AN: Thanks Ae123monkey, christian_nickles_3 (sorry, FFN keeps eating up my dots, so I used underscores instead), MilandaAnza, ThatGuest01, misconstrued0892, sedryn, frankenjones, OnkelHarreh, Gcohen, C A Moore, and t3l4m0n for their kind reviews in the last chapter. About whether Elsa has explicitly stated that she loves Anna, I'll be honest and say I actually forgot whether or not Elsa has said anything about it in this story (I apologize. After my little hiatus studying for comps, I just skimmed over the earlier chapters and didn't pay enough attention to the details). I think my thought process when I wrote the earlier chapters was probably that Anna is a more expressive character while Elsa is more subtle about the way she feels? Either way, they'll both have more chances down the road to express their love for each other in more obvious ways. As for the 250k microscope, it's that expensive mainly because of the high resolution camera. The objectives are typically pretty expensive as well. It has a turret to alternate between different filter cubes because it's an epifluorescence microscope, so it needs to shoot light at the sample at a specific wavelength (so a specific color, if you will), and detect the emitted light from the sample at a specific wavelength as well. Wikipedia actually has a really good diagram of how the filter cubes work, if you're interested. Of course, the 250k cost also includes service and maintenance contracts, warranties, shipping and handling, accessories as the computers that come with these microscopes, the program for controlling the microscope, the moveable stage and incubators, etc. But even without the accessories, the most basic type of epifluorescence microscopes is typically a lot more expensive than the type of light microscopes you find in undergrad lab courses (where you can only look at things under brightfield with a 10x or 20x objective). There are even more expensive microscopes though, such as confocal microscopes and electron microscopes. For a comparison, an upgrade on the detector system of a confocal alone can cost 100k, and each laser around 40k. I swear if I burn one of those lasers out, my PI would probably want to burn me.

(This is the July 2016 revised chapter)

Courtship of the Grad Student

Chapter 19

Why did they have to have a colloquium on the top of a mountain, Anna had no idea.

As much as she would've liked to commute back to campus with Elsa, encourage her before heading down to classes, come back to share lunch with Elsa, then encourage her again before she headed off to the meeting room battlefield against Hans and Weselton, Anna signed up for this goddamn local colloquium back when she submitted that abstract for the International Creative Genomics Conference. She really wanted to skip it, but Elsa told her to go, said that it'd look good on her resume. Now she regretted listening to her.

She was carpooling with Eugene, Rapunzel on the front passenger seat, Merida sharing the back with Anna. It was pouring outside, and only got worse as they ascended the mountain. The narrow, unpaved two-lane road twisted and turned on the steep incline, and Anna swore that on the last turn, Eugene swerved the car into the opposite lane and almost ran them off the damn cliff into the ocean a good hundred feet below.

Before, Rapunzel affectionately overlapped her hand on top of Eugene's that was on the gear lever. Now, she held onto the side handle with both hands, most probably for her dear life!

Anna thought that she would puke at any moment. Only Merida seemed to be enjoying the ride with Eugene, humming a tune before adding, "Aye, reminds mae uf gud ole daeys rid'in mae lil' pony, Angus." It would be much later that all of them found out Angus was a giant Clydesdale and he ran...real fast.

They finally managed to get there. It must've taken a miracle for them to arrive all in one piece. They were already late though, seeing as they drove around the mountain three times before they found the parking lot.

"How do you even use this thing?" Eugene growled at the digital parking meter. Rapunzel quirked an eyebrow.

"And you said you got a PhD. Really?"

"I don't have a PhD in Parking Meters! Shouldn't it be assumed that I know nothing aside from growing yeast?"

"Aye...argue on...we've got all daey dunt we, und that gondola is gonna wait fur us all daey too..."

And sure enough the gondola took off without them, stranding them at the parking lot for fifteen more minutes before they could ride it up the mountain peak.

"Ah...it's snowing," Anna remarked once they exited the gondola.

