hadriel_logs | log: bruce banner the science man

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log: bruce banner the science man

Who: Bruce Banner, Arya "Nymeria" Stark, and open!
What: Dr. Banner is giving science lessons!
Where: The clinic.
When: Tuesday, December 8
Warnings: No safety goggles were worn during the conducting of these experiments.

Arya still isn't quite sure what a "clinic" is. All she knows is that Bruce seems to spend an awful lot of time there, and that it's the only building in the city that's properly painted. Arya figures it's something from Bruce and Steve's world, but she doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want to appear like some kind of know-nothing, after all.

She would have come sooner, had she not changed her face. Face-swapping takes a toll on someone as inexperienced as she is. There's a period of shock, and after that, Arya had to separate her memories from the dead girl's. When Arya does arrive, she does so quietly, almost tentatively. Bruce won't recognize her, she's certain of it. What if he throws her out? That's what Arya would do, if she was in Bruce's position.

Arya stands in the entryway of the clinic, chewing her bottom lip and filled with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity.

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"Hello." Says Bruce, friendly, but without any actual recognition there. Her face is different, and he knows nothing about this art, so to him, she's just a stranger.

"Can I help you?"

Arya isn't exactly sure how to tell Bruce that she's really Nymeria, since Nymeria herself was a lie in the first place. She has to remember that she's no one. No one doesn't have any real identity. She can't be someone, not truly. She's silent for a moment, but eventually manages, "You told a girl that you had...science to show her."

She squirms slightly, because this face is not supposed to have that memory, but she wants to keep the memory so, so badly. Bruce doesn't make her uneasy like so many of the other people here do. "She is here."

Bruce pauses, holding his glasses mid-polish, and gives her a look over, head to toe.

"I'm sorry."

He says, very honestly.

"I- I have to admit, I don't understand."

Arya shakes her head, visibly frustrated. "I --"

There's a voice in the back of her head. It's the Kindly Man, reminding her that those things did not happen to her. She has a new face, therefore, she is a new person. She isn't supposed to remember, she's doing it wrong, all wrong.

"A girl," she corrects, "Said the words. And you were quiet for a moment, and then you spoke of science. So she came, but she is different, she is not herself, she--"

Arya takes a deep breath, trying to keep herself calm.

"Valar morghulis." One girl died, and she is here. Hopefully, Bruce can make the connection now.

"-all right."

Says Bruce, and one of the best things that can be said for him is that he is a self-contained man, and placid- on the surface, at least, even when his stomach is constricting with worry for his young friend. He sees her before him- and not, at the same time, but this will have to do.

"All right. My name's Bruce. Bruce Banner. What can I call you, Miss-?"

"Nymeria," she responds. She has to justify it, though, because that was the name of another girl. Mercy likely never knew the story. "Nymeria was a false name. A lie. So this girl can have it, too."

She hopes that the reasoning is solid enough. She's still worried that the Kindly Man will hear of this -- and punish her accordingly. After he took her sight, he threatened to take her ears and legs too, and the thought still scares her.

"Okay, Nymeria."

He says, with a sincere nod.

"Nym, so we know the difference. What kind of science are you interested in learning today? We can do- how people work, how weather works, how the world itself works."

"You know all those things?" Arya's eyes grow wide. That's a lot for just one person. She's not even sure that the maesters knew that much.

"Everything," she gushes. There's just enough of the curious child left in her to make her very excited. "All of it. But first, weather. Especially winter." Winter is her favorite, but it's also scary. Winter kills. She's never seen it, not properly.

"Okay."

Says Bruce, and claps his hands together.

"To start with, then, we're going to talk about matter- which is the stuff the world is made of. Wait here."

While he goes and gets what he needs; namely, a little stovetop cook kit he scrounged from one of the stores, with a burner surface, and then a chip of ice from the freezing until they scrounged up from one of the housing units.

"Here's ice- which is, of course, a solid. And a cold one, at that. Feel."

While he gets them plugged in, and the heat turned on.

"Matter," she repeats, softly, so she remembers. Got it.

Arya stares at the small stovetop when Bruce brings it over. It's similar to the stove in their house, but smaller. Arya didn't know they were made so small. Does it still hold the same power? She supposes she'll find out.

She pets the ice gingerly, like she's worried she'll break it. She isn't worried about that, of course -- she has plenty of experience with ice from back when she was really Arya Stark. But there's a part of her that's not sure if she's allowed to do this. It makes her think of home, but she's not supposed to remember that home.

