I would like to dedicate this chapter to my dear friend Toretha and to her younger sister Jenny. Although I'm sure that this will never be read by them, the original of this had me rolling on the ground.
Standard disclaimers apply.
---
The Misadventures Of A Rogue Hawking
by Gracelyn Musica
Chapter Two
Great Teacher... Koushiro?!
---
"I found a steady job I can do!" Kou Hawking's victory cry rang thoughout 'Starwind and Hawking Enterprises', causing everyone to jump and stare at one another, confused looks on their faces.
Jim came out of the garage, wiping his greasy hands on an equally-greasy rag. "A job, sis?"
"A job, Kou?" Gene echoed, leaning out the door in his chair.
"Yes, a JOB," Kou told them sarcastically. "A PROFESSION, a VOCATION, a FIELD OF WORK, a--"
"We get it, we get it," Aisha told her. "What kind of job?"
"I'm going to be..." Kou took a deep breath, drawing out the tension in the room. "A TEACHER!"
The room fell quiet for thirty seconds. Then Jim broke the silence by laughing at his sister. Laughing hard, turning red then finally falling on the floor and rolling around, still laughing. Gene quickly followed suit, and soon even Melfina was giggling at the prospect of Kou becoming a teacher.
Kou, however, was not as amused. "Oh, so you're laughing at my dream now, huh?"
"C-come ON, sis!" Jim told her, breathing hard, sitting back against the wall. "You, a teacher?"
Kou crossed her arms across her chest and glared at him.
"I mean, all the paperwork, the lesson plans, the parents, the kids? It's not worth it! Besides, teachers aren't paid much!" Jim reasoned with her, wiping tears from his eyes.
"Not to mention the fact that everyone's IQ drops when you enter a room," Gene muttered just loud enough for Jim to hear, sending the blonde into more fits of laughter.
Kou was pissed. "Watch me," she declaired before storming upstairs to her room.
---
A week later, everyone regretted their laughter as Kou flounced in and dropped a stack of books on the coffee table. The table jumped slightly, and Suzuka quickly snatched up her sake bottle before it tipped over.
"What are those?" Gene asked, opening one eye as he napped on the couch.
"Those are books, Gene Starwind," Kou told him, hands on her hips. Gene rolled over to look at her, and was a bit shocked at what he saw: She was dressed in a business suit, and had managed to fix her hair enough to make it look reasonable--she even dyed it back to her natural blonde. The most shocking thing, however, was the fact that she was wearing make-up. Behind her was a green chalkboard, making her outline stand out even sharper.
"Damn, Kou, you look hot. Totally fuckable, even."
Jim hit him over the head with a book.
"In a very respectable, post-feminism way, that is."
Jim smacked him again.
Aisha looked at the stack of books. "Mathematics?"
"Yes. Because you all laughed at me yesterday, I'm going to teach you a lesson--literally."
"What lesson would that be?" Gene asked, cracking open a book and cringing.
"The history of numbers."
Jim rolled his eyes. "Okay Great Teacher Koushiro, impart your wisdom among us."
Kou stuck out her tongue and tugged on her shirttails. "Now class, this is how numbers started."
"When two numbers love each other very much..." Gene said, elbowing Jim.
"No, Gene, numbers were invented by shepherds. Why?" Kou looked from one confused face to another.
"To throw at mammoths?" Aisha suggested brightly.
Kou rolled her eyes. "No, to throw at stupid cats-in-heat."
"HEY!"
"Counting sheep?" Melfina suggested timidly.
"Yes!" Kou cried, clapping her hands together. She turned to the chalkboard behind her. "When a man wanted to count how many sheep he had, he would count them with--" She pointed at Melfina, who supplied another "Counting?" Kou drew a circle on the right half of the board and wrote 'Counting Numbers' inside it. "Correct, Mel. Now some shepherds were--"
"Poor!" Aisha supplied, grinning from ear to ear.
"--Yes, they had no sheep," Kou continued, glaring at the cat woman. "And they needed a way to count the unit 'no sheep'."
"Is this a new and intriguing Biography of a Dangerous Idea?" Jim said quietly, mostly to himself.
"So what did they need?" Kou asked, ignoring her little brother.
"A sheep?" Jim suppied. Kou glared at him as well.
"A... way to count no sheep?" Suzuka offered helpfully.
"Yes, Suzu, they needed a way to count no sheep. They needed a... zero!" Kou turned again and drew a larger circle around the first, writing "Whole Numbers" between the two lines. The rest of the crew digested this diagram in silence.
