"Good christ, woman," I said.

Attempting to teach Akane the mad science of transformation was... shall we say, taxing. The thing about mad science was, you had to know what you were doing. You have to understand the reality of the situation in order to effectively formulate a predictive model that would have the effect you want.

And since Akane wanted to make a gadget for cosmetically transforming humans, she had to understand a thing or two about medicine, anatomy, and/or biology to get it to work properly.

Which she didn't.

At all.

"Okay, well, you're going to need some remedial education in biology and medicine, but we can do that later," I said. "I can tell that the field of transformation is brain candy for you, so we're going to finish this today, just... differently."

"Ooooh, like pairing the transformer with a medical scanner and a mental scanner with an integrated Virtual Intelligence that can interpret the user's desires into sane, concrete details?" Akane suggested.

"...Yes, exactly," I said. "It's good that you're thinking outside the box. Right, let's get working on that. You want me to handle the VI?"

"You're gonna have to," Akane said. "The VI's medical knowledge has to come from somewhere."

"I am so lost," Lisa said.

"Yeah, mad science has that effect on people," I said. "Uhhh... Ah, here we go. I bought this phone as a prop to hide the fact I have a computer in my head, but now I don't need to hide it, so here, take it." I fished the smartphone out of my pocket and sent a factory reset command to it with the Virtual Machine before handing it over to Lisa. "Gonna take a bit to factory reset, but probably not much. I didn't do much of anything to it."

"Android, huh?" Lisa asked.

"I'm just so sad that Steve Jobs died of ligma," I said.

"Who the hell is Steve Jobs?"

"Ligma balls."

"No, seriously, who is that?"

"The founder and first CEO of Apple?" I said. "Y'know, the company that made the iPhone and popularized the notion of smartphones?"

"That didn't happen here," Akane said. "You know, it occurs to me that there are a lot of divergences that I kinda assumed you figured out yourself in the month you've been here, but... Apparently you didn't spend a lot of downtime on Wikipedia?"

"I did not, no," I said. "I was busy doing vocational research instead of looking up who the Founding Fathers were in this timeline."

"Was he called George Washingtub on your planet, too?" Akane asked.

"...I'm sorry, Washingtub?" I asked.

"I guess not," Akane said. "Yeah, the national capital is Washingtub D.C., and there's a state in the Northwest called Washingtub."

"I don't fucking believe you," I said, frowning. "You know what, no, we're not doing this. Get back to work. Lisa, go entertain yourself. We're going to be busy for a few hours."

Working with Akane the entire time meant I couldn't really be surprised by the results of our work. Dismayed, certainly, but not surprised.

"Here, Lisa, put this on," Akane said, holding out a leather collar with a subtle plastic enclosure for electrical components. One of the most useful tricks learned from transformational mad science is to make one's gadgets look... approximately normal. Obviously technological, and often of unfamiliar make, but normal enough to not draw suspicion.

"You're joking," Lisa said, looking up from her phone.

"Humor us, please," I said.

"...The hell is this thing gonna do, anyway?" Lisa asked.

"A temporary and minor cosmetic transformation," I said. "You'll have fox ears and a tail for like ten minutes, and then it'll wear off. Or it'll wear off as soon as you take the collar back off."

"And if it doesn't?" Lisa asked.

"Well, if it doesn't, you're still going to be a shapeshifter," I said. "You can just... shapeshift back."

"...Alright, fine, give it here," Lisa said, taking the collar from Akane and putting it on below her already-worn collar. I had the sudden mental image of Lisa's fashion sense taking cues from Final Fantasy, with the one exception being that all the pointless belts were instead pointless collars. Some of those characters still wore collars and chokers, but Lisa probably thought they didn't wear enough. "Oh whoa that feels weird."

Lisa was already decently cute, but now, with the fox ears jutting out of her equally-red hair, she was patently adorable. Especially as one of the ears twitched a few times.

"Alright, we need to make sure the nerve hookups are working properly," I said, lifting up my hand. "Do you mind?"

"...Fine," Lisa said, turning her head away. I carefully reached past the ear closest to me to skritch at the base of the far one, summoning forth a cute little noise that Lisa unsuccessfully tried to strangle in the back of her throat.

"That one seems to have functioning tactile sense," I said clinically. "Other one..." I gave the other ear a good skritch, followed by a gentle rub between thumb and forefinger that made Lisa squirm. "Excellent. Alright, now, next phase in the test, try removing the collar and see if the ears remain."

Lisa nodded silently, her face a bit red, and unbuckled the collar Akane gave her. She handed it back to Akane... and still had fox ears. "Shit," Lisa muttered.

"Try shifting back to fox form first," I said, because I had no idea whether it would work as intended, or if Lisa would have four fox ears. Unfortunately for my latest flight of fancy, it did work as intended, and Lisa was simply an ordinary fox. And then she was an ordinary human once more.

