A/N: So, this chapter is about two and a half times larger than the first, and features more of Serah, Vanille, and Fang. I don't feel like spoiling how ridiculous this chapter is. Let's just say that I got very excited after eating candy and playing through XIII and XIII-2.
Some time had passed since the food-fight. At this point, Serah Farron was fidgeting at the front of the class, hands clasped behind her back as she swayed back and forth nervously.
"My, my, you're looking awfully thin lately," Miss Nabaat announced perceptively, eying her. "It's something about those elbows of yours.. too thin, I think." Offhandedly, she spouted, "Have you been slamming your arms in doors again?" The class collectively snickered all but for Serah's sister, who quirked a brow. "You really shouldn't do that, little Farron. Not everyone has deliciously flat elbows like your sister, sure, but there's no sense in beating yourself up over it, not if it makes you late for class, understand?"
"Someone has an interesting take on psychotherapy," Fang's voice cut through the quiet cacophony like a knife before landing the brunette an elbow to the ribs courtesy of big Farron.
Serah looked at her shoes, ashamed. "Yes, Miss Nabaat," she conceded, desperately wanting to take her seat; she waited until the teacher ordered her to do so before slinking off to the back of the class and taking up the empty space dead center between Vanille and Fang, who busied themselves with exchanging flan flavored gum sculptures, or rather, in Fang's case, smooshing the well-chewed forms into the bottom of her desk. A large, extra gooey glob of fresh gum oozed downward from Fang's work area, coated with copious amounts of saliva, meaning that it was fresh; Miss Nabaat eyed its owner with somewhat of a miffed squint as Fang coaxed the droopy blob back into place whilst putting on the most charming of sheepish grins.
Serah watched the affair with nothing short of horror and gawked at the sheer size of the gum wad. How did she even get all that in her mouth? The shorter pinkette wondered, looking to Vanille's desk, where the redhead merrily busied herself with more spitty sculptures, D-did the two of them chew it at the same time and clump it all together? Serah immediately purged her thoughts of this subject altogether as the image of the two long-time flunkies conjoined at the lips whilst chewing over a long, slobbery mass of flan flavored yellowishness imprinted itself in her mind. Serah blanched.
Lightning seemed to be thinking along the same lines as her younger sister; with a single glance to the back of Serah's head, then to the messes at which the girl's attention was directed, the taller pinkette visibly paled and shuddered. What has been seen cannot be unseen.
The ever-stylish Miss Nabaat proceeded to her lesson for the day, donning once again the patented sadism-glasses. The students groaned as she began. "Now class, following the incident last week"-she looked pointedly at Hope, who logically should not have been in this class due to a severe age gap between him and the other students, and Snow-"which subsequently lead to several hair surgeries and five days' absence on my part, not to mention two hundred sixty-nine student suspensions in total, all Caterpillar students must now take an additional course on the ill effects of heroic delinquency." She paused, now glaring most pointedly at Snow. "This subject, as you all will be pleased to know, is taught by none other than myself, requires thirty two study hours per week, and will entail thirteen one-page essays per credit hour, per day. Cheating will be rewarded by Supreme Principal Overlord Dysley, who will relish in the writing skills of you budding young minds, especially those of you heinous repeat students – Vanille, Fang – and determine various punishments, which will range from choral arts courses to nails-against-chalkboard appreciation class. The former will be instructed by Professor Sephiroth, and the latter by Professor Rosch."
"But what if we like those classes?" Vanille piped up, earning death glares all around. Fang interrupted the resulting silence with a squish of the gum that just wouldn't stay put under her desk.
Miss Nabaat's smile, if it were possible for such to occur, seemed to grow even eviler than before. "Then we'll forgo that route, and you'll get"-everyone knew what came next since this exact same speech had been heard for three years preceeding with Fang and Vanille on the same class roll-"the hardcore courses." Secretly, the woman thought to herself, I hope this kid doesn't like spankings; if she does, well, there really isn't much more that we have to offer this year.
The entire classroom erupted into a round of contagious 'ooh's before Vanille and Fang simultaneously returned, "Well gee, that doesn't sound so bad. Can we take our courses together again?" This elicited a sigh from Jihl.
"No!" the teacher yelled, then turned away from the two as they deflated. "Pfft. Of course, the Overlord Special wouldn't work on the mutant children," she mumbled. "You know what, I shouldn't have said anything. All of you, hold still," Jihl directed before strutting in an unnecessarily jaunty manner so that her impossibly large chest created a feasible distraction. When the children had gone sufficiently slack-jawed at her incomprehensibly exaggerated assets, she recited "By the power of my magnificent boobage, I command each of you to forget everything that happened from the beginning of class up until now."
