prologue : pilot

❝I pronounce you a community❞

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾　☆　☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙

"GOOD MORNING. How do we turn this off? Can you help me turn this off? Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. How do we turn this off? Can you help me with this? Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I didn't mean to snap."

"Good morning. Many of you are halfway through your first week here at Greendale and as your dean I thought I would share a few thoughts of wisdom and inspiration. What is community college? Well, you've heard all kinds of things. You've heard it's loser college for remedial teens, twenty something year old high school dropouts, middle-aged divorcees and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity. That's what you've heard. However, I wish you luck!"

Olivia Barnes' eyes had just grown wider and wider during the rather uninspirational 'inspirational' speech.

"Please tell me that's not actually the dean but some comedian with a bad sense of humour talking?" She asks her cousin who had been studying a football flyer taped to a bulletin board.

Troy Barnes looks away from the board and looks at Olivia.

He shrugged before tugging nervously at the hem of his lettermen jacket.

Olivia was worried about Troy – he, like her, had been awarded multiple college scholarships but had ended up here, at Greendale, with a man she truly hoped wasn't actually the dean at the helm of things.

"What classes do you have today?" Olivia asks, trying to get her cousin to speak.

"Spanish 101, Introduction to Business and Phys Ed 102." He tells her. "What about you?"

"Spanish 101, too, Advanced Physics and Intro to Criminology."

"Oh sweet, we're in Spanish together!"

Troy puts up his hand for a high five and Olivia had to jump to meet his hand to slap.

"Let's go speak español." She smiles.

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾　☆　☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙

Olivia's phone buzzes from within her backpack.

Digging it out she sees that she's got a text from Troy.

spanish study group in study room f happening now :)

Olivia wasn't actually bad at Spanish but she knew that the best way to make it through her first (and hopefully last) semester at Greendale would be to stick with her cousin and if that meant joining a study group then so be it.

When she walked in she saw there was three spare seats.

"Hey Liv!" Troy greets.

"Hey, Troy." She replies, grinning back.

She goes to take the empty seat next to the skinny guy she recognised from Spanish but he promptly stops her.

"Britta sits there and Jeff sits in the seat next to her." He tells her.

"Oooooooookay."

Taking the seat next to a girl with dark brown hair she begins unpacking her stuff.

When she looked up she saw that five pairs of eyes were on her.

"Can I help you?" Olivia asks, slightly disconcerted by this group staring at her, unashamedly.

She didn't mind Troy looking at her but the other four strangers, not so much.

The dark haired girl goes to reply but closes her mouth when two more people join the group.

The blonde girl takes a seat next to skinny boy so Olivia deduces that this must be Britta.

The guy just stands behind the empty seat next to Olivia before he begins to speak.

A fake smile appears on his face.

"All right. Look at this crew. All ready to study all night."

"I can stay at least till 10." The older woman next to the brown haired girl replies.

Olivia was tempted to cut in and say that she couldn't stay later than 6pm, she didn't plan on sticking round this building later than that, the slightly sagging and weathered buildings were already making her sad.

If she closed her eyes she could still see the pristine lawns at Yale and the redbrick buildings all uniform and perfectly upkept.

"Who studies with strangers, right?" The guy asks. "My name is Jeff."

Go figure, Olivia thinks, a douche name for a douchey guy.

"Jeff, it's a pleasure. My name is Pierce Hawthorne. And, yes, that is Hawthorne as in Hawthorne Wipes the award-winning moist towelette." The older guy introduces himself.

Olivia tries to hide her laugh but when she makes eye contact with Troy a tiny giggle escapes her lips.

"I was just gonna ask." Jeff replies sarcastically but it's wasted on Pierce.

"I'm also a toastmaster so maybe I should do the introductions." Pierce carries on and another giggle escapes Olivia's mouth, Jeff looks down at her and rolls his eyes with a smile.

"Definitely." He agrees before sitting down next to Olivia.

"You know Brittles." Pierce starts, gesturing to Britta.

"Britta." She corrects.

"Ay-bed. Abed the Arab. Is that inappropriate?" He asks turning to the skinny guy, Abed.

"Sure." He says with a shrug.

Pierce then turns to her cousin.

"Roy, Roy, the wonder boy."

Olivia fully bursts out laughing at this and seven pairs of eyes fix themselves on her.

"His name is Troy with a T."

"What sort of name is Troy?" Pierce asks and Olivia's smile slips.

"A perfectly good one." She replies, eyes narrowed.

Pierce holds up his hands in surrender before going back to his ridiculous introductions.

"Little Princess Elizabeth." He nods towards the girl next to Olivia.

"Annie." She corrects not even looking at him.

"And, finally, this beautiful creature is named Shirley." He goes to touch the woman next to Annie who not so subtly moves further away from Pierce.

"Is that even close?" Jeff asks and Shirley nods. "And you didn't introduce Troy's defender." He tells Pierce tipping his head towards Olivia.

