Fan Fiction ❯ Raven ❯ Discovery ( Chapter 1 )

 

 

Both of my parents had IQ's bordering on the genius level. My mother was a researcher at a lab and my father was a teacher at Princeton. They met at a research convention in Denver and, after an hour of argument, fell madly in love. After I was conceived, both came to the logical conclusion that children would not be a healthy influence at that point in their lives. They named me Susanna Lass. At the age of four they sent me to a boarding school for children. The punishments were harsh, so I quickly learned not to get in trouble. The other girls would pick on me when I didn't go home for the holidays. In the few hours we had after classes but before lights out, I would seclude myself in the library. As I grew older, I grew used to the dim and dusty rooms. By the age of nine I had read all the books in the library at least once. Something like that might seem odd to you, but when I could barely relate to any of the other girls, who had homes and families to return to, I had nothing else to do but read. Anyway, I loved it. Looking out at the world through someone else's eyes and finding new perspectives held an appeal to me like no other. Our boarding school was several miles from the nearest city, so we were relatively secluded from any of the heroes or villains that seem to run rampant across the world. It was at this time, though, that my powers first manifested themselves and showed me what my future truly held.

 

 

 

 

“Susanna Lass, pay attention!”

I glanced up from the book on my desk. Mrs. Hawthorn stood staring down at me, glaring over the rum of her thick, shiny glasses. Slowly I closed my book, and stood up beside my desk, as we were expected to do whenever addressing a teacher.

“What was the question again?”

For a moment she simply glared, making sure the class knew the full measure of my humiliation. I simply stood and waited, keeping my eyes averted so she wouldn't have the chance to see the simmering hatred burning in them. Finally, with a sneer, she walked up to the front of the class and glanced down into her teacher's manual.

“The rest of the class has been working on solving a triangle with the sides two and three and the angle sixty degrees given. Since you have had five minutes to do it, what are the values of the other side and angles?”

God, what an evil woman! She could see that the paper on my desk was blank and only wanted to further humiliate me. Then again, I didn't really talk that much and everyone just assumed I was stupid. I wasn't.

“The other side of the triangle is equal to square root seven and the angles are,” I paused to think a moment, “forty point nine and seventy nine point one degrees. Unless I miscalculated something,” I hadn't, actually I had pre-read and worked that exact problem several days before.

Mrs. Hawthorn's eyes bugged out and it took her a full twenty seconds to muster a response.

“Miss Lass,” her eyes now blazed and her voice dropped to a barely audible hiss, “We have a no tolerance for cheating policy at this school.”

“I didn't cheat.” I kept my head down.

“Lying will only get you into bigger trouble,” she stated authoritatively.

“I didn't cheat.”

She continued over my objections, a juggernaut of knowledge. “You'll be sent home and have to wait until next semester to join another boarding school,” my face was heating up and I could feel myself trembling. “Your parents shall be ever so unhappy. And you haven't seen them in four years have you? And to think, first offense and already expelled, they—“

“I DIDN'T FUCKING CHEAT!” My voice crashed over her tirade, and in some small part of my mind I noticed that something about this was wrong. I felt my face heating up as my teacher's voice faded. I stared, fascinated, at my teacher's moving mouth. And suddenly, I could feel myself falling. I fell backward, through my chair, through the floor, into darkness.