For a brief moment, the class sat in a stupor in front of a triumphant Jihl Nabaat before slumping forward and collapsing onto their desks momentarily. Lightning was first to awaken from the momentary trance, looking around quizzically before re-witnessing her sister sit up and shudder at the disgusting slime that now stretched from the underbelly of Fang's desk to the tile floor. The older sister soon followed suit when she looked to Serah's right to witness the sight of Vanille snoring over what had originally been a half-dried flan sculpture. Gum was everywhere, including in Vanille's hair. This didn't bode well.
Several seconds later, Fang's skull flew up and back into the student behind her as she reawakened and shouted, "Woah! Where am I? Who did tha - oh, it's just you." She intended this line for Serah, but the girl was oblivious, focusing only on the mess that Fang had created. Fang mistook Serah's inability to look at her for guilt, saying, "You know, you didn't have to hit me, mini-Light; that was mean."
The innocent party began to protest, "But I didn't-"
Serah's sister gave her a disapproving look. "She's not an action figure, Fang." The pinkette furrowed her brow at her semi-friend's fancy blue and white blanket, which appeared to have been adhered to the floor along with the flan gum.
Next was Vanille's turn to rise, and she did so with a big, cutesy yawn and stretch, oblivious to the fact that a large, gooey curtain of gum was still adhering her to the desk even as she did so. Even Fang was baffled by the calamity, not quite aware that this was her fault; she'd been the one to purchase ninety-nine packs of Gorgonzola Surprise from Sazh and his big trench coat the week before, after all. At once, the half-grown brunette on her left shouted, "Vanille! What happened to your head?" She pointed at what should have been the girl's copper hued, pig-tail 'do but was instead a veil of goop. "It looks like you tried to wear a flanborg as a hat!"
Serah and Lightning could only stifle their vomit as the redhead's hands instantly went to her hair to make sure that it hadn't all evaporated or morphed into a gelatinous form over the course of the last minute or so. "Fang, what are you"-her fingers became entangled in the glob and she deflated-"talking about..." A brief second went by without any reaction on Vanille's end before the girl steamed, "Fang? What is this?" She dragged a goopy hand from her head and watched with irritation, a thing Vanille seldom did, as a saliva-like trail sagged between her head and hand before breaking and falling to the ground with a plop. "Is this your fault?"
"No! I don't know what you're talking about, Vanille!" Fang hastily defended, "Just ask Light-"
"Don't ask me; I don't want any part of this," Lightning interjected, frowning.
"Er, mini-Light! Ask her!" the brunette corrected, "I don't know what happened, honest, right, mini-Light?"
Serah looked between the two with a ponderous expression. "Well," she said astutely, "Judging by the fact that your blanket is stuck to the floor, I dunno..."
Fang's immediate alarm went to her lap, where her improvised garment, which was most definitely not a glorified blanket, resided. "What? Serah, my sari is fine," the lanky teen replied, "I see what you're goin' for. You're just tryin' to freak me out." She sighed. "If that's the way it is, little one, two can play at that game." Fang squinted at Serah's form before finally settling on something. "Mini-Light, don't say you didn't ask for it, but there's a bug in your hair."
Immediately, Serah screamed, bolting up and frantically clawing through her pink strands until her hair extensions fell out and her ponytail hit the floor. "Where? Get it out! Get it out!" she shrieked, "Miss Nabaat, I'm going to the bathroom!" And I swear, I'm going to kill whoever did this horrible deed to my hair!
As the younger sister left the room, Lightning commented, "That may have been a bit excessive, Fang. You know how she is about bugs, and ever since Dad attacked her with a pair of clippers, she's been embarrassed about having shorter hair than Hope."
Vanille, disturbed by the scene, now stared at the floor where the most of what she previously believed to be Serah's hair lay in a tangled mass. Fang remained silent, tugging on her blanket to readjust it along her frame; without any fastenings, it proved bothersome to keep in place all day long, and not to mention, it looked really ridiculous. She kept tugging, but the thing just wouldn't move. Finally, the girl looked under her desk to see the dilemma, and her dearest Mister Snuggles was indeed stuck to the tile as Serah had said.
"My blanket – I mean, Mister Snuggles!" she screeched in dismay. "Who did this to you? Was it that dopey Hope?"
