Amity Noceda-Clawthorne-Whispers was a woman of science. Since a young age, she had been fascinated with how the world worked. Heck, one of her earliest memories was stealing a screwdriver from Mama Eda's toolkit and disassembling the tiny AM/FM radio that Amity kept in her room. Nobi Raine had been gathering the kids up for lunch when they walked in on Amity sitting on the floor of her and Willow's room, surrounded by all the little bits of circuitry and hardware that comprised the radio. After that day, Mami Camila and Mama Eda had gone to the local hardware store and bought their little Abomination a workbench so that she could do her experiments in the relative safety of the garage. (Well, that, and they also didn't want to have to clean the carpets of any Abomination goo that Amity might leak out if she got too invested in her work and forgot about keeping her human form. Preventative measures and all that.)
Over the years, Amity's "lab", as she referred to it, gradually expanded as her interests evolved. The numerous shelves that now occupied the entire left side of the garage were filled from top to bottom with all sorts of experiments and creations. The objects on the shelves were roughly categorized into three main sections: deconstructions, inventions, and journals/magazines. For the deconstructions, the items ranged from a watch she had taken apart to a portable TV that she had removed the screen from and yanked all the circuitry out of. She also had a few inventions that she'd cobbled together from parts that had been stripped from the deconstruction portion of the shelves. If she had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the Blueberry Pi and breadboard she had jury-rigged together with an old CRT TV so that she could play Snake with the TV remote as a controller. Finally, there were all the journals and magazines that she'd collected. On Fridays, the mailbox would be chock full of all the magazine subscriptions that Amity had convinced Nobi to buy. (They were always a sucker for her batting her eyelashes and asking politely.)
That radio from all those years back had a special place in her heart, though, so Amity kept it on her desk. She'd repaired it back in middle school, and she fondly remembered the ecstasy of hearing a cheesy car dealership ad when she turned it back on for the first time. When she was getting particularly frustrated with a problem, or if she just wanted to kill time, she'd turn it on and fiddle with the knobs and switches, the static and occasional legible sound acting as a way for her mind relax.
It wasn't just the radio that occupied her desk, though. Powering on her computer, Amity waited for the machine to boot up. It wasn't a top-of-the-line laptop by any stretch of the imagination, but it suited her needs just fine. As long as it could hold a stable internet connection and run some rudimentary programs without overheating, she was happy. After entering her login credentials, she was soon looking at her desktop, the wallpaper being an artist's rendition of the underlying circuitry behind the laptop screen. She didn't create the awesome drawing, mind you. She just ripped it from an image search online because she thought it looked cool.
Nevertheless, Amity had some work to do. Over the past few weeks, she had been working on her science fair project for Ms. Sanderson's class. Luckily, Ms. S had been lenient enough to allow Amity to use one of her personal projects as a starting point for her submission. Though, it was under the caveat that she changed the topic enough that it didn't result in the Abomination just copy-pasting her notes and calling it a day.
As for the subject of Amity's project? "What is the best path-finding algorithm for going from the main page of a website to another page that is n links away, for any size n, given that each page has 4 links?" Before she could start typing up any algorithms, though, Amity needed an actual website for the algorithms to search. Since she didn't want to shell out money to actually host a website, the ever-reliable localhost would serve as the website. Free and fast, it was the best of both worlds. Well, as long as you were trying to access the site from her laptop and her laptop only.
With hosting taken care of, she just had to start creating all the folders and subfolders for the links to point to. While she initially was hand-typing the visual elements of the website, she soon realized that it would be far easier to just spin up a quick helper function that could do all the typing for her. One loop later, and she now had as many pages as she desired. During the creation of this function, she finalized what the site pages would look like: no styling whatsoever with a header showing the current page and four links to sub-pages. The pages didn't need to be fancy, plus the simple design would help the webscraping aspect since there were so few elements to parse through. The only page that was different was the destination page that the algorithm was looking for, as all it contained was a giant green checkmark.
Now with her website up and running, the Abomination could focus on –
"AMITY!" At the calling of her name, the girl in question whipped her head around, seeing who was looking for her. She finally laid eyes on Luz, who was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed.
"We've been saying your name for the last 5 minutes. It's time for lunch," Luz explained.
"Oh," Amity blushed at her mistake before nervously chuckling. "Hehe, guess I just got caught up in my project."
