The inside of the Hall for Druinte Cognitive Disorders (a rough translation of the facility that Belfrat operates) is very sparsely decorated, which isn’t strange for any of the many halls of science on Druont, though it is noticeably sparsely populated by scientists. The DCD is located in a small rectangular building adjacent to the Hall for Druinte Biological Sciences pyramid that is one of the busiest halls on the planet. The DBS has facilities for treating patients with various physical ailments, and it also dedicates time and resources to studying foreign medical technology, biology and anatomy. It is a stark contrast to see the stream of Druintes into and of the DBS compared to the DCD; except for the handful of scientists that assist Belfrat with experimentation, and the one dedicated maintenance staffer who helps him with heavy lifting and custodial work, there are not many regular visitors to the hall. Belfrat does not mind the relative solitude, it is conducive to good work. And he is not your typical Druinte, Belfrat loves deeply and has committed himself to another Druinte. The two have lived together for most of their long lives, they have made countless children together and they are laughed at and mocked by most Druintes they encounter on a daily basis who are made aware of their relationship. Most Druintes do not understand why someone would choose the burden of raising their own children, which explains why the Hall of Orphans is made up of two pyramids and is by far the biggest hall on the planet. Its no suprise that when Belfrat got the opportunity to find a job away from the typical Druintes that mock his love and dedication to family, he happily took the assignment. When he started at the DCD, there was only one other employee who Belfrat liked, though it was never certain if the two were friends. The other guy was Eakran and even though Belfrat was kind enough to bring him a nice hot drink in the mornings when they arrived, and the two had good conversation about the future of the Druinte race, once work was over, they never talk, just like every other Druinte Belfrat had worked with. Belfrat found Eakran particularly interesting because of his fascination with cognition and the two worked on early prototypes of Belfrat’s dark matter manipulation machine for improving Druinte moral, though Eakran eventually moved on to explore more practical avenues for addressing the planet’s moral problems (Eakran is credited for the development of something similar to psychoanalysis that is now commonly practiced as the most viable method for helping Druintes avoid suicide).
Belfrat was working alone in his lab when he discovered the particles that made up dark matter and dark energy and he slowly learned use regular energy to change the fundamental nature of dark matter and the reaction usually resulted in the conversion of regular matter into dark matter (to an observer, it appeared that something appeared out of thin air as something else simultaneously disappeared). Because the nature of the reaction was random, and sometimes converted vital things like his clothing or his work table into invisible dark matter, Belfrat devoted his attentions to controlling the conversion. The solution came when he realized that a dark matter conversion device could hold matter to be used during the conversion and he figured out the way to take randomness out of the equation, it just meant that the device needed to be refilled depending on the size of the device.
When Belfrat finished his first and only working prototype, he looked at it with pride. He had his staffer test it out and it worked seamlessly, like magic, when the staffer imagined one of the apples that Eakran had shown him from a picture taken on the distant planet Earth.
“That’s nice. Eakran said they taste nice,” and the staffer took a bite before Belfrat could stop him. Of course it did not taste like an Earth apple, the user of the dark matter converter must give the converter precise details about the object it wishes to create and the converter uses its available resources to follow those instructions. The staffer had created something similar to plastic fruit.
Belfrat was ecstatic to present his prototype to the MDDS and he worked diligently on a report into the night. As he worked, he felt the tremble of an earthquake and quickly evacuated the building because of recent quakes that had flattened other small, rectangular buildings on the planet. As he stood outside waiting for the quake to stop, the unbelievable happen; the building collapsed and destroyed all of the Belfrat’s work with it. And because it had meant so much to him to boost morale on the planet, he ran toward the building as it fell and was killed by debris. After the quake stopped and the debris from the building seemed to settle, there was an explosion that rocked the DBS Hall and caused a lot of damage that forced its closure for two Earth months after the accident. Belfrat’s experimentation with particle physics had created some unstable matter, and by a chance as small as a grain of sand, Belfrat’s dark matter manipulator was hurled into space at break neck speeds and it traveled, like the smallest comet ever, across the cosmos, leaving a trail of fire. It should have burned up or been smashed to bits by asteroids, but Belfrat encased it in a material that was more durable than he ever knew, and the propulsion from the explosion was such that the dark matter manipulator made its way all the way to the planet Earth, which is an unfathomable distance from Druont. As it zoomed towards earth’s surface, it lit up like a firework and it eventually came to land amidst mid-sized hills and patches of trees in the peidmont region of NC, USA. When it hit the surface of the Earth, the dark matter manipulator was liberated from its casing, but lay hidden in plain sight, no bigger than a pinecone, undisturbed until a curious young boy, with a bad habit of shoving things up his nose to make his twin sister laugh, found it and his body took hold it and never let it go.
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