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

[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."

/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.

[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?"

[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.