"It's cold, but nice," she says at last.

"It's a solid, right?"

He says, taking it gently from her, and setting it on top of the burner.

"Everything in the world is made up of what we call 'particles,' little dots of matter that are clumped together to make things. When something is cold, the particles move really slowly."

He shows her with his ten fingertips, bouncing them together in the air and affecting slight twitches, but letting her see how tightly packed they are.

"They move slow, so they can stay really close together, and that's what makes them a solid. But what happens to ice when you add heat?"

"Yes," she says. "I can't pass through it unless I break it, and even then, I couldn't pass through the little pieces, not even if they were very, very small."

Steve had said everything was made of cells. That when cells die, a person dies. "So everything is always moving at all times?" she asks, curious. "And when you kill the particles, you kill the matter, like people and cells?"

She didn't know you could kill ice. That's frightening.

She makes the same motion with her own fingertips. So the ice does that too? How strange.

"It melts," she says, confidently. "I've seen it."

"We're talking about a level a little bit smaller than cells. You know how you look at a building, and it's one building? It's made of bricks. And those are how cells work. They're the little living bricks that make us up; you, me, and everything that's living. But just like a brick is made of stone or clay, a cell is made of particles."

Scale is something they can work on later.

"Cells are living, but ice isn't- it's made up of non-living particles, so you can't really kill them the same way you can kill a cell. What we're doing today is adding energy to our ice. Heat, which is the energy, will go into the particles and make them get excited, and begin to move faster."

Showing her with his fingers, affecting the tips shifting to higher speed, bouncing off one another, and taking up more space.

"Can you see what's happening?"

And clay is made of little tiny pieces of rock and water that let you bend it and shape it, to make pots and things. She's seen it. "Then what are particles made of? Can I make a particle?"

If she could make particles, then couldn't she make anything she wanted? She could make another direwolf. She could make an army of direwolves.

She nods, and says, "The particles are moving really fast. Because the heat came. The heat makes them excited, or scared, and they want to get out of their space, right?" She pauses, thinking hard. "But if they're moving because of the heat, doesn't that mean it'll get bigger?" She doesn't feel bigger when she's warm. Maybe that only happens to really small things.

"That comes much later. You have to understand the basics."

He says, slowing her back down, nodding at their icechip; which is now a bead of water on the heating surface.

"They get enough room between them that they change to a liquid. You're right, that it does get bigger; a box with ice in it, if you let it melt, will have water spill out over the surface. Now, if we keep adding heat, what happens to our water next?"

The little drop of water is so small. Arya's not sentimental enough to find it cute, but she is a little mystified by it. Where she comes from, water is like the Blackwater or the Trident -- big, rushing, powerful and dangerous. This looks fragile. Arya doesn't trust herself around fragile.

She has a small, proud grin on her face. She was right. "It boils," she says confidently. "Like Weasel Soup." She's killed a man with boiling water. She knows all about it.

"Exactly."

He says, with another approving nod, and a serious little smile, lifting his hands again to show the movement increasing, and eventurally spreading even wider.

"Which brings us to the third, and most excited state; gas. As the water boils, it turns into steam and vapor, and disperses into the atmosphere. When you boil a kettle and it starts steaming, it's letting you know it's so hot that some of it is turning to gas. If you keep it on the fire all night, eventually you boil all of it away, and up into the atmosphere. There's actually quite a lot of water that ends up evaporated by the sun, circling through the air."

And in the meantime, he goes to find them a few things; the first is a pot of water, the second is a small beaker, and the third is a dish of the sugar he's scrounged and keeps around for tea.

"When you look up and see clouds in the sky, that's what they are; pillars and shapes made of water vapor, hanging in the air. That's why fog feels wet on your skin, too."

Woah.

She's not really sure how Bruce knows this, or if any of this is really true, but she figures it doesn't matter. It's plausible enough, and it explains why water falls out of the sky as rain. Farmers used to talk about gods controlling that sort of thing, but the weather is too big of a job for just one god to control. The fact that water does it on its own, as if it knows what it's supposed to do, is amazing.

"But there are no clouds here," she responds, "so where does that steam go?" She points at the kettle. She hasn't seen any weather here in the past few months, come to think of it.

"So if you had enough fog, could you swim in it?" That sounds much gentler than swimming in a river or lake. Those have currents, and currents can drown you, but no one ever drowns in fog.

She looks at the beaker, brow furrowed. It's a curious little glass tube, and she's never seen that kind before. "What's that for?"

"Hah- not quite. What happens as the water gets thicker and begins to form into drops, which becomes rain. Fog is more air than water, which is why you can breathe it, and when it thickens up too much it falls from the sky."

He puts the beaker on the flame instead of their steaming droplet, to get the new water good and warm. But here's why he started this lecture;

"When the weather becomes very, very cold, the condensation up in the sky moves not just from gas to water, but sometimes from water all the way to delicate, tiny little flakes of ice crystals, so small that they fall from the sky as--?"

He glances up at her at this moment, to be sure she has it.

"Snow!"

Arya beams at him, quickly, before going back to her tougher, more neutral expression. She loves snow. Snow was where Winterfell was. Snow, like Needle, is home. "It -- it used to snow all the time. Back --" something in her throat catches. "Before."

She doesn't trust herself to say home. That would be a lie.

"Are you going to make snow?" she asks, hastily changing the subject. Can people even do that?

"I can't do that without some fancy equipment."

He admits, with a little shake of his head.

"What I'm going to do is show you what I mean about there being space between particles. With all these things, it's easy to understand when someone says it, but better when you can actually see. We've just got to wait a minute for the water to warm up. So do you have any questions so far?"

Arya's eyes widen nevertheless. "But you can make snow? For true? With the right equipment?"

Honestly, Arya's not sure why he didn't tell her that from the beginning. He warned her about the big green anger situation, but isn't the bit about the snow just as important? Arya knows plenty of people who are deadly when they're angry, but she doesn't know many people who can make snow.

She shakes her head no. "Will we get to see the particles?"

"Yes. But-"

So can every ski hill in the country. But.

"Probably not in Hadriel. Anyways- it's not so much a matter of seeing particles, as it is- well, you know how when you see a building from a distance, you can't see the individual stones or bricks it's made of? It's like that. With the naked eye, you can't see a particle."

But;

"What we'll get to see is evidence. I think it's almost ready-"

And he sets up the beaker. It, he fills to the top with water that's shy of boiling, but certainly hot enough to steam up the glass as he tips it in. He fills it right to the top, then a little more, until it's just about to spill over, until a few drops do, trickling down the sides of the glass. Then, he offers her the teaspoon.

"Add a spoon more of water. You'll see it roll over the edges- because the beaker is as full as it possibly can be of those kinds of particles. You can't fit water between water, right?"

But of course, that's what the sugar is for.

Arya's never seen a ski hill, or even heard of one. Bruce will have to save that lesson for another day, because if Arya ever hears about it, she's going to want to visit one right now.

She takes the spoon and gently, gently fills the beaker with water. It overflows as expected, and Arya nods solemnly. A job well done.

"You can't put something in a full container without it overflowing," she adds. "That's what it means to be full." She's got this. She's a regular junior scientist, probably.

"Unless you find something that fits into the spaces between the particles."

He says, and offers her the sugar.

"Add it slowly, a little bit at a time, and see."

The water is warm enough that the crystals will saturate into the liquid almost instantly, and she can probably get two, three whole teaspoons in without spilling more than a drop, while Bruce sits his elbows on the table and lowers himself down to watch, where the water stays level at the top of the beaker.

"So now you're seeing them, the spaces between particles."

She takes the sugar and looks back at Bruce, skeptical. There's space between the little bits of water, small drops that she can't see? Sugar-sized spaces? She doesn't quite believe him, but she'll give it a go nonetheless.

She takes a small spoonful of sugar and shakes it into the boiling water, slowly. It doesn't overflow. Mystified, she shakes another spoonful in, then peers closely, watching the sugar do its magic. Because it is magic, Arya's decided. That doesn't make it any less true. Science is magic, obviously, because wonders like that can't be anything but.

"It's real," she says out of sheer amazement. It's like learning that fairies or goblins are real. "Not just a story." She looks back at Bruce. "Could you do that with other liquids, too? Like wine or ale or melted chocolate?"

"You know, in principle, yes, but we'd have to do experiments to find out what those spaces are like, what things the liquid can absorb."

He says, with a little smile.

"We'd test, and test, and through that process of learning, we'd eventually know."

"Is that what you did?" Arya asks, curious. Bruce seems to really enjoy this, after all. "Before you came to Hadriel? Testing things so you could know all about them?"

It doesn't seem like such a bad life. Like a maester, minus the chains.

"Exactly. I tested different things, but this, just this, is where I started."

He turns off the burner, and settles back in his chair.

