The student activities office was never really a place Noah liked spending time, because being in there meant that he was overdue for some community service work that he had no intentions of ever actually doing. But to be called into the office with less than a month left of his high school career? That was just asking for trouble on his part.

Trouble that was always around with bright orange hair and a wicked grin on her face. "What am I doing in here?" he asked when he entered the office and noticed her, choosing to glare at said source of trouble, who had draped herself over one of the tables in the office. "Izzy, please, tell me you didn't volunteer me for something stupid again. If we're spending another day at the zoo shoveling animal waste, I'm going to revoke our friendship card."

"I didn't cause this, don't you worry!" Izzy responded with a cackle, lifting herself off the table and pushing herself back to her feet. "I got pulled out of class the same way you did. 'cept when I left, it was in the middle of dissections. Betcha that whatever you're missing, it's not quite the same as cutting open a dead cat."

"Please, don't talk to me about your biology class. I'm supposed to be taking a chemistry test right now, and being in here is only going to sink my grade." He kicked one of the chairs at the table, the noise of the two pieces of furniture colliding enough to attract someone from the other half of the office. As the self-proclaimed "fun guy" activities instructor came into view, Noah reminded himself how much he really did not enjoy being in the presence of this man. There was just something about Mr. McLean—or Chris, as he had everyone refer to him—that made Noah's mental processes revert to some sort of summer camp from hell survival state, and it made him shudder to wonder what sorts of vile things this man could have done in an alternate universe.

Chris looked at the two teenagers in his office and shook his head. "You sorry souls. Doesn't graduating high school matter to either of you? You're not expecting to become famous and live off of doing nothing, are you?" They both looked at him like he was insane, because obviously graduating mattered if it was less than a month until graduation and they were both still attending classes. "Then why didn't either of you sign up for the science fair? Y'know, graduation requirement? You have to help out with the incoming freshmen at a local school, just like everyone else. Rules are rules, and you two are breaking them."

"Breaking rules is sort of my thing." Not letting her grin falter even slightly, Izzy clasped her hands together in excitement. "So what's the punishment? Do we get to do something else? I love something elses. Noah does too, sometimes, when he feels like it." Noah heard his name be said but didn't catch anything else of her rambling, as he was too busy focusing on the fact that he really hadn't signed up for the science fair thing. He had known it was a requirement, and had known that without doing it, he wasn't going to be graduating and therefore would be stuck in the hellhole known as high school for another year. But his disdain for this office and the man who ran it seemingly had stopped him from signing up, and now it was time to face the consequences.

Or so he thought. "The punishment is that you have to participate. You two are the only ones to not sign up, which means you get the last two spots." Chris stepped away for a moment, coming back with a paper in hand, which he slammed down onto the table. "I'm sure you'll be happy to know that they aren't clean-up crew positions."

He was right, they weren't positions of that nature, but it seemed that the only blanks left on the list were under the category of supervising the students in their projects. "Uh, sorry, don't have the time to help a kid build a volcano or something," Noah said as he checked over the list to see if there were any other possible things he could do. "Kind of have other things to worry about, like final projects and the like. Need to be able to graduate."

"And without helping that kid with their volcano, you won't be graduating anyway, so I suggest you make time for this. It's going to be explosive." The glee in Chris' eyes as he said that would have been enough to make a normal person cringe, but all Izzy heard was the word "explosive" and she began whooping and hollering like she had just been told she was a new millionaire. As for Noah, he grumbled something about how ridiculous the situation was, ignoring the fact that he had fully set himself up for this. "Oh, and, by the way, we're heading over to the middle school tomorrow to pick out what students you're helping with. Non-negotiable field trip. Perk of being a senior. Better see you here bright and early for it."

There was no way this was going to end well for anyone.

The selection of students who needed senior mentors was slim for the pickings by the time the school bus filled with the unlucky souls put up for the job made it over to the middle school. In fact, there were so few choices left that some of the seniors were being repurposed for other positions in the running of the science fair. Noah and Izzy were not two seniors met with that fate, as they were already looking at what projects still needed pseudo-adult supervision when the decision was made.

