Tik. Tik. Tik.

Normally tik tiks were reserved for clocks. He would know, because Papa was a clockmaker, or more accurately a clock-fixer. But today the sound was coming from the eraser-end of Anssi’s pencil. Well, what had once been an eraser. Last week, he had scrubbed it so hard when fixing mistakes on his Potions lab report that the whole eraser had popped out and rolled away and gotten immediately lost, leaving only the metal rim behind. That was what was tiking now. He was trying to be as quiet as he could, since libraries were quiet spaces, but he had been staring at the same question for a long time now and he was getting restless. He just had to move, not too much so that he wouldn’t distract other people, but enough to distract himself a little and try to shake up his thinking brain so that he could understand the question.

He tapped his pen on the table a few more times before sighing softly and turning the page over to see what else was in their assignment. The next question said… Blue eyes scrunched up at the corners as he tried to make sense of it. He had to… draw a… a battery? Cultural Studies was a strange class. As far as Anssi was aware, there were no other classes at RMI that required students to draw as part of their homework. His big brother did a lot of drawing, it seemed; sometimes they had meals together, and in those more recent sometimes, Ruben had papers out for his runes class. Runes were basically drawing, except without shadows and focal points.

Wait, did he have to draw the battery like a real battery, or like a science drawing with arrows and stuff? Anssi was pretty sure that he at least knew what a battery was. That is to say, it wasn’t the same as the one he had attempted using when he was learning American Baseball, and it wasn’t the same as the ones that were like a mix of birds and butterflies, so it almost definitely was the one that went inside his flashlight at home. The Finnish boy re-read the question, identified the words “power” and “function”, did not actually know what “function” meant, sighed again, and started drawing a basic cylinder battery.

He had shaded in along one side when a girl spoke up near him. A distraction from someone else was almost always appreciated whenever he was stuck on his homework like this, so Anssi immediately looked up. It was Remmintun - Rumminten - Rommentin - he couldn’t remember how the sounds went exactly, but they had met on his very first day at the big group dinner and they were also in all the same classes since they were in the same age-group. “Kitten?” he echoed. Leaning over in his chair to look at his unzipped knapsack on the floor, he gingerly hooked a finger around the opening and tugged it up to peer inside. A pair of eyes looked back at him. “Oooh, that kitten! Do not sorry me,” he reassured Remy, still staring happily inside. “I like cats. I think.” They had never had a cat at home, so he didn’t really know for sure.