"Okay. If a man has an ugly daugher--"
"He kills her and has negative daughters!" Aisha declaired, smiling triumphantly.
"Wait, what? How does that make negative daughters?" Gene protested.
"He's so depressed he kills his sheep and his neighbor's sheep, and has negative sheep?" she replied.
"AN UGLY DAUGHTER!" Kou yelled, getting attention back. "And he wants to get rid of her. He wants her to get married."
"But she's too ugly!" Aisha protested.
"I still don't get it," Gene declaired. "How does that make new numbers?"
"He gives his daughter to another shepherd," Kou explained, "and loans his neighbor some sheep so he'll keep the daughter. Then the other shepherd has six of HIS cows and ten of his neighbor's cows."
"And-and... an ugly wife," Gene supplied, not even noticing that Kou has switched animals on him.
"And in nine months, a baby boy!" Melfina said, clapping her hands excitedly.
"No, she's too ugly," Gene replied.
"Then the first man's cows all die." Kou, obviously making it up as she goes along, draws a third circle around the other two.
"And thus were negative numbers born!" Jim exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air.
The six crewmates stared at one another, scratching their heads.
"No, no, no..." Kou muttered, rubbing the back of her neck. "The man with the wife..." She reached up and erased the third circle with her fingers. "Yeah. All of his kids die."
"Kids, Kou?" Melfina asked, just as confused as the rest of them.
"Is it because they're too ugly?" Suzuka asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Cows, I mean. Cows. All his cows die."
Jim ruffled his blonde mop of hair. "Um, teach? Is it just me, or have our sheep gone though an identity crisis since the start of this story?"
"COWS. All his cows die, and all his neighbor's cows that are on loan die."
"So what happens to the wife?" Melfina asked.
Kou chose to ignore her. "So his neighbor has negative cows." She stared at the five identical dumb faces. "No, no, you're all screwing me up. The man has an ugly wife, and he owes his neighbor ten cows."
"Wow. Sucks to be him," Aisha stated.
Kou turned around and redrew the third circle around the first two and labels it "Intergers", and then puts a square around the whole thing and labels the square "Rational Numbers". The first half of the chalkboard is full of scribbles.
"That's weird," Gene states bluntly.
Jim gives him a sideways look. "Thank you, Mr. Holmes."
"Do they want to find the square room of a cow now?" Suzuka wondered aloud.
"Now the cows aren't dead after all," Kou declaires, wiping chalk off on her shirttails.
"Why?" Gene, Aisha, Melfina and Suzuka ask, perplexed.
"Because it's the third day, and the cows were sent to save us from our sins, that's why," Jim said sarcastically.
Kou threw the piece of chalk at Jim and continued with her 'lessson'. "And the ugly daughter--"
"Wife!" pipes up Aisha.
"--Wants some of the cows too. But, uh, her husband's too... stingy, he's only giving her part of the cow. The who--"
"The WHAT?" Aisha cut her off. "I mean, I know she's ugly but!"
"She's ugly and now she's poor," Gene reasoned, "so her huband doesn't want her anymore, so it's off to the brothel--"
"THE WHOLE COW!" Kou shouted, stomping her foot.
"OH! The WHOLE!" Aisha sighed happily. "Okay."
"No, no, he's too small a piece. It's exactally the size of five plus the square root of six," Kou told her.
Her five crewmates stared at her in shock. "Damn," Gene declaired. "He IS stingy."
"And now she needs a number to express the amount of cow she has," Kou continued, ignoring her captain.
"She couldn't just call it 'part of a cow'?" Jim asked.
Kou ignored him as well. "So that's how they got irrational numbers." She drew a box on the other half of the board and scrawled "Irrational Numbers" in it.
"I suspect I see a flaw in logic here, teach," Jim told her sarcastically.
As an afterthought, Kou draws a bigger box around the whole thing and labels it "Real Numbers". By now, she has to stand on her toes to messily scrawl her letters. "Now."
"Well, those poor sheperds wanted a way to count the sheep that they had in their imaginary flocks," Suzuka said slyly.
"No, now they needed a way to count negative square roots of their cows," Kou countered. "So they made imaginary numbers." She drew a box outside of the whole mess of squiggles, down in the corner, where there was just a little bit of room left. She managed to fit the words "Imaginary Numbers" inside the box.
