A Work In Progress
Feb. 1st, 2004 02:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaNOTE: Since it doesn't follow the usual pattern of a SmallWorld story - copyright issue, weird science, supernatural event - and not being ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quantumduck's work, this in not canon for SmallWorld. It is, therefore, technically a SmallWorld fanfic, and the usual fanfic disclaimers apply.
Writer's Block
*bzzz* "Your 10 o'clock appointment is here." The RoboSec's announcement came at 9:55 - a good sign, he thought, for the parent conference; usually the parents were at least five minutes late.
He pushed his hoverchair back from the brushed aluminum desk and stood, stretching as he rose. The small mirror on the wall told him the collar on his neatly pressed t-shirt was just a touch off-center; he fixed it - one always has to make a good first impression, after all. He scooped up his RecordPad from its usual perch in the exact center of the desk, now empty except for a holophoto of a lively-looking dog catching a baseball and a nameplate reading "Carver Lowdon, Head Principal of Instruction," and purposefully but casually shoved open the door to his conference room.
She was already seated, but she climbed to her feet as he entered the too-brightly-lit room. Dammit, he thought, hoping his sudden discomfort didn't show on his face, I hate it when the parents overdress for these things just to impress me. She was wearing lavender shoes with medium heels and an ankle strap, a knee-length violet sheath dress, a strand of lavender freshwater pearls that matched her shoes, a single silver ring on her left hand, a light blue scarf draped around her shoulders, and a stainless, crisply-ironed white lab coat. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun, with a single strand of dark brown hair draping behind her left ear, and her handbag - lavender, like the purse and pearls - was already tucked under her chair. As he approached the table, never breaking stride, she stepped forward, extended her hand stiffly, and smiled - a hard smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"So glad to meet you, Mr. - Lowdon, isn't it?" She was anything but glad to meet him; that much was obvious. Her voice was hard, cold; she was irritated to be here. That was all to his advantage; the less she wanted to be here, the more quickly the conference would go.
"Yes; please, call me Carver. And you're Allison Northcutt's mother? What may I call you, Mrs. - "
She interrupted, "Dr. Northcutt, please."
And she wants to one-up me with her title. This one's going to be a tough nut to crack. "Please, Dr. Northcutt, have a seat." She settled gently into her chair - for a heavyset woman, she moved pretty efficiently - and reached into her purse. One at a time, she set a pad of paper and a pen on the table. She's an old-fashioned one, too. He didn't even recognize the tip of the pen - instead of just coming to a point, like the pens his father had occasionally used, this one had a strange wedge-shaped metal bit at the writing end.
Dr. Northcutt smiled that same fake, brittle smile. "I understand that Allison has caused some sort of disruption, and that you needed to talk to me about it."
Right to the point. Amazing. This should be quick. "Yes, Mrs. - sorry, Dr. Northcutt. Your daughter has been consistently engaging in non-educational activities during class, and it's causing friction with her teachers. It also distracts the other students. May I ask you a few questions about her home life?"
"What sorts of 'non-educational activities' has she been engaging in? Has she not been doing her work?"
"Oh, that's not the issue, Mrs. - Dr. - Northcutt." I've got to stop that; she's going to think she's rattled me. "She finishes her work satisfactorily. In fact, " he amended with a deepening scowl, "she takes far less time than the assigned amount to complete her assignments. I believe that if she took the recommended time to complete her work, she wouldn't have time to do these - other things. Now, does she have a father at home, or are you her only parent?"
"Then perhaps you should assign her more challenging work."
Dr. Northcutt's eyebrows raised as Carver's scowl turned into a look of wide-eyed shock. "Oh, no, Mis. . . Dr. . . . I'm sorry, what was your first name again?"
"Please just call me Dr. Northcutt."
"Um, Dr. Northcutt, we couldn't do that. The approved state curriculum explicitly lays out for us which grade levels will cover what objectives, in what order, in how much time. We can't make exceptions for anyone. Now, about her home life -"
She began to look exasperated. "I'm not asking you to make exceptions; I'm asking you to keep her busy. Obviously, you want her busy, too. Can't you just give her material that's covered in the curriculum, but more in-depth? Maybe something they'll cover in the next year, or a topic you only cover briefly that she can mine for a little more information."
