Hippie Log: Pixie & Hank (back-dated slightly)

[x-welshpixie.livejournal.com]

 Pixie’s heart pounded in her chest as she sat in Dr. McCoy’s office, staring at the final exam paper in front of her. She had studied for the physics exam all week, and was convinced that she wasn’t going to get more prepared than she was now. It was time to get this make-up test out of the way so she could focus on her current schoolwork.

Wiping her palms on her skinny jeans, she brought pencil to paper and tried to focus on answering the questions.

Here goes nothing... 

The minutes ticked by. Her anxiety began to abate as those answer bubbles got filled in one-by one, skipping only one that she was uncertain about.

Oh man, word problems...

Hank hung from the ceiling of his office, a part of him watching Megan as she carefully worked on her test, a part of him going over medical test results for Kevin and Wade, and a final part completing the daily Times crossword puzzle. The older mutant could tell that his young student was nervous- her voice had even quavered when he had welcomed her. He smiled as he realized that the answer for forty-eight down was nihilism, using his stylus to fill in the boxes in his scrawl before returning to the test results.

So because of the law of entropy... no, the conservation of matter... Argh, I know this one!

Pixie wished she could fish inside her own head and get the answers out. They were in there <i>somewhere</i>, probably buried under the memory bank of song lyrics or something equally useless. She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice the familiar burning sensation of her skin.

She didn’t notice it until it stopped, that is. Then she felt a little light-headed and the wood texture on the desk was popping out a little, like a hologram, the grain lines wavering slightly.

“Oh... cachi,” she swore softly in Welsh.

Without any windows open, her dust was settling about the office like a fine cloud of spore, moving on the faint air currents of the room. It was really too late to do anything now but wait out the effects.

“Ah, teacher? Dr. McCoy?”

Hank heard her swear, but was having a hard time caring as he switched off his touch pad. Why was he doing that? He dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch and slowly getting up. His head felt funny and his mouth was dry- and was it just his imagination or were the lights oscillating a bit more slowly all of a sudden.

“I need to... tell you something important.” The stuff that came out of her skin. What was it called? Some parts of her brain didn’t seem to be working correctly at the moment. She could almost feel her brain going through each concept she was thinking of and assigning words to it. Words that seemed really arbitrary and sort of funny at the moment. She stifled a giggle. This was serious!

Her teacher cracked a toothy smile and began to chuckle along with her, “What is it little pixie?”

“Dust,” she said simply, the word suddenly popping up in her mind like a text message. Then, “sorry.” She knew from experimentally dusting herself that there was no real way to control the hallucinations.

“I’ll just be in the back seat of my mind for a little while,” she said in her airy voice, turning the test over to the blank side.

“No need to be sorry, little miss. It’s a part of your powers and...” the doctor stopped in mid-sentence and looked to the back of the room where a giant ball of red yarn had materialized under a spotlight. “Bless my stars and garters,” he looked down at his giant hands, as if transfixed before looking back at the yarn which seemed to be calling to him.

“Stars and garters?” Pixie giggled. The teacher looked sort of like he was crying, because his blue color was melting down his face and hands and trickling down to join other colors pooling on the floor, but he didn’t sound sad. “You could be a waterfall,” she informed him casually, nodding her head contemplatively.

“Metaphysically we could all be waterfalls, actually,” Hank turned his attention back toward the young winged creature sitting on a giant mushroom in front of him. “All life is made up of the same matter and energy- only differing in the arrangement. You and I are actually no different from a waterfall- we are both primarily water and kinetic at that.” Hank was suddenly hungry...he wondered if the giant mushroom was edible.

“Wow, it’s so true,” Pixie agreed. “And all of our matter came from stars. So we’re basically all stardust, right? Some of it is arranged into waterfalls right now and some of it is in the forms of humans and mutants. Stardust, forming, dissolving and re-forming over time. Who knows where my stardust will go next or what shape it will be? We are all... connected with everything.”

“And if you take that into account then this limited exam doesn’t really matter,” Hank picked the piece of paper up off her desk and pulled out a pen that seemed to be alternating between blue and red from his breast pocket. “What grade do you want?”

Grades seemed sort of weird now, when she tried to think about it.
“X is good. It looks like a crossing, or things bringing together.” She could see crisscrossing patterns in the fibers of the paper that Dr. McCoy was now holding. “Grades are just like... something to keep us motivated. Everything needs a score so we’ll keep playing. Actually, we’d all keep playing without any scores or grades. But the school’s part of a game, too, and to keep playing it needs random proof that facts are being absorbed.”

Hank drew a large “X” on her paper which immediately began to run down the paper. “We learned long ago that education for the sake of learning is not enough to motivate the bourgeois student, little Pixie.” He handed the test back, “Good job though. I think you understand the material, right?”

Pixie nodded happily, accepting the grade-X paper. She felt like the finally understood the laws of physics for the first time. Everything was fluid and made sense.
“According to the principle of mass/matter conservation, mass cannot be created/destroyed, although it could be rearranged in space, or changed into different types of particles. So even a black hole doesn’t eliminate matter. If I fell into a black hole right now, Megan Gwynn would be eliminated but my particles would go on in some form. Maybe someday becoming the seeds for an entire new universe... whoa...” Maybe she’d invented time just so she could experience this moment and come to that realization.

The doctor nodded, stroking an imaginary beard as he jumped up onto the ceiling and perched there. “Precisely, and the lesson to take away from this is that we are all the same. You, me, he and she- I’m the walrus-” Hank chuckled to himself and let go with one foot, dangling himself a few feet off the floor. “That’s why we need to fight to protect one another from the people who see themselves as superior to one another. This is the only time that violence is acceptable. Remember that.”

Hank fell, rolling to a ball as he did and slumping against his desk, limp, “One more thing. Because you just expended some of your mass, I would presume that you need to ingest new energy to be converted into mass and potential energy within yourself. What would you say to visiting HB2.7 for some mocha-java-latte and digging up some pastries in the kitchen?”

“Oh, do let’s. I could use a spot of tea or... mocha-java-thingie. I’ve always wanted to see how the new machine rearranges particles,” she giggled. Something with the name HB2.7 sounded more like a piece of science equipment than a kitchen appliance, anyway.