Several years ago, when I first came up with the idea behind this one, my roommate was just learning about the psychology and science behind how we see colors and it messed us both up for a while, haha. I remember being very frustrated by the timing of her syllabus while figuring out how the conversation at the end of this chapter would go. XD

Chapter 5: Preparation

Lancer's class performed admirably.

The students had been eager to leave behind their usual lesson behind in favor of something new. He had expected that. But these teenagers had looked at this as more than just an extra project.

Hands sprung up into the air and Lancer had had a hard time getting each suggestion down on the board before the next person was speaking. Soon, the chalkboard had been completely filled with proofs of their ghostly visitor, arguments for legitimately closing down the school in order to investigate the threat, and suggestions for how to go about making their school a safer place in the meantime.

The ideas flying across the room in that hour and a half had been worthy of seniors, at least. Perhaps finishing a project in a course on state and local government by presenting a change of procedure.

He was able to introduce logical syllogisms and persuasive patterns to these students at least a year before it would have appeared on any teacher's syllabus. And they understood the intricate ideas first patterned by the ancient Greeks because with them his students were putting together an argument with real life applications. About something that mattered to them and with which they had firsthand experience.

They knew something that no one else in the school did. Their mission, and they chose to accept it wholeheartedly, was to make others believe and understand what they themselves had seen.

The rhetorical skills blossomed and flourished in the classroom as people began to understand how to set forth a convincing argument. Students who had never raised their hand in class before were now volunteering their opinions, rephrasing their thoughts to make them more clearly understood, and their classmates encouraged them from the side, nodding their heads and agreeing with everything that was said.

Lancer could have recommended every student in the room to join the forensics team after he heard, for the first time, what they were really capable of. And he could have expected every one of them to do well in the national circuit. But this afternoon was not about recruiting new students for the NFL, it was about preparing a case to the best of their ability.

So now he stood at the front of the room, copying down the notes from the board in a shorthand that only he could decipher. He agreed with the final line of argumentation and order the class had finally decided upon—guided, of course, by his commentary sprinkled throughout the process, but one that was, in fact, nearly entirely their own.

While he was occupied in this final step of preparation before he had to go before the board, he let his students take a well deserved break at the end of class, allowing them free time to complete the little homework that they had been assigned or letting them speak in small groups so long as they did not disrupt anyone actually trying to be productive.

Nearly half of them were finishing off worksheets so that they could spend the rest of their day doing whatever it was they would like. Eating ice cream in the warm sun outside of the Nasty Burger, for example, and forgetting about the oddness taking place in their school. He couldn't blame them. It was exactly the sort of thing he should like to do were he in a position where the safety of others did not rest on the fact that he remember and always maintain constant vigilance.

In the back of the room, several students had actually taken their notes and decided to continue hashing out the finer details of the prose. One girl was sitting with an extremely serious expression on her face pretending to be an unconvinced Principal Ishayama as the students around her took turns plying her with bigger and better arguments.

Lancer smiled. Perhaps he would make a note of those five and send them along to whoever was running their speech and debate team these days.

Casting an eye over the rest of the room, he was satisfied that everyone else was behaving as they ought, talking quietly in small groups with their friends, so he let himself focus on the outline his class had helped him prepare.

One strain of conversation near the front of the room did catch his attention, though, as Ms. Manson and Mr. Foley were asking their newly returned friend about his medical situation. He, too, was curious as to the state of his student, but he knew from experience that teenagers were more open about such things with their friends than they were with their teachers. He had refrained from asking if all he was going to get out of it was a tightlipped answer that Mr. Fenton was 'fine' despite his pale face and the arm in a sling.

But now he listened closely to the exchange in case there was anything that he should know.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Ms. Manson asked, turning to her friend.

Danny shifted at his desk. "Yeah," he replied.

Sam pinned him with a stare that Tucker must have coached her to make at some point in their long friendship. It was an excellent likeness to the expressions her fellow teenagers made on a nearly daily basis, and this one was particularly effective coming at just the right angle to make it look like she was actually looking him straight in the eyes.

"Yeah, man," Tucker followed up by prodding him in the arm. "You don't look too good. We're serious. Did you escape from the hospital? Does Sam need to take you back?"

Danny chuckled nervously. "Sam take me back? What, you're going to let her drive? Then we'll all really need a hospital."

"Hey," Tucker held up his hands. "I'm not going to be the one to take you to one of those white boxes of needles and antiseptic. I'm sure that you can give Sam good enough directions before you pass out in the back seat."

Sam nodded, a grin on her face. "You'll just need to tell me which one's the gas and which one's the brake, but yeah, I can totally take you. And if you don't answer Tucker's question," she added. "We're just going to assume that for once in your life, you were actually rebellious and broke out of the hospital against the doctor's orders, so we're going to have to take you back. It is our duty as responsible citizens."