"No, ma'am. She has to cover the curriculum just like anyone else. Besides, her disruptive activities don't have anything to do with what we're covering - it's things like this." He touched a couple of icons on his RecordPad and brought up a scanned image of a computer screen. On it were a scattered group of words:
School Bites
school is an unnecessary
interrupt tion
a withering of brain
a loosening of hard facts
training good consumers of bad pop culture
radio listeners TV watchers Net crawlers
no harvesting of truth,
no feast of knowledge
just
an
empty
withered
tree
Dr. Northcutt studied it for a moment. The tip of her pen, forgotten in the other hand, tapped at her pad, leaving odd spidery marks. Finally, she looked up and commented, "I keep telling her that she needs to start with one of the more structured forms. You can't write good free verse until you can write a good sonnet, or a villanelle, or a sestina or something. She won't listen to me, though; she figures if it was good enough for e.e. cummings, it's good enough for her." She sighed, deeply. "I'm sorry she's giving you attitude; I'll talk to her about it."
Carver was gaping at her. "You . . . encourage this sort of behavior?"
It was her turn to scowl. "No, of course not; I just told her that I'll talk to her about it. Disparaging the educational system is totally unacceptable."
"No, not that. The . . . the poetry?"
Now she was confused. "What about it?"
"It's perfectly all right for the students to express their feelings about the educational process. We encourage that; it's the only way we know whether we're reaching them or not. The problem," he emphasized, "is that she's writing this - this poetry, during school hours."
"It seems a harmless enough hobby . . . "
"But, Mrs. Northcutt, it's illegal! What if she wrote a line from Angelou, or one of the other published poets? She could be in total violation of any number of copyright laws! And we would be held responsible!" Am I sweating? My god, she can tell I'm nervous.
Her confusion had turned to amusement. "Frankly, Mr. Lowdon, as long as she's not actively plagiarizing, I don't really think that's a big problem. I'd rather have her writing poetry or reading when she's done with her work than sitting idle."
"But that's the other problem! She - she carries around -" He swallowed, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "Books! Paper books. How do we know they're not copied? Or that she's not copying words out of them? She's not supposed to have those!"
"Then confiscate them. You have my permission."
"We're not supposed to have them either!"
"Ship them back to her home address, then."
Sweat poured off his forehead just thinking about it. "Do you know what penalties we'd suffer if we shipped copyrighted material through the mail system?"
"Then ignore it. It doesn't seem to me that she's doing anything harmful, or disrupting the environment for the other students." Dr. Northcutt re-capped her pen, and tucked the pen and pad carefully back in her lavender handbag. "Allison can take responsibility for her own actions. If what she's doing is against school rules, then give her detention or whatever it is you do these days. I'll tell her again that she shouldn't bring anything to school she's not prepared to lose. Other than that, I don't see her behavior as a serious problem. Good day, Mr. Lowdon."
The sound of her heels clicking along the plasticeramic tile of the hallway echoed in his ears as he sat, astounded by what he'd just heard, in a uncomfortable office chair. "How can you be so casual about a copyright incident waiting to happen?" he pleaded to the empty air.
--
The custodian was so startled, she'd lost her command of English; it took three repetitions for Carver to figure out what was upsetting her. When he finally figured it out, he didn't even wait for her; he grabbed a resurfacer from the cleaning supply closet and charged into the upstairs east girls' bathroom without even knocking. Sure enough, there on the wall of one of the stalls was written:
Mr. Caraway
is the ugliest man in
the whole fuckin school
Carver was about to apply the resurfacer when he realized he needed evidence to punish the student responsible. Security dragged Allison in three minutes later; she studied the graffito for a second, then turned to him and sneered, "I didn't write it. First of all, that's not my handwriting; that's someone who has had a lot less practice than me. Secondly, I don't have a marker that will write on this sort of paint; you can search my stuff if you don't believe me. Thirdly, I wouldn't have left the 'g' off of 'fucking.' Fourth, I don't even have Mr. Caraway for any of my classes."
