gone_byebye | (no subject)

Well, I've been going home the past several nights in a row, which's led to some interesting temporal-shift distortions. Seems that I can spend up to a week in New York City without more than two hours passing in Milliways, although it really does vary wildly with no one factor being present to a statistically significant degree. It's a little annoying that I haven't been dumped into the animated continuum yet, but I suppose that’s only to be expected, since it's not really where I come from, philotic affiliation or no. I'm probably going to have to get some help if I'm going to get back there and warn them.

Though it might have to wait, because, um… Romana? She came back the other night. And she wanted something better than television to distract her for two weeks so that she could get her brain back in order. I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head on Earth that sounded right, so I said the first thing to pop into my mind, which was the Bondurant School out in AZ, but Romana's never driven an Earth car before. So, we downgraded the idea to bumper cars, and then she mentioned Ferris wheels and stuff, and the next thing you know I was suggesting two weeks in Pennsylvania, starting with Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom and going on to camping and rafting and things like that.

This is. . . strange, very, very strange. Not bad strange, mind you. Just strange. I mean, come on, it's not as if I haven't gone out of town with a girlfriend before, but they've generally been little things. Weekend trips. And usually the girl's been human and close to my own age and they always wind up bored. That or scared- I'm not stupid, I can tell when a woman thinks I’m a weirdo. This is the first time in years that I haven't had even one look like that. Of course, traveling together through time and space and history for the better part of a year is probably a really big factor in that.

I'm not objecting. I'm just saying. And, yeah, I'm aware of the fact that I'm dealing with a Gallifreyan here, not a human, and that when I'm eighty-four years old she'll still look almost exactly the same as she does now, assuming she hasn't had to regenerate or something like that. . . holy mother of toothpaste, I'm thinking in terms of 'when I’m X age'? I can't remember the last time I did that.

This is big.

In other news, I've got the licky security system up and running on the PDA and the holocomputer. Epithelial cell DNA, salivary composition (no unusual levels of stress hormones, no weird chemicals), body temperature (above 30 degrees Centigrade), sub-lingual pulse rate (must be present, but not matching the patterns seen in duress situations), and PKE absence (nothing beyond my baseline reading, which is pretty effectively human normal) all have to match before it unlocks the voice print identification. Then I have to give it about fifteen seconds' worth of talk time to analyze. I've got the training phrase written down here, but actually using that phrase will lock the attempted user out of the system for ten seconds before resetting the security protocols- I hate it when people think they're clever because they've cloned you or shapeshifted into you and gone through all your stuff when you weren't looking. Find the 'pass phrase' and get slapped for it, I figure.

Still modifying the PKE meter design to damp out high energy harmonics at close range so that the meter doesn't necessarily explode. It's taking longer than I thought.

Reading up on crystallography and psychic self-defense. The first for lightsaber purposes, the second because Venkman recommended it. I got some information on Vigo the Carpathian a while back and he is not somebody I want mucking around with my head. I don't know how well what I’m trying to do is working, since I don't have a telepath trying to get into my skull- I should probably try and find a trustworthy one, huh? Or something. As for the crystal stuff, I seem to remember that Jedi got their crystals from some specific planet or other and that the crystals are sensitive to the Force, but let's face it. I'm not in that galaxy, and even if I were, I wouldn't have the ability to find the planet in question. Not a pilot and somehow I doubt that they run commuter flights to anywhere important enough to the Jedi as that. I'm going to have to grow the crystals somehow. I realize that probably sounds pretty silly, especially considering what happened the first time I tried it, but the first time I was just trying to come up with a self-terminating energy beam. This time I actually understand what's involved, even if I don't grok the energies involved as well as I should. All part of the learning process, I guess.

Romana asked me what color the saber was going to be. I told her I'm going for blue.

It's just occurred to me that nobody I've told about this project has asked me why I'm trying, except for one person: Qui-Gon Jinn. I mean, I told Venkman, I told Romana, I told Barry, but nobody's actually asked why, except him. And even that was just in the context of 'why did you do it when you were a kid'. I've had to stop and think about that a couple of times lately, myself. At first it was just to see if I could, considering that Earth technology (even mine) isn't much better than stone knives and bearskins considering some of the stuff here in the bar. Then there was the whole proton assault cannon incident, which is the kind of thing I almost wish I could erase from my memory as easily as I did from the computer- almost. It's not often that a man gets a warning of exactly what kind of monstrosity he could produce if he turned off his conscience. I don't want to be that kind of person, but I could be, and that's why I have to remember it. I'm a scientist. I'm supposed to understand, not destroy. Even the 'busting work isn't supposed to be destruction. Just- removal. Protection. Defense. Things like that. Yeah, there's dangerous stuff out there, but that doesn't warrant bringing the man-portable equivalent of the Manhattan Project into existence. The mark 0.2 plans were a peek at the genie before I could get the cork all the way out of the bottle. I'm not going to unleash that on the universe. That's why I've got to build the lightsaber- if I have to have a weapon that's undeniably a weapon, it's going to be one that's a real defense, not some kind of spirit-rending pre-emptive offensive blast of subatomic particles. And, hey, if I find out enough about the Force in the process to pick up some of the Jedi schtick myself, that's an added bonus.

Who knows? I might even catch up with Pete at this rate.

Beyond that, I spent the other night talking with Prospero at great length. He seems to be a little bit past his horror of the Void ever sine I explained some of the basics of thermodynamics to him and told him about the background radiation of the Big Bang, but I kinda squicked him by mistake by telling him about the American Revolution- it wasn't my fault! He asked about New York and the subject of kings came up and I had to tell him the truth, didn't I? At least we got to change the subject to spirits after that. Tobin's makes for a great distraction even if it does mean I had to explain batteries and basic electronics to yet another pre-industrial wizard. Honestly, I'm going to have to get my NY State teaching certification back at the rate I'm going.

Oh, by the way- when I was home last I pulled up a Web site that looked interesting and did the quiz there just for the heck of it.