He looked fairly young for a professor, but strode to the front of the room confidently. "Good evening," he said. "I'm Professor Papadopoulos, and this is 'Great Mysteries of History!'"
As he logged onto the computer and fired up the projector, he continued, "I recognize most of you are engineering majors in need of one last elective to polish off your humanities requirements." He grinned. "So, we'll keep this class interesting. You'll have great cocktail party banter for the rest of your life."
As the computer booted, he pulled a clipboard from his bag. "We aren't tracking attendance but I would like to start learning your names. I'll go down the roster. Abrams, Brent?"
"Here."
"Adamson, Lisa?"
"Here."
"Blaze, Autumn?"
"Actually!" The speaker was in the middle of the class, and a pony—no, not a pony, one of those related species. It... she?... continued, "I'm 'Autumn Blaze.' It's a mononym, not a first and last name. But it has a space bar in the middle of the mononym. A spacebaronym."
"Autumn Blaze," Professor Papadopoulos said. "Got it."
He finished the roll call and then brought up a PDF of the syllabus on the projector. It began:
Great Mysteries of History: HIST 340
Eric Papadopoulos, PhD, Adjunct Professor
"Hey, uh, sir?" asked Abrams, Brent. "What does 'adjunct' mean?"
Papadopoulos frowned. "I'm contracted by the class, rather than on the tenure track as a permanent employee."
"It means," Autumn Blaze said, "he's overworked, underpaid, and has to sell his blood plasma to eat."
Papadopoulos looked at her. Kirin, that was it. Immigration had sent him a courtesy email yesterday with a brief information packet on the species. He'd had a unicorn last semester, but Ms. Sparkler had been quiet and studious and sat in the back and took notes without speaking much. He said, "I don't have to donate blood... plasma."
Autumn Blaze winked at him and made a gesture that would have been finger guns if she had fingers, but was instead sort of hoof-shimmies.
"Hey!" Adamson, Lisa said. "My cousin took this class three years ago and it was taught by a full professor, but tuition has gone up, not down."
Professor Papadopoulos sighed. "The economics behind the capital-driven fiscal imperatives of the University and its policies on both hiring and tuition management are sadly both incredibly depressing on an existential level and beyond the purview of this course," he said. "This course is about mysteries and the University's cheapskate-ism is well known."
The you idiot conclusion was implied.
"Moving on, you all received this syllabus by email," he said, ignoring Lisa and Autumn Blaze, "but let's go through the class format and expectations."
They spent about fifteen minutes on the syllabus. Then, he closed the PDF and opened up a PowerPoint slide deck and clapped his hands.
"Okay! We're going to have a great semester. This class is a lot of fun—but let's spend the rest of our time tonight discussing some of the most puzzling mysteries in history. Not far from here, in fact just south along the coast, was the Lost Colony."
He advanced to the first slide which showed an old drawing of some men in pioneer clothes standing around a tree that had the word CROATOAN carved into it. He spent about five minutes describing the mysteries around the disappearance of every man, woman, and child in the Roanoke Colony.
"And now, speaking of the lost, what about Atlantis?" He advanced to the next slide, which was a photograph of a damaged marble sculpture of one Olympian goddess or another.
"Oh! Oh! I can explain that!" Autumn Blaze waved a hoof over her head. "It's in our history too!"
"This mystery has persisted for thousands—"
"King Atlas of Atlantis was a demigod, right? Super strong? He married several human women but kept... uh... breaking them. On their wedding nights."
"Miss Blaze..." Professor Papadopoulos started, but she rolled right over him, her words coming rapidly.
"Spacebaronym! Anyway, so Atlas negotiated with our Queen Spit Shine for one of her daughters—Quenched Billet—to be taken as his bride, since a nirik can stand up to almost anything, right?"
The class stared at her.
"But," Autumn Blaze continued, "she might have given him the ol' Hades on his Tower of Hercules on the wedding night, am I right? Ha!"
The silence deepened.
"Anyway, long story short, after the Kirins won the war, we had to sink the island to put the fires out."
"Autumn," Professor Papadopoulos started again.
"Space-bar-oh-nym."
"Autumn Blaze," he said, "I would love to hear more Kirin mythology, but that story hardly seems possible. Your world only contacted ours five years ago."
"The whole 'Atlas holding the world on his shoulders' is a mis-remembering of how swollen his... globes... got after the very flamey wedding night."
With a deep breath, Professor Papadopoulos minimized PowerPoint and opened another PDF. Its first page showed an elaborately illuminated manuscript. "The Voynich Manuscript. What is it? It seems to be a herbalist manual, but the language—or more likely, code—is unreadable."
"Oh, I can read that," Autumn Blaze said.
Professor Papadopoulos's eyelid twitched.
"That's a kirin medical text."
"It... it is?" Professor Papadopoulos asked. "About what?"
"Cures for sexually transmitted diseases."
"I don't think it's appropriate—"
"Here," Autumn said, her horn glowing. "Page thirty-seven of Voynich... my last coltfriend gave me a burning case of flamyphilis."
The PDF projected on the screen scrolled rapidly.
Professor Papadopoulos grabbed the wireless mouse up from the desk and cradled it. "Don't levitate my mouse! I'm lecturing!"
"Not touching your mouse," she said, continuing to scroll the PDF. "I sat on a USB wifi dongle a few months back."
The student next to her asked, "How do you accidentally sit on a wifi dongle?"
Autumn made a puzzled face. "I didn't say 'accidentally'."
Professor Papadopoulos used the mouse to close Acrobat Reader and brought the PowerPoint back up. He advanced another slide which showed a primitive drawing of two warships, perhaps galleys, going bow-to-bow. Flames spouted from the bow of one, landing on the other. "Greek Fire! What was it? How was it made? How did it work? Lost to history!"
"Pffft. That's easy."
"Miss Autumn... Blaze," Professor Papadopoulos said with a cold voice, "the best historians, chemists, and chemistry historians have spent literally centuries—"
"My ancestors visited yours," she said defensively.
"This is a serious class, Miss Autumn Blaze, and—"
Her hoof shot up. "May I please be excused to go potty?"
He raised an eyebrow. "This is university, Autumn Blaze. No one cares if you show up to class, much less leave early."
She slid from her chair, levitated a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola from her saddlebags, and trotted from the classroom, guzzling soda straight from the bottle.
"We've all heard of Cleopatra," said Professor Papadopoulos, advancing to the next slide, which showed a satellite shot of the Nile Valley, "but where is her tomb?"
He lectured for about five more minutes before Autumn Blaze returned.
She walked to the front of the classroom and put the two liter bottle, now filled with a clear liquid, onto the lectern. "I made some Greek Fire. Give me an 'A' and I won't prove it."
THE END
