What I Wish I Knew Before Not Becoming an Astrophysicist

What I Wish I Knew Before Not Becoming an Astrophysicist

It had all begun, as most of Quaraun’s misfortunes did, with a bad decision made in a moment of boredom. That and his obsessive inability to not arrange everything in a red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple-pink rainbow order.

The Pink Necromancer was the world’s most powerful wizard, yes, but punding and stimming were always Quaraun’s downfall.

A mistake.

A terrible mistake.

Because now, thanks to an improperly stabilized wormhole, they were standing in what appeared to be an abandoned space station orbiting a dying star.

“Okay, so like,” GhoulSpawn tapped the monitor, which flickered ominously. “According to this, we’ve got approximately, uh… forty-seven minutes before the station collapses into that star. Which, by the way, I don’t recommend as a travel method. I like my atoms where they are.”

“Ghouly, sweetie,” BoomFuzzy drawled. “Fix it.”

“I’m trying to.” GhoulSpawn turned back to the flickering screen and, with a heavy sigh, began recalibrating the equations. “The problem, as it turns out, is that Quaraun has miscalculated the quantum field harmonics — an issue he might have avoided had he actually studied astrophysics instead of relying on ancient necromantic spells to brute-force a solution — “

“I was not calculating anything. The colours were in the wrong order,” Quaraun stated.

Quaraun sighed.

Quaraun wished he had known, long before this moment, that becoming an astrophysicist required an inordinate amount of patience, an obsessive love for numbers, and the ability to explain quantum field theory to idiots.

Not that he was an astrophysicist.

Quaraun had never once, in all of his long and storied life, considered becoming an astrophysicist. He had no particular interest in the stars beyond their usefulness for navigation and the shimmering beauty they provided on cloudless nights.

Quaraun would rather gouge out his own eyes with a rusty spoon than study physics.

But GhoulSpawn, GhoulSpawn was an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, a quantum physicist, and whatever other type of physicist his wall of Harvard University PhDs said he was.

And Quaraun, by unfortunate circumstance, was now being forced to listen to GhoulSpawn talk about astrophysics, theoretical physics, quantum physics, and whatever other type of physics Harvard University had taught him between 1959 and 1978 when GhoulSpawn had hid in university to dodge the draft.

GhoulSpawn had spent the last twenty minutes speaking endless physics jibber jabber that Quaraun did not understand and it was starting to grate on Quaraun’s rawest of nerves. BoomFuzzy was standing silent as a grave, between the two of them, grinning like a madman watching Quaraun and waiting for the Elf to burst a blood vessel.

“Okay, so like, dude, the issue here is that when you accidentally, uh… punched a hole in the space-time continuum, you didn’t account for the Lorentzian traversability restrictions,” GhoulSpawn was saying, waving a glowing screwdriver wildly as he explained.

Quaraun’s eye twitched.

“Which is, like, a huge oversight, man, because — “

Quaraun cut him off.

“I do not care.”

GhoulSpawn blinked at him.

“Dude. You should care. Because we are about three minutes away from being sucked into a collapsing gravity well.”

“How did we get here again?” BoomFuzzy asked, arms crossed, tapping his foot impatiently.

“Quaraun touched buttons,” GhoulSpawn said flatly.

BoomFuzzy turned to Quaraun.

“Again?”

Quaraun scowled.

“I did not touch buttons. I simply rearranged them.”

“You shouldna be touchin’ that, me wee pink JellyElf,” BoomFuzzy muttered, adjusting his cyber-tech goggles as he peered over Quaraun’s shoulder at the rainbow of colourful big buttons on the console in front of the Elf. “Ya start pushing that shite an’ next thing ya know, ya’ll be blowin’ yerself up tryin’ to fold space like some eejit Goat scientist who thought wormholes were a good idea.”

“I’m a sheep,” GhoulSpawn snarled through gritted teeth.

Quaraun ignored them both, his long jellyfish tendrils twitching as he squinted at the half-legible text.

“Gravity wells must be precisely calibrated to avoid singularity collapse — “

That part seemed important. He did not fully understand why.

“I did not push the buttons,” Quaraun reiterated. “I simply rearranged them.”

“Dude! Why?”

“They were not in rainbow order.”

“Not in… rainbow…what?” GhoulSpawn stared at Quaraun in disbelief. “This is not the colour coded laser tech you use in your sonic ray gun — “

“It is a Rainbow Wand.”

“It is a sonic screwdriver, with a colour coded dial, that changes the type of laser beam emanated from it — “

Quaraun pulled out his Rainbow Wand and held it up.

“THIS is a magic wand. And I am a wizard.”

GhoulSpawn groaned and buried his face in his hands.

“Why do I try explaining science to you?”

“Unicorn has a magic wand as well.”

“It is science not magic — “

“His Glimmer Stick Wand creates illusions.”

