Nightmares of the Past

View Character Bio Here

(OOC: I hope I'm not spoiling your plan for this story by giving the teacher character an evil history to give some explanation as to why the dreams are so horrible. If so just let me know and I can edit him and this post to fit your idea better.)

"As I'm sure you've noticed by now, I am not your regular Math teacher. My name is Mr. Dupree and I am the replacement teacher for Mr. Jenkins, who recently retired, luckily giving me employment. This is my first teaching job and even though I know the material well, I'm not really sure how to deal with several students at once, so if I'm moving too quickly just let me know."

He slowly scanned the classroom in a vain attempt to familiarize himself with all the new faces. This was his third class so far today and he knew he could never remember all of them. He went through the roll call, with only one student absent, and after a quick check, knew that he was off sick for the day. So far so good.

"Now that we have that tedious task out of the way, I can begin. Mr Jenkins' notes are almost entirely uselless since his handwriting is virtually illegible, but for what I can gather from them, it appears that this class was tackling quadratic equations when he left."

He managed to stay focussed on the task at hand despite his constant visualizations of Mr Jenkins' last moments, as he slowed flayed the skin from his body, listening to the wails of agony as he dripped his personal cocktail of lemon juice, salt and tabasco sauce into the various wounds. Of course they wouldn't tell the students that they found most of his corpse scattered in the woods behind the school. Nor would they tell them that the hands were still missing. Much better to let them think he suddenly retired and not cause a local panic.

"I'm going to start with something simple to gauge the general abilities of the class. If 2x²+3x-27=0, what are the possible solutions for x?"

OOC: I was thinking that the reason they might be so horrible is that she's watching the murders from the victim's POV, but that would require her to be somehow psychic or something similar. If you'd rather, she could've been present at one of them and has blocked it out, only catching glimpses in her sleep. Either way I'm good. It's up to you whether you want your character to be mentally sensitive to these things or not.

He notices a redhead with her hand up and motions for her to answer. "That is correct," he says after hearing her response, "3 and -4.5 are both possible answers to this equation. It appears that Mr Jenkins' teaching was far superior to his handwriting, well that is a relief."

As he continued to teach his lesson, he began to notice that the redhead that answered his first question had a slightly strange look on her face, it looked like a cross between confusion and recognition, like she thought she'd seen him before but had no idea where. He found it slightly unnerving, but not really a problem. She couldn't possibly know him, he most likely just looked like someone she knew.

She also seemed to be his star pupil, always having the answer and never being shy about sharing it. On the whole the class was good, the expected few who either didn't know or didn't care what the answer was, but fewer than he had come to expect from a class this size.

He also noticed that the readhead's friend that she kept whispering to looked at him in an entirely different way, a way that he wasn't sure he was confortable with, but that he could definately take advantage of if the need arose. She could be an excellent alibi if he could manipulate her in the right way.

"So how am I doing so far, are you finding it more or less difficult to understand with me teaching than with Mr Jenkins' teaching? If he was doing something differently and it was helpful, let me know so I can incorporate it into my teaching method."

"Something you want to share with the rest of us?" He said sternly towards the redhead and her friend after their little exchange had concluded. "Between the laughing and the mild assault, I'd imagine it's something fairly interesting."

He waited for the reply that he knew wouldn't come, after all no-one ever shared these things in class, he just wanted to single them out and embarrass them a bit to get them to quiet down.

"As I was saying, I'm not a big fan of homework, I always hated it when I was in school so any take home exercises I give you will be completely optional, though not entirely pointless. I will count them as extra credit towards your final grade, but they will not be a requirement to pass. I will always assign these tasks on a thursday and they will be due in the following thursday, so you'll have plently of time to decide whether or not to do them."

He scanned the class to see understanding on all the students faces. He hated having to explain things to people more than once, so he wanted to be sure they all got it the first time. "This week's assignment will be the 20 questions at the end of chapter 3 in your textbooks, I believe it's page 43 but I might be mistaken."

Just then the bell for class change went off. "Before you go I would just like to recommend that those of you finding it more difficult to keep up in class do the homework, not only for the practice, but also to take up some of the slack that you might have from less than perfect marks on classwork and tests."

He then began to write things down on the small notepad on his desk, paying no attention whatsoever to the students as they shuffled out. He had to begin making plans for his next "outing" and these things took a lot of time and thought. This one would completely throw the police, they'd never expect this one.

Mr. Dupree got through the rest of the day without anything significant happening, but he couldn't get the redhead and her friend out of his mind. He decided that he would goto the office and check out their files, see if there was any useful information in them.

He walked into the file room and requested the files for the two girls, giving the excuse that they had been slightly disruptive in class and he was wondering if this was a freak occurence or if they were persistant trouble-makers. He thanked the secretary as he took the files and went back to his room, sitting down to examine them fully. There was nothing particularly special about either of them. Gina had been in trouble a few times before, mostly for talking or laughing in class, but was otherwise unremarkable. Arisu was an excellent student who's only interesting feature was that she had talked to the school nurse a few times about nightmares, giving them as the reason she didn't get much sleep and sometimes looked unwell at school. Apparently the school almost investigated her family life, thinking it might be abusive parents, but they just dropped it suddenly for no apparent reason.

Well nothing too useful in there, interesting, but not useful. He decided to try and see how easily he could manipulate the Gina girl. If he could get close enough to her to use her for something, she could be a very good asset. Plus if her and Arisu were such good friends, perhaps she could tell him why she looked at him so weird.

- The next day -

Class was running along smoothly, and Gina was still staring at him in that way that it was clear she was attracted to him. He was making sure to ask her the harder questions. Often she couldn't answer, and that was good. The worse he could make he look in terms of math ability, the more easily he could get close to her.

The bell began to ring and as they began to shuffle out of the room he stopped her. "Can I speak to you for a moment Gina. I noticed today that you seemed to be having some problems with the coursework. I hope you won't be offended if I offer you private, one-on-one tutoring to help bring your grades up."