There was a delay of about five minutes, and then Valeria shot up her hand. Her exclamation went nowhere as she turned around, beaming, and her smile grew even wider when she saw the grown-ups weren’t done.
I gestured for her to remain where she was, the little Sound Bubble making sure she didn’t distract anyone else, and she just watched as first her father solved it less than a minute after she had, then Tony Stark, and finally Hank Pym brought up the end, a good five minutes after she had done so.
Valeria’s smile was ear-to-ear at coming in first, while the three men all looked at her in disbelief.
“Round Two. Everyone, if you could look at one another’s solutions. I’ll give you five minutes.” I flicked up a timer, and the men promptly converged on Valeria’s hovering display, while she went around to the others and sort of wrinkled her nose as she examined them, clearly not impressed.
Dr. Strange stepped up beside me, his complex rendition of the solution to the formation problem spinning before us. His rating of 29 (31) was also clearly visible.
“Very good, Doctor!” I complimented him. “Mordo comes in at a 23, by comparison.”
He sighed in some relief. “That is far below a 50,” he pointed out.
“Yes, yes, I’m a special snowflake, pheer me,” I waved his worries off, and he smirked. “This test does not measure emotional depth, strength of will, mental fortitude, determination, or ethical and moral awareness, all of which are extremely important to spellcasters,” I pointed out, and leaned forward slightly, him doing the same. “You trounce all of them in most of those areas,” I whispered to him.
“Ah.” He straightened up, clearly feeling better about that. “Thank you.”
“Now watch this,” I smirked. “Round Three!” The holo displays vanished as they all looked back at me from where they were inspecting one another’s work. “Back to your places! On five, begin solving the second problem!” They hurried back to their places, and waited as the timer counted up. “Begin!”
----
This delay was only four minutes along before Reed Richards solved it. Tony Stark squeaked in seconds before Valeria did a minute later, and Hank Pym was less than a minute behind.
Valeria looked very put out as she went from first to third. She stomped her little feet and was very unhappy as she demanded petulantly of me, “Why didn’t I win?”
“Dr. Richards?” I asked him lazily.
“Valeria, dear, this is an intelligence test, made to encompass not just what you know and how you think, but also how well you can learn,” he responded promptly. “What did you learn from looking at the solutions of myself, Hank, and Tony?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Nothing! You all took the long way around!” she declared aloofly.
“And this time?” he asked her patiently. She stared at him for a moment, and we all watched as she darted off to first her father’s display, then Tony’s, then Hank Pym’s.
“You all got much faster at finding the right solution!” she finally admitted aloofly after coming back to us. “But you still took more steps than I did...!” she said defiantly.
“Yes, and Tony and I still finished before you. What does that mean?” he cajoled her patiently.
She screwed up her face. “That... you think faster than I do?” she guessed, and we all nodded along with her.
“Even Hank,” he admonished her, which made her blink. Reed looked at me. “If we were to run this multiple times, what would happen, Dynamo?”
“Oh, Dr. Pym would eventually catch up to her and pass her, while you and Tony would also get faster and faster,” I confirmed calmly, and her face fell again in shock. “But did you all understand the most important point?” I asked them archly.
They looked at one another. “We all learned some short cuts to the solution, looking at one another’s work,” Tony spoke up quickly.
“And Valeria didn’t pick up more than one... and that was from Dr. Pym, if I’m not mistaken.”
Her jaw dropped as she looked at me. “How did you know?” she gasped.
“Because you’re all Useless Geniuses.” All of them blinked at me in shock. “Really. Dr. Pym is the least useless of you, but that just made him look dumb compared to the rest of you.” His expression at the backhanded compliment was fun to see. Even Susan looked a little incredulous.
“In actuality, THIS is the solution to the first puzzle.” I waved my hand, and promptly the whole damn lab was filled up with the formulaic solution, every step in place, anchored in foundational mathematical theory, building up on one level to the next, clearly understandable by anyone with a foundation in math who could balance everything.
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It was smooth, clean, elegant, and complete... and it was LONG.
Like, pages and pages long. Especially the conversion parts to higher math tiers.
“Valeria’s solution.” I made the parts of it glow that her thought patterns had run through, and less than ten percent of the display lit up. “Dr. Richards. Tony. Hank.” Each time, more of the actual formula lit up, with Hank Pym’s the most expansive, and still covering less than thirty percent of the actual math, leaping and skipping past whole sections without any segueway, just doing it.
“And here’s the correct solution to the second test.” The math on this one was actually even more complex, but because it borrowed from the first question, they’d solved it just as fast or faster.
This time, none of them covered even twenty percent of the actual solution. They gawked at it all.
