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 Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 4:49 pm
Faustite's pencil rapped restlessly against the page. Textbooks sat open, their assigned work inside, with solutions manuals stacked at the far corner of the Negaspace library table. Quietude fell over the place, save for the occasional skitter of an officer's youma. Seldom did anyone come in or out of the vast room. The silence grated on him, however, and he recognized it for being completely and utterly stuck in his studies.
And Faustite hated being stuck. Even as Elex Yorke, he so seldom found an insurmountable challenge in his schoolwork. When he did, a teacher was usually at the ready to explain away the roadblock and give him the insight needed to complete the assignment. This welcome, if expected, structure fell by the wayside under Schörl's instruction — she expected him to guide himself, finish all assignments by himself in a timely manner, and solicit outside help where applicable on his own time. She demanded independence and ingenuity. And she did so with her eyes cast ever downward at him.
Faustite snapped another pencil in his grip. With a long sigh, he accessed his Negaverse tablet.
Schörl made mention of few tutors affiliated with the Negaverse. Only one of them was both keenly associated with Schörl herself and board recommended for mathematics and other traditionally difficult subjects. The database listed her as Suri Ellis, or General Zircon — General of recent date. A meeting then held future promise.
Faustite pressed the tip of the communictor to his lower lip for a moment. Should he call her? Schörl tainted all she touched; surely Zircon suffered some fundamental malignancy by association alone. Every general he met fell far short of the mark for a functional human being. He may find better sources by wasting his glamour inside the local university, or in retreating back to Azure Valley if they still let him cross campus.
He chose the risk. We do not keep our ships ever to port, he thought bitterly.
Pressing for audio, he recorded a message for the general. "General Zircon? This is Faustite. You've been recommended to me as a tutor for math and science subjects. I…" He paused, held the mic away while he snorted at himself. "I'm sorry. This must sound ridiculous. Asking a General for tutoring… It isn't my place. But there's no other way to do it.
"Will you please meet me in the Citadel library?" Another pause. "Thank you." He let the transmission drop.
He hated using communicators, he decided.amitotic i hope this works kinda flying by night here
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Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2017 9:54 pm
It was so rare that Zircon was asked to tutor these days.
She liked to think that, by and large, it meant that the Negaverse had curbed its habit of recruiting children to the cause, which she supposed was some kind of consolation. However, it was just as likely that the brass was less inclined to invest in education and more likely to force teaching officers to sign off on extensions, grade replacements, alternate assignments, a song and dance Zircon was all too familiar with. As a lieutenant, she'd fought to make her students do the work as planned, and as a captain, she'd just kept her head down and signed her name on the dotted line. Her behavior as a General remained to be seen, and Faustite's request inspired her to dust off a line of thinking she hadn't considered in years.
Slouching across the length of her cozy loveseat sans pants or leg suspension system, Suri waited a moment to respond to the message, taking the time to instead be a snoop and call up the database, where she sought out his history as an agent, his superior officer, his age. Half-youma, she read on the cold screen, her flat expression crinkling as her eyes shot back up to the name, the age, the previous schooling. Young, too young to have such things taken away. She didn't like it.
"Captain Faustite, I am currently finishing up an errand but I will join you in the Citadel in approximately fifteen minutes," Suri clipped back in response, sending the reply with little aplomb. Her errand was apparently getting up from the couch on a Sunday, crossing her apartment with a hand from the installed railings that trimmed every wall, and sitting on her bed so she could slide on a pair of modified socks, followed by the weighty metal and plastic of her prosthetic leg. She traded the nightshirt for a dress, brushed her hair, and rummaged around her desk for a blank notebook and a pen.
Feeling suitably prepared, she wrapped herself in the warm cowl of General Zircon, and for the first time that day, she felt like she was truly breathing, like her blood only decided to pump through her veins when she was veiled in chaos. Letting out a satisfied sigh, she stepped forward and was elsewhere, clicking her heels down a familiar Negaspace hallway just shy of the library doors.
When she stepped inside the library, she gave a slow scan of the tables until she saw the dark-haired captain, her face blank as she looked into those nothingness eyes. She'd seen him before, in this place or another--and slumped over homework, he looked too young, far too young. He could have been one of her students, had she the particular inclination to teach at a co-ed school.
Zircon cleared her throat, and then made her approach.
"Good afternoon, Captain," she greeted with a nod, both an acknowledgement to his rank and a reminder of his place in comparison to hers. She stood with arms crossed behind her back and a notebook tucked under one arm, glancing at the open book in front of Faustite so she wouldn't have to linger on his eyes or the strange pipes on his back. "And what are you working on today?"
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Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2017 9:20 pm
How curt. How professional. Energy being finite, he said nothing more in response. The fifteen minutes would invariably pass hovered over one of many difficult chemistry problems. If not that, then linear equations. If not that, then overly verbose word problems intendng to convey a mathematics question. None of it held direct application to the Negaverse's work, which left Faustite perplexed. Why assign any of it? He could never work as a structural engineer or a pharmacist or a nuclear physicist, so all the traditional reasonings for pursuit of these subjects in school left him. He couldn't pose as any of these in the three meager hours —
A cough, or a scoff, and Faustite drew attention to the far closer General's signature. He knew not what to expect when he found her name in the database — a gritty photo only offered distance recognition — but he imagined someone taller. More fit. Someone with straighter posture or broader shoulders or two intact legs. In the singular instance of his sightless eyes falling on her, he found her wanting.
It wasn't a recent trend.
