#[wwe announcer voice] SQUISH HIM

[specialgrades]

SQUIMBUS!!!!!!!!!

FUCKIN' SQUIMBUS

[hankwritten]

Quodlibet

Demoman/Soldier, 2k

Request for ImSorry, College

“How do you even know this guy anyway?” Jeremy asked, leaning over Jane’s back in such a intrusive distillation of his character that this particular instant could have come from any singular moment throughout the semester, right down to the mortal threat to Jane’s class project.

“Watch it, Buster! You are dangerously close to causing the greatest second dolphin extinction event since the invention of the six-pack!”

Trying to dislodge his suitemate, Jane threw his shoulder, pushing Jeremy and his grasping arms backwards and away from the fragile, pseudo-aquatic diorama.

Jeremy slid down Jane’s spine. “Fine, jeez, I wasn’t going to squish your bath toys.” He went boneless just long enough to reach the floor, then promptly popped to his feet and began looking at the aquarium from the other side. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don't know what you mean by ‘this guy’,” Jane grumbled. “This is clearly a diorama. Not a guy.”

“The guy, man,” Scout nagged, and Jane could already feel the migraine coming on. Jeremy was actually the human embodiment of head pains, to the point where sometimes Jane wondered if he had escaped from a lab that had been trying to bio-engineer the most aggravating person in existence. “This guy that’s making you go wackadoo and put like ten times more effort into a freaking GED project than anyone ever should.”

“This has nothing to do with him.” Jane put an aggressive amount of glue on his last dolphin.

“Right, sure,” Jeremy snickered. “But as soon as I said ‘guy you have a weird rivalry with’ you immediately jumped to him.” When Jane grit his teeth, Jeremy laughed again. “So what is it with you two? You didn’t get the urge to start tearing each other’s intellectual dicks off just because of some Economics of Marine Biology class, right?”

“Applied Oceanography,” Jane corrected, pointedly not looking up.

“C’mon pally, you know what I meant-”

“Hrrn nn brrdaa”

The voice of their third and final suitemate spoke up from a nearby beanbag chair, where its owner was trying to ignite a textbook with a lighter.

Jeremy looked to them, then to Jane. “Really? He plays for the Brawlers too?”

“Yes,” Jane snarled. “Mystery solved. The new power guard is in my oceanography class, and now you will shut your trap, shortstop, so that I can proceed to kick his ass in diorama making and prove that I am the superior guard.”

“That ain’t exactly a perfect chain of events, but you do you pally.” Jeremy pulled to the far end of the couch, drawing his legs into a fold. “Ain’t like, you supposed to develop deep-seated rivalries with players from other schools? Not your own?”

“If you met him, you would understand.” Jane placed some cherry bombs at the bottom of the glass tank. “Plus, he-...” Swallowing his fury, he said, “he got me moved to small guard.”

“To- what?”

“Hurmm umma,” their third put in helpfully.

Jeremy absorbed this for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Oh, oh man. There’s literally a position called small guard? That’s- that’s fucking hilarious you gotta admit.”

“I have to admit no such thing!” Jane rounded on him, diverting his attention from his precious project for the first time in over three hours. “I used to be power guard! Then some one-eyed, Scottish, lay-about, freshman comes in and thinks he can take my spot? This is betrayal of the highest order! A perversion of our constitution!”

“Mrra hudda.”

“I do not care if small guard is ‘technically a step up’,” Jane huffed. “Power guard is further to the front. That makes it better.”

“Basketball’s for chumps anyway,” Jeremy said, apparently having derived all the entertainment he’d wanted from the conversation, laying until he could reach his arms behind his head and dropping his legs in Jane’s lap. “You should try out for a real sport. But hey! Hope your little fish tank fills your inadequacy or whatever.”

“Oh it will.” Jane lowered his face to the glass, breath fogging and obscuring the magnum opus within. “It will.”

#

“And here you will see what happens when America finally colonizes the ocean!” Jane said to the drooling, glassy eyes of an 8am class.

They were significantly less slumberous when he threw a final cherry bomb into his demonstration, causing a chain reaction as dozens of ‘fireworks’ went off under the ocean, celebrating America’s eventual conquest. To really send the message home, he pulled the ripcord in the back, dropping a miniature stars and stripes behind the tank.

“Oorah!” he concluded.

“...Thank you Mister Doe,” the professor said. “Your time allotted for presenting is up.”

He turned and gave her a big thumbs up.

While some staff at Teufort U insisted you call them by their first names, this professor was not one of them, and it was rumored that the TA who had once dared to call her ‘Helen’ in front of her students was never seen again. However, no one could be that much of a hardass all the time; Jane was confident his project had just blown her out of the water (pun intended.)

She eyed his thumbs up with her perpetually sour face. “...That means return to your seat, Mister Doe.”

Jane picked up his aquarium and strolled jauntily back to his desk.

His good mood dissipated as soon as Tavish was announced as the next presenter. The usurper pulled his aquarium in on a cart, a sheet draped over to allow for a dramatic reveal. Dammit. Jane should have thought about dramatic reveals.

Tavish grinned at his audience, whisking away the blanket with a flourish.

“Behold!” he declared. “You’ve heard of desalination to deal with the oncoming global water shortages, but my proposal is this: a complete and total refinement. Salt water? Pah! Whiskey oceans are where it’s at.”

