How to Cope with Being Suddenly Famous, Thursday Second Period

[jaegerbombdad]

Herc had, upon getting a good look at his class roster this morning, considered just turning around and leaving and not doing this to himself, but in the end it turned out he was a glutton for punishment. By the time he arrived for class, no one would guess he'd spent most of the morning pacing in his office and muttering pep talks to himself while Max looked on in doggy confusion.

"Right, listen up," he said as he entered the room with Max on his heels, only a minute or two late, "I'm Herc Hansen--that's Mr. Hansen to you lot--and this is Max. Max has run of the classroom, so be nice to him." Herc suspected that wouldn't be hard. "But I want you paying attention to me, not--not my dog." The back of his mind kicked over to panicking over how he'd deal, what he'd say, when Chuck finally thought to wonder why Max was with him now. The rest of him kept going with his carefully rehearsed speech. "If you're here, you're either famous, or you think you might be someday, or you're not sure why you're here but hey, might be useful for you someday too, right? You never know. Take me. I used to fly helicopters. I was pretty good at it, but I wasn't anything special, and then--well. Things changed. I turned out to be able to do something that needed doing, something very few people could do. Something that had nothing at all to do with flying helicopters. We were all famous all of a sudden, and some of us dealt with that better than others." His brother, for example, had dealt with it really, really badly. "So," he said, a wry twist at the corner of his mouth, "I'm hoping you can learn from me.

"Now, you've probably had to introduce yourselves a fair few times already this week, but I don't know all of you yet, so we're gonna do that. Name, why you're in the class, what you'd like to learn from it if you have some idea already. Go."

When they'd finished, he steeled himself and added, "Chuck, if you could please see me after class. I have a job for you."

Plus We Have a Motorcade [Thursday, January 9, 2014, 1st period]

[professor-lyman.livejournal.com]

Josh wasn't in the classroom when it was time to begin. It wasn't because it was the first class of the day, either--he'd been up since 6 because he was a weirdo that way. No, he wanted to make an impression.

He'd called in a few favors (okay, a lot of favors) and instead of Josh entering the room, two Marine sentries came in, immaculately dressed in their dress uniforms, and stood at attention. They were immediately followed by five men in suits and serious expressions with very obvious earpieces in their ears. They glanced at each student, assessing them for danger, and then spread out around the room.

Finally, a familiar fanfare (at least if you were American) began playing and Josh strode into the room, waving like he was expecting to greet hundreds of onlookers. He then proceeded to walk around and shake the hands of each student individually, pausing to learn each of their names, before heading to his desk.

The Marines and Secret Service agents left.

"Wasn't that great?" Josh asked bouncily. "I've always wanted to do that. Anyway, I'm Josh Lyman, this is a class on the presidency and if you're in the wrong place, stand up so we can all make fun of you."

He wasn't really expecting anyone to do that.

"The presidency, or executive branch if you want to get fancy about it, is one of three alledgedly equal branches of the US federal government," he said. "But it's also the only one with its own theme music so that makes it better than everyone else. We'll get into the details about how much better it is later in the year, and we'll get some special guests if I can swing it, but for now, let's do the introduction thing so I can immediately forget all of your names again. I'll start. I'm Josh Lyman. I was the deputy chief of staff during most of the Bartlet administration, then became CoS for the first part of the Santos administration before coming here to mold you young people into not being complete idiots. My favorite president, other than the ones I worked for, is Thomas Jefferson, and if I could have a theme song, I'd pick meta for Shaft because that's some great music."

He pointed at some poor student. "Now you. Name, grade if you haven't been a chief of staff for a president, favorite president or leader of whatever dimension you come from, and what you'd pick if someone played theme music before you walked into a room."

He leaned back against his desk. "And I need an assistant for this class if anyone's interested. I might find you some theme music too."