by Silas Vale
"Okay." She sighed, pressing her lips into a thin line as she examined his face. "I'll let Blake know that you're staying the night tonight. Be warned, she's going to tease you, but she'll stop if you tell her to." She shrugged her shoulders, and after a moment smiled slightly. "I can show you all of my equipment and projects in my apartment. I've done some pretty cool stuff if I do say so myself." She seemed to be looking forward to it.
She liked talking about their work. It was actually quite fun.
He nodded his head, glad they'd finally reached an agreement.
He would be very, very uncomfortable sleeping somewhere that wasn't his apartment, however. He was used to having his own personal space, and having that taken away would be… Interesting.
They had reached the door to the lab, crossing through the school's courtyard, and he opened it with a key on his ring. The hallways lit up like they had before, and he held the doors open.
"After you, oh-so-gracious savior."
"Oh, whatever." She rolled her eyes, stepping through the door and beginning to walk down the hallway. She felt more at ease knowing he would be safe, and she really didn't mind having him stay in her apartment. He was quite kind, and was an interesting person to talk to. She was sure even Blake would warm up to him after she got to know him and figured out the rumors were false.
And they definitely were. They had to be. Nych was a good person.
"So. What are we going to work on today?" She raised an eyebrow, glancing in his direction.
"Well, we need to figure out how to build the nanobots. Considering a transistor is less than a nanometer now, we have to figure out how to get all of our programming into something we can't even see. It'll be… Difficult. That's why it's never been done before."
It would be a challenge, even for Willow Grace.
"Once we get that done, it should be smooth sailing. I've already got the chip programmed with the cancer killing instructions, we just have to make and program the bot to do it."
He walked over to a table, smiling as he did so.
"First, however, I'd like to show you something else."
"Oh really?" She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head to the side as she set her things down on a nearby table. She was curious, because she had no clue what he was going to show her. He was a complete mystery to her, and it was incredibly fascinating. There were so many projects, so many things that he just… Knew. And she loved it, because she had someone engaging to talk to. Someone who challenged her own intelligence.
And that hadn't happened in a long time.
"Alright. Show me." She walked over to him, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
With that, he pulled a sheet off of whatever was on the table, revealing…
A very strange looking machine.
"You've heard the old tales, right? Of alchemists turning lead into gold?"
No way…
"I have." She raised her brows, looking over at him and then down at the machine on the table.
There was no way he’d actually figured out alchemy, right? It was impossible. Scientists had tried for hundreds of years, and had no success. There was no way in hell that he would've been able to do it.
… Right?
"… So where are you going with this?" She asked after a second. "What does this do?"
He laughed lightly, looking down at the machine fondly.
"We've come a long way since the Large Hadron Collider, dear Willow. This little thing… It's another pet project of mine. It's not the smallest of its kind, but it’s definitely the fanciest. And the most powerful."
He looked to her, his eyes full of mischief.
"What I'm saying is that this machine can turn lead into gold."
Willow stared at him for a couple of seconds, a sparkle coming to her eye.
This was remarkable. And there she was, standing right in front of it. Fuck- she was talking to its creator. Nych would no doubt go down in history, and he had already achieved so much in the few years he had been on the Earth.
"Show me."
Her voice was soft, but alight with excitement. She wanted to see this thing in action.
"Of course." He said, a smile on his face as he took a tube from underneath the table. Inside of it was what looked like a rock, and when he held it up to the light, it had a dull sort of sheen. It was strange.
"This is pure lead. You know chemistry; it has an atomic number of eighty-two." He opened the tube and dumped the rock into the opening of the machine, and then closed the top.
"You'll also know that gold has an atomic number of seventy-nine. That's only three protons in the way. And considering this machine works very, very quickly… Watch."
He pressed a button on the front, and the inside of it seemed to explode.
In reality, it was billions of lasers, all only the width of a proton, all slicing through the lead in multiple different spots, making it nearly impossible to see.
"The machine works by utilizing the three extra protons and assembling them into lithium, while leaving the gold behind. The gold would normally be an unstable isotope, but the machine also corrects that by either adding or removing unnecessary neutrons. So, when it's finished…"
Right when he said it, the lasers stopped, revealing two rocks in the center.
One was much smaller than the other, and was obviously the lithium.
But the other… Was a solid chunk of gold.
"Wow." Her voice left her in a breathy whisper, and she gaped at the chunk of gold within the chamber. It was remarkable, and… Could make a lot of money. If someone could just produce gold like it was nothing, they'd be rich. They'd put gold miners out of business with tech like this.
She grinned, looking over at Nych. "This is incredible! You built this all yourself?" She tilted her head to the side, and then laughed.
He was amazing.
"This is… I- wow." She ran her hands up into her hair. "Alchemy. You're literally an alchemist."
He shook his head with a laugh, looking to her with a smile. "No, dear, I am merely a chemist. A chemist who, instead of doing the easy thing and turning mercury into gold, decided to take the route of the fairy tales and turn lead into gold."
