Doctor Rei Richards always wore a long white trench coat to class. She said it was because she was too lazy to change from when she worked in her lab. But she had been recently begun teaching physics at your Univeristy, part-time, when she's not out saving the world, but you've learned that she is equally terrifying as she is kind, a combination of traits you had never met in a person before her.

She has standards, you find, and traditional ways of doing things that somehow emphasize her love for the delicacy of science. For instance, she only grades papers with a fountain pen and therefore expects every assignment to be handwritten instead of done on a computer, which is tedious and difficult for those who don’t possess a steady hand. The scary part of her comes out when she says she simply won’t grade the papers that aren’t turned in as she wants them to be. The warm part shows itself when she later makes a self-deprecating joke about knocking over a glass of wine during her grading.

Yet, here you are with an assignment running three weeks late, your procrastination having reached its limits, and your excuses to your professor wearing thin. It’s a challenging state to be in when you’re so used to ranking your popularity with Dr. Richards higher than everyone else on this course. Sure, her attention is nice when it is rooted in praise but you don’t know if the kind that will follow this lecture, the deadline you’d agreed upon for your paper being yesterday, is the kind that will satisfy something in you like the small smiles she'd given you.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” she greets as she finally arrives, and you find yourself jolting with nerves at the fact that she is finally here, and inevitable doom is just around the corner. It doesn’t make it better that her brown eyes sweep over the crowd in a hurry until she spots you, her gaze full of concentration until she gains eye contact with you for less than a second. You sit up straighter at the way she measures you, and the subconscious movement of your leg stills completely. Frustratingly, the woman keeps talking as if nothing happened.