The lesson eventually drew near to its conclusion.

"Alright girls," said the teacher, "You now know most of the new properties of negative numbers. Subtracting a negative number is the same as adding its positive absolute value, and the converse applies. The product of two negative numbers is positive. The product of a positive number and a negative number will be negative. The same applies for division. If both the numerator and the denominator are negative, then the result is positive. If either one or the other is negative, then the result is negative. For homework, you can all have a read of page 155 of your books, and you will see how we can use the multiplication results from today to do indices."

Wendell found it interesting, learning high school work by eavesdropping from Ann’s pocket, now that he was often attending a school of relatively giant girls.

"Indices," thought Ann, "Powers of numbers. I have just been working ahead on that myself. It seems obvious to me that an odd number of negatives multiplied together will give a negative product, and an even number of negatives multiplied together will give a positive result. So therefore a negative number to the power of any even number gives a positive result, and a negative number to an odd power gives a negative product. That means that minus two can also be squared to equal four."

Ann O’Malley raised her hand.

"Yes Ann," said the teacher.

"Does that mean that positive numbers each have two square roots and two fourth roots and so on?"
"That's right. So from now on, your answers to 'square root of nine' for example will be 'plus or minus three'. You won't have any trouble with the homework, which is page 155 and the exercises on page 156."
Ann packed her mathematics books away, as the period's lesson came to an end, and prepared for the last lesson of the day, which was English. She hid the instructions for Wildstar in her coat pocket, and waited for class to commence.

Soon afterwards, her English teacher walked into the classroom and outlined what the class would be expected to do for the next forty minutes.

"Today, I want you all to write me a composition. You will each do either a story, a poem, a small play, or you can write about a recent news item in your own words. You will have to read your compositions out in class tomorrow."
"How long should it be?" asked one of the girls in Ann's class.

"As long as you like, but it should go for at least one page, and that doesn't mean one of your little twenty-five line exercise book pages. You should all be writing on the foolscap paper that was supplied for your folders at the beginning of the term. You'd better get started, and if I see any scribblings that aren't part of your compositions, I will read them to the class, before they go into the bin, won't I, Ann O’Malley?"

Ann decided that the comment was not warranted.

"Can I write a story about anything I like?" asked Ann.

"Of course you can, so long as it goes for at least one page of foolscap paper."

"Oh it will," thought Ann, "It certainly will."

Ann scribbled frantically for ten minutes, thought for five minutes and then scribbled again. She completed her story, and then gave it a title: 'A Visit to Rubbishland.'