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To a lot of Negaverse agents, still having to stick to the routine of a school schedule to keep up the facade of normalcy was probably very unappealing when put up next to the relative excitement of their night life. Keeping grades up and writing papers and staying on the ball with extracurricular activities didn't seem very important in the grand scheme of things when they were waging a war that aspired to completely overhaul human society. Battling senshi, stealing souls and leaping between rooftops was notably more exciting than sporting events and petty popularity contests. School was bland. School was boring, school was a countdown to the next vacation period.

Having a uniform magically form itself around you and being told you had basically been chosen to be a member of the world's new elite had a way of making school out to be even more of a drag. Or at least that's how it must have been for most people. Being recruited had not changed Janice's opinion on school very much. She was still an overachiever. She was still determined to get valedictorian, she still wanted to bash her head into a wall every time Audrey Collins got one more question right than she did in a calc quiz and still was planning to sneak laxatives into Tallulah Cowden's coffee when the next test in history came up. Her education was very important, a smart soldier was a good soldier, keeping the mind active also kept it sharp.

But she was having a really difficult time thinking about her education right now, because all of her brain power was being diverted into parsing what had happened to her English teacher's office.

Granted, Ray Gordon's office was never quite the most impressive sight to take in. In spite of the janitorial service doing what it could to keep it in decent shape without being overly invasive, there was always a tendency towards looking a little worn around the edges; one too many empty styrofoam cups at the desk or paper towels leftover from whatever that one redheaded paraprofessional brought into the faculty meeting room once in a while. But that was little, vaguely annoying stuff, it was normal. It told people they were sitting in Mr. Gordon's office.

The sight of the massive swarm of carnations that had taken residence there told Janice that her teacher's laziness had finally been grounds for dismissal and he was being replaced by someone with an unhealthy love for flowers, or that perhaps he had gained some popularity in a blog she didn't know about and it had gotten him a bunch of creepy Internet secret admirers who had ordered him carnations on Valentine's Day. Or something. She really didn't know what the hell. In all honesty, the first thought that had sprung to mind when she saw that Mr. Gordon was still indeed occupying his office and had not been fired for some reason was an estimation on how long they would be allowed to stay there and wilt before they were finally disposed of. Her inner botanist wept.

"Excuse me," she finally said, arms crossed and leaning against the doorway. "Mr. Gordon. I think you know why I decided to stop by."

Janice was in her school uniform, which was by regulations to be expected, but made the whole "dude in a short skirt" look it invoked no less jarring. She looked terrible in a skirt. She was aware of how terrible she looked in a skirt. Unfortunately for her, though, Meadowview High School was not the first episode of Utena and she had no real desire to be anyone's dashing prince anyway, so she was stuck wearing the girls' uniform until she transferred to Sovereign Heights.

"Ask me that again when we're in Portugal and it's the early 1970's," she replied, striding in and allowing herself to occupy the uncomfortable wooden chair wedged into the wall -- the most unapproachable thing about Ray was having to sit in that thing -- her arms still crossed, expression vaguely brooding as usual. "I'm afraid I'm only here to ask you a question, sir."

Her gaze rolled over to look her English instructor straight in the eye, a hand lifting up to push some hair behind her ear before resting flat on top of her knee. "My copy of The Blues Brothers."

Janice was using a tone that suggested she was talking about illegal contraband.

"Where is it."

"Considering I have been using figures of speech to ask you to give it back to me for the past six weeks, Mr. Gordon, I figure you wouldn't be too off the mark making that assumption." Her fingers were drumming over her knee now, which effectively looked like half a spider trying to crawl over her leg and getting nowhere. She watched her instructor swivel around in his swivel chair like he was an eight year old who had just discovered it was empty and his parents weren't in the room, looking more disdained than entertained.

But that wasn't for his behavior, it was because he was avoiding the question. Again. Which means he didn't bring her DVD up so she could get it back. Again.

"I'm assuming by how you're offering to answer my question, it isn't here in your office," she guessed, eyes narrowing, her jaw working to grind her teeth a bit over the course of her pause. "In other words, you don't have it. So. It's at home, still?"

The look could also have been because of the fact Janice sometimes relented to these meetings by deliberately making her next assignment so dry and such a struggle to read that it would have been preferable to walk barefoot down a corridor with broken glass scattered all over the floor, but again, it was anyone's guess.

