VI & ½ . RE: Nerdy Interlude

Cloud looked down bemusedly at his boss.

"Professor, I'm not quite sure this is sound…"

"Nonsense," the professor said as he pushed up his thick glasses to peer into the microscope in front of him, observing the thin slice of crystal he mounted on the stage. It was a combination of two molten materia, one was a Fire and the other a Thunder. Somehow he was coming up with Blizzard. Like a diamond, he had to chip away at his new materia along its "facets." Looking under his microscope under one hundred times the magnification showed a smooth surface, unlike the grainy hybrid he was expecting. The materia didn't cast anything after he crystallized the mixture. Another failure and a waste of perfectly good materia. "If we can get this to work, maybe we can even make huge materia! Ones that can cast everything!"

"I'm sure we can," assured Cloud, "But that would require a huge amount of energy and pressure not to mention sacrificing countless amounts of company property."

"In the name of science," Zalinka defended indignantly, "Where is your spirit of adventure?"

"I left it back in Nibelheim," Cloud quipped under his breath. Zalinka heard it and grinned.

"Professor," his assistant cleared his throat, "That microscope isn't gonna tell you more. Besides, why aren't you turning on the camera? Then you can see it on the computer screen like a normal person. You've been staring at the same damn hing for the last three weeks. I have in the meantime booked time on the x-ray defractometer and also obtained a powder diffraction spectrum." Cloud just blinked up at him.

"Out with it!" Zalinka cried, "Don't torture me more. I've already been away from my lab for too long."

Cloud raised a brow at the melodramatics of his PI and boss. Zalinka, noticing the look laughed mortified and took it down a notch. This was actually kind of typical in the Zalinka Group, which actually only consisted of himself and Cloud, Zalinka realized. When the young man came to him for a research position over every other prominent scientist in the department, Zalinka was frankly shocked. His admittedly underfunded and understaffed office was often overlooked by eager young academy students looking to get a nice line on their Shinra resumes. However, since Cloud joined almost half a year ago, the young man had played a significant hand in progressing all of Zalinka's projects. So much so that Zalinka really wanted to give the kid a raise, except he didn't control pay grades, which are set by the company as almost negative for students.

"It turns out," Cloud said as he pressed three print outs of spectrums onto their messy and scribbled upon not-so-white board and set magnets on top of each, "All of the materia we've been studying, at least in this class, are polymorphs." That meant that its chemical composition was the same but the crystal structure was different.

"That is hardly a revelation," Zalinka sighed in disappointment.

"Whoa, hold your chocobos, Prof," Cloud held up his folder, "I got more-" He nimbly dodged an attempt on the doctor's part to grab the folder. "-there seems to be rules for how you can combine different materia. If you don't use compatible ones, it falls apart. And the more materia-"

"-You try to use the more issues you run into," Zalinka finished, pleased. "Excellent, this must be why we have been running into so many fatal problems."

"I wouldn't call them fatal," Cloud said incredulously, "Unless you are planning to blow up the lab, Prof." He grabbed the newspaper on Zalinka's desk, the one that the professor had ignored, and flashed it in front of the man. "I hope you remember the last one, considering it happened only yesterday. Please don't try to recreate this." Zalinka waved his assistant off.

"Pish posh," Zalinka laughed, "What's a few explosions in the name of science?" Cloud sighed helplessly and hunched his back.

"Gee, oh grand master of science, what do you want to do tonight?"

"Same thing we do every night, Cloudy -"

"Yeah, yeah."

I recommend playing the theme song of Pinky and the Brain to this piece of crack.

Expect chapter 7 to be out by next week (promise).