Chapter 6
Monday arrived not with the heavy "entropy" Professor Reinn had feared, but with a sun so bright it felt like a reset button had been pressed on the universe. The magic of the Saturday bloom had retreated into the subconscious, replaced by the frantic, wonderful mundanity of a college lunch break.
Under the sprawling canopy of their Narra tree, the four of them had abandoned the sterile plastic chairs of the canteen for a picnic-style spread. A patchwork of waxed paper, Tupperware, and extra-large juice bottles lay between them like a tactical map of a feast.
"I'm just saying," Marcus said, gesturing wildly with a half-eaten chicken wing, "if I have to draw one more 'structurally sound' beam for Design Class, I'm going to lose it. Why can't we build a house that stays up purely through the power of kilig? It's the strongest force in the Philippines, anyway."
"Because, Marcus," Elena countered, meticulously peeling a hard-boiled egg with the precision of a diamond cutter, "kilig is a non-renewable energy source. One ghosting incident and the whole building collapses. You need the stability of my Circadian rhythm for that. Besides, your water-cathedral from Friday? Totally leaked in my dream."
"It didn't leak! It was... indoor precipitation," Marcus argued, grinning.
Maya let out a melodic laugh, leaning back on her elbows. She looked better today—the color had returned to her cheeks, and the shadows from Saturday had been bleached away by the midday sun. "Guys, you're thinking too small. If we apply Maya's Law of Multiversal Academics, we don't even need to study. In some dimension, I've already graduated summa cum laude, and in another, Leo is actually the professor teaching us why we shouldn't ask 'What if' at 7:00 AM."
Leo, who was busy trying to open a stubborn bag of chips, looked up and scoffed. "If I were the professor, I'd fail all of you for excessive talking. Especially you, Maya. You'd get a 5.0 for 'Unauthorized Use of Imagination during Physics Lab.'"
"Aouch! Shedah!" Maya cried out, clutching her heart in mock agony. "The Keeper is becoming a tyrant! Help me, Elena! Use your time-turner to go back to when he was nice!"
"I can't," Elena deadpanned, checking her vintage watch. "According to my calculations, Leo's niceness expired exactly three minutes ago when he realized we ate all the liempo."
The group erupted into a fit of laughter that sent a pair of sparrows fluttering from the branches above. It was a light-hearted, silly argument—the kind that only exists in the brief window of youth where the biggest problem is a missing piece of meat or a boring lecture on Kinematics.
Leo finally popped the chip bag open with a loud bang, offering it to Maya first. He watched her reach in, her fingers brushing against his, and for a moment, the "physics of missing pieces" felt like a million miles away.
"You know," Marcus said, his voice dropping into a terrible, over-the-top imitation of Professor Reyes, "Look around you... every person you sit next to is a universe. But Marcus... your universe is specifically made of gravy and bad puns."
"Professor Reyes would never say that!" Maya protested through her laughter. "He'd say the gravy is the 'dark matter' holding the meal together."
"Oh, please," Elena said, rolling her eyes as she tossed a grape at Marcus. "If Professor Reyes saw this mess, he'd probably find a way to calculate the trajectory of Marcus's flying chicken bone. Projectile motion, students! It's all about the initial velocity of the hunger!"
"Speaking of velocity," Maya said, sitting up and crossing her legs. "How fast do you think the ghost can run behind the auditorium? Mang Ben said not to stay late because we might run into the 'unseen ones.'"
Leo snorted, leaning back against the rough bark of the Narra. "Maya, Mang Ben is just trying to save on electricity. If he scares us away, he doesn't have to keep the perimeter lights on. It's not a supernatural phenomenon; it's an economic strategy."
"Boo! You're so unromantic, Leo!" Marcus teased, pointing a finger at him. "That's why you're single, eh. You analyze the ghosts instead of asking them for their life story. Imagine the interview: 'So, Mr. White Lady, on a scale of one to ten, how much does entropy affect your ability to walk through walls?'"
"First of all," Leo replied, a smirk playing on his lips, "White Ladies are female, hence the name. Second, if they walk through walls, they're clearly ignoring the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Atoms shouldn't be able to overlap like that. It's just rude physics."
"Rude physics!" Maya clapped her hands, delighted. "That's the title of our next group project. Rude Physics: Why Ghosts and Multiverses Don't Care About Your Feelings."
