The next day, in an Aquila Space Guard precinct...
Physics, broadly, was something that Evelyn Augusta Bell excelled at. She had been a professor of translocational science at the Galactic Citadel in a universe far far away, which meant that she could puzzle out how to get from Point A to Point B, no matter where or when or
how the relevant points were. It might just take her a while.
It was not at all clear where or when (or how) Tranquility Ira Burke-Adia was. "Where is she?! Frozen solid! On board the Metamorphos! May she rest in peace," said either the lieutenant from the Aquila Space Guard who had given them all the mission last night, or another ASG officer that Evelyn did not care to distinguish from the others.
"Ehhhhh," said Evelyn as she continued playing
Warrior Princes Kiss Crush IX on her GP32, seated on top of the officer's desk. "Nature abhors a vacuum. I mean, not really, I'm fairly certain I saw a fully bio-integrated sweeper droid up there, um," she paused her
Sweet Gifts + mini-game to check her watch, "nineteen hours and fourteen minutes ago. But with all this junk around, and this junk, too," she said, picking up and dropping the poor man's Garfield calendar onto his novelty shot glasses and his plastic hard copy TPS reports, "well, it
wants to move, right?"
"I'd really like
you to move right now--"
"Pretend I'm a vacuum. The complete absence of matter."
"Ohhhhh, how I wish that was the case," he sighed.
She winked at him. "That means there is nooooooooooothing," she wiggled her way into the center of his desk and swept her hands around her backside to clear a circle, piling junk all around the edges, "heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere."
"Oh my fracking--
Security!"
"But!" she said, and hopped her butt down from on top of his desk and pointed dramatically at him. Reflexively, he had crawled halfway up his chair away from her, in serious danger of toppling over backwards. "There's always something," she said, stacking a shot glass in the center, "at the center. Like a neutron star! Absolute zero doesn't
destroy matter, it just means there isn't any matter
moving through your space. Got it?"
"Um--"
"UNTIL THERE IS!" she shouted, sweeping her arms around all the junk piled around his desk, pushing it all into the center. He screamed and fell over backwards. The shot glass was launched up... though not by very much, but she caught it and pitched it hard enough to stick into one of the cheap ceiling tiles. "She's not there because she can't be. Not completely. She's much too cold! All the while, Yggdrasil and RhyDin and space freighters and satellites and cosmic dust and rays and photons are all pushing, pushing, pushing and
squeezing her, at the very center, from all sides. Which means!"
The officer was halfway back to his feet, rolling his sleeves up, looking about ready to haul her out by her ears, but he yelped when she trod on him on her way to the digital whiteboard in his office. She found that wiping with her hands erased the pixels, so she did that, erasing an elaborate web of cartels, independent smugglers, and fringe groups that he'd been preparing for a meeting the next day. Then she started writing with her fingers, muttering as she did. Writing and drawing.
...He couldn't help it. He narrowed his eyes when he managed to haul himself partway off the floor. "Is that a wormhole?"
"It's a wormhole!" she exclaimed. "So you know what I need next."
"What," he started, and stopped, wide-eyed, when she marched over to him, clapped her hands over his cheeks, and kissed him on the brow.
"Your coffee warmer!" she said as she held it up from the desk drawer right next to him. "Well, I don't need it, but
she does, and by extension, my hair dyers do. Well, they're Olaf's hair dryers. Semantics. Goodbye!" she said, and hurried out.
"What," he repeated.
* * * * *
A short time later, a woman in a jacket and goggles and hat that looked exactly like Kurt Russell's jacket and goggles and hat from the set of 1982's
The Thing--
--emerged from a chest freezer where Tranquility Ira Burke-Adia, a completely different thing, and a great many other things had been flash-frozen on board the derelict ship. The chest freezer hadn't been there before, but that hardly seemed to matter to Evelyn Augusta Bell. She pulled on a heavy-duty orange extension cord, plugged into a great many other cords in a web that would have given the father from
A Christmas Story a coronary. (She'd just done something extremely spooky, she was allowed
one comparison to Christmas before November, thank you very much.) These were all plugged into a coffee warmer on her end, and on the other end (deep inside the chest freezer), three hundred and fifty-eight hair dryers from Olaf von Trunk's personal connection. She squinted at the completely different thing, set the coffee warmer under Tranquility Ira Burke-Adia, and raised a switch that was connected to yet another extension cord in the web of extension cords.
She flipped it.
"VR-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" said three hundred and fifty-eight hair dryers. "FZZT!" said the confluence of extension cords as it emitted a burst of sparks evocative of those fireworks that
THUMP with only a paltry burst of golden sparkles every 4th of July. This was allowed, because it was a completely different kind of holiday.
The ice immediately around them was beginning to soften. That was the only opening that she needed -- well, no, that was a lie, she still needed the chest freezer as an opening. That was her escape route! Regardless, she used
this (metaphorical) opening to remove the clock key from her watch, click it into the coffee warmer, and attune the intense waves of really-just-awful-for-the-environment heat to Tranquility Ira Burke-Adia specifically, and the very distant place that part of her had been shunted into by this very intense cold.
