Fairytale Maths (James)

[Eli Triton]

"If your sword can cut six vines with a single stroke that takes you thirty seconds, but as the sword blunts each stroke takes you five seconds longer, and there are 200 vines between you and the entrance to the castle where your princess sleeps, but a dragon can burn 20 vines with a burst of flame, and your princess is sleeping for a hundred years, how long are you supposed to heroically pose before you need to start cutting - what? How does that even make sense, is that really the question we're supposed to answer?" Eli frowned, flipping between the pages of his book in the hope that somehow, somewhere, he was missing a page. He looked up at his partner with desperation, hoping James would have the answer.

"How are we supposed to finish five questions before the end of class when they're all like this?" he asked morosely, turning his attention back to his completely blank answer sheet. He didn't even dare go on to the next problem in case it was just as ridiculous. He didn't even intend to go fighting a dragon, or rescuing princesses for that matter, it was yet another case of the prince lessons not really covering the sort of thing he actually wanted to do with his life. He just didn't feel like the type of person who would embark on a dangerous quest for true love, he couldn't even imagine falling in love with a girl he was really good friends with, let alone one he just met. It didn't help that he was surrounded by princes who seemed just perfect for the part, how was he supposed to get a look in with them around? With all their dashing coats and their fabulous hair and their beautiful... a suspicion stole over him, one he had contemplated before, that he'd be more interested in meeting a prince than being one. He brushed the thoughts aside and focused once more on the question.

[James Florian]

    "Honestly Eli, I think the bigger question here is, who on earth takes thirty seconds to swing a sword." James said as he stared at the math book in front of him, clearly confused and barely focused. The raven haired lad had never liked numbers, he did not have a single memory where he enjoyed messing around with decimals or fractions. To him, they were nothing more than torture devices designed to make his life as painful as possible. He had hoped that he wouldn't have to deal with numbers here at Seacombe, and instead no such luck. Arithmetic was probably going to be the death of him, unless of course the villains got to him first. 

    "I'm guessing the answer is five minutes at most, at least I think that was the number from 'recognizing and breaking curses,' though I could be wrong." He continued as he rubbed his temple, trying to coax the headache that was forming to go far, far, far away and come again never. Of course the one day they actually learn something in that class that the Prince was going to need, was also the day that he had fallen asleep. It hadn't really been his fault though. The stupid bruises that Cyrille kid had gave him made it impossible for the Prince to sleep, and the class had been just so boring. (It also didn't hurt that it was also the first class of the day.)  So uh maybe James so far wasn't earning the most stellar reputation here at the school, but it didn't really bother him though just as long as his mother and father were kept out of the loop. 

    James wrote down the number then attempted to throw some numbers together to make it seem like they hadn't pulled their answer out of thin air, but barely a minute had passed before the prince put down the pencil and said to his partner, "This is foolish. We are never going to need to do this, and if by some minuscule chance we had to rescue a soporific princess I'd be far more concerned about getting rid of the dragon or actually cutting through the vines. No instead SH is far more concerned about how long we model for." James groaned as he thought about all the useless information that they were trying to cram into his brain. Take for example that Slaying Dragons class. Dragons didn't even exist where he lived and they wanted him to learn how to get rid of one? Seriously? Where was the logic in that? "Please tell me that you've learned something here that you're actually going to use." The seventeen year old asked his fellow royal who had been here far longer than he had, and hopefully he had something to show for it. 

[Eli Triton]

"I don't know..." Eli shrugged self-deprecatingly with a vague grin "I'm not all that good at swinging a sword, maybe the thirty seconds is the time it takes me to drop it and pick it up again..." the more physical classes had never been ELi's forte - outside of swimming, of course, but he just didn't seem to have the right coordination for anything on land.

"That sounds sort of familiar..." Eli agreed, looking down at his paper and trying to work out what equations to write to make it look like he'd actually tried to figure this out.

"I know what you mean," he sighed, looking up again "It's a pretty specific set of circumstances, all these quests and things our parents went on seem wildly different, how are they supposed to prepare us for the one we'll actually go on? Not to mention, it was my mother who did most of the work, not my father, but I'm still supposed to go on a quest for true love? Maybe I'm supposed to just be sailing or something and waiting for a girl to find me." he struggled to think of something that was actually useful "some of the etiquette stuff will come in handy in court?" he suggested with a shrug.

Glancing up at the teacher, he waited until their back was turned before flicking through the pages to the answers section at the back. He stared at it blankly.

"Apparently the answer is 'no time at all, because you are invisible', how are you even... how is that...what?"

[James Florian]

James scoffed at the mention the quests that their parents went one were completely different then the ones they were expected to fulfill. "At least your father did something, all mine did was climb over a wall and show up fashionably late.  He left all the dirty work for my uncles." Of course that's not the version his father loved to tell, according to the king he had single handily chased off the would be assassin, guided his mother to the cottage, and then raced back to defeat the Queen. Of course when he 'discovered' that she had transformed her appearance, he had been the one to chase her down and send her tumbling off   the mountain. As if. His father had given himself far more credit than he deserved, and even the young James had known that parts of his version weren't true. Typical Kings. However regardless of what really happened, or who the best storyteller in the royal family was everyone missed one tiny crucial detail. The Mirror. No one knew of the part it played in the story of how the King and Queen met, since the ex-Queen had kept it a closely guarded secret along with her lair. So two symbols of pure evil still existed in his family's castle and no one had any idea. 