Carver was struck for the first time how very much she looked like her mother as she stalked back to class. He resurfaced the wall without recording the incident.
--
The next one appeared three days later. This time it was the boys' bathroom downstairs on the north wing, and the author had scratched the graffito into the paint; it took three applications of the resurfacer to erase
History class is
boring as hell - it's spring and
I wanna go screw
He almost didn't question Allison this time; he regretted it when he did. She only smirked, "Yeah, I heard about it. You don't seriously think the palmreader would let me into the boys' bathroom, do you? I hear this one even got in the seasonal reference."
--
When the resurfacer broke, Carver nearly panicked. Terrified of what he'd see, he waited until an hour after school let out to check the bathrooms. In every single one of them, every open surface was slowly being covered by marker, scratches, even paint - short line, long line, short line.
He tendered his resignation without figuring out what the actual pattern was. He wouldn't have cared even if he had known.
--
Dr. Borealis was stirring a beaker of spaghetti sauce over the burner when Allison came home. "Hello, dear. How was school today?"
"Not too bad, Mom. Mr. Lowdon quit."
"You do realize, dear, that whoever they replace him with is unlikely to be any better."
Allison grinned. "Yeah, but the new guy will have to deal with the graffiti from the beginning."
"Why did you teach them all the haiku, anyway? You don't write them." Dr. Borealis tasted the sauce from the end of her stirring rod and added a little more basil.
"It's like you taught me, Mom - you've got to start with structure." Allison tried to look innocent, and failed. "If I tried to teach them rhyme first, they'd give me awful doggrel in poulter's meter or something even worse." She made a disgusted face, and continued, "A haiku can't be dragged out, and the structure forces them to actually think about it, at least enough to actually count stuff. Mom, some of them even had trouble with that," she whined.
Her mother frowned. "I know. I'm working on it. In the meantime, dinner will be ready in about half an hour; go upstairs and work on your calculus."
"Aw, Mom! Can't I do that later? I've just gotten to the best part of Ender's Game . . . "
Dr. Borealis looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Well, all right. I suppose you've done your subversive act for the day, and you deserve to be rewarded. But don't let me catch you skipping the calculus altogether."
"Don't worry, Mom. It's a lot more fun than the 'Algebra readiness' crud they have us doing. Geez, they act like we don't understand what the distributive property is." Allison and her book disappeared up the twisting concrete stairs of the hidden underground lab. Dr. Borealis stirred the spaghetti sauce again, then got up, peered into the murky fluid burbling through the eight-foot upright tank against the left wall, and jotted a few observations on the clipboard hanging next to it:
Experiment 6:
spectroscope analysis
Ready on Tuesday
No room for the seasonal reference. Oh, well. She smiled lightly as she meandered back into the kitchen.
quantumduck's work, this in not canon for SmallWorld. It is, therefore, technically a SmallWorld fanfic, and the usual fanfic disclaimers apply.Writer's Block
*bzzz* "Your 10 o'clock appointment is here." The RoboSec's announcement came at 9:55 - a good sign, he thought, for the parent conference; usually the parents were at least five minutes late.
He pushed his hoverchair back from the brushed aluminum desk and stood, stretching as he rose. The small mirror on the wall told him the collar on his neatly pressed t-shirt was just a touch off-center; he fixed it - one always has to make a good first impression, after all. He scooped up his RecordPad from its usual perch in the exact center of the desk, now empty except for a holophoto of a lively-looking dog catching a baseball and a nameplate reading "Carver Lowdon, Head Principal of Instruction," and purposefully but casually shoved open the door to his conference room.
