"At half past seven, the couple in the room began to quar", Nene's chalk paused its quick, yet careful, scribbling noise as she glanced over her shoulder to see her teacher's face, then resumed. "rel. The man in the room sout-AW!" The last part appeared not on the blackboard, naturally, but upon her lips. Nene wiped off "sout", then replaced it with "saught" - that was met with another dull thwack - and, finally, with "sought". That was self-evidently correct, and the dictation resumed: "for A on his flute, the gas went a little lower, three coal wagons started to unload..."

Choco actually liked the ruler game, in part for the obvious pun that none of the girls seemed to have noticed, probably by way of being preoccupied with the ruler as a very physical implement. The concept was dead simple — if you were unsatisfied with how you did on a spelling test, you could take a remedial in front of the class, which was guaranteed to be a perfect score, if only due to the fact that, instead of marking down their score for every error, she would physically imply that they've made a mistake, every time, until they've gotten it right. It was actually surprisingly effective, because it served as a reminder for the rest of the class on how to spell particularly tricky words, plus the girls that took it cared enough about their score to actually study in the first place, and she was looking for ways to adapt this method to other areas of study. Though that was not really the main draw for her.

Nene finished writing "... with hardboiled egg" and waited for a nod to sit down. She had no difficulty doing so — the point of the exercise wasn't to hurt her as much as it was to embarrass, which, judging from her ears, flushed with red, was a success. On some level everyone understond that fairly nominal ruler thwacks through clothes really weren't that bad, but that didn't preclude pity looks, and, more importantly, helped set the mood that Choco enjoyed so much. Reminding everyone who's really in charge here, including charge of their own bodies. The ruler, so to say. The queen. Choco did hope that outright helping Nene spell "dandeleonized" did not do much to diminish that effect, as much as it is a fact that authorial neologisms are totally unfair in a dictation.

"Now, class," she started, "I'd like to just tell you all that you did a good job and wish you a nice spring break, but there's a few matters I'd like to attend to. Of course, first of all, you did fairly badly, but if I wanted to go through the whole list we'd be here all night." She expected at least some polite giggles, but that only really got a hushed murmur. Of course the prospect wasn't really amusing from their perspective, but she didn't really care. "So let's keep this short and talk to the exemplars today. On the topic of attendance, let's see here..." Choco started leafing through the class journal, pretending to count the X-es for each surname across the semester, but it really was theatrics, since you could guess the head truant of the class immediately if you've been attending it for the past few weeks yourself, and people were already glancing over at her. Choco let her be nervous for a few minutes before ripping off the figurative band-aid. "Aha. Is... Uruha Rushia here? Please come over here, we need to talk." Without glancing up, she heard the sound of a moving chair, then slow, cautious, uneven footsteps. 

To be entirely honest, Choco already knew the whole deal. Rushia had a problem. Why, yes, everyone in this asylum of a class had a problem in their unique ways, but still. She liked her fans. Loved them. It was unlike anything she's ever seen before, Rushia had an utterly parasocial relationship with her whole fanbase, bordering on stalker behavior sometimes. She once hacked a guy's account to find his phone number and make a call to tell him good morning, and he wasn't even a member! Anyway. Her addiction to being validated, doting, just general human interaction with people she knew find her interesting instead of droll and creepy absolutely shredded her sleep schedule. She would stay online way past midnight, wake up and find out that she missed either half the classes or all of them — and English was usually in the morning — hate herself for a few hours, order takeout and have a guerilla stream. It was no way to live, and she's asked Choco for help, in her capacity as a nurse. Choco explained the idea of hyperbolic discounting and akrasia to her (the girl wasn't words-dumb) and prescribed melatonin... only for Rushia to do the opposite of what's prescribed and take it at five o clock in the morning when she would go to sleep anyway, instead of when she should have (the girl was brains-dumb). Choco knew of all this as a nurse, but as a teacher nonetheless pointed at the string of X-es and asked Rushia to explain them to her. She listened patiently, only interrupting with a few pointed questions that didn't change the story much — it was sad, it was understandable, and it was dumb as shit.

By the time Rushia finished stammering through her explanation, she was already borderline in tears, and some part of Choco's heart hated to see it. A fairly small one, though, since she was a demon after all. She cocked her head. "I get what you're going through, and you're going to need help — I'll put in the word for higher management." Assholes treated her like a cash cow and not much more. No respect for the human being behind the screen. "However, this is my English class, and you chose to neglect coming to it because it felt like the easier way for you. You have responsibilities, and you should not skimp on them. Thank you for coming in today, because you will have to remind your classmates what happens otherwise. Uruha Rushia, if you would get over my knee, please?"

