endless airship, a hunter x hunter dressing room

*Ging paced around his dimly lit lab, between the huge maze of oak tables. Some were pushed together to accommodate large experiments or contraptions, others to facilitate a long rack of test tubes or a series of related experiments. Some were burnt through with acid, or scorched with fire, or splintered. None were pristine, and none had a comfortable gap between them. In tungsten tongs he held a beaker that was overflowing with an effervescent yellow liquid that wouldn't stop expanding, an energy source he'd stolen from Belgerosse and transmuted before taking here. It had just activated, and now he had no time.

There was so much research to track. He must have passed a dozen promising leads on creating a Philosopher's Stone before he found what he needed for this one - a Faraday cage with a glass tray inside, a block of salt in the tray. He was careful in pouring the liquid straight down the middle of a gap he'd designed in the top of the field, but it turned out that the fizz and the electromagnetic fields repulsed each other. The block changed colour as it absorbed, and then it started glowing painfully white. Ging slammed his eyelids shut, stepping backwards and shielding them with his arm, before he bumped into something else, knocking something over behind him.

He had no idea what he'd just mixed.

If the basement had windows, he might have seen impossible things on the outside of them as the entire lab was shunted through space and time, wrenched from his current world as he knew it, but instead he felt his body being tugged apart from all directions, then squashed into the centre, alternating every second. He felt ill, staggering now towards his fainting couch for what felt like minutes. He felt his face land against the decadent cushioning before he realised he'd lost his balance. He took slow, deep breaths, then hauled the rest of his body on top. When the sensation stopped, he still felt tired, only wanting for now to sit up. He'd analyse the results of the experiment later.

Ging heard a knock on the door to his lab. He knew it to be deep underground, at the bottom of a spiral staircase that took about ten minutes each way at a brisk pace. What he did not realise was that it had been absorbed into the airship, an unlocked, unlabelled door all that separated it from the hallway.

He checked his clothes. He wore a dark green vest, tears and burns and acid holes exposing perpetually tanned skin. He wore a belt that ran over one shoulder, diagonally across his chest and back, securing a heavy tool belt to his waist. On the other side was a pocket watch attached to his belt with a platinum chain. Another chain attached a monocle lens to the vest pocket it was inside, which he used to fine-tune certain equipment. He wore dark brown trousers which had platinum zippers on both sides, and tall-laced leather combat boots which also had zippers on the side.

He groaned. Hated visitors. Probably a funding body he'd need to dazzle with something impressive to keep the lights on. He glanced at the whiteboard across from the couch, at scattered ideas that only made sense to him, the handful of big overarching concepts of his entire work.*