Today (open)

[Tobias Xenos]

Thank goodness class was over for the day. Tobias put his hand in his pocket and dug out a key. He trudged up to his room and stuffed more stuff in his bag. He couldn't stand being inside and alone. He loved being around people too much so he moved down to the student lounge to get his work done. He dropped at the end of the table occupied by a few people, but it wasn't too crowded on this Wednesday afternoon. First he pulled out his math book. He had skipped up to Algebra 2 Trig from the math skills test he had gotten. He ran through the assignment in what felt like minutes. He looked up, an hour had passed and the room had gotten much more crowded. It was starting to liven up. He put that away and started science. Earth Science. He loved it. He ran through the book reading only key points .

He did the little worksheet they were given in little over ten minutes and he sat for a while just enjoying the noise and loathing to get out his English book. For all his skill at math and science, Toby had the skill of someone three years under him when it came to English. He pulled out his essay and winced. It was a sad thing indeed. Covered with red marks that made no sense to him. Unfortunately he had the misfortune of writing like he spoke, which was a strange thing sometimes mixed English with Russian and Greek. He dropped his head down on the desk and sighed deeply. He wiggled his pencil and frowned at his paper. He didn't even know where to start. He looked up, of all the people here someone had to be good at English.

"'Scuse me," He said in a small voice, "Is anybody in 'ere good ah English?" His voice was a mix of an English accent with Russian and Greek. It was awkward but at the same time very much like an urchin from the streets of Old England.

[Tamar Harris]

Tamar was having her own issues with homework. She had changed schools several times in the nine years she'd been in the foster system and it had left a few gaps in her education. It wasn't as if she needed to be taking remedial classes or anything, but every once and a while she found that there was something that she had missed. She wasn't what one would call a good student, either. She didn't like to draw attention to herself during class, so usually sat in the back and didn't answer or ask questions.

At that moment she was having trouble with math homework that Tobias would have breezed through given the worksheet he had just done. She sat with her head resting on the palm of her left hand, pencil poised over her page but not moving. She stared down dully at the problems in front of her, the numbers just not quite clicking together in a way that made sense to her. Math was not one of Tamar's preferred subjects.

Tamar looked up at the boy's words. She shared a couple classes with him and she remembered him simply as the boy with the weird accent. "Depends on what you mean by 'good at English.'" She said, glad to have some distraction from her math. "I'm certainly better at that" she motioned toward his essay, "than I am at this" she said, brandishing the math worksheet.

[Tobias Xenos]

He smiled when a girl answered his cry for help. She looked familiar which led him to believe she was in a few of his class. Maybe power training? He shrugged he didn't even remember what her power was and his was pretty much straight forward, the only thing they were working on with him was trying to negate the pain without him needing to be passed out on pain meds. He smiled, "Better than me'self at least, which isn't 'ard to do." He joked letting out a little laugh. He knew he wasn't very good at English, both speaking and writing and reading. And don't even get started on his spelling, sometimes he inserted a Greek character if he didn't know how to write out the sound. That lead his teacher to circle some words and neatly scrawl 'What???' in the margins.

Toby glanced at her paper that she was working on. Math, his love. He grinned, "'Ow about a deal, I 'elp you with your math and you 'elp me with m'English." He gathered his stuff and slid down the table to sit nearer to her. "You're in some ah my classes, right?" He asked wanting very much to have a study buddy for some of the stuff he was struggling with. Mostly the English and other things that required a lot of reading. He was better at listening and understanding than he was at reading and understanding. "What are you workin' on?" He peered over at her work.

He looked back at his own paper, it was sadly covered in red. He frowned deeply. Would they have mercy on the language deficient boy? Nope, not in the slightest. Certainly he was in easier classes but still it was humiliating to being doing stellar in his other classes than for him to be failing a remedial English class. "Me name's Toby by the way." He smiled.