It was one of those laboratories that might have in times gone by witnessed ghoulish attempts to bring the dead to life. Great marble slabs were placed in neat array upon a stone flagged floor. Heavy shelves along the walls were packed with shiny and not so shiny glassware twisted into odd and tangled shapes that served no purpose other than to be odd and tangled, all the better perhaps to show off bubbling coloured liquids swirling in their midst.

The wooden ceiling, sloped with heavy rafters and stained planking, showed signs of past explosions and impacts. Tiny fragments of experiments gone horribly wrong were embedded in the wooden fibres and what might have been bits of hair seemed nailed to one corner by metal splinters.

Posters, some wrinkled and discoloured by acidic fluids splashed upon them, displayed vital factoids on elemental properties, atomic arrays and a molecular dance display from several years ago with now time-lapsed invites to attend in comical chemical costume. One could turn up dressed as hydrogen peroxide, a left handed glucose molecule or the ever popular benzene ring.

Then, near the teacher's iron framed desk, was the locked cabinet. Thick glass windows crisscrossed with reinforced tungsten thread, revealed stoppered bottles containing tinted powders, both fine and granular, each labeled neatly and each with a glaring skull atop the writing. It was a matter of pride to the chemistry mistress that they were arranged in pleasing colour coordinated rows on the three visible shelves.

Upon Miss Venacula's desk an assemblage of rods and clamps, beakers, retorts and test tubes had been set up, looking like a miniature funfair park for tiny people. The loops of rubber tubing seemed an especially thrilling ride for those small enough to appreciate it.

Gathered before the desk were eight girls from the first year of Miss Plazenby's Extremely Exclusive Seminary in Frangea Winkel. The eleven year olds wore various expressions on faces that hinted they had come from widely different and distant lands, which indeed they had.

Princess Rapture, hailing from the cold and northerly Winkel of Xenia, showed a polite but slightly apprehensive interest in proceedings. Her pale face was topped by a swishy brown ponytail and her overall demeanour suggested a languid sophistication borne of generations of royal etiquette.

Next to her was a figure the very antipathy of the cool princess. Red-headed Bubbles Bannatyne of Frangea was a restless soul, eager to engage in any exciting venture and her dark blue eyes were wide with anticipation at what crazy experiments this morning's lesson might entail. These two girls were both from Dorm Flare and were the best of friends, thereby confirming opposites attract. The hotheadedness of the one was tempered by the cool consideration of the other whereas any languidness that might dampen spirits were stirred by ingrained impetuosity. These simple facts were the secret of their mutual association, quite appropriate considering their chemistry lesson combined the subtleties of nano-physics and sub-nuclear forces. Miss Venacula was nothing if not comprehensive in her scientific vocation.

"Today girls," she said behind heavy duty protective goggles and holding in a gloved hand a white powder clutched by tweezers, "we are going to test the saltiness of sea water."

There was a gasp from one of the girls.

"Isn't that dangerous?" Meresinth Woodbine suggested in alarm, taking a step back which made a number of other girls retreat as part of the well known herd mentality phenomenon. Of course, a number of the girls knew Meresinth was a quite mischievous individual. She had made it her life's ambition to find humour in just about any situation except earthquakes and plagues of boils, neither of which were frankly funny.

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"It may be so, it may be so," the mistress said, her goggles nodding more than her head, and she glanced at the locked cabinet. "That is why you must all for the moment stand behind the glass screen there while I proceed with the first stage of the experiment, the dissolving in solution."

Everyone duly shuffled into a corner behind the clamped sheet of transparent perspex with giggles and mutters as the shaky hand of Miss Venacula placed a beaker of water upon the edge of the desk where everyone could see it. She dropped the powder into it, took off her gloves and began stirring the water with a glass rod, the sound of it grating on the bottom of the beaker putting more than one set of teeth on edge.

"There," she said eventually in the silence that followed. "The salt is dissolved in the water. I shall now apply a powerful magneto-electric charge to the saline solution while tickling the surface with an intuitive divining sponge." The said sponge was plopped casually upon the water's surface, looking pink and fluffy and completely unaware it was going to be a part of an experiment soon to become legendary in the annals of Winkel World.

"What?" Bubbles spluttered. Like the other girls she had read notes on the basic chemistry curriculum of Miss Plazenby's and there was no mention of divining sponges there, especially in year one.

"Prior to adding the salt," the mistress continued, ignoring the puzzled noises from her pupils, "I had treated the crystals with a radiative light consisting of distinct wavelengths that excited the electrons with anticipation. Simply put I made them aware of where they were."

As she plugged in the heavy electrical equipment which she had rolled up to the desk, there was a humming sound, a dimming of the lights and a crackliness in the air that made more than one girl glad she was standing on a rubber mat behind a plastic screen.

"Miss?" one pupil raised her hand, Esper by name, being short for Sentimentalia Placidia Rosala but no one could be bothered to say all that. "Did I understand you correctly, that you said you imbued the salt crystals with intelligence before dissolving them in water?" Esper had the peculiar ability to almost read minds, such was her sensitive perceptiveness, and the subject of applying mental activity to inanimate things was of peculiar interest to her.

"Indeed that is so, child," came the sententious reply in a voice of great and weary authority. Obviously she had done this experiment countless times in front of numberless pupils, for she was quite an elderly teacher, long experienced in the ways of bonding, allotropy and valences.

"Isn't that cruel? I mean what you are about to do."

This made the teacher pause with a pair of huge rubberised prongs she was about to plunge into the solution. She had not heard that one before and she laughed huskily.

"My dear, I have enhanced their ability to organise themselves, not to have feelings. It quickens the experiment. Enlivens the response times." This time she licked her lips oddly and glanced goggle-eyed up at some spot in the ceiling where the bits of hair clung to the woodwork. There was a suggestiveness about the gesture, as if to say that is all that's left of a former pupil who questioned the actions of her chemistry teacher during a tricky experiment.

Of course the interruption of Esper, though well meaning, had made Miss Venacula forget completely the all important routine of dusting off the prongs before inserting them in the solution. Introducing foreign bodies into a delicate process was always bad practice. When the only barely understood ethereal force of intuitiveness was involved the end result could hardly be predicted.

With an impatient huff the teacher plunged the highly charged prongs in the water. There was a fizz, a froth, the slight hint of a squeak the origin of which no one could quite put their finger on, and then the lights failed.

"No one move," Miss Venacula said cautiously. "The emergency lighting will kick in shortly."

And so it did, glowing an eerie green. The teacher found she was talking to an empty laboratory for everyone had sensibly fled. Also she found the beaker had melted, the fluid running off the desk onto the floor. It attempted to spread itself in several distinct directions as if endeavouring to find the best escape route until its substance ran out into dryness like a river evaporating in a desert.

"Well," came a grunt of scientific curiosity. "That's never happened before."