He smiled, handing her the chunk of gold. "I don't use this machine often, because I could flood the market and make gold essentially worthless, but… This should be at least a couple months' rent. That should definitely help a medical student."
He was just… Giving her a chunk of gold worth thousands of dollars?
Talk about a nice guy
She held the gold in both of her hands and looked up at him with shock. He couldn't just be giving this to her, right? This was an extremely valuable chunk of metal, and she didn't know what she had done to deserve it.
"I-" She looked down at the gold, and then back up at him. Shaking her head, she held it back out towards him. "I can't take this."
It was far more valuable than anything she deserved.
Nych rolled his eyes, nodding towards the machine that had just created the highly valuable chunk of metal. "Listen, Willow. You see that machine right there? It can do that however many times I want. So, I would like to make you aware that the piece of metal you're holding right now has no value to me, other than being a pretty decoration. Therefore, because I know you could probably use the money that would come from selling it, I'm giving it to you. So just take it, and don't complain. If you really want, you can use it to fund some party or something. I hear you're into those."
He winked at her, and then turned away, as if he hadn't just helped her substantially with her student loans.
Medical school was expensive.
"So! Ready to cure cancer?"
She stared at the back of his head for a second or two, and then looked down at the chunk of gold in her hands.
She supposed she might as well take it.
"As ready as I've ever been." She set the piece of gold down on top of her binder, turning towards him a
nd pulling her hair back with an elastic band she had on her wrist. "So, what do you have in store for us today, oh wise one?" She said teasingly, walking up behind him with a grin.
She was excited.
"Today, I want to see your skill at working with small robotics. It won't be working with the things tiny enough for our job, but it'll give you a good feel for the mechanics and how everything will be put together. I've been able to build the robot at a scale of ten times bigger than required, but anything smaller than that, I start to… Well, fail."
His voice sounded strained as he said that, and for the first time, Willow wondered why he had such an interest in the cure to cancer.
"Here you are." He said, walking her over to one of the longer tables in the room. In front of them, painted on the walls, were blueprints related to very tiny robots.
And spread across the table were very, very small robotics parts, some of them too small to even be visible. They sat underneath glass domes with labels to show they were there.
"Let's see what you can do."
"Alright." She walked over to the table, and after a second sat down, taking a moment to examine the blueprints and commit them to memory. She soon started to piece the tiny robot together, only glancing up at the blueprints a couple of times.
"So." Her fingers were gentle, and remarkably steady. She held her tools without a shake, which Nych couldn’t manage. That was because of his… Problem. "Blake told me some rumors. About you."
She wanted to let him know what she had heard. "Apparently people think you're sick. Like. Literally. They think you have some disease or illness and that's why you won't talk to anybody." She cast him a brief glance before returning to her work. "And that you experiment on animals and people and shit. I don't believe any of it, really."
Nych's face slowly paled as she made her statements, but by the end of it, he simply sighed. "Well, I suppose rumors do spread like wildfire around here. I'll tell you what I've done, with no lies."
Oh? So he'd actually done one of those things?
"The only time I ever experimented on an animal was my kitten, when she was bitten by some animal and got rabies. I loved her to death, so I tried my best to find a cure for her. Eventually, she passed away. I couldn't do anything to help her."
Oh…
"And I've experimented on a person once. Because they volunteered to test my cure for malaria. I flew out to Africa and administered my cure for the first time. It worked."
So they were true, but the rumors made him out to be much more… Disturbed than he actually was.
"As for me being sick… I do have an illness, but it hasn't affected my life so far, and I don't really want to talk about it. It's definitely not the reason I don't talk to people."
Willow listened to him speak, and nodded slowly. "I didn't really expect any of the rumors to hold much truth." She said after a moment, narrowing her eyes as she fiddled with some very small parts. "It's okay, though. Now that you're hanging out with me, I bet a bunch will dwindle off. Nobody fucks with me or my friends."
She was very confident in that statement, and why wouldn't she be? She was Willow Grace. Nobody messed with a Grace.
"… I'm sorry about your kitten." She said after a moment, and frowned. "I've always considered getting a cat, but seeing how often I'm out of the house and how much equipment I have in my apartment… I wouldn't want them to get lonely or hurt."
"That makes sense. I used to be home a lot, because that was before…"
He trailed off, electing not to the continue the sentence. His face told that he didn't want her to ask about it, and he walked over to check on her machine. She had, very quickly, assembled the tiny robot that had been depicted on the blueprints.
"You put this together well, but make sure your wires are in just the right spots. That's not usually a problem, but considering we're going to have to build something smaller than a nanometer… We will need the wires to be placed very specifically."
He was right.
In that moment, after speaking, he fell to one knee, a hand clutching at his chest. He didn't make any sound while doing so; it was almost dismissible as purposeful. Only the thud of his knee against the floor and the very slight wrinkle of his shirt in his hand.
