~~~
Harry sat on the half-pipe, waiting for his lover. It was two months now since
he had dropped out of Hogwarts; following such foolish rules and boring, pointless
regulations stifled his true heart. No more, he and Avril had decided. So now
they hang out at the local skate park.
"Oh Harry!" The cries of his beloved echoed around the half-pipe as
she approached. "My darling! How art thou feeling, mine dearest one?"
Harry surveyed his angel. His tenshi. His beautiful, sugoi tenshi-chan.
This epitome of womanhood before him was his true soulmate. Their eyes were
locked in an unspoken embrace that reached across the short, short distance
between them. A distance that was all too long to Harry. He leapt down from
his seat, poised lithely on the half-pipe, the angular, muscular, jutting curvature
of his body truly accentuated by his beautiful, flowing movements. Within mere
seconds, moments, sands of time so insignificant that God Himself would not
have concerned Himself to note them, the embrace that was those moments ago
a mere metaphor, had become all too real. Harry looked into his Goddess's eyes,
ringed so perfectly with eyeliner that truly brought out her deep, deep sadness,
and his despair lifted.
"Avril, my holy maiden of the night sky, whose tears of joy are an elixir,
a nepenthe for all of my ills, my demons and my bruised soul's deepest torments,
I am now at peace with this entire barren world, since you have rejoined my
side. Let us not ever part again, my best friend and my dearest darling. Soon,
no longer shall we wait before our embrace becomes unclothed, our touch becomes
unsheathed of these garments that disguise our passions. Soon we shall be wed,
and then we shall join in perfect undulating union forevermore."
"You say such hentai things, Harry. Remember that we must wait for our
marriage, or we may yet dare incur the Lord's vengeful wrath." Avril told
her ethereal, gaunt, beautifully pale true love with a mirth that nigh-on disguised
the seriousness of the implications of such a union before their wedding.
Harry's face became more ashen than before, as his mind raced to recall all of the sordid events that he and Ron had... No! He must cast them aside. That was a different time. A different life. Never again would Ron force upon him the terrible, heathen urges, the destructive desires that went against the grace of God's own will. Never again would Harry do such things... Never again would he don the maid outfit, or the clothing of a grand high priest, never again would he shave his entire body just to satisfy Ron's inelegant whims. Never again would he hear the delicate soprano dulcet tones of Ron's angelic voice. His melodious sighs as Harry reamed him to the core, his squeals of ecstatic agony as Harry lifted him again and again and again, to the highest, most grand heights of perfect pleasure. Never again.
...Would he?
Only time would tell. Time, and the guiding subtle hands of the -Fates-.
The perfect twosome lay in the grass, a field mere miles away from their hallowed
skate-park. The star-speckled sky hung frozen above them; black velvet and glittering
diamond perfection. Perfect like the couple's gentle embrace, their gaunt bodies
holding each other with a need unlike any other love that had ever existed on
this tiny, dark planet of hatred, greed and corruption. Surely, Harry and Avril's
Tru PunQ Revolution would be the last chance that this dying Earth has.
"Tell me about the stars, Harry-sama," Avril whispered delicately
in his ear.
"But best friend and dearest darling, I have told you all that there is
to know about stars!"
"My sweet, my one true punk love whose face will forever be ingrained
in the very fabric of my soul, then tell me something about what is beyond the
stars, the depths, the infinite blackness that almost contends with the darkness
of my inner heart..."
"Very well, Avril-chan. I will tell you about black holes."
"Oh, do Harry! Do!"
"Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass
concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational
pull," he whispered sensuously into her ear. "Since our best theory
of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have
to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail,
but let's start of slow, by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances.
Suppose that you are standing on the surface of a planet. You throw a rock straight
up into the air. Assuming you don't throw it too hard, it will rise for a while,
but eventually the acceleration due to the planet's gravity will make it start
to fall down again. If you threw the rock hard enough, though, you could make
it escape the planet's gravity entirely. It would keep on rising forever. The
speed with which you need to throw the rock in order that it just barely escapes
the planet's gravity is called the "escape velocity." As you would
expect, the escape velocity depends on the mass of the planet: if the planet
is extremely massive, then its gravity is very strong, and the escape velocity
is high. A lighter planet would have a smaller escape velocity. The escape velocity
also depends on how far you are from the planet's center: the closer you are,
the higher the escape velocity. The Earth's escape velocity is 11.2 kilometers
per second (about 25,000 m.p.h.), while the Moon's is only 2.4 kilometers per
second (about 5300 m.p.h.). Now imagine an object with such an enormous concentration
of mass in such a small radius that its escape velocity was greater than the
velocity of light. Then, since nothing can go faster than light, nothing can
escape the object's gravitational field. Even a beam of light would be pulled
back by gravity and would be unable to escape. The idea of a mass concentration
so dense that even light would be trapped goes all the way back to Laplace in
the 18th century. Almost immediately after Einstein developed general relativity,
Karl Schwarzschild discovered a mathematical solution to the equations of the
theory that described such an object. It was only much later, with the work
of such people as Oppenheimer, Volkoff, and Snyder in the 1930's, that people
thought seriously about the possibility that such objects might actually exist
in the Universe. (Yes, this is the same Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project.)
