Character Sketches #1, Sailor Mercury - Part III, "Mercury"
Chapter 2: The fundamental malevolence of the pedagogue

Oedipus:	"O Zeus, what plaything will you make of me?"

Athena/Minerva (she flip-flopped, and was rarely known to use the same name twice in a day; today was an Athena day) struggled with the bow. She had been initially enthralled with the idea of coming to Japan and learning in one of the top-notch school systems in the world, but she was having some difficulty with the red bow that graced the front of her uniform.

Her mother had gone to this school, she'd said, along with Tsukino-san and Kino-san. It was supposed to have been very good, and even better since Tokyo got leveled.

The Tokyo school system was the best in the world, and Juuban Junior High was the best of the best. It had state of the art computers, a student teacher ratio of 3:1, and virtually unlimited funding. She could deal with this.

"Time to flip a coin." Heads. Athena it was.

The red bow on the front of her sailor uniform wasn't acceptable, however. She wondered idly how her mother managed.

She knew, of course, that her mother had managed quite well: head of her class at HS433, which was the school she had attended in the refugee camps, full ride to JHU, getting her doctorate at UNC-CH.

She also knew that her parents expected her to follow in the same footsteps, sans superpowers.

After some tweaking, she managed to get the bow in a somewhat respectable state and grabbed her books. Shouting a good-bye to her parents, she went out the door to stand at the bus stop. Looking both ways, she saw that she was apparently the only person who would get on here. Oh well. Not everyone can jump on the rooftops.

At school, she was dozing through English. It was completely absurd for her to take the class, anyone could see that. But rules were rules: two semesters of English language to graduate. And since she knew English better than the teacher did, she just slept.

Sleeping in class didn't come easily to her, but there was nothing else to study: her first class had been gym, and she hadn't gotten assignments in any other classes. But...yes! The teacher scrawled the homework assignment on the board, and she feverishly wrote it down. Flipping through the pages of her textbook, she let her mind wander.

She had known of her mother's past, of course, despite what her mother thought. It was rather hard for her to keep secret the whole Sailor M deal. Exactly how it had worked, she wasn't sure. She had several theories, and one of them was being tested by the SI she had built in her spare time. The Simulated Intelligence rifled through public records, trying to match her with some other identity in Japan.

But for all its abilities, it was still a *simulated* intelligence. Unlike an artificial intelligence, the Holy Grail of computer science majors the world over, it had no free will, no fuzzy logic, nothing to make it significantly more than a fast adding machine. But it was all she had.

"Henderson-san, would you mind repeating what I just said?"

She looked up and cleared the matter away from the corners of her eyes. "You said that one of the sticking points of English to many Japanese speakers is the concept of the plural noun. Unlike hon, which in Japanese can denote either one or many books, depending on context, English has the two words book and books, which are generally not interchangeable," recited Athena.

"Very good. That was what I said, verbatim."

"Of course, Hastings-sensei."

"Good." He glanced at his watch, then at the clock on the wall. "Now, in a similar vein, let us begin with verbs, which like nouns take on multiple forms in English, depending on the subject--" He was cut off by the P.A. system.

"Attention students. We will now be holding a youma drill. I repeat, this is merely a drill. Please move to the shelter in an organized fashion."

He affected an annoyed manner. "Damn. Well folks, another day's worth of time is going down the drain. We'll pick up on this tomorrow, okay? Now get your stuff and get moving to the basement."

Athena packed her books in her bag and idly straightened her bow before proceeding. The drills were never drills. If the announcement came that it was a drill, it meant that a youma was really on the loose, and the sailor senshi were really going after it. But if they came out and said that, the school would panic. Thus, the incessant drills.

One thing bothered her, however. Why had Hastings-sensei picked on her? And more importantly, why had it seemed as if he had been expecting the disruption?