"Zoe! Catch the board!", shouted Leo as he jumped over a wildly spinning cleaning brush bar that rotated in circles, trying to polish the linoleum floor as if there were no tomorrow.
Zoe reacted lightning fast. She was the best goalkeeper on the school handball team for a reason. She threw her backpack precisely into the path of the whiteboard. The board made a startled "Uh-oh!", braked sharply, slid over the fabric, and gently bumped the aluminum frame against a fire extinguisher. The drawn eyes on the surface spun around like in a cartoon.
Leo skidded over and immediately pressed the big red button on the Q-Fluctuator, which he was still holding. A soft blue beam hit the board. The vibrating stopped, the legs stiffened again, and the eyes on the surface turned back into a completely normal, boring math formula.
"Phew...", gasped Leo and collapsed onto the floor. "It's over."
"Over, my foot," said Zoe, tapping him on the shoulder. She pointed down the long hallway.
At the other end of the corridor, a small but very determined group of three biology chairs and a teacher's desk had formed. The desk opened and closed its drawers rhythmically, like a hungry crocodile. Behind it, the vending machine blocked the exit to the schoolyard and sporadically fired cans of cola into the air, which landed like little grenades.
"Leo," said Zoe with crossed arms. "I know you usually sleep in physics class. But did you just start a furniture revolution?"
"It was an accident!", Leo defended himself. "My coffee spilled into Kringel's time machine. Now this thing is distributing living quantum bolts. If we don't stop this furniture, the school will be ruled by a vending machine tomorrow morning!"
Zoe looked at the Q-Fluctuator in Leo's hand, blinking green in time with his heartbeat. "Okay. The device brought these things to life. So the device must also be able to deactivate them. You just turned off the whiteboard, after all."
"Yes, but I had to get really close and aim the beam directly at it," Leo explained. "How am I supposed to get past a vending machine that shoots lemon soda at me at eighty kilometers per hour?"
Zoe suddenly grinned. It was the kind of grin that always scared Leo because it usually meant an extremely risky idea was on the way.
"We need a distraction," she said, opening her gym bag. "And I know exactly how to outsmart these chairs."