Attempting to lighten the mood, she remarks, “So shall I inspect the rest of you for that deformity? There’s clearly nothing wrong with your face.” She glances toward the door, toward the music and lights and bodies and madness. “Nobody’s going to come out here and bother us.”
“Shame on you for thinking there was,” Ace quipped playfully. As her own gaze drifted beyond the glass doors leading back inside, so did his. “They’re all too preoccupied to even think about it.” He found himself turning his head to face her once more.
“Faces can be deceptive,” she shoots back. “What about the rest of you? Covered in twisted scars, maybe, or zits, or ingrown hairs?” She can’t believe it’s her, saying these things, with even the faintest expectation of an answer. She’s high on the people, even not being in there with them; high on the carelessness and wildness. She might say anything, do anything, and it won’t matter.
Of all people, it was Jackson who slapped Isaac’s shoulder after lacrosse practise, muttering encouragement. Danny tipped him a wink, though, and Stiles was all but pushing him out the school doors as soon as they finished changing out.
Scott was oblivious, too absorbed in asking Kira to the dance no doubt. Although he might be mentioning Isaac’s dilemma to her, for she cast the curly werewolf a very knowing kind of glance over Scott’s shoulder. It was probably fortunate that none of the /other/ girls in the pack seemed to know.
Lydia’s advice might have been overwhelming for the shy boy.
Managing not to flinch violently at the other male’s unexpected contact, Isaac graced him with a brief smile and a faint nod, before turning on his heel and heading out of the lockers after showering and changing. Ensuring that he had his backpack hoisted up securely on his shoulder, he exhaled a deep breath and smiled at the others watching him intently.
Oblivious to everything else around him, Isaac had one though swirling constantly in his mind, and heading toward the parking lot, he jumped in the passenger seat of Stiles’s Jeep, distracted from the boy’s usual chattering. Before he knew it, he was outside Summer’s home, and he licked at his lips, before entering the building and knocking on the door.
Summer opened the door, smiling up at him and preventing Helios’ precipitate exit with one foot. “Hey, babe! How was school?” She pulled him inside, giving an exaggerated shiver, and stretched up for a kiss.
“Isaac,” Summer sighed. “It’s just lunch. We’re just going to nip out for a bite to eat and hang out outside the house a little.” He reached out at patted the werewolf’s shoulder. “You don’t have to make it something special every time, you know.”
Disappointment clouded his features before he smiled sheepishly, nodding as he lowered his head. “I…sorry. I just get so excited,” he mumbled then, pushing into Summer’s hand as it pressed into his shoulder. “Forgive me?”
The empath pressed a brief kiss to Isaac’s shoulder. “Quit worrying,” he smiled. “Come in the shower with me, and stop fretting over every little thing.”
“It would take the servants half a candlemark to bring enough water to fill a bath up here, let alone heat it.” Summer poked at the food on the tray; oat porridge and eggs and preserved fruits, sweet and thick with honey. Not for the mornings the delicate finger foods sent to tempt them last night; she held out a piece of bread heavy with bits of dried apple and nuts for Isaac.
He sighed deeply and filed away the desire for later — after all, they had plenty of time to bathe together, providing they could convince the servants to indulge them, of course. Eyeing her outstretched hand with a smile, he took the bread from her and bit into the crust, humming appreciatively at the taste. “I’m tempted to stay here forever, simply for the food alone!” he teased with a crooked smile, after chewing and swallowing his current mouthful.
They made brief work of the breakfast, though it was effort to keep their hands from one another. When Maire blew back in, therefore, Summer cast an apologetic glance at Isaac. Going to him, she touched his cheek and whispered, “I’ll see you later today, alright?”
“Come on, ducky, it’s time to measure you for the wedding dress.”
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.
So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.
Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.
So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)
Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.
This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be?
Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?
By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.
Those at YOU HQ who were still sitting on the Benedict Cumberbatch fence practically flung themselves over it on seeing this vision in a wet shirt. BC found his inner Darcy for a shoot with Jason Bell (he of cute Prince George photo fame), who was commissioned by TK Maxx to shoot a variety of famous faces, including Liam Neeson, Kate Winslet and Jerry Hall, to celebrate ten years of its Give Up Clothes For Good campaign, which has raised more than £17 million for Cancer Research. Bell’s photographs will be exhibited at La Galleria on Pall Mall, London, from Tuesday until Saturday. tkmaxx.com.
“/You/ have a girlfriend. You’ve had a girlfriend for months. A secret girlfriend.” Jackson, in his shock, was repeating himself. Obviously amused, Danny let him ramble on, a glint in his eyes as he looked at Isaac.
“She’s not gonna say no, man.” The expression on his face shifted, subtly, eyes darkening, as he added, “She’d be crazy to say no to that.”
“Danny, I thought /I/ was attractive to you!” Stiles whined, and most of the tension shattered in laughter at Stiles’ deliberate expense.
And on a sudden spur of spontaneity, Isaac smirked, and if that crooked little smile wasn’t as powerful as it usually was, well, no-one called him out on it, at any rate. “Yeah, guess I’m not as much as a freak as you thought I was, huh, Jackson?”
But turning to Danny then, he hesitated and bit down on his bottom lip, not registering the shift in Danny’s expression before he slowly nodded. “I guess I’ll take your word for it, but thanks, Danny. That means a lot.”
And just like that, everyone was laughing again, Stiles the target for the hilarity as Isaac lost himself in his own mind. He vowed to talk to Summer after classes had ended that day, and hopefully by that point, he’d have mustered up the courage not to stammer aloud his request.
Of all people, it was Jackson who slapped Isaac’s shoulder after lacrosse practise, muttering encouragement. Danny tipped him a wink, though, and Stiles was all but pushing him out the school doors as soon as they finished changing out.
Scott was oblivious, too absorbed in asking Kira to the dance no doubt. Although he might be mentioning Isaac’s dilemma to her, for she cast the curly werewolf a very knowing kind of glance over Scott’s shoulder. It was probably fortunate that none of the /other/ girls in the pack seemed to know.
Lydia’s advice might have been overwhelming for the shy boy.
