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Her foot was tapping.
Cold air filtered in and out of the lab, a steady stream of the optimal temperature. Tachyon had curated it herself, despite how it bothered Cafe. It was slightly too cold for her, Tachyon had noticed. She’d measured that Cafe’s coffee intake had gone up by about 1.4 times since the adjustment.
The vent was right above Tachyon’s desk. She had moved her desk there, once upon a time, because she didn’t want air blasting right on top of her equipment. Some of it was too delicate, and for others, the imbalanced air flow from the rest of the room would err the experiment. Tachyon was used to the cold of the lab. She wasn’t one to shiver.
But her foot was still tapping. A gentle thud-thud-thud on the tiled floor.
Her jaw, too, was acting abnormal. It hung open like the mouth of a fish, which was unacceptable. If her mouth and throat and lung bacteria had even the opportunity to infect her samples…
But she was at her desk. Staring at the door. Nothing was at risk.
Tachyon shut her mouth with a decisive click. And swallowed. Hard.
She wasn’t going to run. She had done her time on the track. She had gotten out of it all that she needed. There was no reason to do it any longer. Not when she had a plethora of willing guinea pigs, as well as the well wishes of the higher ups at the Academy. There was no reason.
She sat back, rather forcefully, in her desk chair. She still remembers how aggressive Pokke was when she learned Tachyon was retiring. The girl said she wanted to be the strongest, and in that moment, back then, Tachyon hadn’t doubted she was. Not in the racing sense, but in pure muscular strength. Tachyon had thought that she’d wanted to test how strong Pokke really was.
Pocket. Jungle Pocket. …When had she become so familiar in Tachyon’s mind?
She stilled her leg again. She hadn’t noticed it had started its little game up again.
It was silly. And rash. And complete nonsense. The ‘strongest’? What did that even mean? Being strong brought to mind musculature and carrying weight and all things that had to do with easily measurable and reliable numbers. But that isn’t what Pocket meant. Her strength, it was a variable that was…
It was unquantifiable.
What absurdity. A quiet sound shook the silent lab and it was only after a moment that Tachyon realized it had been her. A laugh, soft and breathy, had escaped her. She reached her fingers up to her lips. A crooked smile was spread across her face.
Well played, Tachyon thought as she turned to her computer, clearing her schedule for the day of the Japan Cup.
The atmosphere was nothing like sitting alone in her quiet lab, hunched over her computer. Idle chatter exploded all around her, even as far back as she stood. The wind brushed through her hair, bringing with it the fresh scent of the turf. It was the opposite of sterile. Nothing could be considered a control; there was no way to replicate what would occur here today.
Tachyon kept still as the racers entered the gate. She allowed for no stray movements, not even an errant blink of her eyelids.
Tachyon had seen it. Had known what Pocket was trying to say. She wanted to show her something. What, Tachyon could only guess. And she had. Repeatedly. Her most likely hypothesis was that Pocket held some misguided belief that she was, to use her favorite word, stronger than she was before. And she wanted to prove it to Tachyon.
Tachyon had her doubts. Ever since her retirement, she had spent countless hours reviewing old recordings of famous umamusume races. What could Pocket show her that was any different from that? She wasn’t any more outstanding than the greats. Certainly not up against T.M. Opera O. She was above average, Tachyon could give her that, but she wasn’t incredible.
Wasn’t faster than light.
But back in her lab, Tachyon had observed her body doing things out of the ordinary after speaking with Pocket. And so, she was here, to resolve the situation once and for all. Get back to her new normal.
And so it begins.
Tachyon kept her eyes trained on Pocket. Go ahead. I’m here. I’m watching. So show me what it is you want me to know.
Her race was… nothing special. Nothing unusual, or out of the ordinary, or anything but extremely Jungle Pocket. Tachyon huffs. She had really thought… Thought there had been something. Some truth to Pocket’s offer, some variable hidden behind her proclamation to be strong.
‘I want to run,’ Pocket had said. What a meaningless statement. Didn’t all umamusume have that desire? What made her wish any different? Nothing, clearly, given her current performance.
Tachyon didn’t have the time to sit through this. What a complete and utter waste. Even on the final stretch, she had nothing new to share with Tachyon. T.M. Opera O was the clear victor, and she would be just as easy to watch win from the confines of her lab than in the stands.
Tachyon was about to tear her eyes away and leave, but then… it changed. She changed. It wasn’t obvious. Pokke’s running style didn’t deviate. It was… it was her face. Even as far as Tachyon was, she could tell. There was a something in her eyes that Tachyon couldn’t name. A fire and determination and--and fear, clear as day.