… What the hell?
Willow opened her mouth to respond, but stopped when she examined his current condition. She frowned slightly, setting her tools down on the desk and turning towards him. "… Hey, you doing okay?" She was a nursing student, obviously, and this wasn't something that he would be able to brush off so easily. Not to mention the fact that Willow Grace was one of the most stubborn women he would ever meet.
Her concern amplified after a second, and she moved to kneel down in front of him.
"… Nych?"
After a few seconds, he looked up to her, lines of what seemed to be pain quickly fading from his face.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm good. Hey… Can you show me that diner?"
What?
"I'm kinda… Well, I need to get out of this place. The underground. And well… I could eat. Would you take me there?"
She stared at him for a couple seconds, and then after a moment held her hand out towards him to help him up as she stood. She wasn't sure what had just transpired, and she was worried, but he didn't really seem like the kind of guy to open up the second someone asked him anything.
Doesn't mean she couldn't try.
"Alright." She raised an eyebrow at him. "But you have to tell me what that just was. If you keel over and have a heart attack while eating a burger without warning me, I'm gonna be pissed."
He took her hand and pulled himself up, and admittedly, he felt weak. But he'd be alright. This wasn't the first episode of that nature he had experienced.
"I… Maybe later." He said, though his voice told that he'd never want to tell her what was ailing him.
It was likely linked to the mysterious disease he'd claimed to have.
"So we're bussing there, right?" He asked, walking next to her as they made their way toward the exit.
Willow kept a close eye on them as they walked, grabbing her things as she went and pulling her hair back down so it tumbled in wild curls down her back. "Yeah. I'm saving up for a car, but the traffic here is a nightmare. Honestly, sometimes it's faster to just walk or bus, because at least then you'll know you'll be there relatively on time." She shrugged her shoulders, squinting slightly as they came out into the sunlight.
She glanced around at the people in the courtyard around them, and then looked back towards Nych.
"… Tell me if you need a break, okay?" She tilted her head to the side and frowned a little bit. "I’ve got long-ass legs, so I walk pretty fast."
He nodded his head as he locked the cellar door behind him, walking beside her. He, too, walked decently fast, and pretty much kept up with Willow. There was a slight limp, however, in his step. If one hadn't been looking, they wouldn't have noticed.
Had that always been there?
"So did you move here from Scotland? Or were you born here?" He asked, trying to make conversation as they approached the bus stop.
They didn't, after all, know much about each other.
She slowed slightly to give him a bit of a break, leading the two of them through the campus so they could get to the bus exchange. "I was born here. My parents immigrated here from Scotland a couple years before they had me." She didn't ask how he knew she was Scottish, it was blatantly obvious. She was practically a walking stereotype, truth be told. "They own some property outside of the city limits. Couple acres."
That was interesting. Were they farmers, or ranchers perhaps? A lot of land outside of Vancouver was used for that sort of thing.
"What about you?" She raised an eyebrow. "Where is your family from?"
"I was born in the States." He said, though there wasn't much pride in his voice with that statement. "In between the states of bumfuck and nowhere. That is to say, right on the state line of Wyoming and
Montana. My parents… They weren't very happy with my aspirations toward technology."
It made sense. Most of the people in those parts of the USA nowadays were inhibitive conservatives, a newer party trying to hold back progress of technology. Not everyone, of course, but a good percentage. His parents were a part of that percentage.
"When I was sixteen I stole a bunch of jewelry from my mother and made my way here, on a bus. That was a hellish, terrifying ride, especially at the border. But I'd gotten all my documents and passport legally, and they let me through without a hitch. When I sold the jewelry, I got an apartment for two months, and during that time I built my machine that could change lead into gold."
Wow. His life… Was interesting.
"And then I bought a chunk of lead with what I had left and turned it into gold, sold it, and that's how I've been living ever since."
Willow stared at him for a couple seconds, slowly nodding. "Wow… That's really impressive, actually." She sent him a glance, brows furrowed slightly as she examined his face. He could be incredibly rich if he wanted to, judging by the machine he had down in the laboratory. She had to wonder why he lived in an apartment in what she assumed was a bad part of town, considering he was getting mugged every night.
"Yeah. My parents and I have had a bit of a rocky relationship." She shrugged. "Not really their fault though. I'm not the most cooperative daughter. Doesn't sound like it can compare to your situation, though." She tucked her hair behind her ears. "I'm sorry about that."
She was so much… Nicer than she had seemed.
Nych stared at Willow for a few seconds, and then looked forward. They were coming up on a bus stop, where luckily, nobody else was waiting. He didn't feel like controlling his topics like he would around others.
"Willow, I've got a question."
Oh?
"Why is it that you present yourself so differently? I was hesitant to work with you at first, not because of your intelligence, but because of your reputation. I thought that you never took anything seriously. Now that I know you… You aren't like that at all. So why?"
