I know, I know, it's been well over a year – nearly two! - since I updated this. My only excuse is that originally I wasn't really planning to continue it after the first slightly crack-filled chapter, but I had another idea! So here we go – School's Out Part 2.
Chapter 2 – Break
In which Physics causes many problems, and Brooklyn sulks
Garland rubbed at his head. It was break time, supposedly, but as it was pouring with rain outside nobody really wanted to brave the dash across the compound to the dinner hall.
When the BEGA headquarters had been rebuilt as a super-advanced training facility, the BBA had belatedly remembered that most of the original BEGA team didn't really have anywhere else to go. Well, Garland had his home, of course, and Ming-Ming's bank account might just about stand up to the cost of a house, but Crusher couldn't go anywhere until his sister was fully better and out of hospital, and Mystel and Brooklyn had just floated in like leaves on the wind and attached themselves to the team. So dorms had been built on the south end of the building, suitable not only for the BEGA team, but also for any bladers visiting from overseas. They consisted of three floors of rooms, with a kitchen and dining hall on the bottom floor as well. The classroom had been built after that, a temporary thing supposedly, but it was still there, a cold chipboard hut on the west side of the campus, about five minutes from anywhere vaguely sheltered; a cold chipboard hut that currently housed a bored, irritable Brooklyn who definitely did not want to be inside, a stir-crazy Mystel who had clearly managed to smuggle his launcher back again, and Ming-Ming, who was just being Ming-Ming. And Garland, of course.
But not Hiro, who had an umbrella and refused to share it with the bearer of Appollon. He was safely in the canteen, getting first choice – actually, only choice – of the various cakes that would be on offer, whilst his students shivered in their cold hut and did their homework in the vague hope that it would keep them out of the firing range of Brooklyn.
For no-one from the BEGA team seemed to be having a good day. Tempers were frayed and tensions running high, which wasn't at all helpful when you considered that the five students in the room didn't even have to move from their seats to cause total chaos. Ming-Ming was up against the monster that was her Physics coursework, and irritated sighs could be regularly heard from her seat. Normally, Brooklyn would give her a hand, but he was sulking. Which, of course, meant random clouds of purple-black static appearing around the room. Mystel's hair was already twice its usual size, and two of Garland's favourite pens had inexplicably disappeared. Occasionally, the lamp would shake a bit when one of Zeus's sub-sonic growls rolled out, and Garland knew Apollon had his paws over his ears. Considering that the reason Brooklyn was in such a bad mood was because he had a detention for doing exactly what he was doing now (again), Garland did briefly wonder about the effectiveness of the punishment, but a spike in the levels of static sent a stab of pain through his already aching head, and he forgot.
Crusher was trying very hard to concentrate on his drawing of the structure of an atom, but with everything else going on in the room, this was becoming more and more difficult by the second. For one thing, the integrity of an atom tended to change when in contact with either Brooklyn or Zeus, so even if Crusher managed to copy it perfectly there was a chance that it would actually be wrong. In fact, there had been one occasion when Brooklyn had persuaded Zeus to enlarge a single molecule of water large enough to see the atoms in it, and Hiro had nearly collapsed. Apparently he had some knowledge of theoretical quantum physics, and Brooklyn's behaviour had just threatened the structure of the known universe. Not that Brooklyn cared – he had his own private universe in his head that he was quite happy to pull apart to see how it worked. If he didn't like what he found, he changed it. He didn't really understand why the outside universe should be any different.
Ming-Ming suddenly snarled and threw her pen across the room in a fit of temper, and Zeus instantly snapped it up, claws shredding the biro to pieces before they vanished into nothingness.
"What's wrong?" Garland asked, deciding that someone had to take control before there was an explosion.
"It doesn't make sense!" Ming-Ming cried. "I've gone over it three times and it still claims that if the blades are that shape they'd only spin for about thirty seconds! But we all saw them in the dish and they don't!"
Garland leaned over. They had been permitted to choose their own topics for their coursework, and Ming-Ming had taken it upon herself to discover why the Hard Metal System had been so much stronger than the old system of beyblades, or rather, how so much power had been packed into such a small frame. Garland had been very impressed – it was a difficult topic and so far Ming-Ming had been handling it very well. Now, though...
"And then I tried multiplying by the rotation speed but that just said that they'd fly." Ming-Ming was now sulking as well. "I hate this coursework. I don't want to do it any more."
"Well, you have to," Garland sighed. "Coach Hiro said the deadline for changing your mind was last Wednesday."
"It's still not fair," Ming-Ming muttered. "You got to do a really cool one, and so did Mystel."
Garland couldn't answer that. He had picked his coursework very carefully, studying bit-beasts and the sort of energy they were made from, and how this translated into both battles and the amount of energy in a blade. Mystel, on the other hand, had decided to calculate the exact increase in power that his jumping launch gave him, and whether there was any way to improve it still further. Coach Hiro had rolled his eyes when his students turned in their proposed questions, which all related to blading in some way or another. "You're all obsessed," he had sighed, before letting them get on with it.
Talking of Coach Hiro, here he came through the rain, umbrella still sheltering him as he reached the hut. "Break-time's over – put your books away, please. Garland, back to your seat. Now, let's – Mystel, how did you get that back again? Bring your launcher up here, right now. Brooklyn, behave yourself. You know the rules of the classroom – no bit-beasts allowed during school hours. I've already put you in one detention..."
Garland exchanged a long-suffering look with Crusher, who was storing his rather wobbly diagram of an atom in his desk. This was what life was like in BEGA school.
