[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Homework

Genre: Slice of Life/Humour

Words: 2459

B/D: Just something goofy to blow off steam after Beach Part part 2.

Aru was having one of those days. For other people, ‘those days’ were the days when the toast fell butter side down, when every traffic light was red, and when large, ruthless corporations eagerly tossed them into the bonfire to fuel the engine of capitalism. For Aru, ‘those days’ were the days where she woke up, had breakfast, and then got roped into something stupid before she had even realised it.

To begin with, she wasn’t sure why she was doing homework with QP and Syura. She hadn’t done homework in years. She was a responsible adult who owned a business. She was exempt from homework, in the same way that oil barons were exempt from taxes. She had business cards, damnit. They were extremely cute, they cost a bomb and a half to have designed, and she was in the habit of handing them out like confetti at a wedding. Usually they came back to her like confetti at a wedding as well, in innumerable tiny pieces, but she had taken the first of many steps on the long road to professionalism.

But it seemed that even her deadliest combination of whining and business cards couldn’t get her out of QP’s study meet, at least not with her kneecaps intact. So she had moved onto the second of her many, many questions: who on Earth needed to know this stuff? She had offered to help with geography, because geography was something she was good at. She regularly circumnavigated the globe; nobody could name capital cities quite like she could. But QP’s geography homework wasn’t about capital cities. It wasn’t even about maps. It was about things like soil erosion in riverbeds, undersea tectonic plates, and the rain cycle. Last time Aru had checked, ‘geo’ meant earth, so why were all the questions about water? That was a whole classical element away. Plato would be spinning in his grave so hard that he’d drill down into the planet’s core.

As it turned out, though, QP also had many questions. Most of them were directed at Syura, and very few of them were flattering.

“How can you be bad at math? You do programming,” she pointed out, as Syura failed to carry the one. Maths teachers always wanted Syura to carry the one, and someday soon she was going to carry it all the way up Mount Doom and throw it back into the hellfire where it belonged.

“How can you be bad at math? You’re a dog!” the redhead snapped.

“Yeah, but you don’t need math to be a dog. For programmers, you kinda do.”

“Look, I major in game design and do programming on the side. Whenever I need to code anything, what I do is start my computer, slam three energy drinks in a row, and then it’s done by the time the room stops spinning.”

QP looked at her with something that would have been pity, had she not used up all her emotional fortitude on a fifteen question biology worksheet. “You’re gonna die before you’re thirty-five, guaranteed.”

Having established this as an incontrovertible fact, she went back to chipping away at English Literature. She liked her English Lit teacher, who was a personable woman with a fondness for puns. If she came in with the excuse that a dog ate her homework, she would probably get away with it, provided she had a half-eaten worksheet in her lunchbox. She didn’t know whether she wanted to eat that much paper, though. Sure, it was annoying trying to pretend she knew what the author was thinking with every single word choice, but was it worth dining on tree pulp? Probably not. On the plus side, she was making firm strides towards forming her own school of literary theory, based on the idea that most of the little niggly bits of creative fiction were actually an expression of what the author wanted for breakfast. Nobody was taking it seriously, but that was fine. It meant it could be a parody, only to become a dark portent of the future once the apocalypse came and toast became a luxury good. That was how These Things Worked™.

When she had successfully plucked a two page essay out of her brain and transcribed it in roughly the right order, she set about making Aru give her a pop quiz on her business studies. It went swimmingly, in the sense that she felt out of her depth and constantly on the cusp of drowning.

“What is a loss leader?” Aru asked.

Despite being in an entirely different business studies class, Syura was the one who answered. “Easy. That’s the stage 1 midboss.”

“Incorrect. What does SWOT stand for?”

“Strong Wandering Overpowered Terrors.”

“Incorrect. What is gross profit?”

“When you can see the future, but there’s no shower in it.”

“That’s zero out of three, which I’m pretty sure is a fail.” She slumped over the table and sighed. Even if it wasn’t really her schoolwork, it made her back ache for some reason. With her head against the cool wood, she almost felt comfortable – but for the scritch-scratch of the pen nibs right next to her long, fluffy ears. “Why didn’t you ask Krila to come?”

QP’s head tilted up as she thought of her answer, almost as though the correct response was written on the ceiling. Sadly, she had already tried writing the answers on the ceiling during a mock exam, and it hadn’t gone well. If she wrote big enough to see, there just wasn’t enough ceiling for all her notes; if she squished it all in, she would need telescopic eyes.

“Oh, it’s her busy season. She makes good luck charms and sells them outside the library,” Syura explained.

“Do they work?”

“I sure hope so. I bought eight already, but I’m thinking of making it a round ten, just to be sure.”

“It’s a pity,” QP said, furrowing her brows. “She’s tall, so I bet she knows lots of stuff.”

Aru, who had very long legs and counted her ears towards her overall height, was very interested in this proposed correlation between tallness and intelligence. She demanded more details.

“Well, think about it. All of the teachers and professors are way taller than we are, right? And they’re also way smarter. My theory is that you can only have so much knowledge inside you, and when you hit that limit, your body grows so there’s more of you to store it in.” Her tail wagged as she confidently explained her hypothesis.

“That means you’re gonna be short forever,” Syura replied dryly, and ducked the pencil case QP launched at her head. “But anyway, don’t you think it’s actually the opposite? I think that as your brain gets fuller, it gets heavier and squishes your body down underneath it. Also, it sucks the calories away from the rest of your body, so you actually get shorter and skinnier the smarter you get. That’s why all the really smart kids are, like, Dweebulons from the planet Dweeblord.”

“My theory is you should both pay more attention in biology,” Aru sighed. She didn’t say that ‘Dweebulon from the planet Dweeblord’ was more or less exactly how she would describe Syura, not least because Syura would take this as evidence of how smart she was.

