Odd meets Intelligent

Marki strode wherever her feet took her. In one sense she seemed very stereotypical. A Ravenclaw walking away from the library, her nose in a book. But several things about this picture just did not work. Like the fact that she wore mismatched shoes, and that her sweater was on backwards. Why she did this? Because she could. Marki had never felt the urge to conform to society. Who needed people? She had a frog.

Jeremiah, her mini bullfrog, let out a croak and she tore her eyes from the book in front of her. He was nestled in his usual spot, the hood of her sweater, which currently rested against her chest. She shushed him and eyes went back to the book; a muggle book she had picked up from a thrift store. Sure it was written in the seventies, but she was intrigued by this thesis of future shock...

Marki found little interest in the knowledge the school offered her, because it offered it to everyone. She would rather understand the things no one would bother to even think about. That's why she always had a medley of random books that had nothing to do with her studies in her bag.

She tripped on her own shoelace and decided it was time to settle. She strode over to a wall and slid down it, reaching into her bag and pulling out a paper bag. She had stopped by the kitchens and rescued some sandwiches that would have gone uneaten. As she did, some of her books fell out, revealing topics on dead poets, engineering, the Canterbury Tales, and odd hypothesis on society most people wrote off as crazy that she would always at least consider.

Walker stumbled through the hall, scuffing his foot against a pillar and cursing to himself. Maybe if he had been watching where he was going he could've avoided that, but at the moment his nose was buried in a notepad full of scribbles - vague psedo-latin phrases and a large jumble of complex mathematical formulas covered it.

He made a few marks over in the right hand corner, looking up briefly to make sure he was going in the right direction. Of course, he wasn't even sure if he was on the right floor - he hadn't been to the library in years. In fact, he had barely been outside his room these past few years at Hogwarts, and when he was out, he was walking the now familiar route to the great hall.

He glanced up again, rounding a corner, and plunged his face back into his notepad. A bit more power here...unicorn tail to route energy here...

He tripped.

Walker tripped all the time, so it was a common enough occurrence. However, usually he was tripping because of his own clumsiness. This time, the offender was a book, strewn carelessly in the center of the hallway. Walker blinked for a moment before pushing himself to one knee and grabbing his glasses, which had skittered to the ground during his fall. He glanced over at the book he had tripped on, a book on engineering. Odd. He hadn't realized Hogwarts carried those kinds of books.

This distracted Walker for a moment, until he remembered that he was still on the ground and that book was responsible. A quick check to the left showed him the reason the book was in the hallway - an odd looking girl sitting up against the wall, tying her shoe. He tried to place just what was so off about her, but failed until he realized that he sweater was on backwards.

Hm. Maybe Hogwarts had decided to take mentally ill kids this year. He wouldn't be surprised. It would almost be an improvement on their previous batch of new kids.

"Why was this book in the middle of the hallway?" He asked finally, picking up the book in question and speaking in very slow, precise tones - the way you might speak to a young child.

Marki had tied a nice little bow and had moved on to flattening out her book Future Shock, squinting to read the intimidating looking author's (the picture on the back gave her the creeps) take on the way he thought people would be coping with change in the next fifty years. It had been fifty years, so every time there was discrepancy she smiled and whenever he had been spot-on, she flicked an eyebrow with an impressed look.

But she suddenly heard a crash above her, followed by a resounding ribbett from her hood. She slowly tore her eyes away from the line in her book, her finger going to mark the sentence she had left off on. She pushed the book out of her lap and saw a boy straightening up, pulling on his glasses and throwing her book a dirty look. "Oops." She said, in a voice that was not very apologetic. "I'm sorry."

She leaned forward, stretching her hand forward as her fingers scrabbled towards it, but he picked it up and she turned her head to smile up at him airily but he slowly asked the book was on the floor. Her eyebrows met and she said, "Are you okay? Why are you talking funny?"

Somehow, it clicked and she offered an understanding look. "Oh. You are just laughing at me, right?" She raised the corner of her mouth, not particularly bothered by it. "Yeah, I'm not stupid, so you know." Again, she did not sound offended. "My books must have fallen out." She scoped the other books into her bag and held out a hand. "May I have my book?"

Walker rolled his eyes, barely listening to what the girl was saying. In his mind, this conversation was already over - all that was left were the formalities of him giving her the book and continuing to the library. There, he would get the books he needed, and return to his room, where he could make the next step on his yearly project.

He sighed, beginning to hand her the book, but something on the page caught his eye. He quickly withdrew his hand, studying the page intensely. What was... There it was. A mistake. A mistake, in a book about engineering! And a simple one at that!

