Someone once wrote a song about their dislike of Mondays. For me, my hated day was Thursday. No, not just because it was not Friday, but almost. No, I hated Thursdays because I had not a single STEM-lesson that day, I got stuck with a combination of World History, English, Art and PE-Class. PE was an exercise in state-sponsored torture, Art did just suck, plain and simple, as I was forced to focus on the suppression of my power, in English I was cursed with a teacher who shouldn’t be allowed to teach anything higher than Kindergarten and finally World History.
World History could be taught in two ways, one good, one bad. Either, it was a pure memorisation of facts and numbers, no critical thinking, no discussion, just the facts as they are recorded in a book. That would be the bad way. The good way was a discussion, critically reasoning why things had happened and discussing the effects they had, some even carrying on until our own time.
Sadly, our teacher was simply rambling on about facts, expecting us to memorize them and write them back down in a test. It made me want to kill, either kill myself to end my pain or kill the teacher to end the torture. Well, I did neither of those, I clenched teeth and other things and kept going, forcing myself to do passably well.
But that Thursday, I was positively surprised.
“Ok, for the rest of the lesson, I want you to start on a partner-project. Get a partner, pick one ancient historical event, any event, and discuss, from our modern point of view, what known powers could have been involved and point out the reasons for your beliefs.” Our Teacher told us, shortly after roll-call.
My brows scrunched by themself for multiple reasons. One was my dislike for partner and group-work. Trying to work with one of my hormone-addled classmates was an exercise in patience and often futility. I wondered if I would have more success trying to teach algebra to a dog, compared to reasoning with my classmates. Hopefully, I could avoid the partner-aspect and do my work on my own. It would save time and nerves on my end.
Another reason was that the task was strange, especially when it came to ancient history, there was just limited knowledge. Everything we knew was suspect because it was mostly written by the winners of a conflict. How could we give sufficient reasoned arguments for anything if the information was suspect at best, propaganda at worst?
There were still people that claimed that the Scourge had been created by allied forces to fight against the Germans, some claimed that it had been created to ‘salt the earth’, so the Soviets, couldn’t get a foothold. It was utter madness to present arguments for or against, let’s say, the Spartan King Leonidas having a version of the Atlas-Powerset as we called it today. Was it possible? Yes. Did we have any corroborating evidence? No.
My rambling thoughts were interrupted by the teacher who came up with that incredibly idiotic assignment. “Alexandria, as you don’t have a partner yet, you will work with Sophia. I hope the two of you can get along.”
After suppressing my annoyance, my eyes went up, first looking at the teacher calmly, then shifting to that ‘Sophia’ and I had to draw upon all my mental strength to keep my calm mask in place. Ever since I had seen her at the first day of school, my eyes had followed her whenever I became aware of her. It was as if she had a magnet in her body and my eyes were made of iron. They just stuck to her, unless I forced them away.
Clamping down on all the strange thoughts, I stood, faked a smile and held out my hand for her. For half a second, she looked surprised, before shaking. “Hello Sophia. My name is Alexandria King, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
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Her touch sent a shiver into my body, unlike anything I had felt before but I managed not to flinch.
“Hi Alexandria. I’m Sophia Collins, the pleasure is all mine.” Her voice was melodic, with just the hint of an accent which I was unable to place. The movement of her lips had an almost hypnotic effect on me, so strong that the back of my mind wondered if she had some kind of Power to capture my attention to that extent. I forced my mind into other tracks, away from those lips and the question of their softness and taste. Those were questions I did not even want to think about.
“Thank you, Mr. Gruber. I’m sure we can take it from here.” I told our teacher, still forcing a polite smile onto my face. He nodded and went back to his desk, before taking out a newspaper and starting to read. So that was why he wanted that stupid partner-project.
I turned to Sophia as she got her desk over to mine, allowing us to sit together and plan our project. Normally, I would tell my partner that he or she should simply lean back, I would take care of the project and sent them the project when it was done so they could read it, just in case the teacher asked them about it. With Sophia, I felt different, I wanted to talk to her, I wanted to hear her talk, no matter how much harder it made that stupid project.
“Well, if the ‘repository of knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ are unable to make this work, nobody should be able to, or what do you think?” Sophia asked as she sat down. It took me half a second to make the obvious connection, Alexandria, home of the legendary library and Sophia, both goddess of wisdom and Greek word meaning wisdom, making it a bad joke about our names. Points of humor, deductions for style but unquestioningly adorable-
“Yes, it should not be a problem. What event do you want to discuss?” I asked, keeping my thoughts hidden behind a mask composed of a polite smile.
She was using no mask, her annoyance plain to see on her face. “Well, the whole premise is retarded. How are we supposed to get any reasoned arguments with suspect information? We could simply make our arguments and then cherry-pick our sources to agree with them.”
I felt happy that her thoughts aligned with mine. Sadly, the assignment was set and we could not change it.
“True. Sadly, I doubt that Mr. Gruber would accept us arbitrarily changing his assignment, no matter how badly it is designed. We will simply have to pick an event that allows us a broad spectrum of sources and design arguments that work with them and with common sense.” I told her. Her brows furrowed, as she appeared to think it over, as I continued.
“What do you think about the fall of the Roman Empire? We could contrast it with the decline of the French monarchy leading to the French Revolution. There are parallels we can draw and it has the advantage of inevitability. The long decline can’t really be pinned on any individual, sure Nero is supposed to have fiddled while Rome was burning but the lack of a singular, stand-out character makes it hard to attribute any Powered influence to the event. It was a simple, inevitability of history.”
She looked at me, apparently intrigued by my idea, before starting to nod with a nice smile on her face. “Yes, we can do that. There are quite a few primary sources that have survived the ages, so it should work rather well.”
We continued our discussion, quite motivated, until the bell rang, ending it far too soon, for my taste. For the first time, I had enjoyed a History-class. After planning to get together at a later date, she suddenly vanished in the throng outside of class. I almost called out in hopes to get to know her better, but she was simply gone.
The rest of the day was just as boring and wasted as an ordinary Thursday but it was a little more bearable than I was used to. Maybe, I could make a friend for once.
Alas, it was not to be. We met a few times for our History-project, always at ‘neutral’ locations like the library and never talking about personal things. As soon as I tried, I was shut down skillfully and politely. When I tried to talk to her in school, she instantly had something else to do, never lingering. I tried a few times but to no effect. I soon got the message that I was not wanted once more. For the first time in a while, I felt the sting of rejection. Maybe once I was free, I could find a friend that I had not built myself.