Lepton? With my bad knee?
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Date: 08/27/2018 Time: 8:00pm EDT |
55 Winder Street, Lower Midtown, Detroit
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Cast: | |
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Arthur lets Emma in. He's holding a paper plate, with pizza on it. From a local place offering Genuine Detroit Pizza, there are a few boxes spread on the conference table. Most empty. "Don't have much left, but you're welcome to what you can find." Arthur laughs. "Fair enough, welcome." He munches his pizza quickly, and sets the plate down. "If you'll follow me, what I need to show you is in the basement. I'm making good progress on the project. What if I told you I have auditory and visual cloaking?" Emma follows along after Arthur, pausing at the door marked 'private'. Well, if Arthur wants her to follow... she passes the threshold, taking a sip from her to-go chai latte. "I'd say I'd need to see it to believe it." She jokes. "Get it. 'See it'?" Arthur will lead her down. All the machines have been busy. The laser cutter cutting acrylic. The 3d printer making little fittings. The computer has a 3d model up of something that looks like a home laser display or planetarium. "Put this in the middle of the dinghy, and we'll be in a dark, echo-less room. and invisible." He pauses. "Well, at least a dim, quiet room, and translucent." With a smile. On the table over there is the main inductor winding. Jaylen and Max worked on that all day. Which is why they, and Alma, got pizza." Emma's eyes are at first everywhere in the labratory, taking in the sighs and sounds with a rapt fascination. Eventually, her eyes are lead to the 3D reconstruction, which she takes in with some amount of fascination. Finally, her gaze follows to the main armature, which she approaches with a curious sort of air. Finding a safe place to set down her to-go cup (far away from equipment), she pads on up and starts looking at it from various angles. "What's your principle of operation?" She wonders to Arthur. Arthur leans in to the touch pad at the computer, and switches over to an electrical schematic. "This inductor is the core of a projector that puts out a grid that pulls the AEtheric particles taut, creating a dense dome of AEther around us. The waves are guided by that dome of AEtheric particles, bringing them around the dome instead of through the interior. Blocking light and sound. We will need a tube, like a uh, paper towel inner tube, to peek outside the dome and navigate the boat." Emma levels an expression at Arthur full of amusement. "A paper towel tube? I love it." She remarks, gleefully. "It'll be like being a kid playing pirates. 'Ahoy, landlubber. Prepare to be boarded!'" She moves to the side to examine the 3d display indicating to parts of the schematic. "What about the polyphasic recoil? Surely you'd have some residual lepton leakage... maybe some gauge boson distortiion." Arthur lets out a laugh at that. "Well we are breaking the law and probably international treaty." He leans on one of the work benches. "Two ways to address the leakage. First, I had the interns manually winding this coil all day. Any off the shelf coil is going to be insulated copper. This is Cobalt-Chromium, uninsulated since it has its own Chromium Oxide protective layer. The crystalline lattice of the nuclei traps the leptonic discharge." Then he pauses. "But the stuff is barely ductile so the interns had to wind it VERY SLOWLY." Emma huhs quietly, visibly thinking for a few moments. She shakes her head. "Well, that just prompts more questions." She wonders outloud, before looking back up at Arthur. "Huh. I guess I'm not *entirely* up on my chromaticore theory." She admits. "I've... been distracted by other areas a little too much. Not that I want to specialize in it..." Arthur chuckles. "You're not missing anything. Point two is that we're just going to absorb it. It's 0.1... 3...." The three is elongated, and he tilts his hand back and forth. "Millirems per hour. It's about the same energetic dose as you get from eating a banana. Harmless, but it'll stablize the grid." Emma blinks, and then laughs. "Well, that's one way to do it." She remarks, shaking her head. "I'll make sure to eat my sea-weed salad before joining you." She looks around the lab again, her curiosity about the innerworkings of the device sated. "I hadn't been down here. This is... very nice set up. Compared to my piles of junk and hand tools..." Arthur laughs. "Thanks. Yeah, I'm used to a lab about three times this size. But I'm glad I was able to get this much together in about a month. This basement is well shaped for me. And the assessors didn't even blink. So I'm all set. How's your office shaping up? Was a bit cramped last time I Was there." Emma laughs, bitterly. "Same as always. Not enough room, deep in the dungeon." She says, shaking her head slowly. "They don't give nice offices to the instructors. They definitely don't give the nice offices to the people that were trained by so-called 'quacks'." Emma shifts her weight from one foot to the other, letting out a sigh. "Still, I should be pleased I have a job. My academic geneology is only 'impressive' to member of the Society." Arthur winces and then smirks again. "Yeah. But you'll get