Ted and Marty had settled into their seats at the back of the lecture hall, waiting for the first class of their first semester to begin, but as the middle-aged professor stepped in and began writing his name on the chalkboard, Ted elbowed his roommate. "Dude, I think I left my notebook back at the dorm."
"Are you sure?," Marty whispered back. "What's that then?"
Ted looked at where he was pointing, and saw a ratty old notebook under his chair. "It's not mine, but it'll have to do; shit, I can't believe I'm already messing things up." He slid it out, not noticing the faded gold-leaf title as he opened the cover. He started taking notes, but his pencil smudged: instead of Comparative Biology 101, the top of the page now read Comparative Biology 201.
Ted glanced up at the board and watched as the teacher used the cuff of his sleeve to wipe out the number and rewrite it as 201. "Dude! Did you just see that?" Ted hissed.
"See what?"
"He just changed the course number."
"Pfft, I wish. I don't know why they assigned us to this class—I'd rather be in an entry level course—but it's not like we can change it now without dropping it."
Leaning over, he looked at Marty's notes: Comparative Biology 201, Professor Opfer they read, the ink lines confident and strong, and definitely not hastily re-written as some sort of prank. "Look, just watch," Ted slid the notebook on top of Marty's, erased the 2 and replaced it with a 1. He moved his book out of the way and sure enough, Marty's notes had updated to match, as well as the chalkboard when they looked up at it.
"Welcome to Comparative Biology 101, I'm Professor Opfer. I know this is a required course, but I hope you all will study as diligently as if you were going to be the next Darwin or Mary Anning—" he was met with a murmured chorus of "Mary who?", but continued unabated with his monotone memorized screed. "The syllabus is available on the course website, please print it out for your records, and make sure you purchase the assigned texts. Yes, the twenty-second edition is acceptable, you aren't required to buy the newer version if you cannot afford it..."
Marty had already slumped in his chair, doodling on the margins of his notes beside print syllabus, buy 22nd ed.; he was grateful they only had this class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It would, he'd decided, very much suck to be stuck with him for every class and almost every subject, as had been the case in high school: if you had an awesome teacher it was amazing, but with a crappy one it became pure torture. He had a feeling these one-and-a-half hour sessions would be the worst part of the week.
With that in mind, he leaned over and wrote on the edge of his notes: I'm already board. Spelling was not his strong suit.
Snickering, Ted decided to run with the joke. Writing on his own paper, he replied: Professor Opfer is such a boar. He'd just dotted the period in place when he noticed an odd sound coming from up front. The droning voice had been replaced with snorts and grunts, and the soft creak of cheap shoes as the teacher paced in front of the class was now the click of hooves on the old linoleum.
Marty elbowed his roommate, but Ted was already staring. Someone had let a huge wild pig in the lecture hall, and it was trotting back and forth like it owned the place. "They're all taking notes!" Marty whispered.
As he listened closely Tad realized he could get some meaning out of the porcine sounds, rather like how Luke Skywalker always knew what Artoo was saying. The boar also had on the same dorky black glasses and decades-out-of-date paisley tie that Professor Opfer had been wearing only moments ago. "I think," Tad said slowly, "we did that."
"That's impossible," Marty said, sounding as though he were trying to convince himself. "Let me try something." He wrote Professer Opfer has purple hair. The boar's bristly mane, however, remained as brown as it had been.
Putting two and two together, Ted ran his finger over the age-stained pages of the notebook that had so fortuitously found its way under his seat. Was it his imagination, or was there an almost electric fuzziness to the paper, as though it were alive with power, hungry for graphite and ink. He took another look at the faded letters on the cover. The Book of Truth it said in ornate gothic letters. On first glance, he'd thought it was just a motivational gimmick, like the glittery "Brilliant Ideas Inside" notebooks that had been all the rage among the girls of his previous school; now, however, he suspected that what it meant was that the book contained truth. In other words, what he wrote...
Unwilling to wait another moment before testing it out, he flipped his pencil around and carefully erased the last five characters that he'd written, replacing them with five different ones. As soon as he dotted the period anew, he again heard the lecturer's voice change, grunts becoming sharp brays. Professor Opfer is such an ass. the book now said, and the reality before them reflected that.
The two young men stared at the brown donkey in front of the class, their eyes going wider as they watched him turn away, bending to pick up a stick of chalk in his blocky front teeth. While he wrote on the board, his ropy tail swished, showing off the plump donut and plumper balls that nestled between his haunches. The white-tipped face spat out the chalk and resumed braying his lecture, gesturing at the surprisingly-legible scrawl with one long ear.
It was simply too much: both Ted and Marty burst out laughing, drawing the attention and ire of the asinine professor, who adm-haww-nished them with a sternly-raised eyebrow. "Sorry, sir," they said, biting tongues and gripping desks to keep from making further asses of themselves in front of the whole class. Several heads in front of them shook disgustedly at the two who'd seemed to find something so hilarious about the difference between phylogenetic and Linnaean classifications.
After referencing Diogenes' old "Behold, a man" joke as an example of the shortfalls of the Linnaean approach, the teacher went on to sketch out an evolutionary tree. Starting with equus he mouth-drew one branch for horses, and another that split into zebras and asses. All the while, the two in the back were staring at his ass with wide eyes, flared nostrils, and uncomfortable pants. Marty almost moaned when Professor Opfer craned his neck up to circle Equus asinus asinus as though underscoring that this was precisely what the former human was and had always been.
On a whim, Marty leaned over and took Ted's pencil, erasing the new addition and writing in one of his own, modifying his original remark: Professor Opfer is such a bear. Lo and behold, the donkey reared up, now clutching the teeny piece of chalk in the claws of one paw, gesturing at the diagram as he roared and rumbled—a diagram that now started at ursinae and branched out, with Ursus arctos being the circled terminus. The sheath and balls were now hidden in a thatch of brown fur, and the ursine sounds were a lot easier (comparatively, at least) to understand than either of the professor's previous animal forms.
Still, Ted was starting to get a headache trying to interpret what was being said, which wasn't made any easier by the fact that Professor Opfer was still somehow managing to maintain his monotone and deadpan lecture style. In desperation he erased the whole sentence...but did so so emphatically that the pencil jumped out of his hands and rolled beneath the seats in front of him.
There was nothing for it but to borrow Marty's pen, and so he wrote: Professor Opfer is a fun guy. He hoped that would result in more energy, or at least a more entertaining demeanor—he remembered with fondness the days when his elementary school teachers would wheel out the TV cart and pop in a Bill Nye video—though in retrospect he realized it would be still more fun to change the words to the punny "is a fungi." instead. But when he crossed out what he'd written and tried to amend it, the page just sucked up the excess ink like something from Harry Potter, leaving the original Professor Opfer is a fun guy. in its place.
Still, at least the old man was back to his old man self, but with a much more animated bearing and, best of all, a modulated voice. He sounded like one of the books on tape Ted used to listen too, as though he'd had theatrical training somewhere in his several decades. The two roommates found themselves so entranced by what he was saying that it wasn't until the end of class that they realized they hadn't written any more notes—neither the reality-altering type nor the normal studious sort. Just as everyone else was leaving, Ted had the brilliant idea to write Marty and Ted are able to remember the lectures without taking notes.
He didn't realize until later that he hadn't specified which lectures. It seemed that college was going to be a whole lot easier (and more interesting) than either of them could have imagined. But even with that help, there was still so much to learn and do and try and explore that it wasn't until that Friday's Comparative Biology 101 class that they remembered to bring out the Book of Truth...