Math time shenanigans

[utopiamods]

Characters: Everyone
Format: Whatever
This log is: open
Location: Math class

It's a bright and sunny weekday morning. The sort of morning one should be spending sleeping in, or failing that, outside playing with friends.

Sadly for all of you, you're in this classroom studying logarithms. (Well, except for those of you who are cutting class. Good luck when finals roll around!) Right now, you've been split up into groups of three and four and should be quizzing each other on the questions from the end of the chapter in your textbook. If you're anything like ordinary high school students, though, you're probably discussing something completely different.

Comments

/Summoned!

[veepofchess]

But Lelouch was not about to leave a pair of Knights to struggle like this. He hurried into class, making an appropriate apology to the teacher, as any respectable student would. He went over to where Suzaku and Sora were working, and made himself at home. He had a few typical supplies with him, but one thing in particular stood out: the Exaclan manual.

Something about this assignment made him scoff. Like he'd had to do something much more complex than this in some ridiculously tiny timeframe. But he didn't dwell too much on it. He took his seat and set to work, finding his way through the first equation as though he'd already mastered this stuff.

[allurprincess]

Sora perked up from her communing with the maths book as they were joined by Suzaku's prince. That was convenient! With her head slightly lifted from the tabletop, she could see his working as he wrote, and her shoulders immediately fell in a melodramatic slump. Greeting forgotten, she mumbled, "Lelouch, you get it just like that?"

She sounded, if anything, as though he'd betrayed her and everything she stood for. So she turned to stare at Suzaku instead. "I thought you were exaggerating."

[snakesonaprincess]

While Tsuki hardly saw much of a point in attending class here either, she still usually made a point to do so. At least, when she didn't have something more pressing she felt like doing. As it turned out, today had been one of those days. So she arrived to the classroom late, strolling through one of the doors without so much as a glance or acknowledgment of the teacher. If anything, her demeanor made clear she had no apology to make, but noted with curiosity the gathering around Sora.

...she was probably making a fool of herself, wasn't she?

"Are you having trouble with this?" she asked, as she walked over and stared down at the book Sora was so troubled by.

[swordofzero]

Suzaku frowned, it sort of made sense, in a not really making sense at all way. His mind was so cluttered from his earlier relevation that he was having trouble concentrating. "Sort of..." He muttered and poked the page with his pen absently.

[swordofzero]

"No, he really is a genius," Suzaku said in a low voice to Sora and looked up when Tsuki came to their table as well. "Hello Tsuki," he looked back at Lelouch who could probably do these types of logarithms in his sleep. He didn't speak but his eyes asked for him, help?

[frozen_desires]

This was beyond absurd.

For a moment longer, Tougyu simply stared into Grenn's eyes, trying to see if she was lying, before he blinked and straightened. His face never changing, he grabbed his chair and pulled it up next to her desk before taking a seat. It was obvious he had no intentions of leaving her alone for the next little while.

"Your legs hurt you?" He asked next, seemingly ignoring the conversation they had just had. For the most part, though, he didn't seem overly skeptical or... different at all, actually. As if she hadn't just revealed something borderline impossible.

A school that took people from different times and played with their memories... maybe this academy really wasn't being run by Iwahijiri...

[veepofchess]

Lelouch slid over a bit closer to Suzaku, both so that he could help him better, and so as to give Tsuki some space to sit if she wished. He didn't seem to take notice of her otherwise. He started to help Suzaku as the two girls talked.

[summerstars]

Blink. Stare. Was she going to have this conversation with somebody who didn't actually care? Well, she wasn't looking for sympathy in her choices regarding her prostethics, so why not?

"With them on, I basically have the same feeling anyone would from their actual legs. They found a way to connect the natural nerves to artificial ones..." And the fact that it simply was assumed that anyone who lost a (replaceable) limb to the Rot would want prostethics were absolutely foolish. No matter if you had money or not, why assume?