The crew stared at the chalkboard. Then, as one, they all cocked their heads to the side, as if looking at it from another angle would help any.
It didn't.
"It absolutely boggles the mind what these sheperds could do when they put their minds to it," Jim stated.
"Well, all they had were ugly wives and plagues that wiped out their livestock," Gene replied.
"Now what, teach?" Aisha asked, grinning.
Kou replies by drawing a bhuge box around everyhing. To do this she has to almost run the length of the board on tiptoes. When she was done, she managed to squeeze in "Complex Numbers". "And that, boys and girls, is how numbers started."
The 'class' stared at Kou, dumbstruck. For several minutes, they were rendered mute, Jim's mouth moving but nothing coming out. Finally, Gene found his voice. "You've GOT to be fucking me, Kou."
"Actaully, Mel is, but that's another story altogether," she replied smoothly, thoroughly enjoying the blush that graced the faces of the redhead and the quiet young woman. "On mathematics... yes, I am. Many cultures have their own systems of couting, most notibly the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Arabians, and the ancient Greeks. The theory is that sheperds first implimented numbers to count their flocks so they would know if they had lost some. The Greeks were the first to extensively study numbers, but it's often the Arabians to which the number zero is atributed."
The five blinked at Kou, who immediately launched into a two and a half hour, very thourough lecture on the full, accurate history of numbers. With every fifteen minutes, her class' eyes got wider. She erased the board and filled it with signs and numbers and little diagrams four times. When she finished, a hushed sound fell over the six of them.
"What?" Kou asked, looking from one of her friends to the next.
"Kou... How did you know that?" Jim asked.
Kou scoffed. "College, duh."
"But you're 18."
"And Dad decided to up my studies a notch when you left. I think he got bored or something."
"So what was your major?"
Kou collected her books and smiled. "What do you think? Education." With that, she disappeared up the stairway, heading to her room.
Jim groaned. "Great, another thing to best. First my father, now my sister. WHEN DOES IT END?!" he howled, stalking up the stairs as well.
Gene, however, grinned. "God, this is going to be great... I never pegged Kou as the bookish type..." He laughed. "A classful of minions. All right."
"Gene," Melfina warned, following the redhead. Aisha yawned and curled up on the couch.
Suzuka continued to sip her sake. "Interesting... the history of numbers, by Koushiro Hawking..."
---
Standard disclaimers apply.
---
The Misadventures Of A Rogue Hawking
by Gracelyn Musica
Chapter Two
Great Teacher... Koushiro?!
---
"I found a steady job I can do!" Kou Hawking's victory cry rang thoughout 'Starwind and Hawking Enterprises', causing everyone to jump and stare at one another, confused looks on their faces.
Jim came out of the garage, wiping his greasy hands on an equally-greasy rag. "A job, sis?"
"A job, Kou?" Gene echoed, leaning out the door in his chair.
"Yes, a JOB," Kou told them sarcastically. "A PROFESSION, a VOCATION, a FIELD OF WORK, a--"
"We get it, we get it," Aisha told her. "What kind of job?"
"I'm going to be..." Kou took a deep breath, drawing out the tension in the room. "A TEACHER!"
The room fell quiet for thirty seconds. Then Jim broke the silence by laughing at his sister. Laughing hard, turning red then finally falling on the floor and rolling around, still laughing. Gene quickly followed suit, and soon even Melfina was giggling at the prospect of Kou becoming a teacher.
Kou, however, was not as amused. "Oh, so you're laughing at my dream now, huh?"
"C-come ON, sis!" Jim told her, breathing hard, sitting back against the wall. "You, a teacher?"
Kou crossed her arms across her chest and glared at him.
"I mean, all the paperwork, the lesson plans, the parents, the kids? It's not worth it! Besides, teachers aren't paid much!" Jim reasoned with her, wiping tears from his eyes.
"Not to mention the fact that everyone's IQ drops when you enter a room," Gene muttered just loud enough for Jim to hear, sending the blonde into more fits of laughter.
Kou was pissed. "Watch me," she declaired before storming upstairs to her room.
---
A week later, everyone regretted their laughter as Kou flounced in and dropped a stack of books on the coffee table. The table jumped slightly, and Suzuka quickly snatched up her sake bottle before it tipped over.
"What are those?" Gene asked, opening one eye as he napped on the couch.
