"Ms. Manson, please consider the impact you could make," the Dean pleaded.
"Dr. Vandenberg-"
"Please, just call me Karen," the Dean interrupted.
"Fine," Sam replied, raising her hands over her head, "Karen. I'm a freshman Karen; I don't know how to teach! How am I supposed to teach a college course on ghosts without knowing how to teach?"
"It's actually fairly simple," Karen replied, "and the rest of the faculty can help if you have any questions. Please Ms. Manson-"
"Please, just call me Sam," Sam interjected.
"Alright, Sam," Karen said with a sigh. "As you so adroitly illustrated," Sam snorted, "We are quite devoid of expert knowledge on the subject. And as you personally told me, you are one of three such experts in the whole world.
"This class is becoming increasingly popular, and we need an authority on the subject to teach it."
"Why can't-"
"Mr. Phantom is too recognizable a figure to properly teach a college level class, and your friend Mr. Foley is only halfway through his second term as Mayor of Amity Park. You are our only hope of properly teaching this subject for the foreseeable future."
Sam glowered at the ground. Cursing her big mouth, she tried to think of a way out of the situation. On one hand, she'd been right. Aside from maybe some monks in Asia or shamans in India, she and her friends were the only real experts on ghosts.
Well, maybe Vlad Masters, but last they'd checked, he was floating somewhere around Saturn's furthest moon.
And the government probably wouldn't take too kindly to him showing his face again.
"What if I just told another professor what they need to know?" Sam asked. "Couldn't they teach it?"
"Were it so easy," Karen replied with a sigh, "we could bring up quite a lot of professors' online ratings. The sad, unfortunate fact is that, at some point, professors have to answer questions, and if they have to consult a notebook or phone a friend to do that, they aren't really valuable to anybody."
Feeling the inescapability of the corner she'd talked her way into, Sam took a deep breath, then let it out all in a rush. "Fine," she said, regretting every syllable, "I'll try."
Sam arrived early the next week, pulling her new laptop past the heavy textbooks in her bag and setting it next to the cables attached to the projector hanging from the ceiling. She booted it up and opened her slides, hoping beyond hope that they would work.
She'd spent the whole weekend trying to write down what she knew, organize it into something that a distant observer might describe as a curriculum.
On a cloudy day.
Through oil-smeared sunglasses.
And she wasn't sure if she'd succeeded.
For several minutes, she double and triple checked her slides for errors, all the while wondering what she was even doing there. The clock on the wall that had ticked so painfully slowly the previous week seemed to run twice as fast as it should, ticking away the time she had left.
Then suddenly, much too suddenly, it was time. The doors unlocked remotely with a harsh click, and Sam scrambled to check her slides one more time.
As her classmates - her students, she reminded herself, feeling a shiver travel down her spine at the thought - as her students filtered through the doors on either end of the top tier of tables, a questioning murmur grew.
She looked up the inclined lecture hall, curved rows of tables and chairs pointed straight at her, and the class full of people that had just the previous week been mocking her beginning to fill seats and stare down at her.
The anxiety she'd been feeling quickly began to rise toward total panic, and would have arrived there and blown straight through into hysteria if one of the older students, a burly man Sam remembered Brianna calling by the name 'Caleb', hadn't said loudly, "What are you doing? Where's Dr. Mentia?"
The disdainful tone of the comment and the slew of similar ones made by the rest of the class paradoxically served to settle Sam's nerves. "Professor Mentia," she said loudly, drowning out her classmates'- students' comments, "was let go last week. Which you'd know if you'd checked your email.
"Unfortunately, since no one else was qualified to replace him, Dr.—" she quickly closed her mouth, catching herself again; saying things wrong was going to get very old very soon, "I mean, Karen Vandenberg, Dean of Humanities, decided to have me do it."
"Do what?" Brianna asked from her place next to Caleb.
"Replace Professor Mentia," Sam replied.
"WHAT?" Caleb demanded. Half the class followed him this time. All but three of them furiously pulled out their laptops and a cacophony of mouse clicks and keyboard strikes filled the room.
Sam watched as face after face fell, each of them reading to the end of the email Dr. Vandenberg had sent out. Curiously, the three students mixed in with the rest of the class didn't even seem bothered by her new position. In fact, they seemed genuinely supportive, casting disapproving glances at the students nearby.
"You have got to be kidding me," Caleb said, folding down the lid of his laptop.
"I did tell you he didn't know what he was talking about," Sam said matter-of-factly.
"Yeah, and you do?" another boy demanded. "Dr. Mentia had a PhD in this stuff; where's your degree?"
"I don't have one," Sam replied.
"Exactly!" Brianna said. "So how could you possibly know better than him?"
"How's not important right now," Sam snapped. "What is important is the fact that the Dean of the University approved for me to be here."
"C'mon guys," one of the three supportive students interrupted, "You really think the University would sack a doctor and replace him with a freshman if they didn't have a good reason?"