"Mr Dickenson has just spoken to me, and he would like to know how you're all getting on, especially in Maths," Hiro continued. "So I've decided to give you a test this afternoon on all of the stuff we've been doing over the past week. It's not very much to cover, and so I expect very good results from all of you. To that end, anyone who gets less than... oh, sixty percent, will have to stay behind after lessons end and study the areas they answered incorrectly until they can answer the questions without help."
Brooklyn paled. He hated Maths, even if Mystel had been so helpful yesterday in explaining how those little numbers and letters worked. Tests were his worst nightmare anyway (not counting certain bladers with scarves or hats... maybe he should get some gloves? Would that improve things? His old winter coat was getting a bit threadbare, so later on it would be really cold if he wasn't allowed to use Zeus to warm up, so perhaps he should get a new one? But that would mean going shopping, and Ming-Ming was the shopping queen of BEGA so she'd insist on coming and getting something completely unsuitable because Brooklyn's hair really did not suit purple, no matter what she said. Green he could just about handle, and sometimes blue, but only on every other Thursday and only if it was a darker blue than the sky and if the sky was grey it didn't count, but white was his favourite even if Hiro and Ming-Ming and Garland and Garland's family who had him over for dinner three nights ago – Garland's sister was really nice and taught him how to play tennis in the back garden, even though Zeus kept on chasing the balls all over the place - all said it was the hardest colour to keep clean. Brooklyn had never had a problem. He never really had a problem with very much at all, unless it was Maths, and that was cheating anyway.)
Brooklyn suddenly realised that he had missed most of what Coach Hiro had just been saying. Irritated, he set off to look for where his mind had wandered away to without him, ignoring the muffled giggles of Venus. Zeus would deal with her as soon as they all got back.
When he finally started paying attention again, he discovered that they were not going to be given extra time to revise (or in Brooklyn's case, extra time to persuade Zeus to steal the answer sheet because detentions with Coach Hiro came very high up his list of things he did not want to do). Instead, they were turning to Geography, which was Coach Hiro's favourite subject. He knew a lot about Geography, having travelled all over the globe with his father to assist with archaeological digs, so Brooklyn had hoped at the beginning of the year that they would get to spend the lessons talking about the newest research on bit-beasts, because he always liked to find out what new theory the humans had come up with that Zeus violently disagreed with – but no. Instead it was learning the population density of every city in the country, and how this affected imports and exports.
The worst bit, of course, was that no matter how bored he was, Brookyln couldn't even try to go to sleep. With only six people in the classroom, it was fairly obvious if one of them was slacking off.
"If you'd all open your textbooks to page fifty-seven..."
.
Lunch-time passed far too quickly for everyone in the classroom. It still hadn't stopped raining, so once more all five members of the BEGA team were stuck in the room together. Brooklyn was holed up in the corner with Zeus and a book, thankfully not causing as much chaos as he had been at break. Garland was revising and eating at the same time. Mystel tried to do handsprings off of the desks, only to run out of desks rather quickly and resort to turning cartwheels down the length of the classroom. Brooklyn threw the board-rubber at him without looking when he came a shade too close. Crusher had disappeared for quarter of an hour or so and then returned with apple cake that Brooklyn immediately charmed him into sharing with him before settling back into his corner with a grumpy-looking Zeus, who was just a bit too big for the classroom and liked apple cake as much as his master. Ming-Ming was trying to get hold of her agent to ask him why the release date for her newest album had been pushed back yet again, despite the fact that it had been recorded and finished for a good three months already. All in all, it was a very noisy classroom. Garland was beginning to consider the benefits of a private tutor when Hiro slammed open the door wearing the face that meant he had run into either Tyson or Kai in the past hour.
"Brooklyn, back to your desk," he snapped. "Ming-Ming, off the phone."
"But-"
"No buts. I don't care if you're on the verge of signing the biggest deal in the history of pop, you have a test to do and it's school hours."
Ming-Ming pouted but said a hurried good-bye to her agent before hanging up. By the time she and Brooklyn were seated at their desks, the test papers had materialised.
"You've got an hour," Hiro told them. "No talking, no looking over at other people's work, no – Brooklyn, just no. No drawings of people with their hair on fire. No talking to your bit-beasts, no using your bit-beasts to find out the answers from other people. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Coach Hiro," they all chorused.
"Off you go then."
And, for the first time in a very long time, the classroom descended into complete silence. Hiro sighed happily, knowing that it wouldn't last and determined to enjoy it whilst he could.
.
"Alright, that's time."
Five sets of eyes locked onto Hiro with varying degrees of boredom, relief and fear. Garland actually looked slightly worried, but then, he always put a lot of store by test results. Crusher and Ming-Ming seemed to have had huge weights taken off their shoulders as their faces lit up. Mystel was almost bouncing in his seat, having finished a good fifteen minutes ago. Brooklyn had finished long before that and was carelessly leaning back in his chair, only two – no, only one chair-leg on the floor. That was probably Zeus' doing, but as Hiro couldn't actually see the dark bit-beast's form around anywhere and Brooklyn had been known to balance on a single chair-leg before by sheer force of will, he couldn't tell him off for it.
Hiro looked around at his pupils, all restless after a full day inside. The rain had let up for a few minutes, so he gave in. After all, they were still teenagers, albeit rather exceptional ones.
"Alright, go on," he said. "Out you go whilst I mark these."
He had barely finished the last word when the classroom was empty.
There will be one more short chapter just to finish this off, then this will (finally) be finished.
