₁.₀ YES TO HEAVEN; peter pevensie ✔

003.

Stereometry might be Birdie's favourite when it comes to solving math problems.

The discovery came as a surprise. When the Professor announced that they would be taking it up the following week, she was rather anxious. Considering she often used to struggle with planimetry, Birdie had no expectations at all. She'd always preferred following the right patterns in order to find the answer - for example, in her beloved polynomial functions - and simply adding up the numbers was never a problem. But when she had to come up with some mathematical theorem first, Birdie would often find herself extremely frustrated after staring at the blank piece of paper in front of her for several minutes. And it annoyed her, made her wish to throw her book against the wall, to destroy it completely - she's always been good at maths and the feeling of being defeated by the problems she knew were objectively easy destroyed her.

So, as she was heading to the office all those months ago, feet shuffling on the floor, Birdie didn't expect that she would end up in the same room, late at night, too excited by a certain task to fall asleep.

Yet here she is now, sitting in front of the Professor's desk in a dressing-down thrown over her pajamas, blabbering, "...so I just converted the given cosinus into sinus, which allowed me to define the height using the 'a'. So all that was left to find in order to calculate the area was the short base-"

"Because the cross-section of the regular quadrangular pyramid that the task mentions is a trapezoid, yes."

"Exactly. And I noticed that these two triangles," she explains further, outlining said figures in her notebook so that the Professor can see, "are similar. Using the method of proportion, I learned that the short base equals four fifths of the 'a'. And this here is the final answer."

The man's eyes scan the paper from underneath his glasses. "Twenty seven square roots of ten times 'a' squared, divided by ten." He smirks at her, visibly proud. Over the years spend underneath his guidance, Birdie has grown used to seeing that expression overtake his features - not that she wants to brag about it, of course - but it still causes some pleasantly warm feeling to erupt in her stomach. "It was a tough one, wasn't it?"

Was it?

The Professor closes the notebook before handing it back to her. And, as her fingers clench around the black cover while she walks over to a sofa, Birdie recalls the first time she sat down to this exact problem. Two days ago, after having read those few lines from her textbook, drawing the described solid figure was the only thing she did correctly, the only thing she was sure of. With her back bend over the desk and her lower lip caught in between her teeth, she spent the entire evening trying to come up with the right way that would lead her to the correct answer. Even though it was the feeling of excitement that accompanied her at first, her patience began to wear thin after she had to cross out yet another line of calculations; all she managed to accomplish was filling her bin with several folded pages torn from her notebook and gaining a rather annoying headache.

Birdie strived to solve this task, there's no denying that. But if she's learned anything in all her years of education, it's the fact that the amount of knowledge a person possess is not the only factor that determines whether or not they are able to find the correct answer to a math problem.

She plops down onto the sofa, internally cursing herself for forgetting that the cushions are not as soft as they look from afar. She does that every single time, which actually seems to humour the Professor. Birdie catches a glimpse of a smile on his lips as she looks at him, and she knows he expected her to do so, even though one could think that he's turned his attention back to the book on his desk.

It's moments like this one that ensure her that he enjoys their moments spent together no less than she does.

"I don't think so," says Birdie at last. She takes a moment to make herself comfortable on the sofa and soon enough she ends up on her back, with her legs bend over the backrest and her head hanging upside down. "I would say that it took me so long to solve this one because I looked at it the wrong way. It didn't differ that much from all the others I'd done before, but for some reason I was trying to find a catch in it. And I wasted far too much time on that, instead of calmly analysing the information given in the textbook and the ways in which it could be used to find the answer."