"Olivia Barnes, I'm Troy's cousin."

"Makes sense." Pierce mutters.

"You wanna be a little louder?" Olivia demands.

Before things turn heated Annie speaks up.

"I'd like to know why I had to find out about this group on accident?"

"Oh, this is getting way more like Breakfast Club now." Abed notes.

"There's breakfast?" Pierce asks, looking around the room.

"Okay, um, maybe we should get started..." Britta suggests and the group all nod.

"You know," Jeff starts, "I've been a part of a lot of study groups that fell apart because of unresolved tension. Shouldn't we address Annie's concern? Did we not invite her?"

What fresh hell?

"Well, Annie, sweetie, it's not behind your back we just didn't really think about you..." Shirley says in a not so caring manner.

"Can we stop with the 'pumpkins' and the 'sweeties'? Being younger doesn't not make me inferior. If anything your age indicates that you've made bad life decisions."

Olivia was beginning to think she'd made bad life decisions by delaying her Yale acceptance to come to this school full of lunatics.

"Mmmm, mmmm..." Shirley replies, eyebrows raised.

"Shirley has a response to that." Jeff prompts.

If Olivia didn't know better she would've thought that Jeff wasn't actually here to study.

"No, no, no. I don't." Shirley quickly denies.

"It looks like you do." Troy notes, when he sees the glare his cousin is shooting him he quickly looks down at the table.

"Shirley, go ahead." Jeff says.

"Okay, okay. Um, I'm sure I've made some, um, some bad life decisions. And maybe Annie's decisions will be better, uh, but I think she needs to decide whether she wants to be considered a child or an adult, because children get pity but not respect and adults, they get respect but they also get the back of the head grabbed and their face pushed through jukeboxes."

The group all look at Shirley rather taken aback by the jukebox comment.

"Can you repeat that last bit?" Olivia asks but before Shirley can respond Britta cuts in.

"Okay! Why don't we try learning 'jukebox' in Spanish?"

It's at this point that Pierce touches Shirley's hair.

"What are you doing?!" She demands practically jumping out of her chair.

"Pierce!" Jeff almost reprimands. "Let's discuss this creepiness."

"Maybe the underlying racism, too?" Olivia mutters.

"Pardon you?" Pierce asks stupidly.

"What are you doing?" Britta asks Jeff sounding almost as stupid as Pierce.

"I'm certified." He replies as if this was some sort of explanation. "Are you unaware that Shirley finds your advances inappropriate?"

"What advances?" Pierce asks.

"Jesus, you're thicker than two oak trees." Olivia observes.

"You have been sexually harassing me since the very first day of class." Shirley tells Pierce without looking at him.

"Sexually harassing? What? That makes no sense to me. Why would I harass somebody who turns me on?" Pierce asks incredulous.

Olivia refrains from placing her hands over her ears and chanting 'la la la' really loudly, she felt like she was being exposed to some old man porn.

"Saying she turns you on is the harassment, dude!" Troy tells him.

"Hey!" Pierce exclaims. "I am a prominent business leader and a highly sought after dinner guest and I will not take courting advice from some teenage boy."

"What dinners would they be? KKK or Anti-LGBTQ?" Olivia asks.

"Anti-what?"

"I'm not just some teenage boy, I'm a quarterback and a prom king." Troy says smugly and Olivia groans.

He really wasn't going to let losing his scholarships deflate his ego after all.

"You're not prom king anymore, Troy. This isn't Riverside High." Annie interjects.

"How'd you know I went there?" Troy asks.

"Because you're still wearing your stupid letter jacket and, more importantly, I sat behind you in Algebra!"

"Wait," Olivia asks, "were you that girl who got hooked on pills and then dropped out?"

"You're little Annie Adderall!" Troy calls out, recognition on his face.

"And you're a stupid jock who lost his scholarship by dislocating both shoulders in a keg stand!" Annie accuses, looking as if she was about to cry.

"Keg flip! They're very hard to pull off." Troy corrects.

"Troy, shut up!" Olivia demands.

"I'm a legend." He replies, smiling.

"A legendary idiot." She shoots back before the group erupts into arguments.

"You know what I got for Christmas?" Abed starts, effectively silencing everyone, "It was a banner year at the Bender family. I got a cartoon of cigarettes. The old man grabbed me, he said 'hey smoke up, Johnny'. No, dad, what about you?'"

"You know none of us were quoting films right?" Olivia asks.

"That actually was from the Breakfast Club." Jeff says, one eyebrow raised as he studies Abed.

"Nobody puts Baby in the corner!" Abed quickly follows on.

"Hey I love that film!" Olivia replies, grinning.

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool."

I now pronounce this fic a-go
sorry if it seems a bit like a character insert fic atm but I'm going to following the s1 plot but then deviate from s2 onwards :)