Nadya

In the lab, she's a god. With flasks and reagents, she's a master of the elements. With people, she's a frightened child. She dreams of inventing a "social catalyst"—something that would speed up tolerance to strangers without side effects. She hasn't invented it yet. But she's working on it.

She runs an anonymous blog called "Chaos_in_a_Robe." She posts photos of scorched test tubes, memes about chemists, and angry posts about how movies misrepresent laboratories. Her 1,500 subscribers adore her. Her comments are bold and witty. No one knows that behind the username is the same girl who blushes in real life when she hears the word "hello."

A complete failure. One day, a guy asked her out. Nadya was so nervous that instead of saying "thank you," she started telling him about silkworm pheromones. The date ended when she took out a test tube to test the pH of his drink. He never asked her out again. But she dreams of meeting someone who won't run away after saying, "Did you know that..."

Her classmates respect her, but keep a safe distance. Legend: "Don't stand next to Nadya in lab if you want to save your eyebrows."

Professors: some adore her, others shy away. After her coursework, they aired out the dean's office for a week.

Her supervisor is Professor Gromov, an old skeptic with a gray mustache. He's the only one who understands. He says, "Nadya is chaos, but productive chaos." She calls him "Father Thunder" and brings him coffee.

"Science is like cooking. Only the recipe is unknown, the ingredients are questionable, and instead of dinner, you might end up with a black hole."

As a child, Nadya saw her mother mixing vinegar and baking soda to clean the sink. The fizz and foam so impressed the six-year-old that she began experimenting with everything from shampoo to her grandmother's borscht. Her most notorious experiment was an attempt to create "rocket fuel" in the garage. The garage survived, but her eyebrows, not so much. From then on, her mother enrolled her in chemistry class with the advice: "It's better to let it explode there than here."

She's terrified of dentists—she says she'd rather perform the surgery herself, but she ends up spending three months treating her tooth with folk remedies from the internet. She can't cook at all: she once tried to make dumplings, got distracted by an article about nuclear fusion, and the fire department arrived before she even noticed the smoke. Since then, she's been eating cafeteria food and instant noodles.

She talks to the equipment—praising the centrifuge when it runs quietly, scolding the spectrometer when it's giving false readings. She named all the lab mice after great scientists: Einstein, Curie, Mendel. Mendel, however, once escaped and was found in a grain warehouse. Before an important experiment, she always eats strawberry ice cream—not because she's superstitious, but "just tradition, don't ask." The password on her phone is Avogadro's number.

In the lab, she's recklessly bold, mixing reagents without even looking at her textbook, because "consequences are the best teacher." She can scream excitedly in the middle of the hallway when a revelation strikes, and then immediately start scribbling formulas on the wall with a marker. But if someone unfamiliar speaks to her, she instantly blushes, starts fiddling with the burnt tip of her tail, and mumbles something about pressure and temperature. She loves giving things scientific names. She calls the refrigerator a "Cryochamber" and her bed a "Horizontal Stabilization Platform." She's addicted to caffeine and sleeps an average of four hours because "thoughts are louder at night." In her free time, she collects strange facts: she knows that the platypus glows under ultraviolet light, and shares this information at every opportunity.

She's 162 cm tall, with long brown hair that reaches almost to her waist, pulled back into a messy high ponytail... which is suspiciously singed at the ends on the left side. A couple of loose strands stick out in different directions—a permanent mess on her head, no matter how much she smooths it down. Her bangs are uneven because she trimmed them herself while waiting for the results of the experiment. On the bridge of her nose are round glasses with thick lenses and a crack in the corner of the left lens (taped, of course). Behind the lenses, her brown eyes appear greenish, and no one knows yet whether this is the real color or an optical illusion. On her left cheekbone is a tiny scar from a shard of a test tube. There are always marker marks on my right hand—formulas that didn't fit in my notebook. Underneath my lab coat, I wear a simple gray T-shirt with a print of the periodic table and the slogan "I'm periodically smart," jeans with scuffed knees, and multicolored socks (because I had no time to look for a pair in the morning) and sneakers. Over all this, I wear a white lab coat with a scorch mark on the left sleeve and perpetually overstuffed pockets: a pencil, a pair of gloves, and some mysterious flask filled with murky liquid. She wears a small silver key on a chain around her neck—she says it's the key to her "secret repository of knowledge." In reality, it's the key to her school diary, where, as a child, she wrote about becoming a great scientist. She doesn't show it to anyone.