"The connection's faulty. Any pressure, even just the prostethics against what's left of the limb, causes pain the brain can't handle like it usually does. So. Painkillers..." Thoughtfully, Grenn traced one of the connection points on her leg, hidden by the pants; she knew anyone who had paid attention that first day would have seen the strange metal on the stumps, but most people probably didn't remember.

"Taking away the ability to feel pain. Rerouting the pain, delaying it... There's lot of strategies. I decided I didn't want any drugs." Grenn shugged and suddenly felt rather renewed in her decision to not want drugs. Even here, when she'd had to use the prostethics more often. So, okay. Even if Tougyu didn't care, monolouging at him had made her feel more clear-headed. That was nice.

[frozen_desires]

An inescapable pain... he knew that feeling.

Against his better judgment, his eyes flickered over to Sora. Where would he be if she hadn't intervened? Hadn't taken him down for beating all those girls until his own hands had been as damaged as them? Would he still be senselessly destroying girls, ignoring the searing pain in his skull? Or would he be...

No, there was no point in thinking otherwise. He was deranged and unsalvageable. A prime example of a masochistic psychopath, someone who only sought pleasure from the pain he could derive from others. Why else would he have hurt his senpai and all those girls?

"Just deal with it." He murmured, half to himself and half to Grenn. "That's the best way. Drugs just let you pretend you're something you're not, until you can't deal with reality anymore."

He fell silent for a moment, before looking back at her and nudging her notebook forward. "Show me another one."

[allurprincess]

Sora sat up properly when Tsuki arrived. Not for appearance's sake, but because otherwise she couldn't lean backwards to grin at her upside-down. The smile was still polluted with maths-related despair, but it was a smile nonetheless.

"A little," she admitted. "We finished one of the questions-" she held up the book and worksheet so Tsuki could see a lot of frantic scribbles in pencil, "- then we got distracted, and the teacher told us off. And this is really difficult." The last came out as a childish whine. She tapped the seat next to her that Lelouch had just vacated, radiating hope. "Save me, Tsuki?"

/more fake math conjecture

[summerstars]

What did he think she was doing? Would, no matter if she usually took those drugs, have to do here, since there were none of those drugs here? But, despite the annoyance, she did agree with what he said. And didn't that feel strange?

"Obviously," Grenn said and rolled her eyes, but there was no real heat in her voice, agreement softening it.

And then he had to go and be annoying again. With a sigh, Grenn wrote down the only other thing she could remember at the moment, because it had frustrated her so when they had to learn it. Fragging Sixteenth Problem... There had been someone's name at the beginning, but she couldn't remember what it was.

"I am not a math genius," she complained as she solved the thing, making sure she wasn't obscuring Tougyu's vision of the paper, otherwise he'd probably demand she'd do it again. Not that he'd have any use of this anyway.

/accepts this

[frozen_desires]

"You could be." He remarked in that absent minded way of his as he took the notebook back and began to go over it again. After a moment, he plucked Grenn's pencil from her fingers too without so much as a word of acknowledgment and began scribbling some side notes in the margin of the paper.

Nothing entirely useful, just some little notes to help him figure out the equation, which he was obviously nowhere near doing. So instead he set the paper down on the desk and scooched closer.

"Make sure I don't do it wrong." He all but ordered Grenn in the same tone of voice before he went back to trying to tear apart the equation.

[summerstars]

Facepalming seemed like a good idea, right here, so she did. She stifled the groan that wanted to come out, though. She was so stupid.

"You are aware I could be remembering wrong, right? I know the first one I showed you is right, because they beat our heads with it, but this one was longer ago, and I have no way of checking if I solved it right," Grenn protested, even as she did follow what he was doing.

This had been an exceptionally bad idea. Forget telling Yuki that the new calendar was based on the first permanent expedition to oversee the terraforming on Mars landing on said planet. It would be potentially more disastrous if he actually managed to understand the whole thing, just from her writing it down.

