22 Ms. Blackice

By the end of the lunch hour, Michael only had about a fifth of the book remaining. He was getting closer and closer to his target of completing his draft this weekend. He left the library with a satisfied smile and rushed over to Algebra to grab his seat. To his surprise, the teacher was already there. "Ah, Mr Prout," she said calmly. "I expected you might be early."

Michael was startled. He had had Algebra class twice this week already, but this was not the person he remembered from his previous classes. "I'm sorry, I'm looking for Mr..." at which point he stalled, as he realized that he'd never gotten the name of his teacher in his previous classes.

The woman at the front of the room was a complete stranger to him. She had the hair and complexion of one of the original inhabitants of the landmass where New Albion was located. Her eyes, however, were a shockingly clear amber colour - something Michael had never seen before, and they seemed to pull him in. She smiled, apparently unperturbed by his inadvertent stare. "Richard is my research assistant, and he was covering for me while I was occupied with a project. I'm Ms. Blackice, your Algebra professor. I wanted to talk to you about your homework."

Michael came back to reality at the question, shook his head and stepped a bit closer to the front. "I'm certain that I completed it, Ms. Blackice. Did it get misplaced?" he asked, a bit of panic creeping into his voice. Getting marked for missing homework - especially homework he had absolutely done - in the first week of school was definitely something he wanted to avoid.

"It hasn't been lost, Mr. Prout," she said, clearly amused. She retrieved a stack of papers from the desk and handed them over to him. "There's just too much of it. Why did you do the rest of the questions, and not just the ones assigned?"

Michael was stumped. He hadn't considered the problem of doing TOO much work - he had included the additional work in the system mission in with his homework for class. "I guess I got carried away," he said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. "The questions were just flowing really well and I guess I got excited."

Ms. Blackice nodded as if satisfied with this response. "Try not to do it again," she said reprovingly. "I often get my assistants to do the corrections, and if the work doesn't match their marking rubric they get all confused. However, if you separate out the additional work and hand it to me directly, I don't mind taking a look at it. It's our job to encourage bright young minds, after all." She said that last line with a somewhat teasing smile on her face, and Michael temporarily blanked out once again.

"Now, go take your seat, class is starting soon. You can hand today's work to me, but from now on, split out the class assigned work to give my poor assistants a break," she finished as some of the other students started to pour in, snapping him back to reality. He fumbled through his bag, found the sheets he needed, and hastily handed them over, thanking her with a nod before scurrying over to his desk.

Soon enough, everyone was in their seats and the bell rang. She rapped on the desk with her knuckles and introduced herself, "Good Afternoon, everyone. My name is Ms. Blackice..."

Michael did his best to focus in class, for better or worse.

---

Michael's chemistry class was significantly less eventful. They got their homework back, and Michael saw that only the assigned ones were marked, with the rest ignored. Since the teacher, whose name he now recalled was Mr. Celeus, didn't say anything about it, so Michael didn't change his habits. He passed the whole thing up, listened to the lecture, took his notes, wrote down the assignment, and left.

The Chemistry lab was quite close to the exit he was meeting Jeremy at, so he arrived quite early. To his surprise, his friend was already there, talking to hulking man in a suit. They noticed him as he was approaching, and Jeremy waved. "Hey Michael! Ready to go?" he asked, his usual smile plastered on his face.

Michael nodded, looking inquisitively at the man next to the grinning boy. Jeremy took the cue and introduced them. "Michael, this is my Uncle Zeke. Uncle Zeke, this is the new friend I was telling you about. He's really good at computers and lives in the library. Definitely a good influence, I promise." The giant of a man turned his piercing gaze to Michael, who involuntarily shivered as he felt a chill run up his spine like he was being eyed by some sort of large predatory beast.

"Don't make a habit out of this, nephew. I'll see you next weekend. Have fun with your friends." he said curtly, as he turned around and strode out of the main door. Only after he was out of sight did Michael relax.

"Did I do something?" Michael asked his friend. "Not at all," Jeremy assured him. "Uncle Zeke just disagrees with my priorities. But enough of that - let's game!! Well, I'll game. You go do geeky things on computers, I guess!" he said cheerily, attempting to change the subject and hurrying out the door himself.

Michael shrugged, adjusted the straps of his backpack on his back, and followed his friend out the door.

---

The electronic bell chimed as the two opened up the entrance to the cafe. Ben was in the midst of stocking a new beverage fridge when they came in, and turned with a surprised look. "Woah, Jeremy, you're here?"

"Hey cuz - yeah, of course! Last night we get to game without a bunch of annoying customers, after all!" Jeremy said cheerily as he quickly raced over to the same computer and dropped off his bag.

"You say that now, but you'd be pretty annoyed if this place stayed empty. And don't just sit straight down - come help me stock this thing!" Ben called out as he struggled with an assortment of bottles. Jeremy sighed and walked back his cousin, somewhat unwillingly. "Fine, I guess. But I'll only help til Val gets here - then we've got plans." Ben begrudgingly agreed, handed off the stocking work to Jeremy, and went to get some more boxes from the back.

Michael chuckled at the antics of the two cousins while he sat down at the test machine he'd been working on the previous day. He logged back in and checked the files on the shared drive to make sure that his work was still there. Nodding in satisfaction, he proceeded to investigate the settings in the firewall application and update his script to make the appropriate updates.

Roughly two hours into his work, Valeria came in to the cafe. Jeremy made a gleeful sound and quickly wrapped up the task he was currently involved in before rushing over to join her. Ben grumbled at this, but didn't stop him. He continued his stocking. By this point, Michael had wrapped up the script, completed his testing, and finished running the script on both Jeremy and Valeria's machines. Knowing that they'd soon be occupied, he decided to do those two first. He was quite happy with the results, as the script ran flawlessly on both machines. Clearly his proper preparation had payed off well.

He continued to log in to each machine and run the script. He would have liked to have been able to run this directly from a main machine, but the systems weren't networked together in this way. Running through the process actually gave him a few ideas about the administration of the various machines, which he decided to bring up to Ben later. Each system took him about 5 minutes to do, and there were a lot of machines to go.

---

A couple of hours later, he had wrapped up the last machine. Looking at the time, it was almost exactly 4 hours since he'd arrived. Quite happy that he'd come in right on estimate, he logged out of the machine and walked over to Ben. "All done," he reported happily.

"That's great! What all did you end up doing?" Ben asked as he broke down empty boxes by the front desk.

"I updates all the drivers and software, the firewall settings and antivirus database, and ran the maintenance tools and even defragmented the hard drives," Michael reported smugly. Ben raised his eyebrows appreciatively. "On all of them? That's impressive."

"I wrote a script and ran it on each of them. A lot more efficient that way," Michael explained. Ben nodded in response. "That makes a lot of sense - a bit more time in the beginning but clearly paid off in the long run! Nice work. Let me get your pay. 7 hours, right?" he asked as he made his way to the register behind the desk. "Do you want to play with them for a bit before you head out?"

Michael thought for a bit and then caved to the temptation. "Sure - it's still pretty early, and I already told my parents that I'd be late. Also I had a few ideas on how you could improve things as far as the administration is concerned. Do you want to hear them?"

"We've got a lot of work to do still for the actual launch, so I think we'll probably hold off for now. Tell you what, how about you put together a proposal and then give it to my co-owner?" Ben replied, handing Michael a stack of cash. "Your co-owner?" Michael replied, puzzled.

"Yo!" Jeremy waved.

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