Fandom High School

The good news was that this week, the room smelled like fresh, tasty cookies! But, they were in basket held by Sarah. Who was, in fact, in black and white. And wearing a modest dress, and white gloves. And she was smiling. Sincerely!

Were you terrified yet?

"Hello, sweethearts," she cooed. "Since I am told you are all such good students, I thought you would all deserve a little treat. So I brought you some cookies, fresh from the oven this morning." She handed the basket over to a random student who happened to be the nearest. "Here, be a dear and pass these around, sweetie. One for each!"

Satisfied with having played her part for the well-being of their young minds, she then took a seat off to the side, smoothing out her dress before settling down to watch the proceedings. Of course she wasn't teaching. Goodness, no, her housework took up far too much of her time. But she thought she could spare a moment to listen in.

So, now it was Sparkle's turn. Sparkle who, next to Sarah, looked positively vibrant, for all that he was still dressed in his typical black and grey motif. And he was smirking as he took a bite of a cookie, perching himself on a stool at the front of the room.

"Hey, cats and kittens," he crooned, making a point to drag out that 'hey.' "Why all this worrying about where you're going to go in the future, anyhow? Why not take a moment to just sit back, relax, and reflect on where you are. That's your assignment for the day, by the way. I want you all to pick up your pens and write us some totally hep poetry about where you're at, dig?"

No, he hadn't been infected with the 50's bug yet. Yes, he was, in fact, trolling the lot of you and doing it with a grin on his face. So what? You get off the hook for research today. Isn't that ... uh ... supermurgitroid?

[Open!]

"Okay, last week we talked about not getting caught breaking stupid laws," Electroclash started. Or maybe she should have been called Sarah this week, seeing as she was out of uniform and in civilian clothes. (There was a point to that, by the way.) "But that's far from being the only way you can get into trouble by not knowing how to act in a specific location. It's just a pretty obvious one." Or maybe it wasn't, if you weren't her. But whatever. "This time, we're looking at kind of the same thing but from a different perspective. This time, you're not the twits breaking the law. Other people are."

( How to not get mugged like a stupid git! )

[Open!]

Okay, so people in Wild Roving today might or might notice that Sparkle was wearing lipstick to go with his usual raccoon-face. He didn't particularly care. He'd been the most fabulous Katharine Hepburn on the whole damn island. And he'd spent last night egging NPC houses in the rain. Because that was the true meaning of Halloween.

Well, wasn't it?

"So I bet at least a few of you non-modern-Earth people noticed all the costumes yesterday. And the freaky half-rotten bunnies, for that matter." Kinda hard to miss, those. Sparkle only looked slightly traumatized when he mentioned them. "Did you guys even know there was a holiday coming up? Probably sucked a bit if you didn't and wanted to participate, what with all the good costumes and junk being out of stock. Upside is that today's cheap candy day. Buy out all the extra stock while the stores in town are trying to get rid of it cheap. They want room for their Christmas stock, since they're all a bunch'a money-grubbing vultures."

This was an important lesson, guys. Honest.

"Anyhow, what I'm trying to say is, you might've noticed that different places celebrate different things, and maybe while you're there, you won't want to miss that. It would suck to be down in New Orleans for Mardi Gras without being aware that it was freaking Mardi Gras. Or like if you're in Latvia for Christmas and you have no clue what's going on when a bunch of people come to your door singing and dressed in masks and stuff and they want food- Kind of like some kind of weird solstice trick-or-treating, but with mummers instead of little kids dressed like Donkey Kong.

"My point is, when in Rome, at least take the time to find out what all those weirdly specific aisles in Turtle & Canary are supposed to be about. People don't usually develop a fixation on carved pumpkins or fat old men in red suits for no good reason. And you don't even need the internet for this one. Just, like, talk to people. 'Hey, I'm not from around here, why not tell me a bit about holidays and festivals and all of that real fun stuff that I don't understand.' So. Today's activity? There's another major holiday coming up this month here in America. If you're not from around here, talk to people who are and find out what it's all about. If you are from around here, learn about someone else's holiday that might be coming up back home. Like how in a few days the teacher might have been lighting fires to burn some guy named Guy in effigy, or I'd probably be wearing a poppy on my shirt if I could get my hands on one around here if I was like some kind of half-decent Canadian or whatever. You wanna know what that's about? Gotta ask questions, don't you?"

A beat.

"Or look it up online, but that's boring."

[Open!]

"So." Sparkle was the one taking point on class today, and, for all that he'd never done this before, he was looking pretty at home there in front of the room. Possibly because his BS skills were fairly unparalleled. "Over the first half of the semester, the teacher's covered things like finding out where you wanna go, how you're going to afford it, what you're going to do so you're not bored out of your skull, that sorta thing. This week, you're going to learn about what to do when things go bad on you."

( Beware. )

[Open!]