The tanked sloshed, full of something clearly scrumpy or scrumpy adjacent. Within the alcohol floated an awfully realistic looking octopus, expertly crafted and swishing with the tank’s movements. An eyepatch covered its left side.

“With the addition of boozed-based life forms of course, for an entirely new ecosystem.”

Jane curled his lip. Damn. He was good.

“...Mister DeGroot,” the professor said, “might I remind you that this is an alcohol free campus, regardless of any student’s legal status to drink? And, even without that, you are not currently twenty-one years of age?”

“Drinking age is sixteen in Scotland, Ma’am.”

“Sit, DeGroot.”

Tavish sat. He shot Jane a smug grin. Jane scowled.

“That concludes our presentations for today.” If the professor’s voice got any more disappointed, she could have been a ringer for a Badlands Brawlers fan. “As you know, the diorama that scores the highest marks will receive extra credit toward our upcoming final exam. I use the remainder of the class time to grade, and announce the winner shortly. Please return on the bell if you wish to receive those extra credits.”

The ‘bell’, unlike those rinky dinky little red bowl things they had in high school, was actually a proper bell tower, situated over the science building and able to be heard anywhere on campus. This was where Jane retreated to wait out his nerves, pacing around the semi-enclosed area and mulling over his chances. Fine, Tavish’s had been good. He was used to Tavish being good, the bastard, but Jane’s was better, and this time he was going to mop the floor with him.

“I am going to mop the floor with you!” he declared to the heavens.

“Not with that sad display you won’t.”

Jane jumped. A quiet moment of solitude foiled, besieged by his mortal enemy who’d somehow snuck up on him in order to lean cockily against the door to the stairs.

“My display was anything but sad.” Jane shook his fist. “It was joyous! Victorious! Other words that mean not sad!” When Tavish continued to smirk at him, he added, “plus, your idea is bad anyway.”

“Aye?” Tavish challenged. “How so?”

Dammit. Jane hadn’t thought this far. Replacing the oceans with whiskey really did seem foolproof...except…

“If there is no more water, then you can’t make other type of booze either!” he declared triumphantly.

Tavish jaw clenched. Ha! Good. Let him get angry for once.

He walked over and got right in Jane’s face. “Well what about you? How are you going to light off the fireworks underwater?”

“Oil, salt, and various temperature and pressure difference!” Jane didn’t like the other man in his space, and gave him a shove. They were always doing that to each other during practice, blocking and shoulder-checking harder than necessary, doing things that would certainly be penalties in an actual game.

“Who cares?” Tavish shoved him back. “No one’s going to see them anyway.”

Jane grabbed him by the front of the shirt and shouted, “the dolphins will! You would know that if YOU HAD BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.”

One, dangling, aggravating second stretched on, catching friction as they pressed noses and breathed heavy with the effort. Then they reacted simultaneously, lunging forward and attacking each other in mouth to mouth combat.

Jane growled furiously, trying to gain the upper hand, but Tavish was just as motivated not to let him get it. The pair of them sucked at each other’s faces, mastication muscles competing for this year’s WWE championship belt, crashing against the nearest half-wall surrounding the roof. A more wary observer might have worried about them careening over the edge, but Tavish and Jane had more pressing things on their minds. (And ‘more pressing’ was exactly how they were going to resolve it.) Just a whole mismatched ball of absolute frustration as they worked out several months of pent-up attraction.

Their combined rage might have carried them to hell and back, had the bell not struck 9am at that exact moment.

They both screamed, trying desperately to cover their ears as they hundred and fifty year old bell GONGED above them, rattling teeth inside skulls and causing tears to spring to their eyes.

“God! Why don’t they have a warning sign up? Bloody hell!” Tavish moaned, having found his way to the floor and using his beanie to futilely cover his head.

“What???” Jane, who already didn’t have a good ear at the best of times, worried briefly that he’d finally gone deaf.

“What?” Tavish asked. “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying.”

“What?”

This went on for several minutes, the two men lying on the floor of the bell tower.

When they finally staggered down to class, it was in a terribly haggard state, and new bruises around their mouths.

“Hello professor,” Tavish, the least winded of them, declared. “It’s alright, you can tell us which one was the winner now. We’ve worked out our differences, and determined to let the best man win.”

“The best man will be me, but yeah what he said!” Jane put in.

“If you’re going for flashy, maybe, but on sheer sustainability-”

“No one’s going to eat alcohol-based sushi, cyclops-”

“Enough,” the professor cut in. “Neither of you won the extra credit points.”

“What?” Tavish gaped. “But ours were the best out of anyone’s! How could we possibly lose?”

“The assignment,” she said in a clipped voice that spoke of years of dealing with the exact idiots that Teufort tended to attract, “was to create a physical display of algae chemical reactions at different levels of light and pressure as found in the oceanic zones. Not only did you not win, you have failed this project. Now, since I have a lecture in Hale Hall in fifteen minutes, I suggest you both move out of my way, otherwise you will not have the chance to recuperate those points on the final exam. Goodbye gentleman.”

She stripped the last of the grading notes off her desk, shoved them into a manila folder, and disappeared out the door.

Tavish and Jane watched her go. The minutes ticked by on the wall mounted analog clock, which probably could have told them the time just as well as the giant bell that had nearly deafened them.

“Hey,” Tavish said, elbowing Jane in the side. “I got to take Basic Intergluteal Numismatics next semester.”

“...Yeah? And?”

“Bet I can solve systematic inflation before you can.”

“Oh, you’re on son.”