Alea still didn't see her siblings when it was time for her evening revision. With a sigh she sat on her bed, cross legged unfolded the ceramics square on hinges fastened to the wall that her father insisted was a decent table and hung her tablet on the wall. Pulling out her page and pen she had to wave them around in front of the tablet twice before it registered them.

The lesson icon wasn't marked yet, but Alea wanted to avoid the alarm that might draw her mother's attention. As she had chosen to study history and biology that day she chose both of them and then hesitated. She had done quite a bit of maths in her free time, so she might as well call up the relevant lectures for review.

Hearing a lecture while taking notes by hand, which was supposed to be an effective learning strategy. Even though the notes would never be useful for anything, Alea did what she was supposed to. It was really her mother's option of choice to check whether she was studying regularly, she knew.

History was boring as usual. The age of exploration had been fun back when she was 12, but the bajonic wars? Who cared which tyrant or republic declared independence in which systems only to be overthrown politically or conquered by Curell in the end? There was no chance she'd ever need the information or even see any of those places her entire life.

Still, she wrote down the main points obediently. Once the page was full she tapped the surface twice to flip to a blank and kept writing.

Biology was marginally better, though she couldn't claim to be particularly interested in sinews. At least it wasn't entirely useless.

After 45 minutes of each subject Alea got up, drank a glass of water, noticed that the dishes were gone and stretched her legs. Her steps were only at 2304, so she hopped on the walking mat in the hallway to get to her mandatory 3000. After just a few steps Alea stopped, got her tablet and switched on the maths lecture she was going to take a look.

At least this way she wouldn't be bored to death by staring at a blank wall.

As she walked and listened to a lecture about speed calculations there was one thing she never imagined might be connected to anything useful, ever: integral calculus. The tablet went on the wall, her ear buds in her ears and her feet back on the mat.

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The lecture was supposed to teach her how to calculate the rate of change in total distance. At least that was what the lecture said and it was exactly what she wanted to look up. Due to sometimes vast distances speed calculations mattered, she thought. Speed and timing seemed to make a difference when it came to good and bad aim, at least.

The lecture gave her a formula to calculate velocity, but...

v(t)=∫a(t)dt+C1=∫(5−10t)dt+C1=5t−5t2+C1

Well…

Alea realised quickly she was in way over her head. She had just chosen the speed calculation topic, but hadn't properly checked when it was supposed to be part of the curriculum. She had seen an integral formula before and done some calculations, but that had been nothing like, well, this!

The lecture had lots of words she understood individually, but trying to follow the explanations strings of these words created... what was dt supposed to be anyway? The lecture mentioned it like it was self explanatory!

And then she realised that maybe, just maybe, this formula maybe wouldn't even work with space travel since there was no air. The lecture talked about air, at least. Since she didn't understand what all of those letters meant or…well, anything about the lecture, really, she wondered if finding out who would win before anyone else was worth the headache. She would have to start at the beginning, but where even was that beginning with this mess of words and letters and entions of other formulas meant to help explain the logic when they explained exactly nothing to her.

As it was pretty much impossible to just study up on what she wanted to be able to do in a few hours Alea ended the incomprehensible lecture.

So…what now?

Her feet kept moving on the mat as her head spun.

Since she couldn't understand and, frankly, had no idea if understanding this stuff would even be useful in any way, she told herself to just leave it. There was no good reason to waste her time like this and she couldn't understand anything anyway. Giving up was definitely for the best.

Doing it the way she had before might not be the most accurate or practical way, but it wasn't like it didn't work, right?

Yeah, right.

As her inner monologue went on and on in circles her watch suddenly beeped, telling her that she would strain her muscles too much if she kept walking. The big number of almost 15000 steps seemed impossible. Alea was certain that there had to be some kind of malfunction, she couldn't have been walking for that long, could she?

A look at the time shot that thought down pretty fast. She had, in fact, been walking for two hours.

Now she really was wasting precious watch time mulling over maths, of all things. Plus she still had to take a shower!

It took her almost ten minutes to undress, go in the shower, run to her cubicle in a towel because she forgot to bring her jammies, put them on, take the towel back to the sink and then finally get back to her cubicle to watch as much as possible of the tournament before her apps turned off for sleep mode.