YAYYY new chapter. Sorry it took some time, you have no idea how hard writing has been recently. This is the first coherent piece of writing I've been able to produce in the last couple of weeks that I find tolerable enough, so I'm quite happy with myself :3
I know you can't say a motley tablecloth. It's just the best way of describing that tablecloth.
"Jack, what's the square root of minus one?"
Pushing his narrow-framed glasses up his pale snub nose, Jackson Overland lifted his eyes from the frankly deplorable English homework that Jamie had given him to proofread. The white-haired youth only switched his lenses for glasses on one day of the week, and of course he would choose it to be his tutoring day. The dark titanium rectangular spectacles made him look so much more teacher-ly.
Technically, he had been employed to babysit Jamie and Sophie Bennett while their mother was away to work on Saturdays. However, he had soon found out that the eleven-year-old boy was an outright mathematical genius. Jack being the geek he was, had offered to tutor him, which Mrs. Bennett had gladly accepted. While the teacher and his student sat at the dinner table, unkempt white pages sprawled across the motley tablecloth, little Sophie was on the carpeted ground beside them, doodling with bright fuchsia, deep ultramarine and vibrant green markers onto a substantial notebook covered in cartoon character-themed stickers.
Jack quickly went over the pre-teen's answers to the problems he had set, ticking his way through with a rather blunt pencil. It had been hardly a fortnight since he had started tutoring the boy, and he could not help but marvel at how easily Jamie already managed to solve quadratic equations with ease. Most children of his age would have to wait a couple more years to even get to know what an equation was. And yet, this phenomenon of a schoolboy managed to get all of them right.
Well, except that one that involved the square root of minus one.
On that occasion, Jack was the one who had messed up. As if that was a surprising thing. If he had carefully checked through the signs in those equations he had given to his student to solve, that wouldn't have happened. The boy would have found a beautiful, real solution. Of course, he could just wave it off and say that problem had no solution. Just the way they'd end up telling him at school when they finally got around to it. Just to say the exact opposite a year later, as always.
But Jack had another idea. His lips twitched up in a mischievous smirk. His idea sounded way more fun. Or at least, fun in that massively nerdy mind of his.
"That would be i, the imaginary number."
"Imaginary? As in... imaginary like Santa?"
Jamie's tutor grinned at that, recalling that his pupil, despite his mathematical abilities that would put most high-schoolers to shame, was still but a child in his body and mind. Sophie, on the other hand, let out a high-pitched yelp, the garish stickers she held in her tiny fist tumbling softly against the patterned maroon carpet.
"Jamie - is Santa imaginary? What's imaginary?" the four-year-old girl blabbered excitedly.
"All the numbers you've seen so far are real," Jack started to explain, ignoring the toddler. "But in general, numbers can be written as the sum of two parts - a real one and an imaginary one."
"Jamie - is Santa real or imaginary?" Sophie chirped further.
"Shush, Soph. So… what does the imaginary part do?"
As Jack picked a fresh sheet of white paper and started drawing graphs as he spoke, Sophie decided to investigate. In a second, she was up on the soft balls of her feet, carefully padding along the carpet until she reached the table. She moved as quietly as a cat after a mouse, proudly noting the two males hadn't remarked her approaching.
"Jamie - is Santa real?" she repeated, her cheeks lightly flushed, as she tugged her sibling's desaturated blue T-shirt sleeve, earning a startled gasp from his part.
"As I was saying," the babysitter continued, imperturbable, "you can plot them on the compl - "
"Jack - do you know if Santa's real?"
"The real part is along the x-axis, and…"
"What about the Easter Bunny? Is he real, too? And the Tooth Fairy? Oh and -"
"No, Sophie, Santa isn't real."
The child stared at him for an instant, her chocolate eyes wide with shock. Then, she burst into tears.
"Um… Isn't Soph too young for -" Jamie started to mumble, until his white haired tutor raised his hand to silence him.
The boy saw Jack get off his chair and kneel down before his weeping sister, blue eyes right at the level of swollen brown ones.
