Behold, the first chapter of the Fabulously Haired Science Squad! It keeps growing as I try to write it (as in, this is already the single longest fic I have ever written and it's not yet done) so I'm not sure how many chapters of this there will be, but they will keep coming once Gundam 00 Week is over.

But this is for G00week's Day 3: Power Blocks / Future.

I also need to acknowledge that this feat of utter ridiculousness has been a valiant team effort, so thank you to ninthfeather, who turned a few off the wall tumblr tags into a plot bunny; Laora, who helped me develop this premise until I was suddenly staring at a plot and part two; and dannyboymw, who made me laugh until I cried when we sketched out some of the later scenes.

The Fabulously Haired Science Squad

May 3, 2016

Billy knew that the life of a scientist consisted of long periods of waiting.

Waiting for test results to come back form the lab, waiting for other teams to complete their pieces of the puzzle so he could begin his, for the light bulb to go off over his head so that the jumbled figures staring up at him from the page finally reorganized themselves into some sort of order.

And that was when he were working with known factors and technology, that his country's premier minds have already investigated and written papers about. Looking into limited glimpses of technology that literally no one in the world had ever seen before, didn't understand, and most likely wouldn't even have believed possible if they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, made the situation even worse.

He thought he'd gotten used to the endless waiting in grad school, but with military officials pressing for answers every day and his brash best friend and his companions breathing down his neck every few hours wanting to know the secrets of the Gundams before anyone had yet discovered them made things impossible.

Billy was going stir crazy and he knew it. His own personal pot of coffee was emptied and remade and drained again like he subsisted purely off of the stuff. Half eaten donuts lay scattered on whatever surface had been nearest his latest makeshift workspace. But there was only so much he could stare at when he knew there wasn't enough information to make any hypotheses that were even worth investigating. And the ones he'd made thus far had all dead-ended rather spectacularly.

There was, frankly, nothing else that he could do. Nothing else to glean from the paint samples or the coating covering the internal wiring or the very mundane metal plating the military had recovered. Professor Eifmann had claimed the only interesting parts, the ones that might shed some light on the special light particles that they hypothesized powered the suits.

Eifmann refused to tell him anything about it, yet, though, despite his incessant questions and offers to help. He was his second in command, his trusted right hand man, his apprentice and underling since he'd attended university but still he wasn't considered important enough to be let into the secret, to help him make the breakthrough that the world needed weeks ago.

It hurt, not being entrusted with the task, and worse, it left him with infuriatingly little to do. Until Graham and his squad went out and brought back more than a couple twisted pieces of metal, there was nothing more for him to discover and he knew it.

But he couldn't… couldn't just leave. Not when everyone else all but lived on the base, not when the professor stayed until the middle of the night to examine his top secret data, and Graham rested at the foot of his Flag as if communing with it in the darkness of the hangar after everyone else had retired to the barracks.

So he stayed, flitting from table to counter, leafing through pages of notes that he'd long since memorized even if they didn't help him at all. Pacing between the door outside Eifmann's private office, his work station, and very occasionally the hangar where Graham chatted with his fellow pilots, raising an amused eyebrow every time Billy came downstairs with increasingly frazzled nerves.

He'd discovered it was generally best to avoid Graham at such times.

So he sat at his desk and flipped through some pages of the closest notebook, making a few quick calculations before crossing out first one part and then the other. He finally decided the page was best entirely scribbled out, then improved even further when it was ripped out, crumpled up, and tossed into the nearby pile of trash bin overflow.

He reached over for a bite of his donut— stale now— and grimaced before setting it back down. Chewing it stubbornly, he swallowed it with effort and blinked down at the blank page in front of him.

It stared up at him, the light blue lines taunting him with their emptiness, their downright refusal to ever be filled.

With a groan, Billy set his head down on the table.

A quiet chuckle from behind him had him swinging his head up so quickly that his hair whipped around to hit his face with a soft thwack.

Professor Eifmann walked forward and laid down a single sheet of paper in front of him, with just a few lines written out in the man's careful penmanship. A quick glance told Billy that it was some sort of chemical formula, incomplete, but nothing like anything he'd been working on thus far.

Was this… from the Professor's work on the Gundams? Had he stumbled across a completely revolutionary line of inquiry? Was that why everything Billy had thought to try had been so off base?

"Is this…?" he asked in awe, eyes flickering back and forth between the lines as his brain already started running through the new doors this could open.

The Professor just smiled. "It looked like you were in need of something to do," he replied. "So you can finish that," he said with a nod to the paper. "I haven't had time."

And then, before Billy had a chance to corner him to ask his thousand questions or press him for details, the Professor vanished back up to his study.

But knowing that he had something to work on now, an assignment from the Professor himself, no matter what it was, was more than enough reason for Billy to wipe the exhaustion from his mind and focus on the task at hand.

