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I will be traveling to see my family for the holidays next week, so there will be an art update and a reminder about the Max plush while I'm away! Paranatural will return after that. Thank you very much! Also: support Paranatural on Patreon on Ko-fi if you can! Thank you!
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[Transcript]
Coach Oop’s eyes drifted down to a trio of students creeping behind his colleague like the cast of Scooby Doo.
“HEY!!” barked Sister Cat, crudely mixing cat and dog like the proverbial rainstorm both beasts were known to fall from. “Hey. Hi. Hello,” Miss Baxter sputtered on with a veneer of kind composure. “Stephen, dear, I thought we talked about this...”
While Miss Baxter had been occupied by distracting thoughts of highschool bittersweethearts, Stephen had been trying to sneak past her for the second time this morning. Factoring in his first bizarre request to “make first contact with the greys” within her classroom, Miss Baxter had been forced to deny him three times now. A nascent faith’s apostle ought to earn sainthood for that sort of measured, insistent persistence—she was fairly certain there was precedent!
“You don’t freakin’ GET IT, Miss Baxter!” Stephen whined, trying to sidle around her now that she had blocked the door. “It doesn’t matter if we ‘disrupt math class’ or whatever! Do you REALLY think algerba is gonna matter once the ALIENS land and teach us fractal hyperphysics?!”
“We already teach that at this middle school, for some reason,” Miss Baxter replied. Her fabricated smile trembled with her muscles’ effort. “I’m sooo glad you’re interested in advanced mathematics, Stephen, I really am, but I’m afraid you’ll simply have to learn the earthly basics first! You know? And not fail every test you take! You know?” Her tone had all the saccharine malice of a puppet on a children’s show, an inexplicably relevant analogy to make amidst such programs’ recent surge in popularity. “Maybe then, if you work hard enough, you can grow up to be an astronaut, and then you’d finally get to GIVE ME SPACE—er, GO TO space,” she corrected herself, gently sliding Stephen from the doorframe. “Then YOU could be the extraterrestrial, Stephen, that fills the empty void above our heads and in our hearts! The dream that paints possibility into the black and lifeless canvas of the infinite!”
“I could be... an extraterrestrial...?” a puzzled Stephen echoed back to her. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I think YOU could be an extraterrestrial, Miss Baxter. An INFILTRATOR sent to Earth to SABOTAGE OUR MISSION!” He gestured back towards his fellow truthseekers, a very flustered-looking Alex and an RJ with a strangely squirming stomach (a hidden Cash Reward that they’d repeatedly explained away as “cartoon indigestion”). “Why ELSE would you be STANDING GUARD at the ONLY PLACE that Alex gets abducted every day: YOUR CLASSROOM?! Answer THAT, Miss Baxter... if that IS your REAL NAME or REAL FACE or REAL BODY!”
Miss Baxter smiled at him like a scary clown painted on the side of a struggling carnival’s funhouse.
“Oh, Stephen. Silly. NOBODY is real,” she hissed through a grimacing grin, unconcerned for such a statement’s likely impact on a bobbing buoy of a brain like Stephen Henchman’s. “Everyone wears LIFTS and WIGS and MAKEUP. Forget first contact: we’re all staring out THROUGH contacts, through our PHONE SCREENS, through an inch of CREAM and POWDER, SILLY BILLY. True connection with our fellow human beings is impossible, let alone with distant figments of wishful thinking born of our fear that WE’RE alone in a dark, hollow universe! You SILLY, SILLY BILLY.”
Stephen blinked at her.
“ALIEN!” he cried out, pointing at her as if ordering his posse to attack.
“i don’t know,” mumbled Alex. “i found that whole speech very humanizing.” Perhaps even more humanizing than the time that she’d seen Miss Baxter at the grocery store, shoplifting clearance chocolate on the morning after Valentine’s Day.
“All right, Steph, take a lap. I’ll blow my friggin’ whistle if I have to,” grumbled Coach Oop. He was keen to intervene before Miss Baxter tried to bite a student for the second time this year.
“...Whatever you say, Coach Oop,” scoffed Stephen. “Say hi to Captain Boop and Fleet Commander Bibbity Bobbity Beep for me, you bald-faced cyborg FREAK.”
Before Coach Oop could save the Student Council the trouble of giving him detention, Stephen turned to leave and bumped straight into Eddy Burger.
“Oof!” squeaked Ed—uttering, perhaps, the name of a gym coach in some parallel dimension that only fractal hyperphysics could conceive of. Even Eddy’s most careless exhalations had an air of intellectualism, a transient whiff of their brain’s boundless breadth.
“Watch where you’re GOING, dork,” Stephen began to say reflexively, before a solemn hand fell on his shoulder.
“No,” RJ’s silent shaking of their head seemed to suggest. “This one has earned mercy, having shown it, and their strength, in our last battle.” Eddy could have easily killed Johnny when they’d bested him and RJ in their fight the other day. It would have been super messed up to murder him in Bayview’s PG-rated paradise, but, logistically speaking, the opportunity had been there. Ed had shown a warrior’s steel restraint.
Stephen nodded back in sober, if reluctant, understanding.
“...You’ve earned the respect of my proudly disrespectful friend. Stand tall, short queen: you have a bully’s heart,” Stephen said to Ed.
“Oh!” Eddy replied. “I don’t want it! Sorry! I’m flattered, but my only love is SCIENCE at the moment. The only bonds and chemistry I care about, are, um... electrons? And I’m only interested in dating, uh... carbon.” They gave Stephen a very scientific thumbs up.
“...Alien?” the bully hesitantly theorized, pointing with less confidence than he’d deployed for Baxter.
“i’ve been saying,” Alex nodded, definitely not at all relieved to hear Stephen preemptively rejected, “it’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
“Oh, those! I make those all the time,” Ed beamed. They were very smart, and could definitely pronounce the word. Hypopotamus. Hippothermia. Hypothenuse. Those were other, similar words, and not their best attempt to mentally repeat the term that Alex had deployed.
This latest cognitive surge was swiftly overtaken by the next brain wave to crash against the coastline of their oceanic consciousness. Eddy had overheard much of Stephen’s rambling at Baxter. Alien abductions? Cyborg infiltrator fleet commanders? That sounded super fun! Maybe they could also play with everybody also? Every sci-fi story needed a wacky scientist, after all, a scholar doomed to die for their hubristic fascination with a people-eating meat monster!
As it was in many a passable genre romp, however, the real threat was the monster in us all: mankind’s capacity for evil, as instilled in them by carceral, destructive ideology. A regiment of Student Council gendarmes had just stormed into the hallway, seizing nerds and preps alike for preschool-era crimes.
“Let GO! Running a wagon over an anthill is not vehicular regicide!”
“I haven’t eaten crayons since KINDERGARTEN! What do you MEAN they’re ‘anatomically a cigarette’?!”
“HEY, if you got questions, bub, pretend that you’re in CLASS and RAISE YOUR HAND! Now raise the other one. Now UP AGAINST THE WALL!”
While the others stared in dumbfounded confusion, Stephen was the first to turn and face the coming storm.
“...Get behind me,” he growled, holding up an arm in front of Alex.
“you don’t have to tell me twice,” she mumbled, swooning surreptitiously, “but you can if you want to and maybe i could like record it this time ha ha?”