Multivariable Calculus
Posted: Tue May 31, 2022 11:58 pm
S I • T A C U I S S E S
P H I L O S O P H U S • M A N S I S S E S
P H I L O S O P H U S • M A N S I S S E S
Glade 32, 122 Age of Steel
The Spring term of One Twenty-Two was perhaps doomed from the start. Only the military classes had anything resembling order to them, the focus of the officer-instructors keenly locked upon the need to prepare the cadets as quickly as possible in case the call came down to graduate them early. Every other subject was a complete loss, for every time any concentration of students became large enough it inevitably began to talk about the twin debacles of late Frost and early Glade and what they meant for the future. Many were already calling for war, as the rich set which dominated the academic class had a large overlap with families which contributed officers of the state - including the ambassadorial mission to the Jewel of the Northlands. Others were silent and sullen, having instead lost members of their family in the purge that followed the new Grand Marshal's rise to power.
It was in that mood of constant chatter and rumor, whispers and anxiety, revenge and ignorance, that Sahfri's declaration and Kelgarde's response had greeted the student body of the Greater Institute of Zaichaer, striking them like a lightning bolt. An electric hum filled the air as what they all knew was at last confirmed. War had returned to the Northlands. Preening cadets in their senior years told melodramatic fantasies of what they would do after they were commissioned in late Searing, while the sons and daughters of prominent bureaucrats let innuendo and implication convey the message that they had known all about this but simply couldn't have said anything until everything was official. That most unfortunate section of student had life in their eyes for the first time all season, wondering if perhaps open conflict could grant them redemption and assure their loyalty to the state that their relatives had so squandered.
Calculus didn't have a chance of keeping the attention of the rowdy band of teenagers and twenty-somethings.
Despite everything, Anton tried to pay attention to the lecture that the professor was still valiantly attempting to give. Or perhaps she had just zero consideration for whether or not anyone paid attention, and if they did not, then they did not. She was the rarest of all things at the Institute - a foreigner, and a graduate of the Imperial Academy no less. With his attempts to escape engineering foiled, Anton demanded that his favors and contacts at least ensure that the registrar would have him attend the class he wanted to take with the best. And she truly was, despite how much the other students hated her and her thick Kathalan accent. The half-Imperial, being fluent in the language himself, had far less difficulty understanding her, and when issues did arise he simply asked her questions in her native tongue.
Still, despite the advantages of his mother's tutelage, today was a challenge beyond any that he had reckoned with before. His rune was already thrumming with power, expanding his consciousness beyond mortal sense and sensation simply so that he could read the formulas and diagrams that filled the chalkboard, and it was there that the young mage focused his mind. If Semblance could be used to enhance or replace senses, then perhaps it could deaden them as well. The feeling was somewhat akin to squinting ones eyes in order to focus on something distant, trading away the ability to see the near in exchange for the far. Except it wasn't a matter of mere distance, but also source. Gradually, Anton deadened his ability to notice auras in general, and then tried to focus on the professor's in particular.
His first attempt did not go over well. Oh, true, he had managed to shut out the auras of those around him, but he had overreached to the point that he cut off all sensation. Even the pencil in between his fingers was as nothing, as the mage inadvertently robbed himself of the four senses he still possessed. Dead and utter silence filled Anton's mind as he entered a stillness closer to death than sleep. Struggling to maintain control of himself, and refusing to take the emergency option of simply cutting off the flow of aether into his Rune, Anton forced his mind back out of the abyss.
"-ou alright? Hello? Anton? You're being... weirder," one of his classmates asked softly, looking over in his seat to where Anton had until recently been sitting slack jawed and glassy eyed. "What uh, what was that all about?" he asked, noticing the lordling regain his composure.
"Nothing important, sorry," Anton replied with a disaffected shrug that fooled approximately no one. Realizing that he had to give something, he let out a very real sigh before reaching for the first lie that came to mind. "It's just, my dad's in the Corps..."
"Ah c'mon, you worry too much. I bet he'll be in the pidge palace by this time next year," the other boy reassured him.
"Yeah, you're probably right," he said with a nod, hoping that would be the end of that as he returned to attempting to focus upon his rune. The second try went far smoother, most of the sounds and symphonies of the world fading away to a dull roar. There, and noticeable, but not demanding his attention. Searching for the half muted strain of the professor, he seized upon it as soon as he noticed it, and willed it to prominence.
"-gral of a vector field over a loop is therefore equal to the flux of its curl through the enclosed surface. I trust that if you require any additional explanation on this you will ask, yes?" she said, her voice sounding in Anton's mind as the only clear thing in existence.
Anton's hand was up like a shot as he tried to salvage both the time he lost after cutting himself off from even his working senses, and also the fact that he had barely understood anything that she had said before now. "I'm sorry, professor. Could you repeat the theorem?"
"Quite unlike you, Mr. Michaelis. Very well, but only because you apologized. Do not make this a habit, yes? It would not do for you to require this all of a sudden, no?" she said with a disappointed cluck of her tongue, the sound loud enough to draw the attention of a handful of students who were engrossed in visions of glorious conquest throughout the Northlands. But only a few. The majority of the class had all but tuned out the lecture, and it seemed that their professor did not care what they did or did not comprehend as a result of this decision.
"Of course, professor. Thank you, professor," Anton said graciously as he settled back into his seat, pencil flying across the page as he rebuilt his notes. Empty Throne preserve him but he actually found the pure math fun. His prior work with Haber's research projects had already taught him its value, and seeing the crude thuggery of the equations he wrote compared to the elegant symphonies of someone who actually knew what they were doing was a humbling experience. He had endeavored to further his understanding of the topic, the siren song of a well written formula holding him tight in its grasp.
He was, without a doubt, the only person in the room who could possibly care about something like that at a time like this.
While part of it of course was the fact that most of his students saw a multivariable integral and saw a snarling mass of symbols and figures that they then had to tame into compliance and Anton saw a gleaming symphony composed by a master's hand, there was also a great deal of conflict concerning the war in general for him. The coup and its aftermath had left him in an awkward situation to begin with, and Zaichaer's power and influence growing could not necessarily be considered a positive for him. Still, he had family serving in the Defense Corps, and wished no harm to them - but that was easily incorporated with his anxieties by simply preferring them to stay safe at home instead of marching off to the uncertainty of war. It wasn't a very Zaichaeri response, but it was his.
But for now at least, with the rest of the lecture hall silenced and his world reduced to himself, the professor, and the chalkboards, Anton could focus on something besides the grim horrors of the conflict to come. He threw himself into the sketching of contour maps and boundary curves and surface manifolds, pencil flying across his page. Eigenvectors and matrices were his concern for as long as this class would last, no matter what anyone else deigned to discuss. Even as an escape, a patent coping method, he nonetheless took pains to take value from these times, shoving away the distractions to think on the implications of the mathematics unfolding before him. The shortcuts and simplifications of prior courses fell away in the face of the broader system that they had been derived from, and Anton's satisfaction at the understanding was marred only by his frustration at having to live with the simpler, duller methods as his only truth for so long.
For now, war was a distant worry.