victory_road | video || action for Goldenrod

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video || action for Goldenrod

-- Red! Hey!

[Haunter is carrying the 'gear, apparently. Following diligently after its trainer like some shaky-cam show cameraman. Haunter's claws are visible around the edges of the camera frame. While they both chase a Torracat through the tall grass just outside Goldenrod.]

[A Torracat who is engaging in epic battle with a Nidoran♀.]

Seriously!? Get --

[They don't get there in time. The battle ends, with Torracat victorious. And... a flash of light. Which clears to reveal...]

[Incineroar.]

... back... here...

[Silence. Except for, you know, Incineroar bellowing in glee. Shiro just. Slowly looks over at the camera. With the camera turning to look at him in return.]

Okay then. That happened.

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Huh. You'd think someone would figure living on them would be easier.

... yeah, I've noticed. He talks about it like I do space exploration.

What? Space exploration? What's that?

[Oh no, Jean, now you've gone and done it!]

[JUST. GRINS.]

You know those stars you see at night? It means going up there. Seeing what's out there.

What?

[Sorry, Shiro, but that sounds too wild to be believed.]

You've been up in the stars? Are they a lot closer than they look?

[He laughs again, shaking his head. Yeah that was pretty much the reaction Armin had, too.]

I have, and no, they're even further away than they look. Millions of years away, some of them.

[These are kids who were amazed by hot showers and refrigerators; it's not hard to impress them with technology, especially when talking about something as outlandish as space exploration.]

How can something be millions of years away? That's not how you measure distance.

[Gosh, Shiro, next you're going to be telling Jean that you made the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs.]

They're that far away. It's like... if you turned on a light at that distance, with nothing to obstruct it?

It would take millions of years for us, on this planet, to be able to see that light come on.

[HE THINKS THIS IS REALLY COOL, OKAY JEAN, SORRY.]

If you tried putting it in miles? Or anything else? It's just too far.

But... wouldn't the light eventually just stop? How can it keep going on forever?

[It's not that he doesn't believe Shiro, but that he can't wrap his mind around light that never ends.]

How can any light source be strong enough to keep traveling for millions of years?

Because, man, the stars are suns. That's how they're strong enough.

[They're also planets and other things, but let's start simple.]

They look that size because of the distance. Get close enough, you see how big they really are, and how strong.

Really? The stars are actually suns?

[Okay, this is something Jean can understand. It's mind-blowing, but he also gets it, on some level.]

Why do they all look the same size in the sky? Are they actually all the same size as the sun? How far away is the sun?

[Look out, Shiro, you've awoken something Jean didn't know he had in him.]

Most of them. Some are planets, too.

[This is great. This is the best conversation.]

They don't, though. Some are a little bigger than others -- or a little brighter. You've got suns the size of the one Earth orbits, bigger, smaller... or super novas.

[THERE ARE SO MANY KINDS OF STARS, JEAN.]

Depends on how you measure the distance.

[TELL HIM ALL ABOUT THESE DIFFERENT TYPES OF STARS, SHIRO.]

What's a super nova? Is that some kind of special star?

Uh... how far away is it in meters?

[Meters, Jean can understand. He'll be able to grasp the concept of light years later, but for now, he wants to stick to what he knows.]

It is, yeah. It's when a sun gets to a certain point in its life... they basically expand. And explode. It's about as destructive and awesome as it sounds.

[But then he pauses, in thought.]

[How many meters is the sun...?]

A... few hundred million, probably?

Suns explode?!

[Let him just... process that for a moment. Of course, Shiro then follows it with another insane revelation, and Jean's head is spinning.]

But it looks so big in the sky... that means it's probably enormous, if it's so far away.

Eventually, yeah. Do you know what the word "nuclear" means?

[He's figuring he has to start small, here.]

Yeah... yeah, it is. Millions and millions of times bigger than Earth.

No.

[He's still grappling with the concept of the internal combustion engine and steamships; nuclear energy is way outside of his wheelhouse.]

[Jean is quiet for a moment, being completely awed by this new information.]

Have you gotten close to it?

Okay, it's... way, way beyond the kind of power you could get from combustion or steam engines. It's... the kind of power that changes what things are made up of.

[Sorry, Jean, he's into astronomy not astrophysics.]

To Earth's sun? No way.

[To an actual supernova? Way too close.] The gravity would pull you in and you'd burn up before you got anywhere near it.

Uh...

[Okay, this nuclear stuff sounds like something Dr. Ford and Armin should talk about. Jean will simply accept Shiro's explanation that it makes a lot of power. Gravity, though... he gets gravity, and immediately warms to the subject.]

So just like the earth pulls us down, the sun and other stars pull stuff in too? Cool.

[Admittedly, nuclear fission or fusion or whatever it was, isn't his strong point, either. He knows it happens and that's why the sun works. That's. Really all that was necessary.]

[If Pidge or Hunk were here, though...]

Yeah. They do. That's why the earth orbits the sun, and why the moon orbits the earth.

[If Shiro's nerd friends were here, Jean would never see his own nerd friend Armin again; he'd be off talking about gravity and fission or fusion or whatever all day. It would be a nerdy extravaganza!]

How big does something have to be before it gets its own gravity and can make things orbit it?

Edited 2017-08-31 11:38 (UTC)

[Clearly, his team nerds need to show up for Nerd Party.]

Big. Bigger than anything ever on the ground of a planet. Like... say, the moon, or so.

Wow.

[That's impressively big.]

So the bigger something is, the more gravity it has and the more things it can pull into orbit? Could one of those bigger suns have more planets around it?

You got it.

And yes, absolutely. A lot of them do.

[He's been to a good chunk of them, in fact.]

How many? I mean, which sun has the most planets around it? And how many?

[Size matters to Jean, apparently.]

I... don't know which one has the most.

Earth's solar system has eight planets. Nine if you count Pluto. But every system is different.

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