Wood Sprites

“That stupid tripe?” Mr. Kessler snapped his fingers, demanding her tablet immediately. “Those videos are nothing but a glorification of the rich and selfish elf royalty.”

“They are not!” both Louise and Jillian cried.

“It’s believed that there are fewer than ten thousand elves on the whole North American continent, and yet the queen lays claim to all of it. Nine point five four million square miles for just ten thousand selfish bastards. That’s over nine hundred square miles per elf. Alaska’s population density is less than two square miles per human.”

“Mr. Kessler.” Elle waved her hand, making Louise shrink. When he didn’t acknowledge her, Elle pressed on without lowering her hand. “Mr. Kessler, you shouldn’t use the b-word in class. It’s very rude. And what you’re saying is very bigoted. Can we stay on topic?”

Mr. Kessler snorted and handed back Louise’s tablet. He’d deleted all her work and purged her cache. She gasped at the hours of work she might have lost. “I want you to solve the problem on the board, Louise.”

She took a deep breath against the anger boiling in her. He had no right to delete work off her tablet. Yell at her, yes, but not destroy her work, much of which she’d done before his class started. They were only five minutes into class, too; it wasn’t like she’d spent a long time ignoring him.

“Sometime soon.” He pointed at the board.

She glanced to the front of the room. The wall screen had a quadratic equation. She locked her jaw against the first two things that wanted to come out. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh, then you agree that this is a class and I am a teacher and if you were paying attention to me you would understand—”

“I don’t understand why you’re asking me to solve that equation. This isn’t math class, and we’re not up to quadratic formulas yet. We’re still doing pre-algebra work.”

“Yes, this is computer literacy class, and if you were listening, you would know—”

“That x is negative four and one?”

“Huh?” Obviously, he wasn’t expecting her to be able to solve the problem since he didn’t recognize the correct answer when she gave it.

“You’re asking me to solve y equals x squared plus three x minus four. The solution is negative four and one.”

He glanced at the board and then at her. “What?”

Did he even know how to solve the problem himself?

“Quadratic equations with two variables have countless solutions,” Louise explained because she suspected he didn’t know. “The answers create a continuous line in the shape of a parabola. The ‘correct’ answer to this equation is the two points where that parabola hits the x-axis: negative four and one. What I don’t understand is why you’re asking us to deal with an equation like this. Our class has just started to graph straight lines. How do you expect anyone to use a computer to calculate this if they don’t know how to check the result? They could get a nonsense answer like ‘forty-two’ and think it’s right.”

He stared at her, slack-jawed, for a moment and then said angrily, “My point is that you should be paying attention to me.”

“I will when you start teaching something I don’t already know.”

He scanned the room, taking in the hostile stares of the other kids. “Fine.” He went back to his desk, deleted the equation from the wall display and typed in a simple addition function. “Reed, can you set up a four-column, four-row spreadsheet that uses this to produce totals in the fourth row?”

* * *

At lunch, the entire fifth grade gathered around their table, worried that Kessler had deleted all their work.

“We saved it.” Jillian pulled it up on her tablet and played what they had finished.

“Wow!” Iggy said when it came to the end. “You did this all during class this morning?”

“It’s only five minutes long, and we’re using a lot of old stuff,” Louise said. “Hopefully people won’t think that someone forged this since it’s all rehash.”

“If we use the new song for Black Willow Wicker, the music would establish the video as one of ours.”

Louise tugged at her hair as she considered the pros and cons. Their soundtracks were heavily influenced by the fusion music of garage bands in Pittsburgh. The groups combined guitar-heavy rock and roll with Elvish musicians playing traditional instruments. When the twins started writing their own songs three years ago, the fusion music was insanely hard to find. They had stumbled across a handful of tracks during a research raid on the Pittsburgh Internet during Shutdown. With their Aunt Kitty being a composer, they knew better than to use the songs without permission. To create their own version of it, though, they had to digitally recreate the off-world instruments. It had taken them months to dig up enough information and code it all in. Since then, fusion music had been discovered by the masses, unfortunately fueled by mass piracy and pale imitations. None of the groups based on Earth could match the twins’ music, because no one else had the right instruments.