"So why do you think Ms. Harshwhinny asked Sonata to stay after?"
Adagio Dazzle looked over at Aria Blaze with a slightly raised eyebrow. It had been two weeks since the... incident at the battle of the bands, and the three sirens were still attending classes. By all rights, they didn't need to be here, being positively ancient by mortal standards, but without a driver's license that stated that they were eighteen or older, the three couldn't argue with any police officer who suspected them of truancy. Hence, they at least had to stay here until summer...
...But that was neither here nor there: That one little question was more concern for either of her fellow sirens than Aria had demonstrated in over a thousand years. Adagio wondered if her counterpart might be coming down with something...
After a moment, Aria gave a slight, embarrassed cough and said, "It's not that I care, I'm just curious."
Adagio shrugged, and said, "I don't really care, either. I am kind of curious myself, though: Why would Ms. Harshwhinny ask Sonata to stay after grading yesterday's tests?"
"You don't think she tried to cheat, do you?" Aria asked, with perhaps the slightest bit of concern in her voice.
"That bimbo?" Adagio retorted, annoyed. "Cheating requires you to be smart enough to plan ahead. She's barely smart enough to remember her own name..."
---------------------------------
"Alright, 3x equals seven x minus 2," Ms. Harshwhinny stated, staring down at the seated student. "Solve for x."
"Okay," Sonata Dusk replied, "x totally equals one half."
The teacher nodded, then pointed to a nearby chalkboard and said, "Good. Now, show me how you found it."
The siren nodded, stood up, and walked to the chalkboard. She then wrote out the equation that the teacher had asked, then wrote it again, this time moving the minus two on the right hand side as a plus two on the left. Then she moved the 3x over, subtracting it from the 7x. This left her with the equation '2 = 4x'. To wrap things up, Sonata then wrote '2/4 =1/2, therefore x = 1/2'.
Smiling innocently, the siren turned around and asked, "Would you like to give me something harder?"
That made ten for ten, she'd answered all of the questions correctly. Again. Shaking her head, the teacher said, "That won't be necessary. I believe you now. I'm just... surprised, I suppose. I didn't expect you to make an A+ on yesterday's test, given your..."
Sonata Dusk giggled, and then said, "Oh, I know, I know. I'm such a total bimbo, everyone says so. But I'm, like, totes more than a thousand years old, and I've been a high-schooler for longer than there's been high schools. Sit through enough algebra, calculus, and trigonometry classes, and sooner or later, it all starts to soak in." She giggled again and said, "Besides, think about where humanity was a thousand years ago: You guys were just starting to work on getting out of the Dark Ages, and were only starting to figure your way back to the level of general education you had in the days of ancient Greece! Only, like, five percent of the population was literate in Europe, if that; just about everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth, instead of the other way around; and people hadn't even gotten around to higher mathematics yet. Most people could barely manage two plus two! When I first got here, I knew at least that much, and as thick as I can be sometimes, if given a thousand years with not much else to do, I hope I'd be able to learn more than that!"
It was... sobering to consider the fact that the 'young lady' in front of Ms. Harshwhinny was more than thirty times older than her teacher. Ms. Harshwhinny briefly wondered if given that much time, Snips and Snails would smarten up a little.
...Not likely. It would take time passing on a geological scale for those two dimwits to approach anything near average intelligence. And being smart enough to get straight A's? The heat death of the universe was much more likely to occur first...
"So, why the sudden change in your grades?" Ms Harswhinny asked, more than a little curious. Just before the battle of the bands, Sonata had failed a test so spectacularly that the teacher had been seriously tempted to handle it with surgical gloves, fearing that she might somehow catch 'stupid' from the siren.
"Well, Aria Blaze is, like, way too stubborn to ever change her ways or learn anything, and Adagio Dazzle considers herself too 'perfect' to ever need to improve, and too 'great' to ever be willing to work for anybody, ever. So, after graduating high school, if I don't get into a really good college, and then get a really good job to put food on the table, they'll both starve. Well, either that, or I'd have to find someone willing to marry the two of them, and let's face facts: Nobody in their right mind would marry either of them, given everything that happened at the battle of the bands."
"That bad?" the teacher asked, an eyebrow raised. She hadn't heard anything about that kind of thing, and Ms. Harshwhinny definitely had sharp ears when it came to student gossip: It paid to have an idea of who might be doing what, and with whom, especially in a school like this one...
Sonata nodded, and said, "I asked a couple of the boys here if they'd be willing to at least try dating them once. One of them ran away, screaming at the top of his lungs, and another one said that he'd rather... well, it involved something big, spiky, rusty, and on fire being shoved up someplace that it shouldn't be, and then rotated at, like, five hundred RPMs. Ummm, the third said that he'd never go out with them even if he was paid to, but that he'd totes like to go out with me." She paused, blushed slightly, and then said, "On that note, are we done? I have a date tonight, and I really need to get ready."
Ms. Harshwhinny smiled. A thousand years old or not, a 'teenager' was still a teenager. "Go right ahead. Sorry to keep you."