there. I slogged through uh, grad school, got my doctorate, and then moved cross country to take a consulting job. Just lucky I guess." "Not much consulting for Astronomers." Emma points out with a wicked grin. She shakes her head again. "My biggest problem isn't equipment... afterall, I can make do with the handtools... as neat as your 3d printer is. It's the lack of *space*. And how I'd pay for it." She pauses a moment, before looking askance at Arthur. "How do you pay the bills on this place?" Arthur tilts his hand. "It's part of the job. I'm paid fairly well, and the firm compensates me, becuase I'm still working for them." He then shrugs. "Of course, I'm being paid to stay away, keep quiet, and let everyone forget about my last project." Emma wrinkles her nose, giving Arthur a sympathetic expression. "That's got to be rough." She says, that sympathy being mirrored in her voice. She adjusts the bag over her shoulder, and gives a shrug. "I've been thinking about that a lot, lately. The economics of... being a Scientist. Having a Chantry means we need to figure out how to pay for things. And hell, having my own lab... would mean figuring out how to pay for things." Arthur nods. "Well you could be like uh, what's his face." He snaps. "Tyson. He runs a planetarium. You could uh, do something edutainment. In person or Youtube. Apply your knowledge. Leverage the edutainment to buy equipment, and space." He pauses, and winks. "And if you happen to instill in children the boundless potential of the uncharted universe, tearing down the Union consensus by a tiny amount... oh well." Emma snorts. "I'm afraid I don't have much of a face for video." Emma says. Which isn't true. She's fairly conventionally attractive, even if she 'dresses down' some. "And the YouTube thing is more Aster's port of call, not mine." She gives a small shrug. "But your point is well taken. Maybe I need to be... unconventional." Arthur takes a deep breath through his nose. "How do I put this without getting sued and fired? You'd look great on video. I haven't met Aster. Does she do video? Maybe she can share her talents with you." Emma laughs a bit, putting a hand on Arthur for a moment, before shaking her head. "Meet Aster some time." She suggests. "She's... her own can of worms. But crazy in a good way." Emma shifts her weight again. "Maybe outside, in Measure 2 area, I could afford something. As an advantage, it'd be in a place where the near dimension doesn't look like a Art Decco painting..." Arthur shrugs. "That's where Rei has her lab, right? I thinks he told me that. Heh. MAybe you could use that old tech startup building we broke into to have the Chantry vote in. I can give you an address." Emma considers for a moment, before tilting her head to the side. "That's a thought..." She remarks, drawing off as if to consider it for a few moments. Eventually she shakes her head, like dismissing the deep contemplation for a moment. "Anyhow. If you have any ideas on how to pay for Chantry property, I'm all ears. So would Alexandra or Wednesday." She pauses, before making a face. "Economics. Bleh. Not why I went into Science." Arthur grins. "Pass around the offering plate. I'll put in what I can. I imagine we have a few others who can afford it. Frankly I'm surprised if Alexandra isn't well off herself." "We want to be fair to the people who can, and can't afford it." Emma says with a sigh. "Offering plate. Bleh." She adds, like the idea has a negative connotation in her mind. "We talked about dues, donations, endowments, and more. The devil's in the details." Arthur shrugs. "I don't mind paying a lot more to get this thing going than someone who lives on the streets. I would rather take a loan and pay it off over a few months, and get us a building in Measure 2, than have the whole thing fall apart. I'll pay for the whole dang thing myself if I have to. It's Detroit. Real estate isn't THAT expensive." Emma's eyebrows go up, and his comment gets get a slight nod from her. "Well... you're not wrong about that." She agrees. "Maybe it's worth another discussion as a group. I mean, Alexandra, Wednesday and I." Arthur nods again. "Please do tell them that. If I need to take a loan, and give 20 thousand or whatever, I'll do that." Emma holds up a hand. "Hopefully we don't need to take you up on that offer. But thank you." She says, offering him a wane smile. Looking around, she adds, "I suppose all this talk about lab space and economics and chantries... and I plain forgot what I came here for. Derp, where's my brain." She jokes, shaking her head. "Good to hear that you have this proceedure on the lock-down. I want to do some light recon - and by that I mean look with a telescope - to make sure we're not stepping into a land mine. But after that, I *think* we'd be good to go... unless you can think of more prep we should do for our expedition?" Arthur shrugs. "Well. Sounds good. I tthink Alma wnated to talk to you about what her role in this is. She wants to know how to prepare. Apart from that, we should be able to rent a dinghy and go." Emma's eyebrows go up, but she nods. "I'll go talk to Alma." She agrees, starting to head over to pickup her to-go cup. "Thanks for showing me the progress. This is great." She comments behind her, as she starts to head back upstairs and out. | |