Tucker chortled. "You… a responsible citizen, Sam? Please…"

"Hey, if it'll get me out onto the road, I'll take it," she said.

"Fair enough," he nodded.

She and Mr. Foley sounded so serious about their plan that for a moment, Lancer was worried about them actually carrying it out and wondered if he should step into the conversation with at least a raised eyebrow to show that their disaster of a plan was frowned upon by the authorities even before they put it into action. Thankfully, he was saved from making that decision when Mr. Fenton decided to answer them and thus make their threat invalid.

"I'm… I'm okay, really," he said.

"Come on, man," Tucker sighed. "You gotta level with us."

"No, I am. I'm okay," Danny pressed. "The doctors let me go. No massive hospital breakouts," he assured them. "Said I was pretty much okay. The sling is mostly for show," he said, lifting it up with more ease than Lancer would have expected. "My parents will… hopefully… let me stop wearing it in a few days. They're just super paranoid because they thought it was a lot worse than it actually is."

"Well, you were in the hospital for a couple days, man," Tucker pointed out. "We all thought you were going to come out of it with at least a missing arm or something."

"Or an extra one," Sam supplied.

"Right. Or an extra one."

Danny flapped his arms in a brief imitation of a chicken, minus the usually accompanying noises, thankfully.

"Nope," he decided. "Just the two. Sorry to disappoint."

"But then why were you there so long?"

Danny hedged by slowly closing the notebook he had on his desk page by page. "They just wanted to run a bunch of tests. Make sure that they didn't miss anything and that it was just my arm, I guess."

"What else could it have been?" Sam asked. "That's a lot of tests for just an arm."

"So many tests," Tucker said, visibly shivering in his seat.

Danny shrugged half heartedly. "My parents wanted to make sure that I didn't have ecto acne or anything…"

"That you didn't have what now?"

"Ecto acne. It's a lot worse than it sounds, apparently. My parents were pretty worried there for a while. The docs would have let me out a lot sooner but Mom and Dad were like 'no we're not leaving until you tell us that he's clean.'"

"Whoa."

"Yeah. One of their friends got it in college and, uh, it sounds like he was in the hospital for a couple years after that."

"A couple years?!" Sam and Tucker chorused.

Danny flinched at the outburst. "Geez, keep it down, would you?" He looked around the room to see lots of people looking toward them. "You're going to get us in trouble!" he said, quickly checking to make sure that Lancer wasn't ready to yell at them.

Lancer, of course, averted his eyes at the last moment and was serenely copying down one of the last lines when his student looked up at him.

"But a couple years? In a hospital?" Tucker asked, his voice going up an octave or two even though he was more quiet than he had been before.

"That's really serious, Danny," Sam said, and Lancer agreed.

"Yeah, well… I… don't have it, okay? So it's all fine," he said, trying to placate his horrified friends, but the image of him relegated to living in such a horrible place for years was a hard one to quell, as they both stared at him for a while. "At first I thought… but it's all good, okay?" he said again, "I don't have ecto acne and I don't need to go to a hospital. I'm… fine."

"Well, I'm really glad about that, man," Tucker finally said, his voice a little rough.

Sam put a hand tentatively on Danny's and quietly said, "Me too."

"But why would they think that's what you had?" Tucker asked. "I mean… that seems really weird, random, right?"

"Um, not so much," Danny admitted. "Their friend who got it? They were working in the lab on a project together and something went wrong and blew up in his face."

"Well, what were you doing, then?" Sam demanded.

One of Danny's hands rubbed at the back of his neck.

"Dude?" Tucker asked, on the edge of freaking out. "What happened? Did… did you… did something…?"

"I, um, accidentally set off one of my parents' inventions. It was a big one and they told me to be careful in the lab and not to touch anything," Danny added with a side glance up to Lancer, "but I didn't think it was working, so I just… well… found out it was working," he finally said with a weak laugh.

Both of his friends stared at him.

"But I'm okay," he stressed. "Really. So, let's change the subject…"

Sam blinked a couple times and then asked, "So what color's your shirt?"

That startled a laugh out of Danny. "White with a red oval. Why?"

"No reason," she said. "Just… curious."

"Well, hey," Tucker said, sitting up in his seat. "What about me? I'm feeling left out over here!"

Sam laughed, "Alright, what color is your shirt?"

"Mustard yellow," he proclaimed proudly, and she was still staring at him with her unfocused eyes when the bell rang to end the last period of the day.

Every student in the class either picked up their bags to start the mass exodus flooding through the hallway or frantically packed up their notebooks to join their classmates. Several of the students took the time to wish Lancer good luck in his presentation, which touched him.

Once the classroom had mostly emptied and Mr. Fenton and Foley had accompanied Ms. Manson off to their next destination, Lancer stood and faced his classroom, gathering strength of mind for his students—from his students—to do what he was about to do.

*NFL = National Forensics League, not the National Football League, although that would have been a perfectly logical assumption to make. ;)