"Well, it's a ski resort," Eugene answered.

"And they're having a colloquium at a ski resort. Without the skiing..." Rapunzel deadpanned.

"Aye. Just read wut that gondola pass says und found that it costs fiftae bucks just ta git up haere."

"Fifty dollars for a gondola ride without the skiing? I'd rather they spend it on grilled lobster tails!" Anna couldn't believe what Merida just said, but smart as Rapunzel was, she turned towards the head of wavy red and glared.

"Who are you kidding, Merida...this is so obviously Fergus Dunbroch's idea."

Oh, and once they entered the resort building, Dunbroch's booming voice sounded from inside the boardroom. "Oh just shut yur butts, ya ungrateful peeps, tha fireplace tis totally wurth our daepartmental budget!"

Seems like Anna and her friends weren't the only ones complaining.

They opened the door and walked into the boardroom. Well, they first walked into people crowded at the entrance of the boardroom. The first talk was starting and they could hardly find a place to stand, let alone sit.

"I'm quite sure the sign at the door said that the occupancy of this room is 50. And I'm quite sure our department alone has more than 50 people." Rapunzel said.

"Maybe he expected the guests and speakers to arrive on horse and speak from outside the windows," Eugene answered.

"Right. In the snow. All the while he's hugging the fireplace."

"I'm just concerned about where to put up my poster when it comes time for the poster session," Anna entered the conversation.

"Along the ski track. Then we can look at it on the way downhill. I'm sure that works just as good as what usually happens at poster sessions anyway." Eugene was on the roll with his sarcastic replies, it seems.

"At laest tha muffins are gud!"

"You don't have to try so hard to find something positive to say about Fergus' idiotic spending decisions. I mean, we get it, we're stuck behind a concrete post while the keynote is speaking," Eugene said.

"All the while, he invited the accountant. I swear she's falling asleep," Rapunzel added.

"What do you mean she's falling asleep? You see that pool of drool on the table cloth? I think she's been asleep since they loaded up that presentation!"

Amidst the obligatory technical difficulties and the speaker who thinks he's more important than everybody else and inevitably runs overtime by an hour, they finally got their lunches at two.

"And this is supposed to end at five? At this rate, we're staying till seven!" Rapunzel complained between a mouthful of muffin. Yes, breakfast and lunch both consisted solely of muffins, because that was all they could afford after paying for the gondola rides.

"Don't worry, the gondolas only run till five. The resort staff would force us out anyway. All this means is Elinor will cut down the poster session to fifteen minutes, and she'll make the speakers shut up half an hour into their talks with the big gong over there," Eugene explained.

If only Anna knew the colloquium would turn out like this, she wouldn't have come. Was it too late to rent a pair of skis, go down a couple runs to kill time, then head home?

She sighed. She wondered if Elsa was doing alright.

Elsa felt cold sweat on her palms. She was more nervous than when she had her comps, but she willed herself to stay strong. She had contemplated just letting this one go, just signing that patent application like she knew Weselton wanted her to in order to get that manuscript problem out of the way, but after Anna's encouragement, she decided not to.

If Anna could stand up to her own father to fight for what she thought was right, it only made sense that Elsa did the same. Otherwise, how could she become the strength that Anna would need to rely upon?

Maybe this was the solution she had been looking for all this time she had forced herself to stay at the Winters Lab. She had an impressive publication record, her thesis was pretty much complete if she just compiled all her papers together - she was still here because she was afraid to get out into the real world where she would have to deal with people like Hans and Weselton and probably much worse. But if she were a violet, she couldn't stay in this greenhouse forever. She belonged to the sun, the wind, the wild. She needed them to grow.

To be the scientist she really wanted to become, she would need to learn how to play this game, and when she was strong enough, make her own rules to advance this field in the direction she believed in.

She nodded to herself, grabbed the door handle of the conference room, and pushed it open. Weselton looked surprised, stopping mid-sentence, while Hans just turned around with a smirk.