"It's absurd. At least you would think that they would tailor the classes to fit what actually happened? Because if that was so I'd be like a little monkey at the end of the year and you would be the best sailor on the ocean. Except nope, they have to take one story and expect everyone to follow that one." James said with a tone of disbelief in his voice underneath the annoyance. The school pushed and pushed for one set of events when in reality they should have been pushing for what happened after the day was saved and the villains were defeated. Instead there was only a handful of classes for that kind of stuff, and it still wasn't everything they needed. Apparently ballroom dancing ranked higher than managing an entire kingdom on Seacombe Halpworth's list of important things they needed to learn. At least hopefully the university would be better tailored to what they actually needed to know. 

"Well if you take to the sea though, take me with you. At least out there, we wouldn't have to worry about dragons, sleeping princesses, or how long it's going to take us to cut vines."

When Eli flipped to the back of the book for the answers, James continued to keep an eye on the teacher, making sure he wouldn't spot the two of them cheating. Normally the Prince wouldn't automatically go along with this idea. After all he was good, only evil people didn't work through the problem to the answer, but obviously whoever came up with that notion didn't have to sit through a math class. However when Eli revealed what the answer was, James' eyes widened in pure disbelief, "What the hell?.. You can not be serious..." The prince muttered as he too flipped to the back of the book, found the problem they were working on, lo and behold it was right there in black and white. They wouldn't have to heroically pose because no could see them for Christ sake. 

"That's it. I give up." James said as he dropped his pen onto the desk. "If that's the answer, then I'm going to outlaw math when I get home. There is no possible way that can be it."

[Eli Triton]

"Honestly, when you really think about it, all the boys seem to have to do is get through an obstacle course and kiss on cue," he sighed slightly, it wasn't exactly what he wanted out of life - oh sure, it seemed very dramatic and adventurous at first, but the more you thought about it the less exciting it all really seemed. He didn't even want the excitement, he just wanted to swim, but if he had to go through the motions of proper princely life, he would at least want it to be more interesting than that.

"I know what you mean, I think the idea is that you follow your role but your actual story might be different, only they're not really covering all the bases..." a sailing class would be a lot of fun, actually, now that he thought about it. He preferred to be in the water than on top of it, but it would give him something to talk to his father about when he went home, a way for them to actually bond. Besides, then maybe he could sail off into the sunset on diplomatic missions, and he could keep in touch with his family because he'd be right on top of the sea all the time. That didn't actually sounds so bad...

"Knowing our luck, we'd probably have to worry about sea serpents and drowning princesses and cutting seaweed instead," he pointed out with a wry chuckle. Dropping his own pen on the desk he nodded in agreement, what kind of maths was this anyway? Did they think they wouldn't need maths so they could waste the lesson trying to make some other point about... about... about what exactly? What purpose did that ridiculous problem solve? Who even came up with it?

[James Florian]

    "Yeah and the girls only have to look pretty and faint whenever something evil comes up." James said in response to the life Seacombe expected them to fulfill. For royalty it was clear cut and unchangeable. The Princes and Kings destroyed whatever threatened their true loves, while the Princesses and Queens just had to wait for them to be rescued. Villains just had to cause chaos, but die in the end hated by everyone, and finally the sidekicks just had to be comic relief. As if this was going to be everyone's lives after graduating. Granted yes, maybe some grand quest would take place where James would have to go head to head against a fellow pupil. However this wasn't going to be something that took up fifty more years of his life. What about after Happily Ever After was achieved? What if by insisting everyone take these silly classes instead of the ones they really needed, the school was screwing over the kingdoms they were expected to lead one day.

    Maybe this thought didn't trouble Eli as much, because he had heard the prince say before that he had siblings higher in the line of succession for his kingdoms throne. However his homeland didn't, James was it. After him it was just various dukes and lords, but they were just the backup plan if something were to happen to the Prince. If he didn't learn what he needed here, then his mark on history would be that he was the King who knew nothing about running a kingdom. Now that image had to be worse than the one his step-grandmother left. 

    James groaned when Eli suggested that instead they would have to worry about other sea related troubles. "Eli, that's not even amusing. Especially since some of us don't know how to swim." It was true, James didn't know how to swim. Mostly because of the fact there was no reason to. There were no deep lakes or vast oceans in his kingdom, just miles upon miles of forest. Also mines, there were plenty of mines scattered here and there back home. So he never had the opportunity or reason to learn. 

    "Now should we continue struggling with these utterly useless problems like good princes, or should we just copy the answers?" 

[Eli Triton]

Ordinarily, Eli might have been thinking similar things to James - maybe not in relation to himself, he still had duties and responsibilites at home but nothing as serious as James. There were still plenty of things that school didn't seem to be preparing him for. He dimly remembered, when he first started, there being more options and more practical classes, but they seemed to have all disappeared somewhere along the way.

