TESTING DAY FINALLY ARRIVED. Almost a million students walked in for their exams on the March 3rd. Collectively, more than four million liters of coffee were drunk, and almost twenty million hours were spent studying. District 7 was on edge. The espers at Tokiwadai were particularly nervous. News of the ability borrower had spread among the studentry. Having been exempt from the standard esper examinations, the Ace of Tokiwadai was able to hide the truth from the rest of the class.

Tōma waited in his seat and watched Tsukuyomi Komoe fiddle with her thumbs. A thick packet of paper that was to be his physics examination lay face down on his desk. Outside, water seeped down the roof and dripped, dripped, dripped onto the pavement. Besides that, it was quiet. The clock struck noon, and Komoe announced that they could begin.

Tōma flipped over the exam and scribbled his name on each page. His actions were automatic; he'd done this a hundred times on the practice tests.

Inhale. Exhale.

First question. State the second law of thermodynamics. Okay, no problem. Write: No process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower temperature to a body of higher temperature. Easy.

Tōma looked around. Pencils weaved furiously around him. They were all still on the first problem. He smirked and moved on.

Second question. A generator uses a heat engine operating between two heat reservoirs, one consisting of steam 100ºC, and the other of water at 20ºC. What is the maximum amount of energy that can be produced for every joule of heat extracted from the steam?

Tōma cracked his knuckles, licked his teeth, and hoped that his neuronal connections were strong enough to earn him a decent grade.

MEANWHILE, FROM THE TOKIWADAI DORMS, a constant droning could be heard from a certain scientific railgun's room.

"Misaka-san and I are dating … Misaka-san and I are dating … Misaka-san and I are dating…"

Mikoto flipped through a magazine as Kuroko watched from her bed beneath nine tenths of a coma.

"Misaka-san and I are dating …. Misaka-san and I are dating…" A bead of drool hung from the corner of her mouth.

"Kuroko," said Mikoto, "you've been saying that since you woke up three hours ago."

Kuroko snapped to attention. "This is serious, Onee-sama," she babbled. "You dating is like me sitting still. It's just uncharacteristic!"

"Sheesh, Kuroko. It's normal for girls to be dating at this age."

"Yeah, but not with someone like him!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean he's lazy, he's arrogant, and he's got a face made for radio. He's not your type. Definitely not your type."

"Okay. Then what is my type if you know me so well?"

Kuroko thought for a moment and then fixed her pigtails. "Someone proactive. Energetic. Devoted. And definitely an esper. Not too weak, though, but not a level 5 either." Her subsequent smile was so saccharine that Mikoto could taste it in on her tongue.

"Let me guess," she said. "You're talking about you."

"Well… coincidentally, that description does match my profile."

"It's about as coincidental as a sunrise."

"Don't be that way, Onee-sama. I think you owe me that much for hiding the truth from me."

"Well, I suppose I should've told you sooner."

"See, Onee-sama? Isn't it nice to tell the truth? We don't have to keep secrets between us. Honesty is good."

Mikoto raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Like that time you didn't tell me that you were secretly stashing away pictures of me and planning to drug me with an aphrodisiac?"

"Eh…," Kuroko mustered.

"Or did you forget about that time that you stalked me under the pretense of protecting me from 'someone watching'?"

"That's…"

Mikoto clenched her fists and formed an angry smile. If she had her powers, there would've been a thunderstorm inside the building. She savored a breaths and eased her fists open.

"Relax, Mikoto, relax," she told herself. "All this stress, Kuroko. You keep this up, and I'm going to die of a heart attack by age 20."

"You wouldn't die even if someone killed you. This I know."

Mikoto sighed, and the weight of a week's worth of fatigue evaporated from her shoulders. "Say, Kuroko. What say you and I catch a film tonight?"

Kuroko's eyes shimmered. "O-O-Onee-sama…. Are you serious?"

Mikoto smiled and nodded. "Just us two. But no weird stuff from you, or else it's off. Misguided as you are, I think you're right about honesty. I should've told you about Tōma earlier. This'll be my way of making it up to you."

"Onee-sama, you are the wind beneath my wings!" exclaimed the teleporter as she wrapped herself around the railgun.

"Hey, there…. Just try go easy on Tōma the next time you see him."

"I can't promise that I'll try," grinned Kuroko, "but I'll try to try."

"Fair enough," said Mikoto. "Now if you'll just let me go, I have to–"

A loud ringing interrupted her sentence.

"Whoops! That's mine," said Kuroko. She snatched the phone from her desk and scanned the screen for the caller. "Duty calls, Onee-sama."

"A message from Judgment?"

"Correct. And they want you to come to the office too."

"I suppose it's something important."

Kuroko nodded at Mikoto, and together, they headed for the branch office.

HALFWAY THROUGH THE EXAM, a most untimely episode of drowsiness passed through Tōma. He had only slept for three hours last night to cram in the section on basic statistical mechanics. His eyelids seemed to grow heavier by the second. Letters on the page pixelated into blocks of ink. He let out a mighty yawn and rubbed his eyes. The next question momentarily revealed itself to him.

Question 7: Multiple choice.

The third law of thermodynamics relates mainly to:

a) Absolute zero

b) Thermal equilibrium

c) Entropy

d) Conservation of energy

The words slipped in and out of focus. Tōma blinked twice and then massaged his temples. The room was toasty, and his chair was comfortable. More and more, the packet of white paper resembled a pillow. Even feathery stuffing seemed to pop out from the fringes. This is bad, thought Tōma as he lowered his head and sunk into darkness.

