I was in a funny mood and this happened. Don't judge me...

Colin closed the door to the BBFO office behind him, turned around, and ducked.

The high velocity potted plant slammed into the door at exactly the height his head had occupied, the pot it was in apparently made of something tough enough to take it and merely bouncing. The plant and the earth it was in was another matter, as he was covered in a veritable explosion of both.

Brushing himself off, he looked quizzically at Saurial, who appeared apologetic. "Sorry about that. Some of Ianthe's experiments are a little… lively."

"What on earth was that?" he asked, looking at the mess on the floor, then at the lizard-girl who had admitted him.

"An imbalance in the endochronic chemicals expressed in the leaves," an irritated voice from further into the building said, making him look over. "It was that close, too." A thumb and forefinger were held with the talons nearly touching. Ianthe seemed mildly miffed, but otherwise in a good mood. "Sorry, it got away from me at just the wrong moment."

Metis was sitting at the far end of the table that her sister was working on, looking amused, with Raptaur standing next to her grinning. He nodded to both the other reptiles as he followed Saurial over to her cousin. Inspecting the large number of very weird things scattered on the table, and then looking around with widening eyes, he felt he should probably have waited for Dragon to come with him.

He could already tell he was going to have a headache when he left…

"What… is this?" he asked, indicating a similar plant in a pot, the green leafy thing looking a little familiar to him. He thought it was possibly some sort of herb or other.

However, most herbs didn't glow a faint purple color.

Neither did they, and their pots, hover six inches off the table. In general.

The deep, faint, and slightly wavering hum was also oddly unnerving.

"An experiment," Ianthe said, examining the floating plant closely, while not looking entirely satisfied. "We were reading some of your human scientific literature and came across a number of interesting concepts which seemed to have been sadly neglected. After some thought we decided to work on perfecting a few of them, by combining them with Family tech. It's good practice and quite a lot of fun. But we do seem to keep running into places your scientists didn't fully explain their work properly, so we're having to derive the solutions from first principles."

The humming got a little louder, the plant starting to vibrate slightly. Ianthe quickly grabbed a small mister and sprayed it a couple of times with something that smelled like aniseed, which made the humming die back to the original level and the vibrating stop. "This one is a good example. I've managed to get modified chloroplasts to produce a minute amount of thiotimoline in the leaves, but it's annoyingly difficult to balance the production of the stuff with the consumption of it, and at the same time stop it becoming endochronically unstable."

"Thiotimoline?" Colin asked, thinking that sounded familiar for some reason that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"Well, not pure thiotimoline, of course. This is a modified version of it. Very complex molecule, with some fascinating properties. The temporal instability of it is quite hazardous in pure form, but with some modifications I managed to make it more spatially indeterminate than temporally so. It's more useful like that, we were thinking that Vectura could use it for…"

The glow suddenly spiked to a higher level, and the potted plant left the vicinity so fast there was a distinct 'crack' as it went supersonic. Colin instinctively ducked, although none of the lizards did more than follow it with their eyes. The pot pinged around the room several times until Raptaur reached out with a blurringly fast motion that would have made Velocity jealous and snagged it as it came past. Holding it firmly as it wiggled in her grip, she waited for her cousin to spray it vigorously before putting it back down on the table.

The glow died away and the plant wilted, making Ianthe shake her head and mutter something in her own language, sounding peeved. "Unfortunately, the stability still leaves something to be desired, and it's also somewhat toxic to the host plant. Perhaps I need to try something else as a base, but this one seemed a good choice for several reasons."

"You just liked the name," Saurial laughed. Ianthe shrugged, smiling a little.

"It was an amusing idea, I'll admit." She picked up the pot and looked sadly at it. "Vectura would have had a good laugh about being able to use this as the power source for Thyme Travel."

Colin winced despite himself.

"If I can ask," he said after a moment, desperate to change the subject, "What is that?"

