Mike & Karen Ch. 25

Why couldn't everyone be straightforward and sensible, like him?

"Good morning, big boy," Mona purred as she hugged him from behind, giving him a kiss on the cheek. "How's everyone's favourite oversized egghead?"

"Doing fine," he replied, watching as she sat next to Karen. Lisa hugged him next, a little more effort required on her part, since she was smaller than the other girls. Mike kept telling her she still had growing to do, but she seemed to think he was teasing her and got grumpy whenever he brought it up. So she'd just be short from now on, he guessed. "Just checking out some spin equations and making notes so that we can go to Lucerne with new info."

"Aw, you're so diligent, Mongo," Janet cooed, hugging him last and giving his ear a nip. He was casual lovers with both her and Mona, and had even had sex with both of them at the same time now, even if they didn't make love with one another. It was a little strange, but they were comfortable around each other that way, so at least it wasn't awkward. They just enjoyed watching him fuck each other while being really close and often getting off, occasionally kissing and caressing. "By the time summer rolls around, I'll get you... what?"

She had stopped talking because Mike was now staring at her. She'd moved around from behind him and was heading to a seat when she noticed the look he was giving her. His laser-blue eyes were fixed on her, and they were beginning to show that characteristic gleam of amusement. His gaze travelled up and down her body, and a faint hint of a smirk creased the corners of his mouth.

She looked down at herself and then back at him, almost frowning. "What?"

He was smirking because Janet was wearing a bright red jumpsuit, hitched at the waist with a white belt and matching white pumps. He'd seen similar outfits on girls dancing in music videos, of course, but to see it right here, in the cafeteria...

Nobody else at the table said anything, just hunkering low, but Janet's eyes hardened and she almost glared. "DeBourne, if you ever want to fuck me again, you had better not insult my new clothes..."

Mike put his huge fist in front of his mouth, cleared his throat and looked up at her, not a trace of amusement to be found anymore. "That's a lovely outfit, Remington. Did Diana Ross mind selling it to you?"

"Jesus," she muttered as she stomped around the table and sat down next to Lisa while Mona lost the battle and broke down snickering uncontrollably. Karen just shook her head and concentrated on her coffee, while Lisa slumped down in her seat, hoping she was out of the path of any sudden projectiles. "You are so lucky the only thing bigger than your brain is your dick."

She then scowled across Lisa at Mona. "See if I ever film you fucking this big jerk again, traitor."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Mona sniffled, trying to arrest her giggle and feebly waving her hand as tears of mirth shone on her cheeks. "That was just a really good one! I'm sorry it was at your expense, Jan, but... oh, God, that was good..."

Mona's giggling was seemingly infectious, because soon Lisa began to giggle, followed by Karen tittering prettily behind her hand. Janet kept shaking her head and muttering, but soon enough, even she was wearing a smirk. DeBourne had a way of lightening a mood and making people laugh, with his unexpected, unparalleled lightning wit. He also knew when to extend the olive branch, and did so once the snickering had died down at the table. "You just caught me off-guard, Remington, I'm used to you being more of a t-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap kind of girl."

"Well, maybe I'm... upping my brand," Janet tried to reason, shrugging. "I used some of the money Mr. Blackwell gave me to buy some new duds. A girl's allowed, right?"

"You look great, babe, no matter what this troll says," Mona cooed, reaching behind Lisa and caressing her friend's shoulder. They'd always been good friends, but for whatever reason, the two of them fucking Mike had brought them closer. "Nobody escapes DeBourne humour, not even Princess here."

"That is true enough," Karen agreed, nodding. "I have indeed been on the receiving end of his absurd antics more than once."

"Oh, you're one to talk, young lady," Mike snorted, giving her a look. The other three girls glanced back and forth, wondering what that had been about, but seemed entitled to no further elaboration. Mike just kept his gaze fixed on Karen, who sat there in her elegant, aloof manner, sipping at her coffee. Clearly, Karen had somehow given Mike a taste of his own medicine at some point recently, but what form it had taken was anybody's guess.

"It's good to see you two bickering again," Janet sighed. "All the getting along and camaraderie after your big discovery was starting to make me paranoid, like the universe was ending or some shit."