"Hey, Soph." he spoke in velvety, hushed tones. "It can't be such a bad thing they're all imaginary. It's actually a lot more fun, when you think about it. It means you can see them whichever way you want in your mind and no one can say you're wrong. And as long as you believe in them, nobody will be able to take them away from you, for they'll always exist somewhere on there, along the y-axis on the complex plane… oh, and deep in your heart, too. Say, you could imagine Santa had 'Nice' and 'Naughty' tattooed all over his arms, like so… and a thick Russian accent, and a bunch of yeti friends. Oh, and elves, of course."
The young man had picked up Sophie's notebook from the floor, and started sketching as he spoke, most to the little girl's amazement. Jamie had to admit his teacher's caricature-esque drawing style was not bad at all, very far from that.
"Does he like cookies?" his sister gasped between two broken coughs. "And fruit cake?"
"If you believe he does," Jack answered with a gentle, encouraging grin. "In your imagination, whatever you believe in can exist."
The last remnants of her sobs had subsided, and she wiped her puffed up eyes onto the stripy magenta sleeve of her hand-knitted woollen dress.
"Do the Easter Bunny!" said Jamie as he came to sit on the carpet beside Sophie.
"Yeah, Bunny!" she repeated cheerfully.
And a new mischievous idea came across Jack's mind. 'Bunny' was a nickname he had heard around when it came to one particular person...
"Bunny? Okay, he's got greying, receding hair, that he brushes around to make it seem like he's got more hair, but it doesn't really work. A real big Australian accent too, like you'd swear he were a kangaroo if he didn't tell you otherwise. He's absolutely obsessed about speed and his code is literally littered with Easter eggs. Of course, he just has to ssh-tunnel in every day…"
Jack's voice faltered as he noticed the siblings' perplexity. Oh right, there was hardly a way they could comprehend all the nerdy jargon. Or that they could realise his new boss was the one he was making fun of. He cleared his throat in embarrassment, distractedly shading in one of the rabbit's ears on the notebook.
"Can you do… um… remember, mom told us about him on the first day of snow..." the pre-teen turned to his sister interrogatively.
"Jack Frost?" Sophie chirped.
"Jack Frost? That's a fridge. In my lab. Icy cold and messy as hell," the babysitter shrugged, much to the children's disappointment.
While Jamie gave his tutor a confused look, Sophie started to draw a fridge next to the other characters - a wobbly blue rectangle on which she added half a dozen stickers, insisting they were fridge magnets. Clearly, she had no idea the fridges at Berk University were huge, with close-packed shelves of Petri dishes and cute freckled boys in them. Jack felt ever so slightly flustered at the memory, glad that Jamie and Sophie couldn't tell what wild thoughts lived within his vivid imagination.
Real numbers and imaginary numbers. Twice as much information encoded. The brain needed as much information as it could get not to succumb to the chaos. When real solutions were poor or lacking, imaginary solutions were the only alternative. Real memories and imaginary facts, spiralling out of control like fractals of frost that embellished everything they touched, everything they kissed.
"Jack, everything all right?" Jamie's voice shook him out of his reverie.
"He must be thinking about his girlfriend…" Sophie pouted with a wink so exaggeratedly suggestive that it was adorable.
"Huh, not quite..."
"Jack, did you hear the doorbell? I think Mum's forgotten her keys inside, I think you should go and open for her. I mean, now's about the time she gets back from the salon, usually."
"Yeah, sure, Jamie. I guess this is it for today, then, guys. Jamie, make sure to solve all the equations I gave you for next time, okay?"
"Psst," Sophie whispered, even though so obnoxiously loudly it was almost deafening, into her older brother's ear. "What do you think she looks like? Does she have a pet dragon?"
"Who knows? The only limit is your imagination, right?"
A one-stop train connected the Berk campus to the city of Berk, on the mainland. Yes, the whole name thing was certainly quite confusing. It was an average-sized town, which provided the student body and staff of the university with food and entertainment. Jack had first met Mrs. Bennett in the city centre, when he had stopped by her hairdressing salon to get his bleaching and hair colour re-done. Hairdressers were known for profuse discussion during their work, which was how he had walked out of the salon with a dye job as new as the fresh-fallen snow and an equally brand new job as a babysitter.
