AN: All right, here's a shortish chapter (because I had to break up the uni scene somehow) that introduces two minor characters that are also OC's, and sees things from their point of view. It's more humor than anything else.
NEWSFLASH! Falling Star has a TITLE PAGE! So go to my profile - that's where the link is - to check it out! It's just pencil (that's about the limits of my artistic talent), but it's pretty good, it took me a while, and now you get to see what I think Xan looks like.
Avalon University
December 23th, 2021
Despite it being Christmas break, and despite what the woman on the bus had implied, many of the scientists were working in the laboratory. There had been a sudden rush of demands from Higher Up; projects that needed to be completed, reports to file, files to report, and so on and so forth. Not only was Christmas around the corner, but so was the new year, and that meant (one assumed) that there would have to be an annual report made, and the lab's budget and funding recalculated. Scientists working at Avalon tended not to be the type to be very fascinated with things like budgets, except the numbers that comprised them.
Long gone were the days when one had the luxury of mail that took a few days to reach its recipient, and the days when the office bureaucracy that inevitably develops when businessmen take control allows for excuses and lost papers and general untidiness of notification.
The yellow-haired man who had fooled around with the cleaning bots had received an email from a Waterhelm executive that was cryptic to say the least. It described a task for him that MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE DEC. 25 and involved the properties of a purely hypothetical type of radiation and its effects on another purely hypothetical type of particle that seemed to relate to matter's interaction with the fourth dimension. It had been disguised as another scientist's paper, but all the people working at Avalon were quite intelligent, even for geniuses. They were all fairly green, too, and had the suspicious minds of young adults competing for top positions and research and access to information. The email had clearly been sent by Waterhelm.
Warren Aang had yellow hair and a matching complexion, so at times looked strikingly like a banana. He studied particle physics and astrophysics, which explained the subject of the email. He sat in the lab with his friend-slash-friendly-rival Colin Montague, who was as ginger as the Doctor could ever hope to be but nowhere near as tall. Colin had also received a strange, conceptualized email a few weeks before, concerning a series of genetic modifications for a hypothetical genome. Since neither assignment needed to involve actual lab materials, the two sat together on the windowsill, which was pleasantly warm from the radiator underneath, throwing ideas off one another.
"Could it be possible for the particles to be a species of meson?"
"Nah. They're probably dark matter of some kind. We hardly know what any of that is."
"Right, right. Hey, maybe it's more got to do with quantum."
"'S always got to do with quantum..."
"Quantum entanglement, but on a temporal level, you know?"
Colin straightened up very quickly. "Connected to themselves or others?"
"Can't be themselves, you'd be facing all kinds of paradox everywhere you look."
"Either way, though, right?"
"Well, it is hypothetical..." They both settled down again.
Colin turned his iPad around so Warren could look at it. "What kind of freak protein's that?" asked the man. Warren shrugged. Colin tried to explain. "It isn't translatable. Se how it's set off by MET, here, so it starts reading okay, but it's only a little way in you get this, here, and that's a stop codon, and then there's all this..." he flicked through a long sequence, "...and here's another stop codon, right here."
"Yeah?"
"So it starts reading here, and then it stops here, and then all this happens, and then it says stop again. None of this gets translated into amino acids, because it already stopped all the way back here."
"Is it a mistake?"
"Well if it is, I didn't make it." He placed his thumb and forefinger on the pad and pinched them together; the display zoomed out to show whole sequences, and then histones, and then clumped together to become a file that was one of a few scattered around the screen. Colin flicked the file into a folder, and began to study the next one.
There was the sound of voices approaching the door. One American female, one British male. The woman was speaking with her skeptic turned all the way up.
"All right, so I'll accept for now that the paper can override an optical scanner. That's potentially believable... If there were some very delicate electronics behind the paper, I could see that. It makes some kind of sense. But the security guard..."
"I told you, it's psychic paper."
"You can't just override someone's mind."
"You'd be surprised how often you do it to yourselves."
The door swished open and, unable to agree on courteousness, two people walked in side by side. Colin and Warren had already recognized Xan's voice, but the man she was with was new, and the strange thing was, they seemed to be holding a conversation.
"Check it out," hissed Colin. "Xan's got a date."
"'Course she hasn't," Warren said. "Look at them. Do they look like a couple?"
They watched.
"Somehow I knew you were going to say that," Xan was responding, unimpressed. "But that's all internal. You can't remotely override someone's mind. For one thing, everyone's brain chemistry is unique."
The man was smug. "That's why it works. It lets you make up whatever you expect to see."
"Yeah, but, see, she does look interested," Colin insisted. "See, she's checking him out, look..."
"But a brain is totally encased in the skull," Xan pointed out, holding up a hand. "And for good reason. It's so that the neurochemistry doesn't interact with the outside. And it doesn't."
"Yeah, checking out his brain.," whispered Colin, jabbing his friend. "Wouldn't she like to interact with his neurochemistry...?" The two snickered at this.
"Aha! Then how do you see?" countered Xan's acquaintance triumphantly. "Or hear? Or feel?"
Xan's eyes narrowed, becoming increasingly vulpine. "So it's sensory input? Is it also sonic, or something like it? Does it...?"
Warren sat back against the radiator. "The only reason why she's listening to him is that he knows something she doesn't," he said dismissively, waving a hand. "Do you think she'd bother otherwise?"
Colin huffed and picked up his pad. "Bad news for her, then. She can't have that happening, someone walking around who knows more'n she does, can she? Ruin her image, that would."
"Well, you've got something on her, with that project of yours."
"Yeah," said Colin savagely. "They didn't ask her, did they? Sent it to me."
Xan seemed to be coming to a decision. "We'll just ask them," she said. Then she lowered her voice and added, "And try not to drop really obvious hints, all right?" The man gave her a look: Who, me?
They had the quiet authority of inspectors as they began to pull people aside and ask questions. Or, at least, Xan did; she commanded respect in any academic field because, no matter how obscure the topic, she could always cut in, speaking with intensely focused amity and fluency, with a spice of jargon, a few bits of truly original ideas, and a reference from a book. The Doctor, on the other hand, let his words fly all over the place, in a stream of consciousness that probably had significance to him, but not to anyone else, so there was no chance of deception, because no one could work out what they should or should not say, or what the man's motives could possibly be.
A woman working at a computer might suddenly hear a voice behind her saying, with all seriousness, "This is about the phonemic radiation from South Africa, isn't it?" and she would turn around to see Xan's light-and-shadow features, with halo of brown hair around her head that had disentangled itself from her braid.
"Yes, I'm tracking the spread specifically with the Native American language diversity, because they don't really fit in with the basic theory..."
"I've always thought that," Xan told the woman, quite truthfully, "Do you know of any recent projects on, say, genetic manipulation or biofuel, maybe commissioned by Waterhelm?"
"I don't think so," a man informed the Doctor. "I don't work on that."
"Do you know what tau radiation is, then?"
"No."
"Anything about temporal distortions?"
"No."
"Genetics?"
"No."
"Any weird patterns in history?"
"No."
"Er... what do you study, then?"
"Cave paintings."
"Just them?"
"Yes. Just them."
"See any good pictures of me lately?"
"In a cave?"
"Yeah, sure, why not?"
"There was this one..." the man began.
"And it looked like me?"
"Yes."
"Was there a blue box?"
"They didn't have blue pigment in the Paleolithic Age. You need indigo or lapis for that."
"Any color box?"
"There might have been."
"That's ridiculous. I've never been to the Paleolithic Age. What on earth are you suggesting? That I can just go to the Paleolithic Age? Just like that?"
"I'm not suggesting anything."
"Yes, you are."
"No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are. What kind of scientist are you?"
"I'm technically an art historian."
"Really? So am I. I have a degree in art history. And basket-weaving. Did you know that?"
"No."
"Probably would have figured me out to be a medical type, or a physicist, or a chemist, right? Of course you did."
"I don't think-"
"You people are always so naive."
On the other side of the room, Xan was talking to a man who was carrying out a delicate lab procedure. He was trying to shoo her away.
"I didn't have anything to do with it," he insisted. "It was someone else. I just do the reports."
Xan fished around and pulled on a pair of goggles and a lab coat. She re-addressed the man.
"Can I help you with anything?" he asked, mysteriously and unexpectedly cordial.
"Did you get a contract from Waterhelm recently?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"What about?"
"They gave me a brain scan yesterday, and asked me to interpret it."
"Huh. Can I see it?"
"The scan?"
She nodded. "Yeah."
"Once I was done with it, they took it back. And then my computer got a virus, so everything was erased. Bad luck, eh?"
"Hm. Very bad luck, yes. What did you make of the scan? What did it mean?"
"Well, it was weird. It wasn't even human. I thought, dolphin, because it clearly was intelligent, and had some way of emitting high-pitched noise."
"So like echolocation."
"That's the one. And it had a few other funny parts to it. I told them it was emitting a distress signal, 'cause that's what it looked like."
"Oh, well. That's probably just the usual inhumane torturing of animals in the name of science. Thanks anyway."
"No problem."
The Doctor, meanwhile, was engaging in what Xan aptly named 'a long passive-aggressive Socratic questioning game' with Colin Montague, who had decided for reasons of his own that this strange man was a threat because of his relations with Xan. A spy, perhaps, from the enemy camp.
"So, wait, you got this email a week ago?"
"Yes."
"From Waterhelm?"
"Maybe."
"Did they or didn't they send it?" "Probably."
"Why are you people always so laconic? Is that what science does to you?"
"I don't really know." Colin was giving the Doctor a strange look. It was attempting to be calculating, but somewhere in there it missed the mark.
"Okay, then. The email. What was it about?"
Some edge to the voice made the request hard to refuse. The Doctor was reluctantly handed an iPad. With a pleased noise, he promptly began to reconstruct a genomic pattern with a speed that left Colin quite disconcerted.
"Ah! This is clever! And you had it all put together before? Most of it? Simple enough... all right... but there isn't much left of this... Oh, look, that's just shoddy, take a look at that pairing..." Swiftly, a group of letters was rearranged.
"So. Um."
"Yes?" The Doctor contrived to look very busy. Working over an iPad didn't quite merit the donning of his square-framed glasses, which he wore simply to appear intelligent, and this disappointed the Doctor, because he found that he was less likely to be bothered bespectacled than not.
The man seemed uncomfortable with the question he was about to ask. He looked over his shoulder for some support from Warren, and found that he was talking eagerly to Xan, who was no doubt nonplussed by his enthusiasm. This betrayal made Colin bold.
"So you know Xan?"
"Clearly, yes." A particular set of genes was giving the Doctor trouble, and this was not a feeling he well knew, so he found himself being a little curt.
Colin stole another glance at Warren, and looked back at the Doctor.
"So you two are friends? Friendly?"
"Not exactly."
"Oh. OH. I see."
"Honestly, I hardly know her."
"Oh." Colin didn't realize that the Doctor was slowly edging himself closer to Warren and Xan, and Xan appeared to be doing the same with Colin and the Doctor. The two conversations began to intermingle.
"She's a bit of a loner, right?" Colin.
"So I've been told." The Doctor. He took out what appeared to be a flash drive and surreptitiously began to download the data.
"How did you meet him?" Warren.
"Look, what I actually want to know about it the research you've been doing." Xan, trying desperately not to let an edge of annoyance creep into her voice.
"So you don't know what animal or thing this genome modified?" The Doctor.
"Sorry. I was just... nothing... nothing..." Warren, looking quite ashamed.
"No. I don't know. So you two are working on something together, then?" Colin.
"You had the idea of quantum temporal entanglement?" Xan. She looked impressed.
The Doctor did too. "So early in history? Remarkable!"
"Wait. What are you talking about?" Colin.
"Quantum temporal entanglement. It isn't so far off the mark, either."
"I wonder, though..." began Xan, a few feet away with her back turned.
"What?" The Doctor, as it seemed to Colin, was talking to thin air.
"Well, a couple of things. Was it planned or coincidence?"
"What was?" asked Warren, utterly lost (as usual).
"The similarities in the conversation threads?" posited the Doctor.
"Right. Absolutely."
"What did I say? Who are you talking to?"
"Absolutely what? Who's right?"
"Me," answered Xan, to Colin.
"Me," said the Doctor at the same time, to Warren.
"Let's leave," proposed Xan.
"Good idea."
In one choreographed maneuver, they returned the iPads to their owners with flips of their wrists, and withdrew, bowing slightly in the direction of the scientists. Both young men sat, unsure of what had just happened, as the pair walked out, trying not to laugh. As the voices Dopplered away, Colin heard Xan ask, inevitably, "So, how does quantum temporal entanglement work, exactly?"
"There she goes again," muttered Colin. "Think she'll have your job by the new year, or is it too low for her?"
Warren looked a little dazed. Then he turned to Colin and asked wistfully, "Do you think he might be a relative of hers?"
"They just met," Colin informed him absently.
"Oh. Wonderful." Warren pulled the iPad closer and started to type ferociously.
"So how long do you think it'll take for her to suck him dry?"
"What?"
"Of knowledge. She's like a fact vampire. Takes everything and makes it hers."
"Did you notice the way she looked at him?"
"She didn't. Not that much."
"Out of the corner of her eye," Warren said bitterly. "Every time. Never directly."
"Ha! So you admit that I'm right, do you?" Then Colin caught something in Warren's tone and twisted to stare at him.
"What?" Warren finally asked, sullenly. He paused and glanced up. "Why are you looking at me...?"
"You've gone over to her side, haven't you?" said Colin. "Traitor. "