Rushia's face, already pink, flushed bright red all over. She leaned over and said, as quietly as possible, something to the tune of "Choco-sensei, please let's do this in private, it's too embarrassing!" Choco took another sip from her glass of ice water and adjusted her glasses. 
"First off, that's Miss Yuzuki for you, this is still an English class. Second, serving as an example for your classmates is why you're here. Third, this wasn't a question, I was just being polite. In conclusion, get your MAGICAL LITTLE BEHIND over here so you remember showing it up sometimes!"

 Now that bit of theatrics got a few laughs. Some of them nervous, but mostly people were interested in seeing this happen. It wasn't that... people hated Rushia, exactly, Choco would not have been doing this if anyone did, but she was aloof, slow to make friends and easy to anger, rarely paying attention to the classmates outside of her group. Combined with her success, it made people feel like she was haughty and elitist. Many thought it was a long time coming, and frankly, it was. 

Rushia carefully laid herself across Choco's lap. The desk was in the right corner, her chair behind it in such a way that someone lying across would have their top or their bottom half hidden from the audience's view, depending on whether you lay down from the left or from the right. What will all your friends see today, your panties or your tears? Rushia decided on the tears, apparently. A fine choice. Choco was interested in seeing them today, too. Rushia's skirt was still down, but Choco decided not to scold her for it — the poor girl's heart was already beating too fast. Carefully, using only her fingertips, she neatly and slowly raised her captive's dress, like a child sneaking a peek at presents on Christmas Eve. Today's offer turned out to be so exciting she barely stopped herself from gasping. 

If you asked people around what they know about Rushia, you'd hear that she's kind of scary, nice if you know her closer but still scary at times, a necromancer that no one ever recalls raising any undead, and that her chest is as mountainous as an ice skating rink. This fact cost her zero fans on net, but was an infinite source of chagrin for her, to such an extent that she constantly made self-deprecating jokes constructed in a way that made it clear that's also what she really thought about herself. 

It was inevitable that she would eventually ask Choco for advice — both as a medical health professional and as someone who squarely beat her in that department, and Choco was happy to oblige. Rushia, simply put, had a habit of forgetting to eat and a small appetite in general, which made her look bony, especially combined with how rarely the sun saw her skin. Choco wanted to remedy that and explained that breasts, all things considered, were largely big blobs of fat, so calorie-dense food would be really handy to build up reserves of it, and, punctuate this, offered her some candy from her table drawer. The little necromancer was all too eager to accept. Halloween passed without trace, Christmas as well. Then came Valentine, and with it, came trucks of candy from her infatuated fans.

She probably didn't eat all of it, all things considered, or maybe she did and her otherworldly metabolism chewed through the shower of excess nutrients just fine, but either way, she still didn't look like she was in need of a larger bra... or, well, a bra at all. You couldn't really look at her and say "oh, Rushia really put on the pounds, huh?" Her cheeks got a bit chubbier, but you'd need to look for the changes. Choco was monitoring her weigh-ins though and knew it was working, and now she got her belated Valentine's day gift. From a certain point of view, it was even appropriately heart-shaped.

Choco put the palm of her hand - the one she was just holding an ice-cold glass with - on bare skin and was rewarded with a soft whimper and goosebumps spreading down Rushia's legs. She grabbed her fingers around, looking for a nice, soft, sensitive part to focus on, but it was like looking for a leaf in the forest. A year ago, when Choco was giving her an intramuscular injection,  the poor girl had virtually nothing but hip bones down there, and now she was serving as a comfy wrist-rest.

"I'm not doing this for my own amusement, you know", said Choco, who was doing this for her own amusement. "I'd like you to apologize in your own words, to make sure you got what you did to get yourself into this situation in the first place." Already flush with embarrassment, nervousness and something else, the little mage, put on the spot, stumbled over words and fell on her figurative face. The gist of it was something about how she's sorry she had thought brightening up people's day was more important than ruining hers. It was sometimes said that Rushia had a 1600-year old mind cursed with a 16-year old body, but her teacher was sure someone got the ages the other way around, sometimes. She cocked her head to the side slightly. "Well, that won't do at all, will it? Here, let me help you out."

The first slap was hefty and drawn out, its sound almost but not quite consealing a faint "ow", and it was immediately followed by a second, quicker one. After that, Choco let her hand settle into a familiar rhythmic pattern, alternating between buttocks, not really hitting that hard, mostly focusing on how it felt. To be honest, it felt wonderful. The old adage about "hurting me more than it hurts you" has always been kind of bullshit, even taken in the figurative sense, but here it just didn't apply at all. Rushia's pale white bottom, a child of Choco-officiated marriage between excess sugar and zero physical exercise, had the consistency (and, no doubt, taste) of fluffy marshmallow. It was so easy and so much fun to leave red handprints on it and watch them disappear, almost but not quite, leaving faint traces of pink that slowly accumulated. 