"Oh, Mister Snuggles," Lightning mocked, imitating Fang's current posture, which was that of the girl having ripped the fuzzy fabric from the floor and clutched it to her chest, "That's not a blanket's name, no!"
"You're just okay with this?" Vanille peeped.
The straight-A student simply shrugged, unbothered. "I don't see why I shouldn't be," she said, "You two seem to have it under control."
"Mister snuggles!" Fang cried out in contradiction to her point, weeping, "My prideful sari, I knew ye well!"
"See? She's coping just fine."
Alas, Vanille sniffled, looking to Lightning with wide, imploring eyes of verde. "Lightning, do something, please?" She resembled a particular cute, green eyed, funny-accented, orange, boot wearing feline, but unfortunately Lightning wasn't too fond of any pussies that didn't belong to Serah, so this cat was working dangerously far out of its league; Serah's cat, Snow, was the coolest... but technically, Snow was Fang's cat first, so this was quite a conundrum.
Somewhere in an alternate dimension known as In-School Suspension, Lebreau punched Snow in the arm and said, "I told you so!"
Looking at Vanille as if she'd grown six deformed limbs from out of her belly-button, Lightning frowned. "Please do what?"
In the short span of time that Vanille spent drooling at her afterward, an infuriated Serah stomped her way into the classroom before abusively slamming the ubiquitously large – comparable to the size of Snow's feet in relation to the rest of his body, Villiers', not the female cat's – door for the second time in the span of three minutes. Even Miss Nabaat was forced to take notice as the normally placid girl loomed her way over to Fang's desk like a menacing thundercloud, pink brows twitching all the way.
"You," the shorter of the two pinkettes in the room snarled at the pitiful lump that was Fang, "You made me ruin my hair, and for that, you must die..." Her eyes narrowed into angry slits before she smacked the sparse school supplies off of the raven haired girl's desk, subsequently nailing Sazh in the afro in doing so; Sazh was unconscious, so nothing came of this, however.
"Er, Serah, isn't that going a little to far?" Vanille dared to ask, trying to make her see reason. This had an unintentional side-effect; Serah's murderous gaze now locked onto the redhead, promising doom.
"Shut. Up." Serah fumed before backhanding Fang in a very Farron-esque sort of way and taking Vanille's collection of motivational stickers from her gum encrusted desk. "This is mine now. You can have it back when you apologize for acknowledging Fang's existence." Sullenly, the little Farron collected herself and took a seat at her desk, effectively ignoring the fact that without her hair extensions, her head resembled a half-eaten roll of toilet paper. Seeing this, Lightning came to the conclusion that angry Serah would make a better teacher than she herself would, if their current instructor was an accurate model of such. As if to prove this point, the pinkette snarled at Fang, crossing her legs.
In a rare act of mercy, Miss Nabaat performed the ritual from earlier, thus erasing the memories of everyone in the classroom all over again. Not long after, she resumed her lecture from before without interruption, considerably more miffed at having had to say it twice over, and that was that before Serah, Fang, and Vanille turned to grief about their respective predicaments, having only faint ideas of what had happened to them.
Take three, Nabaat thought to herself, irritated, Let's see if we can get it right this time around. She sighed raggedly. All this memory erasing was really counter-productive to her tight schedule.
Lightning retained a sense of deja vu throughout and grimaced as Fang shouted, "Hey, Vanille, mini-Light, what the hell is up with your hair today? You been takin' suggestions from Raincloud or somethin'?"
Silence. All eyes in the room instantaneously locked onto Fang. More silence.
Lightning's gaze narrowed until she was drilling holes into Fang's head through blurry little slits. "And what about you, Scraggles? I didn't know incorporating acacia gum and floor tiling into your wardrobe was a style now," she sneered, "You must be starting a new trend."
And so, the drama ensued again, and several more jokes were made by other classmates about Serah's hair and Fang's blanket before Jihl had finally gotten fed up. "Alright, enough!" she shouted, silencing the children just as Sazh was beginning to wake up from his third nap enough to duck a thrown baton. "The day is almost over, and I've had enough of erasing the memories of you brats for one hour. If you can't shut up, take it up with our elective course instructors, got it?"
And so the class was silent until Fang spoke. "You think they can fix my sari?"
"Ooh, and do they still have nails-against-chalkboard appreciation? I always felt like I learned so much from that class," Vanille cooed lovingly.
The class as a whole, excluding those two collectively sighed and shook their heads, Miss Nabaat included. Geez, she thought, children were such a chore.