Fandom High School

"Today I thought we'd talk about where fish come from," began Philomena. "Which is space."

Someone had perhaps taken away something different from the entire shark episode than everyone else had.

"No one quite knows how space makes fish, but there's got to be loads of 'em, 'cos there's supposed to be infinite space. Down here on Earth is actually an abberation from the regular way things are, 'cos there's no space here, except for in the oceans, where the fish go."

She began to gesture as she paced around the class, the chicken following in her footsteps. "You could say we are surrounded by fish," she said, "All floating in space, watchin' us. Making fish nookie in Uranus and havin' a merry old time mucking about Saturn. Most people don't know this, but the first Space Shuttle was actually invented 'cos they wanted to go fishing."

Beat.

"One of 'em exploded," she said. "As we've all found, you don't want to mess with an angry fish." She let that sink in for a moment. "Now I want you all to think about space fish a lot for your final. How do fish swim in space? What do they drink? How hard is it for a dolphin to have sex in space when it keeps floating about? You have fifteen minutes to research, and then you have to write your paper."

A pause.

"Start now with the sciencing."

Philomena was sitting at the front of the class, at the desk, the chicken perched on her shoulder and a very intense look on her face.

"D'you hear that?" she said. She turned her head quickly, but saw... nothing. "I swear I heard something," she muttered. "Sound's weird, innit? It's all waves and bits, like the ocean, but sometimes you hear sound when there isn't any. 'Cause of the waves, they go through everything."

It was entirely possible she hadn't slept well last night.

"I've been trying to figure out how earworms happen," she said. "I can't get Despacito out of my head, it's driving me mad. I think it's 'cause of all the oceans around Puerto Rico, there's extra waves, and those waves get in everywhere, like."

Beat.

"Credit goes to whoever can wave this song out of my head."

... and that was it.

"Today we'll be talking about sciencing animals," Philomena said brightly. The chicken on her shoulder looked bored. "They say we're all made of the same stuff, like tissue paper and organs and bones and stuff. That's cos of a thing called evolution, which Charles Darwin invented in the 19th century. He wrote this book called the Origin of Species, and his invention was the big twist at the end: humans weren't special, we were made of bits of monkey."

She nodded sagely. She'd done a special on this. She knew stuff.

"Of course, it was a bit unrealistic, as twists go," she said, "Cos you can't see evolution, can you? Monkey bones--" Let's just say she didn't say 'bones' and leave it at that, "Aren't quite shaped as human bits, are they? They're sort of squishy and small, like little people, but harier."

What had this class been about, again? "Darwin claimed we were all family. Not just of monkeys, also of meerkats and rhinos and elephants and birds and beetles and squid and ants and cuttlefish and those weird spiny things that live underwater and maybe even like, flowers and plants and stuff, so really that bit of moss you find in the shower in the morning might be an aunt or an uncle." Beat. "Not sure where it keeps its bits, though."

She pointed at the chicken on her shoulder. "I think this one might be a cousin," she said. "I've got this uncle who looks a bit chickeny, like, or at least he walks funny, kind of like a squiggle." She mimed the squiggle with her fingers.

"Anyway, there's like, a big animal family tree that people drew, but I can't really read it 'cos I can't find my mum on it so it's hard to figure out where I started. Which also makes me doubt this Darwin chap, lazy bugger, couldn't actually be arsed to work all of this out. So I tried to work it out, but I got distracted."

Which would explain the large 'family tree' at the back of the class, which, upon closer inspection, made no sense at all. She'd just sort of filled things in where they made sense. Bees and birds were related, weren't they? Like directly. They made babies, anyway, which was a bit disgusting since they were family, kind of like hillbillies.

... which was scribbled right underneath that particular part of the tree.

"I need your help to finish it," she said. "So get your laptops out and help me fill this thing in. Don't forget to put yourselves in, like. Don't be like Darwin, he's a lazy f--"

"Hi."

Well, at least this first class, it wasn't a completely confused Philomena at the head of the class. Just a... regularly confused Philomena. "So this class we're gonna be sciencing further than we were sciencing last class," she said. "Since science is all about questions, I made you a jar you can sort of stuff your questions into, like."