"Never mind that, here comes your dean," Lisa said warily, spying the dean of the Physics Department, Graham Marks, walking briskly through the cafeteria, and making a beeline for their table. Mike and Karen both let out small, quiet sighs or groans of despair.

"What did you do to tick him off this time?" Mike queried, looking at Karen. She returned the gaze, her elegant eyebrow arching skeptically while her fingers were steepled in front of her on the table.

The dean reached the group, looking hurried and flustered, as he always seemed to manage to, even when he was sitting in his office. He looked back and forth between his two prized students (well, prized in the case of Gordon, he somehow managed to tolerate DeBourne on behalf of the department), his body language betraying his agitation.

"Heya, Groucho," Mike said cheerfully. He was as tall sitting down as Marks was standing up, and he knew it irked the dean mightily. "What can we do to help? Need something reached from the top of a tall shelf?"

"DeBourne, just once in your lamentably long life, shut up," the dean snapped, glaring at the titan student. His dislike for Mike was legendary. If anybody hated Mike's short jokes more than Lisa, it was the dean, who didn't even clear five-and-a-half feet in height. Mike was just shy of seven feet, so seeing them together often gave people vertigo. The dean looked at Karen. "Do you two have the time to go over some numbers?"

Karen considered and then shrugged, an elegant gesture when she did it. "I think I do. But I can only speak for myself."

She looked over at DeBourne, who said nothing, having dutifully shut up. Marks turned a shade of puce, made a frustrated noise before exhaling in exasperation and then looking at Mike while he put a piece of paper on the table and allowed Karen to examine it. "Fine... DeBourne, do you have time to help us with some numbers?"

Mike put his hands behind his head and shrugged. Lisa called it the 'lights-out' gesture, because if she was close to him and he did it, he blocked out any light behind him. It made her giggle. "I've got a dinner to make for some students, I'm giving piano lessons, and I've got my D&D game tomorrow, so... what're you working on?"

Marks scowled at having to explain himself while Mike looked at the paper Karen had just pushed toward him on the table. "We're following up on the Hawking Radiation readings from the experiment, and we've run into some trouble with the submanifold numbers in the codimensions. They are not equating on the hypersurface the way they should."

Mike shrugged again. "That's just numbers. Gordon'll have that worked out for you in no time flat. You don't need me, Groucho."

"Until I run into the complex projective space, that's where you know more than I do any day of the week," Karen pointed out. "I need you to actually steer the ship, even if I'm just making the calculations."

"The only possible vector from the 2(n-1) hyperplane is two, because the hyperplane won't separate," Mike countered. "It's already reached the allowable higher dimension."

"Agreed, sir, but it will have a real codimension of two as well, meaning that it suddenly falls out my algebraic variety," she replied, producing a small notepad from her clutch and a pen from somewhere in her enormous cleavage. She began writing down numbers and equations on it in her graceful script while she explained. "The manifolds compactifying proved that the vector space v + 2w was a degrade, and will collapse once they registered in cw dimension. That leaves a Zariski tangent vector of V, and a Euclidean vector of a."

"Gordon, you just jump-started a miniature black hole," Mike laughed, pulling the paper she'd been writing on over and using his own, admittedly less elegant and less expensive pen to write his own big, bold figures. "We scanned the Hawking Radiation all the way up here in (4+n)," he explained to her. She just kept looking at him and his notes levelly, while the dean and the girls were glancing back and forth in varying levels of confusion and disbelief. "More than that, your proposed line will result in kbT= C3, meaning no Newton Constant, and the black hole collapses before we could even read output or decay."

"But," Karen said, holding up a finger before pulling the paper back to her and then writing down more lines of impossible math. "Not if we... measure... the thermal freedom in a degenerate set. We look here and here, where the Green's Function diagonalizes, and we still have spectral representation of the Heisenberg two point."

"Oh, yes, good one, but watch out for this," Mike said rather eagerly, pulling the paper back and writing something quickly. "With a value of g here, you suddenly end up with a Riemannian manifold. So you need to move the curve to xW, or end up with a Zeta immersion."

"Out of what textbook, Gilman?" Karen almost snorted. "Unaussprechlichen Kulten? We're equating a hypersurface, not summoning Cthulhu. M over M is still always M, even if you introduce an f subversion in the Planck field."

"Try fg with an inherent value of 0," Mike suggested.

