"Are you sure this is the best use of your time?" Nicky asked.

"No," I admitted as Lisa arranged some potted plants on the floor with the aid of a tape measure. "But, y'know. At this point, there kind of isn't anything productive I can be doing with my time, vis-a-vis the whole Skinner thing. I'm just keeping busy so I don't get too deep in my own head and freak the fuck out and have a nervous breakdown."

"Also, doing science can be fun," Akane said, carefully examining my notes as I assembled my transforming ray.

"Sometimes," I allowed. "Rigorous science involves a lot of repetition and removal of the human element to the maximal viable extent, which generally takes a lot of the fun out of it, but, well. It's fun to think about, at least."

"Also," Lisa chimed in, "I don't think a vtuber gets to complain about other people using their time unproductively."

"I choose to interpret that as a dig at my audience, not myself," Nicky said haughtily, folding her arms. "Because I'll have you know I'm making enough to keep myself above the poverty line in donations, and I'm doing it without putting tits on the screen."

"GreaseKitty the Vtuber," I said. "Raking in the dough with both tits behind her back."

"Oh that is a terrible mental image," Nicky said, shuddering.

"Changing the subject," Akane said. "Would you mind laying out the general theory behind why combining weapons science and transformation science is anything approaching reasonable?"

"I've been wondering about that, too," Lisa said. "So, uh, maybe give us the explanation that non-mad-scientists can understand?"

"Bit tricky, but I'll try," I said. "So... okay, I'm going to operate in a Platonic Idealist slash Essentialist framework for this explanation, because it's one that real mad scientists have gotten to work- myself included- while also being one that's easy enough to explain to normal-ish people."

"Alright," Nicky said. "I'm not totally sure what all those words mean in that particular order, but keep going."

"So, the mad science of weapons is, fundamentally, about using mad science to produce ways to hurt people and break things," I continued. "It can be thought of as a collection of methods to induce the effect of damage or incapacitation upon other things. And these methods generally align with an ordinary modern human's conception of regular weapons: melee weapons that have to physically touch the target to induce the desired effect, ranged weapons that only have to be pointed in the right direction, area-effect weapons that can apply the effect to, well, a wide area rather than a single target, lingering area-effect weapons that apply the effect to anything that enters the area for some period of time... All of these things and more have mundane equivalents in knives, guns, grenades, and firebombs."

"Alright, I'm with you so far," Lisa said. "The mad science of weapons fundamentally works just like real weapons, except it shoots black holes or ghost farts instead of bullets."

"More or less," I said, nodding. "But! When you conjoin weapon science to some other science in the right way, you can use the weapon science part to define a method of applying an effect to other things, and the other science to define what the effect is in the first place. By way of example, this here ray gun uses very basic weapons science to define what is, in all honesty, a very shitty pistol- point it at the target and activate it to apply the effect, but not terribly strongly and not with great range- and very basic transformation science to make that effect 'make things glow in the dark' instead of the typical 'make things more damaged.'"

"Ahhh, I see," Nicky said. "So, weapons science defines ray guns and bombs, but you can replace the damaging payload with pretty much any other effect you know how to create through mad science?"

"Kinda, for a more limited version of 'any other effect,'" I said. "Akane can make a ray gun that shrinks someone's truck, but I don't know how she'd go about making a ray gun that applies the effect of having a truck, even though a truck is in fact a thing she can make through superscience."

"It'd probably be through more transformation, with an admixture of vehicles," Akane added. "A ray gun that applies the effect of transformation, with that transformation being either into a truck, or into a person who can run as fast as a truck."

"...Can you actually turn someone into a truck?" Lisa asked.

"Probably!" Akane said. "I haven't tested that, but I have tested turning mice into toy cars. They were all fine afterwards."

"The ethics board made us hang up a placard if we were going to keep using lab mice," I added, pointing at the placard on the wall.

"In memory of every animal whose life was taken in the name of science," Nicky read aloud. "...And then in smaller text beneath that, 'Animal lives taken in the name of science within these walls: Zero.'"

"The ethics board lets us keep that bit, but only as long as we stay honest about it," Akane said.

"Anything legitimately experimental, we test on plants first," I added. "Which we're doing here more because I don't feel like doing the paperwork necessary to borrow a dozen lab mice. The mice are more to confirm that something'll interact with animals the same way it interacts with plants."

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"Speaking of plants," Lisa said, setting the last plant in its designated spot. "Ready when you are."

The plants were arranged in a pretty straightforward pattern, resembling a spiral. The first plant sat three meters away from the marked spot where I'd stand. The next plant, at a ten degree offset from that first plant, was six meters away. And so it continued, incrementing by ten degrees and three meters each time, until at last we reached the final plant, which was 90 degrees offset from the beginning and a full 30 meters from where I stood.

Once everyone was standing safely behind me, I shot each plant precisely once, taking enough time to be sure of my aim, and not really that much more. These plants were head-sized philodendrons, and the furthest one was only thirty meters away; as a professional doer of violence, I wouldn't be very good at my job if I couldn't reliably hit a head-sized target at that range.

I hit the last plant, then turned off the overhead lights for a second, confirming that all of the plants closer than twenty meters were glowing in the dark, then turned the lights back on.

"Yep," I said, pointing the ray gun at the floor. "This thing sure does only have an effective range of twenty meters."

"What's that in feet?" Nicky asked.

"Sixty five," Akane supplied. "Well. Y'know. Thereabouts. What I wanna know is what it'll do to me."

"No," I said.

"Roxy," Akane said patiently. "I am a shapeshifter and also loaded to the gills with all sorts of protective and healing implants, that you gave me. This isn't unreasonably dangerous. I just want to glow in the dark without having to work out the transformation myself."

I considered it carefully... then sighed, and shot her with the ray gun.

"Yesss," Akane said. "Ooooh, lemme get the lights." She reached out to the light switch with her own Virtual Machine, and indeed, she did in fact glow in the dark. Or, at least, her skin did- which was an interesting appearance as she was, at the moment, wearing her casual around-the-house outfit of a tank top and shorts, meaning that all of us were treated to the sight of some lovely glow-in-the-dark cleavage. "Oh hell yes."

"Hrm," Nicky said, as Akane started to play with her own boobs, enamored with the glow.

"Hrm?" I asked, turning the lights back on and spoiling the effect.

"I have a question and a concern," Nicky said. "Question first: could you affix semi-arbitrary mad science effects to semi-esoteric and potent weapon methods such as lingering area-effect?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "I mean. I'm not sure if I could do that, because I've never successfully gotten an area-effect weapon that just hurts people to work, but I'm not very good with weapon science, so that doesn't say much."

"I see, I see," Nicky said, nodding. "But, you'll accept that someone who's better at weapon science than you could make a bomb that turns everyone in the room into a catgirl, right?"

"Oh, absolutely," I said. "I've seen weapons that turned everything alive in the room into salt, and turning people into catgirls is way easier than that."

"Right, right," Nicky said. "What about a bomb that leaves a lingering catgirlification aura on a room?"

"Probably doable," I said. "What're you building up to?"

"Would it be possible for Doctor Skinner to build a bomb that leaves a lingering brainwashing aura on some high-traffic area?" Nicky asked.

I blinked.

"Shit up my fucking nose," I said. "Oh fuck I hadn't even thought about that, oh christ, we are fucked."

"No we're not," Akane said. "Doctor Skinner personally isn't capable of that."

I blinked, and turned to face her.

"And... what makes you so confident about that?" I asked.

"Because I know a few things that you don't," Akane said. "You and Skinner both specialize in some of the more diverse fields of mad science. I mean, look at controller science- at your level, you can control technology, organic nervous systems, minds in general, the trends of crowds, the weather, and the concept of luck. Meanwhile, look at weapon science- just an assortment of ways to hurt people and break things. You're both arrogant, and think you're the smartest people in the room, and so the idea that weapon science is in fact every bit as complicated, deep, and nuanced as controller science just doesn't occur to you."

"...Um," I said, a bit uncomfortably.

"I know, but it needs to be said," Akane said. "Remember what you said about area effect and lingering area effect weapons? Those are actually really hard to do! You're not unable to make a raygun that shoots explosions because you're bad at weapon science, you're unable to do that because you're not good at it, and you can't even become good because you don't really respect it as a discipline it'd be possible to become good at in the first place! Sure, Doctor Skinner is a little better at it, because she's had longer to practice with it, but I've seen her attempt at making weapons to arm her supersoldiers with, and she's not good enough to do what Nicky proposed. Like, let's say Skinner was going to try to mind-control the world by putting a lingering mind-control field over every airport terminal on the planet. She'd have to be the next best thing to a legendary master of weaponry to manage that! And she isn't! Because she doesn't really believe that weapon science is a skill to begin with! And neither do you, which is why you don't know this already."

"Alright, alright," I said, closing my eyes. "I get it, weapons science is a deeper well than I give it credit for, and this particular paranoid worry is just that- paranoid and jumping at shadows. Lesson learned."

"Sorry, I just..." Akane said, suddenly wilting.

"It's fine," I half-lied.

I didn't mind being told that I was wrong about something. Well. I tried not to, anyway. I was a prideful woman and kinda stuck with that, but one workaround I cultivated was taking pride in the ability to admit when I'm wrong, which happened to be easier with subjects I didn't care about, like the mad science of weapons.

What I minded was a minute-long rant that hinged on the argument that Doctor Skinner and I were blinkered and arrogant in precisely the same way...

...and the fact that it was right.