I enjoyed the story in general, but there's a technical niggle that annoys me:
The teacher transferred (more than) 10,000,000 zettajoules of energy to the senator. To put that into proportion,
the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated had a fireball 9Km across and a mushroom cloud seven times higher than Mount Everest. It was 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
It released one
forty-billionth as much energy as was transferred between these two beings.
Ten million zettajoules is as much energy as the sun puts out in 30 seconds. It's enough energy to boil every drop of water on Earth 15 or 20 times over.
You know what Douglas Adams said about space being big? Yeah, well, this is
hot.
To be fair, without knowing the creatures' size or composition, it's hard to argue that they must be incapable of holding this much heat without being vaporised, but the fact that they're in a region where gravity can pull them out of being spherical strongly implies that they're smaller than your average gas giant. Also, there was something about people coming within a few metres being able to feel the residual heat? That implies that they're about human in scale, to within a couple of orders of magnitude.
The same thign happened with
EP094: THe Last Wave, in which the author thought that 10
12 picoseconds was a significant amount of time. So, I propose a general rule of authors: Don't throw around big numbers without actually knowing what they mean. Choose a scale in natural language that makes sense (a thousand years; 5,000 Calories) and then convert that into scientific notation.
Collorary for editors: When faced with numbers like this, convert back to something you can make sense of, and if it seems odd, raise the issue with the author. Because you
know that your audience is going to do it.