She was already seated, but she climbed to her feet as he entered the too-brightly-lit room. Dammit, he thought, hoping his sudden discomfort didn't show on his face, I hate it when the parents overdress for these things just to impress me. She was wearing lavender shoes with medium heels and an ankle strap, a knee-length violet sheath dress, a strand of lavender freshwater pearls that matched her shoes, a single silver ring on her left hand, a light blue scarf draped around her shoulders, and a stainless, crisply-ironed white lab coat. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun, with a single strand of dark brown hair draping behind her left ear, and her handbag - lavender, like the purse and pearls - was already tucked under her chair. As he approached the table, never breaking stride, she stepped forward, extended her hand stiffly, and smiled - a hard smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"So glad to meet you, Mr. - Lowdon, isn't it?" She was anything but glad to meet him; that much was obvious. Her voice was hard, cold; she was irritated to be here. That was all to his advantage; the less she wanted to be here, the more quickly the conference would go.
"Yes; please, call me Carver. And you're Allison Northcutt's mother? What may I call you, Mrs. - "
She interrupted, "Dr. Northcutt, please."
And she wants to one-up me with her title. This one's going to be a tough nut to crack. "Please, Dr. Northcutt, have a seat." She settled gently into her chair - for a heavyset woman, she moved pretty efficiently - and reached into her purse. One at a time, she set a pad of paper and a pen on the table. She's an old-fashioned one, too. He didn't even recognize the tip of the pen - instead of just coming to a point, like the pens his father had occasionally used, this one had a strange wedge-shaped metal bit at the writing end.
Dr. Northcutt smiled that same fake, brittle smile. "I understand that Allison has caused some sort of disruption, and that you needed to talk to me about it."
Right to the point. Amazing. This should be quick. "Yes, Mrs. - sorry, Dr. Northcutt. Your daughter has been consistently engaging in non-educational activities during class, and it's causing friction with her teachers. It also distracts the other students. May I ask you a few questions about her home life?"
"What sorts of 'non-educational activities' has she been engaging in? Has she not been doing her work?"
"Oh, that's not the issue, Mrs. - Dr. - Northcutt." I've got to stop that; she's going to think she's rattled me. "She finishes her work satisfactorily. In fact, " he amended with a deepening scowl, "she takes far less time than the assigned amount to complete her assignments. I believe that if she took the recommended time to complete her work, she wouldn't have time to do these - other things. Now, does she have a father at home, or are you her only parent?"
"Then perhaps you should assign her more challenging work."
Dr. Northcutt's eyebrows raised as Carver's scowl turned into a look of wide-eyed shock. "Oh, no, Mis. . . Dr. . . . I'm sorry, what was your first name again?"
"Please just call me Dr. Northcutt."
"Um, Dr. Northcutt, we couldn't do that. The approved state curriculum explicitly lays out for us which grade levels will cover what objectives, in what order, in how much time. We can't make exceptions for anyone. Now, about her home life -"
She began to look exasperated. "I'm not asking you to make exceptions; I'm asking you to keep her busy. Obviously, you want her busy, too. Can't you just give her material that's covered in the curriculum, but more in-depth? Maybe something they'll cover in the next year, or a topic you only cover briefly that she can mine for a little more information."
"No, ma'am. She has to cover the curriculum just like anyone else. Besides, her disruptive activities don't have anything to do with what we're covering - it's things like this." He touched a couple of icons on his RecordPad and brought up a scanned image of a computer screen. On it were a scattered group of words:
School Bites
school is an unnecessary
interrupt tion
a withering of brain
a loosening of hard facts
training good consumers of bad pop culture
radio listeners TV watchers Net crawlers
no harvesting of truth,
no feast of knowledge
just
an
empty
withered
tree
Dr. Northcutt studied it for a moment. The tip of her pen, forgotten in the other hand, tapped at her pad, leaving odd spidery marks. Finally, she looked up and commented, "I keep telling her that she needs to start with one of the more structured forms. You can't write good free verse until you can write a good sonnet, or a villanelle, or a sestina or something. She won't listen to me, though; she figures if it was good enough for e.e. cummings, it's good enough for her." She sighed, deeply. "I'm sorry she's giving you attitude; I'll talk to her about it."
Carver was gaping at her. "You . . . encourage this sort of behavior?"
It was her turn to scowl. "No, of course not; I just told her that I'll talk to her about it. Disparaging the educational system is totally unacceptable."
"No, not that. The . . . the poetry?"
Now she was confused. "What about it?"
