The classroom was full to the brim with stupid little kids.  Snot noses, unwashed hair, bad breath and even worse attitudes.  The hour was rapidly approaching nine in the morning, the point of the day at which the unfortunate bastard (or bitch...this school, like most others in whatever city it was in, was both politically correct and non-denominational) assigned to teach the youth of America a thing or two would enter and try to bring order to this miniature war zone.  Every morning it was the same, but for whatever reason, this one felt different.  There was just something about those kids...

There was the class clown with his sole, gargantuan eyebrow, operating at Mach 10 speed in an effort to crack a joke or two at each and every one of his fellow students in the bite-sized few moments before the start of class.  He had some magazine or another under his arm, constantly opening it up and flashing it at random classmates.  The subject matter of this magazine was neither relevant nor important.  It might've been a Playboy but it could just have easily been a Reader's Digest.  Visibly sweating from his efforts, the hard-working but ultimately pointless busybody kept up the act, still moving from classmate to classmate.

If that kid had been the class clown, the next one was probably considered the class joke.  Big, bald and beefy, a young nu-metal fan, looking as though he'd just gotten up out of the wrong side of a hundred beds, tried his absolute hardest to bully the rest of the class.  Sympathy for the would-be bully would've been excused this morning, as his efforts just didn't seem to have any sort of affect...on anybody.  A rather inappropriate toy for a 12-year-old, the Ann Summers' "Fucking Bear" (with pelvic-thrusting action) clenched firmly in his right hand, the bully gave up all hope of scoring even one kid's lunch money after a similarly bald, shinier kid reacted to his Neanderthal grunting with a blunt and to-the-point, "Get out of me face, you boring little handicapped!"  The bully broke down and cried as all attention shifted to the shinier, balder child.

For whatever reason wearing a rather flash Armani suit combination in place of the typical T-Shirt and jeans combination (that not a single child in sight was actually wearing, it must be added), the shiny child appeared to be in his element.  Although merely an impressionable, immature youth himself, that he was surrounded by such types pleased the youngster to no end.  Sipping on a pre-class milkshake whilst engaged in a conversation with the school cleaner, a weary-looking, full-grown Japanese woman, one couldn't be blamed for wondering why, exactly, the shiny child was even here in the first place.

Not quite the class clown and not quite shiny, one kid had apparently brought along his own kids...and wife.  And his lawyer.  And a lengthy procession of severed hands to kiss and babies to shake.  Or something like that.  This one had jet black hair and wore a smart, conservative little suit.  Impossible for a child of his age, he spoke as though he were a grown Englishman forcing a generalised American accent.  The smirk on his face was one alien to this particular room - it was as though he had the greatest story in the world to tell...

...But before he could tell it, he was overpowered by the resident meathead jock of the class, overshadowed and knocked back into obscurity.  This jock, though.  Bleach-blonde hair and a chiselled face, he didn't quite seem to fit in with the rest of the class.  He coughed a single, unremarkable cough - a symptom, apparently of blandular Fever, a rare and fictional ailment that this young man had apparently picked up whilst off (a convenient few states from here) winning thousands of elementary school football/basketball/hockey trophies.  He was about to talk himself up when another kid made his presence known in a particularly mysterious fashion.

Dressed from head to toe in a black cloak with a bold, white '?' spanning the height of it.  Nobody paid him any attention and he died shortly afterwards in a freak cloak-removing accident, the first of its kind in human history.

Rounding off the relatively small class was yet another bald twelve-year-old kid.  Not possessing the shininess of the shiny kid and nowhere near as ineffective as the bully, one would think that this particular youngster didn't have a whole lot going for him.  Resting on his lap, however, was world famous actress Sandra Bullock.  Ignoring the twenty-something-year age gap between the two, it appeared as though they were married.  If it sounds stupid, that's probably because it was.

In the nick of time, the bell sounded.  And He walked in.  The chaos disintegrated into quiet order as the teacher strolled through the door and planted his books firmly on his desk.  He silenced the remaining murmurs in two seconds as he announced, "Class is now in session.  Everybody shut the fuck up."

John Taylor loved to be in control.