Jaime is in school.

This is a waste of her time.

She used to make a habit of writing down ‘this is a waste of my time’ on the bottom of all of her tests and quizzes and homework, in plain English, just to make that fact abundantly clear, but then there was a parent teacher conference and her counselor growled at her and everyone made a great deal of fuss, and now she writes it down in a personal conlang. 

The personal conlang is spare, minimalistic, and has a writing system consisting entirely of curclicues; she’s acquired the habit of doodling extensively, to make the fact that she’s writing down a specific set of glyphs on every paper less obvious. Sometimes she just writes ‘fuck you’, still in the conlang, as a change of pace, and sometimes she doesn’t do it all, but she’s pretty consistent about it.

This is very personally satisfying.

It doesn’t make school any less of a waste of her time. 

She could be dancing, she has more natural talent than anyone she’s met but she’s still falling behind people with more time, having to squeeze in practice elsewhere - it doesn’t help that she can’t manage to concentrate on just one dance style - and she doesn’t have the social grace to persuade her uncle to homeschool her - 

She’s finishing the word ‘time’, concealed in the scales of a cute little drawing of a fish, at the bottom of her latest statistics test.

Starscape hits her.

She grows glossy black bat wings, seven seconds later.