"What even is your project?" the human asked.
Amity's mood instantly turned around, and her face lit up in excitement at the chance to talk about what she was working on. "It's super interesting. It's about analyzing different styles of search algorithms to see which has the best asymptotic time complexity when applied to a webscraping function that searches for a specific page on a website that has a random path."
Luz stared blankly at her sister. "I'm going to pretend like I understood what that meant. Anyways, let's head in. Nobi made some cheesesteaks, and they look great."
Amity's stomach grumbled at the prospect of food. "You don't have to tell me twice."
After making sure to save her work, Amity closed her computer before joining Luz and everyone else in the kitchen. All the others had already claimed their spot for lunch, so that left Luz and Amity with no choice but to sit at the kitchen counter, instead of being at the table with the rest of the family. There were only so many ways you could seat 10 people in a room that could only hold an eight-person table.
Grabbing the glass that had been set out for her, Amity went to fill it with some ice water. While soda was also an option, the high sugar content and the carbonation always made her feel… weird. Whether that was due to her being an Abomination and the soda reacting with her goopy nature, or just Amity being Amity, she wasn't exactly sure. Knowing her, it was probably a mix of the two.
Returning to her seat, Amity offered a quick apology for holding everyone up. "Sorry, I lost track of time."
Camila brushed it off. "No worries, Mitones. Glad you could join us."
As the others around her began eating, Amity grabbed her sandwich and took a few bites before putting it back on her plate. Given her unique biological makeup, she didn't actually require food to stay alive. Still, she didn't want to make Nobi feel bad if she didn't eat their cooking, so she would always humor them or Mom or Mama by taking a few bites, even though she didn't need to. There was a downside to not needing to eat, though, as even if this was the greatest sandwich known to man, she wouldn't know how it actually tasted because her "tongue" (which was just Abomination goop, like the rest of her body) didn't have any tastebuds. Given that also did allow her to eat the slop they passed off as food at Gravesfield High without issue, so there were a few benefits in not tasting anything, but they were few and far between. So, if she had to choke down that horrible-looking square pizza or whatever else the cooks had heated up in an industrial oven, that was fine by her. She had to keep up the façade of being a human around her classmates, after all, and never eating lunch would undoubtedly be cause for concern.
"So, how is your project going, Boots?" Eda asked, tiny chunks of cheesesteak flying out of her mouth as she talked, causing Amity to internally cringe.
Oh, right. People talk to each other, Amity thought. "It's going well. I've already got the site for testing created locally and have a program for making a random graph out of the webpages, so all I need now is to set up the search algorithms and collect the relevant data," she explained, hoping she wasn't going into too much detail. Most other kids didn't like it when Amity went really in depth about topics she was interested in. When they thought she was out of earshot, she'd hear the names they'd call her, many of which would probably earn those kids a trip to detention or, even worse, a meeting with "The Owl Lady".
"That's nice," Eda replied. "All that math and science-y stuff was never my forte, though."
Hunter faked a cough, raising a hand to cover his mouth. "NERD!" he shouted, using his fist to muffle the noise.
Amity threw a potato chip at the boy in retaliation, but he teleported out of the way of the projectile, leading to it falling harmlessly to the floor.
"Hey! No throwing food!" Camila said in an authoritative voice, nipping the food war in the bud before it could begin.
"Sorry," Amity responded reflexively. Hunter did the same, but with an added grumble before sitting back down and apologizing to his sister.
The rest of lunch passed by without issue, at least according to Amity. Her cheesesteak had gone mostly uneaten, so she had given the untouched half to Hunter as an apology for throwing a chip at him.
She made all the required small talk, being sure to keep the conversation on topic, and every so often adding in a personal anecdote or a comment on the conversation. That was a mission accomplished in her mind. After lunch came cleanup, though. Thankfully, it was Vee's turn to load the dishwasher, which saved Amity from having to touch all the dirty plates and utensils. She hated doing the dishes. Being around all those germs and bacteria made her feel icky.
Taking the first opportunity that presented itself, Amity escaped back into her lab to resume working on her science fair project. She had been on such a roll before Luz and the others had interrupted her with lunch. Closing the door, she let out a sigh. Who knew that talking with people could be so demanding? Collapsing into her rolling chair, she slid back a little bit before dragging her feet to come to a stop. Scooting back up to her desk, she reopened her laptop.
Time to get back to work.