Jack had been allocated a room on campus for the length of his contract with Dr. Bunnymund. He had somehow miraculously been able to bargain to obtain a ground floor set, with the pitiful argument that bringing that five-hard-drive tower of his that he called a desktop computer up the stairs was likely to get someone killed. It was a modestly-sized apartment with a kitchen and bathroom he was supposed to share with a certain linguistics research fellow, Mr. Sanderson, but the latter was away on a placement abroad, such that Jack had never even met him.
Faces on a train. Hastily formed bubbles on the surface of a fresh silver stream. Everyday life stories quietly writhing against each other, almost colliding, dragged along by the relentless flow, the increasing speed. Fragile transparent envelopes that protected the self from the inquisitive onlookers, always letting some fragment of information through. That redhead with a pencil in her frizzy bun was bored beyond belief by the paperback on her knees, which displayed the silhouette of a young woman in a meditation pose on a blurry white and lime green background. That young man in a gray hoodie hushedly talked on a two-year-old version of the iPhone, visible cracks running through the screen, begging his mother to allow him to attend some sporting event on another campus. That woman with a cat on her knees and turquoise clipped earrings was congratulating her granddaughter about getting into architecture school. In another life, Jack could have been an architect, he reflected.
Bubbles... one could not help wondering when they would burst. It was like a snowball rolling down a mountain; fast, white, powerful, ever-growing and seemingly unstoppable… there would be a critical point where it would finally shatter, brutally and irrevocably like a trainwreck. The whole question was to predict when.
Even though he had been expecting the phone call, the sudden vibration of his phone at that arbitrary moment snapped him out of his internal musings.
"Hi, mom… Good, thanks… Moving in is basically done. Not that I had that much to move in… Yeah, he seems to like me. The team's nice, too... How's Emma? Is she with you? ... Last week? Oh, okay."
Jack's curt responses progressively got onto the automatic mode, as his mind started wandering freely again, from distraction to distraction. They moved on to talking about the world news. He was appalled by the tragedy of the recent events in Tunis. Images formed and rapidly melted away in his mind, faintly faded with pastel artefacts like pictures on printed newspapers, ever so slightly unreal like the rest of the world beyond the dirty train wagon window that gave back a bleak reflection of his face.
"So you've cancelled the bookings? ... Means we're not spending that week touring around Morocco and Tunisia in the summer then... Yeah, she told me about it. Bryce Canyon sounds like a good plan… Definitely, that should be fun, I'm sure Emma is gonna love it… I'd better get some practice then, I haven't climbed for a while… Ah, you know me too well, haha..."
The silver-haired man took a deep breath as he leaned back onto his hardly cushioned plastic seat.
"... All right, I'll ask you, if you insist. Have you visited Dad recently? ..."
That obligatory part of the conversation quickly subsided into silence. The imaginary part of Jack thought it was always when bubbles were under most pressure, on the point of bursting, that the rainbows of their frail iridescent surface became most vibrant. He had to find something to say.
"Hey, did I tell you I found a weekend job as a babysitter? … What, me, excited and immature? … Yeah, you know how I like working around kids."
If one had taken Hiccup right there and then and forced that messy head of his down an MRI scanner or one of those other imaging devices further down the building, or even if one had paid minimal attention to his interesting facial expressions, if would hardly have been hard to guess he didn't like working around kids.
And that 'kid' denomination included undergraduates who behaved irresponsibly around the lab.
"How many times do I need to tell you that this dye literally binds to the DNA, Ruffnut? This thing is basically pure cancer in an Eppendorf..."
Hiccup showed some sign of hope at seeing her removing her plastic glove after having pipetted out of said tube… but his high expectations vanished as soon as he saw her running after her twin brother, brandishing the violet glove like a T-rex's paw, both siblings cackling madly. He precipitately stepped back to get off their dangerous path, only to bump into his third undergrad and nearly knocking the younger boy's bright yellow, aluminium-covered tray out of his hands.
"Sorry, didn't see you coming," he mumbled as he seized the small slip of paper the student was practically stuffing into his face with obvious pride.
"Where did… where did you get this?"
"Dark room. Didn't know you could get photos that good there, did you?"