"Those are books, Gene Starwind," Kou told him, hands on her hips. Gene rolled over to look at her, and was a bit shocked at what he saw: She was dressed in a business suit, and had managed to fix her hair enough to make it look reasonable--she even dyed it back to her natural blonde. The most shocking thing, however, was the fact that she was wearing make-up. Behind her was a green chalkboard, making her outline stand out even sharper.
"Damn, Kou, you look hot. Totally fuckable, even."
Jim hit him over the head with a book.
"In a very respectable, post-feminism way, that is."
Jim smacked him again.
Aisha looked at the stack of books. "Mathematics?"
"Yes. Because you all laughed at me yesterday, I'm going to teach you a lesson--literally."
"What lesson would that be?" Gene asked, cracking open a book and cringing.
"The history of numbers."
Jim rolled his eyes. "Okay Great Teacher Koushiro, impart your wisdom among us."
Kou stuck out her tongue and tugged on her shirttails. "Now class, this is how numbers started."
"When two numbers love each other very much..." Gene said, elbowing Jim.
"No, Gene, numbers were invented by shepherds. Why?" Kou looked from one confused face to another.
"To throw at mammoths?" Aisha suggested brightly.
Kou rolled her eyes. "No, to throw at stupid cats-in-heat."
"HEY!"
"Counting sheep?" Melfina suggested timidly.
"Yes!" Kou cried, clapping her hands together. She turned to the chalkboard behind her. "When a man wanted to count how many sheep he had, he would count them with--" She pointed at Melfina, who supplied another "Counting?" Kou drew a circle on the right half of the board and wrote 'Counting Numbers' inside it. "Correct, Mel. Now some shepherds were--"
"Poor!" Aisha supplied, grinning from ear to ear.
"--Yes, they had no sheep," Kou continued, glaring at the cat woman. "And they needed a way to count the unit 'no sheep'."
"Is this a new and intriguing Biography of a Dangerous Idea?" Jim said quietly, mostly to himself.
"So what did they need?" Kou asked, ignoring her little brother.
"A sheep?" Jim suppied. Kou glared at him as well.
"A... way to count no sheep?" Suzuka offered helpfully.
"Yes, Suzu, they needed a way to count no sheep. They needed a... zero!" Kou turned again and drew a larger circle around the first, writing "Whole Numbers" between the two lines. The rest of the crew digested this diagram in silence.
"Okay. If a man has an ugly daugher--"
"He kills her and has negative daughters!" Aisha declaired, smiling triumphantly.
"Wait, what? How does that make negative daughters?" Gene protested.
"He's so depressed he kills his sheep and his neighbor's sheep, and has negative sheep?" she replied.
"AN UGLY DAUGHTER!" Kou yelled, getting attention back. "And he wants to get rid of her. He wants her to get married."
"But she's too ugly!" Aisha protested.
"I still don't get it," Gene declaired. "How does that make new numbers?"
"He gives his daughter to another shepherd," Kou explained, "and loans his neighbor some sheep so he'll keep the daughter. Then the other shepherd has six of HIS cows and ten of his neighbor's cows."
"And-and... an ugly wife," Gene supplied, not even noticing that Kou has switched animals on him.
"And in nine months, a baby boy!" Melfina said, clapping her hands excitedly.
"No, she's too ugly," Gene replied.
"Then the first man's cows all die." Kou, obviously making it up as she goes along, draws a third circle around the other two.
"And thus were negative numbers born!" Jim exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air.
The six crewmates stared at one another, scratching their heads.
"No, no, no..." Kou muttered, rubbing the back of her neck. "The man with the wife..." She reached up and erased the third circle with her fingers. "Yeah. All of his kids die."
"Kids, Kou?" Melfina asked, just as confused as the rest of them.
"Is it because they're too ugly?" Suzuka asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Cows, I mean. Cows. All his cows die."
Jim ruffled his blonde mop of hair. "Um, teach? Is it just me, or have our sheep gone though an identity crisis since the start of this story?"
"COWS. All his cows die, and all his neighbor's cows that are on loan die."
"So what happens to the wife?" Melfina asked.
Kou chose to ignore her. "So his neighbor has negative cows." She stared at the five identical dumb faces. "No, no, you're all screwing me up. The man has an ugly wife, and he owes his neighbor ten cows."
"Wow. Sucks to be him," Aisha stated.
Kou turned around and redrew the third circle around the first two and labels it "Intergers", and then puts a square around the whole thing and labels the square "Rational Numbers". The first half of the chalkboard is full of scribbles.
"That's weird," Gene states bluntly.
