He glanced at the board and then at her. “What?”
Did he even know how to solve the problem himself?
“Quadratic equations with two variables have countless solutions,” Louise explained because she suspected he didn’t know. “The answers create a continuous line in the shape of a parabola. The ‘correct’ answer to this equation is the two points where that parabola hits the x-axis: negative four and one. What I don’t understand is why you’re asking us to deal with an equation like this. Our class has just started to graph straight lines. How do you expect anyone to use a computer to calculate this if they don’t know how to check the result? They could get a nonsense answer like ‘forty-two’ and think it’s right.”
He stared at her, slack jawed, for a moment and then said angrily, “My point is that you should be paying attention to me.”
“I will when you start teaching something I don’t already know.”
He scanned the room, taking in the hostile stares of the other kids. “Fine.” He went back to his desk, deleted the equation from the wall display and typed in a simple addition function. “Reed, can you set up a four-column, four-row spreadsheet that uses this to produce totals in the fourth row?”
* * *
At lunch, the entire fifth grade gathered around their table, worried that Kessler had deleted all their work.
“We saved it.” Jillian pulled it up on her tablet and played what they had finished.
“Wow!” Iggy said when it came to the end. “You did this all during class this morning?”
“It’s only five minutes long and we’re using a lot of old stuff,” Louise said. “Hopefully people won’t think that someone forged this since it’s all rehash.”
“If we use the new song for Black Willow Wicker, the music would establish the video as one of ours.”
Louise tugged at her hair as she considered the pros and cons. Their soundtracks were heavily influenced by the fusion music of garage bands in Pittsburgh. The groups combined guitar-heavy rock and roll with Elvish musicians playing traditional instruments. When the twins started writing their own songs three years ago, the fusion music was insanely hard to find. They had stumbled across a handful of tracks during a research raid on the Pittsburgh Internet during Shutdown. With their Aunt Kitty being a composer, they knew better than to use the songs without permission. To create their own version of it, though, they had to digitally recreate the off-world instruments. It had taken them months to dig up enough information and code it all in. Since then, fusion music had been discovered by the masses, unfortunately fueled by mass piracy and pale imitations. None of the groups based on Earth could match the twins’ music because no one else had the right instruments.
The new song for Black Willow Wicker had been written for the humorous battle between Queen Soulful Ember and an army of Black Willows protesting Hairbrush’s attempts at magical topiary that created roving flocks of boxwood penguins (“They had to be flightless birds. Flying topiary would have been simply ridiculous.”) Louise used a series of bugle calls starting with reveille to mirror the trees strategies. It was bit of geek humor they didn’t expect Harvey to get.
It didn’t quite match the feel of the filler video, but everything from the zalituus horn to the olianuni marked it as one of their pieces. To write and record something else would take days. Louise wanted to get their reply video posted as quickly as possible.
“Yes, let’s use it.” Louise ported in the song and started to fiddle with the video’s story beats to match up with the music. Because the battlefield scene had been punctuated with explosions as the new storyboard, it actually wasn’t as hard as she had thought to make the two mesh together.
“What do we call this one?” Jillian asked. “Thank you for the shout-out?”
There was a groaning outcry against the title from the kids around them.
“It’s a trap!” Ava suggested.
“Where in the world is Nigel Reid?” Iggy said.
“Missing Treasures,” Zahara shouted to be heard over the sudden loud flood of possible video titles.
“Missing Treasures,” Louise repeated. There was a nice double meaning that the Queen was missing her original targets, the various treasures, but also that Nigel Reid was going to go missing. “I like that.” Louise glanced to Jillian, who nodded. She quickly created a title screen. The only ending credits that they did were to claim copyrights to everything in the video, from art down to the music, and assigned them to Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. “We’re ready to load.”