"This book is wrong," he said, looking at it more closely. "This shouldn't be four, that's all wrong...when was this published?" He flipped to the front of the book, where the year 1958 was printed in faded letters. "Of course," he muttered, mainly to himself. "Leave it to a school like this to carry books 50 years out of date..." He closed the book and began to walk towards the library, tucking the book under his arm as he did so. "Absolutely pathetic...completely unnaceptable....call themselves a library?"

Marki felt her eyes snap to his as he rolled his eyes, though she said nothing, because she had become quite placid when it came to dealing with other people's offensive actions. If she reacted sensitively to every person who teased her, she would live her life with hurt feelings. She felt some of her mental defenses come up and she pulled her legs up.

He found a mistake and began to rant and rave about it. "It's an older book. I got it from a secondhand shop to compare past theories with modern accepted ones and-" He began to walk away. "And that's rat, just charming." She realized he still had her book and she jumped up, walking over to him and saying, "Er, you are kind of stealing my book, there."

"Yes...yes I am," Walker said, staring down at the book with a puzzled expression. He had obviously taken this book for a reason right? And what was that again..

Ah, yes. Reprimanding the school librarian for carrying such outdated copies of books. That, or burning it. He wasn't completely sure. He had bigger fish to fry.

"Yes, well I took it for a reason," he said, rolling his eyes. "So I don't think you'll mind if I keep it. Maybe I'll lend it to you if I find the time," he said, continuing to walk away. "See you later."

Marki surveyed him with a disdainful expression, feeling irritated. She had accepted that most people did not understand her humor, nor her fascination with odd subjects, or her weird phrases, but she still did not think that ignorance constituted a rudeness such as this.

He began to walk away and she pointed her wand at her things, muttering a few spells and watching as her books and her things slipped back to bag, and then she summoned her bag, letting it slip up her arm and onto her shoulder. She adjusted it and turned to follow this rude boy.

She fell into step with him after awhile- he was considerably taller than her, thus equating in longer strides- and said, "Actually, I do mind. I would like to finish reading it, I'm not far. I would not mind lending it to you, since it is my own personal property, but otherwise, I would like it back." She wheeled around in front of him and stared up at him with a firm expression, holding a hand out to receive the book.

The girl was annoyingly persistent.

This much, Walker knew. He didn't know exactly how social etiquette had changed since he had last locked himself in his dorm, but he was pretty sure any normal person would've given up. Or maybe not. He couldn't really be bothered to remember things like that.

He rolled his eyes as he considered what to do with the girl. He could either continue, in which case she might a) give up, or b) become violent. Walker had been at the receiving end of a woman scorned once before, and it had not ended well for him. Of course, the woman in question had been significantly larger, and he had been significantly younger. Still nothing, like a bad childhood memory to come back and bite you in the ass later. He had tried to work through those memories, but self psycho-analysis wasn't exactly his forte.

Finally, he rocked back on his heels and looked down at the girl, arching an eyebrow. "No."

Marki chewed her lip, crossing her arms with a puzzled expression taking the place of her irritated one. A moment ago she had been fairly angry over the fact that she had just lost her book, and then frustrated by the nerve of this stranger to butt into her life and make adjustments to what she read.

Now, she was curious- though she was still quite angry, having really wanted to finish the book some time that night. She was usually surrounded by rather normal people who abided by certain social laws and the strange boy before her was breaking every one of them. Perhaps she had met someone stranger than herself?

Doubtful. Still...? She chewed her lip a little more, narrowing her eyes as though observing a specimen under the eye of a microscope. She finally said, "And why would that be?"

Walker ran a hand through his hair. Surprisingly enough, he wasn't it horrible pain...yet. Who knew how long it would take for the girl to fly completely off her rocker. She was, after all, wearing her sweater backwards. Which was definitely not a good sign when considering someone's mental condition, especially if said person was a hormone driven 15 year old girl.

But since when had he let trivial things like potential crippling injuries stop him? She was just going to have to learn to be quiet and accept defeat. If worst came to worst, he could just hold the book over his head. He was significantly taller than her, and that should stop her from getting anywhere near it.

But the truth was, he didn't exactly have a reason to keep the book anymore. (if, indeed, he had ever had a reason at all) It was just his own stubbornness now, but he couldn't bloody well tell her that, now could he.

So instead, he technobabbled.

"I want to check the cold-junction compensation of a coxial cable and compare that with the field affect transistor of the third coupling," he said, as if it was obvious. To anyone with any study in engineering, it was painfully obvious he was just pulling complicated phrases off the top of his head, but to most people it should seem like a legitimate goal.