Last Girl Alive | Bangtan

68: The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

"Like this?"

"Be extremely careful with that, we ain't playing around."

"Bullshit," Yoongi says grinning, arms folded as he looks at Namjoon. "You're practical glowing. You really enjoy this don't you?"

Jimin clamps shut the valve and lifts up the vial of liquid oxygen looking extremely proud of himself. He flashes the tube to everyone else before adding it to the rest. Namjoon nods satisfied. "This doesn't make any sense," You admit. You'd just been somehow free floating through this "class" as none of you had really cared that much about the details of how it all worked. Like any other experiment you just wanted to see chemical reaction and make things go 'poof' although Namjoon has adamantly declared much to your dismay that there was no 'poof' involved.

"It's quite simple actually," He begins. "The oxygen gradually condenses in the glass tube due to the rubber at this that that sto-"

"Yeah yeah we know," Jungkook rolls his eyes. He pats the tank impatiently. "So we have to move this all to the ship then?"

"Uh yeah," You say pointing to the blueprint again. "I think these upper stages that Taehyung described earlier are somewhere here. "There's a side here, like a really thick door that pushes open."

"Once we have these tanks in we pour in the kerosene at the bottom and that's it? Don't we need like backup? We don't went to run out do we?" Jimin says anxiously.

"No no, this is just the propulsion. The spacecraft is run on solar energy," Taehyung explains to him. "The solar panels extend after take-off, though it isn't exactly clear here."

"Here," Hoseok unravels the sketch he'd made Jungkook draw for him of the control board. "These two levers here control the energy and electricity conversion of the spacecraft, according to those manuals. If we pull this outwards and check this rating the solar panels should begin their task."

"We also figured that this switch would flicker on the electricity at the full," Yoongi adds. "Although I suppose there is a way to use the electricity we have here to power it up."

"Wow," Jin says eyebrows raised. "I really underestimated you guys. Who knew you could steer a spacecraft?"

"They've done good work," Namjoon nods. "It's all still theory, we don't really know but nothing was ever confirmed without trying."

You lean forward a little content. Things were falling into place. The past few days all eight of you had worked daintily and passionately on this spacecraft. You had read an endless more amount if books using dictionaries and Google for aid, doing research and then searching the inner parts of the spaceship to link your knowledge with what you have. The two drivers composed of a Navy soldier and a music engineer had made their best efforts to learn the mind of the vehicle. Namjoon had used a few members of the maknae line to his advantage in creating fuel through what seemed like a very complicated homemade process as he did not use the machinery provided. Despite being like a detective sort of architect for the spaceship, you also helped Jimin and Hoseok who had been indulged in the research of what they called 'astronaut training." They'd even compiled a book of their notes that Namjoon pushed everyone to memorize every night. It was thoroughly boring because it consisted of reading through endless pages of mechanical engineering, crash-landing and survival courses, microbiology and sections after sections of physics. Besides that, you did not even know if the equipment lying about was supposed to be for your use or help you in any way but you never touched anything that was beyond your knowledge. 

You feel like you've aged more in these past few days than in years. Science was an extremely delicate and straightforward subject. It was either this or that and it couldn't be anything g else. You needed to get your facts straight or everything would go wrong. The amount of knowledge you'd acquired had been more than your simple high school science education could have offered. This laboratory was brimming with the ghosts or scientists and it felt like you had Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton swimming in your head informing you of each and every simple law and statement of chemistry and physics.