Jim gives him a sideways look. "Thank you, Mr. Holmes."
"Do they want to find the square room of a cow now?" Suzuka wondered aloud.
"Now the cows aren't dead after all," Kou declaires, wiping chalk off on her shirttails.
"Why?" Gene, Aisha, Melfina and Suzuka ask, perplexed.
"Because it's the third day, and the cows were sent to save us from our sins, that's why," Jim said sarcastically.
Kou threw the piece of chalk at Jim and continued with her 'lessson'. "And the ugly daughter--"
"Wife!" pipes up Aisha.
"--Wants some of the cows too. But, uh, her husband's too... stingy, he's only giving her part of the cow. The who--"
"The WHAT?" Aisha cut her off. "I mean, I know she's ugly but!"
"She's ugly and now she's poor," Gene reasoned, "so her huband doesn't want her anymore, so it's off to the brothel--"
"THE WHOLE COW!" Kou shouted, stomping her foot.
"OH! The WHOLE!" Aisha sighed happily. "Okay."
"No, no, he's too small a piece. It's exactally the size of five plus the square root of six," Kou told her.
Her five crewmates stared at her in shock. "Damn," Gene declaired. "He IS stingy."
"And now she needs a number to express the amount of cow she has," Kou continued, ignoring her captain.
"She couldn't just call it 'part of a cow'?" Jim asked.
Kou ignored him as well. "So that's how they got irrational numbers." She drew a box on the other half of the board and scrawled "Irrational Numbers" in it.
"I suspect I see a flaw in logic here, teach," Jim told her sarcastically.
As an afterthought, Kou draws a bigger box around the whole thing and labels it "Real Numbers". By now, she has to stand on her toes to messily scrawl her letters. "Now."
"Well, those poor sheperds wanted a way to count the sheep that they had in their imaginary flocks," Suzuka said slyly.
"No, now they needed a way to count negative square roots of their cows," Kou countered. "So they made imaginary numbers." She drew a box outside of the whole mess of squiggles, down in the corner, where there was just a little bit of room left. She managed to fit the words "Imaginary Numbers" inside the box.
The crew stared at the chalkboard. Then, as one, they all cocked their heads to the side, as if looking at it from another angle would help any.
It didn't.
"It absolutely boggles the mind what these sheperds could do when they put their minds to it," Jim stated.
"Well, all they had were ugly wives and plagues that wiped out their livestock," Gene replied.
"Now what, teach?" Aisha asked, grinning.
Kou replies by drawing a bhuge box around everyhing. To do this she has to almost run the length of the board on tiptoes. When she was done, she managed to squeeze in "Complex Numbers". "And that, boys and girls, is how numbers started."
The 'class' stared at Kou, dumbstruck. For several minutes, they were rendered mute, Jim's mouth moving but nothing coming out. Finally, Gene found his voice. "You've GOT to be fucking me, Kou."
"Actaully, Mel is, but that's another story altogether," she replied smoothly, thoroughly enjoying the blush that graced the faces of the redhead and the quiet young woman. "On mathematics... yes, I am. Many cultures have their own systems of couting, most notibly the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Arabians, and the ancient Greeks. The theory is that sheperds first implimented numbers to count their flocks so they would know if they had lost some. The Greeks were the first to extensively study numbers, but it's often the Arabians to which the number zero is atributed."
The five blinked at Kou, who immediately launched into a two and a half hour, very thourough lecture on the full, accurate history of numbers. With every fifteen minutes, her class' eyes got wider. She erased the board and filled it with signs and numbers and little diagrams four times. When she finished, a hushed sound fell over the six of them.
"What?" Kou asked, looking from one of her friends to the next.
"Kou... How did you know that?" Jim asked.
Kou scoffed. "College, duh."
"But you're 18."
"And Dad decided to up my studies a notch when you left. I think he got bored or something."
"So what was your major?"
Kou collected her books and smiled. "What do you think? Education." With that, she disappeared up the stairway, heading to her room.
Jim groaned. "Great, another thing to best. First my father, now my sister. WHEN DOES IT END?!" he howled, stalking up the stairs as well.
Gene, however, grinned. "God, this is going to be great... I never pegged Kou as the bookish type..." He laughed. "A classful of minions. All right."
"Gene," Melfina warned, following the redhead. Aisha yawned and curled up on the couch.
Suzuka continued to sip her sake. "Interesting... the history of numbers, by Koushiro Hawking..."
---