It's been a while, Ms Rutledge. How have you been?
Tracey looked up from her table in the study room, and a small smile spread across her face. "Hey!" she nodded. "What brings you to the uni?"
Jai smiled back, glad to see that the young woman had gotten herself so far. "Well, as silly as it may sound, the librarian who used to work here used to let me in to keep out of the rain, she'd get me a hot drink and sometimes food, if she could. So I still come here to read." She shrugged. "What are you studying?"
"Principles of Mass Spectrometry," she groaned. Tracey put the book down, rubbing her eyes. "Basically, setting shit on fire and looking at the pretty colors it makes to figure out what it's made of. They needed a whole class for that."
"So, fancy chemistry then?" She teased "Or, 'How to make things explode prettily."
Jai shifted the book,what looked like a medical encyclopedia,from her hands up under her arm. 'How are you finding it?"
"I don't need a book to blow shit up," Tracey smirked. "But the spectrometry patterns... yeah, I need that explained."
She saw the book under her old teacher's arm and raised an eyebrow. "Getting into medicine?"
"Hm, I know you don't. You're as bad as Seamus from harry potter." Jai shot back, a small smirk playing at the sides of her lios. "Is it as complicated as it sounds?"
At Tracey's question she shifted the book again. "No. I've always had an interest. It's just something to read over a coffee."
Some people read newspapers, Jai read random encyclopedias.
Tracey looked at the encyclopedia. Then she looked back at Jai. Then she shrugged. Whatever, it was her business. She had a whole shelf of "light reading" that she'd stolen from various science departments, who was she to judge?
"I mean, the basics of it aren't difficult," Tracey explained. "You ionize the thing, then when it starts to break apart you look at the bits that fly away to see what it's made of. Charged particles, molecules coming apart, you can basically get a breakdown of what elements are present and in what amounts. It's just the details, little charts and numbers. I was never good with rote memorization, you know?"
Jai listened, intrigued. She'd never really read much on the subject, and hearing Tracey explain it was actually a breath of fresh air. She smiled as she set her coffee down on the table. "How times change, the student becomes the teacher." She teased lightly.
Tracey's mouth twitched into a slightly disgusted expression, but it ended in a smirk. "Gods, no," she said. "I ain't teaching shit. I'm just here to get my master's in chemical engineering, that's all."
Jai laughed, "I was messing. You would hate teaching, especially now. The classes are...allowed to get away with a lot."















