NEWDIE STEADSLAW

So, after that whole business at Old Missus Lopkit’s house, where Nesodi Iveent ended up turning out of city and into woods, Roby and Ben Garment were left in an Escherine stairwell, unready for the next step but attempters despite—they’d become foresteers now, and remain so for the remainder of their days—or whatever days remained—for henceabout was only the woods now, and perhaps the woods would last forever, precipitating the need to get more than a few bearings about the place. And so they put on some flannels and checked their compasses and shouldered their packs, and Roby counted out their supply of canned goods and Ben Garment looked at some sticks and said that a storm was coming. They pitched some tents—low and away, as always. This was good campesque work, and they were satisfied with establishing their mystique, and so it was time to broach the awaiting catastrophe.

“Well then, let’s speak,” said Ben Garment, poking the campfire with a technically good stick. “What was that plan of yours?”

Roby smiled and nodded, gleed at last to reveal her plan, for it was a good one, and she was proud to show it off—it’d been stewing in her noggin long enough that the steam would demand release regardless of request. “The plan of me is simply to see if we can find someone smarter than either of we!” she said. “Traycup is missing, his location unknown, so we must start seeking a mind overgrown with lots of thoughts and solid smarts who knows the spot that we do not: the place the cage was placed away to safely stay far away! Ask about all around up and down town until someone expounds upon the sought-for grounds where Traycup is found!”

Ben Garment considered the goodliness of this plan and found some in at least half a heap—but he couldn’t let that slide. “That’s but one step of a journey of leagues,” he said, broodmently. He gazed at the fire to aid his thoughts, which several obscure researchettes have already proven really works. “If we find Traycup’s spot, we’ll find his taker as well, and she’s a power-haver! What’s to be done thenwise?”

“If we find a smart enough person,” said Roby, “they will know how to verse them.”

“Like who?” said Ben Garment.

“Like anyone likable,” said Roby, “as many as you are able, and be friended with them, for that is nice, in the end.”

“Not what I mean, but close enough,” said Ben Garment. “But if we’re to become askers, who’s there to be asked but the trees?”

Roby had to pause at that one and weigh the merit in talking to trees—a brief enough task, as there was nearly none—and you can append the label yourself, this time. But, there was the potential for a quirkful pastime, but only just. The implication Ben Garment created had accuracy to spare, for no such person stalked nearby, nor did a candidate spring freshly to mind.

“There is another idea of me,” said Roby after but a brief breath, “to create a new plan for we.”

“Well, you’re a regular spout today!” said Ben Garment. “Let’s hope the flavor improves with practice.”

So Roby said, “We will make our own school, likable to fools, where everyone is cool, and there are no rules! If folk fear tests, we will not be pests, but do our best to let them rest—if classes for masses are always so shunned, and passing a hassle for near everyone, then lower our standards so any can handle, and none hold to a candle to our zealous fandom! When school is a breeze and passed with great ease then any of these will be as smart as they please, and whoever is smartest and knows the most things will be able to tell us near anything—including the place where Traycup may be, as well as the whereabouts of the mother of me!” Roby smiled brightly, for she had mastered the piece, and knew not whether more would ever come, and embraced the momentary victoré sappily.

“A standard and measured response,” said Ben Garment. “But a final snag presents itself: our school wants for location—we are again stymied by arborism!”

It was right about that time that the camped fire that Ben Garment and Roby had built got out of control, and the trees that stood all about, in their slackish lackadaisicality, had left all manner of refuse lying everywhere—twigs, leaves, hamburger wrappers, one ferry, the lamentful nostalgia at summer’s end—and this turned the fire into a tormentful blaze that engulfed the whole of the woods, and burnt up all the trees till they were ash. Not like ash trees, just the ashes of what once was, their originating type immaterial now. Don’t pour one out of them, though, for these were the cursed and haunted trees born by what’s-her-face during that battle before, their lives merely a false mockery of truth, their existence a stain on history, their destruction an inevitability. All the same, this freed up some real estate. Beanjam Indigo Cruality arrove, for he was a real estate agent, and a real estate agent, and, seeing the site prime for development, began signing deals as fast as a crawfish can wait for lunch. Nature abhors a vacuum—and many, many other things—and so this vacancy lasted unlong. Within moments, Dulltooth James came by with his tractor and started laying down paven roads, and Mackle Foodbar started pouring foundations for a fleet of identical made-to-order hice. They hired Tarnado the Honorable Beer to build a factory, a big, shiny palace of industry for everyone to work at. And they put a fire department on every corner this time.

