Les frowned, and took another pull of his coffee. He'd been trying to get some of the administrative work taken care of, but he really felt like working on research at the moment. But when he tried to go back to his research, he kept running up against the same wall of this-doesn't-make-any-sense, which was why he'd been trying to take care of the administrative stuff in the meantime in the first place. It was so aggravating; this whole situation just plain didn't make any sense! How was he supposed to study the problem if the problem simply refused to conform to known-
He smacked a palm to his forehead. Listen to him! As if reality were obligated to confine itself to acting in only the ways that people currently understood! If he thought about it that way, the double-slit experiment hadn't made any sense by the early nineteenth-century understanding of light, but it was nonetheless demonstrable and repeatable; it meant that Newton's model was inadequate, not that light was suddenly nonsense. He was placing more stock in current understandings than in observable reality; it was scientism, it was a blind faith, and he was being stupid about it. Science is a method for understanding reality, not a complete and binding definition thereof, he thought. How easily we forget that.
But if he were to look at this from that perspective, it raised even bigger issues. What was happening under the light of the new Sun was so far removed from previous understandings that it must depend on a wholly different set of principles. It was crazy to even consider that, but there was simply no way around it. The changes under the iridescent sunlight flew in the face of normal biology; there was simply no way for the human body to have encoded developmental instructions for each of the countless possible forms under known genetics, even putting aside the question of what was special about the new sunlight that it, and only it, triggered these changes. Something entirely different was going on here - and that meant that any attempts to understand and study it were starting from...not, perhaps, from all the way back to first principles, but from a very limited understanding. The question was less how whatever this other system was differed from the current understanding of physics, and more the question of what they even had in common.
He could hardly give up on studying this; not with everything that was riding on it. But it wasn't going to do him any good to bang his head against the wall trying to make this fit into current scientific understandings when it very plainly didn't; the goal would have to be to test and understand it as it could be observed now. Really, that was what they had been doing, but...well, they'd have to get serious about it. If this was a whole new field, it was a whole new field - but it was one they needed. They'd already spent a lot of time and effort trying to explain and address the Sun phenomenon based on current understandings; now it was time to try to understand it on its own terms.
Alex had spent the afternoon sticking closer than usual to her sister; Sally's revelation that she might very well have her eggs come out tonight had had her a bit on edge, and she didn't want to be far away, since Sally was the one who'd done the reading on the subject, and also the one who didn't have to worry about it just yet and could focus on helping her. But she'd managed to put her mind off the subject, and they'd passed a pleasant afternoon with Sally reading while Alex played her game, the two of them idly chit-chatting all the while. It wasn't until close to dinner time that Alex began to feel funny.
It started with a settling feeling in her abdomen; she could feel the eggs bunch up more closely around the floor of her pelvis. One had been hanging out there since this morning, but for all of them (three, she thought?) to suddenly move into position was a bit suspic-
She gasped. "Ow! Holy...S-Sally, I...I think they're coming!" She winced at the feeling; it was like something was being stretched open inside her. Sally sprang to her feet and helped her from her chair, guiding her into the bathroom and shutting the door. In a flash, she had her sister's pants and underwear off. Alex flushed a bit at this, but she wasn't in any mood to argue at the moment. "Wh-what do I...ow...d-do?" she asked, feeling equal parts scared and simply uncomfortable.
"Um, it sounded like it's best if you squat," Sally said. Alex could see that she was just as nervous. "It's easier to push that way, and there's less chance of them breaking. Other than that...it sounds like you just push 'em out."
Alex hunkered down on the floor, suspended on the balls of her feet, her tail laying on the cold tile, and waited. She didn't want to wait, she wanted to get it over with, but her attempts to push with her abdominal muscles weren't accomplishing anything. She felt the kind of uncomfortable, aggravated impatience she'd only experienced with the dry heaves before, of wanting something to hurry up and happen when it was taking its sweet time. And the stretching feeling was getting worse.
"Ah!" she gasped. "Sally, why isn't it haaAA...ppening?"
Her sister's face was pure sympathy. "I think you're not dilated enough yet," she said. "It might be a bit before they can come through."
"But it hurts!" the dragon-girl snapped. She was beginning to get irritated now; why couldn't this just be over!? Why did she have to go through something like this just because she was a...a girl? And not just now, but regularly from here on out! It wasn't fair! Scowling, she bit her lip and waited.
It was a couple minutes more before her body finally decided it was ready. The actual passing wasn't actually much worse than the lead-up; something contracted inside her, she pushed along with it, whatever was stretching was stretched a little further as the egg passed through into...whatever the lower part of the whole thing was. (She supposed she should look some of this stuff up herself at some point, if she was going to have to live with it, but right now she wasn't exactly in the mood.) There was some further discomfort as her outer lips were stretched to accomodate it, but that seemed to be a (comparatively) milder sensation. Then it was out, dropping gently onto the bathroom floor. The other two were fairly quick to follow; after that, Alex sat, dazed, on the bathroom floor as whatever had opened up inside her re-closed.
She hadn't realized until the pain subsided that her breathing had become ragged. Little tears pricked at her eyes, the kind that came from sharp physical pain, like she'd got when she dropped the corner of her dresser on her big toe once. Panting, she stared down at the the floor. This was what all that had been about? Three eggs, significantly smaller than an ostrich's but still way too large for her comfort. The shells were creamy pink - not a magenta kind of pink, more of a very pale red - with little speckles of darker, purer red scattered across the surface. Hesitantly, she reached down to touch one. It was hard and smooth, slightly moist, and body-hot. She was a little surprised by that - she hadn't realized how warm she must be until she felt her temperature on something she expected to be cold.
Alex felt...kind of strange at the touch of her own eggs. It wasn't anything extreme or impairing, but she did feel...a little territorial, protective. But at the moment, that merely fed into her irritation at the whole business. She hunched over them, scowling, brooding in all senses of the term as she worked herself back into a foul mood. All that pain, for this, for...for essentially nothing! These weren't going to hatch into anything, but she'd had to go through that, and she had this slight instinctual tug that was complete nonsense if there weren't any kids to be concerned about, making her act...act silly, insult her own dignity by feeling protective of something that wasn't even really alive, and she was still sore from laying them, and...and...RRRGH! She finally understood just why the other dragon-girl - Melody, was it? - had been so irritable.
She bristled at the feeling of a hand on her shoulder - then she realized it was Sally, and relaxed a bit. "You okay, sis?" her sister asked. Alex hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "I'm not dying, I guess."
Sally snickered, then resumed her look of sympathy. "I s'pose you don't really want to hear about perspective right now," she said. "But...at least it's over now. That's one thing we've got over normal girls. And it'll be so much easier when we have kids..."
Alex frowned, then sighed and nodded. She supposed that if it had to come down to it, she might prefer brief, intense pain to prolonged discomfort - but she didn't want to have to deal with either! Let alone the idea of...of... "It still sucks," she muttered. Sally nodded and wrapped her arms around her. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry you gotta live with this, Alex. Too bad I messed up your plan, huh?"
Alex shook her head. "You didn't, Sally. I woulda gone to the cafeteria whether or not you were there, and the same thing would've happened. I just wish you hadn't gotten dragged along..."
Sally laughed. "That was my fault, though. Besides...this isn't so bad, at least not for me. And...thanks for looking out for me, Alex."
For the first time since the ordeal had started, the dragon-girl smiled. "You're welcome, sis."