"It's perfectly all right for the students to express their feelings about the educational process. We encourage that; it's the only way we know whether we're reaching them or not. The problem," he emphasized, "is that she's writing this - this poetry, during school hours."
"It seems a harmless enough hobby . . . "
"But, Mrs. Northcutt, it's illegal! What if she wrote a line from Angelou, or one of the other published poets? She could be in total violation of any number of copyright laws! And we would be held responsible!" Am I sweating? My god, she can tell I'm nervous.
Her confusion had turned to amusement. "Frankly, Mr. Lowdon, as long as she's not actively plagiarizing, I don't really think that's a big problem. I'd rather have her writing poetry or reading when she's done with her work than sitting idle."
"But that's the other problem! She - she carries around -" He swallowed, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "Books! Paper books. How do we know they're not copied? Or that she's not copying words out of them? She's not supposed to have those!"
"Then confiscate them. You have my permission."
"We're not supposed to have them either!"
"Ship them back to her home address, then."
Sweat poured off his forehead just thinking about it. "Do you know what penalties we'd suffer if we shipped copyrighted material through the mail system?"
"Then ignore it. It doesn't seem to me that she's doing anything harmful, or disrupting the environment for the other students." Dr. Northcutt re-capped her pen, and tucked the pen and pad carefully back in her lavender handbag. "Allison can take responsibility for her own actions. If what she's doing is against school rules, then give her detention or whatever it is you do these days. I'll tell her again that she shouldn't bring anything to school she's not prepared to lose. Other than that, I don't see her behavior as a serious problem. Good day, Mr. Lowdon."
The sound of her heels clicking along the plasticeramic tile of the hallway echoed in his ears as he sat, astounded by what he'd just heard, in a uncomfortable office chair. "How can you be so casual about a copyright incident waiting to happen?" he pleaded to the empty air.
--
The custodian was so startled, she'd lost her command of English; it took three repetitions for Carver to figure out what was upsetting her. When he finally figured it out, he didn't even wait for her; he grabbed a resurfacer from the cleaning supply closet and charged into the upstairs east girls' bathroom without even knocking. Sure enough, there on the wall of one of the stalls was written:
Mr. Caraway
is the ugliest man in
the whole fuckin school
Carver was about to apply the resurfacer when he realized he needed evidence to punish the student responsible. Security dragged Allison in three minutes later; she studied the graffito for a second, then turned to him and sneered, "I didn't write it. First of all, that's not my handwriting; that's someone who has had a lot less practice than me. Secondly, I don't have a marker that will write on this sort of paint; you can search my stuff if you don't believe me. Thirdly, I wouldn't have left the 'g' off of 'fucking.' Fourth, I don't even have Mr. Caraway for any of my classes."
Carver was struck for the first time how very much she looked like her mother as she stalked back to class. He resurfaced the wall without recording the incident.
--
The next one appeared three days later. This time it was the boys' bathroom downstairs on the north wing, and the author had scratched the graffito into the paint; it took three applications of the resurfacer to erase
History class is
boring as hell - it's spring and
I wanna go screw
He almost didn't question Allison this time; he regretted it when he did. She only smirked, "Yeah, I heard about it. You don't seriously think the palmreader would let me into the boys' bathroom, do you? I hear this one even got in the seasonal reference."
--
When the resurfacer broke, Carver nearly panicked. Terrified of what he'd see, he waited until an hour after school let out to check the bathrooms. In every single one of them, every open surface was slowly being covered by marker, scratches, even paint - short line, long line, short line.
He tendered his resignation without figuring out what the actual pattern was. He wouldn't have cared even if he had known.
--
Dr. Borealis was stirring a beaker of spaghetti sauce over the burner when Allison came home. "Hello, dear. How was school today?"
"Not too bad, Mom. Mr. Lowdon quit."
"You do realize, dear, that whoever they replace him with is unlikely to be any better."
Allison grinned. "Yeah, but the new guy will have to deal with the graffiti from the beginning."
"Why did you teach them all the haiku, anyway? You don't write them." Dr. Borealis tasted the sauce from the end of her stirring rod and added a little more basil.