It was as fine a construction as one could want, and thrice as good as one deserved—however, one object was yet wanting.

“And here is our role,” said Ben Garment. “We shall supply the school!”

Everyone glared at Ben Garment. Roby was caught in the blast.

“We need a hospital,” the buildicians said.

And so they hastily but carefully constructed an element-proof hospital, and thus was New Nesodi Iveent—Newsodi Iveent?—completed, so Roby and Ben Garment went somewhere else and built their school.

The bell rang and Roby said to her class, “That concludes the lesson of the day! Now you may finally go home and play!” And then the students went home.

So, it had happened. They had builten a school, a fine, normal building over in the puzzle box district, where the giraffes were trying to find work that didn’t involve cave-painting. The permitting had taken three hundred years to resolve, the construction two hundred, and recruiting enough students another hundred more—ages and ages of such dullness that even mentioning it in passing was enough to knock a wheelbarrow off the trapeze. Roby and Ben Garment’s school had thirteen stories, but to avoid bad luck they were all on the same floor. They had stairs in every room and all the windows were kept at the bank for safekeeping. There was only one schoolroom—not a grand, modern lecture hall, no, this was one of those old-fashioned kind of schoolhice—but they had a teachers’ lounge, break room, conference room, gymnasium, two-ply, seventy-one bathrooms, pool room, pool hall, van pool, and three more bathrooms. Not a bad result, considering they used a Q. R. code as a floor plan. Also, there was one more bathroom.

They had four hundred and eighteen students, and had been teaching them all day, but now, since the bell had rung, and the bell was really the one in charge, the studentia had dispersed, and so the novice teachers went to take a well-earned break in the sewing circle. Roby went to sit on an electric rum barrel, and said, “Ben Garment, it is a joy of me to be teaching with glee so many students, pupils, and educatees.”

“Back-breaking work,” observed Ben Garment, “but, then, it all is. And I’ve a host of splinters! They’ll be needing names—but, that’s another affair.” He pondered a hedgehog’s phone—no points—and encomfortablated himself in a diorama. “So, have any students turned smart yet?”

“That is a thing not known by me,” said Roby. “And so a fresh idea is in need for the solving of the question to proceed!”

“You’ve got another one at the ready?” inquired Ben Garment.

“I have got the thought,” said Roby, “to plot a lot and spot who has been taught a lot of smarts. We are pressed to test the best guess of our mess of guests and put this quest to rest. Give all the students a quiz to find who the smartest is. Place them all in order, make them ranked and sorted, give each one their grade—and finally get paid!”

“There’s a shiny one,” Ben Garment nodded. “The wig of teacher suits you! You’ve gained a wisdom, I think to say, or have dispensed with part of your wild eye.”

“I am glad,” said Roby, “and quite unsad to have the compliment of my friend Ben Garment!”

“There remains the design of the test,” said Ben Garment. “I propose baking them into a cake with glass and tubas and leaving it on the windowsill for the plantation owners. That’ll weed out the worthy.”

But then there was a knock at the grill, and before they could say, “Eat more tofu! The presence of mange does no harm to those who believe the guilt of a speeding knapsack,”—not that they were going to say that, but, if they were planning on it, there was no time at all—it popped open, and there stood Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, frenetic with an as-yet unstated query.

“Egads!” said Roby, adjacent to a startle. “A trifle rude! But, how do you do? Silly student, sneaking so, suspiciously stalking in subterfuge! Say the nature of your lateness, but know that you are blameless, and though class is long dismissed, at your home you will be missed, so you must now gain hasteness or your parents will be pissed!”

“Four Seventeen,” said Ben Garment informally, “a strange breach! What calls for this act?”

“Yes, yes,” said Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, “yes—most odd, I know, I know—so, I’ll say it plain! I haven’t the foggiest—not the haziest, mistiest idea! How to do it—to be schooled at school, and to be the student proper! Yes, that’s why—I’m here for a lesson to supplement the one I’ve gotten!”

“The knowing of school is not of you,” said Roby, cheerily nodding. “That much is surely true. But while you are a student poorly done, the teachers of you have only just begun! You and you, and also me, are each a novice at this craft, you see!”

