Honesty is the Best Policy! {w/Rosy}

Chapter 28: The Egg Method

It was May 1st, 2019, and everyone was getting their tests back, which they had taken the previous day, and finding out what they had made. Some people were angry and were taking it up with the teacher while others were brimming with happiness after finding out that their overall grades were improving due to their scores here.

However, Honest was doing neither of these things.
Instead of being simply angry about what her grade was, she seemed to be in utter despair.
"Oh, no! The Egg method is a failure!"
Her particularly shadowy compadre lifted his eyes from his paper and stared at her with a confused expression. Honest flailed her arms in a rather overly-dramatic manner.
"It didn't work this time! I got one point taken off!"
"One point?" he said in a questioning way. "Just one? Also... what's the Egg method?"
"The Egg is a method to test-taking that I came up with. It was supposed to ensure that I complete my tests in a timely manner while not messing up a single bubble. Basically, I give all of my answers' bubbles a mustache the first time through so that I can stop at the end of the test and finish filling them in with more precision than if I had done them on the fly." Shadow nodded the whole time, showing that he understood. "But, this time, it failed! I left pieces of the mustache sticking out, and it was counted wrong for not being perfectly filled in! My experiment failed!"
Honest acted like she was about to fall over as she pulled on her ears. "I'm going to have to revise my hypothesis!"
"'Hypothesis'? 'Experiment'? Are you finally losing it?" he asked, actually concerned.
"Nope!" Honest said, stopping her psychotic ramblings. "I've just been really interested in the work of a particular psychaotologist I admire."
"What's a psychaotologist?" the dark pineapple asked, making sure to say that word carefully.

"A psychaotologist is a scientist that studies Chaos and its effect on the psyche," she informed, raising a finger. "I've always kind of zoned out whenever some Knuckles recolor would start to go on a tangent about Chaos and such, but recently I've become very interested in not really Chaos as a religion but how Chaos affects behavior and thinking."

"Mm-hm," Shadow voiced his lack of trust in her level of sanity.
"He's kind of a mad scientist. His ethics are questionable, but his thinking is sound."
"Uh-huh," Shadow said. His response was calm. At least it was, since he then realized the full extent of her meaning a moment later. "Wait, huh? That's a little unnerving."

"No, it isn't," Honest corrected him flatly.
"Yes, it is," he countered. "If you can't trust a scientist's ethics, how can you trust his morals? If his practices are inhumane, the ideas he pushes are probably just as inhuman."
Honest put a finger to her cheek and ignored his question by going off topic. "Is 'inhumane' even correct in this situation if we're not talking about humans?"
Shadow didn't notice this deviation and answered in an even tone. "Yes. Remember? Mephiles said humanity in '06."
Honest disproved this immediately. "He was referring to humankind and GUN and how they were destined to cause their own downfall, so no, I don't think that's right to say."
The bell then rang and they both sighed loudly, Shadow picking up his books. Honest slung her backpack around her shoulder, and they left the classroom in relative silence.
Honest immediately found Scourge in the graphic design room and sat beside him at her computer. "You wanna play a game?" she asked him.
He turned and looked at her with interest. "Sure."
"Just go to this site and wait for me."
He did so as Honest waited patiently for her ancient Mac to start up.
The game consisted of shooting your bubbles out of a canon at other bubbles to make matches. The aim was to decimate as many bubbles as you could before they could drive each other towards an apocalyptic collapse of their very way of life, which was sitting in a twisting channel while slowly heading towards a black hole. They would all be sucked in eventually, but the player's level of skill determined just how fast this fate would come.

"So, after this do you want to go to the library?" Honest asked after a while of playing this extremely nerve racking game.

Scourge jumped. Apparently he had been so invested in this game that this sudden bit of dialogue occuring startled him. "To read?"
"Yeah," Honest confirmed, her face going sour. "What else is there to do in a library?" This resembled the same question Infinite had asked her the other chapter (Chapter 20).
"Oh, yeah, sorry," the king of air and empty space laughed. "Durr."