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" Elsa asked, but clearly, she cared not for an answer. She pulled out a seat from the table and sat down, "Oh, is that not the manuscript I emailed you, Prof. Weselton? That's what I came to talk about."

Weselton smiled, but Elsa could clearly feel a tinge of nervousness and ample anger radiating off him, "I've just been telling Hans about the device design we've developed for your work. You don't mind me showing him the part of the methods section that describes this process, do you?"

"Of course not. It's developed by your lab after all. I just gave suggestions each time it failed to work over the past year of our collaboration."

Now the nervousness from Weselton became completely overshadowed by the anger. He was becoming red with frustration. On the other hand, despite Hans' calm visage, Elsa knew he was quite amused by the situation.

And Elsa? For once, she could truly speak her mind, and it was the best feeling ever.

"I don't mean to say that Hans is not welcome to use the design if that's what you think is appropriate, Prof. Weselton. I know you're eager to file the patent application on this device, so Hans could probably help you show that the invention is useful, and therefore patentable, by applying it to his work."

"So you mean to say you no longer plan on using this device for your work?" Hans asked.

"Over the past weeks while I've been trying to contact Prof. Weselton, I came to understand that perhaps my work is premature for publication. I haven't performed as many experiments as I had hoped to verify my hypothesis due to limits imposed by the device, so I sought the opinion of Prof. Mally Moors. It has been very insightful."

"You do realize that if you choose to work with Mally instead, your work will no longer be patentable as my lab's design patent would be granted by then, and its claims would cover what you are working on," Weselton said. It was a threat. Even without feeling the negative feelings emitting from him, Elsa understood just from his choice of words. She smiled though.

"Oh, I should've considered that. After all, I recall the patent strategy we were to take was a scorched-earth approach, correct? Of course there will be a claim on my work even if such data does not exist. But didn't Prof. Weselton always find the need to remind me to sign the patent application? I think while working with Mally, I'd probably forget about it too. I mean, as a grad student, my job is technically just writing up my thesis, no?"

That was the reason Elsa refused to sign the patent application, and Weselton knew it. The scorched-earth claims would bar many scientists from entering the research that would progress the field further, but at the same time, it would do nothing to prevent big corporations with much cash to pay their vast legal teams to find a workaround the patent should it prove to be really useful. Of course, Weselton probably just wanted to broaden the claims to make it more attractive for a potential commercial buyer, who would have their own legal teams to defend their intellectual property.

It all came down to money, and despite Elsa being not naive enough to think that money was unimportant, she still didn't agree with, nor wanted to take part in realizing Weselton's belief that money should be everything. Could they not do both at once - make money and make contributions to their field and society as a whole? Maybe her view was too idealistic, but Elsa didn't want to give up without trying.

"Have you talked to Brad about this yet?" Weselton asked. Elsa stared into his eyes with her cold blues.

"I've informed him of my new collaboration with Mally. I don't think it affects him either way, as he has already agreed for Hans to take over on this collaboration with your lab. It should not be too inconvenient for you either, would it, Prof. Weselton? I mean, you've already started communicating with Hans instead of me over the past weeks. This would seem to me that he's doing a better job than I have in the past, and I apologize for that. It's unfortunate that things didn't work out as well as we had initially expected."

Hans mused that Weselton surely didn't feel any sincerity in Elsa's apology, not that she had actually meant it either. But this Elsa, one who outright refused to back down, was certainly new to him, and as much as he hated to admit it, she was winning quite some respect from him.

Truth be told, as angry as Weselton was that a little brat like Elsa dared talk him down, he couldn't find an excuse to turn away her offer. He wanted the patent filed and Elsa was willing to back out of it. That was what he wanted most anyway. It would've been better if he could take all her data along too, but if he insisted on it, would Brad back him up? Brad Winters was the department head and that meant he knew what he was doing when playing the political game. Using Elsa to foster a collaboration with the brilliant but ever elusive Mally Moors might be the outcome he wanted from the very beginning. He might be less than pleased if Weselton interfered with his perfect plan.

