--------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter Two
In the Art Class Down the Hall and Around the Corner From Wesker's RoomNemesis stomped back into the room, flipping through the red dictionary and tearing out several pages at a time until he found what he was looking for. One kid looked at him inquisitively as the monster stuck the book in his face and pointed to a specific page.
"Um… What is it?"
He turned the book back to himself, and slowly drug his finger down the page until it met with the definition. The kid looked at the page carefully.
"Neme… Nemesis?"
He roared triumphantly, slamming the book shut and tossing it out the door, going to the blackboard and pointing to his sloppy writing.
"Oh! Your name is Nemesis!" the kid said, and he nodded, starting to rifle through drawers all around the room.
They sat in silence for a while, watching him get his bearings as to what was where. They had virtually no clue what he had in mind until he held up a fistful of acrylic paint tubes and a canvas that their teacher had been painting a portrait of the assistant principal on.
"We're going to paint?" a little girl asked.
Nemesis twisted the cap off of a tube, and slathered crimson paint across the portrait with satisfaction.
It wasn't long before the assistant principal came barging into the art class with his arms crossed, being followed by Bill Gates who stopped outside of the door, staring in shock at the destroyed Gateway.
"What in the world is going on in here!" the fat red-headed assistant principal barked, glaring around the room at all the students and then to Nemesis. "How did the computer get damaged? AND WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY PORTRAIT!"
Nemesis just growled and started towards the fat man like he was Chester Cheetah after a bag of Cheetos.
In the Spanish Class Near the Art Room"Hola, Senor Mendez," the class said rather unenthusiastically.
The seven-foot-tall man smiled slightly, pacing back and forth in front of the room a few times while he thought, trying to piece together the plan of attack for the day. A lot of kids, if not the whole class, gazed at him curiously, probably because he was a giant and had a hideous glass eye. He chuckled to himself for no particular reason, and then stopped walking back and forth to speak.
"Have any of you ever heard about a Spanish cult – err - religious sect, called 'Los Illuminados'?"
They all shook their heads.
"Then that's what we'll learn about today." He smiled to himself, twiddling his beard deviously. "Now all I need is a test subject…"
In the French Class Downstairs"I wont lie to you – I'm not the greatest French-speaker…" Brad said, crossing his arms and sighing. "You're on your own."
"See? I told you this school was cheap!" one student named Robert, probably the oldest of the group, said to another.
"This school is creating a race of morons!"
"Not exactly… It was rated number three of the best on the East Coast."
"Yeah – best for selling heroine and teaching future mafia members!"
"Okay, class; that's enough," Brad said quietly, paging through a French magazine on the teacher's desk to suppress his boredom. "I don't know what you should be doing, so…"
"We normally start with the daily routine."
"And that would be…?"
"Good morning, how are you today, what time is it, and what is the weather like?"
Brad covered his eyes in dread. "Oh, jeez… Well, I'll ask in English, you can answer in French… Good morning, class."
"Bonjour, Monsieur."
"How are you today?"
"Très bien, merci. Et vous?"
"Was that a question? Oh well. What time is it? – No, forget that one, we can all read the clock. What's the weather like?"
"Le crap," the oldest student, Robert, said.
"Can we watch a movie?" someone asked and Brad looked thoughtfully at a badly drawn poster of Marie Antoinette behind him.
"Uh, sure. Anything specific?" he asked going to the teacher's supply closet.
"The one about time!"
"Time?" Brad said, as the class agreed they should watch 'the one about time'. "What's it called?"
"I think it's 'Quelle heure est il'," a student said, and Brad scratched his head in a bewildered manner.
"Can you… Spell that?"
Suddenly, Robert began to run around screaming that someone stole his napkin. Brad just backed up into a corner and watched in shock.
The Room Next Door to the French ClassMr. Lucan, the ever-pissy German teacher who hadn't taken off like the rest of the normal staff, heard the commotion in the French class next door and, of course, felt a desperate need to hassle the substitute about it. He left his class without saying a word, most of the students looking up from their work in wonder as to where he was going. He stepped into the doorway and asked gruffly, "What is going on over here?"
Before he could answer, the towering form of Mendez came up behind Mr. Lucan, and Brad let out a squeak of alarm before diving behind the teacher's desk.
"Is there a problem?" the gargantuan man asked the unfazed German teacher, and received a rather impolite glare.
"There is a racket coming from in this French class. It has to stop."
"I can help you with that," Mendez said, pushing him aside, and going in. With very little effort at all, he picked up the still-ranting Robert, and carried him off by the throat.
"Hey!" Brad shouted, still hiding behind the desk, "You can't just cart off my student!"
"Are you going to do something about it?" one of the kids asked, sounding a tad concerned.
"Um… In a minute…"
In a Dark Room Hidden Somewhere In the OfficeLeon rifled through folders with both hands, holding the flashlight precariously against his shoulder with his head, while Carlos was (against his good judgment) looking through the students' permanent records at their request. He was about to give up and tell them to do it themselves, when Leon piped up excitedly.
"Hey, Carlos! I found something!" he held up a manila folder that had been labeled with big red letters. "It says 'Read and Die: School District Conspiracies'!"
Carlos sighed exasperatedly. "Wow, it's so inconspicuous."
Leon opened it and found a list. "Let's see… The elementary schools seem to have some kind of hit-man service going… The primary school is utilizing child labor to make those stupid America Online disks… The high school's assistant principal is trying to take over the world… Ah – here we are! Middle school – getting kids into drugs and the mafia, and … Aww, the last part's been ripped off… I wonder where it is."
