[Episode 173298] [Episode 173298]“And Hotaru?” asked Professor Sochiro Tomoe of his daughter, trying to sound detached.
“Oh, she’s fine,” replied Doctor Mizuno. “Perfectly normal other than she keeps showing up in Ranma’s room.”
“Some teleportation ability?” asked an eager young member of the press.
“What!? Oh, no, Jimmy, she walks in, of course,” Professor Sochiro explained. Straight passed the hospital security he didn’t add, but how would they stop her, after all. “She wasn’t aboard the JHCX-01 at all. She’s just concerned about her friends.”
“Ranma anyway,” Doctor Mizuno added, “I think she has a crush on him.”
Sochiro hurumphed as the press scribbled down a possible lead on an human interest angle. “Never mind about that. Is it safe?”
“She calms him down,” the Doctor replied. “That seems to help his control. In any case, your cute little cyborg has been wind tunnel tested at hurricane level so there’s no problem. You worry about her too much.” Implying that he hadn’t worried about her daughter so much when he sent her into a parallel universe. “I’d be more concerned about her near Miss Kino or Miss Aino, but she doesn’t have a crush on them.”
Sochiro grumped again, then turned his attention back to the monitors. The camera in Makoto’s room had, again, shorted out due to frequent electrical surges. The one in Minoko’s room was broadcasting, but the monitor showed only static from the electromagnetic interference. “Hotaru’s cybernetics are designed to be resistant to EMP,” he commented proudly, “but still…” He wasn’t about to take any more chances with his precious daughter.
“And Usagi?” a voice coughed.
“Who? Ah, Miss Tsukino,” the Professor nodded, and wondered again why he’d let himself include her on the voyage. Of course, since nobody but Ami had taken his theories seriously he had to make do with what he had. Mostly the girls had been easy to work with, easy on his old eyes too, but that one had been trouble from the start. Too bad he hadn’t been able to use chimps, they would have been easier to train for the mission. Safer and much more intelligent too. Easier to talk to too, though not as easy on the eye. Ah, yes there had been advantages to having five pretty lab assistants despite the drawback of one being such a klutz. All in all he was glad those five had answered his help wanted add. …
“Ahem. She seems fine, Mister Chiba,” Doctor Mizuno interjected, noting that the Sochiro’s mind had wandered into absent minded professor mode. “She is perfectly healthy as a matter of fact, aside from that odd glow.”
That the silver glowing Usagi was perfectly healthy was, as a point of information, an understatement. She was more healthy than a sixteen-year-old coming out of such an accident had a right to be. Her skin was unblemished despite several now non-existent scars noted in her medical record. Her teeth were free of cavities, including the fillings on her dental charts. Doctor Mizuno half suspected that if she explored she’d discover that the girl’s appendix had regenerated. She wouldn’t be surprised at all after noticing that a small cut she herself had suffered getting the crew out of the shuttle had healed up while handling the girl. That odd silver glow had possibly helped the crew survive as much as Ranma had by keeping the air from venting.
“I’d like to keep her in for observation none the less, Mister Chiba,” she added, “but aside from problems controlling their... new abilities, they all seem healthy enough.” Her voice was polite, if a little cold. Some things a mother could not tolerate. Sochiro had merely sent her daughter through a wormhole into another dimension without so much as asking her so much as to sign a permission slip, but he was a lovable absent minded professor. However, she hadn’t warmed to the young male model at all after discovering he was romantically inclined towards one of her daughter’s friends.
“Nincompoops! Bobble-headed boobies!”
Professor Sochiro Tomoe tossed the paper aside and grumbled some more. The world was finally taking note of his research and they got it all wrong. It wasn’t a rocket at all... it used simple altitude jets to travel through another freaking universe! But no, they ignored the implications for real space travel to focus on the side effects. He hadn’t set out to create ‘super humans’. How could he have expected Dark Energy to have that effect? No more, he admitted, that the Curies had anticipated the effect of radiation.
The press weren’t alone in totally missing the true potential of subspace. Government funding was finally being offered, but no one seemed interested in his desire to develop shielding to prevent such accidents in future exploration. No, the fools from military ‘intelligence’ were only interested in the possibility of duplicating the exposure. It was Hotaru’s accident all over again. He offered new frontiers of exploration and expansion, and they wanted super-soldiers.
Still, despite the setbacks to subspace exploration, he was, as a scientist, fascinated by the results of the exposure. He could measure the way Rei excited molecules into plasma arcs, but from where did she gather the needed energy and how did she transfer it? He could theorize that she tapped into the Dark Energy, or that Ami likewise shunted thermal energy into subspace, but how did they do it? How did Ranma control currents of air, or sense the gaseous components? How did Minako produce and sense electromagnetic radiation? What mechanism generated the fields? What organ provided the sensory data? And where did the surplus electron’s Makoto discharged come from, and where did those she absorbed go? He could theorise about subspace batteries, but how did she connect to them, and why were her biological systems unaffected by conducting such currents?
And what, exactly, was the energy Usagi radiated? He could see it, but it didn’t show up on any spectrograph or react to photosensitive media. It’s effects were almost like Hotaru’s medical nanomachines, but much more effective and completely undetectable besides that false visual impression.
Sochiro Tomoe wasn’t the only one not so very pleased with the press.
“I refuse to be called, ‘Hot Babe’!” Rei snarled, incidentally incinerating her fourth copy of a paper. At least she wasn’t incinerating much else any more.
“Why do we have to have ‘code names’ at all?” Ranma complained as he tossed one paper down and picked up another. “It ain’t like we got no ‘secret identities’ now or nothing. Feh. An’ I ain’ gonna be called ‘Kamikaze’ neithah. Huh. ‘Windrider’ don’t sound so bad…”
“It’s an American press thing,” Minako explained. “Don’t leave home without it. They’re going to give us code names whether we like it or not, so we better pick one we’re comfortable with before the press conference. Mmm… Lightshow? Golden Girl? Yech! Laser Lady? Rad Girl? Hummm…”
“We’re the first astronauts in subspace,” Ami complained, “and all they can think of is making us out to be celebrity power heroes or something.”
“So what do you want to be?” Makoto asked. “Yuki Oni? Icemaiden? Blue Ice Space Ranger? Ice Queen?—Oh, and they even suggest you wear an ‘IQ’ emblem! … Or you could just stick with Miss Scholastic?”
“I don’t think so… Shocker,” Ami replied.
“I was thinking maybe Thunderstorm,” Makoto reflected. Nice an powerful sounding.
“Hey! Can I be ‘Astro Girl?’”
“Uhm, no I don’t think so, Hotaru,” a no-longer glowing Usagi answered gently. “Sorry, you’re not part of this and your father’d like to keep it that way.”
“Looks like you’re bolting the stable door after the horse has ran away with the spoon,” Minako pointed out, pointing to a headline reading: “Cyborg girl visits super boy. Is romance in the air?”
And so when the press conference rolled around:
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(Posted Mon, 22 Jan 2007 05:02)
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