the other hand looked slightly more confused. He stared at it for several seconds before lifting his eyes to meet the professor's and answer.
"A fish?" he asked uncertainly. Even Nick with his easy going nature had to keep from rolling his eyes at that. Of course it was a fish, he wanted to know the specifics. If Connor had attended his seminars, he would have been able to give a name to the type of fish it was.
"Obviously." the professor stated. Nikki cleared her throat slightly from where she was sitting and they turned to look at her.
"It's a Sarcopterygian. There's no trace of them in the fossil record for seventy million years, and then suddenly one of them just pops up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Totally inexplicable in modern evolutionary terms."
Connor looked a lot more impressed as he gazed at the fish. Across the room, Stephen shot an impressed glance at the newcomer. He still couldn't shake the feeling that he knew her from somewhere, though he still couldn't quite figure out where he'd met her before. Nick picked up where Nikki left off.
"See, Darwin provides most of the answers. It's the pieces that don't fit that interest me." Nick finished with an awed expression on his face that Nikki shared. It was obvious just by looking at them that they were very passionate about their work. Their excitement had spread to the rest of the room, as both Stephen and Connor looked slightly awed as well.
"See, that's why I was wondering whether you'd seen this." Connor said, holding up a newspaper with an excited look on his face. The newspaper read 'Monster Hoax or Truly Beastly?' and had a blurry picture of a large beast running through a parking lot. Nikki rolled her eyes at that. This kid really had to stop watching so many sci-fi movies. And really, 'Truly Beastly' was the best name the paper could come up with?
"Some sort of giant undiscovered predator." Connor said to Cutter. Nick went around the desk, and handed off the fossil to Stephen then snatched the paper from the young man. He looked at it for several seconds before tossing it to Stephen.
"Oh," Connor said, realizing he was losing the three of them. "no, no, no, no. This- this is the real thing." He excitedly took it back and showed it off again to the professor. Nikki spoke up from the desk where she was still sitting.
"Connor, I hate to say it, but you need to get out more. Go to a bar, meet a nice girl. Life will seem a lot less confusing if you have someone you care about who will share it with you." Connor looked at her, his cheer undiminished.
"I've already got a girlfriend. Sort of." He added on, slightly less certainly than before. "That's not really the point. There's an eyewitness who has claimed to have seen it." He tapped the paper to emphasize his point further.
"People claim to have seen the Loch Ness Monster. That doesn't mean that it's there." Nick said, removing his jacket. Nikki spoke up as the professor sat down.
"That's true. They believe that despite all scientific evidence proving that the ecology of the lake, as well as its size, would be unable to support a life form that large. And the fact that there was sonic sweep of the lake, and nothing was found. " Connor gave a slightly mocking laugh at the two of them, causing Nikki to raise an eyebrow again.
"It's not there now, obviously. It died years ago." Even Stephen shook his head in disbelief at that. "The government took the body away, and they covered the whole thing up." Nick decided it was time to get the student to let the matter go.
"It's just a hoax." Cutter said firmly. "Forget it." Connor was becoming desperate to be taken seriously, and to catch his professor's attention again. He scanned his brain for anything that might convince the man to at least take a look.
"Your wife wouldn't have ignored it." he burst out. Nicole and Nick's eyes snapped to him, and Stephen raised his head slowly to look over at him. They all stared at him in silence for several moments before Nick spoke again. His tone soft, and rather sad.
"My wife was a serious scientist." Connor lowered his gaze, realizing that he'd crossed a line. "She wasn't some gullible… monster hunter." Nikki looked over at the older man, and returned her gaze to the student who had brought up Mrs. Cutter.
"You had no right to bring up Helen. You never met her. You didn't know her." She said quietly, no real venom in her voice, just disappointment directed at the young man. Connor nodded slightly and muttered an apology to the both of them. Stephen looked at the young woman, it was beginning to bug him that he couldn't place her. It was obvious that she was close to the Cutters, judging by Nick's reaction to her, and her use of Helen's first name.
"It's okay." Nick said, easily forgiving the student. Nicole stayed silent and gazed at the Trilobite in her palm. Connor looked to her to see if she would say anything, and when she didn't, turned back to Cutter.
"I just thought that you might want to check it out, that's all." He began to walk out of the room but turned back to add on an additional thought. "It's not as though the Forest of Dean is far away, though." Stephen immediately lowered the magnifying glass that he'd been using and sat up. Cutter lifted his head, and Nicole looked up from her Trilobite and got off the desk.
"The Forest of Dean?" Nick asked the boy. Slightly startled by the reactions he'd gotten, Connor could only nod. Stephen looked at the professor, only to find that he and Nicole were having a silent conversation just by looking at each other. Nicole nodded at Nick, then looked over at Connor.
"We're in. Tell us where to go."