“I call it Nothing 2.0.”

Catra blinked. A dimly-glowing white orb glared back at her, floating a few inches above the desk. She reached a hand forward and tapped at it with a claw, curiously; out of the corner of her eye, she could see Scorpia bracing herself for some sort of explosion, and Entrapta grinning with barely-contained manic glee.

The orb echoed with a small [i]pat[/i].

“Entrapta, I hate to break it to you, but there’s clearly something here.”

“Oh, right, I haven’t explained nothing yet,” Entrapta said, a tendril of hair wrapping around Catra’s outstretched arm and dragging her forcefully toward a whiteboard covered in scrawled equations and diagrams. “When most people say ‘nothing’, what they’re talking about is the absence of anything, or a vacuum. But a vacuum stops being a vacuum the moment anything enters it, which makes nothing incredibly fragile…”

Catra nodded. Entrapta’s explanations usually went over her head, but all she really needed was to get enough from them to figure out how to use whatever crazy contraption she was presented with to get the upper hand on Adora and her stupid Rebellion.

“… and that’s why I made Nothing 2.0 repel literally everything. If nothing can get inside, Nothing 2.0 can never become something!”

“Why is it glowing?” Scorpia asked. “Surely it can’t glow if there’s nothing inside there?”

“Oh, it’s not glowing!” Entrapta said. “It’s reflecting. Light can’t get inside it because light counts as something, which would stop it from being nothing.”

“Wow.” Scorpia was hunched down by the desk, her eyes wide in wonder. “So it’s like a tiny disco ball?”

“Exac—”

“How can we use it?” Catra demanded. She didn't have the time—or patience—to let Scorpia get sidetracked. “Does it explode?”

“Oh, I mean, we could try rapidly expanding it, but that would just knock things out of the way and would require huge amounts of energy.” Entrapta sighed. “It’s not a very efficient process. I had to reroute a lot of power last night just to have this much nothing.”

Scorpia hummed, nodding to herself. “That explains the power cut the cadets were complaining about…”

“So it isn’t a weapon,” Catra said, pacing back and forth. “And it’s clearly not an energy source, either, if making it is so inefficient. It’s highly reflective, so we couldn’t use it for armour without giving away our positions, and it’s expensive to make it bigger so we can’t use it as a building material. What is the point of it, Entrapta? Is there [i]anything[/i] that we can make out of this experiment?”

“Don’t be silly, Catra,” Entrapta said, shaking her head sadly. “You can’t make something out of nothing.”