fate/first order derivative

Part I.1

> be: tomasu tomonaga

Wow, not a great start! My condolences. There's just two things you need to know about me:

1. When I was three or four, I tried sticking a knife into an electrical outlet just to see how it worked. No idea how I survived. Got blown halfway across the room. I don't remember this myself, of course. I just heard it secondhand from my mom years after the fact. She said she had to rush in and stop me from trying it again.

2. I'm a high schooler, it's Friday night, and I'm sitting in my room, trying to figure out how calculus works on my own. Not for a class. Oh, no. This is for fun. Kind of.

And that's it. That's me in a nutshell. Well, okay -- that, and I've clearly spent enough time reading imageboard stories and playing old text adventure games that it's infected my inner monologue. But that's more of a side detail.

You sure you don't want to choose again? Wouldn't blame you. Clearly, mistakes have been made.

> more background plz

Fine, fine, if you insist. I'm sixteen, I live in Misaki Town outside Fuyuki, I'm in class 2B of Homurahara Academy, blah blah blah exposition exposition. Look, I'm boring. I know it, you know it. Don't ask me about me, ask me about something interesting.

> so whatcha doing / why calculus

There we go, was that so hard? I'm trying to figure out calculus because these notes I got from my uncle seem to be using it. Seems to be calculating some kind of acceleration or change in potential, I guess? He rarely bothered defining his variables. It's pretty annoying! By which I mean maddening!

> talk about uncle

Oh, Uncle Shin? My dad's older brother. He passed away about a year ago. I inherited a bunch of stuff from him -- well, I say "inherited," but I really just grabbed it out of the trash after my mom threw it out. It's not like anyone else wanted it.

So Uncle Shin was a physicist and a tinkerer. Proudly called himself a "crackpot" -- had a plaque on his wall and everything. (Saved that too. It's on my bookshelf, right between Dune and my TARDIS cookie jar.) Taught courses at the local community college, but his big passion was in these weird sensors and transmitters he put together out of whatever junk he could find. Really crazy stuff. Couldn't even begin to describe the wiring on this board in front of me, for instance. He seems to have deliberately crossed wires two or three times. They're even soldered together...

Anyway, his big theory was that using these sensors of his, he could detect this spectrum that's completely unknown to modern physics. Not anything electromagnetic -- some kind of dark energy that no one else has ever noticed. He said that it could only be found in Fuyuki, though. For whatever reason, his sensors worked in this particular town and nowhere else.

So, anyway, yeah. That's my inheritance: a plaque, a bunch of dusty old machines, and a pile of handwritten notebooks I rescued from the incinerator. Still probably the most interesting thing in my life.

> how did uncle shin die

Cancer. Look, can we not? I don't like thinking about it.

> so why are you looking at this now

Because the notes say to. Okay, in more detail: this particular section I'm looking at seems to involve predicting some kind of... surge, I guess? At the end of it, there's a range of dates circled in red. Which includes this week.

So -- in honor of Uncle Shin, I've set up the one sensor package I think I have all of and powered it up. Got the little scavenged radio dish sticking out of my window. Been waiting for three days now to see if any of the little lights come on. Once more sticking the knife into the electric socket that is the universe. This one's for you, Shin.