Normally, he'd be thinking about that, but then something happened that completely derailed his train of thought entirely and left him staring at James in shock.

"You can't swim!?" he said, a little louder than he intended. He realised people were looking over at him in surprise and turned a little red, lowering his voice as he continued "But that's terrible, swimming's amazing, it's just... it's like flying, sort of, there's nothing quite like gliding through the water, it's the most perfect sensation in the world. You need to learn, it's amazing, I'll teach you." He said it decisively, not really planning on taking no for an answer, swimming was one of the most important things in the world to him, he found it hard to imagine not being able to do it.

"Oh let's just copy them," he sighed, realising the teacher wasn't paying any attention to them, and flicked to the back of the book.

[James Florian]

    "No I can't Eli. Is it really that surprising?" James asked with a curious expression on his face. Could it be that James was the only one here who didn't know how to swim. That just might be a tad bit embarrassing if it was the case, after all he didn't realize that the ability to swim was something everyone apparently knew. James felt his cheeks redden a bit and stand out against his genetically pale skin as everyone stared at the two of them because of Eli's outburst. Great he felt like a fool over something that he didn't even have any control over in the first place because it concerned the geography of his kingdom, and even he couldn't change that. This was the second time since he arrived that he had felt this way, but at least it wasn't going to end like the last one. James did not want his brain to feel similar to a vegetable once again. 

    He listened to how Eli described swimming and did actually sound pretty cool. Though he knew that he would probably wouldn't catch on that quickly, after all his cousin was a mermaid, it was clear that swimming ran in Eli's bloodstream. "Sure, just as long as it's not in the lake." James said with enthusiasm. Granted there were two reasons as to why James did not want to learn in the lake. First of all, he didn't want other students seeing him screw up if it didn't catch on right away and secondly, James already knew that you couldn't see the bottom of the lake. If he was going to learn, he wanted to know exactly what he was above. No chance of lake monsters or clever villains sneaking up on him in the pool. 
 
James nodded when Eli approved of ending this torture session by just copying the answers. He also flipped to the back of the book and mumbled quietly so they could both write them down, "Alright the second one is 'the West Path,' then it's 'None, only a blessed sword will pierce the dragon's heart.' As for the other two do you remember which page they were on? I know it's a different one, but I just can't recall..." He trailed off as he turned the pages in the book hoping to jog his memory somehow.

[Eli Triton]

James' curiosity was enough to make him stop and realise his mistake. It may have been completely alien to him to not be able to swim, but he shouldn't assume the same of everybody. After all, even at home some of the older sailors on his father's ships refused to learn to swim at all, they said it was bad luck. Eli had tried his hardest to understand that, but had eventually had to give up, it didn't make any sense at all to him.
He was usually very careful to try and see everybody's point of view, but when it came to swimming he often had a bit of a blindspot, it was like people who were afraid of water or the ocean, he just couldn't get his head around it.

"I suppose it's not," he admitted "I didn't mean to imply you were strange, it's just that swimming is such a big thing for me, it surprises me that other people don't feel the same." he explained, hoping he was making sense.

"Pool it is," he agreed with a nod "Don't worry, it's really easy and lots of fun, you won't regret it." It was a useful life skill, you never knew when you'd fall into a large body of water. Honest.

He jotted down the answers as James gave them, looking up at his book to try and find the remaining questions "It was 16 wasn't it? ...Or was it 26..."

[James Florian]

James breathed a small sigh of relief when Ei said that it wasn't so weird that the Prince didn't know how to swim. It was just Eli being Eli. "Okay for a few moments I thought that I was the only one who doesn't know how." The Prince said after Eli had explained that swimming was almost comparable to breathing or walking to the other royal. Maybe James jumped to conclusions so quickly because he didn't have a hobby like that, where it felt like you would die if you were separated from it long enough, you would die. Granted he did have a passion for reading books on history, and he would never turn down a chance to go out riding, but it wasn't on the same level as obsession that Eli had with swimming.

"Alright, who knows maybe I've just been a landlocked fish all these years." James said with a small grin as he flipped through the book to the pages Eli gave, and he quickly remembered which ones they were supposed to be doing when he saw the problems. "It's page twenty-six and surprisingly the answers are actual numbers. The first one is Two years and the second one is fifty seven kilometers." He said as he flipped back to the part of the book that the teacher would be checking soon, and said "Looks like we're going to have to fake the work now."

{{Ready to wrap this up?}}

[Eli Triton]

"Sorry," Eli admitted genuinely, feeling bad, but he perked up when he thought about swimming, nodding eagerly in agreement. You never knew, some people were just naturally gifted in all sorts of strange areas, maybe James would be really good at swimming. Even if he wasn't, Eli was equally excited to teach him.

Still beaming happily at the prospect of sharing the wonders of swimming with somebody new, he jotted down the answers as James said them, glancing briefly up at the questions to see how they corresponded. They did not do so very well.

"I guess so," he agreed, pulling a face, it was almost impossible to understand how those questions resulted in those answers, how was he supposed to write down an approximation of how he managed it? Shrugging, he started scribbling numbers down on the page.

((sure thing ))