Not quite. Let’s hang back and understand a bit of Thermodynamics.

“Heat is merely the flow of energy. It must always flow from the hot to the cold, until both the bodies involved reach equivalence, so that any transfer to and from is indistinguishable.”

Both the members of audience raised an eyebrow. The Bloody Knight twirled the halberd in his hand, but drove the Zweihander straight down into the ground, and a bit of boiling blood popped out from his forehead. To be fair, he really didn’t have an eyebrow to raise.

“Two bodies,” I continued our lovely chat. “Then are said to be in Dynamic Equilibrium. Of course, if there is no longer a flow of heat, our bodies are in thermo-dynamic equilibrium. They have reached the same temperature!”

The other member of my audience pointedly raised her eyebrows, her one knee on the ground in a posture of balance. She held her sword, hilt high, point down, with pointed attempts to avoid my gaze.

There was another member, the unconscious old man, behind her. But he was marked absent because he couldn’t give his attendance.

 “Everybody says,” I paced back and forth. “That ‘I feel cold’, or ‘I feel hot’. Well, I ask, with respect to what? And the answer is moot. They are not comparing temperatures. No. Not that at all!  They are talking about the flow of heat.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” the woman asked.

“Nobody in particular, to be honest. Just like every other lecturer of physics.”

“What sort of witchcraft are you babbling about?” A puff of mist formed in front of her. “The Bloody Knight stands in front of you! I suggest you run! You are outmatched and naked, not to mention you have no shame of nudity!”

I waved her down. “First, tell me are you feeling cold?”

She stared at me for a moment.

“Yes.” But it was asked with all the questioning tone of uncertainty.

“Well,” I explained. “What you mean by that is that heat is leaving your body. The more the heat that leaves, the colder you feel. It has, therefore, not much to do about temperature! You can feel cold even in the middle of summer. Just spray perfume.”

“Okay,” she said. “Now, please can your either turn away, or get yourself killed, because you are too inappropriately close to me.”

Note to self: nobody likes getting information, until they ask. Kind of why self-help courses are so famous: nobody wants to listen to their mothers.

Time to question the other pupil.

“So,” I said to the Bloody Knight. “Do you know what is temperature?”

The Bloody Knight raised his halberd high up above him, holding the butt of its haft. And it burst alight as a red flame roared upon the axe head.

“Not the correct answer,” I said. “But a good demonstration.”

He hurled it towards me. It spun. The silvery haft gleamed like a mirror in the middle of a ring of fire. But I felt the air grow dense around me, thickening not quite unlike gaseous gelatine. All I had to do was imagine.

The halberd slowed its rotation, then the flame grew dimmer. It moved as if we were watching its action replay.

After it stopped moving, it just hung in the air, like a stapler inside a plate of jelly.

Startled, the Bloody Knight took out the Zweihander, and whirled it around his head, generating a glow of intense yellow on its edge. Then, in an arc he swung it from his left to right. The ground shook as a blast of fire rippled through it, upending grass and the little snow that was left on it. The arc of the blast raced towards me.

But it faltered. It fizzled out before it could even reach within an arm span of me, only to hit my legs as a puff of wind.

Bit of an overreaction to a physics lecture?

Perhaps an underreaction. There are some nasty professors.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me give you an example. What do we mean by the air temperature? Somebody just marking numbers on a thermometer? Well, no. Temperature has a physical meaning. It is a measure of the root mean squared velocity of all the atoms that make up the air we are talking about.

“Just think about it: as ice, water molecules encase themselves in a crystal lattice, having only the possibility of vibration about where they are. As a liquid they can travel around and about where the liquid is, however the liquid is — be it inside a bottle, or inside a river. They can, alongside vibration, move up and down. But even then, there are just too many molecules close to them. It is a huge traffic jam in a slow road. But as steam! As steam, they are all on an express highway. As steam, the molecules can travel right to the edge of a room, or vanish in the atmosphere. It is all about their velocity! Everyone follow?”

The woman’s sword was shining with white. Oh, even she could do magic. Good for her. She stepped back in a defensive stance, away from where I was.

The Bloody Knight had started to increase his size, that deep red boiling blood rippling on his surface, stretching it out. His hands grew, just like last time, and even the Zweihander seemed like a single-handed sword in its grip.

The halberd finally fell through the gelatinous air, and vanished, only to form back from the mist in his hands.

That wasn’t the best reception to my first ever lecture.

Perhaps this lecture-business is not for me. Sigh.

“I am talking about motion!” I shouted, wagging my finger. “Motion is temperature, in a way. Rather, motion is energy, and temperature is a measure of energy.”

“What has this got to do with anything?” the woman shouted at me. “Please, spirit, let us humans leave. We do not take sides in your battle.”

“Non, non, non, mon chéri,” I said. “It has got to do with everything. Everything is energy. Your life is energy, this air has energy, the Bloody Knight has energy. Well, in his case, he is about to explode with it! In fact, I would argue that it is almost impossible to find anything that is without energy. And even if you do—” I turned towards her. “Wouldn’t it absorb energy from literally anything else?”

The earth shook with the steps of the Bloody Knight. He jumped, arcing through the air, aiming at my general position. Well, if he wanted to get stuck in a quicksand, it was his bloody right.

And he did get stuck, in the same gelatinous air. I could almost see the little gleam of metal surrounding him.

“One must always keep a cool head,” I said. “Ironically, it leads you to feel very hot.”

He was wary, of course. Tentacles of blood spilt out from him, and dug into the soil, pulling him down. I couldn’t keep him in the air for long.

His arms extended, shooting hot, boiling bloody bullets at me. They hit the boundary, and huffed and puffed. Then turned solid and fell down in front of me.

“If you’ve had enough of me to gander about, Mr. Bloody Knight, let me spell it out for you: I can drink your boiling blood like Dracula’s favourite tea-time snack!”

The Bloody Knight gave a roar, and thrust the Zweihander’s point straight at me. Its arm extended out like a gleaming tentacle with blood dripping along its length, powering the thrust as much as it could. It pierced through the air, a bullet.

But just before the Zweihander could pierce my chest, it stopped. The air had turned into liquid around it, bending the light of the moon — it felt like an odd haze of murky ink had somehow appeared in front of me, holding the gleaming sword like giant hands of ice around its hilt.

“So, we come back to our initial arguments,” I told the Bloody Knight, as his halberd suffered a similar fate towards my right hand. “Heat is the flow of energy. The Sun heats the air, and at night is cooled. Do you know where it loses most of its energy?”

The Bloody Knight didn’t answer. He just made more fire. I think he was not a very good student.

I looked up at the sky. Ah! The moon was in the right position. Surely, it couldn’t go any nearer to the zenith anymore. I grabbed hold of both the blades, hovering before my body.

“To space! The air radiates its energy to space. Sometimes, I cannot even believe it is real. Look above you! Just a few miles of gases, and then infinite emptiness. Between you and the moon, lies two hundred thousand miles of almost nothing. You could make as much flame as you like, Bloody Knight, but your fire will be quenched. It will be absorbed. Did somebody ever tell you that metal were the best conductors of heat?”

The Bloody Knight gave an uncertain steaming rumble.

“Well, it is time,” I looked into its crimson point-like eyes. “For it is, right now, midnight!”