"We'll see about that," Caleb said darkly.
Half the class grumbled and half-heartedly pulled out their notebooks, while the other half packed theirs away completely, stood up, and left the lecture hall, led by Brianna and Caleb.
As the last of the leaving students passed through the doors and Sam heard the loud clicks of the doors closing tightly behind them, she said, "Well. That went better than I thought it would."
For the next hour, Sam tried her best to talk about the Ghost Zone. Stumbling and sputtering, she tripped her way through her lesson plan, answering the occasional question from one of the three students that had moved up to the front row.
The others present occasionally scribbled down what she was saying, but for the most part sat slouched, looking mutinously bored.
When the clock finally ticked its way to the end of the class (Sam swore the thing had it out for her), the class rose, bags slung over their shoulders. Sam rapidly packed her laptop away in her bag, shoving her notebook haphazardly alongside it, and then turned to leave…
And saw her only three interested students standing in front of her.
"Uh," Sam said nervously, "can I help you?"
One was a short, thin, incredibly pale woman wearing a black t-shirt with some sort of ship and the words "Starbuck Thirteen" on it in big, sharp letters. She smiled excitedly up at Sam.
To the woman's left stood a tall, dark skinned man that Sam could only describe as 'sturdy'. He had two small silver earrings shining on either side of his head and a white and pink plaid button down shirt that somehow managed to be long enough to cover his stomach.
Beside him was a thin but smartly dressed Asian boy, slightly taller than Sam and standing completely straight in such a casual way that it took Sam a moment before she noticed how weird it looked.
"Yes," the woman said, her excitement not exclusive to her smile, "I mean, maybe- no, shoot!"
Sam looked back at her, her mind utterly devoid of possible responses.
"We just wanted to thank you," the tall man said, voice rumbling out of his throat like a thundering summer storm.
"For what, my spectacular lecture?" Sam replied sardonically, a self-deprecating smile on her face.
"For saving the world," the quiet, marginally accented voice of the Asian boy said.
That stopped Sam up short. "You know about that?" she asked hesitantly, "How do you know about that?"
"Practically everyone on the internet knows about it," the woman said. Sam could just see two tiny blue boxes swinging erratically from the woman's ears as she shook in barely contained excitement. "Is it true that you're dating Danny Phantom? I've been trying to find proof of that for ages! My friend, well not really my friend necessarily but this guy I talk to online doesn't believe it. I keep telling him he'd eat his words one of these days (well, strictly speaking it's kinda hard to eat text on the internet, but the point still stands). Wait till I tell my friends I met-,"
"Hold it!" Sam interrupted, cutting the woman very short. "My friends and I like what little privacy we have right now. You go spilling that to every forum you can find, we're going to lose that."
The tall man looked down at the woman, a quelling frown on his face, and her excited smile slowly evaporated, replaced with the sort of profound disappointment typically reserved for the dissolution of a beloved band.
"How'd you guys find out?" Sam asked the other two.
"I watch the news," the tall man said. "Vaguely remembered seeing a photo of you in the North Pole on one of the local stations. Got talking to these two and it sort of all came together. Makes sense now, you getting this job."
Sam absently massaged her chest, convinced that the man's voice had shaken her lungs loose.
"My father was there with you," the Asian boy said politely, recapturing her attention in an instant, "Matsuzuki Daisuke. I am Matsuzuki Katsuo."
"He was there?" Sam asked, shocked. She tried to remember some of the faces that'd scrambled to build the Intangibility Distributor at the North Pole. It was surprisingly difficult trying to remember them through just three years of accumulated memory. "Wait," she finally said, another Asian man's face bubbling to the forefront, "was he the one coordinating the transfer cable construction?"
Katsuo bowed slightly, "Yes. Our family owns Japan's largest electrical systems contractor. My father speaks very highly of Mr. Foley, and also of you and Mr. Phantom."
"That's... great!" Sam said, completely incapable of thinking of something better to say, "And, uh, sorry I didn't remember your name," she said, "It's just that-"
"There is no need to apologize, Ms. Manson," Katsuo said politely, bowing slightly again, "You had barely met, and you had other concerns at the time. Also, the ones at the top so rarely remember all those below them. Where those at the bottom can much more easily remember the ones above."
Sam blinked at that. "Um, well ok," she replied.
Had she fully understood the significance of Katsuo's statement, she would have replied with somewhat more enthusiasm.
"So, um, what did you guys need? Because I've got a class coming up in a little bit…"
"We just came to introduce ourselves," the woman said brightly.
Sam looked back at her and waited.
And waited.
"Sooo…" Sam said finally, "what's your name?"
The woman jumped in embarrassment, "What do you- Oh! Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I forgot! I mean, I got so caught up with actually getting to talk to you that I-"
"I'm Alex," the shuddering rumble said. Alex looked down at the woman.
"Right," she said, taking a breath. "My name's Katherine, but my friends just call me Kat."
