Korva misbudgeted her time last night; her requested books about the history of wizard education had come through, and she, idiot that she is, had spent time reading them, hoping that she could make up the five hours it would probably take her to fully understand the Rule of Succession early tomorrow. If not for the instruction to prep specific spells, she might have tried to pull an all-nighter understanding the math (which she did do earlier this week, before their ostensible day off). But even though she can't actually prep Fox's Cunning or Owl's Wisdom, she didn't want to be the only person who couldn't prep anything, couldn't even prestidigitate her name tag. She managed to cram a little work in during breakfast, after spending more effort than usual prepping her spells, but if anything it made her feel more confused.
She should have realized that this was going to be a test day. Stupid.
She has her notes, but there's no time to do the necessary work to fully understand them. She could try copying the exact math that Pilar and Asmodia did, without understanding which parts are different in this problem, but Keltham will see through that immediately, and - honestly she's not sure she can do the math, actually, she looks at it and tries to read the problem and there's just - nothing, no understanding left in her brain. She tries copying the literal symbols that she wrote down in her notes, in case that jogs something loose, but it doesn't seem to; she keeps staring at it without comprehending.
She's going to die.
No, worse than die; she's going to be rendered completely useless for the entirety of her existence. Maybe she should take some comfort in the fact that this cruelty to her must be making Keltham more evil than he already is, but she doesn't think that's the sort of contribution to evil that gets you a duchy, or a spot in the library of oaths, or a few more years of mortal existence. She hates Keltham, violently and passionately, for stealing her perfectly good life from her and buying her like a slave, without so much as checking beforehand whether he would want to use her or cast her aside like so much refuse. He is able to do so, and so he did, and it doesn't really make any sense to be angry about people using the power they have to hurt you however they want, but she hates him for it anyway. She wants to punch him, or maybe cut his head off, or maybe rip his eyes out, or maybe just scream at all of the gods who are so obsessed with him that he's a self-important teenage idiot, that he's nothing special among his people and only very coincidentally of any interest to theirs, that he's a cleric (a fourth circle cleric!) of Abadar, who is nonetheless too careless to realize that he owns his trading partners like chattel, and that any talk of paying them is farcical, and that in general he deserves to be in the same stupid, awful position as the rest of them, and not only doesn't have the basic residual humanity to feel embarrassed about his wholly undeserved position, he doesn't even notice that it's undeserved. Hasn't even noticed that he's an incredibly shitty teacher, even though he's been trying to cram months of lessons into them in a matter of weeks, because he ASSUMES that adults can learn things that much faster than children, even though they CAN'T, there's NO reason to think they could, they can't do it with languages and they PROBABLY CAN'T DO IT WITH MATH EITHER, unless they are GENIUSES who are doing WAY MORE WORK THAN THEY SHOULD HAVE TO DO to make up for his SHITTY ASS TECHNIQUE.
Except that some people can. The other people in this class can.
The only person she hates more than Keltham is herself. Her hatred for herself is blinding, searing, like being shot through with a piece of the sun. She thinks that she might feel a small piece of what Asmodeus feels about her, some tiny percentage of the full weight of the agony of being human, and a not even very impressive human at that.
The only thing she can think to do at all is to write something. Not math; she doesn't have any math in her. She has words, ugly and shifting and imprecise and disgusting and human, but Keltham prefers wrong answers to no answers, so she will at least try to give him the stunningly wrong answer that she has.
There are two tables, each of which produces sets of RIGHT and LEFT. She wants to know whether they output the same or different frequencies of LEFTs and RIGHTs. The first thing to note is that, per previous lessons, you can't know; a Civilization experimentalist would, what - they would have multiple possible specific underlying frequencies of LEFT and RIGHT for each source, to be hypotheses, and then calculate the likelihood of getting each specific dataset in each of the worlds where a given possible frequency was the true frequency. And then they would - what - you need to compare them, but you're not supposed to use hypotheses that rely on comparisons between multiple data sets -
That also doesn't use the Rule of Succession, obviously, because she's only dimly aware of what the Rule of Succession even is. It's something to do with breaking the space of possibilities into infinite pieces, which you'd think would allow you to identify the specific hypothesis that is most likely, maybe, for each of the datasets. And then - how would you present it. The most likely frequency, plus how likely this dataset is if you have the true frequency - maybe, although that has as much to do with the size of the dataset as with whether you're right -
And then given that information, you - you - well, you can at least say how likely it is that the data sets have the same frequency. And then you'd have to... calculate it. Somehow.
Her paper is wet.
She looks at the calculations in her notes, one last time, and her brain just slides off of them. Might as well be written in Celestial or ancient Azlanti.
She writes her stupid, probably-incoherent verbal description of how a Civilization experimentalist might structure their analysis, doesn't do any actual calculations, buries her head in her arms on her desk, and waits for someone who thinks that the garbage never cries in Taldor to kill her and replace her with someone less distraught.