The Adaptations of a Polar Bear, chapter 2:
"How did we end up here?" Yen Lin muttered.
"I have no idea, but I suspect Ms. Ng had something to do with it…" Mei Keen replied sarcastically.
Ms. Ng had backed away until she could back away no more, trying to appear inconspicuous. A few uncomfortable moments elapsed.
Then the whole class started conversing with each other again as if nothing had happened. They had long learned that weird things occurring were nothing out of the ordinary – the trick was to learn to ignore anything and everything strange going on. In plain and simple Singlish (the Singaporean style of English), this was called bochap. (Don't-care attitude)
Then someone fell out of a nearby tree…
~~
Ms. Lim walked up the bridge, carrying an ominous stack of papers. The class isn't going to be very happy, she thought, glancing down at the first question printed on the paper. Grammer worksheets were bad enough a shot to give out to the mentally unstable class of twenty-three, but the fact that these were reported speech worksheets made the problem just a tad trickier… She sighed.
Rounding the corner, she passed 6H. Mdm. Azizah was currently in there, rambling to them about Singapore's seperation from Malaysia in 1965. That's funny, she thought to herself again, 6I isn't usually this quiet… Then she saw the slight tendrils of smoke emitting from the classroom doors and windows. Ms. Lim groaned mentally. Were they *so* bored up to the point that they decided to start a campfire? Here we go again…
She seriously considered running to activate the fire alarm at that point in time, but then common sense kicked out instinct, and she just continued in the general direction of her form class.
Knowing 6I, anything could happen, but there had been no fatal incidents so far, in their extremely notorious history, and she did not expect that record to be broken… Yet. She, however, would not even be vaguely surprised if she entered the room to find a pile of what looked like English Comprehension worksheets in a burning pile. "They boycotted goods…" Mdm. Azizah's voice floated from 6H as she went on to drone about communists. Boycott could definitely not be ruled out… They were, after all, capable of anything.
But isn't it Science now? I'm sure Mrs. Tong would not allow them to start a fire… Ah well, maybe they're conducting an experiment. Shrugging off the dark thoughts in the best way she could, she walked to the door.
But nothing prepared her for the sight that met her. The classroom was empty. Well, empty as in there was nobody there. 6I could never be literally empty, because there would always be randomly assorted things lying around on the floor… And for 6I's case, randomly assorted meant randomly assorted, ranging from nice, normal Pilot G2 pens, to the not-so-normal suspicious-looking crumpled pieces of foolscap (try and guess), to the absolutely absurd category of items such as purple stuffed dogs that survived three days in the class dustpan. Yep, 6I was such a nice normal class.
Back to the story. 6I was completely deprived of human beings, and a black visualizer, still emitting sparks and a lot of smoke, stood among the thick, grey mist.
She walked in, waving the smoke from her face with her free hand, and reached out to touch the sparking visualizer. Silly thing to do, but she was Ms. Lim after all…
The visualizer blew up again.