Quantum Entanglement and the Tensile Strength of Love

Quantum Entanglement and the Tensile Strength of Love
Date of Scene:	10 February 2016
Location:	Dark Kingdom
Synopsis:	Nephrite follows the nightmare fuel prince; a lot of higher math happens on a whiteboard and it's actually code for a conversation that's shoujo af.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Nephrite

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Mamoru Chiba has posed:
It's only just outside the throne room that they're talking-- Kunzite and Endymion. Kunzite's body language is what it had been, more or less; he stands straight and tall, self-possessed. The way Nephrite would remember him having stood before Queen Beryl months and months ago, before anything changed. Back to something familiar-- perhaps subtly wrong, especially with this boy in place of their Queen, but familiar, known.

Endymion, though-- neither the strangely nostalgic energy of Chiba, reined in cautiously, nor the every- which-way half-broken reckless exuberance of the Endymion who came with Kunzite and Homura to rescue him and then acted so boldly and decisively and achingly familiarly at Walpurgisnacht...

...and not the empty shell he's seen, or heard about from youma or been hinted at by Zoisite, blankly wandering the halls of the Dark Kingdom and shadowed by the littlest General.

There's something hideously wrong with him, animated by darkness, by the source of the malevolent red glow behind his eyes. It's a coherent intelligence that speaks to Kunzite, alien and smooth and alarming. His words are enunciated with the slick viscosity of fresh blood spilt in pleasure; his motions are foreign, unsuited to his body but by no means unpracticed. He is a glove, broken in and comfortable for that which wears him.

When Kunzite leaves, Endymion stops.

He stops like a watch that hasn't been wound, he stops and stares down the hall, unmoving. Only breathing. Standing there like a character in a video game when the player's put down the controller to go get dinner.

It's a long moment before he moves, and when he does, it's with the slow inevitability of a lodestone swimming in honey. Instead of turning to face north, or spinning uselessly due to the Earthside location of the Dark Kingdom's main entrance, he turns to face in Nephrite's direction. It doesn't matter if the brunet is hidden, is invisible, is lurking out of sight-- there's a sense of notice, fractured and scattered, lacking in enough tatters of attention to actually be regard.

Endymion knows he's there.

And then he starts walking away.

It's certainly not a compulsion to follow him. It's not even a request. Nothing so living and willful. There's just--... there's something. Whatever it is isn't conscious on Endymion's part, if he's even the source.

Nephrite has posed:
Something about the dark Prince and his inhuman (superhuman? subhuman?) movements makes Nephrite's skin crawl-- and he is not easily creeped out. He did not know Mamoru Chiba for long, and Prince Endymion he knew even less than that. And yet, the uncanny, unliving thing that he has become makes Nephrite's stomach churn uncomfortably. Surely death would have been a kinder fate.

But there is no hiding. And the Prince-- or the thing that resides within his empty shell--is summoning him. Or rather, it is like a vibration that thrums through his ribs, too deep and low to hear but just barely felt. He could pretend not to feel it, but the feeling is just unsettling enough not to be ignored.

The darkness parts around Nephrite, folds and settles behind his back. He follows the puppet prince, at a careful distance.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
It's an eerie walk, to be sure. Silent and measured, Endymion's pace doesn't change, and his steps are so certain as to be rote. The halls are more and more empty the further they go from the hellish organic tunnels surrounding the throne room, the further from where the walls move and melt. Part of the drop in population is, of course, the fact that most of the youma in the kingdom would prefer to stay close, prefer to remain where they can attempt to curry favor and, at the very least, stay abreast of court gossip. Part is that they know there's something dreadfully wrong with the dark Prince, that at any moment he could turn from an empty shell to the glowing-eyed monstrosity that delights in tearing them apart if they should be foolish enough to make an attempt on his life.

Part is that they respect and fear Zoisite, who's been minding the boy.

Another more subtle reason is that the human-wrought halls beyond Beryl's court point to a different center, an older one, out of favor and shifted to the liminal, to the forbidding and forbidden. The architecture there is just that: designed, engineered, carved, built -- originally made with a purpose alien to their natures. For the youma, there's a deep sense of 'shouldn't be here', of trespass, of retaliation should they roam there without permission.

This sense does not apply to Nephrite, though he may not have noticed this region before. This taboo does not weigh on him, General that he is, though he's never been here. Nonetheless, there's something about these ancient halls that's strangely familiar, that tugs on something deep in his subconscious-- deja vu, almost. A feeling he may have been here before. It feels real in a way that few things in the Dark Kingdom do.

Eventually, the shell of a boy leads him to a door, unassuming and solid, barely decorated. Barely: carvings worn smooth with the passing of aeons edge its borders, designs and runes similar to the crooked script of the youma, ancient and unreadable. The door opens for Endymion on its own, without ceremony, and he passes through it to whatever room lies beyond; he leaves it open behind him as a wordless permission.

Should Nephrite hesitate to enter, it's only a moment of silence before he'll hear the unmistakable sound of writing on a board, smell the pinching scent of dry-erase markers.

Inside, then, there's Endymion. He's dropped his henshin, his princely armor, jacket, and flowing cape; he's in the wrinkled uniform of an Infinity high school student, hair mussed and glasses perched on his expressionless face. He is indeed writing on a whiteboard, a portable thing that swivels on the horizontal. He's filling it with maths in a neat, tight, precise hand.

The room itself is incongruous, a model of cognitive dissonance. It's large enough for a bed in one corner, a massive and hella ugly antique wooden desk in another, a bookshelf and a tall cabinet, office chairs, the whiteboard. There's a modern bathroom to one side, utilitarian and sterile. There are no decorations on the walls.

The calculations, though...

To an astronomer, to a physicist, to a chemist? The basic principles informing them are recognisable. They are all centered on a variable that's not visibly defined, but its theoretical physical properties are clearly being examined. The effects of forces of varying magnitudes on its shape and composition, potential attenuation over astronomical and dimensional distances, behavior and cohesion under multiple forms of stress, strength and mutability and adaptability, density and attraction.

Endymion's hand slows, and he turns to Nephrite. On his face is the first expression the older boy's seen on his face in two weeks.

Unfocused frustration, almost pleading.

Nephrite has posed:
Nephrite runs his hand along the wall. Cool, ancient stone. Solid, ruler-straight, uniformly designed. Not the organic, haphazard style of the rest of the Dark Kingdom at all. The same feeling churns in him that he had in the witch's labyrinth. That feeling of almost remembering, of loss. But this is the exact opposite of the labyrinth. Not the freshly-conceived defiance of physics that twisted upon itself. This place is tangible, ancient, unchanging.

He does indeed hesitate outside the door of Endymion's lair. He knows all too well how easily a door can vanish once passed through, how easily a simple room can become a trap. But he is too intrigued, especially when the sound of soft marker on whiteboard starts, for him to hesitate long.

The odd blend of old and new in the room is surreal, like a clashing of different eras. Nephrite takes in the sight of the empty prince, doing something so mundane as writing. "You've got homework even down here, huh? Infinity's school system is intense."

The joke falls like a lead weight, but he clings to that scrap of normalcy despite the lack of appreciative audience. He watches the calculations take form. Begins to recognize formulae.

And then the prince gives him that pleading look. Nephrite is captured by the immediate, inexplicable desire to comfort him. And that is an absolutely silly thing to feel about the broken shell of a boy he barely knew in the first place. "What is it, kid? Not getting the answer you wanted?"

Nephrite moves to stand beside him, and peers down at the rows of numbers. Slowly makes sense of their meaning, how they all fit together. "This is... what is this?"

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
'Kid'. Endymion would object, if he were himself. This boy doesn't. He's working more slowly on the board as Nephrite comes closer, comes to look. Adding a measurement here, correcting something's change in velocity there, calculating for a larger distance. More stressors. More attenuation. A lower frequency.

His one hand continues to write; the other comes up to grip Nephrite's sleeve, an action that's kin to the panicked Zoisite hiding behind him in the throne room.

The tensile strength. He's got an empty space on the opposite side of the equation at the end of the board, and the property he's ultimately looking for is the tensile strength of whatever the variable signifies. Whatever the material is that's being tested, it's being tested versus all these wild violent vectors that have no business in straight calculus. Some of the defined properties, in fact, indicate that the variable in question isn't even a material.

Endymion reaches to the top of the board, then, and writes the variable, and defines it.

Love.

He turns to look at Nephrite again, and his eyes are-- there's no one home, he's not there. But he's there, and behind the blank eyes there's something so bleak, so frightened. There's no despair, and there's very little self-awareness, but there must be something that's pressing on like this, that's fighting so hard using something that's safe, something that no one cares about, something that can't subvert.

His board is full of questions: what is the tensile strength of love? What is the yield strength? What is the lowest frequency that it can be carried on without loss of signal? What is the maximum distance before the attenuation overrides the fidelity?

How long can he hold on?