“It’s not illusions. It’s holograms. Yours produces laser beams of varying degrees of deadly. His is a projector that produces images. It’s not magic. You just think these are magic wands because you don’t have enough education to understand how science works — “

“What the Goat is saying,” BoomFuzzy interrupted.

“I’m a sheep.”

BoomFuzzy exhaled.

“Right. Aye. What the Sheep Demon is saying — “

“I am a Ursiug, a type of Sheep Satyr. A male version of a Glaistig, which is a female Goat Satyr — ”

“Aye. I’m Scottish, and King of The UnSeelie Court. I know the folklore of me people. Yis a malevolent, solitary male Fae, often associated with lonely pools and known for taking the form of a beautiful half-man, half-goat, who lures female victims to their doom — ”

“I’M A FUCKING SHEEEP!”

“Whatever.” BoomFuzzy waved a dismissive hand at GhoulSpawn and turned back to Quaraun. “The Goat, wants ya to stop touching hims buttons.”

“I had to to move them.”

“No ya did nots.”

“They were in the wrong order!”

“Because ya ken all ‘bout astrophysics an’ quantum mecha-ma-whoosits.”

“I do not. I know absolutely nothing about astrophysics or quantum mechanics.”

“That were exactly me point.”

“Which is why I am standing here not fixing it and Glinta is,” Quaraun retorted.

GhoulSpawn sighed, rolling his golden, pleco pupiled eyes.

“Yeah, I am fixing it, but like, dude, do you know how tedious it is to reverse-calculate a wormhole stabilization equation when someone,” he shot a look at Quaraun. “When someone, randomly plugged in eldritch magic nonsense instead of actual numbers?”

Quaraun sniffed.

“I did not use nonsense. I used necromancy. And this.” Quaraun pulled out his Rainbow Wand.

GhoulSpawn pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You used your mumbo jumbo spooky ghost spells on my quantum physics devices?”

“Of course!”

GhoulSpawn groaned.

“Good god! This is why I never let you guys in my lab. Science doesn’t work like that!”

Quaraun crossed his arms.

“Yet, it did work.”

“Yeah, badly!”

The Black Tower’s Space Dock 13 space station groaned ominously, metal twisting under immense gravitational stress. GhoulSpawn cursed and frantically typed into the control panel.

“Okay, okay, okay, I think — uhhh — yeah! Got it! The field stabilizer is recalibrating! We just have to, you know, not die for the next sixty seconds while the gravity well collapses away from us instead of into us.”

The dying star vanished and they were once again in GhoulSpawn’s lab under the Black Tower Lighthouse.

BoomFuzzy clapped him on the back.

“See? This is why we keep ya ‘round, Goat. Ya know how to fix things!”

“Things I would not have had to fix if you two bumbling idiots would stop meddling with things you don’t know nothing about!”

Quaraun sighed, adjusting his pink feather boa.

“Next time, remind me not to meddle with things I do not understand, BEFORE I touch them.”

“Are you trying to tell me, it is MY FAULT that YOU touched something in my private personal space where you were not supposed to be to begin with?”

“Of course. Next time you will know to not let me touch it.”

GhoulSpawn snorted.

“Next time? Dude, next time you’re not even allowed in my lab. I’m going to have my AI security around this lab coded to set off alarms if your DNA gets within twenty feet of the door!”

BoomFuzzy chuckled.

“Come on, Love,” BoomFuzzy took Quaraun’s arm and dragged him towards the door. “I’ll go mess up the order of my spice jars while I cook, so ya can have something to arrange in rainbow colour order without disturbing the Goat.”

“I’m a sheep.”

Today I am used this prompt:

Participate in Medium Mini Writing Challenge

The Pink Necromancer, Moon Elf silk weaver & merchant: Quaraun on Noodle Beach. His master chef Phooka turned Lich husband: BoomFuzzy with his 1968 VW Bus Beach Noodle Food Truck. And their on again/off again mad scientist Sheep Demon lover: GhoulSpawn with his 1974 AMC Gremlin time machine. Time Travel setting swings back and forth between 40th century Maine after a comet hit the moon decimating the planet, and the 1970s, Maine. Quaraun in the main character, he and BoomFuzzy are a married gay couple. GhoulSpawn is their shared live-in lover. Art by Wendy Christine Allen.

BoomFuzzy

Quaraun

Faeries vs Elves (In The Quaraun Series) A Pink Necromancer World Lore Post

The Pink Necromancer: The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane aka The Twighlight Manor Series

🌸🦄🌸 Furry Yaoi Fiction about Elves and Faeries and Satyrs and Demons and Unicorns and Technomancer Wizards and Liches living in a Lighthouse and surviving as Travelling Merchants and Food Truck Chefs in Cyberpunk Dystopian 40th Century Maine, and Zombie Apocalypse and Time Travel but it’s Slice of Life Vignettes of Mundane Daily Lives of The UnSeelie Court’s Royal Family trying to survive after a comet hit the moon and turned the Earth into a CyberPunk Ice-Age. 🌸🦄🌸

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