And then, for but a fraction of a second, Pokke looked toward the stands. And Tachyon stared her dead in the eyes. And she knew Pokke was looking at her.
‘I want to run,’ Pokke had said. ‘I want to be the strongest.’
Huh. Maybe it wasn’t such a meaningless wish after all.
Tachyon hadn’t seen Pokke since the Japan Cup. She’d needed time to record all the new information she’d acquired.
She mostly stayed holed up in her lab, but as soon as she heard the raucous footsteps of the other, she made herself scarce. Tachyon had even taken to avoiding Cafe. There was simply too much data and too little headspace. She couldn’t waste a second of it doing something as frivolous as small talk.
No, most of her time was spent writing. Writing down everything, from her own initial races to Pokke’s debut and more. At first, she’d started by watching the tape recordings but quickly found it was just as helpful as it would’ve been if she’d watched any other umamusume’s race. So all of those notes were scrapped, and Tachyon restarted, this time from her memories.
It was very slow going. Tachyon quickly found how unreliable the brain was. She forgot many details, and those she did remember were all brightly colored with the paint of her own emotions.
It was frustrating, at first. To learn of such a glaring error in her own psyche. She’d nearly thrown those notes out too, and she’d taken the rest of the day off from that line of research and shifted her focus to something she had been working on prior to this whole mess.
That night, she’d dreamt of the Japan Cup, and the look in Pokke’s eyes. She’d woken up, run down to the lab to make sure her notes weren’t, in fact, destroyed, and began right where she left off.
It took a week. Which was short in a purely scientific timeframe, but long when those days also amounted to avoiding nearly everyone she knew. But it was well worth it, Tachyon knew.
The results were this: Pokke had done as she’d set out to do. She had inspired Tachyon to pick back up her racing shoes and join in the competition once more. That was an easy deduction to make, and one Tachyon already knew before analyzing all the data. The more pressing question was how?
This was what had taken her all week to discover. It was a topic of study that had never once crossed Tachyon’s mind before. It was illogical and irrational. It was emotional. It was…
Unquantifiable.
It was in the way their first race together had gone. The way Pokke had looked when she swore vengeance. The way she looked on their final race together, before she knew it’d be the last, with her eyebrows drawn tight and her expression severe. She had honestly and truly believed she’d overcome Tachyon in their next face off.
Her anger when she realized there would never be a next race together. Tachyon remembered it in imperfect clarity. Pokke’s footsteps echoed through the halls long before she found her way to Tachyon’s lab. Her anger radiated off of her in waves, and though Tachyon hadn’t understood the breadth of her emotion, she’d worried it might contaminate some of her experiments.
It was in the weeks after. Pokke’s face when she invited Tachyon to go running together. There was no reason to believe Tachyon would accept. She was a woman of her word. But there had been hope clearly written on Pokke’s face. And a request. In her flawed memories, Pokke’s face had been practically begging.
Tachyon didn’t see the end of the Japan Cup. She knows Pokke won. She didn’t have any desire to see a recording after the fact. It would have been flat and boring and pointless. That wasn’t the part that mattered.
What mattered was when Pokke glanced at the stands and Tachyon saw her.
And Tachyon had written all of this down, and read over it again and again until she realized Pokke had instilled these feelings in her that she just couldn’t shake, and that was why she had acted oddly and why she went to the Japan Cup in person and why she wanted to keep running.
Pokke made Tachyon want to run. Even though it was stupid, even though it was more than likely she could do some serious damage to herself. Tachyon saw Pokke and thought, I want to find those limits myself. I want to run and run and run until I can’t anymore.
It had been an hour since coming to this revelation. Tachyon was in her lab, as usual, her notes scattered across her desk and her walls and the floor. She had needed to see every piece of evidence all at once to truly take it in. Still needed to, because her brain could only handle so many newly acknowledged emotions that it took time to sift through them all.
Time she did not have, she realized, as the door to her lab clicked open.
“Tachyon,” Pokke said, sounding shocked that she’d actually caught Tachyon here. She supposed that was fair, considering Tachyon had been steadfastly avoiding her for the past week.
Tachyon quirked her brow, composed just enough to properly engage with the conversation at hand. Quickly, she catalogued all of her physical symptoms; elevated heart rate, slight twitching in her fingers, abnormal breathing pattern. Was she nervous? Excited? Tachyon was so woefully under-researched in the subject that she wasn’t sure.
