Work Text:
“Now, you all know why the seven of you are here.”
The Dean looked up and down the study table with a squint that he may have imagined looked stern. Everyone save for Annie hastily attempted to look shamefaced; Annie did so sincerely.
“It must be some sort of record,” the Dean continued. “Y’know, I let a lot slide around here, I renege on my New Year’s resolutions as much as the next guy – even I’ll admit the unicycle was a mistake – but I was seriously hoping after resolving that this year would be the one that this college finally gets taken seriously for more than just its rate of discovering new microbacteria, that we might make it more than twelve seconds past midnight on New Year’s Eve without embarrassing ourselves. But no. Thanks to a little juvenile practical joke, I’m going to be the butt of every passive-aggressive anecdote at the annual Deans’ ski retreat.”
The corners of Troy and Pierce’s lips each quivered at the word ‘butt’; Annie shot them each a dangerous glance, and they hurriedly resumed staring blankly at the table-top.
“Where you even got that much shaving cream from, I don’t pretend to know; frankly, if I hadn’t won that all expenses paid trip to Tahiti, I wouldn’t even want to know.” The Dean shook his head. “The point is that the seven of you have some atoning to do, and this –” He waved towards the study room door, “– is how you’re going to do it. Ben!”
Chang shuffled into the room, carrying what looked like a dark green plastic trash can.
“Now, as you know, we at Greendale are equally proud of and receptive towards all peoples and cultures – which, coupled with our limited resources, means we generally elect to celebrate none of them. However, since our original New Year’s festivities went so spectacularly awry, and since it been brought to our attention that this is the first time in the school’s history that we’ve managed to complete a full twelve-year cycle without losing one of our faculty buildings to fire damage –”
“Because of me they have a course now,” Chang added.
“– we have elected this year to hold our first Lunar New Year dance on campus.”
“You’re not planning on a costume, are you?” Jeff asked hesitantly.
“That would probably also make it our last Lunar New Year dance,” Britta agreed.
“Good point,” Jeff nodded. “In that case, Dean Pelton: we would be delighted to help you be appropriately garbed for our first –”
“Nice try, Jeffrey, but it’s too late for flattery,” the Dean snapped. “No, you seven are going to be helping out…”
Chang picked up the trash can again and upended it onto the study table.
“…with this.”
A mountain of folded scraps of paper poured out onto the worktop, along with a clatter of pens. The study group looked from one another back to the Dean. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” Jeff said in horror.
“The time for jokes has passed,” the Dean replied shortly. “No, we’re going to need eight hundred fortune cookies by tomorrow. Shirley, our Domestic Science professors are still recovering from the salmonella they sustained marking their classes’ most recent tests, so you’re in charge of baking –”
“Oh.” Shirley adopted a look of conflicting feelings. “That’s… nice?”
“–which leaves the rest of you to come up with eight hundred vaguely plausible and culturally sensitive horoscopes.”
The Dean left a lingering look in Pierce’s direction. “Hey!” Pierce responded indignantly. “I’m more cultured than any of you. How many of the rest of you have actually been to Asia?”
“Every summer,” Abed said.
“Lived there for four years,” Chang concurred.
Pierce scowled. “Well, I’ll bet they were forgettable. I was in the front row for Ali versus Frazier in Manila.”
“Was that before Cheers?” Abed asked curiously.
“Hold up,” Annie interjected. “By tonight? Dean Pelton, doesn’t this seem a little excessive? Things may have gotten… slightly out of hand, but –”
“Annie, as our inaugural and only applicant for campus Honesty Officer, I would advise you not to go any further.” The Dean shook his head firmly. “Now, I’d advise that each of you gets started. A very happy Year of the Rabbit to you all. Jessica Rabbit!” He momentarily brightened. “That’s perf – oh, who am I kidding?” His face fell once more, and he sighed. “The gloves would look ridiculous; you’ve got forearms like spaghetti, Craig…”
He meandered out of the room, Chang in tow. Annie reached for the nearest scrap of paper in resignation. “Come on,” she said wearily. “We may as well get started.”
**
“Annie, will you stop dotting the Is with hearts? You’re slowing us down.”
Annie scowled. “Well, excuse me for trying to add a little bit of cheer. I don’t notice anyone picking on you for some of these –” She picked up a folded scrap of paper as proof. “I mean, come on: ‘events may involve you’; what the hell is that?”
“Hey, I’m just trying to get home, my cat hasn’t had his insulin yet –”
“Guys, seriously,” Jeff cut in. “None of these things are going to happen and everybody who reads them is going to be too drunk to remember whether or not they do. Just meet your quota and then we can all get out of here.” He nodded to the pile of completed horoscopes in front of him.
Annie sighed. “I guess you’re right. Sorry, I suppose we’re all just getting a little… hey!” She snatched up a half-unfurled scrap of paper from Jeff’s pile. “‘All you want from tomorrow is to get it better than today.’ Jeff, these are just Huey Lewis and the News lyrics!”
“And as an uncool kid in the 1980s, they were exactly what I needed to hear.”
“Classic Jeff.” Abed smiled fondly. “I started off by doing Yoda quotes for mine.”
“But, then we figured it’d be more fun to do a bunch of tiny paper aeroplanes,” Troy elaborated, throwing one onto the pile in demonstration.
Annie threw her hands up in exasperation. “Great. So now you have to unfold them all, write them all and fold them all back up again. Honestly, I shouldn’t even be here; none of this was my idea-”
“Done!” They all looked in surprise as Pierce dropped a final paper twist onto his own pile. “Piece of cake," he declared proudly.
