Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a quiet afternoon, the winter sunlight filtering through the curtains in the living room where Diryas sat cross-legged on the sofa. Student papers lay strewn around him and in front of him on the coffee table, a forgotten mug of coffee off to the side and growing icier by the minute. He frowned at the paper he held, wondering why the student had chosen to swap back and forth between two ways of drawing a benzene ring, seemingly at random.

Neither were wrong, it was just… weird.

He set the paper down and extracted himself from his position, feeling his knees creak rebelliously at being moved for the first time in hours. He even stumbled on his first couple steps until he regained his balance on his way to the kitchen. The forgotten mug of coffee was remembered and picked up on the way. He could reheat it, or he could just dump it down the drain. Reheating might make the creamer weird—

He chose to dump it down the drain and pour himself another cup from the carafe. It was also cold, but black coffee tasted better cold anyhow. He didn’t feel like rummaging through the cabinets for the sugar and creamer.

There was a creak in the floorboards as the house moved in another gust of wind that, for one second, made it sound as if someone was in the second bedroom upstairs. He paused, looking up at the ceiling, hating the way he’d had hope for a second. Hope that everything had gone back to normal.

The coffee tasted like s**t going down, but it would have been worse warm.

Grading would probably have been easier at the dining table, but the living room was at the front of the house. That gave Diryas the best vantage point for seeing who pulled into the driveway as soon as possible. It was only ever Zebulon these days, of course. Tobias only came by occasionally now, and Teegan, well…

Anyway.

He made his way back to the sofa and sat down, carefully setting his mug away from the papers.

Back to grading—

The knock on the door made him frown. They had a “no soliciting” sign. Was it someone ignoring that? Was it a package being delivered? Diryas put his coffee down again for a moment and pulled himself off of the sofa and toward the front door.

He was pretty sure it was the wrong time of year for Girl Scout cookies, but who knew?

Diryas thought about looking through the peephole to see who it was, but decided against it, feeling frankly too lazy to do so. Whoever was at the door was whoever was at the door. They were just going to have to accept him as he was as he swung the door open, squinting and blinking in the daylight with his pen trapped between his teeth and his coffee mug clenched in one hand.

The woman he saw standing there, however, made him squint just a bit longer than the daylight required. He knew who she was, of course. He remembered her from the purification. Her name was a bit more nebulous, but he’d recall it soon he was sure.

Given what he knew of her background, the outfit was a bit surprising, but he supposed she’d left her background behind for a reason. Plus, who knew how chaos dressed when it wasn’t out causing trouble, stealing starseeds and energy? He was getting sidetracked. She wasn’t part of chaos anymore. Was the whole reason Teegan wasn’t, either.

Diryas covered the pause with a long draw of his coffee. Had Teegan forgotten something and sent her to come get it for him? Teegan wasn’t allowed in the house, but Diryas hadn’t said anything about his friends. And as far as he knew, she lived at the same house Teegan did, so the assumption made sense.

His voice was gravelly from disuse when he asked quite flatly, “yes?”

Tobias had told him he was sending someone over to talk to him, and the name Tobias had used suddenly came back to Diryas. Diryas hadn’t quite dismissed that there would be someone coming over, but he had perhaps thought it would be more time until that happened. It seemed Tobias hadn’t wasted any of that time. Given the common thread Diryas had with Livie and the whole reason Tobias would have to send anyone to talk to him, Diryas supposed it made sense.

Didn’t make him any more thrilled about it…

Was he busy? Could he tell her he was busy so she’d go away? He glanced over his shoulder toward the living room where the papers were that he’d been working on. Truth be told, he didn’t want to have to go back to them, and she provided an honest distraction, even if it was over a topic he was tired of discussing to death with everyone else.

Also, Tobias had sent her, and Diryas wasn’t likely to make headway in trying to convince Tobias to move back home if he told his friend to go away. Plus, he’d promised he’d hear her out. It had taken considerable effort on Tobias’ part, but he had eventually gotten Diryas to make a promise about it.

He took a long sip of his coffee. The answer was obvious, but, again, it didn’t make him any more thrilled. His sigh was internal except for where it showed in the briefest narrowing of his eyes, but Diryas turned and gestured she follow him inside. “Come in. Don’t mind the papers.” He’d get back to those later.

“Adjunct professor at DCU.” A pause. He figured he should elaborate. “Chemistry department. Organic chemistry.” Diryas picked up and wiggled his faculty copy of the textbook for the current class he was grading papers for, then set it back down. She was probably less than interested in the nuances of organic versus inorganic chemistry.

That was to say nothing of the nuances of plant biochemistry—

Anyway. He should probably offer her a drink or something.

“Are you thirsty?” Diryas glanced briefly toward the kitchen. He assumed she was probably going to be at the house for a while. He had told Tobias he’d listen to her, and that included not rushing her off. There would be no complaints about his handling of the situation.

He was going to get an ‘A’ in conversation. A normal thing to want, surely.

She reminded him of the first-year chemistry students, the ones that would only ever take the introductory course because that was all their major required of them. It had its endearing qualities, and in another setting he’d half expect her to be handing a paper off to him. Her bouncing in place also reminded him of the anxious or over-eager first-year chemistry students, after all.

First, water. “I’ll answer that in a moment.” Matching her energy, he grabbed a glass Zebulon had been sent by one of his teenage nieces. Lisa Frank was emblazoned over a rainbow-coloured leopard. It seemed like the kind of thing his guest would like. He was trying to make her comfortable, at least.

Tobias wouldn't be able to say he didn't give it an honest attempt.

When he returned with the water, he gave answering her question a shot. ‘Organic’ was fundamental for life as they knew it, but it wasn’t precisely life, itself. “Molecules aren’t alive, no.” He slipped easily into professor mode, it being something he was well-practiced at by this point.