"If you've really decided to end our collaboration, I wouldn't insist further," Weselton answered, then looked at Elsa who remained seated, "Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?"

"I'm thankful for all the useful advice you've given me in past committee meetings, but with this, it seems that there will be some major changes to my thesis proposal," she said, handing Weselton a form to sign. "As much as I would've liked to keep you on my committee, I understand that I would be taking up a lot of your precious time discussing matters that you may not be most interested in. I've asked Mally to help supervise my thesis progress instead, so if you agree, just sign at the very bottom of the document."

So Elsa wasn't so dumb as to think Weselton wouldn't take retaliatory actions against her for what happened today, huh? Hans smirked. She was smarter than he thought.

But would Weselton agree?

When he took a look at the document, he noticed that despite Brad not having signed yet, Mally's signature was already on it. So regardless of what Brad thought, the girl would go through with her plan anyway, reason being she already had Mally behind her?

Weselton couldn't understand what Mally saw in the girl, then again, Mally was always an odd ball, which was why they stuck her in the basement despite her highly influential status in their common field of work.

He scoffed. The girl was a rather daring lil' un. He could almost see her future as Mally's successor.

"I'll sign it. Ya happy now?" He scribbled his signature on the page and passed it back to Elsa. She took it, stood up, and nodded.

"Thank you, that will do. I'll interrupt no further."

Elsa was about to fire a text to Anna with the good news that her Weselton Problem was finally over, but when she unlocked her cell and checked her messages, she could see a string of complaints from a rather displeased Anna.

- finally got on Eugenes car. parked two blocks away in this damn rain! posters soaked :(



- shouldnt have complained about walking. id be more scared if he drove the extra 2 blocks



- WERE STILL GOING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN CAUSE HE CANT FIND THE PARKING LOT omg imma puke



- gondola tickets 50 bucks. thats why its muffins all day



- highlight of the day: presenters laptop got a porn popup LMAO



- u doin ok Els?



- i miss ya

Elsa quickly tapped on the keys of her phone to send a reply:

- It went great. Thanks for all your encouragement, Anna!

Elsa looked out the window at the mountain in the distance, blurry from the water that ran down the glass pane. She touched her hand to the cold glass and lined it with where she thought Anna would be far away, a longing feeling rushing up her insides.

- I miss you too. I want to see you now.

After sending that last message, Elsa ran out the building. She hadn't brought her umbrella, so she got a bit soaked. She hastily grabbed a towel from her dorm room as she was fishing out her car keys, took the umbrella this time, and hurried down to the underground carpark to get her car.

She was going to drive over to where the colloquium was, but thought about the texts Anna sent. It led her to take a little detour to the Chinese place just off campus and bought a dozen of Anna's favourite steamed pork buns before driving off again. She was probably going to be a little early since colloquia usually ended a bit late, but considering the afternoon traffic rush, it wasn't such a bad idea to allot extra time.

She arrived an hour after she set out. Maybe she shouldn't have bought the steamed buns. She was worried they wouldn't be fresh anymore when Anna came down. But since Elsa kept the package on her lap, the buns might still be warm, right? But...would it be bad to keep the food at a warm temperature for so long? Would Anna get food poisoning from this? Gosh...so many worries swam through her head.

Then, people finally started coming down the gondola to the parking lot, Anna among them. Elsa got off her car and waved at her.

"Oh Elsa! What are you doing here?"

"You said Eugene's driving was horrible, so I'm offering to be your chauffeur instead, if you trust my driving, that is."

"My driving isn't that bad," Eugene complained. Rapunzel glared at him.

"I swear, I would beg Elsa to drive me too if not for how I'd totally be a third wheel if I did."

Both Elsa and Anna blushed at the comment.

