Bath was fairly apathetic towards the three boys he would be sharing the rest of the suite with. They were, to him, akin to insects: not worth anger or attention. But all the same, they were pests, and he wanted to fix the situation in his suite before they drove the place to ruin.
So, the same day that he told Lisa his plan for her involvement in his “research,” he asked her what he found to be an innocuous, general question.
“Lisa, how do humans normally go about establishing dominance?”
She gave him a stunned look, then keeled over in peals of laughter. “You can’t ever say that in public again,” she snorted. “That’s...Bath, come on, even you should know.”
Bath frowned. “You're thinking about my question in the wrong light.”
“Don’t tell me: you aren’t getting along with your suitemates, are you?”
Bath’s jaw tensed, then dropped in exasperation. “I didn’t even mention them! How did you know?”
“I know now,” Lisa grinned mischievously. “Why? What are they doing?”
Bath had to consciously control the blood vessels in his face to keep from blushing. Why was he blushing? Embarrassment? From not being able to control a pack of hormonal human children?
Perhaps a little. But mostly just from frustration.
“Just forget it,” he grumbled.
“No no, tell me,” Lisa insisted. “This is what I'm here for, after all. You handle the physical stuff, I handle the emotional stuff.”
“After a hundred years I won’t need you to handle the emotional stuff,” Bath said with a hint of arrogance. “By then, I'll have obtained mastery over the human psyche.”
“Why are you proud of being such a slow learner?” Lisa said, punching his arm. “Besides, you better be able to handle the emotional stuff by then. I’ll be dead, dumbass.”
“Fine, I'll tell you my problem. But, instead of helping directly, I want you to tell me what to do.”
“Fine by me,” she said, and began to listen to him explain the current situation.
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Bath wasn’t convinced Lisa’s plan would work. Either way, the plan could wait for later that day. In the meantime, he started doing some of his school work.
He and Lisa were working outside by the hammock.
“Lisa, this is absolutely terrible,” he cried, staring at his computer. “Why are we taking this class?”
Lisa sighed and gave him a pointed look. “That’s exactly why we're taking this class. You've become human expressly to stop humans from destroying the planet. What a better class to take together than a class exploring how people have systematically been destroying the environment?”
Bath stared down at the syllabus for ENVT 118, an introductory class on Environmental Policy in the United States. Lisa had told him about it and insisted that they take it together.
“But reading this makes me want to go out and kill the people involved in this report,” Bath rumbled. “Promoting environmental policies that knowingly destroy the environment becaue of a profit motive...”
“Bath, I still don’t understand why you're so outraged by political maneuverings. Aren’t those people just using their power to get what they want?”
“It just...feels wrong. Dishonest.”
They continued their classwork until four pm. That was when Bath announced that they needed to meet with Professor Scranton.
“I can’t wait to see her face when she sees your photograph,” Lisa chortled as they walked to the Paleontology building.
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“I'm sure it’ll be, at the very least, mildly entertaining,” he grinned.
“I feel like we're kicking a hornet’s nest just to see what will happen,” she remarked. “Like, this photo is so impossible, your fricking obsidian sample is so impossible, that I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
“Oh, it isn’t that impossible,” Bath rebutted. “It seems feasible enough to me that a creature with an incredibly tough, perhaps minerally-lined exoskeleton could be flash incinerated in magma and then cooled fast enough to leave an imprint with the minerals arrayed like so. And then that piece of cooled obsidian could, against all odds, not be drawn into the mantle...”
Lisa shook her head as she smiled. “Whatever you say.”
Bath knocked on the door; this time the professor didn’t detect his approach.
“Bath? Come in.”
He and Lisa entered.
“Hello, Professor, this is my friend Lisa, who was working with me on a project in Siberia this past summer.”
Lisa shot him a look.
Bath continued smoothly. “We managed to find a remarkable fossil in Siberia when we went investigating the Kara Sea.” The Kara Sea was the body of water along the region’s northern border.
Professor Scranton appeared perplexed. “What do you mean, you and, um, Lisa, were investigating the Kara Sea? By yourselves?”
“We decided to take a private trip to Siberia. We're both incredibly interested in ecology and wanted to investigate the unique properties of Siberia's igneous region. What we found...Well, we wanted to find a professor to help us investigate and publish our findings. After meeting with you the other day and hearing about your research, I think you're exactly who we've been looking for.”
“What did you find?” The professor closed her laptop and leaned forward in her seat. “It’s been five years since I last went to Siberia. I never found any fossil worth note.”
Lisa glanced at Bath. “We found an enormous fossil in a slab of obsidian,” she said hesitantly. “It’s the biggest fossil we've both ever seen.”
This had the professor’s attention. “That doesn’t make any sense. A fossil in obsidian?” She paused. “The only things that can leave a mark in obsidian are minerals."
Bath smiled despite himself.
“While that’s true, all the same, we found a fossil in obsidian that dwarfs anything humankind has seen before.”
She stared at them, her face screwed up into a disbelieving pucker. “I can’t believe this until I see it myself.”
“You're free to go and find it,” Bath smiled. “I'll tell you the coordinates.”
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“Y'know, Bath,” Lisa said as they left the paleontology building, “why don’t you just kill all of them?”
Bath cocked an eyebrow. “Who am I killing now?”
“You were talking earlier about how you wanted to kill the people who were destroying the environment for selfish reasons. Why don’t you just, y’know, go out and kill them?”
Bath responded with a question. “When there’s an ant hill, does it really make sense just to kill the ants on the surface?”
“These people aren’t just ants on the surface. They’re despicable, selfish bastards in positions of power. There aren’t an infinite amount of them.”
“They’ll naturally go away once we seize absolute power.”
“But why not act now? Sometimes you really confuse me. You became a human because the environment was being messed up. You didn’t want to let Global Warming accelerate climate change. And yet, every year the problem becomes worse!”
“You're the one who wanted to go to college instead of transition directly into taking over the world,” Bath reminded her.
Lisa snapped. “You don’t need me to do anything. You could have killed off all the oil moguls by now, destroyed oil fields, ruined lobbyists...”
“That’s not good enough,” he asserted.
“It’s better than nothing!” Lisa fumed. “If you're going to spend the next four years here with me, going through college, then why don’t you at least spend your free time doing something more productive than arrogantly taking credit for a mass extinction!?”
Bath’s expression became dark, sinister. Lisa flinched but continued walking at his side.
“You think I did this...out of arrogance?”
“What else would it be? It doesn’t matter what caused the Permian Extinction! ‘Teaching the humans about how one being can usher in an apocalypse’ is complete bull.”
Bath frowned. “Arrogance?” Now he spoke the word as a question.
“Bath,” Lisa sighed. “On the ridiculously long scale of time that you've been alive, you haven’t ever had the kind of brain you do now, one capable of processing higher level emotions like arrogance.”
“What are you implying?” he rumbled, a deep fury only barely concealed beneath his voice. At once, the air felt heavier, saturated with an intangible substance.
“All I'm saying,” Lisa said meekly, wondering if she was pushing Bath too far at once, “is that you've been in a kind of...mind-crucible over the past eighteen years. Before now, you never had to deal with human emotions. Now, you're starting to feel them for yourself, and act on them, even if-”
“Lisa.” Bath’s voice had a sense of finality to it. They didn’t speak for the rest of the walk to Ellis.