“Yes, I know!” said Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen. “But, great teacher, poor teacher, no teacher—no matter! A true student should overcome such odds! But, of course—to school, to learn, to become the smartest, and know it all! That’s why I’m here—oh, Teach, teach! For all the day I’ve longed to learn but still, here is me, dumb and quite the fool! So, what to do, what to do?”

The student, columnar and wrapped in ribbons, was in quite a state—or possibly a province—but fortunately, Roby and Ben Garment were now great teachers. But, alas, there’s at least one typo involved there, though that was unlikely to stave off their efforts, for what they lacked in competence, they made up for in confidence, which is surely worth something in the right marketplace.

Roby said, “Now, student, it is a simple thing to go to school—simply come and be and soon cease to be a fool!”

“Here I am,” said the student, “I have come and been! Yet fool I remain!”

Roby considered this mystery. Roby considered this a mystery. “This is a real thing,” she slowly said at last. “And this thing tells one tale: our school has failed! If the student of me tries to be at school and stays a fool, our school is no school by rule!”

Now it was Ben Garment’s turn at idea-having. He snapped his fins to symbolize his thoughts both audibly and visually. “I’ve unlatched it!” he said. “Here’s the student, at school—and so until she leaves a fool, our school’s not failed, and we’ve still the chance. Let’s teach, and delay her departure until a satisfying education’s occurred!”

“Credit is due you, Ben, and extra, too!” said Roby. “We shall remain to teach some wisdom, so, student, begin to listen!”

And so they resumed teaching Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, which overjoyed Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, seeing as how she wanted to become educated and bring cessation to her foolishness, and it also joyed Roby and Ben Garment because they had found a loophole by which to demonstrate that their school wasn’t a complete waste of time and another dead end. After centuries of set-up, and all their eggs firmly entrenched in a single basket, if they had nothing to show for it—well, better to unthink that dismal prospect.

Roby and Ben Garment, taking turns at the helm, continued Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen’s education by listing all the numbers, picking up where they had left off during class time—somewhere in the low forties. This went on for ninety-nine hours and ninety-nine minutes, and they had covered all the numbers almost up to fifty, when Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen raised her hand and said, “Teacher! Teacher! Well, tell me—am I smart yet?”

“Well,” said Roby, “out we shall find! What is three added to nine?”

“Why,” said Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, “I know that! That’s easily known! Yes, yes—surely it’s the first president!”

They’d done it! Roby and Ben Garment cheered, and celebrated with champagne, popping the corks at some orphans, and declared that Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen had become wise or close to it, and now she could go home, and tomorrow would be another day of class, and they’d learn the rest of the numbers, and become wiser than wise, but they didn’t tell the student that last part, because they wanted her to go home with success in her head—or at least at all.

Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen gathered up all her papers, as one does at the end of school—because one can’t be bothered to organize one’s things as one goes along, apparently—when suddenly the linoleum turned to paint and got outsourced, to the dismay of a tapir on vacation and a painter on location. The local newspaper hired some bees in an attempt to generate some buzz, not misunderstanding the innuendo in the slightest, and ran a column about game shows. “That’s odd,” said four tire irons. “I would’ve thought the border’d be dangerouser than this.” They flipped the page and saw that Saint Plasticine’s Day was coming no time quick, and called their lawyers to cancel their shoe subscriptions. The shoes themselves went job hunting, the lawyers went regular hunting, and the bees busted down the classroom door with a corncob pipe. Roby, Ben Garment, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen all made an appropriate noise or smell of alarm, and ran to hide in the coffee maker.

“Hey! Where’d y’all go?” said the bees. “Y’all gotta check out these GUNZ!” The bees flexed mightily, bursting their shirts to pieces, and the shirt pieces all got sucked into the ventilation system, jamming up the fans, overheating the motors, and then the whole system exploded—not like a nuclear explosion this time, it was just electrical, all the transformers blew or whatever—and then everything caught on fire.

Ben Garment floored it and drove the coffee maker downstairs into the flooded ant farm, where they kept all the stickers and sidewalk chalk. The bees followed, but got distracted when they passed an open door wherein a llama, a pterodactyl, and a Knight Templar were posing for a still life painted by one of the original celery-sellers. The bees soon began a heated haggling session as they tried to secure the painting for their dart gallery.

“That one was a close one,” said Roby, “and not close to fun!”

“Hey!” said Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen. “Watch out! Right there—it’s a tourniquet!”

Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, despite all her newfound smarts, was incorrect. The approaching threat was no tourniquet, but a wave of the tidal variety. Roby and Ben Garment knew this instinctively, having priorly dealt with such a wave, when it had washed their bus clear out to pond. They had learned a lesson in that, so when this tidal wave came, they dodged adroitly, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen did as well, copying her wise mentors. They successfully failed to get washed out to pond, sea, or kiddie pool, but they weren’t the wave’s target—it wanted the school itself, and easily snagged it after they’d left it defenseless. Roby, Ben Garment, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen were left behind in the coffee maker, the roving bees approaching at a medium saunter, still flexing their GUNZ and newly acquired painting. Out at sea, the tidal wave took it upon itself to demonstrate the awesome power of Nature by not only beating the fire to death and casting its corpse into the abyssal depths, but also turning the school into a highly profitable diploma mill, pocketing the cash itself—and firing Roby and Ben Garment.

“Alas!” said Roby. “Yet again I have met the gaining of unemployment.”

“It was more than inevitable,” said Ben Garment. “Let’s hope there’s riches to be had in a pan’s handle, at least.”

“But, Ben Garment, there is greater concernment,” said Roby. “No longer teachers and lacking a school, we have no more students, and our plan has been doomed!”

“Not that fast, Roby,” said Ben Garment, “for we’ve still got the one. What’s more, as the only one we’ve got, she’s by default our best and brightest pupil.”

“Yeah—yeah!” said Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen. “That’s the truth, and a fact as well! I know what purple is—I’m practically a genius! Ask me anything—everything! I’ve got you covered!”

“All right,” said the bees, “how do you plan on getting out of this one?”

The bees closed in on Ben Garment, Roby, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen—though not necessarily in that order—and remained as armed as an armadillo, twice as peevish, and thrice as peckish. Most seemed lost. Roby, Ben Garment, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen huddled amongst one another for support, but not one of them, not even Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, were properly bolted and fastened in place per city municipal code number eighty-one, section twelve, subsection sea, paragraph eight, item four, and so no support was to be had, and the sole beam in the vicin’, installed to the depth of a playing card, toppled over at the first glance from a gust of wind. The bees divode into three platoons, and each platoon encircled one of their targets, and all the bees still had their literal and metaphorical guns, which they then aimed and flex as appropriate, not minding the anachronism, and then in a spate of disco fever they pounced targetward—

“Halt!” cried a voice with such commandment that it was obeyed by all—and it was this same allhood who became shocked to denote that the voice came from Roby.

“We’re commanded, but yer no commander!” said half of the bees, and the other half agreed, not wanting any boat-rocking. Guns and GUNZ would not be enough to express their fervor to its fullment, so they removed their stingers’ scabbards, and prepared to behave beely.

“I say again, halt!” came that voice, but now, with eyes upon Roby, all saw she was not the speaker, though she possessed the locale of the voice’s source. Something rustled in her coats, and then one of her pockets opened, and from it came a bee.

“Oh, a one bee!” said the other bees. “Then, yer one of us! Come on, come join our fold! We have foes to dispense of!” And, like that, the whisper of words never said faded away, their shadow already covered in dust.

“Say not these words,” said the pocket-bee, “for I am Lorenzo, the free bee, and long have I lain apocket—indeed, shattered from shackles laid long ago, and not long lost. From the pocket of the swapped Traycup’s coat did I listen at length, and I learned all the words, and then, finally, lingering in the presence of the teachers two, did I learn to speak for myself—the true voice of a bee!”

But the bees were unmoved by Lorenzo’s proclamationing. “What’s with this attitude?” said they. “We can talk, too! We should be same-sided! Ya got stripes, same as we’ve got! And a stinger, to boot! Yer hangin’ with the wrong cloud!”

“Do not try to choose my choices,” said Lorenzo. “I was the first bee to finish school; flex your so-called might all you wish, but know this: knowledge is power, and—wait, what’s that?”

Lorenzo, in horror, pointed to a monstrous and terrible object behind the other bees. Fearing a fresh bear attack, the bees whirled around to gaze at the frighter, and, in the back-turned moment, Lorenzo quickly flew away, holding Roby’s and Ben Garment’s most convenient appendages so as to tug them along in his egress, and Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen followed as well, since she had accidentally tied her shoelaces to the rest of theirs.

“We see no frightful thing!” said the bees. “But, just in case, we’ll continue to search for one—all bees, diverge, and cease not the investigation until true terror is located!”

The bees, as ordered by themselves, dispersed, and sought more trouble than they were worth.