Elena sighed, though she was smiling. "If we submit that, Professor Reinn will literally turn us into a chemistry experiment. She'll have us calculating the pH levels of our own tears after she fails us."
"Worth it," Marcus declared, holding up a juice box as if it were a chalice. "To the University of Remembrance! Where we learn that everyone matters, but our grades are still subject to the laws of 'backroom' politics."
"Wait, wait," Maya interrupted, her eyes sparkling with a new idea. "If we were in a fantasy world right now—like, legitimately—what would our 'powers powers' be based on our majors? Marcus is easy. He's the Earth Bender because he wants to build things."
"Earth Bender? No way," Marcus protested. "I'm a Master Mason of the Arcane. I'd build fortresses in five seconds."
"Elena is the Time Lord, obviously," Maya continued, gesturing to the vintage watch. "She'd freeze the clock during finals so we could actually finish the multiple-choice questions."
"I'd just use it to make lunch last for three hours," Elena corrected.
"And Leo?" Maya looked at him, her head tilting to the side. "Leo is the... The Nullifier. He's the one who walks into a magical room and says, 'This isn't real,' and all the spells just stop working because he doesn't believe in them."
Leo looked at her, and for a second, the humor softened into something more grounded. "And you, Maya? What are you?"
She didn't hesitate. She looked up at the sunlight filtering through the Narra leaves, her face glowing. "I'm the Portal. I'm the one who finds the door when everyone else thinks there's just a wall."
The laughter died down for a heartbeat—not because the mood had soured, but because for a split second, it felt too true.
"A portal, huh?" Marcus broke the silence, waving a stray fry like a wand. "Does that mean you have a high 'mana' cost? Because I'm pretty sure the portal is currently powered by that extra serving of extra-rice you had earlier."
"Hey! Portals need fuel!" Maya retorted, sticking her tongue out. "At least I'm not an 'Arcane Mason' who gets defeated by a single termite."
"Termites are the 'dark wizards' of my realm," Marcus conceded with a dramatic sigh. "They represent the entropy Reinn keeps talking about. They are the tiny, hungry soldiers of chaos."
Elena checked her watch and groaned. "Speaking of soldiers of chaos, we have fifteen minutes before our 1:00 PM lecture. If we don't clean up this 'picnic dimension,' Mang Ben is going to exercise his power as the Gatekeeper of the Trash Bins."
As they began to pack away the Tupperware and crumpled napkins, the conversation shifted to a critique of their upcoming midterm projects.
"I still think it's unfair that we have to prove gravity works," Maya grumbled, stuffed her juice box into her bag. "It's been working for billions of years. Isn't it a bit redundant to keep checking? It's like asking if water is wet every single morning. Gravity is the clingiest thing in the universe. It never let's go."
"It's about the mathematics of the clinginess, Maya," Leo said, standing up and offering her a hand to help her off the grass. "Reyes doesn't care if you fall; he cares about how fast you hit the ground and if you can calculate the exact moment your dignity shatters."
"My dignity is a quantum particle," Marcus chimed in, dusting off his jeans. "It exists in a state of superposition. It is both shattered and intact until a girl actually talks to me. Then it collapses into a singularity of pure embarrassment."
"That explains so much about your design sketches," Elena teased, slinging her bag over her shoulder. "They're just manifestations of your social anxiety in 3D form."
They walked together toward the main building, their laughter echoing through the corridors of UR. To any passerby, they were just four students sharing a joke, but in the specific atmosphere of the University of Remembrance, they felt like a complete circuit—a closed loop of friendship that the outside world couldn't easily penetrate.
They passed a group of freshmen who were staring intensely at a blank wall, likely trying to find the "hidden meaning" Reyes had talked about during orientation.
"Look at them," Maya whispered, leaning toward the group. "They're looking for the magic."
"Should we tell them it's just a wall?" Leo asked.
"No," Maya said, her eyes twinkling as they reached the door to Room 302. "Let them look. Sometimes, if you look at a wall long enough, it starts to look back. And that's when the real lecture begins."
They entered the classroom just as the sun hit the podium at a sharp angle, turning the dust in the air into a golden mist. For a moment, the "Rude Physics" and the "Portal" jokes felt less like jokes and more like a premonition, but then Marcus tripped over a chair leg, and the reality of their clumsiness brought the humor crashing back down to earth.