"It's like you taught me, Mom - you've got to start with structure." Allison tried to look innocent, and failed. "If I tried to teach them rhyme first, they'd give me awful doggrel in poulter's meter or something even worse." She made a disgusted face, and continued, "A haiku can't be dragged out, and the structure forces them to actually think about it, at least enough to actually count stuff. Mom, some of them even had trouble with that," she whined.
Her mother frowned. "I know. I'm working on it. In the meantime, dinner will be ready in about half an hour; go upstairs and work on your calculus."
"Aw, Mom! Can't I do that later? I've just gotten to the best part of Ender's Game . . . "
Dr. Borealis looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Well, all right. I suppose you've done your subversive act for the day, and you deserve to be rewarded. But don't let me catch you skipping the calculus altogether."
"Don't worry, Mom. It's a lot more fun than the 'Algebra readiness' crud they have us doing. Geez, they act like we don't understand what the distributive property is." Allison and her book disappeared up the twisting concrete stairs of the hidden underground lab. Dr. Borealis stirred the spaghetti sauce again, then got up, peered into the murky fluid burbling through the eight-foot upright tank against the left wall, and jotted a few observations on the clipboard hanging next to it:
Experiment 6:
spectroscope analysis
Ready on Tuesday
No room for the seasonal reference. Oh, well. She smiled lightly as she meandered back into the kitchen.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
That fuckin' rocked, er, fuckin(g) rocked!
Date: 2004-02-01 10:21 pm (UTC)Also, only C4H stories have to follow the rules of law/science/magick plotlines. Smallworld has room for every story form, and was largely conceived as a space within which to tell stories just like this. You needn't consider this a fanfic, unless you want to. One thing I've been considering myself is the copyright issue as regards real fanfic. In Smallworld even children cannot play, since they often pretent to be copyrighted characters, but then do things which authors have not preapproved. Tough being a teacher on a playground when you have to break up kids impersonating superheroes! But at what point to we draw the lines? I might be offended by QD slash, but I don't think many of the other things I've done would really be hurt by fanfic. I know other authors feel differently, but how much is the crackdown on fanfic driven by real creative concerns for character and authorship?
Smallworld details I loved that you picked up on: (bonus points for each!)
-T-shirts and jeans as formal dress (each age adopting the casual wear of the one before)
-Paper being an underground item of uncertain and generally illegal origin
-Basic reading and math skills not being taught, since they are not needed for many jobs
-Ironic and sometimes goofy nomeclature (Carver Lowdon), that's such a porn name!;-)
*blush*
Date: 2004-02-02 07:30 pm (UTC)The bit about the curriculum is exaggeration, but it's a logical outcome of the educational "standards" movement as the conservatives are putting it into practice and the suppression of creativity in the SmallWorld background. I thought the rarity/semi-contraband nature of paper, ink, and page would fit in well, too.
Careful about the fanfic bit - you don't want to give me permission to write Thrie/Pye slashfic! (*winks broadly at
I'm probably being too sympathetic to the Borealises in this story, but this seemed one of the easiest ways to introduce a particular Allison I want to play with, and this Dr. B. is a manipulative bitch of a mom, not an abusive bitch.
You didn't comment on their adopted last name. Borealis pseudonyms: Northcutt, Norse, Nordlander, Thule, Northsward, Arcturus, etc. Zephyrus is the name-of-last-resort.
Re: *blush*
Date: 2004-02-04 12:39 am (UTC)Just plain 'North' was too obvious, huh?
Greek: Boreas. Latin: Aquilo. The Latins just borrowed the old name for special occasions. I just checked my Greek mythos, Zephy was Boreas' brother. So if we're using family names; don't forget their other two brothers Eurus and Notus. Boreas was from Thrace (or possibly Scythia), so that might make a good name too!
Speaking of Greek names and phrases: Ariadne is the name of the tiara made to store Dr. B's soul. that's the name of the last owner of a Corona Borealis. She's from my favorite Greek myth ever (Theseus and the Minotaur). She the pure girl who get saved, but then abandons our hero in favor of Dionysius. If you were pure you'd fall for the first man to give you a glimpse of sex too, I suppose.