"Great. Who the heck could have taken off with it?" Carlos groaned.
Meanwhile, in Wesker's Science class:
"Ha ha ha! This is great – kinda lame, but great!" Wesker said to himself, stuffing the last part of a school conspiracies list (reading 'Hire people with unassuming first names, and then put them together to form names of famous people from the last century') into his pocket. "Now I can play mind games with those two clowns!"
In the Next Room Over from Wesker'sWilliam Birkin sat at the desk, working quietly on mixing different vials together, scribbling down equations, and paging through reference books. He was supposed to be teaching about kinetics, 'to the best of his ability' as stated by the principal, but he wasn't interested. And he wasn't about to invest energy in anything he didn't want to.
Somehow, in the absence of his attention, the students had started mixing different solutions together and were daring each other to drink them, while others were tossing cornstarch at each other.
Despite his lack of interest in what was going on, he was getting just slightly peeved that cornstarch was getting all over the teacher's desk… And himself. Right when the urge to tell everyone to "be silent" kicked in, the phone rang.
He stared at it, then after about two minutes, he answered.
"Hello?"
"Will, it's me Albert."
"Nice of you to ring, Albert. But you're right next door."
"I know, it's just that I'm watching a couple of kids beat each other to a bloody pulp, and I can't leave the room under those circumstances."
"Why don't you break it up?"
"Eh… It's not worth the effort… They'll wear themselves out soon enough."
"Right." Birkin stared at a crack in the ceiling, while toying with a vial impatiently. He was wishing that his students would resort to killing each other, so he could be alone.
"Hey, what's that white stuff all over you?"
William looked at the powdery patches all over himself, and then peered out into the hall to see Wesker with his head just outside of the door, waving at him stupidly. He must have been really bored over there, with the fight going on.
"Cornstarch," Birkin moaned, and he could swear Wesker was holding back a laugh.
"I won't ask," he said, "But if you need any help let me know. What the hell?"
"Something wrong, Albert?"
"No. Bitores just walked by with some kid in a death grip…"
"Almost certainly going to utilize him as a subject for experimentation."
There was a sudden shout of "Go to hell, motherfucker!" both next door and over the phone. Birkin frowned.
"I assume they're still fighting?" he asked.
"Yeah. Sorry, Will, but I think I should go now." Wesker hung up, and there was a loud clatter next door as well as some muffled shouting, and it sounded like the pandemonium had come to a halt. It seemed like everything was going to be fairly acceptable… But not for long, since Brad came running by from the direction of Bitores's room, screaming and being chased by people with pitchforks.
"I SAID YOU COULD KEEP HIM! DON'T HURT ME!" he shrieked, and ran down the stairs, still being pursued by angry farmers.
Birkin put his head down on the desk, wishing he could die. Then he'd get some peace.
In the Home EC Room Just Past the LibraryAshley was busy going over how to make an apple pie, while her students were slightly distracted by the sound of a chainsaw being revved next door. She just tried to ignore it, pretending that chainsaws were just tools for cutting wood, not taking people's heads off. Shuddering, she continued the lecture.
"Now, since we don't have any actual apples, or the time to peel them all, we'll be using canned apples." She set an open can down on one student's desk, and raised an eyebrow when he started sniffing it.
"You can smell the artificial flavoring!" he said happily, and she proceeded to take the can away and put it on the teacher's desk.
"Anyway… You have your recipes, now if you'll go over to the kitchen and get into your groups, you can start making your pie."
The students got up and slowly went over to the other side of the room in a subdued manner. Ashley had already set out everything for them so they didn't need her right off the bat. She looked at some papers on her desk, not really paying as much attention to them as she was the chainsaw going next door.
What the hell was going on over there?
She wandered back and forth along the front of the room, trying to block it out by reading the names of fruits off of posters in the back. "Apple, Pear, Banana, Orange, Kumquat, Nectarine, Peach, Grapes, Kiwi, Star fruit, Strawberries, Blueberries, Raspberries, Gooseberries, Blackcaps, Watermelon, Honeydew, Cantaloupe, Coconut…"
The chainsaw revved and she stopped, starting to feel anxious. Maybe if she just saw what they were doing…
Ashley walked a few yards down the hall unhurriedly, telling herself that it was all in her mind and there was nothing to be scared of. At the door, she cautiously entered, looking around for the source of the sound. It looked like everyone had assembled in the woodshop area, where they were all gathered around a guy that looked vaguely familiar somehow…
She got a little closer to them, watching the vaguely familiar guy cutting 2x4s with his chainsaw. When he turned around to face the class, he saw he standing in the middle of the room and started to come at her quickly.
"Not again!" she screamed running for the door and being followed by the seemingly irked Dr. Salvador. She ran past the room, to the end of the hall, where she figured that she might be safer hiding in the girl's bathroom through some power of school rules…
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And it goes on… CHEETOS! Thanks to my sister for that bit about Cheetos – she had a dream the other night that Nemesis went to school with us and obsessed over anything cheesy… And a little factoid about my school district – the number one drug sold in this area, according the local police, is heroine; and this county is the most heavily mafia-populated county in my state. Another factoid – Brad doesn't make a very good French sub.
Hope ya like the school district conspiracies. I actually was writing a story about the assistant principal of my high school taking over the world, until I graduated. I'll have to go back and finish that… Oh, and I'll include more on what happened to the charries in chapter one next time – it's going to be fun. And you'll get to find out what Wesker did after hanging up the phone.
Well, another chapter down. How many more depends on you guys! Leave a review and let me know what you think, or any ideas you have! All is welcome.