Samael and Tomoko (from An Anthropology of Urne)
"I gain nothing by watching you beat the brakes off your cringing subcalculator, Samael."
"Ahh..." mutters Samael, wind stolen from his sails. With a non-committal and semidigusted wave of the rod, the freshly bruised subcalculator is banished. Doubtlessly it is now skittering off to its private quarters, where sweet delusions of personhood may flourish unchecked.
"This one's a real bugaboo, Tomoko." Samael paces, then, up and down the length of the laboratory, bruising rod tucked behind his back, like a schoolteacher. "Day in and day out, it defies me."
Tomoko, who stands in the doorway and blots out most of its light, remains unamused. "Then you are not the 'Great Algebraist'?"
Samael stops. His brows knot above his smoky little eyeglass lenses. "I'm a passable algebraist." Tomoko shifts her weight and Samael appends, "Barely."
"They ought to give the title to, ah... Evan... Evan... by Jon, what was his name again..." Tomoko closes her eyes and tries to recall the tale of that dazzling mathematician who would solve all those geo-metrical problems in a pinch. Specifically she half-remembers a story involving four hundred angrily advancing separatist arquebusiers.
"Evanendric," offers Samael, infusing the name with some kind of begrudging, hateful grandiosity, "was manikin. Were I given a hundred thousand years to hone my craft I am sure I would be stupendously talented as well..."
Tomoko crosses her tree trunk arms. Samael in turn crosses his sinewy little twigs. He doesn't care that, if properly motivated or even just properly disappointed, Tomoko could snap him in two.
"As it stands, though, madame, I am mortal." The algebraist flops into his armchair and sighs like old ships do. "And I exist. Evanendric is a pulp hero." He snorts. "Surely even you know the difference between the fantastic and the real!"
Coolly, Tomoko says nothing. It would be embarrassing to volunteer the truth. 'Til now, she had thought Evanendric was real.