Professor Neil (sneak peek)
I missed the guy and WIP Wednesday this week brought him back up so here's a lil gift for @jtl-fics for being amazing and closing on a condo today!!
(Snippet includes part of the WIP Wednesday piece in the beginning)
September 16, 2008 (Tuesday)
Tuesday was probably Neil’s favorite day of the week. He only had two classes in the morning and both were lectures that he didn’t mind sitting in. After his lectures, he always went to the small coffee shop that didn’t even serve good coffee, but it was cheap and it was routine. Routines helped and kept him focused. Besides, the coffee shop was the only one that hadn’t tried to demand proof of papers for his service dog. One would think that the prosthetic leg would be proof enough but Neil clearly overestimated the mental capacity of most people.
Armed with subpar coffee and a warm bagel, Neil made his way to the library. The main floor was a communal hub, with no volume limits and plenty of chairs and couches for people to sit on. Tucked on the left side was an open room full of tables, the tutoring center. The woman behind the desk smiled as Neil walked up and wrote down his arrival in a notebook. Neil liked tutoring oddly enough, he didn’t care much for the people, but he enjoyed the subjects and the feeling of someone understanding a difficult concept was hard to beat.
A good chunk of the people who frequented the tutoring center were those who were on big time scholarships and unwilling to risk a dropping a point in the GPA. Hyped up on coffee, Neil often had to fight them away from his preferred table. The largest portion however, were the athletes. All required to maintain a minimum of a 2.3 to play for the NCAA Division 1 league. Neil tutored football players, soccer stars, and dancers every day. For most, as long as they went to their classes and didn’t fail any exams, it was an easy gig. Five hours a week in the tutoring center was a easy gig.
The Exy team was no exception.
Neil had started tutoring Matt Boyd last year, the tall man hopeless with his French courses. His pronunciation was leaps and bounds better, and the backliner was steadily maintaining a passing grade in the class. Languages were difficult for athletes who traveled almost weekly for games.
Thankfully, there was no one at the table Neil had claimed as his own. Despite the years of therapy he still took a table in the back of the room. There were other reasons, which his therapist had been good to point out, the fact that being further back in the room kept his dog focused on the task. Babe Ruth was a large golden retriever who seemed to forget that he had an additional appendage attached to his rump. The dogs tail was a weapon, thumbing hard enough against a leg to leave bruises. It was a disappointing scenario, considering Babe Ruth walk to the right side of Neil—tail smacking against his good leg. At the table, Neil took care to sit with his back to the side wall rather than the back. It was the little things, his reminded himself mentally. By now, his voice in the tutoring center was easily ignored as he commanded Babe Ruth to lay at his feet. The dog wasted no time, flopping onto the hard carpet and splaying out his limbs.
Neil checked his watch, Matt would be arriving in a few minutes. He always came right after his French class. Neil had managed to arrive a little early, so he went ahead and pulled out the workbook and folder that they’ve been using over the semester. This was their fourth meeting and already Neil liked how they were able to review the French that had just been covered in Matt’s class. He made a mental reminder to email his thanks to the French Professor, she’d been helpful in sending Neil her presentations for the classes.
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Shout out to all of the inate, on-the-fly micro calculations Tails does at any given moment to fly. Like, calculating your own mass while doing other tasks and holding another person is so much work AND he's fast!
Anyway I went off
Like just by himself, his pivot point is in the back and not his center of gravity, that is so much extra strain and weight his tails have to support, and that's before including gravity or air presssure. The amount of work from that alone is immense. Not even going into how his center of gravity changes completely on the ground vs the air.
His balance and how he carries his weight in the air is infinitely important. The slightest unprepared twist or unpredicted air current could send him spinning at best and crashing at worst. And gaining that lift and thrust when you're falling, which we see him do, is amazing and scary because you're fighting disorientation, air pressure, and gravity and you know that's not in a controlled environment.
THEN we see him carry Sonic and that's insane bc its tripling his own strain, easy; it throws off your center of gravity and balance; Sonic is usually running or falling which is additional pressure; and he still has to calculate his own mass and everything else too, except now all that changes in response to another person! He doesn't even have a stabilizer, it's all him!
That's so much inate work that has to occur without even factoring in the situation or flying up or pitching or dodging missiles and air pressure and Sonic taking off or dropping should theoretically send him rocketing off. But it doesn't!
That's so much complex micromath for a creature not meant to fly. Sure, he's talking to Sonic who is vibing, but in the back of his mind, he's adjusting his pitch .0192 cm, changing the angle of his left tail to compensate for Sonic kicking his feet, there's an air gust so he has to angle hid tails back to maintain his trajectory, his shoulder feels the strain of Sonic's mass so he has to recalculate for the potentially weakness and-
AAAA he's so cool!!
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