[a/n: Nobody told me any ideas for what to do to Alent next. So I had to make it up. Ah well! The delays in getting out the chapter are due to: Less character development and more plot, also I think it's slightly longer, and I'm lazy.]
ROUNDWORLD
Chapter 2: Mary Sue
Picture the office of your favorite teacher. Picture extra desk ornaments all over the place and cheesy posters on the walls. Imagine everything is strewn all over the desk and shelves.
This will give you a one hundred percent inaccurate picture of the office of Miss Butts.
The office was neat. The office was tidy. The office was orderly.
The office was also a place Alent had seen far too much of.
"It wasn't a pencil, it was a pen," she pointed out.
Miss Butts sighed. "Alent, gels don't normally stab other people in the leg with pens. And certainly not hard enough to draw blood."
"It was not!" Alent protested.
"Alent, there was a red mark on her uniform."
"The pen had red ink in it," Alent pointed out.
Miss Butts rather felt that she was losing the initiative here. "That's beside the point. The point-."
"Look, if you go around daring people to, sooner or later someone will."
Miss Butts sighed. You always lost whenever you got into an argument with Alent. The gel had got a deft hand with logic, no doubt about that. She was always top of the class in Logic, which had surprised the teachers given her astonishingly low grades in everything else. Miss Traitor had in fact complained that Alent couldn't be taught, owing to the fact that she knew it all already, if not the proper name for it then the fact that it was doable. And she was Disruptive In Class, meaning that she was so vocally good at it she put the other students off. She had once proven logically that she was a cat and, for an encore, had gone on to prove that the ground was up and that the dark blue woolly uniform of the College was in fact red.
Still, even if she wasn't going to win the argument…
"I don't think she just randomly dared you, Alent. She says you threatened her with it first," Miss Butts pressed on.
"Okay, I'd had a bad time of it in Sport, she was getting on the sparse, frayed remains of my nerves, I held it up and said something on the lines of 'It has not been a good day for me, would you really like to feel as bad as I do?' and then she said 'Go on, hit me with it' and I did. Can I go now?"
Miss Butts sighed. "I suppose so. And try not to do it again."
* * *
Alent had been having a bad day in Sport for a very specific reason. In the middle of Sport she'd had a really good idea, and had no opportunity to actually do it, and wasn't concentrating, and was mildly concussed by a rogue ball.
Of course, now she had time…
They didn't like Roundworld, even though they'd never read Roundworld.
What if they could be made to read it, or at least something very like it? It should be noted that she was not exactly trying to get them to like it, but merely interested in seeing whether they'd like it if they read it.
She wasn't really good on normal thinking, but she had the feeling they'd want a character a bit like them, or at least like they liked to think they were.
A character like that in a place like Roundworld…
She ought to name the character. She liked really strange names, like Acacia or Adri. Somehow she got the impression those weren't the right names.
Mary. That was a nice, normal name. And a last name…
Well, a lot of the gels didn't really have proper last names, but more like two first ones…
Alent considered this for a moment. "Sue," she said aloud, and it seemed exactly right. "Sue. Mary Sue."
* * *
[a/n: Admit it, everyone throws up a Mary Sue at some point, even if no one else sees it. At least on the first attempt. Anyway: Review!]
