Arithmancy

by daisy-chains-and-bow-ties

This is the tale of a madman with a wand whose ambitions consist of making the perfect cup of instant noodles and trying to understand Arithmancy. His life is simple, daubed with the occasional hiccup,usually in the form of someone's experiment going terribly wrong, necessitating a long letter of complaint from the giant squid due to overcrowding in the lake. But then he meets her.

1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - In Which Pluto is Subjected to Strange and Unauthorised Feelings

I'm sitting in Arithmancy, understanding little but loving the numbers, charts and formulas. They fascinate me with their complex simplicity. The professor has her back turned and still the class sit, raptly attentive, scribbling in leather-bound parchment notebooks. They have their textbooks propped, clean as the day they bought them and the inkpot positioned neatly beside them, quills poised, dripping ink onto the parchment as they take in the equations on the board, their tidy minds separating the blur of shapes into meaning. These are the neat people, and they have a careful order about their lives, a cool logic that sets them apart from the students who can't handle this subject.

Me? Well, my book is sprawled, limp, over the desk, its pages crumpled and soiled from careless use. My quill is lying, slippery with ink, feather sodden, spread like disease over the whiteness. My elbow is pushing my inkpot precariously close to the edge of the desk. I'm watching as the chalk moves, making bold strokes on the blackboard, but I don't take notes – I'll write them out later. For months I've been trying to fit the numbers together, but they elude me.

By themselves, they are easy to unravel, but using them to decipher whether or not a spell will be successful depending on the angle of the wave respective of the angle needed to execute the spell optimally while factoring in the complexity of the spell and the skill level of the caster is enough to boggle my disorganised mind. It just won't click. How can numbers bear to translate into something so mundane, so uncoordinated? Are they not beautiful enough on their own?

I am so absorbed I almost don't feel the ball of parchment strike the back of my head, bouncing off and rolling away to rest a few feet behind my table. A boy I have never liked, but whose name I cannot remember, picks it up and nudges the girl at his side, grinning. I pull out my want and point it at him, muttering 'expelliarmus'. It shoots out of his hand and into mine. He glares at me and goes for his wand, but at that moment the professor turns and he shoves the end of stubby ebony want back into his pocket, scowling at me. I flash him a wan smile and turn back to my desk. "Please try and pay attention, Pluto," the Professor says gravely, before returning to his lecture.

I pretend to listen until the gawky man preaching mindlessly to us returns to scribbling out the numbers with flourishes of his wand. It's long, but crooked, like Ebenezer Scrooge's nose in A Christmas Carol. You can tell a lot about a person from their wand. I tear my eyes away from the new set of equations and smoothen out the parchment, peering at the smudged ink.

Watch your inkpot

It is artistic writing, unlike my common scrawl, and I know almost instantly who it is. She sits at the very back of the class with her head bent over her book, paying no attention to what the professor says. Her name is Eleanor Hobbiton, and I don't know why I know that, but I do. She has green highlights in her dark blond hair, which hangs in short, spiky strands around her thin face.

Sensing my gaze, she looks up and smiles at me. I turn around quickly and have to stare at the blackboard for several moments to calm myself. Then I look down at the letter again and write beneath her message:

E = mc2

It is the best joke I know.

I hope you enjoyed that!

Reviews are, of course, appreciated :)