milliways_bar | Millitimed to sometime after the thing with k_in

"Hmm. Sounds interesting. I've never given her a request that open-ended before, although I have asked for foods I didn't think existed... did you know that deep-fried pancakes are very yummy?"

Struck by impulse, she gives the glass of stuff another look and attempts levitating some of it out of the glass for closer inspection.

"Deep-fried anything is-"

Ray stops, watching the stuff rise into the air, and pulls a meter from his belt. He's got the two red sensor arms out and the whole device pointing at the phenomenon before you can say 'boo'.

Heck if the mun knows whether Matilda's power is PKE or not. If it is it's probably a very odd sort.

Matilda doesn't notice the meter, occupied as she is with the green stuff. An idea occurs to her and, giggling, she tries to concentrate on making the blob change shape.
Her inital attempts to make a snowman out of it fail spectacularly, but she does manage a sort of distended starfish that could, at a stretch, be taken to represent a human being.

Ray's picked up on the use of the Force with the PKE meter, although admittedly the Force is at the very limits of what the meter can perceive. And it's picked up on magic, too, and canonically on Great Cthulhu. It's probably picking up something.

Ray watches the numbers scroll and change, then whistles and puts the meter away. "Nice work," he says. "How are you doing that?"

She deposits her little green man from Bar back into his glass with a plop.

"I do it with my eyes," she says with a serious air. "I look at something, and this terrific fountain of some kind of power comes out, and I can make things move around. I've never done it to liquid stuff before, though. It's a bit slippery, but kind of fun." She turns back to the glass and raises up the little green man again, making him do a brief and awkward little dance in the air before repatriating him. "See? Fun!"

"Funky," Ray says approvingly. "It's only your eyes that do it? You can't just make it happen by thinking about it with your eyes closed? I mean, not that it's not pretty neat as it is- my name's Ray Stantz, by the way- but I'm just wondering, here. I had a friend who used to be able to move things by thinking about them, but he hasn't got that power any more."

"Nice to meet you, Ray. I'm Matilda Wormwood." She produces her second-best adorable grin, the very best one being reserved for things relating to academia and possibly food.

"And yes - only with my eyes. I don't know why, but that's where the power comes from."

"Very funky. I don't think I've ever heard of anything like it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything other than a lack of similar cases in the literature back home. Sit if you want- you can play with the soda some more if you like, as long as I get to drink it in the end." He smiles. "Are you here with your parents?"

"Thanks!" She lifts out the little green man and makes him do his little green dance a few inches above the nearest flat surface of appropriate height - perhaps a tabletop or the arm of a chair. It seems to provide endless amusement. And as a bonus, she's left two-thirds of the substance for Ray to drink while she plays with the remaining third.

"No, I'm not here with my parents. Or anybody else, really. I haven't yet been able to convince my adoptive mother to come along, and now I'm Bound, so even if I wanted to bring along anyone from home I couldn't."

Ray watches the green man dance before turning his attention back to the girl. "Ooh, that must stink," he says. "The Bound part, I mean. I never really could convince any of my friends to come with me either, but I've had versions of them turn up from other worlds, so it's not so bad when I'm here. Then again, I can go back and forth to New York whenever I like. Where are you in from?"

"England. Some little town, I doubt you've heard of it." It is not named in canon and does not exist in mainstream reality.

The green man does twirls and backflips. Matilda keeps on watching him intently.

Ray nods. "I've never been to England proper," he says. "Except for having to pass through one of the airports on the way to France, but that doesn't count. Does everybody there have powers like this?"

Then he stops, and looks embarrassed. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be asking this many questions of somebody I just met- I keep forgetting."

"No - I'm the only one I know of. And the questions are fine." She drops the green man back into his glassy home and produces the second-best grin once more. "I tend to ask lots of them too, so I understand. Speaking of which, do I remember you pointing some sort of gadget at me...? What was that?"

Ray takes the meter back off his belt and slides it over towards Matilda. "Psychokinetic energy meter- we usually just call it a PKE meter. I use it to detect and analyze supernatural or paranormal activity in a given area. Mostly that means I use it when I'm hunting down ghosts, since that's what I do for a living, but it's a really good research tool if you can just get a genuine psychic phenomenon or something similar in front of you. I'm a parapsychologist, you see."

Maybe she'll know the word, maybe she won't. Who knows?

It's in the dictionary; of course she knows it.

"Oh. That's very interesting." Matilda is one of the few people who can say that phrase with total sincerity. "How's it work? And what do the various numbers mean?" She examines the meter, looking for everything from method of construction to labels on the display.
The very best grin has sidled onto her face and made itself at home, for there is New Knowledge afoot.

"Well," says Ray, "whenever a paranormal entity such as, for example, a ghost or spirit manifests on the physical plane- even if it's only to manipulate an object, rather than show itself- the energy expended to cross the planar barrier results in local-area ionization and characteristic disruption of the local quantum valences. It's like watching the foam kicked up in a boat's wake, only on a subatomic scale. The meter's sensitive to those disturbances, even when they're caused by the energetic action of something that isn't a spirit- psychokinetic energy expenditure causes that kind of disruption regardless of whether the living or the dead are the source. See, these readings over here would be the valence levels, and this is the proximity in meters- I might be an American, but my stuff's in metric. That readout over there's only useful if there's a spirit entity invovled, though."

It simply does not occur to him that someone who shows an actual interest in the PKE meter might not be able to follow along with the words.

Lucky for him, this is Matilda, and she has no problem with it.

"Hmm. So what kind of numbers do you get on my dancing green man, then? Is the instrument precise enough to measure what's going on inside an object being lifted specifically, or does it just look more generally for disturbances of the correct sort?"

"At this range, if I tune it properly, I get a general fluctuation of energy from the use of your lifting power- see, here-" He adjusts a few dials to go back through the last few sets of numbers. "That's what I'm seeing when you're lifting. It's not really capable of being that precise- I'd have to build something with probes for that."

"Interesting." The Academic Appreciation Grin has by this time settled down and begun raising children.
Three guesses what she's about to ask, and the first two don't count:
"Are there any books on this sort of thing?"

"Yes, and my colleague Dr. Spengler and I wrote them," Ray says with an answering grin. "The books on the meter and most of the rest of our equipment, anyway. There's loads of other parapsychology books and studies out there, but this little beauty-" He taps the meter. "That's ours. I could bring you some of the monographs from our library, next time I go home, if you want."

"Oh, that'd be brilliant. Could you?" She bounces up and down in excitement. "And if you made this, can you teach me how?"

Ray bites his lip. "I dunno, Matilda. It runs on deuterium power cells. Are you qualified to work with radioactive materials yet? You're what, seven?"

"Almost six, actually. And I'm probably not qualified yet, but what does it take? It can't be too difficult."

"It's not so much that it's difficult as that if you mess up, you could contaminate yourself and the area. Radioactivity's nasty stuff to work with." Ray thinks for a bit. "Tell you what. I have a type of power cell that involves a lot of chemical engineering, but isn't radioactive. I patented the design a while ago, so I know exactly what's involved in making them. If I can work out a way to use the K-14 in the PKE meter instead, I'll get you some of those power cells and then we can talk about teaching you to make the meter. Okay?"

Pause.

"Six years old? That's in Terran years, not Darkovan, right?"

"Okay - that sounds great. But where do you think I can find books on working with radioactive materials? I still want to learn how even if I can't actually do it yet, or it would be inadvisable."

"Yes. What's Darkovan the adjective to? Another planet?"

Millitimed to sometime after the thing with k_in_black.

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