[dancingflames]

Mai didn't like the sound of that, but no sense prying, particularly since Koharu's statement seemed to be in the past tense. Mai listened in, trying to push the distractions to the corners of her head for now. It wasn't exactly effective, but somehow she managed to catch some of that, at least. "Ohh, so for this one," she pointed to a different problem, "We just do it like this, right?"

Mai relatively quickly moved through the process of the problem, coming to an answer with minimal pauses. She slid the paper closer to Koharu for her to see it better. Although she went about her method a bit awkwardly, the solution is correct...other than the decimal placement.

[snakesonaprincess]

"Hello Suzaku," she replied to the greeting, as she took a seat next to Sora herself. She glanced at the question they'd completed, trying to make sense of how they'd gone about it. At the least, they'd managed to arrive at the correct answer some how, eventually.

"This is fairly simple once you get the basis concept," Tsuki said, as she placed a finger down on the next question in the workbook before beginning to give an explanation that was probably far more complicated than necessary.

[frozen_desires]

"Then you're saying you're stupid." Tougyu pointed out, raising his eyes from the sheet once to regard her with that strange, owlish look of his. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking at that moment but from the way he was frowning, it was an easy guess that he hadn't bought her attempt to deflect him from trying to work out the formula.

[summerstars]

That was such a (excuse the 'pun') stupid thing to say, all she could think of was rolling her eyes while her brain tried to catch up.

"Oh yes, a not-photographic memory and not-stellar but working at it skill in math which means I get things wrong sometimes, means I'm stupid. Obviously." She couldn't even work up the energy to be peeved at him, so instead she raised her eyebrows and gave him a good stare.

"I suppose you have no problems at all with any topic, always learn whatever it is the first time it's explained and can remember it perfectly a few months later?"

[willbeurprincess]

Koharu set about correcting each person's work in turn, ever so patient as she put the decimal in place and redid the problem for the other two.

"It just takes a little practice that's all. You will all get the hang of it soon I'm sure."

[frozen_desires]

Instead of answering her, Tougyu simply continued to work away at the problem. Occasionally he would pause and scratch out something he'd written a mere two seconds ago, indicating he was no closer to solving the problem then when he had started out. Still, as he continued to make mistake after mistake, he never once seemed to get frustrated or even the tiniest bit annoyed.

After a moment, he went to a corner of the page and wrote "6 - 4 = 2". Then he went to the line directly beneath that and wrote "6 = 4 + X".

That finished, he pulled his hand away to show her what he'd written. "Numbers change but you can always solve them by following the same thought process. You're stupid because you said you can't check to see if it's right. If it all adds up... it's right."

[summerstars]

Maybe he was right. Maybe he wasn't, since in her experience, there was any number of ways of accidentally getting something wrong and not noticing it in a math problem. She shrugged, determined to not let herself get annoyed, and leaned forward to see.

"I'm not going to tell you if this is right, you know," Grenn paused to look up at Tougyu, eyes narrowed, but there was no indication as to whether what he'd done was right or wrong. "If we come from the same timeline, someone knowing things before they should have been invented or solved would change things."

Of course, she had no idea, exactly, when these two particular math problems had been solved; she was rather sure one of them was after the new calendar was instated, but the other was sometime before that. Maybe it didn't matter. She had messed up several times now. But that didn't mean she'd stop trying.

[frozen_desires]

"Maybe you're supposed to mess it up." Tougyu replied without skipping a beat as he set her pencil down on her notepad and sat back in his chair, looking at it with a minute frown. He didn't seem to really be thinking about his conversation with her but from the way his eyes flickered to her and back to the paper, it seemed to be a given that she was at least occupying some part of his mind.

[swordofzero]

Suzaku tried to concentrate on what Lelouch was explaining, it was ridiculously complicated though and Suzaku was having trouble focussing. He glanced to the side at where Tsuki was trying to explain the question to Sora, hearing the explanation the girl was giving Suzaku a headache. "I think you might need to explain it to Sora as well," he muttered to Lelouch.