Homework
Blank.
That was all that was going on in his head. Utter blankness. The kind of blankness which wipes out the empty white expanse his mind fell into by default, and replaces it with something…so utterly lifeless that it's like sleep. A living, breathing sleep. Of course, sleep was always breathing, but there was something about the phrase which fell into the preconceived building blocks of the mind.
He wasn't blank anymore, was he?
He sighed, running hands through hair. He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what the heck was going on in front of him. Math had never been his best subject; then again, it hadn't been his worst either. He couldn't remember either extreme, just the fact that at some point, bored in some class, he and Marco had made a list of lesser and greater evils.
Get to it. A voice ordered impatiently. Figure it out, or make something up. It isn't important.
His fingers traced letters, numbers, symbols (Greek, he recalled vaguely. Why was there Greek in Math?), his lips curled sardonically. He was giving himself orders now. Only surprising it hadn't happened earlier.
There was something here, about three dimensional planes never crossing each other. Strictly, the planes were two dimensional, only enclosed in three dimensional space. With one direction it could never know, even think of.
He snorted. Marco was right, they were all one helmacron baby step away from the loony bin, in solitary with a straitjacket.
That's how the Ellimist sees us. The part of him which wanted to bother with thinking, the one which would have preferred a long, non-breathing sleep, mused. Planes in three dimensions. Chess pieces.
Except that chess pieces were three dimensional.
There was a snap, he looked down in mild surprise. The pen he'd been using was split cleanly into two at some point along it's length. He didn't notice where, exactly. Insignificant. Like so many things. His life was being crowded by matters slightly higher up in the chain of ultimate global importance. Weak points of a hork-bajir, or bernoullis' theorem? Somehow the choice wasn't all that hard to make.
He sighed again, dragged out a new pen and scribbled something else along his paper, yawning every few seconds. Sleep. He needed sleep. Lots of it, if at all possible; but naturally, it wasn't.
Fair.
What a crazy notion.
He got a D minus the next day, and the look from his teacher that was routine. It said something along the lines of Kid, you're ruining your life.
Only in your world, not mine.