"See, the way it works, is not everyone tests everything. They do a bit, and they write it down, and share it with the world, so some of the stuff you have to do yourself, and some of the stuff you know by looking up. That way, working together, we can make a massive project that helps everyone to understand the world. I didn't have to learn about the space between particles from scratch, because someone had already tried this long ago."

Returning to houses;

"Like the generations before us have laid the foundations, built the rafters and the walls of a castle, and now it's to us to carve the statues and the decorations in the mantles and whatnot. Specializing on intricate, peculiar work."

"Then what do you test?" Arya gets the sense that this was baby stuff; the sort of thing that everybody in Bruce's world probably knows. "Is that why you have all the...technology? Stoves and pencils and things like that?"

Because if a person knows enough about the world, Arya figures, they can do great things with it. Like make pencils, or their own snow. It's a kind of power, she realizes, that is totally separate from axes and swords and lances.

She's blushing, slightly, because all those questions must be so basic. Arya knows how to stick someone with the pointy end, but when it comes to this, she knows nothing.

"It's part of the reason. Stoves, and pencils, are all things I grew up around. The way a sword is native to you as breathing, but I'd drop one within two seconds of holding it, it's just about what you've known and how long you've been doing something."

Assuring her as- why not, he decides to go get a little tea on, make use of that hot water.

"What I tested was how invisible kinds of changes in the air impact people's bodies."

As natural, and as necessary for survival as breathing. Stoves and pencils are nice, but when it comes down to it, she'd rather have Needle than anything else.

Arya follows Bruce, paying special attention to the air. She's trying to detect invisible changes on her own, whether it's smell or temperature or even a very faint sound.

"What did you learn?"

"I accidentally developed the tecnology to create what turned out to be my condition- the berserking that I explained to you. Now, I work on it's reversal."

Primarily, when he isn't distracted by saving the world, or building a murderbot, or whatnot.

Never forget that murderbots are essential to the progress of science. Plus, they're almost as cool as swords.

"What were the invisible things in the air?" Maybe it's those same things that cause her to have the wolf dreams. She hasn't had a single one here; there might not be those invisible, magic things in the cave air.

"It's called gamma radiation."

He admits, even though this is kind of a huge jump down the line. He'll keep the explanation as mild as he can.

"Think of it as- how you hold your hands up to a fire, and feel the heat of it on your fingers. The fire doesn't reach you, but the change in energy in the air does. This is another kind of small change that can happen that drifts through space."

So it's another kind of heat, then. That makes some sense, although she gets the feeling that Bruce isn't telling her the whole story. That's fine. There's a lot she isn't telling him, either.

"Can it be directed at a person?" Like, say, a Lannister. "Is it lethal?" Could she watch them die screaming, strangled by invisible heat?

This kind of science is terribly useful.

"Not unless you want what happened to me to happen to them."

He says, and then glances up at her, trying to remember all of the details she has.

"I have gamma poisoning, from an unsuccessful experiment involving intense exposure. Bad things happen when I get angry, I told you that?"

Good. Poisoning is good. Arya nods, not exactly happy, but satisfied. She has knowledge of a weapon that the people on her list do not, and that gives her a kind of power right there. It's reassuring, almost empowering.

"Yes. You said you turned green, and I was supposed to run away if that happened, as quickly as possible."

"Exactly. But that was a very unusual situation. Normally, it would just kill you- so luckily, it's very difficult to produce."

Which would normally be reassuring.

It's very reassuring, actually. She wouldn't want to accidentally turn Cersei Lannister into a large, green rage monster. The difficulty might be a problem, however, and Arya thinks she'll just stick with swords and daggers, thank you very much. Science is interesting, but it's hard.

"But if it's something that you've made, can't you simply take it out of you? Maester Luwin leeched me once. He said it would take all the poisons out of my blood or something, but mostly, it just made me very dizzy. I think I had a lot of poisons." She shrugs. Arya wouldn't want Bruce to get dizzy too, but it might help.

"Never let anyone leech you, if you can help it."

Says Bruce, making a face.

"It's an old idea and we're not doing that any more. It just takes a lot of your blood, which makes you dizzy."

"I knew it!" Arya grins. "Leeching was terrible. I had to lie down and not move while they put all these squirmy things on me." Unsurprisingly, Arya was not a child who was particularly good at keeping still. She's more than happy that Bruce won't ever try to leech her. Not that she'd let him, anyway.

"You've got good instincts."

He says, as he moves to clean up this experiment.

"And I'll think of what to learn next, but that's it for now."

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log: bruce banner the science man

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