Chapter One: Beginnings (Page WIP)

At Averene High, there were three people who stood out by far among all the rest. These three students were what the school was known for, and they were legendary figures. Each one of them had nationwide recognition for significant contributions to a variety of fields. They were known as the three geniuses of Averene High.

The first was Antoinette Koech, who was recognized for her theoretical work in physics and biology, as well as her extensive research in materials science. She was also very skilled at the piano, and was once the third best cennel player in the world. She kept a professional distance between most people, even including most of her own family, only sharing her true thoughts with those she let in. Perfection and being the best were her ideals.

Second was Velma ‘Velle’ Avila, who’d proved several important theorems across way too many areas of math to name, and was also known for her visual art among a variety of different styles, her poetry, her fiction, and her unique philosophical ideas. She was constantly jumping from thing to thing and back again, just like she was constantly bouncing around physically. For her life, the girl could not sit still.

And the last? Completely anonymous to the world under the pseudonym ‘Iron Frailty,’ and publicly publishing groundbreaking theoretical work in cryptography and computer science online, she ran a website that functioned as her digital realm, host to all manner of forums, 3d animated films, games, music, writing, and so on, all made by her. The full experience was only available on her own custom browser, which she’d made publicly available for free, but for those using the browsers of yesteryear, it was still pretty cool.

And who was I, you might be asking? Well, I was Robin Rosich, and I was close friends with each of them. Oh, and, lucky me… they kind of all hated each other.

✽ ✽ ✾ ✽ ✽

“It’s always genius this, genius that Robin, is that all ‘geniuses’ are good for? To sit around being geniuses and wasting away? I couldn’t care less about that. I could be an idiot, for all I care, as long as whatever intelligence I do have gets me to where I want to go. And a fat lot of good that’s doing me, because this genius rep is getting in my way and on my nerves! I’m so tired of being grouped with those other two, especially that computer dweeb!”

“C’mon, Velle, you’d like her if you got to know her, I just know it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure I would like her if I got to know her and I didn’t already hate her guts Robin! She trashed my poetry —from my ‘Eighth Winter’ anthology no less— on that website of hers, and I don’t even know who she is! She gets to snipe me like that while hiding behind her anonymity, what the hell is that? You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna figure out who she is. And then I’m going to confront her in person and… I don’t know! I’m gonna tell her she was very rude!”

“Okay… I mean I guess there’s nothing particularly wrong with that…”

“Don’t worry by the way, I’m not going to get my answer out of you; I respect you and trust that you’re doing what you think is best in not telling me, but I’m just so tired of dealing with her petty drama.”

“I mean, to be fair, you did generalize basically all of her theorems and kind of upstaged her, so…”

“Is it about the publicity? I do math because it’s cool, because I care about truth, Robin, and I’m not gonna avoid doing math just to protect ‘Iron Frailty’s’ fragile ego.”

“That’s one way of framing it,” I laughed, “but c’mon, you have to admit that was targeted, Velle. Every single one of her theorems?”

“Yeah, fine, it was a bit immature, but she started it!”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Fine, whatever, I’ll find out her identity and then try to settle things amicably, apologize and have a heart-to-heart with her or something. Is that better?”

“I guess, if it goes that way.”

“Dost thou now doubteth thy genius of Averene?”

“You are so weird sometimes.”

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way, boop!”

“Don’t boop my nose!”

✽ ✽ ✾ ✽ ✽

Later that night, I spoke with ‘Iron Frailty.’ Her real name was Genevieve Winters, but she went by Nieve usually. Sometimes Riley too, since she presented as a boy in public. That was because she didn’t want to take any risks in dealing with transphobia, even though she literally got gendered as female if people saw her without a face mask on and binding and intentionally masculinizing her voice. That was also why being anonymous was so important to her, to avoid transphobia. It was understandable too. She’d had some really bad experiences in the past with that kind of thing. Riley wasn’t her deadname though, just her public name; she was able to scrub her deadname from virtually every database it was in, so it was pretty dead.

So suffice it to say, a girl of many names. But usually Nieve.

To keep her secret, we usually spoke either online or in person at her place, which was tech-ed up to the nines. Like, we were talking self-cleaning, semi-automated cooking, gesture and voice command based UI, a lockdown mode, and probably a ton of other things I didn’t even know about. The room, which had a pretty minimalistic style with a dark blue to white vertical ombré from the floor to the ceiling on pretty much everything, if you were wondering, was basically an extension of her. The couches she had were insanely comfy too.

“She knows I’m telling you by the way. Y’know my policy, I’ll keep secrets but I’m gonna be open about keeping ‘em- to at least some degree.”

“Mmm.”

“What’re you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I did that first off; I shouldn’t have gone off on her work like that. Especially not publicly. I should’ve been the better person.” She paused for a second. “I just wish she would leave me alone sometimes.” A slight flash of anger and hurt appeared on her face.

“I don’t expect her to know that though, since I’ve struck back pretty much every time she struck at me. Sometimes I try not to, and she keeps going, so then I keep going, and I push back even harder because I get even more angry that she kept going while I wasn’t doing anything. For her, it doesn’t seem like it bothers her nearly as much as me, like it’s more of a rivalry, and sometimes I think of it like that too, but I honestly think that’s just my brain trying to reframe it to make it more palatable to me.” She stopped, and silence hung in the air for a moment.

“I.. I didn’t know you felt that way. I mean, I don’t know what I thought. I guess I just wasn’t thinking. I should’ve realized, and explained things to Velle, intermediated between you two.”

“No, I didn’t ask you on purpose. This is my problem to solve, and I want to be able to solve it myself. Plus I don’t want to make Velma feel bad and like it was one-sided.”

She continued. “I guess I’ll throw up a temporary apology on that post and schedule it for takedown. Even though I don’t know if it’ll solve anything long term.” She lazily whipped a few gestures into the air to make her system do that, and then began dictating:

“This post is scheduled for deletion. It was immature of me, and just because I found this poem boring doesn’t mean that others can’t appreciate and enjoy it. And this kind of poetry’s never super been my thing anyways.” She raised and closed her hand to signal the end of the dictation. “Does that sound good, d’you think?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“...Y’know, I actually really found myself loving her poem after I looked at it more, and then I felt really ashamed. I’m not… gonna tell anyone about that though. Except for you. But if you could let her know I’m sorry about what I said about her poetry, I’d really appreciate that.”

“Sure thing. And, if you change your mind about having me try to clear things up, just let me know.” I paused for a moment. ”But why don’t you say that on your website, instead of what you just drafted? How you really feel about her poem?”

“Well… it’s embarrassing. Y’know, I should. I made this website wanting to be fully honest about as much as I could, to have a place where I could be me because I couldn’t in real life, but I can’t. I can’t share everything, because then it’d just be too obvious it’s me. If I was a drop in the billions of people on this planet, then sure, and I am, I’m nothing special, or rather, I’m just as special as everyone else, but either way I’m thrust into the limelight. At least I can share some thoughts there, which is better than having nothing like it was before, but I’m basically all alone.” She paused.

“Except for you.” Nieve looked up and smiled softly. She’d been looking away from me; she had a tendency to do that when she was being honest about things that were hard for her to say. “I just feel so inadequate.”

“Inadequate? Sorry, but that’s just not true Nieve. Look at me, I can’t do any of the things you can! I’ve picked up a little bit with your help, and I’m really appreciative of it, but it’s a drop compared to an ocean. You are insanely skilled.”

“Yeah, I guess, but you’re incredible in ways that I could never hope to be. Your world is amazing, the way you talk is amazing. You’re so expressive, the people you’ve made friends with are incredible, and I’m all alone except for you. Surrounded by people, eyes on my words, at times it feels so isolating. Being with you though, I feel like I can really be myself with no holdouts. Which is why I’m so grateful that I can call myself your friend.”

“I’m really grateful to be your friend too.” I leaned in for a hug. She hugged me back.

“Alright, so I’ll let Velle know you’re sorry. Do you want me to let her know that you liked her poem too? I’m sure she would appreciate it.”

“Actually, you know what? I’ll write her an apology. And try to clear things up, explain my feelings to her in my own words. If you could give it to her for me, I would really appreciate that. I just need a bit of time to figure out exactly what I want to say and how to word it. Could you swing by tomorrow evening to grab it?”

“Alright, sounds good. I’m gonna start heading home now then. I’ve got an early start tomorrow, doing—”

✽ ✽ ✾ ✽ ✽

Doing homework. School immediately flew out of my mind after class let out Friday, and in had flown thoughts of Nieve’s new game. It was a 3d bullet hell game called ‘Hard Light,’ where instead of dodging bullets, you were dodging beams of light discretized from raytracing. The thematic upgrade system allowed for all kinds of builds, but the one I’d locked in on was increasing my reflectivity, to decrease the effective size of beams of light. It took me eight and a half hours, but I’d finally beaten the entire game. Well, except for that one optional shattering mirrors level, which was hell incarnate. But I’d get that later.

