rakuen | Math time shenanigans

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Math time shenanigans

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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.

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As Grenn set her notebook down, Tougyu tilted his head to peer at the paper before his eyes suddenly narrowed. Reaching over and picking it up, he used one scarred finger to trace the equation as he murmured softly to himself as his face grew more and more confused.

Finally, after a long moment, he looked up at Grenn with a deep frown.

"A solution doesn't exist." Yet. Curiously, his voice was quiet now. Almost speculative in some manner as he gazed at the girl with searching eyes.

"Of course not. Yet," Grenn said with something nearing smugness, echoing Tougyu's mental statement. And then realized she had just been rash. Again. Suppressing a sigh and the urge to tug on her hair, she knew she had it coming. Yuki had been so much easier to talk to, and there had been time (relatively, there always seemed to not be enough time) to consider what she should reveal or not.

"And with patience, they shall be blessed..." Grenn muttered to herself, and tried to make it be true. She had already done this much. And he wouldn't be able to learn anything from this, since that particular equation was for azural. Something else that didn't exist yet.

So she took her notebook back and solved the equation, relieved she remembered what had been taught only a month ago.

When Grenn took the paper back, Tougyu got out of his chair to watch her solve it, his eyes filled with a curious understanding of what she wrote and... not.

This didn't make sense, that solution didn't exist and yet she wrote the numbers with the assurance of one who knew exactly what they were doing. Was Grenn much more intelligent than he'd given her credit for? Or was something else at play here?

As his hand went out to Grenn's shoulder, resting on it with the barest amounts of pressure, Tougyu leaned in and spoke against her ear, well aware that if he acted rashly now, he'd gain attention.

Something he did not want to do with Sora a mere 5 feet away. That would be just the opening she needed to try and drag him into her fold.

"Who are you?"

That was too close. And she didn't mean what he was saying. But all she did was tense up and frown, because how were you supposed to answer something like that?

"... I was rather sure you knew my name, Toygyu." That came out first, and it wasn't until after she'd said it, that she realized that wasn't what he'd meant. It was a more general question. She tilted her head to be able to look at him out of the corner of her eye, mouth set in a slanted, narrow line.

"I am no one special," she started, and was briefly distracted when she remembered (so not-special, that Lyra had first started to talk to her for... for... something. Frag...), shaking her head, Grenn pulled her brain back on track.
"My future career will be in flying." She was rather sure, considering the intensity she suddenly had been 'gifted' with, that Tougyu was now considering her earliest angry remark very closely. To forestall, she decided to give him what she had given Yuki, but it didn't please her at all.

"It's year 326, Tougyu." She was not going to tell him anything else.

Staying silent for the most part, Tougyu rolled over that new bit of information in his mind. The academy was... reaching through time?

That was absurd, the sort of thing found only in sci-fi and the minds crack-pot theorists. Then again, he had the beginnings of solid evidence right here in front of him. Grenn's legs, her mathematical theorems, that seemingly innocent statement from earlier... was it possible? Or was she just a genius pulling his leg?

"You're from the future." He finally said, expression never changing as he looked directly at her now, which was possibly unnerving at such close range.

She was not gonna push herself into the back of the chair, no matter how close he was. And then that sort of deadpan expression and voice, which just made her annoyed. How was she supposed to interpret that? Was it just a statement of fact, looking for confirmation (despite what she'd already said), or was he mocking her?

"... Unless the past... er, your future, got a lot more advanced, then yes, I suppose that's what I'm saying," Grenn said, a definitive snarky lilt to her voice. With a sigh, she rolled her eyes. Since she'd already made the mistake of mentioning the "wouldn't be invented for a few hundred years" she supposed there was no harm...

"The sort of pain killer someone with prostethics would be given involve, among other possibilities, a complete lack of feeling pain." There. And if he still didn't believe, she didn't care. It might even be preferable.

... So. Why had she just gone through the trouble of making him believe her? Frag.

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...

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.

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."

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.

"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.

Edited 2011-01-18 11:14 (UTC)

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.

"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.

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?"

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."

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.

"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.

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Math time shenanigans

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/more fake math conjecture

/accepts this

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