by Liz
Fighting fractions by moonlight
Challenging teachers by daylight
Reading Shakespeare at midnight
She is the one named Sailor Pi
She would never forget math operation
Or the rules of heat condensation
3.14 can save any situation
She is the one named Sailor Pi
She is the one
Sailor Pi!
A bubbling translucent orange liquid trickled onto the tile floor. It slithered south between the white octagons before accosting five small human toes, whose owner had been staring at the same textbook page for just over 3 hours.
“Oh, fudge,” she muttered, noticing that her cup of orange soda had fallen over on the table. The drink was now bathing her feet. “I’ve been doing math for far too long.”
Indeed, the petite redhead who languidly gathered her Calculus III textbook, notepad, and pet frogs had been doing math longer than any of her Tigertown University classmates suspected. But since moving into her closet-sized dorm room in the basement of Clio Hall, math had simply lost its relevance for this former mathematician. Now, she spent most of her hours trying to decipher the writings of Descartes, Kant, and Hume.
“Philosophy sounded so appealing in the course description, Alpha,” the girl told her frog. “But I simply can’t read these texts as naturally as I was once able to do math, and now I can’t even do that.”
The orange liquid might have seeped into the Earth and flowed north to Poughkeepsie University, where two students were leaving their Aikido class.
“Wow, Jeffy, you’re sure getting the hang of this!” a girl with long brown hair exclaimed to her friend.
“Thanks, Arpi!” Geoffy replied, hardly flinching at the misspelling of his name. “I’ve been practicing outside of class.”
“Hey Jeffy, remember when--oh, never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I was just thinking.”
“About what?” They were now walking down the steps of Winjad Gymnasium.
“Nothing.”
“About what?”
“Nothing!”
“Arpi, I am fully equipped to solicit information from my opponents--”
“Okay, okay!” Arpi laughed. Indeed, Geoffy could use Aikido in combination with supernatural powers to combat evil. “I was just thinking about the days when the Elements, Tomorrow People, and Sailors were--”
“I don’t know WHAT you’re talking about,” giving Arpi a look that said “Not here, not now!” as he did frequently in the days that he dared not speak of too loudly. He remembered quite well those battles in Canadia that superheroes of different varieties won together. Jeffy himself was an Element, of which there were 4 on Earth. Arpi was a Tomorrow Person, capable of teleportation and telepathy, one of at least a dozen in New York state alone. But one breed of superhero that the two Poughkeepsians had encountered in Canadia was almost extinct as far as they knew, or perhaps they had simply met a rare mutant of the Sailor race...
“Hey Arpi, did you do the problem set yet?”
“No, I haven’t started it yet.”
“Lines and planes, spheres and paraboloids, it just gets more complicated with more variables.” Geoffy shook his head. “But you know, whenever I think math really sucks, I just remember that there’s one weirdo out there who actually likes it.”
Arpi laughed, returning to her memories of Canadia.
“How is Bizzie, anyway?”
“Last I heard she was trying to juggle political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology with her calculus. But honestly her last letter sounded really...sad.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, almost like college is just a mechanical process.”
“No! Out of all of us Bizzie seemed the most excited for college! She couldn’t wait to study with the beautiful minds of Tigertown!”
“Apparently that’s not happening,” Geoffy said with a shrug.
“It’s funny Kenny wrote to me the other day and said he’s not too thrilled with CanTech either.” Arpi fumbled through her gym bag in search of the e-mail printout.
“Well, I can kind of see that. I mean, people don’t really go to CanTech for creative writing.” Just then, a short pale teenager with curly brown hair and cold blue eyes approached them, blocking their path with determination.
“Something’s rotten in the state of New York,” Frodo said, folding his arms.
“Frodo, is that ring getting to you again? Here, let me hold it--”
“No!” Frodo stepped back a foot from Arpi, who admired the gold trinket on his necklace.
“Are you sure?” Geoffy asked, grinning ironically. “I mean, I’m not sure that you’re the one to--”
“Anyway,” Frodo said, clearing his throat, “A plague has stricken the city, and now it’s got hold of the entire Northeast so far as I can tell.”
“A plague?” asked Arpi. “I haven’t seen anyone looking especially ill.”
“Not physically ill. This is a plague of the mind.”
“My gosh! What are the symptoms?”
“The plague attacks the neural networks responsible for numerical computations and geometric representations. All math becomes a big blur to these people.”
“Gee, and I thought that was pretty common,” said Geoffy, thinking of his former classmates who had formed a band called the Spice Girls.
“No, you don’t understand!” Frodo’s blue eyes pleaded them. “Without our mathematical faculties, we won’t be able to have rational thought! 5 apples will be just as good as 2! Our whole economic system with collapse! The world is doomed!”
“Well, how do we stop it?”
“The plague is feeding off of a general sense of apathy towards math that’s been burgeoning in society for ages. We’ve got to reaffirm for people that math is...useful! We have got to LOVE math again!”
Arpi and Geoffy didn’t have to exchange glances to know what the other was thinking. This was going to take an army of 17, 18, and 19-year-old experts who hadn’t seen each other in four years (and a few hobbits who happened to join the crew--maybe even Aragorn would help!). This was going to take speed, wit, and a gallon of orange mocha frappuccino. But most of all, this was going to take the power of math.
“Let’s hope Bizzie hasn’t forgotten pi yet,” they said simultaneously.