The golden mist in Room 302 eventually settled as Professor Reyes entered, his leather satchel hitting the desk with a thud that signaled the end of their "picnic dimension." The air in the room shifted instantly from the chaos of lunch to the structured silence of inquiry.
"I hope your midday meal provided enough glucose for what we are about to discuss," Reyes began, his eyes scanning the rows until they landed on the quartet in the middle. "Because today, we move past the visible. Today, we talk about the 'Weak Force' and the 'Strong Force.' The invisible glues of the universe."
Maya sat at her desk, her chin resting in her palms. She was still riding the high of their laughter, but as Reyes spoke, her gaze drifted to the window where the Narra tree's branches swayed.
"Most people think the strongest thing in the world is a diamond, or a steel beam, or a wall," Reyes continued, pacing the front of the room. "But the strongest forces are those you cannot see. They are the ones that hold the nucleus of an atom together against all logic. They are the refusal of things to fly apart."
Marcus leaned over and whispered to Leo, "See? I told you. The power of kilig. It's a subatomic particle."
Leo let out a muffled snort, earning a sharp look from Elena. But Maya didn't laugh this time. She was watching a single leaf spiral down outside. She thought about her "Portal" joke. If she was a portal, then portals weren't just about going somewhere else; they were about the tension of being in two places at once.
"Many of you are looking for the extraordinary," Reyes said, his voice dropping to that paternal tone that always made the students feel like they were part of a secret. "But remember: the most extraordinary thing about an atom is that it is 99% empty space. Everything you touch, everything you love—it is mostly nothingness held together by a promise of attraction."
He turned to the chalkboard and drew two circles with a tiny, vibrating line between them.
"If that promise breaks," Reyes added, his chalk snapping against the board, "the energy released is enough to level a city. Or break a heart."
The lecture continued, a dense weave of mathematics and philosophy, but the light-heartedness of the lunch hour had left a lingering warmth. Even as they scribbled notes about gluons and bosons, the jokes about "Rude Physics" and "Time Lords" stayed in the margins of their notebooks.
As the 2:30 bell rang, Marcus was the first to zip his bag. "Okay, so if the Strong Force is what keeps us together, does that mean the Weak Force is why I can't resist a second order of fries?"
"No, Marcus," Elena said, standing up and checking her watch. "The Weak Force is your willpower. And according to my observations, it has a half-life of about thirty seconds."
They walked out of the room, their footsteps echoing in the hallway. The sun was lower now, casting long, dramatic shadows. Maya paused at the doorway, looking back at the empty podium.
"Leo?" she called out.
"Yeah?" Leo stopped, turning back to find her framed by the classroom's doorway.
"In a world that's 99% empty space," she said, her voice soft but clear, "I'm glad the 1% that's solid is this." She gestured to the three of them.
Leo didn't answer with a joke this time. He just nodded, his "Nullifier" mask slipping just enough to show the "Keeper" underneath. They walked toward the gates together, the four of them, a closed circuit of energy that, for one more Monday, refused to fly apart.
Just as they reached the main gate, Marcus stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide with mock horror as he patted his pockets.
"Wait! My dignity!" he cried out, turning back toward the campus. "I think I left it under the Narra tree next to the gravy stains!"
"Don't bother, Marcus," Elena called out, not even looking back as she began her walk toward the North parking lot. "I saw a sparrow pick it up. It tried to fly away with it, but it was too light—even for a bird."
"Rude!" Marcus shouted, though he was already grinning. "Avisala meiste, you heartless Time Lord!"
Maya leaned into Leo's side, her laughter bubbling up one last time. "See? This is what happens when you don't account for the 'Gravy Constant' in your architectural designs."
Leo shook his head, shifting the strap of his bag as they turned toward the jeepney terminal. "Remind me again why we're friends with an Earth Bender who gets bullied by local wildlife?"
"Because," Maya said, her eyes dancing with the reflected light of the city's first evening neon, "in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, he's the only one who makes the 'Weak Force' look that funny."
The four of them waved—Marcus and Elena heading toward the city's hum, Leo and Maya toward the cooling shadows of the suburbs. Their laughter lingered in the air long after they had parted, a small, vibrant echo that proved that even if the universe was mostly empty space, the parts that mattered were currently far too busy laughing to care.