That sucked away my entire Friday afternoon and night, and all of my Saturday morning. Then I hung out with Velle, and then Nieve. Bringing me to today. Sunday, the last day before the school week. I had a physics homework that I’d been continually putting off, and it was due tomorrow morning in class. I’d decided to take the hardest courses I could to try and keep up a bit with Velle, Antoinette and Nieve, and physics was usually the hardest for me. My teacher, Mr. Feneltz, was just… really bad. Formulas appeared out of thin air, and vanished all the same after a unit was done. Which was why Antoinette had offered to teach me ‘properly.’

There was just one section left on the homework, and it was on Gauss’ Law. I had a few hours left until Antoinette arrived, so I tried my best to make some progress, and then I tried my best to understand Gauss’ Law because I clearly didn’t, and then finally settled for just trying to understand what the hell electric flux was, all to no avail.

Then Antoinette arrived. “Alright, watch me break this down in 15 minutes flat,” she said. And then that was exactly what she did. She went through a thorough explanation of electric flux, then derived Gauss’ law for a sphere, generalized it, explained an alternative intuition, demonstrated multiple different cases, having me work the problems and isolating errors, and then finally explained how this classical formulation didn’t hold in certain more advanced contexts without modification. And I understood all of it. Watching her work was seriously scary, everything just became extremely lucid and one had to wonder if this was how she saw everything in the world. “Any other questions?”

“Now that we’re done, wanna grab a bite to eat?”

“I’d love to. I’m famished.”

“So how have you been?” she asked, while we walked over to Yvonne’s cafe, a cafe nearby that I’d been wanting to show Antoinette for a while.

“I’ve been good- uh, well, I mean.”

“Robin, I already told you, you don’t have to speak with such care around me. I don’t mind, and to the contrary, I find your natural cadence pleasing.”

“I know, it’s just that your speech is so fancy. Like, you speak in Tangerine font while I speak in plain Georgia.”

“No, I surely do nothing of the sort.”

“Okay now, don’t go breaking the fourth wall there.”

“What?”

“Oh, I was just imagining us being in a book and then your text being in Tangerine just then. Nevermind, don’t worry about it.”

“I worry you spend too much time with that Velma girl. Her eccentricities seem to be rubbing off on you.” She paused. “I apologize if that was unbecoming; I merely mean to say that I do not feel she is a good influence.”

“C’mon, Antoinette, I like her a lot.”

“You’re right, I should have recognized that. My apologies.”

“You say that, but what are your actual thoughts? I know you’re holding back from me, but you can be honest. Remember what you said, things are whatever they are whether you hide them or not, so all you’re doing is hiding things from your friends or yourself when you hold things back. Well, you said it more eloquently, but, you know.”

“Are you sure that is what you want?”

“Yes,” I said resolutely.

“I think that Velma Avila is a bad influence because she does not have any self-discipline or direction, and because she doesn’t think before she speaks. She makes up for it with talent and excels at what she is interested in, but I think you understand as well as I that she would not be able to sit down and work at something she found boring for more than a few moments.”

I sighed. “I understand where you’re coming from. But I see it as the opposite. To me, Velle works hard for the results she wants, and then sees the world in what she works hard at. If she had a reason for herself to do something she considered boring, I think she’d likely become impassioned, if she wasn’t already by the reason for doing it. I… also think you’re being a bit critical, considering you hardly know her.”

Antoinette paused for a moment. “You’re right. I am being overly critical. Considering my feelings, I think… I think it bothers me that I am so often grouped with her as one of the ‘three geniuses.’ I… I…” She trailed off.

“Say what you’re feeling, Antoinette. It doesn’t have to be right. We can work through it later, but it’s important to know what you’re feeling if you ever want to make sense of it.”

She took a deep breath in, and then breathed out. “Okay. I’ll do that.” Then she paused for a moment to think. “I think I hate her. Her success seems effortless, while any success of mine is agonizing. And I do it to myself because I choose to, because this is what I want to do with my life, but it still hurts.”

“I think I only said those things because I wished they were true, because I wished there was some catch, some way that she wasn’t just better than me.”

