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Chapter 35: Findings
Nyx was drooling slightly against the side of the breakroom fridge. The labs had been taking longer than she had hoped and it was rather late, so the unlucky appliance was serving as a pillow for a brief catnap. Luckily the scientists had switched from being annoyed with her to actually getting motivated once they realized she actually had invisible feathers for them to examine. Nyx had been hopeful that they would find something, so when she woke up to an annoyed and confused looking lab tech she wasn’t exactly filled with joy.
“Uh hello. Agent Nyx” the bespectacled man in a labcoat with a clipboard waved as she slowly opened her eyes and righted herself. “We have some results, of a sort.”
“Finally” Nyx stretched her aching neck and stood. Show me what you got?
As the pair returned to the lab the tech started to explain, “Well some tests failed, like microscopes…”
“It is invisible” Nyx deadpanned, “Any theories on that incidentally?”
“Well due diligence, the mass spectrometer had… interesting results. The element spikes from the sample we gave it match what one would expect from a feather… mostly”
“Mostly?”
“Yes. The …. Here” He pointed to a printout on his clipboard, indicating the spikes on it, “These indicate what you’d expect in a feather, proteins and such, but there’s a lot of other spikes that indicate other stuff we aren’t sure about yet. We will need to confer with other labs to see if anyone has found anything like this before. I assume the unknown components must by why it has the same index of refraction to air”
“Pardon?”
“Oh. Uh. Index of refraction is how much a transparent object bends light. You can still see glass cause, even tough its clear, its index is different from air. If you get two materials with the same index, like vegetable oil and glass. You can submerge a piece of glass in the oil and it appears to vanish entirely, you just CAN’T see it. The feather must be matching air in the same way as glass and oil match up like this.”
“As interesting as that may be, I’m not sure how it helps” Nyx sighed, “You got a way to make it NOT invisible? Or anything else of interest?”
“Well, if you cover it with something you can see it, but the feathers are also remarkably, well, ‘non-stick’ if you will so most anything we coat just falls off almost instantly. The most interesting results were from the electron microscope”
“Thought Microscopes don’t work.” Nyx raised an eyebrow, “invisible.”
“Electron, not photon, er, light. Totally different particle.”
“So, what do you see.”
“Well alone it blurs out pretty quick, but that just means the feather is non conductive. We tried sputter coating it with gold, coating it like that makes it conductive so you can see it in the scope.”
“And it looks weird?”
“No it looks like a feather”
Nyx groaned and gave the tech a look, “You said ‘interesting’ you know”
“Uh right” The tech seemed to get nervous under Nyx’s glare, “The interesting part is what happened to the coating, it. Kinda. Melted off the feather.”
“You said it was super non-stick”
“Yes but if the powder just fell off it wouldn’t have become a liquid and stayed that way.” The tech explained, “Gold should melt at over 1000 degrees C, not room temp. And its got something to do with the electron beam too.”
“How so” Nyx said looking down at the electron microscope’s loading try. A small drop of a gold colored liquid could be seen. Presumably the feather was there too on top of where she saw the gold.
“Well the sputter coating works fine and DOESN’T melt off the feather until we hit it with the beam, then it melts. You can see this one” The tech held up a very black looking feather, “The coating is plainly still visible on this one, but every time we try to put one like this into the scope we get more gold drops like that one”
“So gold plus electricity makes molten gold?”
“It shouldn’t though. Its room temperature and still liquid”
Nyx picked up the small dish and tipped the gold into her left hand. The tech’s eyes immediately went wide and he started barking something about gloves and ‘protection’ and ‘we don’t know what that material is’ and similar such concerns. Nyx on the other hand thought she could remember seeing something that shimmered just like this before.
With the memories came a freight train impact of ghost pains in her severed leg, causing her to wince and almost collapse. She steadied herself against the lab bench to ride out the attack. She cursed herself realizing that she had just splattered the gold drop all over the place, but also remembered where she had seen something that shimmered like it did before. Back in the basement of that place, the demon that tore her body apart, and the woman with the golden sword. The sword shipped like it was a liquid despite being solid metal. The small gold puddle had looked like THAT sword.
“Gold and electricity” Nyx muttered to herself.
“Ma’am” The concerned looking tech said, “Do you need some help?”
“I’m fine” Nyx said straightening herself, “I’m taking one of the feathers, your team keep working on the rest. Let me know anything you find”
Before the tech could protest, she opened a box on the lab bench helpfully labeled, ‘invisible feathers, return all samples to box after use to prevent loss’ in sharpie on the outside. She felt a number of feathers in the box, picked one up, slipped it in her wallet and made for the door. She had an Idea for an experiment she could run herself as soon as she got home. She burst out the door and turned to her car.
“Fuck”
Agent Cybele Nyx pulled out her phone to call an taxi.
While she waited, quietly cursing herself for forgetting that she had leant her car to the rabbit boy, she fidgeted around, she couldn’t’ stop running events over and over in her mind, and almost felt like she was starting to spiral inside her head with her inability to put it all together. That is until she noticed something shiny.
Looking down at her hand she saw the drop of gold. Still in her palm despite the fact that it should by all rights have splattered out the instant she used that hand to stabilize herself. It seemed to be stuck to her palm somehow, if anything flattening itself out. Briefly she wondered if it would start to spread over her hand and as if on queue it flattened out more, sending tendrils out along the creeses in her hand. Nyx’s eyes went wide watching it. It didn’t hurt, didn’t feel like much of anything actually, and also didn’t get far, the drop was tiny after all, but its mobility intrigued her. She watched it move around with interest then it seemed to make for her wedding ring.
‘Don’t touch that’ She all but blurted out loud in her alarm. And to her surprise and relief it stopped and any further reaching ignored the ring.
Nyx was more than a little astounded that the small gold puddle turned tendrils on her hand seemed to understand what she wanted, somehow. As her ride drove up, she considered calling it off and going back to the lab to explain her findings, but they would want to go slowly, and scientifically, she had another plan.
After the excruciatingly long ride home with a cabbie who would NOT shut up, Nyx beelined to her jewelry box, tried her best not to wake her husband or their daughter she carefully removed her ring, then set aside anything else of sentimental value and grabbed anything else that even seemed to have a hint of gold on it.
The jewelry went into a plastic cooking bowl in the kitchen, and then she grabbed a sock and a table lamp. She removed the lamp shade and then slid the sock over the bulb. As carefully and quietly as she could she wacked the ensocked bulb against the counter shattering it. Then she gently removed the sock containing the shattered glass and threw it in the trash. Finally, she placed the feather in the bowl that contained most of her jewelry, jammed the business end of the now shattered lightbulb into the bowl with it and flicked the lamp’s switch.
Angel feather, plus gold, plus electrons. The arching was noisy, and she felt sure her husband would hear it, but for the moment the results were all she could look at. The jewelry liquified, well the gold parts did, any stones or other components fell away as the gold rapidly formed a puddle in the bottom of the bowl. Once it looked like it had all melted, she turned the lamp off looked at the gold splotch on her left hand, then shoved said hand into the pool.
Unfortunately, the pool wasn’t exactly large. Only so much gold in a police woman’s home after all, but nevertheless it leapt up onto her hand like a living thing. Joining with its cousin immediately an spreading over her hand like a golden glove.
She regarded it for a long moment, admiring how it flowed and slid over her fingers. It felt like silk liquid over her fingers. She focused on it and tried so send a thought to it.
‘knife’
The gold obeyed forming a knife in her hand. Annoyingly it only got about as bug as a long butter knife before running out of material. It seemed that if she wanted anything bigger she’d need a LOT more gold.
She was starting to ponder if this trick would work with any other metal, it clearly didn’t work with stainless steel as some of her jewelry was gold plated, at least formerly, and the cores were untouched. She flicked the knife between her finders thinking about how she’d get her hands on more gold, or other metals she could try, when a familiar voice interrupted her.
“Babe?” Her husband’s voice startled her so much she dropped the knife or would have if it had allowed it. The metal seemed to melt together and recoated her hands and part of her arm on its own as she turned to face her husband.
“Ah. S-sorry, honey. I know its late. Uh” She paused seeing the look on her husband’s-tired face. He was starting down at her left hand, but his expression was significantly more horrified than one would expect from finding their wife with a golden glove.
“Y-your hand” he said at last, rushing over and grabbing it, then freezing at the odd sensation, “What… it’s still there, but its… wet?”
“Yes of course it’s still there I… wait. Baby, what are YOU seeing right now?”
Hector looked at her confused, but explained, “I … I can see through it. He touched and rubbed her gold covered palm. The counter on the other side is… But your fur is still there, floating” Her rubbed the back of her hand. The gold was holding tight to her skin so any areas with fur, which was everything OTHER than her palm, the fur as coming up through the gold and wasn’t covered itself.
“So, you DON’T see a liquid gold glove on my hand right now?” Nyx asked, waiting for her husband to shake his head before continuing, “Because I do. But to you the areas covered in the gold are invisible?”
He nodded.
This was a complication. Or a boon? Somehow the gold that had affixed itself to Nyx couldn’t be seen by others, and moreover, if she coated herself with it, the covered area would be invisible too. She held up her golden hand, noting the areas were her uncovered fur pushed through it. She ordered it to cover her fur too and watches as her fur was pulled down flat to her skin as the gold covered it. Her husband’s eyes on the other hand widened as he clearly saw the only visible part of her hand vanishing before his eyes. Then she ordered it to pull together into a wristband revealing her hand again.
Hector was still clearly freaked out and poked at the wristband, that to him must have looked like a gap where her wrist simply didn’t exist, her arm stopping at the band then her hand floating in air after it. “Babe what is this?”
Nyx took a deep breath and started to explain.