"Alright," I say. "One more."
Blue watches me for a second, then tilts his head just slightly.
"Are you sure you want to continue?" he asks, tone almost casual. "Or should we stop here?"
I let out a short breath, rolling my shoulders once like that might somehow reset my brain, but it won’t.
"No… let’s keep going," I say, a little less confident than before. "Give me something."
There’s a brief pause, like he’s deciding how far to push.
"Natural logarithm of 7.3," he says slowly. "To four decimal places."
I blink once.
Okay. That’s… yeah. That’s not nice. I lean forward slightly, elbows on the table, staring at nothing now, trying to pull something usable out of my head.
"Alright… ln(7.3)… ln(7) plus… correction," I mutter under my breath. "ln(7) is… about 1.9459… no, wait, 1.9459 is ln(7), yeah…"
I pause, recalculating, adjusting. "7.3 is slightly higher… so derivative is 1/x… around 1/7… so about 0.14 per unit… times 0.3… so about 0.042… which puts it somewhere near 1.988," I mutter, "but I’m not fully trusting the last step."
Silence. I look up at him, already knowing I’m not one hundred percent right.
"1.9879… more precisely 1.9880," Blue says almost softly.
I exhale, a short, sharp breath. "Yeah. Knew I was circling it."
"You overcorrected slightly," he replies with a calm, relaxed expression. "Your linear approximation was acceptable, but you rounded too aggressively in the intermediate step."
I huff a quiet laugh, rubbing the back of my neck. "Yeah, I felt that. Stress can do that. It slipped at the end."
"You could also anchor to ln(7.389)," he adds. "Which is exactly 2. It simplifies the adjustment."
I glance at him, then shake my head with a small, fake smile.
"Right. Of course it does."
He doesn’t smile back, but there’s something faintly different in his expression now, more engaged.
A brief pause settles between us.
Well. While I was hoping to shine here, I ended up feeling almost like I made a fool of myself in front of him. It sours my mood; I sit there with my head down for a moment, then shake it off when I spot a chance to even the score. What if we switch roles?
"Alrighty," I say slowly. "Your turn."
His eyes narrow just slightly. "Go ahead."
I don’t ease into it this time. If I’m going down, I might as well not be alone.
"e to the power of 3.7," I say. "Four decimal places."
Yeah, so I gave him a real challenge. If he doesn’t actually have a calculator in his head, working that out will be borderline miraculous.
For a heartbeat, nothing changes.
Blue goes still. Not tense, not frozen, distant. His eyes shift, unfocused, like he’s looking straight through me instead of at me, as if whatever he needs isn’t in the room anymore. There’s no movement, no murmured steps, nothing I can follow or latch onto, just silence. A second passes while his brain works. Maybe six seconds.
Then, just as simply:
