Chapter 2

*whiiiir -chunkchunkchunk- whiiiir*

The semi-hushed silence of a semi-reverent crowd slid closer to full 
blown irreverence as the Storydroid tried to load the next part of the 
story.  That was the problem with the older model Storydroids, they tended 
to crash on suspenseful parts of the story.  An entire generation of 
children grew up disillusioned to listening to stories as told by animated 
robots, and instead turned to reading the words themselves.  It nearly 
destroyed the modern education system.

This particular Storydroid, now a good minute into a full reboot, looked a 
great deal like a gentle old sweater wearing neighborly man from the neck 
down and a gentle old monochrome monitor from the neck up.  To this day, 
the usage of the blocky monitor is not understood.  After boot, it never 
even displays anything more than a twitchy horizontal line that fluctuates 
with the droid's sound emission.  More than one child has been sent to 
therapy with a phobia of crotchety old monochrome monitors.  More than one 
technically inclined teenager has snuck into a classroom to treat the 
class to a close visual study of porn, set to the tune of their lecture 
on the rise and fall of the Canadian Empire.

The now irreverent crowd was approaching downright unruly.

"I can't believe my parents made me go to a _public_ school."

"Is this going to be on the test?"

And the ever popular, "This sucks.  This sucks so bad."

Finally, the Storydroid completed its reboot and started to load the next 
part of the story.  The only thing remaining was to close all those damned 
pop-up windows (now an integral part of every operating system).  The 
disconcerting squiggly line finally appeared, and the Storydroid picked up 
where it had left-

"Excuse me, but what is an NPO?" asked a little red haired girl in the 
second row.  The Storydroid, used to little more than sleepy acceptance of 
his tales, paused as the computation process switched tasks.

"That will be covered later," it finally replied.

"But, we don't know this guy's name or what he did to anger the Nabowlian 
or anything.  Its just dumb!"

The delay was longer this time.  "You must wait and all will be told."

"But, we don't know anything about how they all got there and-"

"INVALID PARAMETER.  DOES NOT COMPUTE."

"But what about the young offic-"

"INVALID PARAMETER.  DOES NOT COMPUTE."

"But but-"

"INVALID PARAMETER.  DOES NOT COMPUTE."

The red haired girl burst into tears.  "I just wanted to know what 
happened before this..."

The Storydroid (now very angry if the flaring of his squiggly line was any 
indication) paused again and quit tearing at its sweater.  "I am capable 
of revealing the history of this story.  It all started..."