trans_9 | Faith is both the prison and the open hand [open]

It wasn't much of a surprise that Luis was still hard at work in his own little corner. He showed up at Scarlet's desk with a pile of papers in one hand and a small datapad on top of all the papers. Between the slight rasp in his voice and the red eyes behind his glasses, it was obvious he had clearly just gotten out of a long, long session of work.

"All the latest culture data for you, along with the records from quarantine last week, amiga," he announced. "The numbers are starting to blur together when I look at them, so I am probably done for the evening." Probably.

She'd actually been so lost in thought she hadn't actually heard Luis approach her desk and jerked a little when he talked, although she tried to downplay the motion by acting like she was stretching, dropping the photo on her desk and looking up at him. She raised her eyebrows at the overall tired look of her boss, managing to crack a slight smile when he announced he was probably done for the evening.

"Does that mean you're going to go upstairs and get some sleep or that you're going to go back to your desk, work for another two hours, and then pass out in the middle of your paperwork?"

"I don't--" Luis started, but then paused. Wow... come to think of it, when was the last time he went up to his own room to go to sleep? It was always in the plans, but he could probably keep track of how many nights he slept in a bed on one hand. "Well, I don't always pass out on my paperwork," he said with a shrug. "I am just a person with a lot of inertia. I work best in long sittings, you know?"

Then he looked back towards his desk. "I did want to check one thing before I go, though."

Scarlet rolled her eyes at him, picking up the data pad from the top of the pile he'd just brought her and wagging it at him.

"If you're so tired you can't see straight whatever it is can wait until tomorrow." She knew he probably wasn't going to listen to her, but it was worth a shot. She glanced down at the data pad, before pointing with her other hand towards the door of the labs.

"Go to bed."

"All right, all right, yes ma'am!" he said. "I'll go to bed."

Then he reached for the data pad in her hands and took it back, having a seat and starting to skim through the entries. "I'm just making sure I included this one report I had made up. It had a little abnormality I wanted to get your opinion on."

Oh jeez, here he went. Mindful to keep himself from thinking too much about science (lest he slide back into work-mode), he looked for some small talk. "What are you doing here so late anyway? You're not usually here at this hour."

As he sat down she let out a defeated sigh, leaning back in her chair to watch him. At his question, she frowned a little, shrugging her shoulders.

"Lost track of time, I guess. I was going over some of my old files on the Rage Virus."

"Aah," he said with a rather solemn (and knowing) nod of his head. "I know what it's like to have a pet project like that..." Perhaps a little too well, even.

"Sometimes you think you should be spending my time on something to help in the present, but you just can't let it go, you know?"

Scarlet looked at Luis thoughtfully, her tongue in her cheek before leaning forward and propping her arms against the desk, picking through the stack of paperwork.

"If we ever have another outbreak it could very well become the present again, so I really haven't got any interest in stopping with my research. Besides we're kind of stagnate with Steve, right now." Poor kid.

"Hey, hey, I understand completely," he said. Keeping himself busy on old research was better than sitting around doing nothing. And she was right-- Veronica was pretty stubbornly refusing to cooperate lately. He had been trying to culture something useful out of samples they grabbed from the kid's latest round of symptoms and progress was... maddeningly slow. That's what he was checking on the data pad at the moment.

"One of these days we'll spill something into something else and all of our problems will be solved," Luis murmured dreamily, still flipping through the data. "You'll see."

"That would be something," she sighed, laughing a little quietly under her breath while she went through the stack of papers. She absently bit her lip while she rifled through the work Luis had given her, before glancing up at him.

"I think at this rate we might have to resort to spilling things. I've never actually seen viruses capable of infecting such a wide array of species."

"You're telling me," he sighed. "If it wasn't so dangerous and destructive I might find it interesting. And people have tried to find appropriate applications for these viruses... nothing ends well, as you might imagine."

Luis paused for a second, brushed his hair out of his face and set the data pad down for a moment to rub his eyes behind his glasses. "Maybe we should take some time off and then come back to try spilling things," he said, clearly joking. As if either of them would ever take time off. "I wouldn't say no to another night out."