“Molecules make up life, but they aren’t alive any more than a brick is a house. Besides,” an attempt at a smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Bacteria are more for biologists.” Specifically microbiologists, but that wasn’t a distinction he thought she’d really need to understand his point.

Diryas held out the glass and nodded toward the couch.

"You can sit, if you'd like."

She seemed to liked the cup. Diryas considered that a win for him and his attempts to make nice with people he knew very sparingly. She was probably important to Teegan, which should make her important to him by the transitive property.

Or something.

He was a chemist, not a relationships expert. Speaking of being a chemist—

It was certain, very specific molecules, but she was correct, so he nodded along as she spoke about the chain from molecules to cells, to beyond that. The in-between was biochemistry, something he did teach, but something that was definitely not required for her to understand what she was trying to grok. Sometimes other chemists didn’t really understand biochemistry.

Zeb was one of those inorganic chemists who railed against biochemistry, and Diryas liked to tease him about it. Tell him that just because he couldn’t track the mechanism of NAD+ reduction in the TCA cycle didn’t make its production of ATP sorcery.

Though, to be fair, Diryas thought batteries were sorcery. Electric charge just… stored there? With nothing outright maintaining it through an external process? Witchcraft.

“Organic, at its core, just means carbon-based.” He folded himself further onto his seat. “Not everything is strictly alive. Oil is from creatures that used to be alive, but aren’t now. Methane is in the atmosphere of planets that, to science’s knowledge, don’t support life.”

How that reconciled with the fact that wonders certainly existed where life shouldn’t was something Diryas was willing to chalk up to magic. Something. He wasn’t going to think too hard about that.

Hell, the fact that his wonder was cold on Mercury had caused him enough of a pause. But now? He was just going to roll with it. It was that, or go insane trying to reconcile the Gibbs free energy change needed.

“No apologies needed.” The mention of tigers made the corner of his mouth quirk upward. “No, I don’t get to study tigers directly. I sometimes have to analyze samples from their food to make sure it’s nutritively sound, though.”

He listened to her work through it, nodding appropriately. Or, at least, what he assumed was appropriately. “Carbon is like rock, but that’s when it’s connected only to carbon. If you connect carbon to oxygen, you get a gas—carbon dioxide—that we breathe out, or carbon monoxide—which is also a gas but very toxic.”

Her interest in the subject was something that he was more than happy to engage with. Enthusiasm for the subject was something Diryas would have liked to see more of in his students, despite how dry he knew it could be.

“Calcium in a rock is locked in a mineral form there with other mineral deposits. Silica, iron, et cetera. Calcium in our bones is locked in a matrix—a net—largely with proteins and collagen.” A pause.

No carbon? “Oh, no, there’s a lot of carbon. DNA uses carbon as one of the building blocks. But carbon as an element bound to other things makes things that aren’t rocks.” He paused again, trying to think of an example that would work that wouldn’t lead to him dragging her into a college lecture on photosynthesis. “Carbon the base for collagen, which makes up part of skin, muscle, hair, nails, and other things.”

Tigers would be pretty cool, he had to agree. Her question made him snort quietly, a faint, amused whuff of air from his nose. He could study tigers if he really wanted to, he supposed. Metabolism and food science used a lot of organic and biochemistry. Nutritionists sent samples to his lab all the time.

“I don’t get to do explosions, no.” But, to be fair, “I could, if I worked somewhere else. But my lab doesn’t have the government permits needed to study explosives. Security requires extra licensing.”

Explosions were fun, he had to admit.

“I do test samples for toxins, though. We do a lot of toxicology.”

She definitely knew more than she had thought she did. A lot of people he brought the subject up with didn’t even remember the middle school or high school lessons. “That’s right,” was his response, and he tried to make sure he was visibly pleased. As she asked about the ‘net’ itself, he wondered if he should get a spare piece of paper and diagram it. But that was probably moving too quickly.

“Rocks have carbon and silicon, which are all hard, plus other elements that, when bonded with themselves, are all hard because of how the bonds take shape. But if you take one carbon,” one finger on one hand, “and two oxygen”, two fingers on the other hand, “then join them,” the three fingers together, “their bonds are more flexible.”

It was really all down to the electrons, really. But he didn’t want to overwhelm her with talk about valence shells and s-p-d-f electron configurations— Much less electron spin—

“So besides from just the shapes the bonds take depending on how big the elements in them are,” which was a bit of an oversimplification, but he also didn’t think she’d appreciate him throwing all the bond angle values at her considering they weren’t in formal lecture or anything, “there’s the amount of each atom in a molecule.

“So, yes, to a degree, carbon dioxide floats because oxygen does, because the carbon atom added doesn’t make it appreciably heavier than the surrounding air,” which was mostly nitrogen anyway. “And so, with collagen or keratin or anything else that makes up our skin and soft tissues, the bonds have enough space and other things in them that makes them softer.” A pause, as he realised he was, perhaps, getting too enthusiastic about the subject. But one last answer, “the net itself is built by special cells whose job it is to build that net and deposit things into it. But that’s more microbiology than my job.”

Okay, one more answer.

“Yes, but we can’t observe the molecules directly. So we run a lot of tests to determine what molecules are in something. There are tests for cyanide, for ammonia and ammonium, all sorts of things.” Her eyes weren’t the only ones shining. The toxicology part of his job was his favourite. It was part of the reason he told Zebulon that inorganic chemistry was fun and all, but organic was where all the fun was at. “So if someone sends my lab a sample, and it’s a hair sample for example, we can run tests that react the presence of certain heavy metals or illegal substances that get stored in the hair follicle.”