And then, she was a human with fox ears. She shifted back and forth, extending and retracting the ears, starting to grin deviously.

"Well, isn't that a hell of a thing," Lisa said. "I think I'm starting to get the hang of this selective shapeshifting thing."

"Good, good," I said, nodding. "While Akane's doing grad school stuff this week, I'm gonna try helping you figure out the rest of your werefox tricks."

"I thought you couldn't do that," Lisa said.

"I thought that too," I said. "But then I realized that being there to back you up while you try things is going to be better than nothing. So... you in?"

"...Yeah. I'm in."

"So... All three aptitudes," I said.

Of course, after we were done with the testing of Akane's latest device, we retreated back to the lab, which we had currently set up in the basement. Which... well, the question of Lisa's living space could be answered later. The basement was, after all, roughly the same size as the house above us, and one floor of that could demonstrably hold four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and some hallways. We'd put in some studs and drywall for Lisa's room at some point.

"Should I get the champagne?" Akane asked.

"No," I said. "This is a milestone, don't get me wrong, but it's not the one that traditionally means you're no longer my responsibility. The milestone that does traditionally herald the end of an apprenticeship is called the Thesis."

"Do you mean I have to do an original research project and defend it in front of a committee, or is this something else that just has the same name?" Akane asked.

"Well, the Thesis as it is understood by mad scientists could present itself as an actual doctoral dissertation," I said. "However, it usually doesn't. It has to be something tied into whatever it is that drove you to become a mad scientist. In your case, you want to understand superheroes. So... y'know, you're going to have to do something that would bring you closer to understanding."

"Hrm..." Akane hummed. "...So, questions. Question one: what happens when I do understand how superheroes work?"

"You never will," I said. "Not to your own complete satisfaction, anyways. That's something you're going to have to come to terms with now, by the by- you will go to your grave with unanswered questions. There is no bottom. You can always go deeper. The rabbit hole, much like common law property rights, goes all the way to hell."

"Even if I live forever?" Akane asked.

"Nobody does," I said. "There's just people who haven't died yet, some of whom have been managing it for longer. Infinity is imaginary; the cold calculus of entropy is very finite. Next question."

"Right, right... so, what does completing a Thesis actually do?" Akane asked. "Like, I'm assuming that if I can figure out what the underlying mechanical difference is between superscience that can be replicated by humans and superscience that can't, then that'll be a valid Thesis, but aside from answering an important question and opening up new avenues of research, what is that going to do for me?"

"Every demiurge has, in addition to their knowledge and their skill, a certain amount of raw oomph," I said. "You don't start out with that much; you have limited amounts of energy and headspace, there are limits on how much cool shit you can accomplish. But, by completing a Thesis, by immersing yourself deeper and deeper in whatever it was that catalyzed you and drove your Breakthrough, you can get more power, more understanding, more headspace, and fewer limits. Because I've been around this block a few times, I have a good amount of energy to draw upon, more headspace to maintain the reified fabrications that power my tech, and even just the things I build are simply stronger and more capable because I have more metaphysical weight to throw behind these reality-warping lies in the first place."

"Ooooh," Akane said. "So if I complete a Thesis, my motorcycle will get faster?"

"Yes, actually," I said, nodding. "It's kind of weird, because the particular lies that powered your motorcycle are specific enough that getting twice as much top speed just flatly should not work, but it will anyways, because I may have oversold to you the extent to which mad science is understood. And let me be clear: it is not. Absolutely nobody has any goddamn idea why it is that demiurges get to play god and redefine the rules of reality, and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit. More than that, there's a lot of finer details about mad science that nobody understands. We know that normal people make mad science go haywire, but we don't actually know why. We've got guesses, we've got untestable theories, but we just do not know, and it looks a lot like we can't know."

I realized that I'd just gone on a tangent, and tried valiantly to steer the conversation in a more productive direction.

"Now, there are other things I need to teach you before I can consider your apprenticeship truly over," I said, "so don't go rushing towards your first Thesis. That being said, think about it."

"Collate existing hypotheses on the nature of superheroes and use mad science to test them?" Akane asked.

"Maybe, but..." I hummed. "Well, this is what worked for me, and I can think of a few good reasons why it wouldn't be a successful long-term tactic for you, but I always treated the Thesis as an act of self-examination and self-definition. I am Banished; my Theses have been, with one dramatic exception early on, fairly introspective affairs that saw me contemplating social dynamics and the nature of outsider status and how it shapes my life, and what I'm going to do about it. And so I think that you, Akane, before you set out in earnest on this life-defining pursuit, stop and seriously consider the following question:

"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "What's your motivation, what drives you to pursue this challenging line of research? Do you think that understanding could yield materially useful techniques that could improve the world? Do you simply want to understand for the pure joy of knowledge? Are you, in fact, trying to prove a point in some way?" I paused. "You have the week to consider the question. Have an answer for me before your mother arrives. I will check."