She gestured towards it.

It was not entirely certain she'd be genuinely doing anything with it.

"For today we should be talking about our history in sciencing," she said. "My name is Philomena Cunk. I watch a whole lot of telly, so eventually someone asked me to say something about the telly on the telly, like a whole square of tellying, and I tellied so good they gave me a television show about sciencing. 'Cos I'm good at that. Asking questions and the like."

Beat.

"After you're done talkin' about your own sciencing background, we'll watch a short video from my show, so you get a better idea about deeper sciencing and stuff."

There. That was reasonably coherent, right?

"Today we're gonna talk about the science of music," Philomena proclaimed. If she felt any shame about her performance last week, it was not evident in anything she was saying or doing. She looked straight ahead, meeting a random student's eyes periodically.

"They didn't used to have music in ye olde days, which was sad. Parties must have been very boring up until Mozart invented music in the 1700s. And even his music wasn't really party music, it was old people music, and music stayed that way for a very long time. Beethoven tried to invent punk rock, which is the sort of music you make when you can't hear for shit."

She shrugged. "Then the music bit went sort of quiet for a bit," she said. "Not a whole lot of anything happened. Not until the Beetles," you could hear the pronounciation of that 'e', there, "and then music sort of exploded. People tried to stop music before it got out of control by killin' one of 'em, but it was no use, the music genie was out of the bottle."

She mimed a bottle.

"It took science people to come up with music, I think," she continued, "'Cos it's made out of sound waves, which in Mozart's day, they would stuff in a bottle in an attempt to fuel the tiny sailboats." ... Sure, Philomena. "I think sciencing's best done if you can like, reproduce what science men before you have scienced. So today I've brought these instruments--" She waved at a wide and moddable variety of instruments. "And some bottles. You should all go out and try and capture sound waves. Make sure they're exciting sound waves, like Katy Perry sound waves. If you get any Mozart ones or Nickelback ones, you can throw 'em out, maybe burn 'em."

A pause.

"That's it, get to it."

"We'll be talking about chemistry today, 'cos that's a science," Philomena announced. She had a little black chicken riding on her shoulder, but she didn't appear to think this was odd. "You see it on the telly all the time. When people get close together and they look like they're about to get their rocks off together except their clothes are on, that's chemistry."

Beat.

"Also something about fluids and gasses but that's more like intermediate chemistry, like when you've married and you have to start deciding whether to hold it in or not and if the price of easy access to booty is worth not farting half the time."

She eyed the class with all seriousness. "It's not," she offered, with casual, serious intensity.

"But since chemistry's sciencing and so's experiments, we'll be experimenting and measuring it today," she said, holding up the top of a stack of rulers. "I want all you lot to stand up and walk at one another, one by one, and then measure the exact distance at which you start feelin' the chemistry."

Philomena wandered into class five minutes late without paying attention to the class. In fact, she walked to the window and peered, lost in thought for at least another three minutes, before half-turning and startling.

"Oh," she said, "You're still here."

Had they been here all week? Had she hallucinated them leaving? Perhaps they were time-jumpers.

"I was just caught by the leaves," she explained. "Strange things, aren't they? I keep wondering, how are they up there? And why are they attached to the trees like some strange hand-shaped parasite? Do the trees even know that they are on there, and if so, don't they long for a shave or some kind of... tree doctor to come fix it for them?"

She peered back outside.

"I used to wonder why they changed color in fall, but I found out about that, and it's absolutely disgusting," she said. "There's this stuff inside of them called chlorophiles, and they gnaw on sunlight, like a deranged vagina dentata."

She shivered. "It just ain't right," she muttered. "It just ain't right."

She turned back to the class. "So this is a class about sciencing, so we should probably do like proper science men and get samples," she said. "I want you to go out and get some samples and glue them to a piece of paper, so you can wave 'em around to ward off the others, like a sort of warning. Just be careful, 'cos the leaves have got skeletons, and nothing good ever came from a skeleton you can eat."

After finishing that line of thought, she looked at the class expectantly.

"Well? Off you go."