Prequel 1: The Best Lives of All.

Episode 13, 'Mission Improbable', of the Discriminant Boy saga opened thus:

Before some of the characters in this story became characters in this story, they had lives. As we know, Discriminant Boy, who spent sixteen years living in a universe with zero spatial dimensions, is not one of those characters. Neither, for the record, are Spike Boy, Mandelbrot, the 70-ft Woman, Sensai Garden Gnome, the Complex Father or The Vampire. Interestingly enough, Win Tin Tin used to be the life of the party, and the nuns had the best lives of all. But we won't go into that here.

We will, however, go into it here

Long before Discriminant Boy was more than a dot of no particular dimensions in his parents worst nightmares regarding conception, some of the characters later to feature in his life were living. Some were living it up. A lot weren't.

The following characters were simply living. I will briefly explain what constituted their lives before running into some loser Prince in a gutter. The Wet Willie Glee Club, at this time a somewhat less exciting offshoot of Mensa, were known as The Club For People With Too Many Brains, And Who Can't Think of Anything Better To Do With Them Than IQ Tests, or TCFPWTMBAWCTOABTDWTTIQT for short. They were yet to encounter Wet Willie or Win Tin Tin, and thus their membership consisted of the Complex Father, Mandelbrot, The Girl From Molong, The Vampire and the GrumbleBum.

Mandelbrot was a somewhat taciturn trainee pilot, The Girl From Molong a pitiful girl with a few too many identical chromosomes, The Vampire was an anaemic, and The GrumbleBum a well maintained fashionable mode of transport, which never emitted a sound other than a low purr. The Complex Father was in need of companionship, and when an exciting moll showed up on his doorstep selling semi-automatics and encyclopaedias in a package deal he bought the lot and got the girl. And her dog, whom, as we shall see later, she herself acquired by unethical means.

Spike Boy was at first the owner of Pizza Hut, and had to sell out to support his growing addiction to snorting volumes by slicing. He then lived in the gutter for the following twenty years, until the day he woke up to discover he had spent the night in a gutter with some Super-Zero who wasn't sure where socks are worn, and whether or not he needed a bra...

Before this unfortunate encounter with Discriminant Boy, Spike Boy's only friend was Sensai Garden Gnome, who would show up every so often in order to lecture Spike Boy on the meaning of life, the nature of knowledge and the falsity of truth. He had a passing acquaintance with a young giantess whose current occupation was training captive aardvarks to live in their natural habitats. The 70-ft Woman in turn was acting as a somewhat incompetent double agent, oscillating between TANGENT (Tragic Antagonistic No-hopers Getting Extra Non-taxable Trips), and an even shadier organisation you will soon become familiar with. She was extraordinarily unsuccessful, however, and will feature only once more in this tale.

And now, the characters with lives...

The characters later known as Mother Derivative and Sister Gradient were known by the much curvier names of Ellipsia and Möbiusa. They, like their corresponding agent in TANGENT, Hyperbolia, were mixed up in bribery, corruption and Maths dealing. Unlike Hyperbolia, they weren't law enforcers. They were sly, degenerate, underhanded, back stabbing, self-centred, manipulative.... so-and-sos. They were aided in this perpetration of human misery by that beastly hound of hell, Mutilator. (Later known as Win Tin Tin.)

The body of crime they controlled was known as the Mathia. The Mathia were concerned with only one thing. Power. Well, power and partying, but mainly power.

You recall that Sensai Garden Gnome was ruling the world subconsciously. The spirit of chaos that had controlled politics and the money market for millennia, under this malevolent but inept rule, was ripe for subversion by a ruthless group such as the Mathia.

The Mathia had contacts in all the major world centres, that is, Orange, Molong, Millthorpe, Borenore, Mullion Creek and Spring Hill. By corrupting local mathematicians, they infiltrated the black market with cheap, addictive and powerful Maths, thus enslaving the local populations. Sensai Garden Gnome's subconscious mind thoroughly approved.

Ellipsia and Möbiusa were at this time head honchos of the Mathia. Their thirst for power and a good party knew no bounds and all the known world bowed before them and let them have their selfish way. Their unconquerable desire for control even led them as far as... Bathurst!

They were, in short, despicable. Some of their more palatable schemes involved the alteration of the strength of Maths, from Maths in Practice to 4 Unit, to enslave young people of all abilities. To do this, they struck the final blow to the remaining purity of Maths. They were the ones who started the trend in those 'If you bought a certain number of blue pens at five times the price of red pens...' type of questions.

This boundless terror inflicted the souls of all mathematicians, who gave up in despair and reduced themselves to mere cogs in the wheels of despicability, becoming Maths teachers. There was but one organisation that stood against these icons of squalor. This was TANGENT. Now, the members of TANGENT, you realise, weren't particularly wholesome themselves, but at least they played the game straight when it came to integration by parts, which is more than could be said for Ellipsia and Möbiusa. Not to mention the Mutilator, who didn't even respect parametric treatment of the parabola.

Thus, it came to pass that Ellipsia and Möbiusa were to throw a party, reeking of power, influence, sycophantism and immorality. TANGENT got wind of this party, the only useful information that the 70-ft Woman had ever provided in her career as a double agent, and decided to infiltrate it, to throw all their power at these hideous scourges and vanquish them once and for all.