Somehow she wasn't entirely surprised he decided to bring that up. She stared at him for a moment before her eyes drifted back to the papers in front of her.

"Is that what it'll take to get you to leave when I tell you to?" She didn't really like encouraging Luis's behavior, but, she was concerned for him.

Luis finally reached the appropriate section of the data, squinting as he tried to read it-- but briefly glancing up at her answer.

He looked a little bit too impressed with himself for a moment. "That depends. Would you actually agree if it did?"

Scarlet arched an eyebrow, her eyes still on the papers.

"Maybe."

He grinned the idiot grin of a high schooler. "Come on, Scarlet, I know you're not as much of a stick in the mud as you like to pretend."

She finally looked up at that, trying to keep a smile off her face, tilting her head to the side curiously.

"Oh, is that so?"

"Hard as it is to believe," Luis said, mock lamentation in his voice. "Behind that uptight workaholic image is a beautiful woman who--god forbid-- enjoyed herself last time I took her out."

She allowed herself to smirk a little at that, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, elbow propped up on the desk.

"Well, surprising as it may be you're not that repulsive when you aren't trying so hard you'd embarrass Casanova."

Luis faked a gasp and put a hand over his heart. "Why, Scarlet- if I didn't know better, I'd say that almost counted as a compliment."

He was internally thrilled, though. And he hadn't tried this hard on her in quite a while, either!

Scarlet rolled her eyes at that, although her smirk remained in place. After a moment she picked up the pen on her desk, rolling it idly through her free hand before pointing at Luis with it.

"I get to pick the place, this time."

To say Luis was surprised was an understatement. Surprised enough to drop the smooth act, even, looking somewhere between impressed and maybe a bit confused.

"What, you're serious?" he asked. "Well, of course you can. Anything you want."

"Okay," her smile widened, and she shifted a little, so she was sitting up straight again. She wasn't sure if this was a good idea or not, but what the hell. They'd been working too hard lately, anyway.

"Tomorrow night?"

Considering that last time he'd gotten Scarlet Levy to agree to a date with him the two of them had been trapped in virtual mistletoe, Luis was understandably quite pleased with himself.

"Sounds great," he said... and did try hard not to sound like he was terribly excited. He set down the data pad and clicked it off with a little beep, finally looking defeated. "And now, I guess I owe you a bedtime." It really must have been late for him to miss all the possible innuendo there.

Scarlet was willing to let that slide, and she smiled a little, reaching out to take the datapad away from him again.

"Yes, you do. Goodnight."

Russel wasn't really sure if this was going to work. But there was only one way to find out. So, in the name of science, alchemy, and physics, he set out to break ground in both of the fields. And in order to break ground, usually other things must be broken as well. Hopefully, not one's face, hands, or anything else vital. However, occasionally one's eyebrows must be sacrificed for the sake of science.

This was one of those times.

It had been perfectly quiet in the lab right up until the small explosion. Some equipment crashed to the floor, and Russel with it. There was the scent of melted plastic, sulfur, and the faintest bit off burned hair in the air. By the time anyone would have been able to reach him, he was halfway to his feet, going to inspect the damage. He was fine, old wounds notwithstanding. Getting up from his back with one arm took him a moment.

Fletcher was sitting nearby, but not close enough to interfere with Russel's work. He had a different project; he was currently examining the chemical makeup of the ichor secreted by his plantsuit when he'd cut open one of the veins.

When he heard the explosion, he flinched and turned in Russel's direction. He immediately jumped to his feet and hurried toward his brother. "Wh-what happened?"

Explosions were infrequent enough in the lab that for a brief moment she was thrown off, reaching for the gun always on her desk, before she realized where she was and what had happened. After a second she stood and hurried over to where the noise had come from, surveying the scene as she arrived. So much for that equipment.

"What happened here?"

"An aggressive reaction," Russel answered the both of them at once. He inspected the damages. The transmutation circle was now marred by a dark black char, and there was a lot of broken glass lying around. "Don't touch anything," he said to both of them, but it was mostly directed to Fletcher.

