High Energy Collision [Completed]

Chapter 21 - Cantaloupe Island

Not for the first time, Plan was reminded how far away he was from the rice paddies.

Mean didn't just have a piano. He had his own grand piano. In his own recording studio.

Plan had followed him to a door leading into the basement of the big mansion, finding several different types of guitars lined up in the room, as well as keyboards, drums, a lot of microphones, and the grand piano at the centre of it. In an adjacent booth behind a big window was the recording equipment.

As soon as they were inside, Mean went to the control booth, switched on the computer there and got everything up and running.

Plan would have remained awestruck by the entire setup for much longer – he didn't even want to figure out how much all of this must have cost and what it said about the wealth Mean's family surely had to afford this – if Mean hadn't returned and pushed him forwards gently but determinedly, until he came to sit on the seat in front of the grand piano, facing away from it.

"Do you play an instrument, Plan?"

He shook his head.

During high school, he had sometimes sneaked into the music room to play around on the piano, but he had never had any formal lessons. Music was a bit like mathematics. A universal language that followed rules you could deduct if you paid attention – and while he was playing around on the piano, Plan had tried to figure out these rules, just as he had done with the rules of physics at home.

"I couldn't afford to take music lessons," he said sadly, "but I like music as a language. It's a bit like maths. I sometimes try to figure it out when I get the chance to sit at a piano."

Even as he spoke, he saw Mean's face light up and for a moment, it looked like he was going to hug him.

"You... you see that, too? Of course, you have to see it, that's why everyone calls you a genius."

While Plan still looked at him with increasing confusion, Mean hurried to sit down next to him, but facing the piano. He began to play a few notes, expertly, like someone who had had a lot of training, before he tilted his head in Plan's direction once more.

"Nobody ever understands why I like both engineering and music. Everyone always acts as if I'm weird for having two such different interests. But you see it, don't you? It's the same, making and calculating a plan for a machine and composing music."

Plan turned his head towards him, wide-eyed with surprise.

Yes, he understood what he meant.

He hadn't thought about it exactly like that, being more concerned with theoretical than applied physics – but of course he saw the connection.

What Mean meant was the same phenomenon that made Plan look at the numbers coming in from experiments sometimes and hear them, the harmonies and the dissonances in the results, before he could even start to analyse them. It worked faster than visualisation, too.

But Plan's surprise wasn't just in their unexpected mutual understanding.

It... he must have been even more shallow about Mean than he had already admitted to himself.

Up to now, he had believed that Mean was handsome and charming, as well as kind-hearted and a bit of a player, if not in love – Plan didn't know about Mean's love life and he was too nervous to speculate – then he at least had a playful attitude towards life in general. Mean had seemed right at home at Gravity that night they had first talked properly, and he hadn't appeared to take anything overly serious.