"- yes, of course. That's why my glass is green right now, I'm copying the one in the courtyard to make sure I don't get off track."

"Right, I can make that work, even if it's an awful system requiring orders of magnitude more manual intervention than necessary.  How does it go?"

"Right now it's light green, then light blue, lavender, grey, most people switch during the grey sand if they don't have some reason not to, dark red, brown, dark green, dark blue, dark purple, clear, again most people switch during the clear sand, pink, yellow, and then light green again."

"...grey red brown green blue purple, clear pink yellow lime cyan lavender.  Okay.  Rainbow-progression timekeeping, and then dark and light.  And you work light cycles?"

"I'm awake light cycles, I don't spend all my time at work."

"Yeah, my bad on the imprecision there.  But your work hours are light-cycle.  ...Work sands I mean.  ...That'd make for a pretty clock face..."

"If you say so."

"Sorry, ran off on a tangent.  Anyway, when do you want to arrange to meet?"

"I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to try any of these ideas you've given me; do you want to just slip a note under the office door if something comes up and I'm not here?"

"Oh, sure.  Also, I was wondering if I could borrow a bit of clay's malleability from your wife?  Seems like one of those properties that're useful to have handy in your metaphorical tool belt, just in case you need it."

"I can get you a pinch of clay."

"That'd be wonderful, thank you."

"Anything else? I'm a little behind on student assessments."

"Nope!  ..What're they working on right now?"

"Stoichiometry."

"...oh, that's actually something I could help with!  Seeing as it's mostly just math.  ...Wait, how are you doing stoichiometry without - how much understanding of atoms and molecules do you have?  I suppose you could do it by mass just as well, but that's going to miss gases...well, unless you're very careful about doing your work in sealed vessels..."

"Yes, we seal the environment when we're taking data."

"...volume of gases..."

She pulls out a pencil, fidgets with it...

"...Still pretty opaque, though, because - oh, hmm, I wonder if you could differentiate gaseous byproducts by their freezing point.  ...Not very lab safe, though."

"I'm not sure what you're imagining."

"Well, troportation can just casually make an absolute zero temperature.  So you monitor what percentage of the resulting frozen solids melts and-or sublimates at what temperature.  You'd probably want a reservoir with a very high specific heat, to make actual observation easier because it'll go up in temperature much more slowly that way, and the glass to have a lot of thermal insulation so as to not freeze the observer...  ...wonder what happens when you transfer specific heat out of something.  It might just suddenly gas-ify.  ...plasma-ify, even.  No, there's still the energy necessary to actually state-change as separate properties...but yeah it'd probably have plenty of that to go around.  ...scary to imagine, that."

Wheat doesn't seem to think this especially calls for a response. He grades papers.

She'll hang out, then.

"Lemme know if running numbers will help any.  I'll be outside."

"You should probably in the long run have a place that isn't the university to hang out," Wheat remarks absently.

"I also have the library!"

"Yeah, that's a better choice, since it's public and the university isn't actually."