slow progress

[keep_busy]

Eventually Annie goes home for the day. Her mother lives a long but doable walk from campus, but Annie makes the trip by tricycle for speed and safety, or bus when the ice is too bad to allow riding. This is a trike day.

She tells her mother as straightforwardly as she can what has happened.

Her mother wants to meet the boy, but accepts that this should probably wait until the situation with Zevaia changes one way or another.

A few hours after Annie gets home, she gets a call from the Dean's office. There are results in; she can go hear them at the office. Apparently they're not supposed to release them over the phone for some obscure reason of policy.

Coat goes back on Annie, Annie goes back on trike, trike goes back on campus.

Comments

[touchedinthehead]

"You don't," he agrees. "... How would you squish attempts to develop a crush on me?"

[keep_busy]

"Paying attention, mostly. I do a fair amount of conscious management of my thoughts."

[touchedinthehead]

"Oh. That's - useful and also kind of impressive."

[keep_busy]

"It is useful! Most people just think it's weird."

[touchedinthehead]

"I categorize things into numbers and make extremely complex algorithms to sort my opinions of people and how useful they are," he shrugs. "The only thing that worries me about policing your own thoughts is - accidentally changing who you are. And I like who you are now, you changing that would be distressing."

[keep_busy]

"Ceasing to have the ability to change who I am would be a bigger change than any I'm likely to make," she remarks. "It wouldn't happen accidentally, anyway. How does the math version work?"

[touchedinthehead]

"Well, for one, I can't change my head," he says. "But I'm pretty good at weighing how important I consider things, and - organizing the results of that. Into number forms so they're easy to compare to one another - I spend ages calculating how important something is to me, get the number from that, and then I compare that to other things on the same scale."

[keep_busy]

"What's the scale like?"

[touchedinthehead]

"In what way? Do you mean in - what's my range on the scale, what makes up my method for figuring it out...?"

[keep_busy]

"Both."

[touchedinthehead]

"Hmmm... Absolute highest single number was a sixty-seven point three. It's for making the knife go away. The average person tends to rate a seven. It becomes harder and harder to get higher numbers as you get up the scale. I weigh things I find important and how important it is that they be attended to or not, or - how much they matter to me. One point is how much I care about a person who has zero personal qualities aside from being sentient. Er - you also broke my scale, I have no idea how to even begin at figuring out what number you are."

[keep_busy]

"Is the rest of it still functioning even with me leaning on it like that?"

[touchedinthehead]

"Oh, yeah, it's working out fine. You're just - sort of my mental number equivalent of 999999, I'm sort of working around it because it's rather bewildering."

[keep_busy]

"I guess that makes sense. I don't do it with numbers like that. Just - rankings, relative ones, felt out rather than calculated."

[touchedinthehead]

"I'm sort of - obsessively accurate. So."

[keep_busy]

"What's next, after me and getting rid of the knife?"

[touchedinthehead]

"Saving my sister."

[keep_busy]

"Yeah, that makes sense."

[touchedinthehead]

"I do try to make sense," he agrees, softly.

[keep_busy]

"Any responses to your ad about knife-hunting yet?"

[touchedinthehead]

"None, yet," he sighs. "I think I need the Dean to give me more information for them to be willing to risk touching a strange artifact. Even to get rid of the knife."

[keep_busy]

"Maybe he'll come up with enough to go on tomorrow."

If he doesn't, the odds that Zevaia won't have died of dehydration start to go way, way down.

[touchedinthehead]

"Maybe," agrees Aldaras softly.

He knows the odds.

[keep_busy]

Annie pauses in their walk to hug him.

[touchedinthehead]

Hug.

"It has a vested interest in keeping her alive. We know it makes them drink rain water...."