These researchers showed that when a sufficiently massive star runs out of fuel,
it is unable to support itself against its own gravitational pull, and it should
collapse into a black hole. In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation
of the curvature of spacetime. Massive objects distort space and time, so that
the usual rules of geometry don't apply anymore. Near a black hole, this distortion
of space is extremely severe and causes black holes to have some very strange
properties. In particular, a black hole has something called an 'event horizon.'
This is a spherical surface that marks the boundary of the black hole. You can
pass in through the horizon, but you can't get back out. In fact, once you've
crossed the horizon, you're doomed to move inexorably closer and closer to the
'singularity' at the center of the black hole. You can think of the horizon
as the place where the escape velocity equals the velocity of light. Outside
of the horizon, the escape velocity is less than the speed of light, so if you
fire your rockets hard enough, you can give yourself enough energy to get away.
But if you find yourself inside the horizon, then no matter how powerful your
rockets are, you can't escape. The horizon has some very strange geometrical
properties. To an observer who is sitting still somewhere far away from the
black hole, the horizon seems to be a nice, static, unmoving spherical surface.
But once you get close to the horizon, you realize that it has a very large
velocity. In fact, it is moving outward at the speed of light! That explains
why it is easy to cross the horizon in the inward direction, but impossible
to get back out. Since the horizon is moving out at the speed of light, in order
to escape back across it, you would have to travel faster than light. You can't
go faster than light, and so you can't escape from the black hole. (If all of
this sounds very strange, don't worry. It is strange. The horizon is in a certain
sense sitting still, but in another sense it is flying out at the speed of light.
It's a bit like Alice in "Through the Looking-Glass": she has to run
as fast as she can just to stay in one place.) Once you're inside of the horizon,
spacetime is distorted so much that the coordinates describing radial distance
and time switch roles. That is, "r", the coordinate that describes
how far away you are from the center, is a timelike coordinate, and "t"
is a spacelike one. One consequence of this is that you can't stop yourself
from moving to smaller and smaller values of r, just as under ordinary circumstances
you can't avoid moving towards the future (that is, towards larger and larger
values of t). Eventually, you're bound to hit the singularity at r = 0. You
might try to avoid it by firing your rockets, but it's futile: no matter which
direction you run, you can't avoid your future. Trying to avoid the center of
a black hole once you've crossed the horizon is just like trying to avoid next
Thursday. Incidentally, the name 'black hole' was invented by John Archibald
Wheeler, and seems to have stuck because it was much catchier than previous
names. Before Wheeler came along, these objects were often referred to as 'frozen
stars.'"
"Oh Harry! You are fun and educational too! I bet kids can really relate
to you and learn something! Perhaps I stole you away from a better life, a life
as a scholar, whose knowledge could be passed on to a younger generation. But
I took you away from that Harry, and I'm sorry."
"No! Avril-kun, I will not hear another word. My love for your is a fire
brighter than any knowledge. The truth may be the light, but my heart is filled
with another light, the light that is you. You are more than any words
to me! Not a single Fun Fact or ProTip can compare."
Avril saw the tears, like glittering diamonds that fell from Harry's beautiful
eyes. She wiped them away and began to weep herself. They embraced tighter,
their bodies becoming united in the embrace of Love, as the world plunged into
the womb of Night's dark vagina.
Morning rays fell on the twosome as they awoke. In mere minutes they had picked up their clothing, adjusted their various chains and facial piercings, grabbed their tools of sk8erhood and left for the Skate-Park of Dreams. This was their heaven, their hallowed hallways, their house of grandiloquence. This was their and theirs alone, this place. A place where they could truly be.
But not now. The sanctity of this sacred ground had been irrevocably disturbed; a lone figure in clothes of black and green with a hood that obscured his or her face stood before this most perfect of couplings.
"What the...! Just who are you? Who dares defile the sacred space of The Tru PunQ Revolution of Harry Potter and Avril Lavigne!?" The panda-eyed Goddess cried wrathfully, her lips forming the words with such elysian glory that Harry's heart fluttered and melted like snowdew in the morning sun.
With that, the Stranger tossed back his hood, revealing tufts of auburn hair, gaily unkempt and probably unwashed. Two beady eyes sat below, above a snub nose that to Harry was all but irresistable. The eyes, so beautiful, were so filled with hatred and contempt that Avril had to avert her own gaze.
"You..." Harry's mouth was a perfect O of anger, shock, terror and
teenage angst.
"Yes," Ron smiled beatifically. "Me."
"Harry, who is this balding charlatan? Name yourself, you cad, bounder
and scoundrel! Why, the sheer bawdiness of it all!"
"As our dear friend Harry is too dumbstruck to utter a single word, let
alone a sentence or perhaps a small paragraph to explain who I truly am, allow
me to elucidate in his place. I am Ron. Harry's secret lover."
Avril gasped. Her eyes were round with shock, flecked with tears and quivered
uncontrollably with disbelief, grief, rage, hate, all rolled together in an
indescribable cocktail of indescribable payn.
"No... No! Harry, tell me this isn't true!"
To be concluded...