fandomhigh | Shop Class: [3/15]

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Shop Class: [3/15]

Once again, the room looks like something out of a normal shop classroom.

Weird.

On the walls are blueprints and instructions on building the scenery for MSND's play.

"That's right kids. I'm forcing you to do slave labor for the theatrical production this weekend. We need to build a castle scene, a forest, a fog machine and a fairy dust dispenser."

"Okay technically it's a glitter dispenser but I'm just telling you what they call it."

"Please make sure you put the hats back on the hammers when you're done with them."

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Nadia raised her hand. "What's a lorax?"

~~the show needs a thneed! For a thneed is a thing that every show needs!~~

Mac gives Nadia a surprised look. "You've never heard of the Lorax? He speaks for the trees. If you're really interested in knowing more about him...

I suggest that you go to far end of town
where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows
and no birds ever sing excepting old crows...
that's the Street of the Lifted Lorax.

And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
if you look deep enough you can still see, today,
where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

What was the Lorax?
Any why was it there?
And why was it lifted and taken somewhere
from the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows?
The old Once-ler still lives here.
Ask him. He knows."

"Huh," Xander says. "And I was gonna say it's the gross juicy middle bits of a bug. and bug-people." He almost manages a straight face when he says it, too.

Nadia frowned. She was used to not always understanding most of what Xander said and just pretending to, anyway, but Mac was throwing her off. "Bug people?"

"My sophomore year was a little strange." Xander tilted his head. "Sadly, a little less strange than my junior year, which was a little less strange than my first senior year, which... you get the picture."

Nadia nodded slowly. "I didn't know you'd been at Fandom for that long."

Because she refused to believe that there was any place weirder than Fandom.

Xander shook his head. "Haven't been. I started here this year; far as I know everybody did. Home is... odd. Not exactly odder than here? Just differently oddinated."

Nadia nodded and turned to go work on one of the assignments. Then she stopped. "Okay, I've been studying English for awhile now? And I'm pretty sure that 'inate' isn't actually that commonly used a suffix,"

"You are correct, senorita. I believe we're blam~~inat~~ing Jaye for that. And possibly Rory. It's a verbal disease."

Nadia considered this. "Well, as long as it's not haiku, I'm okay with it."

Sunnydale is weird,
But fandom has boykissing,
Which is weirder still.

Re: Assignment: Forest

nadiathesaint - 2006-03-15 15:42 (UTC) - Expand

"I think that's the thorax. Not the Lorax."

"But the Thorax speaks for the bees!"

...

Nadia stared at Mac, her eyes growing progressively wider as his little speech went on. She took some comfort in the fact that it wasn't haiku . . . but so help her god, if Mac got more poetry stuck in her head, she'd kill him.

"Oh."

She turned to go work on one of the projects, then turned back.

"Um, there is there really a guy living on the island named the Once-ler?"

You won't see the Once-ler.
Don't knock at his door.
He stays in his Lerkim on top of his store.
He stays in his Lerkim, cold under the roof,
where he makes his own clothes
out of miff-muffered moof.
And on special dank midnights in August,
he peeks
out of the shutters
and sometimes he speaks
and tells how the Lorax was lifted away.
He'll tell you, perhaps...
if you're willing to pay.

Nadia backed up slowly, keeping her hands in full view so as not to spook the obviously suddenly demented professor. "Um, okay, say, you haven't been eating a lot of brownies lately, have you?"

And because she's an idiot like that, she has to ask. "Pay him in what?"

"Well...

On the end of a rope
he'll let down a tin pail
and you have to toss in fifteen cents
and a nail
and the shell of a great-great-great-
grandfather snail.

Then he pulls up the pail,
makes a most careful count
to see if you've paid him
the proper amount.

Then he hides what you paid him
away in his Snuvv,
his secret strange hole
in his gruvvulous glove.
Then he will grunt, 'I will call you by Whisper-ma-Phone,
for the secrets I tell you are for your ears alone.'"

It's like watching a trainwreck. A horrible, bloody, terrifying trainwreck made of rhyming words and the person who used to be her favorite professor.

"Whisper-ma-Phone?" she practically whimpered. "I don't understand any of this." She frowned, and dug in her pocket. "I have fifteen cents, though,"

"No nail or snail shell? Well, then I can't tell you what happens then. You'll just have to find out for yourself," Mac says looking like he's back to normal.

Nadia was torn between being relieved that Mac seemed to have recovered from his fit of poetry, and disappointed at not getting to find out the ending.

"If I find a nail, can you tell me without the poetry?"

Mac gives Nadia a confused look. "Poetry? What poetry? As for the nail, well you'd have to ask the Once-ler. You might find more information about it in the library."

~~you are an evil, evil man.~~

Nadia makes a mental note to go look up "lorax" in the library.

"Are, um, are you feeling okay, Proff--um, Mac?"

Re: Assignment: Forest

manofthemullet.livejournal.com - 2006-03-15 16:42 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Assignment: Forest

nadiathesaint - 2006-03-15 16:46 (UTC) - Expand

Ivanova is dead of hiding snickers. "That was very illuminating," she said seriously. And was really impressed that he had recited it.

Stark wonders idly if the Lorax is a plant, since it speaks for trees. People that happen to be plants (or plants that happen to be people?) aren't anything new, after all.

While he's wondering, he's attempting to make a tree. It actually looks mostly like a tree, too. A flat tree. And he puts the hat back on the hammer when he's done with it.

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