"No, not the photo of the gel… the gel itself. Snotlout, that's my check gel. Look, the bands are much narrower than on a prep gel, like the one you were supposed to cut. Still… the gel is a lot less butchered than last time… it's just… the completely wrong one, you know? So you could call that improvement, I guess."
The raven-haired boy beamed in response, seemingly ignoring the sarcasm of the compliment that had concluded his demonstrator's rant.
"No need to grab another glove, you're going back to gel cutting with the right gel, right now…" the graduate student muttered as he went back to labelling his tubes on a metal rack.
"Hic! How's PCR practical going? You won't believe what I've got for you! Good news!"
The enthusiastic voice that burst in through the door, in a flutter of lab coat, was immediately recognisable.
"Um… a break? No, wait, you just told me what you'd got for me. Good news. Right," Hiccup deadpanned as he turned around to meet the newcomer.
Tooth, from her real name Dr. Tanaporn 'Tiana' Tooth… something - he wasn't supposed to be able to remember Thai names, was he? - was the extraordinary phenomenon of a post-doctoral researcher he had been assigned to work with. Her short brown hair was shaved on one side, the remainder dyed in hues of sunny yellow, cactus green and saturated cyan sleekly brushed laterally into stylish bangs. A row of small neuron-shaped and synapse-shaped piercings studded her visible ear, interestingly clashing with the baby blue cupcake pendant on her chain necklace. Her unbuttoned white lab coat revealed a dark green, tribal patterned skater dress over thick winter tights and heavy purple snow boots. Multiple pipettes, petite plastic gloves and colourful pens blossoming out of her pockets completed her peculiar outfit.
"So… what's that supposed to be?" Hiccup's nasal voice was hesitant as he flipped through the thick series of text-filled printed pages that she had handed onto him with a playfully mysterious, impeccably white smile, stunningly contrasting with the tanned tones of her skin.
It was on a single column, which was why it wasn't a paper. Maybe it was something they were going to submit, and that they wanted him to read or something they had already submitted… his eyes narrowed with worry as he kept seeing more pages, solidly filled in text and lists of bullet points, devoid of any graph or figure that would have made the reading more tolerable. He hoped he wouldn't have to read through all of it… and then he reached the end of the last page, cluttered in signatures, and started to understand.
"That's brilliant, isn't it?"
"The news is. The paperwork isn't," Hiccup retorted, flicking at the pages with his finger, even though he could hardly contain his excitement.
He had to remain calm and professional, he attempted to remind himself. Another episode of… awkwardness, like a certain previous time in a certain fridge wouldn't be allowed in front of his advisor.
"We've been authorised to proceed to animal experimentation!" Tooth insisted merrily.
Hiccup was aware the application had been a long and tedious process, and their success confirmed how promising their research on place cells and grid cells and memory was viewed by the research community, as well as how close they were from getting significant results and publications. Publishing was the holy grail of any grad student seeking to continue with a PhD, and Hiccup was very much aware of it. In addition, he had to admit that working with lab rats sounded rather novel and exciting.
"Really, congrats on getting the authorisation. I'm really looking forwards to get to work on that part."
"Hiccup, North would like to talk to you about the stuff's gonna go on from here. Can you photocopy this form for me on your way to his office? Don't worry; I'll take on with the demonstrating for now."
"Ah, thanks a lot. I'll be back soon."
"See you, Hic. And don't forget to floss!"
'Monstrous Automatic Stapler. Produces a low, threatening humming sound before striking, as fast as lightning and as deadly. Should it be displaced, it will crush you with its sheer weight. Kill on sight after usage by pressing big red switch.'
Dubitative, Hiccup stared at the warning sign Gobber had pinned onto the electronic piece of stationery. The technician had quite an unusual sense of humour, as well as a wild imagination. As large as Hiccup's thigh, its horizontal slit displaying daunting metal jaws and its black plastic casing bearing a single red button, the stapler did seem scary. The graduate student experimentally attempted to introduce his freshly photocopied stack of paper into the machine, hoping that no one would witness his moment of confusion.
"Come on, I don't have all day," came a low sneer from behind his back.
Hiccup swivelled around at the words, wondering who on Earth had come into the printing room, escaping his notice… and he saw her.
