If there was one thing Lily hadn't noticed immediately about Nickel, it was that he was deceptively intelligent. He had a very extensive vocabulary and he was pretty good at maths, and he knew how to speak a different language, too. He also had a giant cache of seemingly random, but not usually ill-fitting, knowledge that he could spout at almost any time.
Possibly the most obvious clues to that claim was that he had apparently done two school years in one when he was five, and that he'd finished school at fourteen. Lily wouldn't have believed either story if she hadn't witnessed just how much he really understood.
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Maths was never Lily's favourite. Numbers were not easy for her to work with, but she made do just as well as the next little girl. Sometimes, though, she would have to solicit the assistance of her big friend Nickel when problems got really tough.
Lily was waiting for the day when he didn't know the answer to a maths question, but it didn't seem to be nearby. He would get a question wrong initially once in a while, but he would always correct himself super fast.
The most ridiculous thing about it was that he did it all in his head. And really fast too.
One day she decided to have some fun with him and challenged him to some quickfire maths. She was absolutely sure that he would be able to do this, but she wanted to see how fast he could go.
"Mister Nickel?" she called.
"Lily?" he answered, turning from what he was doing on his screen to face her.
"At school our math teacher let us do a test on a website, to see how fast we could go."
Nickel seemed to read her mind. "You want me to do it, too?" She nodded yes. "Okay, what site is it on?"
Lily told him.
"Oh, I know that site. I used to do puzzles there when I was smaller." He turned to his screen again, and Lily bounded into the seat right next to him just in time to see him navigate to the webpage. She showed him exactly which one they did at school.
"'What Makes 10'," Nickel said, reading the game's title aloud. "This seems a bit easy for you."
"It was," Lily confirmed.
"Hmm. Well, I guess the point is to go as fast as you can," the red feline mused. "Okay, I'll start it. How much time did you do?"
"Five minutes."
Nickel gave an acknowledging nod and touched the screen to begin, Lily peering over his arm to see. The short countdown ended and the challenge began.
Lily was not in the least bit surprised to see the speed at which he answered the questions, with them being so easy like he had mentioned. His mind seemed to randomly stop working in spots, but he didn't ever seem to truly lose focus. By the time five minutes had elapsed, five minutes that flew by in Lily's mind, he'd correctly answered two hundred and thirty-eight questions.
"There. How'd I do?"
"Pretty good, mister Nickel!" Lily responded. "I don't think anybody in my class got to 200."
"Well, I am just a little bit older than you all," Nickel commented, and Lily giggled. "What else is there on this site that I haven't seen?"
He began looking through the website, finding all sorts of stuff that interested him, and Lily continued to watch on, asking the occasional question.
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Going to a school that taught Spanish was something Lily didn't think very amazing; the language was weird in the way that words were said and arranged, and while it was novel she didn't think it necessary to teach it - especially to children who barely knew what the words meant in English.
Perhaps that last thought was cynical and a bit like her big friend, but it felt like the truth. The classes were chaotic and full of noise as the students tried to make sense of anything they'd been told. Not that Lily herself was a world beater, but the point stood.
When she'd brought up her thoughts regarding the subject, Nickel had told her that he'd been taught Spanish all throughout his years of school since he was four, and he'd always loved it.
She'd promptly introduced him to her Spanish teacher, who too was a cat - older than Nickel by around twenty-five years and with cerulean fur.
"Hola," the teacher greeted him, her eyes seemingly lighting up at seeing a youth interested in Spanish. "¿Cómo está?"
"Estoy bien, gracias. Eh... que Lily me quería traer para que yo conozca a usted."
Lily looked at Nickel with a rather surprised expression. She didn't know much of what he'd said, but he spoke the language so convincingly.
"Cuénteme sobre usted," the older woman said.
Nickel paused, before speaking: "Mi nombre es Nickel el Gato, y soy de la Isla Britérica. Es una isla al sur del continente. Vení aquí antes de la guerra, y cuando la guerra, eh... cuando la guerra sucedió, tuve que ser parte de la Resistencia."
There was another short pause, and Lily looked back to her teacher, who was smiling a little bit. "Do you have Spanish heritage? Is your family from a Spanish-speaking country?"
The youth smiled himself. "No, no, I don't. They aren't."
"You sound like you could be a native speaker." Lily watched as Nickel's grin grew and his eyes were cast to the floor; she agreed with her teacher's statement. "Hablas muy bien."
"Thank you," he said.
The more elderly feline now turned to the kitten. "Lily. Remember to practise if you want to be able to speak like he does," she instructed.
Lily nodded with a smile. She did want to be like Nickel, and if she could get anywhere near his proficiency she would be very happy.
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Lily was very confused. A ping just came from Nickel's comms device, and it was from Tails. The message was, not that Lily even knew what some of these meant:
"Considering the recent bombardment on our Restoration outposts further afield, I took the initiative to reinforce those circa us with walls made with Ti-6Al-4V and an implanted non-Newtonian layer containing steel rods for fortification, so as to add resilience to impact waves as well as residual thermal energy, and therefore near-immunity to any physical excitation that should emanate from the Doctor's artillery. This message is to discern those acquiescent to attempt to decimate the new barriers."
Why it was sent to Nickel she had zero clue. Could he even understand it?
She called for him, and he was with her shortly. "What's goin' on?" he questioned.
"Somebody sent you something," she said vaguely, handing over the comm.
Nickel took the device, scanning the screen for the message; upon seeing it he nodded his head, before a grin bloomed on his face.
"Good joke, Tails. You're not getting me to do that," he said to no one after a brief bout of silence.
"You know what he said, mister Nickel?" Lily asked.
"Yeah." Nickel started to explain, occasionally seeming to draw reference to the original text. "Basically, he said he's making the Resistance outpost places stronger, using a super tough metal and a reinforced gel layer to absorb shock and stop the walls from melting. And, he wants to know who would be willing to test it out."
Even some of the words Nickel used in his simplification were alien to Lily, but she knew for the most part what he'd said. She was still sceptical, though - he could have just said that as a viable answer to throw her off when he didn't actually know what the text said.
She voiced said scepticism, and Nickel raised an eyebrow. "Oh, you don't believe me, do ya? Watch: I'm gonna put back what I said as a translation and we'll see if I'm right." He started typing, prefacing the paraphrased text with the word 'translation', before sending that message to Tails to get a response.
The fox obliged swiftly; the answer was a short "Basically, yeah" followed by a laughing face. Nickel smiled cheekily. "What'd I tell ya?"
From that moment, Lily decided never to doubt her friend's intelligence.