Sometime in an alternate future...

The class listened with interest as the science teacher scrawled on the blackboard: "Homosaurs".

"5 million years ago," she said, looking around at the expectant reptilian eyes in the room,"they disappeared without a trace. Can anyone tell me how?"

There was a general muttering, as several half-hearted answers fought for ignominy. Apparently the teacher heard something that satisfied her, or else she pretended to.

"That's right," she said, "Nu'Kyular radiation." She wrote the words on the board. "Homosaurs were a vibrant, intelligent species. But their HeadNewts were not always of that caliber."

"They had HeadNewts?" asked a tiny eft on the front bench. The salamanders in the back snickered.

"Not exactly HeadNewts, Kha'jur," said the teacher indulgently. "The homosaurs chose one of them to lead them, one for every tribe. But some homosaurs told the rest of the homosaurs that they were the chosen ones, although they weren't, and became HeadNewts. And -," she continued, pre-empting the wagging tail of little Kha'jur, "and they fought each other."

"Why?"

"Oh, for all kinds of reasons - let's just say that what the homosaur HeadNewts wanted was not what the rest of the homosaurs wanted. But they used fear and ideology to keep the homosaurs from thinking about that. And to keep that fear alive, they had to fight."

"But fighting removes fear", said a burly, self-important looking newt.

"Only when the fighting stops," said the teacher. "Not if it is fueled forever. Anyway, we can go into that in the philosophy class. The point is, they had done this before, twice before, in fact. But that was the weakness of the homosaurs. Each thought its life was different, its ordeals were different. They detached from history the way their live young detached from their mothers. That's right Kha'jur - unlike us, they didn't lay eggs."

She paused and looked around the class for effect, but some newts were yawning. It was getting close to lunch-time, and they were looking expectantly out of the window-hole toward the pool.

"Then there was the Nu'Kyular." Eyes turned back toward her. "A fearsome energy they learned to release somehow. Our foremost ScienceNewts are working on finding that out even now."

"But," said Kha'jur, unwavering, "what caused this final fight?"

"We don't exactly know," answered the teacher. "But it is believed that a being called Fripress Cartoon Prophet created a clash between the two largest tribes of homosaurs." She wrote the name on the board. "We don't know how it happened, but we have a hypothesis. The scraps of records our ArcheoNewts found speak of the tribe called West, and a tribe called Terro Reast, which kept fighting each other almost since they were founded. When some sort of peace was reached, the false homosaur HeadNewts would find a new way to disturb it.

"But Fripress was someone they all liked because of its openness. But then the West used Fripress to say something bad against the Terro Reast. While Fripress said a lot of bad things about the West, too, nobody paid any attention, because they had something new to fight over, to keep the homosaurs from realizing that their HeadNewts were liars.

"But there were no fighter homosaurs left, because they had been fighting so long. So they released the Nu'Kyular on each other. In fact, the last leader of the West gave that energy its name."

The class was silent. "Hmm...," said little Kha'jur "I hope our ScienceNewts never find the Nu'Kyular."

"Or Fripress," said the burly, self-important looking newt.