Welcome to Gaia! ::

It wasn't easy being the new kid, especially not when you were a little short for your age, a little undersocialized, and bad to the bone. Merroth had been a student for three days now and he hated it. It wasn't just the students, or the teachers, or the lessons, it was the massive combination of these things and after one day Merroth had wanted to leave and never come back. Boston had said to him: "Who do you want to win, you or the school?" Merroth very badly wanted to win. Boston patted his "champ" on the back and said, "Then you go out there and you figure out how to win this. You can do it." Merroth had every intention of proving Boston's assertion right. He was Tenebras Merroth Clark, and he was going to be a winner.

If he survived it. The first problem was the material. Having been somewhat unconventionally-educated up until now, Merroth didn't have the same knowledge base that everyone else did. He was ahead of them in some places, behind in others, and it galled him every time he discovered someone else knew something he didn't. For now, he tried to keep to himself, keep his head down, until he could be confident he would know the answers when they called on him and could thoroughly trounce his classmates by any academic standard.

Three days so far, and he hated it, but Merroth was not going to let that stop him. He was hungry, and if he could win this, he could go on to win other things. Bigger things. He just had to start small.

He was so busy trying to figure out his own position that he failed to take much notice of his fellow classmates. He knew they were there, knew he would have to deal with them at some point, but unless they posed a direct threat to where he was and what he was doing at the exact moment (e. g., Christian and Jace) he pushed them out of his thoughts and kept his head down and just let his classmates orbit around him like asteroids around a star. Specks of dust in a cosmic canopy of more important things. So the fact that Merroth was oblivious to Kaimi's immediate presence was not the least bit surprising. The back of his mind noted someone in the vicinity and the rest of his mind replied to the news with a "whatever, more important things to think about." Like how he was going to get this jelly stain off his pressed linen shirt. God, he hated this place.

Merroth pinched his face in immediate distaste with a dash of disbelief thrown in. He could have let the girl go by, could have just left it alone, but Merroth was quickly learning that he had an innate need to correct people's glaring mistakes. He was better than everyone, and it was just one more way of showing it. Someday he was going to find a way to do away with all those pesky mistakes and the people who made them, too, but for now simple corrections would have to suffice.

"There's no one here," he called after the girl. "Except me. And I wasn't talking to you. I wasn't even talking." He shot her a dirty how-stupid-are-you look, but in his mind he had already answered that question.

There was a particular glee that came from over-the-top showmanship, and Merroth did not get enough chance to revel in that experience during the school day. This was the rare exception. Merroth swept his arms wide like a conductor in front of an orchestra, taking a cross-step back and bowing slightly. "Nobody else!" he demonstrated, crazy half-grin on his face that equaled anything Kaimi was capable of. He looked at her expectantly for some form of explanation.

"What?" was the aghast reply. Apparently it was too much to hope for a friendly reception when confessing to hearing voices. "You can't be serious. No, really, you have to be joking." But it wasn't the idea of voices that was angering Merroth, it was something else entirely. "You're skipping math class!?" He punctuated the words with pinched fingers.

Merroth scoffed and stared at her, gaping with disbelief. He could barely compute this lunacy. "What, do you not have parents or something?" He waited for a response, not sure if he was in the mood to be charitably manipulative or downright cruel. It was a coin toss that was still up in the air at the moment.

"Idiots," said Merroth instantly. "And outsiders." Which was Emma's main dislike, but Merroth had cheerfully adopted it in a weird sort of homage to his mother and their mutual hero Black. "And people who don't respect mathematics, as it's the foundation of the universe."

He crossed his arms, daring Kaimi to challenge his assertion. That ought to show her. Or at least underline the sense of superiority Merroth was attempting to convey to her. I, he silently boasted, am in possession of the secrets of the universe, and I am going to use them to own you and everyone else I come across. Just as soon as Merroth figured out how. In that moment, he decided Kaimi was to be a sort of test subject, an experiment to gather data off of for as long as possible.

Unfortunately, I'm better than you was the cornerstone of Merroth's philosophy, so all he did was pronounce, "You wouldn't understand," as if the family bond and paranoia-by-association he shared with Emma were concepts totally beyond the ken of his fellow schoolmates.

"... It's Roth. Or, Tenebras Merroth Clark." Hopefully his wonderfully illustrious name would instill in her some sort of fear or admiration, because clearly he had not yet succeeded in that respect. Of course, had he known just how common his surname was -- even on his world, where it actually meant something -- he would have understood that bandying it about hardly represented a significant status marker. It wasn't precisely like saying you were a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt.