Clara Price sat in her dorm room befuddled and frustrated. Alone here in her room she laid down on her bed and studied her fat in solitary. Well, studied was the scientific term, for it, more like she played with it; she jiggled it, cupped and pinched her belly fat, then her breasts for a bit…And ultimately came to the resolution that she’d known all along…she had grown bigger! Two years here and she grown from a pale face and let’s say…ample 150lbs (that’s 68.03kg scientifically speaking) to an astonishing and unexpected 240 lbs (108.862kg metric) Her lime green eyes, so large and full of curiosity, again scanning her body once more.
Okay…yes, growing up she did value her exercising her mind over exercising her body, and maybe her family had focused on feeding real food just as much as they had supplied her with brain food, her pale skin and thick black vision correcting glasses attested to that…Still though 90lbs in two years! It seemed such a rapid change was highly unlikely.
“Oh yes Prof. Price, it’s everyone’s fault but your own…” she thought aloud and sarcastically to herself. Okay, so she had a good idea what had caused the change, it was a simple formula; Endless portions + Really delicious food factor = 1 chubbier Clara Price. But, could it really be that simple? Had her weight gain slowly snuck up on her? Comparing to some of the other girls and their increase in density, her weight gain had been paltry by comparison. Just WHAT would they have to eat for breakfast and dinner that could fill double or triple that of the normal person’s calorie intake? It seem so impossible that everyone could gain weight so rapidly!
Yes, that was why there had to be more too it...because, there statistically was a correlation between student who came to Buttercombe and an increase in weight, but what about causation?
“Maybe…” puzzled Ms. Price aloud. “Maybe it’s a curse?” A curse that was placed on the school grounds and was proof of the fabled freshman 15? No! No that was silly…Curses don’t exist to a scientist. A misunderstood phenomenon! Now there was something she believed in! And that wasn’t the only question she had about this place either! There was…There was…Clara got up from her bed, engrossed in her brainstorm her brain almost audibly buzzing already with thoughts-
“Ooof!” she bumped into her desk frame. Oh! That was right…A bigger room all to herself. She’d gone and filed specifically to room alone. (It was more expensive sure but a scientist in the making needed privacy, and hey what are a few hundreds of dollars now compared to the millions she’d make when she became a world renowned scientist?)
Clara sighed seeing the cluttered mess that was her desk. When it game to being a ‘mad genius’ she seemed to have the ‘mad’ part down but not exactly the genius part yet…
Her black and blue choppy hair was a evidence of that. Her “My Lil’ Phony Scientist” lab set, begged to be bought as a Birthday present at the tender age of twelve, had caused a few raised eyebrows and confused looks from her parents, but Clara loved more than any other toy she had growing up. From, looking at the cells of leafs through a microscope, to mixing baking soda and vinegar, and so on and so forth, all the way till her 15th birthday when she got a bit more…adventurous, mixing chemicals that were a lot more volatile….
That day she’d almost burnt down a portion of the woods behind her house after the initial explosion, ‘almost’ being the key word as she’d expertly but the mini blaze out with some well slung damp mud, but her hair…As she ran inside, she removed he rubber gloves and safety goggles and quickly went to the bathroom mirror to check for any scrapes or burns, she gasped at how her long hair had been changed! IT was….BLUE!
“Awesome!” Was the first reaction from her inner experimenter, amazed for a brief moment looking at her reflection. “Oh Shit!” She said quickly after, realizing her parents would be home any minute. And before her parents could arrive home; she had quickly cut her hair herself leading to its ‘choppy’ look. Needless to say her parents were a little *explosive* themselves that night when they figured out what had actually happened. But to summarize; “The dye had been cast.” And from then on she’d kept the look, dying her hair blue and black, and keeping her once long hair short and choppy in celebration of her first “big bang” into the science community.
That had been two summers ago…Now, having spent her most recent summer back at home, wanting nothing more than to snoop around the secretive Buttercombe campus, she had been dead-set on getting answers. She planned and plotted for this day, the first day back on campus. Undoubtedly it was time! Today she had been going to do it! She’d planned to march right up to Ms. Polluck, thumping with authority as she climbed each and every step to the Queen of the Combe’s office, and demand some answers in the name of science…
-And she’d blown it! -
If, Ms. Pollock had been in today she may have gotten answers, but she was out, (and she ALWAYS seemed to be conveniently out, according to her assistant Candace Scott.) Who over the previous semester had always seemed to have misplaced one of Clara’s submissions about wanting to meet Ms. Polluck at a later date, or had accidentlyshredded them, or gotten jelly donut filling all over them, and let’s be honest even if Clara did believe in curses there’s no way someone could be that unlucky…right?
And there was that weird Russian(?) body guard who had “SHOWN HER THE WAY OUT.” Always hovering about nearby Ms. Pollucks office undoubtedly the ‘hired muscle’ who seemed to do her job of intimidating any ‘nosy no-good-nixs’(as the European pronounced it,) without actually doing much more than standing around and looming largely. Clara would have asked Ms. Polluck about her too!
-If she ever got the chance….
Again the idea of the "unexplained scientific phenem-" (you know what let's just say "curse" for short,) filled her head…Already she could feel herself giving up, the fire in her belly already slowly being snuffed out, the genius light bulb in her head clicking off ready to shut down for another year of blasé low self esteem life at school.….No! She was CLARA OCTAVIA PRICE! And SHE WASN’T JUST A STUDENT! SHE WAS A SCIENTIST DAMMIT! Luckily this second wind brought a genius idea with it!
She didn’t know when exactly Ms. Polluck would ever be in her office, but she did know exactly when and where she’d be in a few more hours….At the freshman orientation dinner!
No amount of bureaucracy was going to stand in this scientist way. She should make a list. A list of all the things she’d ask Ms. Polluck tonight where she’d be up front in front of everyone and unable to squirm away.
While the thought gripped her, and wondering how well she could forge a freshman ID card, Clara immediately grasped a mechanical pencil and a sheet of paper, then excitedly went to her desk to work.
But as she hurried, she found it was already quite cluttered, labeled with sticky notes and scribbles from earlier…Oh right…those….
Absentmindedly, and a bit dejected from how her attempt at an interview had gone, she had tossed quite a number of notebooks, notepads, and sticky notes onto her desk in a huff. Many of the papers were from over the summer and were outlines of future science projects she’d like to attempt when she got back to Buttercombe with its science lab, (minor as it may be it still outclassed what tech she had at home by light-years!)
Those college Biology grants weren’t exactly going to earn themselves…Maybe…Maybe she should actually do one of those projects instead of tracking down this ‘curse’ she’d been imagining. The friendly solid world of beakers and precise numbers were so much more manageable and controllable than dealing with the infuriatingly smug staff and complacent drones of Buttercombe…
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