Janice was making no effort to hide her disappointment; she'd removed her glasses with one hand to make room for the other pinching the bridge of her strong nose. She was quite possibly being a bit overdramatic with her response, but -- it was her favorite movie, and Franz had wanted to spend a romantic evening watching it with her while they fondued her Valentine's Day gift, god damn it. Way to ruin a date, Ray.

She replaced her glasses and swiveled her gaze back upward, though, when Ray mentioned a proposal, and tilted her head to the side as if to say, well?

The first offer was tempting. She had already started formulating the sort of pieces she could send back Gordon's possession in, depending on which one she picked: the action figures, if she could manage to not just keep them, were easy, but she figured she could take things up a notch by beginning to send the ball-jointed joints hacked up into smaller parts if she hadn't gotten her DVD back into her first month. The First Folio, page by artfully shredded page.

But then he brought her attention to his stack of board games, and all thoughts of methodically destroying his personal possessions were instantly dissolved. Janice could never pass up the opportunity to play, or settle things over, a board game.

Ray Gordon was well aware of this.

Janice was well aware that Ray Gordon was well aware of this.

"Fine," she said, "checkers it is. But if this DVD ends up going the way of my copy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, I might just have to rip out your soul and eat it."

Janice had no qualms with getting picked to play red in such a quick and easy fashion. She and Franz were both always so set on playing red that they often had to play an elaborate series of other board games to settle the issue. Vera would silently accept her fate of always playing black, but she wasn't the most enthusiastic checkers player; she was a more engaging opponent in games of Scrabble.

'Started' was probably not an appropriate word to describe any part of the process in which Janice set up her checkers pieces. She did it with the same speed and gusto of an overenthusiastic poker player shuffling his deck of cards; it sounded more like someone knocking down a noisy line of dominoes than someone setting something up.

She made her moves just as quickly. Really, they were both absurdly fast checkers players and very practiced at it; it almost sounded like someone was firing a muffled machine gun in the room, or that a line of firecrackers had been set off. A couple of faculty members stopped and peered inside to figure out what the noise was -- when they saw it was just Janice and Gordon playing board games again they gave resigned shrugs and continued on to wherever it was they were going.

"Look," Janice was saying, as she kept on smacking the little red chips down on the board, "there are many reasons why I want my movie back, but let me par them down to two. One of them is Nora Merlin -- you know her, obviously -- and the other's the secretary at Hillworth, her name is Ursula -- king me -- who I'm associating with as a part of my internship."

She had always been vexingly vague about her 'internship' whenever it cropped up anywhere. All that was really apparent about it is that it ate up a great deal of her time these days.

Janice had no contrasting displays of showmanship to add to this game. The leisure and theatrics she took when playing board games was inversely proportional to how seriously she took her opponent; at the annual city Scrabble tournament the games she played practically made for a good miniseries on their own (she still hadn't quite lived down her literal throwing of the 2009 championship match). Here, however, she was just playing to win -- Ray was not a shabby board game player by any means so long as the rules didn't penalize you for talking -- and when she ended up not getting her victory, she'd automatically turned to intensely studying the board, looking for where she had made the mistakes that had allowed her to lose.

Of course, she was also rightfully irritated. But this wasn't because she lost at a game, it was because she had lost at a game that was going to be the determining factor on whether she'd be seeing any of the DVDs she'd loaned out to Ray back in her hands before her graduation.

She was, understandably, regretting the decision to not hold Starscream hostage. And by "regretting," it would have been better to say "more than slightly pissed off." Her face was set in that familiar blank expression she predictably wore whenever something had managed to get to her or she otherwise wanted to hide her emotions. Which she was pretty good at. It was a pity she didn't play poker.

"But tell me what?" Janice parroted, chin propped on her hand and her eyes still on the board.

Janice had seen all the pictures before, and after the initial, obligatory curiosity about them had faded they'd ceased to be very interesting. Sometimes she wondered what students in her own class would end up framed on Mr. Gordon's desk next: she almost always, invariably, pulled up the name and face of Charys Murphy for some reason even though she could not imagine a desk-worthy way to photograph her. Maybe listening to her iPod and texting while on a ski lift. Or putting her feet up on the table at some restaurant in Europe, that seemed like her.

"Fine," she answered, after a moment of watching the game pieces getting stacked up and put away. "As long as you don't turn my head into a game of horseshoes with your participation prizes again."

Not that that was likely to do anything to stop him.