A few hours later I was stuck behind Laura, doing economics. She seemed to grasp the ideas being taught fairly well, much like all the other subjects she was in. Whilst her knowledge was almost a little spooky, I on the other hand was struggling to work out why medical care was considered a market failure. Being the intelligence parasite that I was I decided to ask her for help. Tapping her on the shoulder I asked "Hey Laura..."
She tensed at the contact before turning around. "What." She replied with a neutral expression on her face. Damn, she was so hard to read sometimes... Well actually she was hard to read all of the time. That, or I was just bad at it.
"Umm, why is medical care considered a form of market failure?"
"It provides a positive externality of consumption." Right... Of course, silly me. I should have known it was that... Jeez, what sort of a name is 'positive externality of consumption', who's going to remember that?
"Umm... What does that mean..." I asked, having made use of sarcasm in that previous paragraph which you all probably should have picked up on.
"It's consumption provides a benefit for third parties." she answered my question with what could almost be described as a scoff were it a lot more malicious and a lot less amused.
"Oh..." Wow, gee Martin you just sound so intelligent.
"Since many consumers won't pay for it at it's usual price the government subsidizes producers to provide more of the service because they believe it is beneficial for society to have better access to it than what they normally would have."
"Oh, so because the government needs to intervene, it's considered a market failure?" I replied, finally understanding. Man, she was being really patient with all my questions, I would totally reply sarcastically at least once if someone came to me for help.
"Yes" she finished and turned back around.
"Well, thanks." I said to the back of her head a bit awkwardly. "I appreciate the help." Well, that was nice of her and now that I have successfully leached the information I needed from someone else, time to have a nap. I was just about to fall asleep when a sudden though struck me. "Hey Laura..." I asked, needing someone to bounce the idea off of. Man, this was a good one.
"What?" She replied, turning around for the second time that lesson.
"Do you think sociopaths would be bad a maths?" my mind was whirring with the insane amount of the thought processes going on. It was like I was Steven Hawking or something.
She blinked in response, "What...?" Here we go, genius level epiphany coming in fast.
"Well I was just thinking, you know how with math questions, they sometimes ask you 'consider the triangle ABC' or 'consider the following graph' or something like that?"
"Yes..." She looked confused, maybe my logic would be too complex for her to understand...
"Well, sociopaths wouldn't be very good at those questions since they aren't very considerate people, you know what I mean?" I finished, hoping she had followed.
I noticed the ghost of a smile on her face before she replied, "Hmm... I do not think it would effect them so much. Since those types of questions are relatively few, I doubt it would effect their final grades so much that it would have an impact on the average marks for sociopaths. If anything they would do better since they would not have as many friends to distract them from doing work..." She raised an eyebrow at me as I thought of a response.
"Huh... I suppose that would make sense." I smiled at her catching the hint for me to shut up before attempting to fall asleep again. I was just about to drift off when the bell rang, pronouncing joyously that it was time to part ways with Laura and head to my English lesson, yay... Why couldn't it be lunch yet.
Time Skip (Bling!)
Lunch Time! (Well that was convenient)
Immediately after I had entered the cafeteria I was placed with a conundrum. At one end of the food court was the entirety of the X-men, all enthusiastically waving me over, on the other side was Laura, sitting all on her lonesome, reading a book. I silently cursed life and it's cliche romance versus friendship mind games. Fortunately I remembered a piece of advice my uncle once gave me, 'The only way to win is not to play, especially when it comes to girls' Whilst it was true that not all the X-men were girls, at least fifty percent were and that was good enough for me.
I chose a table that was situated somewhere in the middle of Laura and the X-men and took a seat, ignoring the strange looks I got from the the table's occupants.
"Hey guys, I'm Martin." I stated, a large smile on my face. I knew I wasn't acting normal, self-conscious teenagers did not randomly introduce themselves to strangers, especially strangers their own age, but it was a necessity if I wanted to cheat life out of it's fun. Also, I had kinda always fantasied what it would be like to do something like this.
"Ugh, hey..." the tall guy who was sitting opposite to me said, looking a little stunned. He pushed his messy brown hair out of the way of his thick rimmed glasses as he peered at me. The blond girl next to him was staring too, her immaculate eyebrows raised with surprise and her lips set as if she were about to ask me what the hell I was doing. The finale member I noticed was staring at his plate, his shoulders hunched forward and long dark hair hiding most of his face.
"Sorry if I'm bothering you. Life was trying to set me up with this really cliche problem that I really didn't want to handle, so I'm escaping here so that it doesn't happen." I pushed forward, ignoring the strange look I was still getting from the blond. The guy with glasses seemed surprised at my statement which was strange, I was expecting confusion. Most people couldn't make sense of a lot of the stuff that I said, sometimes not even I could.
"No..." he frowned, "You're serious?"
I shook my head smiling sadly, "I wish I wasn't but I'm as serious as premeditated murder. Life was trying to make be choose between sitting with my love interest and my friendship group slash family. I refused and decided sit here instead."