“So, what’s kept you so busy you refused to see anyone?” Pokke leaned against the door. She looked nervous. Tachyon was glad to find that it was easier to discern Pokke’s emotions than her own.
“You,” Tachyon answered honestly. It wasn’t as though she could hide it. Her notes were sprawled all around her for anyone to see. Besides, what benefit would Tachyon receive from lying?
Pokke’s eyebrows shot up, the corners of her mouth following after. Pokke’s smile was always wide and true. She never did anything in halves. “Me? You came to see me at the Japan Cup, then?”
“Yes. Though I didn’t stick around to see your victory, I heard your roar. I’d love to measure exactly how many decibels it racks up to sometime.” Perhaps when she had figured out why her body reacted so strangely around Pokke, in a way that was different from Cafe, or Digital.
Pokke… the best word to describe it would be deflated. Pokke visibly slumped and her smile dimmed. “You didn’t watch the whole thing?”
“I got what I needed.”
“But you didn’t even see the best part! How I overtook Opera O at the last second, after I rammed in from the back--”
“You were scared.”
Pokke was silent. The anger washed away from her face. Her eyes were focused on Tachyon. Hm. It seemed not every emotion was easy to read on Pokke. Tachyon was unsure what the other was feeling in that moment.
“Yeah,” Pokke responded, then swallowed and changed the subject. “I saw you. Near the end of the race. I was s’pposed to be focused on the other runners, but I wanted just one look at the crowd and… I saw you.”
And it was silent again. For longer, this time, as Tachyon bounced back and forth between studying Pokke’s face and trying to distinguish her own feelings. It was a losing battle, because every time Tachyon thought she’d figured something out Pokke’s face would shift and something new would appear. She was kaleidoscopic. Four dimensional.
“At your next race,” Tachyon started, cut short by the new, hopeful expression that overtook Pokke’s features. It was different from her unspoken plea to watch her in the Japan Cup. Tachyon wondered how many different expressions Pokke could make. She wondered how long it’d take to see all of them.
“You’ll be there?” Pokke’s full face smile was back, and now that Tachyon was looking, it was more of a full body smile. Pokke was ominously still when she was disappointed, but when she was angry or happy, it showed in every motion. Her tail swished behind her and her back was straight. Pokke’s hands were clenched but not tense. Her shoulders were relaxed and her eyes were so so bright.
“I will be in front of you. You’ll have to get even stronger to keep up.” Tachyon’s face split into a harsh smile. Another thing she hadn’t told her body to do.
Pokke looked confused. Like she thought Tachyon was stupid. But after one, two seconds, her eyes widened.
“Y-you don’t mean…” Pokke was still smiling, but she had that same look in her eyes as the Japan Cup. She was scared. Huh. Why would this news scare her? Tachyon had a veritable mountain of research to do.
“I am going to beat you in your next race. And the one after. And after that. So you better get training if you have any hopes of even coming in second,” Tachyon promised. It wasn’t a promise to win. Tachyon hadn’t mastered the idea of thinking only with her emotions. Pokke had never beaten her, yes, but she had beaten T.M. Opera O now. There was a chance.
So no, it wasn’t a promise to win. It was a promise to run. Because Tachyon wanted to. Because Pokke wanted her to. Because it was the only way for her to see what lay beyond.
Tachyon could tell Pokke had questions, but mostly she looked excited. Ecstatic, even.
“Yeah? Yeah!” She pumped her fist in the air. “I mean, hell no, I’m gonna kick your ass. But, y’know.” Pokke shrugged. Tachyon thought Pokke could tell she needed to process this, because she rapped the door with her knuckles and said nothing. Huh. Maybe it was easier for everyone to understand others’ emotions over one’s own. Another angle she’d have to study.
Pokke laughed. It was wild and light and full of unfiltered joy. The kind of laugh that brought one’s face skyward to bask in the light. Pokke stood like that for a beat, her eyes closed and her smile wide as Tachyon had ever seen. Then she brought her chin down and looked at Tachyon, that same joy pouring out of her face.
She didn’t say anything. Just stared. Until suddenly, Pokke had decided she had seen enough and she ran out of the lab, her footsteps as light as her laugh, completely dissimilar to the manner in which she appeared initially.
Tachyon basked in it for a moment. But only a moment. She couldn’t waste any time. She had to clean up her lab, and then get out of here. Onto the track.
She wanted to run.