Chapter 33: When Being Too Smart Is the Real Struggle
He had made sure that none of his little worker bees remembered what they did or who he was (or even saw him, since he got them all when their backs were turned).
But, if, by some freak accident, they did manage to catch a glimpse of him, then all they would have seen was a middle-aged woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, or a bald man with a beard, or a little girl in a red coat, or an obviously completely innocent-looking tall man with well-combed dark hair and a curly moustache in a black fedora and trench coat with upturned collars.
As a result of diverting all of his energy into these little projects, when the final exams actually arrived, Tom could proudly say to himself that he had done absolutely zero studying.
Well. Zero studying on the subjects actually tested in first-year finals.
Wingardium Leviosa. Oh, please. Like anyone needed eight entire syllables just to make a damn feather float.
After all, if he had to decide between memorizing who got pushed into what bog at the start of the third Goblin Wars, or perfecting his mind control technique, he'd choose the latter.
You never know when you might have to Confund, Imperius, and Obliviate a person all at once, all the while still having a completely clean wand. He was a future Evil Overlord, for Merlin's sake.
He simply didn't have the time to even think the words – whatever the incantation was, as he hadn't bothered to come up with one in the first place, anyway – every time he wanted someone to do something for him.
On the other hand, Flourish and Blotts had loved his idea of marketing a whole line of study guides, if the amount of revenue deposited straight from the pockets of desperate procrastinators for about two pages of Sparknotes had said anything…
Tom honestly did not feel very bad at all about not caring one whit about his grades. See, for an Evil Overlord, not caring about grades wasn't the same thing as not caring about one's education.
For him, an education was how what he learned could be applied to his goals. Exactly what the teachers believed he was learning was completely irrelevant. The only reason why he even tried was because no one would ever respect an idiot past school.
Oh, they might crowd around a popular, dumb jock, all right, but no one ever remembered any Quidditch players past school unless they played for a professional league, and even then that was debatable considering the vast number of people who simply weren't fans.
Maybe, in a different life, he wouldn't have settled for anything less than the best, but after spending an entire lifetime with someone like Jerry, Tom realized that, after a certain level, grades were only there for point manipulation.
After all, a 94% and a 98% both translated to an A, in the Muggle world, and for a person of Tom's natural talent and Jerry's resourcefulness, there really wasn't any difference in reward between maximal and minimal effort. The Law of Decreasing Marginal Utility and all that.
I wonder if wizards even know what they're doing half the time, or if they just rely on age-old principles from the thirteen hundreds when Europe didn't understand that being dirty led to illness even when the rest of the world viewed that as a topic of common sense.
Really, Tom. There's no point in competing in a system that you know you're so far above. As long as you know you're better than that – and you are, because you're a first-year doing nonverbal and wandless magic, making up your own spells – you don't need to prove that you're the best. Just do what you can to earn respect. Get your Os, get your O.W.L.s and get your N.E.W.T.s.
But don't piss off anyone too competitive, or else they'll hate me, right?
Well, that goes without saying.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have to dumb myself down.
I wish you didn't have to, either. But what are we going to do? If the world knew just exactly how smart you were…
…They'd chuck me in a madhouse in an instant.
Hey – consider this your wind-down time. You need moments of relaxation. These exams are the perfect excuse to slack off and daydream in.
An Evil Overlord, daydream?
You're not an Evil Overlord yet. Just enjoy your childhood and free time while you can. Being the god of the world has its fun, but sometimes, so does the mindless pleasure of taking a test too easy for you.
Considering that he had to work harder to make sure he tied with Minerva and Filius than to get a perfect score, Tom wasn't sure if he could actually count that as relaxation.
It was hard, as a perfectionist, to force himself to answer certain things wrong in the right way. If he just did it all mindlessly, and answered things completely wrong, then teachers would get suspicious or think that he was just messing around and didn't care about their class.
But if he made reasonable mistakes, then they could just pass it off as human error.
Tom's problem was that he didn't make mistakes. At least not with something like classwork. More complicated things, like forming plots to rule the world, sure.
But this stuff was so easy that he actually had to try harderto get a wrong answer than a right one.
Even with Jerry babbling in his head, trying to distract him on purpose so that he would make mistakes. Even when he was multitasking with planning future schemes, he didn't make mistakes.
Tom was simply so accustomed to all those mind-numbing, absolutely senseless problems on paper that he could probably take the final while sick with the flu after three whole days of no sleep and still get a higher grade than most of the class.
The saddest thing was, this legitimately was a reasonably challenging final exam for the other first-years. Even the smarter ones like Minerva or Filius.
He wondered if he would ever meet a person who felt the same way. And then he hoped he wouldn't, because that would be competition, and all competition would have to be eliminated.
And eliminating someone who might finally understand him would be rather tragic, but it would have to be done.
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