It was a day. Not a notably good one, though, as far as days usually went, it was hardly old enough to be considered a bad one. A few early birds had had remarkably good days thus far, and in stark contrast, a good few worms had had days that were not only quite bad, but quite short. The worms could take small comfort in the thought that they would never have bad days ever again. However, there are some people, to whom, any day is a good day to perceive as a good day. These people are usually termed "Cheerful", or "enthusiastic." They are occasionally referred to as "Sociopaths." These days are called "Good Hair Days". Sakura Kizama was such a person. A teacher blessed with a cheerful disposition and a joyful heart, she was also marginally less blessed with a name that was as common as dirt and a face to match. This did not diminsh her joyful attitude, however, and it did not keep her from humming a brisk little tune as she readied herself for another day. She was going to have, she was sure, a Good Hair Day. One wonders how a junior high school teacher could maintain such a suffocating aura of happiness. One wonders how a junior high school teacher could manage to maintain anything other than a comparatively* ordered classroom, and even then such a feat would be considered striking. But no, Kizama-sensei was a staunch believer in positive thoughts and happiness. And she kept thinking positive thoughts and cheery tones even while packing her bags and casually hopping the train to the school, even as she passed the casual salarymen, even as she walked up the stairs, even as she walked into the staffroom, and even as she made her first-morning coffee**. And every last one of them careened to a halt as she reached to the small fridge for the cream. She was always the first in. Teaching history and culture to children barely old enough to discern the difference between last year's baseball finals and the Edo Era on the scale of importance made on prepare a great deal. But this morning, she had been beaten in to work. This didn't phase her in the slightest - she was not a competitive person. But what she was was a paranoid person. Anything Suspicious would arouse her almost instantly, making it utter hell for her students if they were so foolish as to produce any notes that didn't directly resemble the subject at hand. One hapless girl had once had to recite the note from her parents detailing her chicken pox when Kizama-sensei was feeling particularly enthusiastic. And Suspicious stood four inches from her without her having noticed him all morning. He was, of first note, tall. Tall for an asian, and tall even for a gaijin. As she looked up at his six foot three frame, the next note to come to mind was that he was _ugly_. Even a plain woman like herself could notice that this man, silently standing where he was, was no oil painting. Notes three through nine vanished as he looked at her like he'd just seen her, snorted, and shouldered past her from his position in the corner of the teacher's lounge. Observation changed to supposition and then to suspicion, and Sakura, as soon as she figured this man was suitably far away, stepped from the lounge, observed the direction in which he was parting, and ran like all heck the opposite way, looking for the janitor or security guard - whichever came first. The man nodded. Well, he'd looked around the school, and he'd become familiar enough to navigate without help. Content that he'd gotten that under his belt - before the teachers arrived no less - he removed himself from the school grounds. After all, since he didn't actually have the position there for another twenty-four hours, there was no need to hang around, was there? Kizama-sensei had to have the day off, to the joy of her students. Apparently, this, combined, with the absence of a new English teacher gave them a significant bout of free time. "Joyful joyful, we adore the-" Shimaru Shinsei was one of those polar opposites to Sakura Kizama. Of the most important note, he was male. He was also stuck in a permanent Bad Day. In Shimaru's case, it would be a Bad Hair Day, but for the remarkable absence of hair. So, Shimaru was having a Bad Day. It was barely fifteen minutes past six, and he was already having a bad day. Aside from having put the fear of god into an apparently overparanoid teacher, Shimaru had had nothing but bad things to say about this day in particular. He'd woken up on the wrong side of the bed - and fallen out to land on something painfully cornered. He'd found the washing machine broken and his only clean clothes to be beaten leathers from his days spent beating around tombs in Israel. He'd found all the milk in his fridge was expired. He'd found that he had no coffee left. He'd found a remarkable absence of tea in his cupboards. He'd found he had woken up excruciatingly early, despite it being one of his last free days before being forced to fulfill the