Ms. Potter The NPC: A Parodical Essay

 

DISCLAIMER: This is not intended to be taken seriously. The Teacher in question, despite having some robotic qualities, is a wonderful teacher and person. With that out of the way, please enjoy.

Based on a true story

    It is a popular theory that the universe is a computerized simulation. It makes sense, we've seen what computers have made possible. It's not unimaginable that a very advanced computer could simulate the universe, or that the universe itself is a simulation. TV, movies, books, and games that use this concept, such as The Matrix, say that not only is the universe a simulation, but some of the people in it are as well.  Non-playable characters, you could call them.

Non-playable characters, or NPCs for short, are characters in video games that are not controlled by the player. These characters usually serve as the townspeople, the quest-givers, and merchants of games. If the universe is a simulation, NPCs likely exist in the 'real world'.

In Gordon Korman's 'The Super Teacher Project', android teacher Mr. Adact is placed in a middle school as an experiment run by the United States Department of Education. However, this project fails when the students realize he can answer any question they ask him via his connection to the internet. There is a similar case in the 'real world', with Ms. Laura Potter, teacher of Math one and two at Hogsfeild high school.

Of course, Ms. Potter is not a robot. To say she is would be unrealistic. Instead, Ms. Potter must be a previously mentioned 'Non-Playable Character'. The evidence is right in front of us. It's almost surprising no one else has noticed.

First of all, Laura Potter moves extremely similarly to a model running in Unreal Engine Five. If you watch her reach for a dry-erase marker, you will notice she does so with a certain inhuman degree of smoothness and jankiness, only achievable by Non-Playable Characters. When she walks down the hallway she does so purposely, but makes it obvious that she is out of place,  perhaps because she was originally developed to work primarily in her classroom, walking being a low-priority afterthought of the developers. As if her animations weren't a big enough giveaway, her design also reveals her unplayability. Ms. Laura Potter is the only teacher who still chooses to wear a mask. And she not only wears the mask, but she never takes it off. Other students at Hogsfeild High School who wear masks, a population that continues to shrink, have been seen maskless outside, while eating, blowing their nose, or drinking water, but Laura Potter seems to avoid all of these situations. She has been seen outside during fire drills, but she continues wearing her mask even then. She could of course just be wearing her mask in fear of the COVID-19 disease, or as a sign of respect to others, but with her strange behavior it seems much more likely that she wears it to cover up the fact that she has no mouth. As you may know, one of the hardest parts of animation is lip-syncing. The developers, taking advantage of the Pandemic of 2020, likely avoided the need for lip-syncing by removing her mouth. No one will notice if she never takes off her mask.

Additionally, Laura Potter seems to not need sleep. Often she posts assignments on Google Classroom at three o'clock in the morning. When one of her students interrogated her on this strange behavior, she responded "You have to find time to fit everything in." There is no denying that the world is a busy place, or that the life of a teacher is hard, but surely she can and must find some time to sleep. The strangest part is, during class she shows no signs of exhaustion, almost like she doesn't need sleep at all.

The fatal flaw of Project Aidact was the lack of secrecy surrounding his abilities. When asked any question, Mr. Aidact would immediately answer the question, given the answer could be found online. Unlike the fictional Mr. Aidact, Ms. Potter tries to keep her abilities and identity secret. Occasionally, she will get something wrong on purpose to hide her connection to the simulation, but this sometimes backfires. An example of this first appeared when she was solving a math problem as an example for the class. While solving the problem, she made an error. This error did not reveal her unplayability, but what did was the interaction that followed. When she 'noticed' her error, she asked if anyone else had seen it. One introverted student raised their hand, not wanting to bring it up sooner. Although she has no proof that discredited his claim, she denied that he had seen it, stating that he "was just saying that". Another example of her on-purpose mistake system backfiring is when another student attempted to photograph a rainbow visible outside of the room's window. She claimed she saw him typing. He denied it, with multiple witnesses to support him, however, she continued to support her statement. In both these situations it is very obvious what was going on, but Laura continued to deny it, even when all the evidence was staring her down in the face. The only possible explanation is that because Ms. Laura Potter is a Non-Playable Character, she can see everything via her link to the simulation. To hide this, she makes on-purpose mistakes, but these mistakes tend to backfire, revealing her unplayability.

In an interview with another student from one of Laura Potter's math one class, it was revealed that Ms. Potter often arrives late to first period. She has never been seen leaving her car, only ever seen walking down the 1700s hallway. She was also mysteriously absent on the first day of school, although she claimed it was because it was her kindergartner's first day. Additionally, on test days Ms. Potter seldom appears. When she assigns a test or a quiz for next class, you can bet she won't be there. There is a simple explanation for both of these strange behaviors. On test days when Ms. Potter is not needed to teach class, she is not sent to school to keep processing costs low. As seen with Chat GTP, the AI chatbot that took the world by storm back in December of 2022, AI data processing costs can be very hefty. As for her late arrivals and absence on the first day, she was probably undergoing last-minute bug fixes and glitch patches. It seems unlikely that she has a kindergarten-aged child, because it would be immensely difficult to raise a child when you're a high school teacher, let alone one with no mouth, car, or even life.

For these reasons, it is obvious that Ms. Laura Potter, teacher of Math one and two at Hogsfeild High School, is not the human-controlled entity she claims to be. She, is none other than a Non-Playable character.

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