Chapter 3 – Detentions

In which Hiro decides that it should be someone else's problem, and Garland fails a test.

Hiro looked around. "Why hasn't anyone left?" he asked. He had been looking forward to getting away from his five pupils all day. Break and lunch didn't count – break had been taken up with meeting Mr Dickenson, and Kai had turned up on the doorstep of the BEGA headquarters at lunch looking for Garland for a practice battle. Why the kid wasn't in school himself Hiro did not know.

"You put us all in detention, Coach," Brooklyn sighed. Hiro tried very hard not to turn the same colour as the paper on his desk. Zeus's owner already looked decidedly bored, which was never a good thing. When Brooklyn was bored, Zeus tended to try and entertain him. The last time had included everything in the room except the chairs suddenly floating two feet off the ground, which had not been the most helpful of interventions. Admittedly, it was very funny afterwards, but at the time Hiro had been trying to explain that nothing could escape gravity. He had been forced to amend it to "nothing could escape gravity except things that Zeus decides to play with" which made his class laugh at him for days afterwards. He certainly didn't want a demonstration of how Kepler's First Law of Planetary Motion also didn't apply when Zeus decided that triangles were so much more interesting than ovals.*

"Even Garland?" Hiro asked, turning to the silver-haired blader, who shrugged.

"You said anyone with less than sixty percent on the test had to stay behind."

This was most perplexing. "But you're my best pupil - how did you get less than sixty percent? Even Brooklyn got eighty-four, for goodness sake!" Hiro thought back to the test. Yes, now he remembered. He had thought that Garland had just missed a couple of pages, but perhaps not.

Garland sighed. "I was answering the third question when Zeus ate my last pencil. I was going to ask to borrow one when I realised that he'd just eat those ones too."

"Brooklyn..." Hiro said, his voice a severe warning. The red-head shrugged nonchalantly.

"He didn't mean to, Coach," he protested lazily. "They just taste good. And you wouldn't let him out at lunch so he was hungry."

Hiro could feel a headache coming on. It seemed that no matter how many times he explained to Brooklyn that his beloved bit-beast was physically incapable of being hungry, as he was entirely made of energy, the redhead refused to believe him. His reasoning? "He's my bit-beast, I should know."

"And you, Crusher? I'm pretty certain I didn't put you in detention."

"You didn't, Coach Hiro," the young man answered. "I put myself in here."

Hiro stared at him in horror. "What?" he spluttered. "You put yourself in detention? Why?"

In answer, Crusher pointed to the list of classroom rules pinned up on the door. "I used Gigars to get me across the grounds without getting wet when it was raining. I promised Monica that I'd phone her at lunch, and I know I could have just run it, but it was raining so much..."

Hiro's heart sank. Whilst bit-beasts were noble creatures, special and sacred, they were also just as human as their owners, and loved them fiercely if properly looked after. For Gigars to allow his master to get soaked when trying to contact the person he cared most about was just unthinkable. And it was a perfectly good reason – if Gigars had been willing, then it was even a noble reason.

But he had to set an example, or else a pair of rather more troublesome beasts know as Brooklyn and Mystel would begin utilising their own bit-beasts' powers with more and more abandon, which was never a good idea.

"Very well," he said at last. "The rules must be obeyed. Crusher, you'll have to stay behind too."

And so Hiro suddenly found himself with a class full of teenagers who not only did he want out of his sight, they weren't very happy at being there either.

Come to think of it, this was entirely normal.

"Fine," he sighed. "You can all just do your homework or something."

But it was not to be. Brooklyn smirked suddenly, and Hiro glanced rapidly around, just as Zeus managed to prove Murphy's Law completely and totally correct, creating a miniature black hole in the middle of the classroom.

"I'm sorry sir, but my team-mate's dark bit-beast opened up a black hole to a different dimension and pulled all of the homework sheets through..."

Hiro had to admit, once he'd managed to rescue what was left of his paperwork, that it was the best excuse for not doing homework he'd ever heard.

A/N - Haha, poor Hiro, he really doesn't know what he's getting himself into, teaching this lot, does he? JuniperGentle does not endorse throwing rubbers at classmates with slingshots, denying the laws of physics, or creating black holes for the sole purpose of destroying homework, as awesome an excuse as that would be for not handing it in.

*Kepler's First Law of Planetary Motion states that "The orbit of every planet is an ellipsis with the Sun at one of the two foci." Look it up for more details, but basically if we had a triangular orbit we'd be pretty stuffed. And, before anyone points it out, it wouldn't really be an orbit.