drab task assigned him by his sister. He'd found no water whatsoever when he tried to turn on his taps in what he laughingly referred to as his home, condemning him to either a day without a bath or a trip to the public baths - both hells beyond contemplation. And his car radio, tape deck and CD Player, regardless of any kind of actual input that would influence its conventional output, was not going to stop playing anything but Christian Music. In the past, Shimaru had nothing against Christians. Some of his best friends had been nominally Christian - a few of the Caesers, at least - and his family had never really denied its faintly European bent and blood, producing its tall offspring. But Shimaru now held a grudge against Christianity on the most primal level; in the big street of life, God had chosen to fling a brick through his window. A big brick. A big brick with a wasp's nest attached. And so every joyous exultation from his speakers was punctuated by an incredibly hefty thump directly into the electronic face of the expensive equipment. In defiance with common laws of physics, where a person of Shimaru's strength could put his fist clean through the device, the device remained producing high-fidelity praises and hymns. "Fricking... hell..." Shimaru muttered as he took a roundabout, his free hand mercilessly hammering away at the radio. "Six billion people on the face of the frickin' planet and it has to be me with a baptist in my radio." The refrain abruptly changed to horns and swing as Shimaru checked the streetsigns, his irritation fading as a ska beat began to pick up his spirits*** and his mind began to occupy itself with the task of locating his future employment. Smirking nastily to himself, Shimaru found the street name, and merrily rode down it, muttering angrily as the early morning hordes of pedestrians began to filter across crossings and impede his progress. Just as his mood began to blacken, he tried to at least keep himself from trying to throttle his steering wheel by turning up the music. The tune, he admitted, was foreign, an English one. No, American. Ah, good ska was a rare beast in Japan - one had to turn to the west for such things. Yes, this was... Five Iron Frenzy, if he wasn't mistaken. He wasn't. Just as his mind began to absorb itself in the identification of the style, and possibly... ENJOY himself... Shimaru's brief hiatus from bastardly grouchiness was cut short by acknowledging the lyrics. "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow-" Shimaru grumbled as he parked the car and swore nastily as he gathered his accoutremonts to go face the day. The Bad Day. He rocked back in his chair as the students filed in. Heh. They hadn't expected _that_, he bet. To have the teacher turn up first, especially given how early the students usually arrived, would have been a tad jarring. Ah well, they're just elementary kids. Shimaru didn't see any reason to single any one of them out for uniquely abusive treatment. Stretching his shoulders, Shimaru glared around the room through his sunglasses and adjusted his cap. There had been one or two who'd turned up early, and, being right teacher's pets, had sat attentively as though expecting him to start some kind of conversation. Shimaru almost sniggered at the thought of any of these kids holding a cohesive thought long enough to hold his interest. They were milling around their desks, a handful of kids all dealing with assorted issues and generally having as much fun in the last few moments before school began as they possibly could. And as luck - or at least whatever it was that determined Shimaru's interactions with the universe not determined by other people or deities - would have it, there were a handful of loudmouthed kids. Scratching an ear, Shimaru scanned the kids. Not a _bad_ bunch, per se. They were wearing their shoes properly, which indicated that if they thought they were toughies, they weren't showing it. They were all in school uniform with very few personal flairs attached. That sort of shtick didn't really kick in until Junior year anyway. Shrugging, Shimaru glanced up at the bell and then at the clock. And then counted. Shimaru took in a breath and counted once more, to ten. The first encounter with a teacher is always a difficult time. Those who wish to engage in as exploitative a relationship as possible have a penchant for pushing the teacher's limits, in hopes to determine themselves as some kind of special case that was beyond redemption. Others attempt to become the teacher's pet by being as well-behaved as possible. But the instant the bell rang, the visiting students suddenly felt the room temperature drop by a fraction****, and made themselves absent as swiftly as possible. Shimaru had barely counted to six. But no, three students continued to prattle away. Two girls and a boy. Shimaru shrugged as he got to ten, the hunk of chalk already between his