Starry Days & Sunlit Nights: Volume 1 - Reluctant Blaze

Chapter 3.5 - Baffling Review

Kylie was completely unaware of her best friend's situation—otherwise she would have headed out herself to check on her. She spent the late hours of the night poring through websites and looking through her notes and some reference books. Her findings had been unlike what she had expected, yet at the same time, what she had hoped for.

She had finished dinner earlier. It was the usual delivered pizza, and the conversation over it was the same as it always went. Ever since they had discovered the epicenter of the city's unique weather, meteorological and other related scientific matters was all that passed between the lips of the two research partners—apart from, of course, what usually went between life partners away from prying ears and eyes. In the midst of their discussions, Kylie would be left to her own thoughts, thinking over her own findings in a completely different area of study outside of theirs.

They had always been supportive of her calling, seeing it as a good thing. But they hardly ever asked her about her findings or the lengths she had gone to discover them, and usually only did so when they had reached a doldrums in their own work. Thus parent and daughter continued to strive in differing fields with hardly an atmosphere of familial warmth between them.

It was lonely, even she knew that, but to see her parents so passionate about their work inspired her to be the same as them. They were her role models. And so she worked hard at her endeavors to become a proper antiquarian. And now she had come to her own breakthrough.

She leaned back on her chair and stretched, quickly feeling a draft somewhere around her belly. She frowned at her uncooperative nightwear. Sure, she liked it for being so easy to wear and for being comfortable, but sometimes it came with complications—complications which would only be worse with more proper pajama sets.

Grabbing the lower hem of her light green camisole, she struggled to pull it all the way down, only for it to stretch for a while and launch itself upward again, revealing her navel to the elements.

"Pfbfbfbfbfbfb!" she raspberried in annoyance at how the beasties on her chest kept on growing when she had no such desire for them to. For her, they were nothing more than a hindrance. They got in the way whenever she would bend over to examine things on the ground. They strained her back with their absurd weight and mass. They bounced around when she had to run, which turned out to be pretty painful. Added to that, she had to go through the ridiculous process of changing her bra every now and then, until eventually she reached a stage when she considered abandoning the notion altogether.

This didn't even take into account the fact that they were the main reason she often received too many uncomfortable gazes from the men around her, especially when she wore her more comfortable casual clothing instead of her school's uniform. Even worse, she could not comprehend that they were also what kept her and her findings from being taken seriously by other antique researchers in the city, whether they were male or female. She had often thought about having them reduced, but usually ended up not committing to it, with the excuse that she was either too busy or too lazy to do so, and that it wasn't too big of an issue yet anyway.

She flipped out her notepad and chewed on the pencil she had used to write on it with, thinking back to what she had discovered from that experiment.

When she had heated the bronze spearhead, it saw little physical change, except for one thing. As the fire of the alcohol lamp licked at the surface of the metal, the markings of the sun and the crooked lines slowly began to turn redder, taking on a color akin to that of blood.

That had surprised the aspiring researcher. While it was true that she had followed after her parents' example of taking unorthodox and sometimes unscientific approaches to come to unexplored discoveries, she honestly hadn't fully believed that it would actually work.

That was not all. When she pulled the spearhead out of the flame, she dared herself, against all logic, to touch it with her finger delicately. The bronze was as cold as it had been before being put into interaction with heat, and the markings returned to their previous state. If her curiosity wasn't piqued before, it certainly was now. By all rights, there was no way that the metal had cooled that quickly. There had to be some explanation to it, but what?

Now, if there was another thing her parents had taught her, it was to be objective in what she learned, in order to see both the bigger picture, as well as the details that led up to certain phenomena. She still had no idea why the artifact had reacted that way, but she was determined to find out.

And then she would share it with her friend Yumi, who to her knowledge was the only person who truly wanted to listen to her.