“How?” Britta asked in disbelief.
“It’s easy,” Pierce surmised. “I’ve been signing off on adverts my whole life, and this is just the same; all you do is just tell whoever’s reading it whatever the hell they want to hear. ‘People will like you.’ ‘You’ll seem smart.’ ‘Your butt won’t look big in that.’ ‘Your butt WILL look big in that.’” He spread his arms wide triumphantly. “Try it. Come on, don’t take my word for it.”
The other five again exchanged wary looks. “That sounds… oddly coherent,” Jeff said slowly. He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, let’s do it: pander-y crap at the ready. Annie, no hearts; Troy and Abed, no references; Britta, no Britta-ing. Let’s go!”
“Hey!” Pierce sniffed. “How come you get to grab the credit just by implementing my idea? It’s like you’re Neil Armstrong and I’m… well, y’know, whoever the hell built the rocket.”
“Oh, Lord, please let there be some good news here.” Shirley appeared at the study room door, heavily doused in flour and with her hair pinned haphazardly back. “I need the next hundred of these and I need them now; last time I left Chang alone when I came back he’d eaten six of the cookies and two of the horoscopes.”
“Coming right up.”
**
“Y’know, I think that actually might be the last one.”
“Mmhmm.” Annie propped her bag on the table with a vague mumble and placed her head down on it as a makeshift pillow. “Okay, m’going to sleep now.”
Abed turned sideways with his trademark handshake already halfway in motion, only to find Troy already asleep next to him. “Cool,” he agreed, folding his arms and reclining in his chair, murmuring dozily. “Troy and Abed can’t stop snooo-ring…”
“Hey, look.” Pierce pointed at the clock above the eraser board. “It’s after midnight. Happy Lunar New Year, everybody.”
“You mean Lunar New Year’s Eve,” Jeff corrected him. “New Year isn’t until the third.”
“Today is the third,” Britta said.
“No, yesterday was only the…” Jeff frowned, then in spite of himself broke into a tired smile. “Of course. It wouldn’t be Greendale if something actually happened on the day it was supposed to.”
“Can one of you guys give me a hand with the last tray of cookies?” Chang skulked into the study room, looking as if he’d been swept in by a flour hurricane. “Shirley’s on the phone to her babysitter. She might be a while, they sound pretty mad.”
“Sure.” Jeff stood up wearily. “C’mon, people, horoscopes…”
Some complaining at being woken up, ferreting around for lost pages, one or two minor burns and then they were done. They broke from each queueing up for the library’s terrible lone working coffee machine to pile round the study table for a final look at their finished work when Shirley brought it in, a veritable mountain of now-cooled wafers stacked up in the centre of the work surface. “Well, happy new year, guys,” Annie says wearily.
Troy rifled through the pile curiously. “Did we end up with a couple spare?”
No-one, they eventually decided, would sit down to count all eight hundred cookies, so they took a final seat to each crack one open. “‘You will always pass on what you have learned.’” Pierce looked at his proudly. “Is this a Star War thingy?”
“Yep.” Abed nodded in satisfaction as he unfurled his own. “‘People might think you’re crazy…’”
“‘…but you won’t even care.’” Britta smiled up at Jeff from her own cookie.
Jeff took a bite from his, making a mental note to pencil it in on his carbs spreadsheet. “‘You won’t look fat.’” He nodded in Pierce’s direction. “It sells, alright.”
“Hey, mine’s from Pierce too.” Troy looked at his critically, and his face fell a little. “‘You’ll be unlucky.’” He frowned momentarily, then blinked as if in epiphany. “So when I screw up… it won’t be my fault! Nice.”
Chang snapped his own open a little too violently, revealing a sheaf in Britta’s writing. “‘You will do something.’” He looked from his own hands to the cookie, eyes wide and enthralled. “…whoa. That’s uncanny.”
“‘You will spread your wings.’” Annie beamed as she folded her message back into its original plane shape and tossed it back in Troy’s direction.
Shirley broke open the final cookie, the message written in familiar heart-dotted cursive. “‘You’ll make something special.’”
They exchanged looks around the table. “Y’know…” Jeff began.
“Knew it.” Abed nodded in his direction. “Classic Winger book-end to bring us home.”
Jeff smiled privately. “All I was going to say was… even if we can’t predict the future for crap, at least it looks like we can predict each other. Which is what matters, right?”
The table occupants heaved a collective groan.
The study room door squeaked open. “Okay, guys, I was kidding, I obviously didn’t expect you to spend all –” The Dean’s gasp was mildly gratifying.
“What?” Abed looked over at him. “It was all a gimmick, right? Set us a laborious task to serve as a common adversary, we all end up appreciating each other more and learn some vaguely philosophical lesson or something?”
“Just play along,” Jeff advised, tossing him a cookie. “That, give us tomorrow off and have us not ask what you’re still doing here at twelve thirty in the morning, and we’ll call it even.”
The Dean caught it with faint confusion, eyes narrowing as he snapped it open and read the print, before he finally looked up. “Well, Jeffrey, what size my posterior looks is neither here nor there, but, I think we’ll call that a deal.” He ushered them towards the door. “Now, come on, we’re not insured to have you here at this hour. Well, strictly we’re not insured at all, but at least I can claim not to know during the day. Happy Lunar New Year, Human Beings.”
“Happy Lunar New Year, Dean.”