"Well, it was, uh, nice to meet you," Sam said, "I uh, guess I'll see you Thursday. Don't… don't forget to study!"
Walking through the faculty entrance a few seconds later, Sam whispered softly to herself, "That is so weird to say."
Over the next few weeks, Sam slowly got into the rhythm of lectures. It helped that she was also taking classes from actual professors, and, though some of them definitely weren't supportive of the idea, most had been very helpful in formalizing the curriculum when she'd begged them nicely.
Ghost Zone, Ghosts Primer, Ghost Powers, Ghost Factions / Individuals, Ghost Culture. In that order, two to three lessons each, homework on Thursdays, Midterms at the end of every other section. By this point Sam had repeated it countless times everywhere but in her sleep. And she was working on that very, very hard, thinking strongly of all the hours wasted.
Now it was only a matter of getting the class on board. Brianna, Caleb, and the rest of their group had been politely but very firmly rebuffed when they'd demanded Sam be removed. Even better, when Brianna tried to get her obscenely rich father to step in, he'd stormed into the Dean's office, spent about ten minutes shut in there, then walked out and told his daughter to finish the class she signed up for.
Attendance had been slowly getting better, as more and more of the apathetic students grew more and more interested. Now it was only a matter of convincing the openly hostile ones to pay attention.
"Why is there air in the Ghost Zone?" Caleb asked as she finished explaining about the variable time-differential between the real world and the Ghost Zone, the final topic in the section. Caleb's question was the fifth inane question from him in fifteen minutes, and Sam was beginning to feel considerably sorry for the way she'd treated Professor Mentia.
Ignoring Caleb's interruption with that newfound sympathy firmly in mind, she began passing out the quiz she'd prepared with Danny. "This quiz is just to get an idea of how much you know already about ghosts," she said over Caleb's purposely loud conversation with Brianna, "I don't expect any of you to do well on it."
An angry murmur rippled around the room. Before the murmur could move on to angry outbursts, Sam said loudly, "The quiz is NOT a part of your grade, so just relax! I'm just trying to see how much you already know about ghosts."
Which was less than half the reason. She knew they didn't know much, so she was hoping to use the quiz to prove a point. That's also why she and Danny had stuck a section at the end about friendly and unfriendly ghosts.
Based only on their mugshots, her class were going to have to decide if the ghosts were good guys or bad ones. Skulker, the Box Ghost, the Lunch Lady, Pandora, Frostbite, and Wulf; she'd bet Danny dinner and a movie they'd get an average of five out of six wrong.
Unfortunately, he didn't take the bet.
"Start whenever," Sam said, hooking up her Fenton Grader to her laptop. "You've got fifteen minutes."
The minutes ticked by at relatively the correct pace. Sam congratulated herself on finally wearing the clock down.
Caleb, Brianna, and their lovable clique of compatriots were the first of the students to walk up and put their completed tests on her desk, while the rest of the class trickled in more slowly.
The Inquisitive Trio, as she'd taken to calling them, were some of the last to turn theirs in.
As the last student took their seat and the room began to buzz with conversation, Sam fed the quizzes through the Fenton Grader.
"Alright," Sam said after the laptop had finished processing the last one, speaking loudly to get their attention, "You did okay on the regular stuff; about a D- average."
Pressing a key on her laptop keyboard, a graph appeared to illustrate.
An angry murmur rose up from the students. "However," Sam said loudly, "You all did terrible on the Friend-or-Foe portion."
Another key, another graph, but this one's curve was significantly lower. "Average for that was a little less than thirty percent."
"The point of this quiz was to show you how much of what you think you know is wrong," she continued. "That's what-"
"Hold on," Caleb shouted from his seat. "Are you really trying to tell me that most of us got that part completely wrong?! Bull crap!"
Sam pressed another key on her keyboard. "These are the right answers," Sam said, the mugshots appearing on the screen, "They should-"
"There is no way Pandora is a good guy!" Brianna said, staring up at the projector screen. A slew of other students snorted, scowled, and shouted their agreement. "Everyone knows she's a bad guy!"
"That was the whole point," Sam shouted over the students. "To show you how little you actually know!"
"Says you!" one of Brianna's clique shouted.
"Yeah," another shouted, "And we still don't have any reason to believe you!"
"I don't know what you said to convince the Dean you knew what you were talking about," Caleb shouted over the strengthening noise, "but I know for a fact it was a lie!"
"Maybe she got one of her friendly ghosts to hypnotize the Dean," a student mocked to a chorus of cruel laughter.
Sam narrowed her eyes. "Fine," she said. "You still need proof after the Dean shot you down? Then I'll show you proof." A plan began to form in her head that she couldn't wait to try out, "Obviously none of you are going to listen to anything I say today, so be here on time Thursday."
"Now get out of here," she began packing up her stuff, "I've got a friend to meet up with."
The Inquisitive Trio looked at each other and smiled.