She hesitated, and then continued. “The title of ‘genius’ makes me feel awful too. I have no talent. Behind every success of mine are a hundred more failures than it would take anyone else. If they’re even permanent; look at my cennel ICF rankings. Atrocious. The only thing I have going for me is that I’m willing to throw myself against a wall and break all my bones in the process, but anyone can do that. Saying it out loud, I realize that I’m awful. I hate that I feel this way about someone I don’t even know, and I don’t want to feel this way. I suppose I’m just extremely jealous.”

“Hey, you’re not awful.” I put my arm around her shoulder and gently pulled her over to a bench on the side of the sidwalk. “Let’s talk through this.”

Antoinette just looked up at me and nodded silently. She was starting to tear up, and pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her tears.

“First off, your feelings are not you. You’re hurting, you’re not awful. And second, you’re incredible. You’ve been able to realize so many of your dreams already, and you’ve got plenty of time to do everything else that you want to in life. Just because you’re not to exactly where you want to be doesn’t mean you have nothing.”

“My feelings aren’t me… I need to think on that. I… Can I tell you something about my past?”

“Sure.”

“When I was younger, my parents put an immense amount of pressure on me. They… Nothing I did was ever good enough. Perfect grades, I excelled at athletics, I cooked, I cleaned, I was paying my share of income and for my own meals and expenses, everything. But I still wasn’t good enough. One day, I found out the reason why.”

“When I was about 14 years old, my mother told me one night while she was intoxicated that she treated me that way so I would strive more, so that it would push me to be better. Then she made a joke about how it was kind of nice anyways, basically not having to do anything, and how I was actually kind of stupid when you thought about it for falling for all of it, so there was actually some kind of truth to me not being good enough. In that moment I became angry in a way that I’ve never otherwise been in my life. I told her, ’You want me to be perfect so much? The only way I can do that is without you.’” She paused.

“Then I marched to my room, grabbed a few of my most important belongings, and left, as she stared at me dumbfounded. I didn’t know where I was going, so I just wandered around a bit with a bag of my belongings. In retrospect, that was fairly dangerous I suppose, but I remember it feeling so peaceful with the night scenery. I’d never felt before like I had time to just stop and take a look around. Eventually I called my uncle, who I’ve always been quite close to, and he let me stay with him.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Antoinette. I…”

“Hey Robin?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m… emotionally spent. I’m not used to working through my feelings this much. I certainly have much to think about later though. I appreciate you being there for me and helping talk me through this very much. But can we go eat now?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.”

✽ ✽ ✾ ✽ ✽

After eating lunch with Antoinette, I went back home for a bit to take a nap. When I woke up, my dad was just coming back. He usually worked pretty long hours, but they were pretty unpredictable, since he was a crisis hotline worker.

“Hey kiddo.”

“Hey Dad. Long day?”

“Yep.” He sighed. “Yeah, long day. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been okay. You should get some rest.”

“Yeah.”

“Love you.” He said while trudging to his room.

I checked the time on my phone. 3:14 pm. I had a few hours before it was time to grab the letter from Nieve. I still felt kind of exhausted even though I’d just napped, so I figured I’d just have a lazy afternoon and lounge around a bit to decompress.

I grabbed my well-worn copy of Beside Dead Flowers, and flopped onto the couch. It was a story about a teenage girl who’d found the diaries of a man who had no one in his life who cared about him, and had eventually died from a terminal illness. It followed her through a few years of her life, as she’d read through them for the first time, and then grew more and more attached to them over the years. It was melancholic, bittersweet, and at times had an intense warmth to it. It was my favorite book. I opened it, and started from the beginning again.

✽ ✽ ✾ ✽ ✽

“Hey Nieve.”

“Hey Robin. I finally finished writing it, literally like 10 minutes ago. Could you read it over for me?”

“Sure thing.”

Dear Velma,
Robin told me that you were planning on uncovering my identity. If you still want to, please continue to do so with my approval. I want to apologize for things and explain more in person. I wish I could do so more straightforwardly and just give you my identity… but I have my reasons, which are part of what I want to explain. Still though, I’m sorry it has to be so obtuse. By the way, it’s fine if Robin sees this; she’s already read it.
I hope this will be my last time interacting with you as Iron Frailty, and if I don’t get the chance to apologize in person, please know that I am truly sorry for everything I’ve done to hurt you.
- Iron Frailty