“I’d totally trade an inch off my height for an A in History,” QP sniffed. “It’s not like I need to be tall, anyway. I can fly.” She demonstrated her point by floating leisurely up off her chair and bumping her head on the light fitting, at which point she descended rather less gracefully and with a pronounced yelp, followed swiftly by the lightbulb she had knocked free. When it hit the ground it broke with a loud pop that reminded all three of them that they were mortal – mostly mortal, in QP’s case – and no amount of academia would save them from being skewered in the heart by a shard of molten lightbulb glass. Syura was fairly sure shards of lightbulb glass were the modern day equivalents of stone-age obsidian knives, and if Krila ever went off the deep end and started sacrificing victims to her dark gods, that was what she would use.

Sadly, Krila would have been disappointed, because Aru was an expert in this exact situation. She had a 2^nd Dan in fairy lights; while her friends were out partying, she studied the LED and mastered the art of strand manipulation. (Many wondered why martial arts schools offered qualifications in fairy light mastery; few remembered that a strand of fairy lights was essentially a collection of small, electric firebombs strung along a garotting wire.) In mere moments, she had masterfully swept the glass from the ground and spirited a new lightbulb into the fitting, so that her friends could continue to study under her watchful, if mostly clueless, eye.

“So, QP. Don’t take this the wrong way,” Aru began. It wasn’t a very reassuring beginning. QP had noticed that people said ‘don’t take this the wrong way’ only when they would absolutely have taken it the wrong way themselves in the same situation. “But you’re not doing great at English, Math, most of Science, History, Geography… what schoolwork are you actually good at?”

QP looked at her seriously before breaking out in a golden, glorious smile. It was peaceful, magnificent. Like being looked down on by a wise king, or a monk feeling the first twinges of understanding. A truly beatific smile that brought calm to Aru’s soul. Opposite her, Syura was wearing a scowl every bit as sour as QP’s smile was euphoric. They answered at once, their voices in unison:

“Tests.”

“It’s stupid. It’s not how real life works,” Syura continued, immediately launching into a shower of vitriol. “When I make a game, I don’t just turn on my computer and hammer one out in an hour. I work at it for months at a time, little by little, advancing and improving every single day. That’s how you do jobs. That’s how you do everything. When they grade us based on tests, they’re not actually getting any idea of how that knowledge translates into real life and real projects. They’re testing how well we do with stupid artificial pressure.”

QP wasn’t far behind with her rebuttal. “That’s just because you see everything as videogames, though. I think a lot of things are like cooking, or sports. Sure, you can prepare ahead of time a bit, and that makes it easier, but there’s always a limit to that, right? Eventually you just have to get out there and do it. You have to be able to use what you’ve learned in the moment, no matter how bad the conditions are. That’s why whenever we fight, I always win – I’m just better at doing stuff when I really need to.” She paused. “Also, being good at tests means I can slack off for most of the year and then cram to get a good grade. And I don’t turn up to every class on half an hour’s sleep, like you do.”

Aru shook her head. It was a hard truth to realise, but actually, life demanded you to get good at both. Turning up to a big day with no preparation was a bit like wandering into a wild west shootout armed with your two fists and a bullseye on your back. But the preparation was just that: preparation. When the time came to put things into practice, life didn’t particularly give a damn if you’d done your coursework or not. When the time came to put up or shut up, the choice was entirely binary. There was no easy answer, and no easy way to teach it.

Having not been paid to distil the struggles of education into a single glib soundbite, Aru didn’t, and instead told QP that slacking off in school was naughty. Naughty was a loaded word in Aru’s vocabulary; there was naughty, and there was Naughty, and QP had not yet figured out how to tell if she was saying it with a capital letter or not. It could be a velvet glove or an iron fist, and she wouldn't know until she felt the sting.

“Have you ever considered being a teacher, Aru? I learn stuff from you all the time,” QP said. This was true, but it was also flattery to try and get in Santa’s good side; luckily, Santa’s good side was about as wide as the antarctic wastes, and her smile was a good indication that QP’s naughty list status, if she had been on it, was temporarily revoked.

“I don’t know,” Syura said. “I think she might not be scary enough to be a teacher. Also, she needs to get better at geography.”

Aru stood up, and it became apparent that she was not only much taller than Syura was, but also capable of focusing the distilled essence of winter into a scowl that would freeze your heart and strip the paint from your bicycle. “I know geography.”

At that point, Syura decided that if Aru had said baking cookies was geography, she would have cheerfully agreed in an attempt to not get thrown out of a second story window. That was the problem with being able to fly, she found. People could throw you out of windows whenever they liked and not expect you to die, which was very undignified. Most people expected to get thrown out of windows once, maybe twice, in their entire life. She had hit double digits in defenestrations, and she wasn’t even an adult yet. It was unsustainable, economically and environmentally. Syura was always thinking about the environment, and how to avoid interacting with it. Her groundbreaking solution was to stay at home and play videogames. It was a wonder nobody had ever thought of it before.

Eventually – when Aru was satisfied that Syura knew her isoceles from her equilateral, and that QP’s sociology homework was not just ‘woof’ written in ten different dialects – the study session was called to a close, partly because their work was done, and partly because all three of them had been consumed by a lust for pizza, which was one of the many occupational risks of studying. Education could teach them many things, but there are some things that can only be learned by splitting the cost of a deep-dish pie – like compromise, diplomacy, and why pepperoni is overrated. And as the age-old contest for the first slice began, they learned one more, very important thing.

The value of friendship isn’t measured in the number of pizza slices you eat. It’s measured in the number you don’t have to pay for.

A/N: This was fun to write, but mostly turned into just a rambling series of punchlines. Oh well.