Chapter 2
As everyone expected, Clovenard barely scraped by in school. I mean, it was so bad they had to put him on advanced quantum physics just to make sure he passed. Of course, advanced quantum physics is complicated for the earthlings, and it probably says a lot about them that the Praxitan who went into his yearbook as “Monolithic Moron” could still dance circles around their Einsteins and Heisenbergs, but this is a story about Clovenard, and any story about Clovenard already contains enough stupid to go around.
When he took Teleportation 101, Clovenard became the only student in the history of Praxitus to teleport himself to the exact same spot where he started.
When Clovenard took Time Travelling 201, he shot straight past the Big Bang, and the school had to call janitorial services to unclog him out of the time-stick.
When Clovenard took Quantum Entanglement 301, he couldn’t get an electron to speak to itself, let alone another electron.
When he tried quantum tunneling, his electrons tunneled out of the lab and left. No-one’s seen them since.
When Clovenard demonstrated Schrodinger’s Cat, his cat was simultaneously dead and dead. Four times.
When he tested energy shields, he ended up shielding the enemy troops.
In tadball, Praxitus’s national pastime, Clovenard’s team tried to kill him by scoring him into the Narrow Post instead of the ball.
In flight school, Clovenard sunk his star cruiser. Yes, sunk it. In Linguistics, he erased an entire ancient dialect from the database. In Basic Cryptography, he broke his own code. In Simulated Economics, he bankrupted Praxitus. In Galactic Studies, he instigated a civil war between two peaceful planets. In Political Science, he tried to legislate genocide to resolve a minor tax issue.
At prom, Clovenard forgot to pick up his date, and then took back the wrong girl.
In the end, the Praxitan government fast-tracked Clovenard’s graduation “for the sake of the planet”.
And then they appointed him to the lofty profession of pizza delivery. That’s really how the story of Clovenard and the earthlings begins: With pizza.
The Upturned Microscope 