It was clear that Izzy was having a lot more fun getting to look through what cool things people wanted to do as their projects that Noah was, because she was quite literally pulling him around the room, showing him everything she thought was interesting. "Look over here!" she'd shout every time her attention had been grabbed by something different. "This person's got big dreams. Bet they'd be able to do it if they had me helping them out, don't you think?"

Noah would look at the display that showcased the grand idea of whatever eighth grader had designed it, and he would always shake his head in disapproval. "Someone's already claimed it. Like every other project in here. We're seriously going to be stuck helping the kids who eat glue at this rate." He groaned as Izzy's attention was diverted to yet another project, and despite his best attempts to stop her in her mad dash around the room (he was fairly certain that the soles of his shoes were worn down to nothing with how much he'd been dragging his heels), they were off to look at yet another display.

"This one! I think I'm going to help with this one!" Letting go of Noah's arm, and therefore causing him to fall backwards to the floor, Izzy bounced up and down in her excitement as she stood before what had to have been the single most ambitious project in the room. The sign mentioned something about a powerful electromagnet, strong enough to potentially disrupt the rotation of the Earth, and when Noah picked himself up off the ground his first move was to try and stop Izzy from signing up for that one at all costs. He was far too slow, because she had already written her name down in the biggest letters she could muster on the page; when she saw him looking in disbelief at her sign-up, she cackled. "What, you jealous that I got to it first? That's so what you get for being lazy, Noah!"

"I'm not jealous of you for signing up on creating a death trap! I'm scared for what destruction this decision is going to cause!" He banged his fist on the sign-up sheet a time or two, before sighing. "Whatever. We asked for this. You've found your project, and now I need to find mine."

She laughed a bit more, before turning around and gasping, which collected his attention and caused him to look at what she was now transfixed by. "You've got to do that one," she told him, pointing at the display that was now standing before them. "My electromagnet thing isn't going to cause the end of the world, not when someone wants to make a doomsday device!" Izzy slapped herself on the forehead. "How could I have been so stupid and not looked at everything first? Doomsday devices are totally more fun than big scary magnets."

Maybe Izzy signing up for the electromagnet wasn't that bad of an idea after all, if it kept her away from some kid's desires to end the world. Noah cautiously approached the sign-up sheet for the doomsday project and noticed that, predictably, it was missing a name, which meant that he could claim it and help some kid try to end the world. At least it was going to be him, who had no real desire to make this thing functional, rather than Izzy, who would gladly put in the effort to cause real problems.

After all projects had been claimed and they were meeting the students that they were now assisting with their science fair ambitions, Noah realized that no, the electromagnet project was still definitely the worst thing for Izzy to be helping out with. The girl behind that project, a glasses and oversized sweater-wearing girl named Scarlett, seemed like she truly believed that she was going to disrupt the Earth's rotation with her magnet—and based on how calculated her words were, she seemed to have done the research to know what she was doing. The boy behind the doomsday machine, however, wasn't nearly as educated about his topic as she was on hers. From what Noah gathered in their conversation, his name was Max and he was completely hell-bent on ruling the world for the sake of evil. Giving him a doomsday machine, functional or not, was only going to give him even more dreams of ruling in infamy, it seemed. But there was no choice but to help him out a bit, just for the sake of the grade.

Hopefully on the night of the science fair, the end of the world as they knew it wouldn't be brought on by one of these two projects.

The next several weeks were spent filled with many hours of collaborations between the eighth graders and their senior mentors. Sometimes the work was boring, sometimes it was fun, but for the most part, it was a lot of sharing ideas and getting either entirely too excited or terribly bored with what was going on—the sorts of events that would be included in a video montage if someone had decided to make one. (In fact, Izzy had suggested to Scarlett that they should have done just that, in case their electromagnet project worked to perfection and a documentary of their journey was made in their honor. She had been shot down in no less than five hundred words of why it was a terrible idea.)