He pointed at a huge transparent container in the middle of the room. Gently bouncing around inside it was a ball-shaped… thing… about five feet in diameter. A pair of mournful-appearing eyes blinked at him as it rotated slowly. The large black and white patches all over it made it look even weirder.

Ianthe brightened up as she looked over her shoulder. "Oh, that thing actually worked pretty well," she smiled. "I'm still working on making it more robust but it's already usable." She walked over to the container and peered in. "Look, it's looking at us," she added. "Cute, isn't it?"

He didn't want to, but he had to ask. "But what… is… it? Is it alive?"

"Of course it's alive, it wouldn't be much use if it wasn't, would it now?" she asked, staring at him like he was an idiot. "Once I get the bugs worked out, I bet your physicists will love it. We'll lease them at a very reasonable price."

"Physicists?" He looked oddly at her, then at the floating thing. A mouth opened in a soundless cry, the eyes blinking, then closed again. He shivered, there was something entirely wrong about it. "What would a physicist want with whatever that thing is?"

Ianthe looked puzzled, then turned and asked her family something in that language. They had a brief discussion, then she turned back. "It's in a lot of papers Saurial's read, but no one seems to have actually used them for doing the experiments and testing the math," Ianthe said. "Saurial claims that the math doesn't need to be tested, it's either right or wrong, but I think it's nice to be able to prove it empirically. So I made this."

Saurial picked up a tablet from the table and brought it over to him. He looked at the document that was open on it, at her, then at the thing in the container. Then he sighed.

The lizard-girl reclaimed the tablet and read out loud, "Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..."

He put a hand on his visor and sighed more heavily. "Of course, for some projects you end up working with very small or very large numbers," Ianthe said cheerfully. He looked up to see her holding up a small transparent globe which seemed to have a number of teeny tiny specks floating around in it. "So I've got some micro-cows too. I'm still working on nano-cows, they tend to have trouble with electrostatic attraction, and we don't have room here for the mega-cow. We'll have to wait until Vectura works out the bugs in her orbital launcher."

Colin didn't ask.

What he did ask was, "How is that… spherical cow..." He couldn't believe he'd just said that, but pressed on anyway, "just floating in there?"

"Oh, that's one of mine," Raptaur said, sounding pleased with herself. "We found a reference in a paper from over a century ago, from a scientist called Wells. Neat stuff he described. It took some careful work to make it, since it's sort of dimensionally peculiar, but I managed in the end. It's a very effective gravitational shield. The bottom of the containment vessel is made of it."

She frowned slightly as Colin stared. "That Wells guy was very hazy on the math, annoyingly, and he completely neglected to mention the requirements for something to negate the effects of the Cavorite put above it. If you don't use that, all your air will go shooting off into space eventually, although a lot of it would come back. Even so, it's a hazard, if only to birds and aircraft, so I designed a neutralizing version that sort of blocks the gravity blocking. I can show you the math we came up with if you like, it's really interesting."

"Cavorite," he echoed. That name he recognized, although he wished in a way he didn't.

"Yep. I was a little grandiose, I'm afraid, and called the other version Raptaurium, but hey, if this Cavor guy Wells talked about is allowed to name things after himself, who am I to go against tradition?" She shrugged, smiling. "The ceiling's lined with it."

"I see."

"Your literature is full of useful materials," Metis commented, picking up a couple of paperbacks and showing them to him. "Some of them are clearly too dangerous to use, but a few are pretty good. Saurial's working on this one called scrith at the moment."

"It's not as strong as EDM, but it's lighter, and I can see a few places it could come in handy," Saurial added, holding up a rod of a pale metallic substance about a foot long. "EDM is also completely rigid whereas this stuff can be worked, although admittedly with a lot of effort. I'm surprised no one seems to be using it, though. We couldn't find any references to it outside these manuals."

She cocked her head at him enquiringly.

Colin wondered how he was going to explain science fiction to them, and whether he should even try…

And was well aware that Dragon would, by now, be laughing like an idiot. She was a little odd that way, and seemed to find the Family endlessly amusing.