He buckled down with a will, hoping to figure it out immediately, but the incomplete pieces of the formula were more extensive than he'd originally envisioned and he had to backtrack several times to revise his opening hypotheses as he found out where he was starting from.

It wasn't until about an hour in that he realized the formulas were partly organic.

By the end of the night, he was sure that this sheet of paper didn't have anything to do with the Gundams or their impossible propulsion system. But he hadn't yet understood what it was supposed to be, so, once his eyes started blurring everything into double vision even with his glasses off, Billy decided it was high time to call it a night.

He dumped the remains of the donut into the trash and flicked off a light, but didn't dare straighten anything in case it left him blinking fruitlessly at his disjointed scribbles in the morning.

After a rare full night's asleep in his own apartment, he returned to work with a handful of books he hadn't need to reference since grad school, and a renewed vigor to tackle the mysterious formula the Professor had entrusted to his care.

He was sliding a massive chemical dictionary across his workspace when there was a knock on his doorframe. Billy turned belatedly to see Graham already walking toward him, coming to a stop close enough to look over his shoulder at the table which looked even more disastrous than usual.

"Good morning, Katagiri," he said.

Billy flicked one more glance over at him before returning to his text, flipping pages until he came to the entry he wanted.

When Graham realized that he wasn't going to get an explanation, or even an acknowledgement of his presence, he snorted and folded his arms across his chest.

"You haven't been downstairs yet today," he finally noted, trying to sound casually disinterested. Billy didn't say anything, so after he'd waited as long as he could stand, he asked, "So does this mean you've made progress on the Gundam front?"

"Not… since yesterday, no…" Billy replied distantly as he picked up a pen and made a quick notation in the margins of his notebook. He followed it up with a messily scrawled molecular formula before adding, "You haven't found anything new for me to be examining, have you?"

"No," Graham admitted with a grimace. "There hasn't been an opportunity."

"Well then it's not my fault, is it?" Billy asked, blindly reaching across his desk for his spiral bound notebook.

"No," Graham said, trying not to laugh. "But you are working on something," he said.

"Yes," Billy replied absently after a short pause where he flipped through several pages of hastily scribbled notations from the night before.

Graham was a patient man. He waited a full ten seconds before asking, "What is it?"

Billy hummed. "Not sure yet," he drew out, tapping the pen on his cheek. At the strangled noise his friend made, he added, "Something the Professor gave me."

"The Professor?"

"Yes."

Graham came around the table to get a better look at the papers spread across the table, and blinked to keep his eyes from crossing as he tried to decipher Billy's cramped pages of nonsensical notes.

Billy looked up at him with amusement. "Any theories?" he asked, as if his friend had any clue what any of this was.

Graham cleared his throat as he pulled back and shook his head. "But do you?" he threw back with a quick grin.

Billy scowled up at him before returning his attention to the desk. "Not any that hold water," he replied despondently. "Not so far. But…" he trailed off, eyes widening as he froze in place.

"But?" Graham asked.

Billy hurtled to his feet and dug out a book buried in the pile at the corner of the table. He pulled it out, not caring about the papers he dislodged with the movement, and flipped through it madly, pausing briefly to consult Eifmann's original slip of paper and the fifth page of notes he'd made that day. His lips moved silently as he quickly scanned the words.

Then a long slow smile began to grow.

"But?" Graham asked again, his curiosity growing as he was more and more sure that his friend had uncovered something important.

Reaching into the waste paper basket beside him, Billy retrieved a crumpled up sheet of paper mottled with coffee stains and smoothed it out on the desk as he picked up his pen once more.

"But?" Graham asked one more time, but soon realized that he wasn't going to get an answer. Katagiri was in that zone and he knew from experience that nothing less than the battle stations alarm would rouse him now.

So, with a long sigh, he walked away to let Katagiri do this thing, returning at several hour long intervals to slide a fresh cup of coffee or half a sandwich (corned beef on rye with extra mustard, and when the man didn't even bat an eye at the extra helping of the pungent condiment, he knew that this was truly a Big Deal).

Graham resigned himself to getting the full explanation (much fuller than he'd ever need, certainly) once his friend had finally figured everything out, and had to turn his attention to not letting himself get riled up by the inactivity as they waited for someone to sight a Gundam somewhere in their hemisphere so they could scramble.

He was leaning against his machine, shuffling his well worn deck of cards for another round of solitaire when he thought he caught a fleeting glimpse of a long pony tail and white coat disappearing through the hangar doorway in the middle of the afternoon, but was unable to locate him later on the grounds outside the bunker.

Graham made his way up to Katagiri's office just to check but he certainly wasn't at his customary desk, the papers having all been swept up into the semblance of a messy pile but with no scientist in sight.