That evening, right after the fifty thousand Blood-Skull pirates finished licking the last drops of Honey-Glazed Pork-Rib sauce off their dinner plates, they expected to waddle back to their heated bunkhouses on Asteroid #002 and go to sleep.
Instead, three shrill silver whistles blew across the plaza!
TWEEEET! TWEEEET! TWEEEET!
“Nobody go to the bunkhouse yet!” Abacus Su stood on a floating wooden podium above Asteroid #003, adjusting his round spectacles as a hundred Moon-Rabbit teaching assistants hopped out carrying stacks of freshly printed blue booklets and red chalk. “By order of Lord Pei Xuan, physical labor without moral cultivation is like a train without brakes! Starting tonight, all fifty thousand debtors of the Gravel-Yard Mining Belt will attend two hours of mandatory evening classes at Gravel-Yard Night School!”
“Night school?!”
Fifty thousand scarred, burly space pirates stared up at Asteroid #003 in horror.
While they had been eating pork ribs, Chief Shi Gang’s Star-Iron Golems had flattened the entire surface of Asteroid #003 into a five-mile open-air amphitheater filled with fifty thousand neat wooden school desks, fifty thousand small wooden stools, and a hundred-foot-wide black slate chalkboard at the front!
To make sure every pirate learned quickly, Pei Xuan had even spent 20 Billion LP in the Fusion Cube to upgrade the school grounds:
