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After school could be described as the best time in the world to be in the Liberty Center's computer lab, especially if you were the kind of kid who enjoyed sitting down and writing your own code. One such a kid was the jaded Hye-yun, fourteen years old and entirely uncertain as to why she didn't just go home. Sure, she had friends among the other normal kids, but most of them didn't stay after. They went to the normal schools to attend clubs and such, since there seemed to be an alarming lack of them here...

And she sat at a desk (she'd booted a Mac off to join another on a desk so her baby could have room to breathe) in the Liberty Center's secondary computer lab, running code through her home-brewed laptop. It was ironically easy to get this program to go- being a simple interface between two very similar programs, if it had been hard for her Hye-yun would have thought her skills were getting rusty.

Still. It got boring, and repetitive; she looked over to the kid (who had freaking weird hair, man, who had green hair or crab-arms? WERE those crab arms?) on the computer next to her and said dryly, "You have an error in the fifth row."

"Do so," said she, quite implacable. "You just fixed it, therefore, it was there." Then she took a look at her own code, scowled, and changed a definition. This cabbage freak was annoying, and he'd only just started talking! No one corrected her code, she could find her own damn errors when it didn't work.

For once, she was grateful for her mother's extensive etiquette lessons. "Thank you for pointing it out," Hye-yun said, the epitome of bored politeness, "but your input isn't necessary. At all."

"I didn't forget to close a tag. That's a complete n00b move," she sniped, tilting her head away from him and closing her eyes. It was something her mom did a lot when irritated. Her school of thought clearly echoed Leviathan's- she was the correct one. No way could this other guy be right, when she was the elder and the smarter one. "Pff. You'd have spent hours looking for that tag," she said arrogantly.

She frowned. "That's not a good reason to do anything," she muttered, drumming her fingers lightly on the keyboard. "Nothing better to do, pah!" Adding a few more lines, Hye-yun resolved to ignore this stupid little jerk, until-

"What the HELL," she cried, her head whipping around to glare at Leviathan. "A hacker? Me? Do I look like some kind of low-life who'd do that? Huh?" Her frown was small but definite, like it had been carved out of a rock. "I program. Big difference."

For a second it looked like she was going to rip off his scalp and use it for a drum cover, but something he said made Hye-yun smirk right back. "Oh yes," she said, syrupy sweet. "It is so much better to be a scientist and spend the whole day repeating the same experiment over and over and quite possibly blowing off my arms! Not," she said, abruptly thoughtful as she looked at the crab-arm, "Like you'd miss the one. Oh, I wonder how I'll ever live, knowing I could have had such a life!"

She smiled warmly, like she'd just complimented him, and turned back to her computer.

Hye-yun had been getting up to grab the print-out of her code from the other side of the room when he swung at her, so instead of hitting the back of her head it collided quite evenly with her shoulder. "Violence," she said in a perfectly prissy tone, "is the last resort of those with no vocabulary." She didn't bother with retaliating, though she dearly wanted to; it was never the aggressor who got in trouble, it was always the person who hit back.

Leviathan might be a finisher, but Hye-yun had years of experience of waiting for what she wanted.

She went over to the printer and retrieved her code, returned to her chair and sat with a bright green highlighter to review what she'd written into the compiler. Public static void main (String[] args)-- Her right leg, the one nearest the moron, jiggled almost as if she were nervous or impatient. It was just long enough for it to become nothing more than an annoyance, if the other even noticed.

Once she'd checked her hard copy of the code, that same leg somehow slipped its knee under the edge of the green-haired boy's chair and toppled it, applying just the right amount of force to lift up the edge of the chair and send its occupant sprawling.

Hye-yun didn't make excuses; she made battlegrounds.

"Profanity is the last resort of those without the mental capacity to expand their vocabulary," she said, not even moving her gaze away from the laptop's screen. There was a tiny crack in one section of the liquid crystal. She found that incredibly annoying, and it showed on her face.

This kid's tendency to reduce everything to annoying caste declarations bothered her. What was really the difference between a scientist and a geek, anyway? Programmers were scientists, only without the risk of doing something retarded and getting blown up. Better a geek than a hacker, too, she added softly, but only in her head. She had a tendency to have a less-than-accurate idea of the volume of her voice.