"Rushia is a good girl" was kind of ridiculous to even consider, but Choco was getting fairly sure of it. She was taking it really well, trying really hard to not make a sound, except for the ones made by repeated impacts with her skin, of course. Her back was pushed down upon, and she responded almost instinctively, arching it in a way to make access to lower parts of her butt as convenient for Choco as she could. 

Her tears were welling up though, and Choco wasn't going to let her off her lap with her dignity intact. She caught the string of her panties with a nail and pulled them down, slowly, leaving a deep scratch right across already damaged skin — to her surprise, this was met with zero resistance (nothing that would merit, say, painfully bending her captive's arm behind her own back and giving a series of hard slaps as a reminder of what happens when you fight back), though with a prolonged pained whimper. "Sorry, didn't mean to do it", whispered Choco, who was not sorry and meant to do it, and gave her a quick headpat. She blushed even harder, and her cat ears wiggled in delight, despite being entirely fake. Magic bullshit. 

Choco allowed herself some pause, cracking her fingers, then running them across bare, pink-to-red skin, paying attention to the reaction pressing down on forming bruises got. It was some very nice handiwork, almost done, but needed more polish. "Uruha Rushia, do you have a better apology you can offer, or should I help more?" "No, Choco-se... Miss Yuzuki. I'm sorry for sleeping through your class, Miss Yuzuki, I promise this won't happen again!" "Very well. I'm going to have you repeat that, in English, a few more times." With these words, the discipline session resumed. 

Choco hit without rhythm and without consistent strength — (though generally far harder than before, leaving bright red overlayed on bright pink), with the explicit purpose of screwing with her brain, and it worked. Rushia kept repeating her apology (though the pronunciation left much to be desired) over and over, soon shortening it to "I'm sorry, miss Yuzuki", then "Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry", then crying. Choco kept her at the last part for the next couple minutes, then stopped. Rushia kept bawling for some more time. Carefully, Choco got her up, pulled her black lace back on and lowered her skirt, then sat her back down on her lap, making sure not to have any of the thoroughly damaged skin touch it, tightly embracing her and gently patting her head to help her calm down. It's these moments that made the former denizen of hell really love her new job. Well, that, and the past twenty minutes or so.

Besides general aftercare and a bit of niceness, this served another purpose. Rushia wasn't wearing a bra, as usual, and she found something in this situation that made her nipples poke straight through the thin summer shirt — the weather was hot enough for her to not have any other clothes to sneakily tell to cover herself with, so Choco was waiting for that to subside. What was it that did that? The pain? The embarrassment? The feeling of being watched? A mixture of all three? Something else? Must remember to investigate further, there is some potential here...

Choco watched her students' eyes carefully as Rushia was shuffling back to her table. She was somewhat relieved — she could not find a trace of malice or glee, mostly looks of genuine concern. Allowing the truancy situation to get as bad as it did was a big gamble, but it was already paying off. Hurting her pride in front of the class and reducing one of a big stars to a little crying marshmallow will have kickstarted genuine worry over her, maybe even maternal instincts in some of the older girls (of course, "older" was a wonky concept, Rushia was formally far older than most of them). Maybe a little push?

"Note that miss Uruha will still need to catch up on the extensive amount of missed material. Anyone who will help her over the spring break will receive partial credit." Too heavyhanded? "This being said, I'm sure you are all very eager to hear the results of the last test!" From the collective groan, they weren't. "To be short: bad. Very disappointing. Lucifer be my witness, if it were up to me, I'd have you lot envy miss Uruha right here and right now. However, I'm in a very nice mood today, so everyone with a less than sixty percent of right answers will receive extra homework to occupy yourself on a break — it will be personalized, so don't expect copying as you always do. Check your email inboxes periodically. Oh, and... Ookami Mio?"

"Here." was a somewhat groggy response.

"I already took attendance. Zero percent, miss Ookami? Zero heaven-blessed percent? How did you even manage to do it? The first half was multiple-choice!"

"What do you mean by 'first half', miss Yuzuki?"

"The sheet had two sides to it, and I'm already hearing that you're sadly not the only one to make this particular mistake, apparently. 'A cat can haz a little salami', miss Ookami? 'Can haz?' It was an obvious joke answer, you're the only one who fell for THAT one."

"Oh, uh... I can explain this one. I've seen a picture of my smartphone recently, an English picture, where a cat was asking if it could haz a burger. I assumed it's how singular works in British English. Do you think it was a typo?"

"No, I don't, I'm not trying to think of anything right now. Okay, class, have a nice spring break, don't drink too much, sleep well and exercise, and Mio, I'll see you after school."