Monday, November 22, 2021 - Greenwich Village, New York, United States

Ella felt she was suspicious as she creeped around the Applied Physics lab. It wasn’t that much of a stretch for her to be here since she was a physicist, but knowing she wanted to use the equipment for non-Ph.D related analysis made her more nervous. The professors and students just ignored her.

Eventually she found someone at the door to the room of the SEM.

“Excuse me. How do I reserve time on the scope?” She tried to keep her voice calm and even bored sounding.

“And you are?” The woman she had asked had sallow skin from being indoors too much and crowsfeet around her eyes. A professor or one of those postdocs that had never made the leap to professor.

“I’m a grad student here. Well not here, here. But Dr. Fedoriw is my mentor.”

“Anatoly? What are you doing here? And why do you need the scanner?”

“Ummm…” Ella cursed herself a bit as she stumbled over the fiction she had practiced on her way over, “I am thinking about something cross-disciplinary for my dissertation and wanted to learn more about the applied side and what is possible to prove and not prove.” There was no way this woman had bought that.

“I don’t believe you.” The woman’s voice firmed up and Ella could just hear in her head, shit, shit, shit,.

“No high-and-mighty theoretical physicist would ever dirty their hands with real work.” She turned to the lab room and clapped her hands. “Everyone, everyone, please look up to see history in the making. This moment will be immortal for you.”

The students and other lab folk, obviously well used to the theatrics, didn’t pause or look up.

“Well, they are missing a true watershed moment here. I am the Department Chair, Lilly Braithwaite. It is a pleasure to have you here.”

Dr. Braithwaite became almost too enthusiastic and started taking her around the lab, pushing people away from equipment to explain how to use it.

Before she knew it, the tooth she had received from the bear, now hanging as a pendant off a necklace she had braided herself, had been under the SEM and a host of other tools just as for demonstration purposes. The professor didn’t even look at the readings and measurements, just printed them out and handed them right to Ella.

Ella staggered out of the whirlwind tour of applied sciences with a ton of paper, a USB drive filled with high resolution images, and a promise to come back. On her way out, the Chair of Applied Physics gave her a wink and promised not to tell her mentor about her visit. As if she was planning to defect.

Later, in her room, she organized the documents, and realized she had no idea how to read the results. The images on the USB drive weren’t any better. If anything, she could see some occasional readings from the necklace, but the tooth didn’t seem to exist. There might have been some strange emission signatures from it, but she wasn’t sure.

Next, how was she going to pull the same thing off in an analytical chemistry lab?