Kaidan glances at the sculpture, faintly guilty like a schoolboy ignoring an obscure assignment that's right in front of him, in favour of something more interesting... but that moment passes, and he offers her a smile in return. "Just remember that I gave you an out," he quips, before dispensing a 30 second summary that hopefully won't require Geordi to materialize to translate.

"Mass effect fields are created when dark energy interacts with normal space-time. We discovered a substance we called element zero -- eezo for short -- that releases dark energy when you run an electrical current through it. You can increase or decrease the mass in an area depending on the direction of the current, and, well, once you're able to play with mass you can do all kinds of things to special relativity."