He picked up a pen that was undamaged, and poked through the glass with it, as though he were uncovering something he expected to remain under it. He set it down, and reached into the small crater he'd made. From it, he lifted a small, clear, shimmering, rough crystal, barely discernible from the glass around it. He grinned. "Agressive, but successful."

Fletcher stayed put right where he was standing, wringing his hands nervously as he watched Russel fishing around in the broken glass. Why did he always have to be so wreckless...?

Fletcher glanced over at Major Levy. He'd noticed her down here a few times, but they'd never spoken. This was probably a bad first impression.

"Great," Scarlet looked at the kids, a little annoyed, but it stayed off her face as she turned to one of the wall panels and punched a couple buttons to call in the disposal unit. She then turned back to the kids, resting both hands on her hips.

"All right, so tell me. What were you doing?" She didn't have a full roster of whoever was working in the lab at whatever times, and Luis waved people in all the time without getting names down. So long as they weren't poking into their more sensitive research...

Russel's smirk persisted. The disapproval of this woman didn't really mean anything to him. "Applying the amplified forces of gravity to carbon to induce similar processes to the natural forces that create diamonds. It's far from flawless, but it's on the right track." The rough crystal glittered lightly between his fingers. It was as foggy as soapy water, and had one or two obvious cracks inside of it, and more would be visible under a microscope, but chemically and practically speaking, it was a diamond.

Fletcher winced. So Russel really was trying to apply what they'd learned about physics to his alchemy. But to do something so risky on his first try... it was lucky he hadn't created a black hole and destroyed the entire ship.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

She wasn't particularly phased by the smirk on the older boy's face, and she only shifted a little as the droid came out of its hiding place to get to work on the mess he'd created.

"Did you clear this project with Dr. Sera?" If Luis was cool with it she didn't really have any reason to launch into a lecture, although she would probably go find him and lecture him about letting kids do stupidly dangerous things.

"Yeah, he said we could work in here." Not that Russel tried too terribly hard to pull the Spaniard from his own work, and he was in too much of a rush to get started to be particularly interested in being told no.

He picked up a magnifying glass and took a closer look at the crystal he'd made. He seemed rather proud of himself.

Once the glass had been cleaned up, Fletcher moved closer to take a look at his brother's little shiny object.

"Um, Brother, can I see the transmutation circle you used?"

Okay, Luis had green lit them working here. She'd still have a chat with him because she had a feeling he didn't know just what these kids were up to. She relaxed a little, watching the taller boy go to work on examining the crystal.

"All right, let's just try to keep the damages to a minimum?" It wasn't like they could just run to the store if they ran out of unbroken equipment.

He nodded at Fletcher. "It's a burnt spot now, but it's in my notes over there." He pointed to an unaffected stack of papers to the left of the area. "But I used an octagon instead of a pentagon for more power." Then, he turned his attention back to Scarlet. "I don't make a habit of almost blowing myself up. But the only way to find out what the limits of an experiment are, is to actually push them," he justified.

Fletcher frowned at Russel's explanation, but headed over to his papers to sift through them and take a look. It all became clear once he saw what he'd been writing and drawing, though. From what Fletcher understood already, the hypothesis and method looked sound, so why the explosion?

Clearly they didn't understand enough.

He looked up, worried look etched onto his face as Russel spoke with the woman there.

"And a good scientist knows to take appropriate measures if they're expecting an explosive reaction," Scarlet replied, not unkindly, but she was seeing this as something that really hadn't been thought through.

"Judging by your eyebrows, you weren't really as careful as you should have been."

Russel's hand went to them when she brought it up. He frowned when he found them missing. "Honestly, I didn't expect an explosion. Nothing I was working with was, and I made sure my samples were clean. There must have been a problem in the equation." The most likely cause he could think of was that there was an excess of energy somewhere, and his circle needed to be changed to accommodate for it in some way.

Fletcher flipped through the pages some more, and looked up when Russel spoke again. He remembered reading something that it didn't look like Russel had accounted for. "Brother, are you calculating the potential gravitational force based on the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics?"

He would leave the talking with Scarlet to Russel. He seemed to be doing marginally more fine than usual, with an authority figure.

Faith is both the prison and the open hand [open]

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