"Hello General," he offered back. Faustite did not stand and salute, though he straightened from his slowly hunching position. The Negaverse offered no reliable standard for greeting officers of higher rank — half wanted their superiority left unacknowledged while the other half brandished it at his throat. The short blurb on Zircon offered no opinion toward either. The way she tucked her secrets behind her back spoke of either professionalism or insecurity. He hadn't decided. Again, his gaze drew to the wedge of metal where her leg used to be. She was… Unwhole.
She wasn't all that different from him. Half her leg gone, half his humanity gone. Schörl would find fault with both of them. She would chide and croon and cackle over all the meager setbacks brought by their conditions. She'd done as much to him. She'd do as much to Zircon. Small and narrow-then-wide-then-asymmetrical Zircon. He was staring.
Zircon asked her question and his hand slipped from the book. "Chemistry," he answered, only half-anchored to the conversation. "Stoichiometry. Schörl expects me to get my GED." He paused, snorting. Bitterness strained his voice. "I don't know why." He couldn't find anything efficient in a half-youma wasting time on a test that their glamour couldn't cover.amitotic i forgot how to tag sorry
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Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 1:36 pm
Zircon didn't need to guess where the captain's pupils might have been--she could still see the crinkle of his eyelids, strangely aware of his gaze on her, and it settled a malaise over her that she fought with a pinched frown. All it would take is one out-of-place comment and then Zircon would be in the right to measure out discipline as she saw fit, but Faustite said nothing, which was infinitely worse. He was one of Schörl's, he knew how to play these games, probably better than Zircon did, and he had no quivering eyes to betray him.
Zircon looked down at his textbook, her brows knitted.
"I would expect Schörl to have higher aspirations for you than a GED," the general huffed. The pale woman was a curator of the finest caliber goods, expensive wines and beautiful people--that she had somewhere along the way collected this broken officer gave Zircon some modicum of hope that she herself was beyond repair, though she couldn't help but be unnerved by the strange synthesis of his existence, neither human nor construct. Even worse, she found common cause with the vitriol in his voice, unwelcome and unbidden. Zircon did not want to feel sympathy for Faustite, not when she'd done so much to distance herself from his plight. She reached across his space to thumb through the pages, lightly scanning the material, and nodded.
"When we practice chemistry at this level, it's less about the material and more about learning how to think and solve problems," Zircon responded thoughtfully, plucking her words from an old memory she shared with someone far wiser than herself. "It's conditioning. You don't go to a gym just to learn how to curl weights. You go there to build a strength you can apply to outside problems, to things that can't be trained for." With little fanfare, she slid her blank notebook next to his, lowering herself into the next available chair with a motion too practiced to look casual.
"Stoichiometry is nothing more than a game of checks and balances," she continued, gesturing to the half-finished problem on his paper with a pen before noting it down on her own page in small, precise handwriting. "Everything must be accounted for, as in a sufficiently large system nothing is ever gained or lost, simply dispersed through light or heat." With the problem transposed, she began crossing through values, surrounding others in parentheses, quick and rhythmic scratches across paper.
"Everything comes from finding the molar ratio," she continued, and she tapped at one of the coefficients with her pen. "From there's it's simply a matter of using atomic weights to calculate the required amount of your reagent, or your expected product." A focused expression, a few more scratches on paper, and Zircon circled a number at the bottom of her work. Keeping track of these figures meant she didn't have to look at the dark smudges on Faustite's fingers, the empty ink of his eyes.
"Does this make sense so far?"
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Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2017 4:57 am
"I would expect Schörl to have higher aspirations for you than a GED."
Faustite smiled a crooked smile. Are you judging her, General? Or are you judging me? It wasn't an invitation for your opinion. The smile faded as he sat up straighter, as black hands slipped from pages to the edge of the bench. Faustite scooted only so much as he needed to; the general already made plain her disdain for him. It wasn't unfamiliar, nor was it unique. She could pour all her vitriol into her gaze, her frown, her words — she could drive between them all the wedges she needed. He knew where he stood with her. He knew where he could go.
She started with a spiel expected out of a teacher. Much of it sounded well-practiced — her voice smoothed over the words, and what contempt she harbored was dismissed in favor of this project. Stoichiometry and weightlifting and problem-solving and governmental balances. The similes spanned far and wide, searching for a hold in the austere teenager that sat so far removed from all these worlds. He swallowed softly, and all the lines of his throat spasmed to take in his disappointment. But he forced his gaze down to the book, to the perfect typing, to the way multicolored equations danced over example panes. Within him, that disappointment would fester and brew.
Faustite wrote across the top of his paper in quick, sharp strokes. Molar ratio it read, as if the subject of an outline. Atomic weights came beneath it. Coefficients came below that, inidented a thumb's width as its capital letter overlapped with the above line. He watched her finish, internalized her words,
watched all the letters and numbers mix together in a meaningless fragment of existence.
Faustite started with transcribing a different problem and spoke. "Do you think about your analogies, General?" He paused, snorted faintly. "Of course you do. You think about how they relate to the problem subject." Hands picked up from their place to start gesturing through his sentences. "You think about all the parts of your analogies and how they fit together properly. You give examples. You extrapolate."
He kept his voice low, methodical. He kept it as clinical as her words. "But you don't think about how those analogies apply to the person you're teaching, do you? Going to the gym, checks and balances — you know where these are from. You know how to use them effectively. But did you ever think, for one second, that the person in front of you will never know what it means to visit a gym and lift weights? That I'll never experience a government's fairness?" He let the words hang between them like a heavy curtain.
He glanced to the leg tucked neatly beneath her. "It isn't polite to remind people of their flaws."
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