Karen wrote a few numbers and paused, looking at the sheet of paper. Everyone else looked with her, but only Mike understood. Even Marks had no clue now what was happening. To Lisa, the page had become one big ophidian tangle. It made her eyes hurt.

"Did you expect that result?" Karen asked quietly.

"No, not exactly," Mike sighed, shaking his head. "I was getting a pretty good hunch, but I wasn't certain."

Karen looked up at him, and she was seemingly worried. "We don't have to discard and rework the entire theory, do we?"

"What?!" Marks exclaimed in panic, going pale. Had these two lunatics just undone physics?

Mike squinted at the paper, staring hard for several seconds before shaking his head. "I don't think so. Work down that mM line and I'll start working out the Zeta immersion on a fresh sheet here."

They both dived into their equations immediately, occasionally tearing off small bits of paper, writing figures on it and passing them back and forth with their findings. The pens scratched furiously, and the small mound of papers grew steadily.

"Welp," Mona sighed, pushing herself up from the table. "I was gonna try and get laid, but that's obviously not happening. Guess I'll go use one of the showers with the detachable heads."

"Count me in," Janet grunted, standing as well. "Looks like my new Diana Ross ensemble isn't scoring me any points."

"Hey, wait for me!" Lisa squeaked, getting up and hurrying after her friends. "Why'm I always left out?!"

The scribbling continued and Marks just stood there, looking at his star students. They'd gone into some realm of numbers and equations that he was simply not invited to, even if he was the damn dean of the department. They'd lost him when they began arguing on the merits of the Newton Constant in a black hole of negative mass and infinite dimensions. The numbers on the papers they were shoving aside to write more seemed almost unreal. Were they bullshitting him?

He reached down and tried to take one of the papers Gordon had pushed to the edge of the table, but her free hand flashed out and slapped the back of his while she continued writing and concentrating on her task. Marks yanked his hand back, looking shocked and hurt for a moment, rubbing at the skin. It hadn't hurt, but the message was clear. He wasn't invited to the party.

"I'll... just leave you to it, then," he announced, trying to sound authoritative and drawing himself up to his full, underwhelming height. "So... when can I expect these results?"

Karen paused in writing for a moment, looking up and glancing at Mike, her eyebrow raised. Mike returned the gaze and then looked up at Marks. "Give us an hour, Groucho."

"An hour?" the dean blurted, stunned. "Horvath and I figured we'd be at this for at least a week."

"Bully for you, getting stuck working with Professor Horvath, sir," Karen said, already back at work on her numbers with remarkable speed.

He was quickly forgotten again, so he straightened out his tie and nodded. "Uh, carry on, then..."

The dean made his exit, wanting to be just about anywhere else. The two students kept working, exchanging information in scraps of paper and driving one another closer to the conclusion they were looking for. The only question remaining was who would find it first.

Karen gave Mike a sly look. "If you beat me to the degradation equation, I'll flash you again."

Mike paused, sat up and snapped the lid back on his pen, putting it down and giving her a smug look as he stopped theorizing entirely, folding his arms and refusing to jot another number.

Karen looked shocked and offended before giggling and throwing her pen at him.

***

Blackwell Manor, the present...

"Lexi, that was an amazing rehearsal!" Charli gushed as the girls walked excitedly down the hall, coming up from the sub-basement. "We've never sounded better! And your guitar and vocals are to die for, babe!"

"Oh, c'mon, guys," Alexa said, blushing modestly and waving it off as she led the way. "You make me sound good. I mean, I've never been in a band before, and I'm just following off you."

"I'm callin' bullshit," Aarie declared, laughing. "I'm rhythm guitar, and I was playin' off you all night. You're a natural."

"I can't believe how good the acoustics are in that room," Kira breathed. "The sound was incredible. We could record in there! We need to thank your sis and brother-in-law, Alexa, for letting us use it."

"Yeah, I'm sure you'll be happy to be the one to thank 'em, right?" Danijela teased, gently nudging the black girl with her elbow. They all laughed while Kira made a point of scowling and then stuck her tongue out at her bandmate.

"So who's up for a li'l post-sesh jacuzzi?" Alexa asked. "I know I didn't ask you to being bathing suits, so you can all just go in your underthings or we can do the al fresco routine."