“And that’s what I do. This total bullcrap set of equations you all have here which are perfectly nonderstandable to anybody has to be torn apart and set up so that non-Savants can comprehend what is actually going on. Then I have to highlight the areas which can be manipulated to other effects, leading to other chains of reactions in wildly different ways, some of them lethally explosive.” Crazy lines of equations with minor changes to some variables peeled off from specific arcs and branches of the formula and extended off wildly into the distance, some of them truncating with actual holographic explosions, others shining with the bright lights and bells of new discoveries.
“Oh my God,” Valeria blurted out, staring at the display, trying to drink it all in. “This is how you think?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yes. I don’t skip over things like you four do.” The whole hologram faded back to question two’s solution, then vanished entirely. “Thus, the Valerian Aptitude Test. It’s designed to test both intelligence and Savancy, i.e., Useless Geniuses. Savancy helps a specific situation, but not science as a whole. The test is also designed to test learning ability, as Savancy does not fully substitute for lack of a knowledge base, experience, and ability to learn.
“Thus, all three men here could learn from you, Valeria, but you didn’t learn from them, as your Savancy skipped over the foundations they were using right to the proper solution, and you didn’t have the speed of thought and experience to overcome the mental shorthand you taught them.”
She looked properly stumped as all three of the men smiled. “So, I’m smarter... but I’m not?” she asked sadly.
“Well, your dad is a freak. What you basically taught him just now was how you think. He expanded his own way of thinking in that direction, learning how you think and melding it to his own.
“It’s his superpower. You’ve got more Talent than he had before he had his powers, but now? You’re just going to help teach him to be smarter and smarter, and he has a much, much broader foundation to work with.
“Also!” I pointed at Stark and Pym, who almost jumped. “Don’t be afraid to send Valeria some high-end stuff to work on. She’s a Savant, probably the highest-order one on the planet. Even if she knows jack squat about something, there’s a good chance she’ll just come up with something crazy out of nowhere that is totally applicable and which you can use.”
“From the mouth of babes,” Tony piped up semi-seriously, and Valeria just beamed at finally being acknowledged and taken seriously by someone.
“Are you sure that’s wise, Dynamo?” Susan asked me softly.
“If experience is any indicator, she’ll just break into her dad’s files and email and do it anyway,” I told her out of the corner of my mouth. “She’s a kid, has no impulse control.” Susan just sighed and nodded understanding.
“You said there’s another one of me on your world?” Valeria piped up eagerly. “Can I speak to her?!” she asked excitedly.
“The answer to that is no, but I’m sure both of you will build your own custom communication devices and be yakking away at one another shortly.” I wasn’t even fatalistic about it; it was what it was.
She beamed again, and her parents just sighed together.
“And here I thought your son might be dangerous, Reed,” Tony Stark murmured, shaking his head.
“Reality Warper, easy to deal with.” They all looked at me, and I just shrugged. “Deal with them all the time. ‘Oh, look at me, I can mess with all of reality and bend the universe’s laws as I want to, fear me, worship me, adore me... hey, why isn’t anything changing and it’s all going back to boring normal- blargh!’” I said, the final sound effect being quite graphic and making them all flinch. I rolled my eyes, obviously thinking. “Like, eighteen this year, so far? It’s quite depressing how many come here to visit.” Universe-wide, that is, and were vivisized, but I wasn’t going to say that with a six-year-old here.
“Perhaps I should have my son speak to you about such things,” Reed asked thoughtfully.
“If not, he should talk to Stephen.” I gestured to the startled Dr. Strange. “Magic, once you remove the sorcerous ties to other powers and the filters of incantation and casting, is nothing but straight-up reality manipulation of the highest order. Stephen could easily set up a framework for Franklin to help control his powers and start learning the mental discipline to master them.”
Susan and Reed both looked at Stephen thoughtfully. “We should talk soon in the future, Stephen,” Reed proposed to him, and Dr. Strange nodded shortly.
Hopefully we were heading off some angst-inspired attempt by some genius to make this Earth the only ‘real’ one by destroying ours.
I turned my head slightly. Yeah, those two lunkheads in particular out there could be a problem, and so many of the geniuses working for Briggs and Sama were hostile obsessed bastards on this world...
-----------------------
I let Sama do the sit-down with the new High Evolutionary, as she had been the one to kill his predecessor. I doubted he’d actually be able to improve his moral understanding and empathy via evolution OR introspection, but you never knew...
This twat, well, this was a special exception. He sneered at me from inside the shell of hard air, his uniform disintegrated off of him to get rid of his technology, and I hadn’t forgotten to look inside him for surprises.
Owen Reece could be such an idiot. Why would he make the Maker a multiversal existence?
“Do you know who you’re messing with? You can’t kill me! I exist in all worlds at the same time! Go ahead, kill this body! I’ll just bring in another one!” he scoffed at me in disdain.
Function’s Blade slowly jack-knifed out of his Rod. The Maker’s confident sneer dropped off like falling rain, and he backed against the far side of the air-sphere instantly, flattening like a blanket as he did so. “What is that?!” he demanded loudly, staring at the Skull on the Blade in sudden horror.