He woke up in a place unlike a classroom. It was a giant, damp chamber. Stone pillars protruded from the ground and carried torches on them. Outside, past the double wooden doors, what sounded like a hurricane churned about. The words "medieval" and "ancient" crossed Tōma's mind. The only thing missing from this place was a row of armored knights carrying spears and poleaxes. From the shadows, a firm voice said, "Back so soon?"

Tōma stood up and inspected his surroundings. He squinted his eyes, and single lanky figure extricated itself from the background and approached him. Tōma took a lungful of air and then exhaled. "Are you the keeper?"

"I preferred to be called Dante," he replied. A roll of thunder cracked outside, and the columns rumbled in response. "How's the exam going?"

"Exam?"

"You know…. Your physics midterm."

"Oh," slipped Tōma, "It's going well I think."

"Apparently not. You're asleep, and there's not even an hour remaining."

"Seriously?"

Dante nodded solemnly. "If it makes you feel better, at least now you know that the third law of thermodynamics has to do with absolute zero."

"What misfortune," said Tōma, shaking his head. "Can I wake up?"

"How's Misaka-san?" asked Dante, ignoring the question.

"None of your business. Now will you let me leave? I have a test to finish bombing."

"Hey, you're the one who fell asleep in the first place. I didn't invite you here. Either way, I'm not sure how I go about waking you up."

"You're lying. I remember being here before, and I remember leaving this place."

"Ah, you're right," conceded Dante. "I remember now. You woke up when you died."

Tōma furrowed his brows and scoffed. "What misfortune. Go ahead and wake me up then."

Dante stretched out his hand, and branches of electricity coursed from his fingers. "Ready?"

Tōma nodded. Dante raised his hand, and the blue streams of energy followed. "When you're done with the test, find Misaka-san. She'll know where to go."

His arm swung down like an executioner's axe in one grim motion, and a salvo of lightning surged at Tōma. He braced himself. Everything went white.

A high-pitched voice woke him up for the second time. "…remaining," it said. Something remaining. Tōma glanced at the clock. The heavy weight of desperation sunk down from his throat to his gut to his groin. Oh no, he groaned. Twenty minutes remaining. His body flung itself to attention, and Tōma began to write. The third law of thermodynamics? That's absolute zero. The answer seemed to flow without resistance.

He turned the page and found a blurb on Maxwell's equations. This was Tōma's weakest section, but the question was forgiving. He visualized the problem in his head, and the geometries and manifolds of his visualization came to him in a flash of intuition. It made sense. Somehow, all the numbers and symbols linked in harmony and produced a beautiful result. This must have been what Newton felt when the apple landed on his head, thought Tōma.

The next four problems were equally simple, and he worked through them without a hitch. He was positive that he'd gotten them all correct.

Outside, meltwater dripped, dripped and dripped some more. "Three minutes remaining."

He flipped back through the pages and caught several glaring errors in his arithmetic. After some quick bandaging, all of his answers were waterproof. No doubt, he had a perfect paper in his hand. Around him, swarms of students continued to scribble frantically to get their last guesses in. Tōma stood up out of his chair, and two dozen heads turned at once. He shuffled to the Komoe's desk and handed her his exam. The pink-haired woman shot him a perplexed look. The questions were designed so that they could not be finished within the allotted time. No one had handed in an early exam for this course since its inception and gotten a passing grade.

"Are you sure you're done?" asked Komoe. Tōma nodded and went back to his desk. He packed up his belongings and left the room just as time expired. He had somewhere to be.

THINGS MUST MOVE. This notion is perhaps best embodied in the third law of thermodynamics. Stated briefly, the third law of thermodynamics says that: the entropy of a substance approaches zero as its temperature approaches absolute zero. To understand why this is, one must understand both what absolute zero is and what entropy is.

Absolute zero is simply a temperature at -273.15ºC. At this temperature, particles cease to move. No motion is allowed. Not even an atomic-scale picometer shudder. An implication of the third law of thermodynamics is that one can never reach absolute zero. An easy way to think about this is this: in order for object A to reach absolute zero, one would require an object colder than absolute zero, object B, to transfer heat away from object A. Since no temperature can be colder than absolute zero, object B cannot exist, and absolute zero can never be reached.

Another way to think about this is in terms of entropy. Entropy is defined as:

S = -kB ln Ω

Where

S = entropy

kB = Boltzmann's constant

Ω = the number of microstates that a system may be in.

A microstate is a possible unique configuration of all the atoms in a system. At absolute zero, the system is in a perfect crystalline structure, so only one microstate exists. This brings the ln Ω term to zero and thus, at absolute zero, entropy is zero. However, since atoms always vibrate (due to transient attractive forces between each other known as Van der Waals forces), more than one microstate must exist, and entropy cannot be zero. Furthermore, if an atom were in complete stasis, both its position and velocity would be known. This violates another famous principle called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that both the exact position and momentum of a particle can never be known.

Things must move. The nature of objects, be it on a macroscopic or microscopic scale, is to move. No matter how perfectly still objects may seem or want to be, they are always active. Neither the laws of physics nor the will of God can convince them to stop. Birds fly, blood flows, minds think, wind blows. One can try to seek peace from motion, but take it from the third law of thermodynamics: it's impossible.

Author's Notes: Well, it looks like I might not be able to finish by the end of the 2nd season after all. School, you know. But don't lose hope if I don't update in a while!