The girls all looked at one another and then shrugged at her suggestion. "I guess we can get naked," Charli said. "None of us're gay, although you're apparently bi, and Kira is for your sister..."

This earned her a swat from Kira while the others giggled.

"But we've all gone skinny dipping up at Danijela's parents' farm, so I guess a jacuzzi isn't much different."

"Awesome," Alexa said, clapping. "I'll get you guys in there and you get started while I have Val make some drinks for us. You guys've all told my staff what drinks you like, right? My big sissy doesn't like it when her guests aren't being properly looked after, and neither does Tatyana."

"Where's your hunky husband, Lexi?" Aarie teased. "Maybe we can get him to wear a thong and act as our cabana boy while we're lounging in splendour."

"We're already using him as roadie for the performance next week, and sorry, he's my personal cabana boy, when he isn't putting me in my place," Alexa laughed. "But I'll bet you his dorky bandmates would do it in a heartbeat. They're typical teen boys, thirsty for any glimpse of skin."

"Y'make 'em sound creepy, Alexa," Kira mentioned as they approached the solarium in which was waiting the jacuzzi. "They're nice guys."

"Absolutely, no argument there," Alexa said easily as she gestured for them to enter. "I tortured them one day by parading back and forth in my new microbikini and I'm sure they all nearly died from instant blood loss to their brains."

"Can't imagine why," Charli quipped as she patted Alexa on her bum while she sauntered into the solarium. "Didn't you tell us that's the day you convinced them against Alex's wishes to name their little band Kaiju Sex Massacre or something?"

"The girls haven't failed me yet," Alexa replied proudly, cupping her tits and jiggling them for a moment, making her friends all laugh. "Get in, I'm gonna find Val. Back in a few..."

She wandered around for a few minutes, looking for Valentina, but didn't come across her. She happened to be in the east wing near the ballroom when she came across Trilby, who was stacking linens for small, round tables and putting them in the utility room right by the ballroom's grand doors. The hippie girl stopped working and nodded her head. "You seem to be looking for something, ma'am."

"Just call me Alexa, Trilby, it's only the two of us," Alexa said easily, standing in front of the senior housekeeper. "I was lookin' for Val, in fact. The girls'n I are having a post-rehearsal jacuzzi sesh to wind down and I was hoping she could run some drinks for us. I haven't found her, though. Maybe I'll see if Theresa can do someting."

"I think Theresa's in the middle of dinner, actually," Trilby mentioned. Alexa was always pleased and amused by how efficient Trilby was. She was absolutely the hippie chick of the group, the odd one out in the staff. But on the clock, she was a model of efficiency, even if she was often somewhat cavalier in her speech patterns. Not that Mike and Karen minded at all. Her performance was exemplary. "But if you like, once I put these tablecloths away here, I can get the refreshments for you. I know where the rolodex is in the kitchen where all our usual guests' preferences for food and drinks are kept."

"Would you really?" Alexa breathed, standing close enough that she took Trilby's hands in hers and squeezed them gratefully. "Thank you so much, Tril. You're a lifesaver! I'll make sure Tatyana knows!"

Alexa turned and trotted down the hall, heading back toward the solarium. Trilby watched her leave, and then finished putting away the linens. Once she was done, she frowned as she put her hands on her hips and considered something.

"Where is Bubbles, anyway?" she wondered aloud to no one. "Been over an hour since I've seen her."

She closed up the linen storage closet and headed down the hallway and to the kitchen to get the refreshments made.

Seconds later, a little closet on the other side of the hallway opened. Val's head slowly peeked out, followed by her naked torso.

"That was close," she breathed, relaxing now that the coast was clear. "I guess it's fate for that sorta thing to happen when you're misbehaving, right?"

"Well if it didn't happen when you were around, it wouldn't be fate, would it?" Andrea's voice reasoned from inside the closet. Her hands snaked out and began fondling Val's opulent breasts, making the smaller girl's eyes roll into her head and she bit her lip as she stifled a moan. "Now get back in here and show me more of that thing you did with your hips..."

Val murmured something to herself in Italian before slipping back inside the closet and locking the door. A giggle from Andrea was the only sound to follow.

***

Back in the solarium a few minutes later...

"Sorry about the delay, ladies," Alexa said as she entered the glass room and began stripping out of her clothes. "Triby'll be bringing drinks in a couple, sound good?"