It all came down to the one-night event known as the science fair. The senior mentors were all mostly drained of any enthusiasm they could muster for the situation—after all, they were less than a week away from graduation and this was their last task before getting to earn a diploma. Just for having an eighth grader present with a project that worked to some capacity was enough to have them pass the task, and that seemed easy enough; however, nothing was ever easy enough for Noah. How had he been so stupid as to sign up to make a doomsday machine, knowing it wasn't going to work in the slightest? There was no way he was going to manage to be able to graduate, not with the poor choice in project he had made.

"I don't know why you tremble, not when we are going to cause havoc and destruction on the world tonight," he was told by Max, that annoying guy he'd been helping out with everything. Even after being told repeatedly that there was no way a machine built from a cardboard box and some old computer parts would destroy anything, he was still convinced that he was going to be leaving the night the supreme ruler of the world. "And when we succeed in our domination, I'll even let you be my right-hand man."

"Thanks, but I'll pass. Can't let my name be attached to terrible things." He didn't want to crush this kid's dream of ruling the world, so Noah figured saying that was letting the kid down easy. That was not the case, because Max scrunched up his face and shook a threatening fist in Noah's direction for the comment. "Whoa there, no need to get violent. So I won't play along with your dictator dreams. Big deal."

"They are not dreams, they are realistic aspirations for my life, and you're being so uncool by turning the position down. No matter, though, as I'll find a suitable replacement." Dropping his fist, Max looked around at the other people in the auditorium where the science fair was being held, catching a glimpse of two redheads off in the distance. "Such as your lady friend, perhaps? From what Scarlett has told me, she has quite the destructive streak to her. Yes…I could quite use someone like that!"

Just like that, Max was disappearing into the crowd to go approach Izzy on asking if she would want to be his right-hand woman in the ruling of the destroyed world, and Noah knew he should have followed him. Not because he wanted to crush his dreams, but because he needed to put a stop to the whole "lady friend" business that had just been brought about. If there was one thing that got on Noah's nerves more than the general insanity that was his life, it was anyone insinuating that he and Izzy were anything more than just reluctant friends—and an eighth grader who probably had never so much as held hands with a girl had no right to be making that sort of jab. But Noah was stopped before he could even move, by the redhead who wasn't Izzy seemingly appearing before him. "Pardon if this seems sudden and unexpected, but I need information from you," she said, grabbing a notebook and a pen from under her arm. "More specifically, information about your project."

"What, about how it's going to destroy the world? Because, news flash, it isn't." Noah looked to the cardboard death trap and grimaced, knowing that it wasn't going to work and that he was going to fail everything because of it. "There's no need to worry about that."

"That is not my concern here, believe it or not. I am well aware that my project is the best here, and nothing anyone could possibly make would top its abilities, especially not something created by Max." Scarlett, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose with one hand, jotted down a quick note in her book. "I am simply here to ask if you might have created anything that could be attracted by a decent magnetic charge."

Noah gave a nonchalant shrug. "Don't really know. He did all the building. I just did the supervising. What sort of question is that?"

"A question that will make perfect sense once it is my demonstration period." Putting her notebook back under her arm, Scarlett gave a small nod at Noah. "Thank you for your cooperation, and may the best team win. There is no chance that it will not be my team, but alas, the well wishes are a courtesy." Just like she had appeared, she was gone quicker than Noah could react to, and when he checked to see where she had gone next, he saw her off in the distance, once more standing with Izzy. It was then that he remembered about the computer parts inside the cardboard box that made up the doomsday device, but it was clearly too late to go and tell her that there was a chance that their project was able to be attracted by a magnet.

Even with those computer parts, there was no way that some eighth grader's homemade electromagnet would be grabbing the machine from across the room, so there really was no need to worry about it. Everything was going to be fine, cryptic warnings be damned; well, okay, everything wasn't going to be fine, but there wasn't going to be any sort of destruction. It was just going to be a failed project that doomed Noah to another year of high school, that was all.

