I like it, but I'm kinda stumped on the ending. I'd like something a bit better. And yes, it's a cliche ending on PURPOSE.
Oh, and if you look up the character names, they make more sense. And look up who DeMoivre was as well. And can you catch the YWS reference?
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Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Or, rather, no fury like endless amounts of mathematical problems.
Personally, I’d take the woman scorned.
It was all I could do not to grumble and gripe as I sat amidst the fires of Lucifer, pencil in my hand and paper in front of me. No calculators, no notes, nothing but what I’d learned by osmosis while sleeping through math class.
It was a level of torture beyond math class. Math Hell.
Oh, how I wish I’d paid more attention.
I was paying for it now, though, as I stared blankly at the problem before me. The crisp white paper sat on the shoddy wooden desk, taunting me with the squiggly black lines that meant next to nothing to me. They may as well have been written in Chinese -- they probably were. I was in Math Hell, after all.
“I know this,” I muttered to myself, tapping my pencil (with no eraser and only a single piece of lead) against my temple. “This is simple. I know this.”
I sat back in my rickety wooden chair, looking around at the other desks scattered through the fiery ring. My sentiments were echoed by a never-ending collective groan, audible even over the crack of the whips, the laughs of the demons, and the sound of forging iron (ironically, it was logistically impossible to end up with iron in a place like Hell. Hey, I can’t possibly sleep through all my classes).
The demons crawled along the ceiling far above, cracking their whips across the backs of those who were not working below. A sharp sting from one such repulsive critter sent me back to the daunting task set before me, hunched over the paper and trembling slightly. I started to doodle in the margins to give off the illusion of working.
“That doesn’t look like trigonometry to me,” said a voice from somewhere behind my ear. I jumped more than I had when the lash smacked across my back, nearly toppling off my chair in the process. The voice was smooth, not like the high-pitched, grating whine of the demons (who called themselves DeMoivres).
“The name is Aristarchus, not of Samos. You can call me Ari, for short.”
Ari seemed very matter-of-fact as he pulled a chair from a nearby vacant desk and sat down beside me, straddling the chair.
“I’m Jean Baptiste, or just Jean,” I said.
“I know who you are. But you didn’t know who I was, so I introduced myself. And now we both know each other’s names and can thus call one another ‘acquaintances.’ How exciting!”
Ari seemed incapable of sitting still, fidgeting with his pencil (which had a pristine white eraser and, by the sound of it, a healthy supply of lead) and tapping his feet. He spoke at a fast pace, giving off the impression that he’d had one too many coffees.
In short, he was weird.
“So! I see you’re struggling, but that’s the point of Math Hell, yes? But that’s where I come in! I’m a nice bloke, so I go around and help poor saps like you. Although, technically speaking, it is your own fault for sleeping through Pre-Calculus, and here you are -- dead and gone and paying for your sins. You really need Pre-Calculus, you know.”
“I was going to be a veterinarian. What did I need math for?”
“This,” he said pointedly. I bit my lip. Cornered.
“Well… since when is sleeping through math class a deadly sin? I thought they were lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride?”
Ari shook his head. “Oh dear. Not another poor soul confuddled by Dante.”
“How do you mean?”
“My dear sweet lady, Dante did indeed traipse the eight circles of Hell while still living, but you see, his recount of the eighth circle? Lost when Dante misappropriated the length from his fireplace to the desk where he kept his manuscript -- a common calculations error, really. He knew that the hypotenuse of the right triangle formed by his floor, fireplace, and ceiling was 15 feet and the distance from floor to ceiling was 9 feet. He sat at his desk, where the hypotenuse and longer leg met, which everyone knows would be theta. Unfortunately, he forgot that to find the length of the longer leg, you need to use the SOH part of SOH CAH TOA, and instead got mixed up and somehow managed to figure it out using TOA. I’m not sure what he came out with, but he sat 9 feet from the fireplace, and thus accidentally knocked his manuscript into the fire. He lost the famed Canto Thirty-Five. Clumsy bloke, eh?”
“Now, repeat that in English, please,” I said. Ari sighed.
“Never mind. It’s not important. But yes, you’re right, you named seven of the eight circles of Hell. But you’re in the deepest one, so--”
“Wait. Sleeping through math class is more sinful than pride?”
“Did I stutter?”
“No, but… never mind.”
I poked the neglected paper before us with distaste. “So… what? I’ll be doing papers like these for the rest of my life?”
“Your life is essentially over, but yes, if you’d like to phrase it that way.”
“…I don’t like you.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
Ari clapped his hands together as my head hit the desk with a loud thump.
“Now! Enough dawdling on bygone poets and pointless triangles -- seriously, couldn’t the blighter have just used a ruler? Anyway, to work!”
He gently nudged my head aside and slid my paper out from beneath it and over to him. He picked it up, scanning my pathetic attempts at both math and drawing, and tutted disapprovingly.
“My dear Jean, not even one problem done? Oh boy, we have some work to do. Come now, sit up straight, shoulders back, eyes forward, pencil at the ready. Snap to it, sharp now!”
I grudgingly rose to a rather indecent slouch, earning a glare from Ari. Thankfully, though, the quirky mathematician chose not to pursue the matter.
“So! First on our happy list here. This seems easy enough. ‘Point P is on the unit circle and given that the x-coordinate is 4/5 and the point is in quadrant one, what is the ordered pair of P?’”
“4/5 and I don’t give a rat’s tail,” I said dryly. Ari sighed and stretched out his large hand, bringing it down sharp on the back of my head.
“Don’t be cheeky with me, or I’ll leave and let you face the DeMoivres and these problems alone. Show some respect.”
Cornered again -- I would’ve given my life to be able to speak freely, but as I had no life to give, it didn’t really matter.
“So! What’s the first step?”
“You say ‘so’ a lot.”
“Focus!”
I sighed. “I dunno. Graph it?”
“A guess on the upside of moronic. How do you expect to graph half an ordered pair?”
“I’ll just draw one axis.”
Ari glared.
“Okay, okay.”
“The first thing you do is remember the formula for points on the unit circle,” he began, shooting me one more poignant glare before setting the paper down and leaning over. I sighed and leaned in as well. “Remember what that is?”
“Here’s a shocker: no, I don’t.”
“Well, it’s rather simple. X squared plus Y squared equals one. The Y coordinate is the sine, and the X coordinate is the cosine. So you know what Y is, and therefore you can plug that into the formula. Care to give it a go?”
I grudgingly picked up my own pencil and scrawled “X^2+(4/5)^2=1.”
“Good. Now solve for X,” Ari said.
“Okay.”
I scribbled the equation, step by step, in one of the margins. Ari watched me and tutted.
“Nope, no, deary me, you’ve got it all wrong,” he said, scratching out what I’d done. “Since when is four squared equal to eight? That’s four times two, not four times itself.”
He wrote neat, elegant numbers beside my hastily scrawled ones. I was vaguely envious of his neatness, as compared to my sloppiness. What, does this bloke have to one-up me on everything?
“There,” he said in mild triumph, throwing down his pencil. I leaned forward.
- X^2 + (4/5)^2 = 1
X^2 + 16/25 = 1
X^2 = 25/25 – 16/25
X^2 = 9/25
X = 3/5
“So that’s it?” I asked, dumbfounded. Ari nodded.
“See? Not nearly as hard as you thought, eh?”
Instead of jumping for joy like I presume he thought I would, I leaned back in my seat and groaned, covering my face with my hands.
“I would have never known that! And this is what I’m doomed to for the rest of eternity? Eternity is like, a bajillion years long! I’ll never make it!”
“Well, you’re already dead, so you have to make it, and… well, that’s the point of the Ninth Circle of Hell. Torture. Hell, that’s the point of hell, and forgive the pun.”
“But why? Since when is sleeping through math class a deadly sin? Wouldn’t it fall under ‘sloth,’ and wouldn’t I be drowning in the river Styx?”
“I already explained that to you,” Ari said wearily. “And yet you still give up hope so easily!”
“Maybe because this is hopeless!” I shouted, standing up and clenching my fists. Ari cocked an eyebrow at me. I could only glare at him.
A second later, I yelped and sat back down, my back smarting with a fresh wound from one of the DeMoivre’s whips. Ari’s lips curled into a smug smile.
“Shut up,” I moaned, falling face-first onto the desk. He sighed.
“Alright. I probably can’t stay much longer – the DeMoivres have noticed you and will probably be on my back soon enough. Quick, we probably have time for one more problem. ‘Solve triangle ABC when b=2, a=5, and angle C=30 degrees.’”
“I don’t want to do it,” I said, curling into a ball on my chair.
“Come on, at least try,” Ari whined.
“No! You did it for me the first time, you should do it for me again.”
“But I’m not going to be here forever, and this is your punishment,” he said gently. The heat must have been getting to me – I didn’t reach over and smack him.
“Look, this is easy,” he continued. “Start by drawing it.”
He drew a lopsided triangle, labelling the corners as A, B, and C. Opposite of each, he wrote the lowercase version of the letter.
“Then label it,” he said and did simultaneously. He sat up a little straighter and poked me with the end of his pencil.
I felt a small feeling of warmth where the eraser touched me – not in the sense of everything around me, where it was fire-hot and just plain uncomfortable, but a sort of comforting warmth. Like when you bury your nose into a cup of hot cocoa on a cold day. That kind of warmth, that gives you a loved, safe, secure feeling. I sat up a little.
“Do that again,” I said. Ari obliged, this time poking the bare skin of my forearm. It tickled slightly, and I giggled. He blinked at me.
“That feels good,” I said. “Why does that feel good?”
Ari’s brow furrowed and he poked me again. I laughed a little louder, the warmth spreading up to my elbow and down to my fingertips.
“Strange,” he said. He picked up my pencil and shuddered.
“This one gives me a bad feeling,” he said curiously, setting it down gently. I watched the physical effects of it on his perky self – his shoulders sagged, his bright eyes dimmed. I myself noticed a tighter posture in my own spine.
“Give me that,” I said, taking the pencil from him.
As soon as I had it in my most comfortable writing position, the strange warmth extended beyond my elbow and up my arm, slowly spreading throughout my body until it reached my head.
I felt everything that I’d half-absorbed in class and panicked about in last-minute study sessions flood back to me, nearly knocking me off my chair with the sheer force of it. My hand twitched, and I quickly leaned over the paper, scrawling the base Law of Cosines by the triangle Ari had drawn.
Ari blinked, dumbfounded as I blazed through the equation, scrawling numbers so fast I smushed them all together to the point where it was illegible, except to me.
“I feel… funny,” I heard Ari say dazedly. “Like… I felt happy a little while ago. Now I feel kinda… slow and stupid. My brain feels sluggish.”
I didn’t register what he’d said until I’d finished the problem, writing the answer in the appropriate space with a flourish.
- c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab(cosC)
c^2 = (5)^2 + (2)^2 - 2(5)(2)(cos30)
c^2 = 25 + 4 - 20((rad)3/2)
c^2 = 29 - 10 (rad)3
c^2 ~ 11.7
c ~ 3.4
I settled back into my seat, smug and proud. Ari glanced at the problem halfheartedly.
“Well done,” he said, lacking his usual enthusiasm.
“Thanks,” I said, beaming.
I blazed through the rest of the paper, spewing out correct answer after correct answer, before I wrote the final one with a flourish and one of the DeMoivres promptly swooped down and took it from me.
“Another will be along shortly with your next assignment,” Ari said gloomily.
“Why so blue, pal?” I said, literally bouncing in my seat. I had done it – I had somehow remembered everything and done a paper correctly. Maybe Math Hell wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“I dunno,” he said. “Ever since you took my pencil, I just feel… different.”
I looked at the pencil in my hand with interest. It was a simple black mechanical one – it had a pristine white eraser, and by shaking it, I heard several pieces of lead bouncing around inside. I looked at the one I had been issued. It was a dull, sick green. There was no eraser to speak of, and only half a piece of lead.
“Pick that up,” I said on a hunch. He did, and I watched his shoulders slouch even further.
“I just feel worse,” he said. I jabbed him a little too hard in the elbow, making him drop my pencil in reflex.
“Yeow! Oh… wait. That… made it better.”
I watched him straighten up.
“It’s the pencils,” I said, proud that I’d not only succeeded in my task, but discovered why I’d been having such a hard time. “The pencils have an effect. How did you come by this one?”
“It was given to me when… someone else helped me,” Ari said, a tone of gradual realisation in his voice.
“Tutors,” we said in unison.
“We’re here to be tutors,” Ari said.
“But why, though? If this is Hell, isn’t the point of it all to be difficult? Why do we need tutors?”
“A godsend,” Ari whispered, his eyes glittering. “Literally. The Tutors must have been put here because… this was never meant to be a circle of Hell.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why haven’t the DeMoivres done anything about it?”
Ari opened his mouth to answer, but as soon as he did, he disappeared. I blinked.
“Ari?” I said to his vacant chair.
The flames surrounding me flickered. I cocked my head at them, curious. The heat was fading. The room looked like it was lengthening. The DeMoivres started swooping down from the ceiling, howling like a gang of wild monkeys. I shrieked, ducked, barely missing their claws as the floor of the room fell out from under me and I plunged into a dark, seemingly endless hole. I howled, my limbs flailing as I struggled to find something, anything to hold onto as Ari’s magic pencil flew from my hand and the comforting warmth faded instantly. I swiped at it, missed, and –
Promptly sat bolt upright in class.
“Jean?” a voice said from somewhere behind my ear, sounding uncannily like Ari. “The bell rang, it’s time to get to your next class.”
I was in my maths class – sleeping, as always.
Some things never change.
Hopefully your teacher will like it as well.