"Sorry..."the guy shook his head as if trying to clear it before he pushed the hair that had been displaced out of his face. "It's just that something very similar happened to me. Seemed a little coincidental. I'm Simon, by the way." He held out his hand for me to shake.
"Ooh, Sounds like a conspiracy..." Hmm, was life tugging at my strings again? Surely a meeting like this could never happen without the influence of fate... I shook his hand and wondered what the other two were making of the conversation.
Simon nodded, "Yeah, last year I found myself stuck between choosing the swim team or basketball team and the one that I chose would go to nationals whilst the other one wouldn't. To make things worse, my crush was on one and a good friend on the other. I didn't want to make that choice and so started playing bowls instead."
"That is spookily similar, what happened after that?" I asked, wondering if life got it's revenge for Simon's misconduct.
"Turns out my friend was actually a total scumbag and was arrested for beating up his grandma and my crush mysteriously moved to Australia five days after I made my decision..."
"Huh..." I noticed that the blond was still staring at me. Just a little off putting...
"You're not the Martin from the institute are you?" She asked, frowning.
"Umm... Yes..." How did she know that...
"Aha! I knew you looked familiar!" She held out her hand and announced, "I'm Lucy"
I shook her hand, and it dawned on me "Oh!" I said, recognizing the name, "Lucy from the institute?" I asked. Wow, as if this spooky coincidence couldn't get any spookier. It was almost as if some higher power was manipulating events for his own purposes...
She nodded, "Yep."
Simon frowned. "Wait... You both live in the same house but you've never met each other?" he questioned in disbelief.
"Umm... Yeah" I felt a little embarrassed, Simon did have a point. Fortunately Lucy saved me from having to explain myself.
"I don't really get out of my room much. Y'know, because of the thing..." Whilst the statement made no sense to me, Simon seemed to make sense of it and didn't question it further. Damn my curiosity...
"So who's this guy?" I asked indicating to the dark haired dude sitting next to me. He was still staring at his plate as if expecting it to move or attack him.
Lucy and Simon exchanged a look as if sharing a memory. It was Simon who answered, "We don't really know... He just sits there until the bell goes and then leaves. Neither of us have him in out class and we never see him around the school outside of lessons."
"Well that's odd." I replied, taking another look at the guy. I wondered if he was in our year level. He looked around the same age but it was hard to know for certain. "and he doesn't respond to communication?" I asked and Simon shook his head in reply. Well that was just weird, but then who was I to judge. My life had become inexplicably weird within the past few weeks. I mean first I was kidnapped, then thrown out of a window by a girl I then decoded I liked and then made to dive in front of people before they got LASERed.
The three of us talked through the rest of lunch and I walked with Lucy to biology which we happened to have together, who knew? Unfortunately I was a little distracted that lesson. We were doing about respiration and as a demonstration the teacher told us to all to hold our breaths for as long as possible. That meant for me that I had to hold my breath for the entire double lesson until the bell rang. A very strange feeling if like me you were once normal and breathed nearly every second of your life. Of course, this led to the obvious conclusion of me going off on a tangent.
"Lucy?" I asked, as we copied down notes from the board.
"Yeah?" She replied not really paying attention.
"How much water do you think I could hold in my lungs?" That got her attention and she turned in her seat to face me.
"Oh... Umm, I don't really know. Why do you want to know?" She seemed a little confused by the question, which was reasonable considering it was a little out of the blue.
"Well I don't actually need to breath and I was wondering if inhaled a bunch of water how much I would be able to hold..." That got me thinking and I wondered what else I could put in my lungs. "Do you think I could fit a sword?"
"Wait... You don't need to breath?" She replied, still processing the conversation.
I nodded, "Yeah, Hmm... Maybe not a sword... Perhaps a knife? Maybe small one so that it would be able to fit through my wind pipe..." Man, what else could I store in there. This could be really convenient.
"Ew, no... That's just wrong." Lucy stated, seeming a little put off by my suggestions. No idea why.
"Aww... Okay what about a grenade? Ooh how about gasoline? Then I could breath fire!" I started making notes of all the things that I could try out whilst Lucy just shook her head, smiling a little at my antics. This was going to be fun.
A.N. Don't you just hate it when someone points out that you can breath and then you have to consciously do it? Just like you're doing now, heheh. Anyway, hoped you enjoyed the chapter. I was thinking about having something happen between now and Martin and Laura's first training session but I wasn't sure what. Let me know what you think and maybe send in some suggestions via PM or a review (Shush Mr Cynical, no this it not some underhanded technique to get more reviews, why would you even think that?!). Also, a big thanks to SpectorChris for his review and advice, you are a cool dude and (Thank the Lord for copy and paste) blueXredXDemonicAngle for your heartwarming review (seriously, made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside for the entire day) and your unique but impossible-to-remember-all-in-one-go username.
- Someplace Somewhere