The day couldn't have been better for homework - rain was coming down in sheets and going anywhere without boots and a heavy slicker would have been considered grounds for placement in an asylum. If you weren't a guardian with power over water, that is. As it was, Irma - with no more rain protection than her normal clothes and a backpack - strolled care-free from her mother's car to Will's front door while the rain simply sheeted off her as though she were wearing a full-body rain coat. She knocked once and was immediately admitted.

"I think you just won some kind of record", Will said as she led the way upstairs to her room. "I've never seen a grin that smug before."

"Well, you'd have one too if you just walked through the rain and didn't get wet." Irma lowered her voice to a whisper. "Of course, being wet might just compliment you."

"Got one-track mind much?"

"Nah." She waved a dismissive hand. "I just like being able to say it out loud instead of keeping it bottled up in my head. But anyway, what kind of mathematical barrel are we staring down today, oh fearless leader?"

"None other than long division. She wants us to review it before we start getting into trinomial equations."

"Oh man, how awful... that stuff gave me fits. How many problems?"

Will passed over the assignment with a look of defeat. "Twenty of them. And not a single one with the answer in the back of the book."

Irma looked the paper over once, then again. "Wow, sadistic cuss, isn't she?"

"I called her a few other things. So what's the diagnosis, doctor Irma? Can you save me?"

"Maybe. I think I remember a few of these from my own brush with numeric death earlier this week. Let me see here..." She took a seat at the desk, dropped her backpack beside it, picked up a pencil, and began doodling various steps of the division process. "Yeah, I definitely had this one on my assignment before. You subtract the three right here..." More doodling ensued as Will watched in awed silence. After two more minutes and a few more lines of work, Irma dropped the pencil and raised her hands. "Ta-da!"

"Wow!" Will picked it up and started looking it over. "You got the right answer that quickly?"

"Well, I think so."

"Good enough for me. How'd you do it?"

"It's not that hard when you get the basic part down-pat." Irma picked the pencil back up and pointed at various spots among the numbers. "See, you divide the first two digits in this number here by the one on the outside of the sign thingee, and then put the result up on top this little ceiling thing. Then you subtract this thing down here, get the result, drop this thing down over here, and then you just do the same thing over again."

"Yeah, I got all that stuff... but then you kinda run out of number after a while."

"That's where you use decimal places."

Will facepalmed. "It always comes down to decimals, doesn't it?"

"Yep. It's where numbers go to die."

"More like where my brain goes to die."

"Aww, it's not that bad." Irma stood from the chair and stepped behind it with a grin. "Here, you go ahead and give it a try."

"Y'know, that's exactly how my mom looked when she first had me try sauerkraut."

"Don't worry, this paper with pencil-scratch tastes a lot better."

"I'll bet it does." Will spent the next three-odd minutes working on the next problem, until she'd dragged it out to the end of the dividend. "Okay, so now I'm at the border of decimal-ville. Where's my passport?"

Irma reached over and pointed. "Well, you put a point followed by a zero here, and then the result after another point in that column up top there. Then you just keep on going and adding zeros until it works itself all the way out."

"...or until I keel over dead."

"You got it."