My Personal Monster

[Jude Dorrian]

Okay.
So, if h squared = a squared + b squared... and a = 2.89 and b = 5...
h squared = 2.89 squared + 5 squared
h sqaured = 8.3521 + 25
h squared = 33.3521
Okay.
Now what?
Jude groaned loudly, slumping at the small table and causing a few people to jump in alarm and glare at him. He glared right back until they chickened out and looked away, then turned back to his maths homework.
This wasn't fair. This was Pythagorus' Theorum. This was easy. He'd known it since 3rd year, had he not? He'd done it before. Except... what happens when you get to the square rooty bit? He knew it was definitely something to do with the square root. But did he take the square root of 33.3521? No, he had to round that up.
Fine. Did he take the square root of 33.4? But what happened to h squared then? It would equal the square root of 33.4. But hang on. He was meant to be finding the h squared. How could he square it if h was the squared one?
WAIT.
This was the sort of the thing that could reduce a grown man to tears. Jude sighed, massaging his throbbing temples. Great. Only 7 more questions to go. Each one more painful than the next. God, his head hurt. He didn't get maths. That was the thing- you either got it, or you didn't.
Jude didn't.
So Jude was deemed mentally retarded by his exasperated teacher, who moved on to occupy herself with the far more capable students, leaving Jude to struggle through each maths lesson on his own. Tameron would've happily helped him, but she was four years behind him. She didn't know the formula for the surface area of a hemisphere for God's sake! Or the curved surface area of a cylinder. Actually, he always did that bit right, but then was reminded by his dsgruntled teacher he'd forgotten the top and bottom of the cylinder.
Thank god he was giving it up at the end of this year.
Moving onto question 2 and taking a new page in his book, he looked at the question and blanched.
"Find the curved surface area of a sphere of the radius 5 cm."
Goddamit!
Pi was involved somewhere... but where?
Jude put his head on the table and moaned quietly into his maths book. Who invented this ridiculous thing called mathematics? Who? Why?
This was deadly. He couldn't see how anyone could do it!

[Macy Deltine]

Macy walked into the common room, her arms full of books, which where slipping. On top of the pile was a large book of poetry, that she had to read for English Lit., and under it was two books for Chemistry, one for Physics, and two, just for her personal enjoyment. Just before they dropped, she threw them on the large sofa, facing the fireplace. One hit a person from Warriors, who scorned at her. After apolgising, she picked up the books, set them in a pile of the floor, and flopped herself down. She had just spent an hour in the library, having a debate with an Academic in the year below her about Fermat's Last Theorem. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to organise her thoughts again. She was very tired, and would have fallen asleep, if she hadn't been awaken by someone breaking the hush of the room, by moaning. She opened her eyes, and saw a familiar person, hunched over one of the desks. She got up, and peered over Jude's shoulder.
"You have to finally find the square root it there." She said, pointing at one of the questions. "Rounded to three signifacant figures, it'll be 5.78." She leaned over the table, writing on the wood with her finger, using ice. "Sorry, I just like maths..." She said, looking at the sheet of questions.

[Jude Dorrian]

Jude spun round to face her, eyes popping.
"How... did you...?"
He'd never seen anything like that before- not even with Tameron. Macy hadn't even bothered with a calculator. She'd just gone straight for it, and solved his question. Just like that.
"Oh, thank goodness, Macy," he croaked, clutching at her sleeve a little desperately. "I need your help. I don't get maths. I don't get it at all. Can you... do something about it?"
Anything. Goodness knows she'd be a better teacher than Professor Hoat.

[Macy Deltine]

Macy swung one of the seats round and sat down. "Let me see what you have..." She said, looking at the questions. "Let's see...trigonometry, pi, standard form...dosen't seem to hard. Okay, what ones have you done so far?" She looked at his answers sheet, then. "Right...um...okay, what question looks easiest?" She asked. It would probably be easier to start from the top. While she was talking, her head had worked out the answers for the first four.

[Jude Dorrian]

Jude cast a dark look over his homework. "To be honest, I've not much of a clue about any of this. Would it be okay if you worked through some of these with me? Like..."
His finger found the first question, and Pythagorus' Theorum leapt out at him in a blur of headache-inducing numbers. He shuddered, and then sighed.
"How did you get the answer 5.78? I got to here-" he pointed to his previous, scrawled calculations- "then got stumped."

[Macy Deltine]

"Well, think about it: you've squared A, and you've squared B, and added them together to get a new number, and since the two numbers you added to get them have been squared, this number has to be a square number too. So, you've got to find the square root. The equation is H-squared = A-squared + B-squared. Do you understand?" She talked, while putting up her hair in a loose bun with a hair clip and a pencil. "Now, for the second one. To find the area of a sphere, you use the equation 4 piR. So, the radius is 5cm, now times that by pi...and no, I do not know pi. Well, I can say it up to 15 places, but I'm working on it...but, to do it properly, you need a calculator." She said, glaring at him. She wasn't going to do all the work...

[Jude Dorrian]

Jude dragged his calculator over dispiritedly, running his eyes over question 1. Okay. Actually, he thought he might understand that one now. The a squared + b squared were h squared- so if h squared = them, then that meant that whatever they added together had to have its square root found... then that would be his answer!
He typed this quickly into the calculator, and felt a little mini celebration erupt inside him as he reached the same answer as Macy.
Quickly scribbling down his calculations, he looked to the next question.
"4pi r squared did you say?" he asked her excitadly.

[Macy Deltine]

Macy nodded, noticing her mistake. But when she was young, she was taught "If you make a mistake, and you will, then you will keep on talking as if it never happened. You are strong, and if someone will say "You made a mistake!" Then you tell them that everone makes mistakes, and you have learned to ignore them."
"You can probably multiply it by 3.14, I suppose. It won't be accurate enough for me." She said, laughing. "So, what's your answer?" She asked, looking over his shoulder.

[Jude Dorrian]

"It's... 314.1592654," he said slowly, then looked up at her. "I should maybe round that up, shouldn't I?" And more importantly. "Is it right?"