"Ya shudn't even 'ave brought that up, Rapunzael," Merida dragged Rapunzel off into the direction of Eugene's car, "We shall jus hound on Anna daer afterwards 'bout tha juicy details uf thaer lovae dovae escapaede, no?"

"That's totally not the point, Merida!" Anna shouted after her friends' backs before turning towards Elsa again, "Sorry about that."

"No, it's okay. Are you going to hop on?"

"Yeah, of course!"

Anna got on the car and noticed that Elsa's seat is a bit wet. Only then did she notice Elsa was also soaked with the exception of her lap, which unbeknownst to Anna was dry because Elsa had drapped the towel over it. She couldn't let the steamed buns get wet after all.

"You're soaked," Anna noted.

"I forgot my umbrella at the dorms and when I went back to get my keys, the rain poured on me."

"You went back to the dorms? Then why didn't you get a change of clothes?"

Elsa looked down, her face flushing redder, "Well...I wanted to come here sooner, so..."

"You're such an idiot!"

Anna took the towel from Elsa's hand and scrubbed Elsa's hair with it, "You've got to rub it a little harder to get all the water out. Gosh, and wipe the seat! You're sitting in a pool of water - it's like you peed in your seat or something!"

"I did not!"

"You wouldn't want people to mistaken that. Sheesh, isn't your butt uncomfortable from being so wet?"

"You're starting to sound like a nagging mom, Anna."

After Elsa was finally as dry as she could be without a new change of clothes and a blow dryer, Anna finally freed her up and let her start the car.

Anna placed her hand on the gear selector so that after Elsa released the parking brake and was about to shift from parking to reverse, their hands touched.

"Whoa! What are you doing, Anna?"

"I want you to hold my hand!"

Elsa quirked an eyebrow, "You do know I'm not Eugene and I drive with automatic transmission, right?"

"Even if it's just for a couple seconds, I want you to hold my hand," Anna said with a smile.

"Fine, then let me hold the knob and then you can put your hand on top of mine. I can't move it the way I want to when you're holding it, and that's dangerous!"

"Of course, of course!"

With Anna being her little parking aid, helping double-check the results of her shoulder check to ensure they were backing up safely, they got out of the parking spot and started heading down the mountain. While Anna was turning around, she sniffed and sniffed until she located what was now tossed on the backseat.

"Are those steamed pork buns?" she asked.

"Oh, don't eat them, Anna. I bought them just before coming here and I'm a little worried they're not fresh anymore. I'll buy you some more on the way back, okay?"

But that went totally out of Anna's ear. She just delightfully grabbed the package and took out a big fat white bun from inside and held it to her mouth.

"Like I said..."

"You're making a big fuss out of nothing, Elsa. The buns won't go bad in an hour. What, are you gonna toss them out if I don't eat them?"

"I'll heat them up again and eat them myself. It'll be alright."

"You don't even like Chinese steamed pork buns, Elsa."

"But I don't want to waste food..."

"So I'll eat them!"

Nothing Elsa said was going to stop her from taking a bite, so she sighed, "If you're going to eat one, take one of the ones in the middle. Those are probably still warm. I bought a dozen just so that I could insulate the ones in the middle."

So she intended to eat all the cold buns herself, leaving the warmer ones for Anna? Anna couldn't help but look affectionately at her driving girlfriend - as stupid as the idea sounded to her, it was a really sweet gesture. She couldn't stop smiling.

Anna took a bite, savouring the juicy meat and fluffy bun as they melted in her mouth. It was delicious!

When they stopped at the red light, Anna pulled Elsa's face over and landed a kiss on her.

"You taste that?" She asked after they parted.

"I don't like those pork buns."

"But these ones are delicious, aren't they?"

Elsa smiled, "Yeah, I guess you're right."

End of Chapter 19

- comments on your impressions, thoughts, suggestions are all welcome as always! The next update is scheduled for Jan 15. Have a happy holiday, my dear readers! Hope to see you again in the new year.