fingers. With a practiced arm, he raised it behind his head and let fly... Now, projectile warfare between students and teachers is not an uncommon thing in Japanese schools. Erasers, chalk, shoes and pens are frequently used as ammunition in the war of education, and the most open assaults are on the part of the teacher. The sternness of the projectiles can be used to awaken a dozing student, or as a non-verbal reprimand. However, this ilk of hazardous flak is generically constrained to higher grades with more difficulties in discipline. Which is why the more-or-less docile class was not prepared for the remote possibility that not only would the newest sensei see fit to throw things around the room, nor that he'd be at that limit within his first minute of being on-duty. With a sort of delayed prescience, the student glanced up at the chalk, not spinning drunkenly like a kind of hurled axe but rather ballistically spinning towards like a long white bullet. And instinct took over as the body curled in on itself and the bladder emptied. The chalk zoomed over his head, making a faint humming noise until it struck the lockers on the back wall of the class and shattered. "Well." Shimaru shrugged. "Anyone get the message? In your seats, pukes." Were it not that it would have shown a crack in the unassailable armour Shimaru had erected around him to provide the effect of a heartless bastard of a tutor who would trash his students up to - but not including - the point of death*****, he would have grinned. As it was, he just shrugged. "Well, I'm sure you all know," he said, flinging his feet around the side of his desk and flattening his chair, "Your last teacher, whatever his name was, buggered off. I can give you a two-word reason for why, for those of you to whom it may concern, but since I doubt any of you is educated enough to know that reason, I'm not going to waste the effort. Instead, I'm going to make you embarass yourself by standing up and giving a poorly-worded, on-the-fly speech, as per custom, simply because, yes, I'm a sadistic bastard, and there's nothing you can do about it. And then we'll conjugate some irregular verbs. So har-de-har." Shimaru smiled inwardly. This job could be more fun than he thought. "Righto." Shimaru pointed at a girl in the front row. "You. Up here. And the first person to smirk's up next." To those interested in temporal physics and their nomenclature, the shortest amount of time in a schoolroom setting is the ohnosecond, the time between a teacher requesting a volunteer and then running out of patience waiting for said volunteer and selecting the single student in the least capable position to accomodate the demands of the task at hand. As the last of the sound waves of Shimaru's first statement had barely begun to reach the back wall and begin their slow progress towards their own demise, they encountered his next word coming in the opposite direction, causing a real traffic jam for those with sensitive ears. And even those without sensitive ears can barely accomodate the sheer terror carried in the one word that was uttered. If speech was silver and silence golden, this word carried such doom it may has well have been depleted uranium. It was a word that had a gravitational field. This word was the word all students the world over dread. It is a word, in the end, that has taken more students to their academic graves than any other three words combined (saving for "Oh, no."). "You." Narrative takes this moment to observe the basic animal impulses surging through the mind of the next victim; Point. See. Realise. Gibber. And Narrative, having had a good old eavesdrop on the human psyche, turns to where Shimaru is speaking to the poor girl out the front... "So... get on with it. Recite your name, age, and whatever goddamned thing I'm supposed to care about right here and now, oh, and whatever sentai you feel is the strongest, and then we'll all pretend to care and talk about you behind your back. It's such a shame that the class has already had a degree of cohesion and as such you won't be backstabbed by early starters on junior high, but there's only so much I can do, so I will observe this simple social dynamic watching you squirm. Well? We're waaaaaaaaaaiiiiting." And back to the child in their seat, who is infinitely more interesting... Worry. Fret. Stew. Urinate. And Narrative decides to just sod off altogether. "Geeze. What crawled up his butt?" Anne had managed to mutter to Joseph before being shuttled off to her own class. Joseph was smarter than that. He was all-but hiding under his desk. He had nothing against teaching as a rule, and he certainly didn't think all teachers were evil incarnate. However, there was a walking, talking, steretype out the front currently humiliating the class one by one. Joseph just rested his head on his desk. By some amazing stroke of luck, Shimaru wearied of scaring the hell out of his class, and by