Nephrite has posed:
It is almost laughable. It is so ridiculous, so unexpected, so completely at odds with their surroundings, that Nephrite wants to laugh. He is not laughing.

His hand closes around the one that clutches at his sleeve like a child's. He peers into those near-empty eyes. He is still in there somewhere. The boy who called out to his heart. The boy who stood up for them against Beryl. He has not been snuffed out completely. That thought is not altogether comforting. Knowing that something in him still has some level of awareness of the prison he's been trapped in. Beating its fists against the walls.

He regards the board again. Is this all he has? His only window to the outside world? Tapping out code through the walls of his cell?

Does that mean, then, that he can only respond in kind?

Acting on impulse, Nephrite flips the board around. Blank slate. He takes the marker and begins writing out an entirely new formula. Quantum mechanics. A calculation of entropy. If two components are entangled, the entropy of each component is lower than if that component is on its own. In other words, the life of one thing is much harder to snuff out as long as it is connected to the other. He uses the same variable that Endymion used, connects it to a second one.

You are not alone.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
The only ideas that can be held onto are the things like him -- the things that look irrelevant, the things that don't look like they can stir up trouble, the things that have no agency. Numbers. Code tapped through the walls, meaningless noise to anyone unversed.

Whoever and whatever Endymion is, behind and beneath and beyond the control and the darkness, he's someone who knew without knowing, without being able to think about it, that Nephrite would understand. That Nephrite is possessed of the kind of intelligence and intuition that could pick up the obfuscated and oblique and answer in kind--

He needs all of them, never stopped needing all of them. But as much as he needs purification and healing, their champion is too contaminated and too hurt to be able to recognise that he can provide them. As much as he needs purity and affection, their champion has been twisted too far and has turned them in against himself too much to recognise that anyone else matters enough to receive them. As much as he needs endurance and harmony, their champion is out of his reach.

In this interstice of semi-clarity, this brief interval of reprieve, what the boy needs the most desperately is exactly what Nephrite can give him: comfort, born of understanding.

Endymion can feel Zoisite's hand clasping his from the pallet on the floor in the middle of the night, can feel the presence of the connections to the Princess, to the Shitennou, but he can't reach them. He knows they're there and can't reach them. He can't name them. He can't define them; the shreds of his consciousness aren't allowed to. He loves and cannot reach--

But Nephrite's writings, his calculations, his formulae and his examples and his proofs? The boy's eyes widen, and his hand under Nephrite's tightens on the sleeve, gripping it white-knuckled. His conclusion...

Endymion stares at it, eyes going bright and too bright, glistening, welling up. He looks quickly to Nephrite again, and it's so careful-- he's so careful; nothing shows in the cast of his features. But there's a flicker of that something back there, behind the dull red of his eyes, that feels uncannily like a really tight hug.

He looks back to the board, and his writing hand comes up, trembling, to add one more thing. His eyes staying focused on the connected variables, on the figures and equations. Absorbing it all. Making sure he can take Nephrite's calculations back with him into the darkness when he loses again.

When the boy puts the marker down again and picks up the eraser, what he's added to Nephrite's side is pretty simple, all things considered.

(πR^2)/4

And then he erases it all methodically, letting go Nephrite's sleeve and allowing his hand to slip away from beneath the General's.

Nephrite has posed:
Like someone flicked a light switch, Endymion simply lets go of Nephrite, simply begins erasing the evidence of their conversation... or what passes for one, anyway. As though he did not just cling to him like a lifeline. As though he did not just look at Nephrite with such desperate pain. He is back to what he was. Or at least, he is letting himself hide again, for now.

He understood the final formula Endymion wrote, but not its meaning. He does not know what to do with this.

What he does know, though, is that maybe he has stayed away from the Dark Kingdom too much. That maybe, this would be worth trying again.

He pats Endymion on the back as he leaves, though he doubts it will be felt. "See you tomorrow, kid."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Someday soon, even the symbolic meaning of the last equation will shine with bright stark clarity, purified by everything Sailor Moon can throw at it, including all the love in her heart.

Someday soon, 'away from the Dark Kingdom' may become a goal rather than a regret.

Someday soon, Endymion may start another round of apologies over the hood of Nephrite's Ferrari.

For now, though, comfort and intelligence have been carried back to shield against the pain behind dull red eyes and a blank mask of a face, and there's a boy whose hand will be held in the darkness again, not registering a friendly pat on the back. He swivels the whiteboard around again, and erases the defined variable first out of everything else on that side.

He's still cleaning when Nephrite leaves.

He doesn't like messes.