The cold white light of the scanner reflected onto her porcelain traits and platinum blonde braid, almost lunar in its faint glow. Her slim, toned arm casually leaned onto the device's large lid, giving Hiccup an interesting view on the top of her breasts and the curve of her lean waist as it faded into a muscular line, perfectly emphasised by her skin-tight burgundy pullover. Her long, shapely legs, hugged in simple black jeans, were tucked into mid-calf fur-lined leather wedge boots, one of which touched the carpeted floor only with its tip, in a fashion both feminine and impatient that Hiccup couldn't help wide-eyed staring at.
"Hi, Astrid..." he whispered, feeling warmth creep its way to his freckled cheeks.
He merely by knew her by name, of course, just as every other male student in the department knew of her, as the beautiful, pitiless Swedish student spending her gap year in Berk. Before he had time to react, she stomped her way to the stapler, inserted his pages onto the right position and flicked a black switch on the side, placing a large silver staple neatly through the still warm pages.
"See? It doesn't bite," she snapped without looking at him, gathering her own pages to put them through the scary stapler.
You sure do bite, he thought to himself ironically. Hard.
"Thanks, Astrid. You just saved my life. Really, that was… very useful. Thank you again."
As she persisted in ignoring him, he pensively took his pen out of his back pocket and started adding his signature to both copies of his authorisation forms, leaning onto the low desk of the printer room.
"Can I borrow your pen?" Astrid spoke again, startling him a little.
As fierce and fearless as they could be, females would never have pockets suitable to accommodate for pens, this was where Hiccup's chivalry intervened.
"Sure thing. It's a blue pen though. Hope you like blue. I don't really, but… I don't know, I think it suits you. I mean, you do have very nice blue eyes."
Smoothly played, Hiccup, smoothly played.
"Oh, thanks… I do quite like blue, in fact."
"Let me just sign this… there," he said as he handed her the pen, his forest green eyes finally making contact with her ultramarine orbs.
"... Are you left-handed?"
Right-handed folk never thought of how often their left-handed counterparts must hear that fairly obvious question, and consequently how irritating and tactless it was. Not that Astrid was very much known for her tact.
"Ambidextrous, actually," he shrugged.
His mind went blank and his neurons fired all at once as the blonde let out a little fangirl squeal.
"Oh my gosh, would you mind helping out with my experiment? I'm currently running the pilot to collect some MEG and behavioural data. It'd be great if I could get an ambidextrous subject to come try it out!"
"Yeah, I could do… what's the experiment on?"
"Can't tell. Would introduce a bias. Duh."
For a second, he thought she may kill him for his idiocy, by the way her glare bore deep through his insignificant self.
"Oh, of course. It's a psychology experiment, what was I thinking... I might have time tomorrow afternoon after the group meeting…"
"Tell you what, just drop me a text when you want to come by, you know where the neuroimaging facilities are."
She mindlessly scribbled on the front page of her stapled printout, before handing him his pen back. As he reached for it, she forcefully seized his forearm, earning a small pained groan, and wrote a series of figures onto his palm. The stregth in her pale digits, the sleek touch of the ballpoint against the pale, sensitive skin and the sticky feeling the blue ink left spread strange tingles throughout his hand and his body. When he came to his senses, the young woman had already left, her athletic shape swiftly vanishing out of sight through the narrow corridor.
As he headed towards North's office, Hiccup had to look at his hand again to check that her phone number was really real and not imaginary.
Note: I made Toothiana Thai because I know a bunch of Thai people who are involved in research (this may or may not have to do with the fact that my roommate at uni last year was Thai) and that I could definitely see a Thai person sporting that kind of dress style and hair style. Tanaporn is a real Thai name, and I cannot coin a Thai surname for the life of me. The topic of Hic and Tooth's research overlaps with the one of last year's Nobel prize in physiology, which gives some vague indication of when this story happens. I don't know what shade of blue Astrid's eyes actually are, I chose ultramarine to be consistent with the concept art I put up on DeviantArt. The ambidextrous thing looks really random, I know… it will be explained later. (I would have squealed as well).
I feel like my writing style's changed quite a lot as of late. I don't know if it's a good thing. So please let me know in the reviews?
Please R&R, F&F, staw awesome xx