When the time came for the presentations, most of the projects that were showcased were incredibly lame. A lot of them were typical science fair things, like volcanoes and plant growth charts, but a couple were more social in nature and would have been more interesting if there weren't two of the exact same project. (Someone explained it that there was a set of cheerleader twins and they "accidentally" picked the same thing to do, something that wasn't helped in the slightest by their dueling senior mentors.) After what seemed like hours of mind-numbing stupidity, it came to Scarlett and Izzy's presentation. As Izzy rolled the giant contraption onto the stage in front of the audience, Scarlett made her way to the podium, setting her notebook before her as she began to introduce what she had spent her time creating.

"We were unable to make an electromagnet strong enough to disrupt the gravitational pull of planets and alter the rotation of the Earth, but between my senior mentor and myself, we did create a magnet a million times more powerful than anything most humans will ever encounter." Scarlett, motioning to the almost colossal machine behind her, gave an almost maniacal grin. "And now it's time for us to put our plan in action and cause chaos beyond anyone's wildest dreams."

"Turning it on now!" Izzy screeched, kicking the machine, which began whirring and buzzing loudly. Everyone who had gathered for the presentation took a step back, unsure of how to react to what was happening, a confusion made only more prominent when Izzy began her typical cackling, almost doubling over in laughter.

"This, ahem, magnet, has a very strong chance of causing this building to collapse. I would estimate it at about a seventy-five percent chance? By all means, I would suggest running, but it is far too late." Stepping aside from the podium, Scarlett seemed to move just in time before things started happening, the first thing being the microphone she had just been using becoming drawn into the magnetic field of the electromagnet. Following it was loose change that littered the floor, then pens, paperclips, and metal casings of other things—and within seconds people were getting drawn towards the machine, the metal on their belts and other belongings being picked up.

As Scarlett stood by and watched, tables began to move, inching ever closer to the machine she had created. People's projects were being destroyed, the movement disrupting their balance and causing them to hit the floor. There were screams of terror, Izzy's laughter being heard over it all, and as Noah stood back where he had stayed the entire time, he realized that he had been correct all along in thinking that that was the worst possible project for his friend to get attached to. She was going to have given her assistance in destroying everything, and that just wasn't okay. It needed to be stopped, somehow. He looked around, hoping that he'd find something that could help him out, but all he saw was the doomsday device, starting to inch its way towards the magnet.

The thing had to be useful for something, right?

Helping it in its movement towards the magnet, Noah got behind the box and pushed it forward as hard as he could, which not only moved it enough to get it closer to the magnetic pull, but it also started moving it faster. He couldn't do much more than that, not when he was tackled from behind, Max screaming something about how that was destroying their one chance at world domination. How he would have loved to tell the pipsqueak that it was their one chance at saving the world from being dominated by two redheads, but he couldn't find it in himself to do just that, not when the room seemed to go silent at about the same time his face hit the floor from being tackled.

The next thing that he remembered was the room being flooded by an eerie light, the silence seeming to go on forever.

Miraculously, there weren't any casualties or major injuries sustained in the accident. A few people had slight burns from the explosion, but with how many people were engulfed in the bright flames, it was a miracle that there wasn't much worse than what did actually happen. Witnesses that had seen the fallout claimed that if it hadn't been for the giant cardboard box flying in and colliding with the magnet, there wouldn't have been an explosion, but at the same time, there wouldn't have been anything to stop the magnet's tyrannical hold on the science fair.

Because of his involvement in the creation of said cardboard box, even though it didn't do a single thing as advertised (a doomsday machine that saved the day?), Noah was given a passing grade on the assignment. Izzy also passed somehow, even though she had been behind the project that had caused so much trouble. As for their eighth grade companions, their names would forever live in infamy as the duo who wanted nothing more than destruction and chaos at their science fair—and when it came time for them to be senior mentors to other students, it was just going to happen all over again.

A/N: I hope this is suitable as a Summer Secret Santa gift for you, The Sarcasm Master (aka Sam)! I tried to write it with some understated humor and whatnot, and I hope it satisfies the void in your soul that's been open for the past almost-week! c: