Office Hours [3.6]

[atreideslioness]

It was a Friday, which meant Ghanima was in her office again. This time sketching out ideas for a summer class inbetween jotting off letters to home.

If by 'sketching out ideas' you meant 'throw things at options on the wall until something sticks', anyway.

'Ware the flying knives!

[OOC: Open door, open office, and SP is ze rule. It is "

Comments

[blondecanary]

Dinah knocked on the doorframe before peeking in, then her eyes widened. "I can come back if this is a bad time."

[atreideslioness]

"It's not a bad time, Dinah," Ghanima assured her. "I'm just narrowing down options for what I might teach this summer."

It made sense in Ghanima-logic, sadly.

She got up to retrieve her blades, gesturing for Dinah to come in. "Even teachers need to amuse themselves on occasion, you know."

[blondecanary]

Dinah snickered as she came in, then held out a small wrapped box, putting it down on Ghanima's desk. "It's a thank-you present. For whatever you said to Barbara, that helped her listen to me when I told her about this place, and that I wanted to stay."

[atreideslioness]

"I told her that she was talking to the wrong person," Ghanima confessed, picking up the package to unwrap it slowly. "That I thought removing you from the school at this point would be a mistake, but that you were the only person who was going to be able to answer her actual questions to her satisfaction. I was perhaps a bit less diplomatic about it than I could have been, but I said nothing but the truth."

She held up the box to admire it, a smile of delight crossing her features. "Thank you, Dinah. It's lovely."

[blondecanary]

"You're welcome. She actually did listen when I talked to her. Helena was all for keeping me home anyway, but she was overruled." Dinah grinned. "I meant to get you something on the trip, but I wound up having too much fun to remember to do that. I liked the dragonfly, and the leaf patterns made me think of some of what you have in here."

[atreideslioness]

"I get the impression that Miss Helena misses you, and wants to keep you at home for purely selfish reasons," Ghanima confided as she placed it carefully on a shelf. "I can empathize as an over-protective sister, but I told Miss Gordon that she need to focus on what was best for you, and Helena is not the most unbiased source in that regard."

[blondecanary]

"Yeaaah." Dinah rolled her eyes, smiling slightly. "Helena's great, but she doesn't trust anybody else to look out for me aside from Barbara. She needs another hobby." She sobered, handing over a folder. "Here's the brain scans Barbara did. I don't know if they'll make sense to you. Barbara kind of gave me the boiled-down version, because the technobabble makes my head hurt." The file contained PET scans, an advanced MRI, and an EEG showing that Dinah's brain was always significantly more active than average; and that activity spiked even higher when she used her telekinesis, starting in the less-developed parts of her brain and connecting through to the cerebrum. Barbara's notes summarized with 'meta, possibility of more development based on increases in activity over time.'

[atreideslioness]

Ghanima took the folder, an air of puzzlement settling over her features as she looked at the different items.

"It's...pretty?" she tried, holding one of the images upside-down. "I must confess, I haven't the slightest idea how to read any of this." There were doctors and such in her Other Memory, if she went far enough back, that could understand it, but Ghanima wouldn't take such a risk with Dinah in the room. "What does it all mean?"

[blondecanary]

Dinah grinned, kind of glad Professor Atreides didn't understand it any better than she did. "Mostly just that my brain is all hyper, all the time. And that it's getting more hyper? Barbara thinks either my abilities will get stronger, or that I might develop another one, based on that. Something about too much energy for the results. There was a lot of other stuff about amino acids and synapses, but I zoned out."

[atreideslioness]

"I may take it down to Miss Harker at the clinic, see if she can make heads or tails of it for me, but I doubt it will affect what we're working on at all," she replied, still looking them over slowly. "I don't doubt that you'll get stronger; after all, practice makes perfect."

"Human potential is limitless, you see." Ghanima set the files on her desk and looked right at Dinah. "In my universe, the Sorceresses of Rossak could destroy entire starships with their telekinetic talents. Such a burst of pure power killed the wielder, but it is possible. There's no reason you cannot further your talents as well."

[blondecanary]

"Wow," Dinah said, overwhelmed and a little appalled. Applying something like that to her abilities was, well. Way more than she'd imagined yet. "Sorceresses? Were they really, or was that just what people called them?" She looked down, thinking of Arthur. "I mean, were they like me?"

[atreideslioness]

"More like you, really. Genetics, rather than magic. They chose their title to strike fear into those they saw as lesser humans."

"Rossak was a highly toxic planet, and it caused mutations in the humans that settled there," Ghanima explained. "Children were born with terrible physical and mental disabilities."

"However, some children were born without such disabilities, and for some unknown reason the undamaged female children were endowed with formidable telekinetic powers. Even now, no one knows why. So they began breeding for the telekinetic traits, trying to weed out the detrimental mutations for survival. It became a highly matriarchal and stratified society, as you can guess, and the Sorceresses became an intergalactic political power to be reckoned with."

"All this was tens of thousands of years ago," she continued, "and the Sorceresses are no more. They were forced to evolve past themselves, and the order is now the Bene Gesserit." More breeding programs, but for a new, more terrible purpose.

[blondecanary]

Which would've earned another wow, except it almost left Dinah speechless. Dinah thought about it, and finally said, "I can see why they might think like that, when the alternative was being born disabled, but...." She thought of Barbara, stuck in her chair. "It's terrifying. The kind of world you could end up with, with only the powerful or meta in charge." She frowned, and asked, "How do you evolve past that? Did they just breed it out of the population? Or did they develop a different way of dealing with it?"

[atreideslioness]

"They changed the focus of the breeding program," Ghanima answered. "They discovered the Spice Agony, and moved away from the telekinetic and telepathic powers in search of what the spice could do when combined with the right genetic codes."

But that danced too close to things Leto did not want revealed, and she smiled brightly. "In a way, my entire universe is 'meta'. We all enjoy prolonged life and youth from the spice, and it makes interstellar travel at FTL speeds possible."

[blondecanary]

"That sounds kind of cool, actually." So a new focus made all the superpowers obsolete. Hunh. And increased the possibility of kids like Leto, and his sister, who remembered all their ancestors as if they were them, if they wanted to. "So wait. The spice makes speed possible? As fuel?" Dinah shook her head. "No wonder it's so important."

[atreideslioness]

"Not exactly as a fuel in the physical sense, but in the mental. It expands the minds of the Navigators and gives them the prescience necessary to safely guide a spaceship though foldspace," Ghanima explained. "They use it to plot the best course, visualizing the path the highliner should take, and folding space around it to guide it safely to the next port. Without them, we would lose the ability to use wormholes."