Episode 9: James Sheahan Catholic Cesspool Makes Another Pathetic Attempt to Look Good in Comparison to Other Pools.

Once upon a time in a dimension too degenerate to feature in the popular imagination there was the W.A.S. Maths Day. (Various characters in this story are still speculating on what W.A.S. stands for.) This day involved various gifted and talented mathematics students from many independent pools, allowing them to enjoy friendly competition with their peers.

Now, of course, all this friendly competition could make these precocious youngsters feel inadequate, and this was where the Cesspool students, who have severe difficulty even pronouncing 'gifted and talented,' came in. They gave each and every student there something to feel vastly superior to. Unfortunately, no one seemed to have told the James Sheahan Catholic Cesspool Maths department this, so once again they hopefully sent off another batch of losers, headed by names which are now synonymous with idiocy.

Thus Spike Boy, Hyperbolia, Sister Gradient, Mother Derivative, the 70-ft Woman and the Complex Father woke up bright and early and managed to show up at Cesspool at a time when they wouldn't normally register any brain waves. (In fact, come to think of it, several of them had undergone years of experimentation by neurologists on the basis that they had never shown any sign of brain activity above that of your average amoeba.)

They gathered under the malevolent but inept leadership of Sensai Garden Gnome and proceeded in due course to arrive at Bathurst, having driven several younger representatives of their pool right through insanity and out the other side. The GrumbleBum arrived fifty minutes late, having had mechanical problems.

When they arrived, Spike Boy was already suffering severe withdrawal from sycophanticism, but the other six were surprisingly healthy, even though the Complex Father looked a bit of a dill in his Cadbury Chocolate bar outfit. This healthy optimism lifted them up enough to actually get a couple of points in the first round, but once they saw the food it was all over for the Cesspool kids.

Somehow, one of the two senior teams ended up with a negative point score, much to the puzzlement of the scorers, while the other cowered under the table for the last two rounds, convinced there was a bomb threat. The 70-ft Woman didn't turn up at all after the first break, having been unfortunately locked in a garbage can while 30 centimetres tall, looking for decent food. She showed up several weeks later with the bin stuck on her head, having started growing, but forgetting to kick the lid off until she was too big to get her head out.

The other five insisted on singing 'Koombiyah', to a techno beat over the bus PA all the way home, thus going above and beyond the call of duty and actually making Sensai Garden Gnome feel superior by comparison.

And so these fine young students crawled back to the Cesspool and received pretty little participation certificates, having had their butts kicked once again in the name of tradition.