the time the clock had ticked to the halfway mark of his hour-long stint with these students, had stood up, introduced himself in the most basic of ways - writing his name in hiragana on the board - and then began to rattle onto the class about their studies. "Okay, twerps. Unlike most new teachers, I am not going to attempt to start from scratch and therefore fulfill my own neat shedules; instead, let's the point at which the students you're actively weak. So... respond, if you can." They handled him as he belted through his alphabet at lightning speed. They were not, after all, a dumb class. As he rocketed through his state-of-being verbs and action verbs and the distinctions inbetween, they stayed with him. A handful of the class kept up with him as he reeled past articles and nodded at adverbs. And a stark silence fell over them as he resorted to slang. And boy, did he exploit it. Sure, Written English was one thing. But the colloquialisms Shimaru reeled off at the room full of elementary children was terrifyingly fast, and barely a member of the class caught any of them. That was, until... "[Your muzzere was an 'amster and-]" "[Your fazzere smelt of elderberries!]" Joseph responded. Shimaru paused. "[I suppose...]" Shimaru said, in slightly accented English, "[That I deserved that one. Well then. You seem to be well-acquainted with the language. Most of these children speak it poorly, but you, I suppose, have the accent of a dairy maid.]" Joseph hit a crisis point. On one hand, he could exploit an advantage here, an advantage that may prove a saving grace in this class. On the other, it would set him apart and be possibly a nail in a coffin, as the weirdness around him exploded yet further into a cloud of improbabilities into which even fewer would dare stray. For a moment, Joseph wavered, his normally quiet impuleses wrestling with the momentary desire for the spotlight. And almost as though a direct result of the boy's penchant to change the probable to the improbable and the impossible into the likely, the desire one. "[That's appropriate. You have the accent of a cow.]" Shimaru's eyes narrowed a slight bit. "[I've known dogs better-versed in Eigo than you.]" Morphic resonance states that once something has been done, it will be done again and more easily. And so, it was not as as surprisign to see Joseph open his mouth for a response. "[Did they teach you everything you know?]" Shimaru paused. "Bien." he spoke in a very, low, quiet voice. For a moment, Joseph wasn't sure he'd heard him speak at all. "ANYWAY," Shimaru turned his back to his class and produced another chalk, using it to scrawl some terms on the board. "It seems that the grade average IQ for this particular turnip field is just as low as I thought it would be. You're learning English. Why are you learning it? So you can pepper your speech with random Japlish? If so, sod off and listen to the pop radio and spend these two classes bumming cigarettes off the junior high students that pass by. That's not why you learn a language." Shimaru shrugged. "So your first assignment, due... oh, I'll put it at..." Shimaru scratched the back of his neck. "Wednesday, next week, is to write a four-page essay on just why you're learning a second language." A groan came up from the class. "[In English. Submissions with so much 'gana, 'kana or kanji as your own name will be failed automatically.]" The groan increased. "Do you want it due _tomorrow_?" The groan silenced. The deadly pause that followed was only punctuated by the ringing of the bell, to signal the end of Shimaru's bout with the students. "Good. Now. I'm going to sod off." He shrugged and grinned, and stepped towards the door. As he put hand on the doorknob, he turned back, to face the class, his eye catching Joseph's for a moment, but nonetheless staring at space above and beyond Joseph's left ear. "[As the good things of day began to droop and drowse...]" Joseph looked up. For an instant, he felt words rise unbidden to his lips... then he silenced them. Shimaru looked momentarily disappointed, then smirked as if the universe had just proven him right. -- * Comparative, say, to the Ethiopan Navy. ** Those who knew her wondered just why she drank coffee. Those who knew her really well knew _exactly_ why she drank coffee. They're not telling, though. *** For what it's worth, in his case. Lifting Shimaru's spirits is comprable to changing decks on the Titanic - lots of lateral movement, but still sunk. **** 19/20ths ***** this, of course, was an effect because Shimaru would thrash his students up to and beyond the point of death, mostly because it made seating arrangements easier. He was contemplating removing a desk every week of the semester and using whichever student was unseated as an unofficial organ donor and lunchpack for the remaining students. It would be a good lesson in English culture, after all, and put the fear of god into the fat ones.