19030504 11:32:32

19030504 11:32:32

MF-S-2400

Mr. Jack Riley gently snapped the long wooden ruler against the surface of the chalkboard so that he connect the dots plotted to the equation y = 2x + 3, which was to be drawn above the line he had just drawn for y = 2x. He kept the lines that he drew constrained with an invisible square boundary that formed around the segment of axes which he had drawn for this part of the lecture. Before he could step away from the finished line to speak about it, the students in the room were already distracted enough to not pay attention, because a pair of bees had entered the room though one of the windows and were proving to be an increasing annoyance. Mr. Riley was ready to admonish the class at large when he turned around to see nobody paying attention, but soon figured out the problem. He took up a roll of papers from his desk, stood out in front of it in a pensive stance, joined the students in studying their erratic and rapid flight as they made laps around the room. He gripped the papers with more force just as he was about to strike, and he eventually committed to making a swing at one of the bees, but it was a total miss. By now, Grace had become disgusted with the interruption and took it upon herself to get this situation resolved.
"Mr. Riley, may I please use that wooden ruler you just had against the blackboard?"
"The ruler? You sure? I don't think you'll have the right tool there to take out these bees with it."
Grace walked up to the desk and extended her hand out to receive the ruler without speaking a word. She kept her eyes upon Mr. Riley throughout her approach.
"Fine, here, take it, just don't break anything with it." Mr. Riley remained standing in front of the desk as he said this while passing the ruler to her.
"Thank you, Sir." Before receiving the sword, she had been paying mind to the bees flight patterns which were probing to be consistent. The bees were essentially flying clockwise around the entirety of the room; with knowing this, Grace took her position to the corner of the student desk row and instinctively stood at the ready as if she were holding a fencing sword. She kneaded the ruler while holding it in her hand, then she exhaled a breath as she assumed a spread legged stance which is suited for the sport. After watching one bee make a complete clockwise lap in the room, she held the ruler upright and focused on making the kill and hoping that the strike would connect on the first try. The opportunity to do that soon came.
The bee came into her peripheral sight on her left side. She stood at an angle away from the students who in their desks immediately before her. Within a few moments, the bee was drawing near to her and ready to make its next turn. At this moment, Grace took her training to heart and focused on making the attack while tuning out surrounding distractions. The bee was turning the corner. She breathed sharply and felt her body pulsate with anticipation. The bee was now right in front of her attack range. Grace made no hesitation to make the strike and did so with precision; her weight was, at first, leaned on her back, and she used that leverage to lunge forward as her hand snapped tightly around the ruler, which she then used to make a forward thrust kind of attack which turned into her swatting the ruler against the side of the bee before it got away. It immediately fell to the ground with a barely audible tap of the bee corpse bouncing off of the ground. She didn't have time to admire her handiwork quite yet. The bee traveled right past her the first time she would have been able to see it was coming around. This bee soon followed the track direction of the first bee, and came within Grace's attack space. Her attack was conducted the same way and had similar results; her good weapon control and swift blade handling resulted in two sequentially rapid strikes.
Grace didn't give the two bees a time to recover; when they were both down on the ground after the strike, she lifted her shoe over each and ground the bee into the floor by stepping on the insects. With the threat eliminated, one of the boys gave out a single word cheer and began to clap, but quickly stopped doing that when nobody else joined in. The rest of the class, including Mr. Riley, stared at Grace as she waked over to the teacher's desk, placed the ruler on its surface, and walked back to her desk; nobody expected her to make those kind of precise attacks using a simple teacher's ruler, and even fewer people would have predicted that she would have been able to kill both bees in such quick time. Mr. Riley was especially confused as to how Grace made her attacks in the style of a fencer, yet such an event was something that the school did not instruct. He wondered how was she getting that kind of training.