I gave Astrid a vicious back-hand slap to the face.<br/><br/>"Do not be impertinent. You have just earned yourself a second punishment at my hands. In addition to the slap!"<br/><br/>I scowled at her and then glanced at my watch. Mistress was almost late, which was unlike her. I wondered if she was having any trouble with Charlotte, the object of the intended demonstration. From my position behind the curtained glass house, I couldn't see the path. A slow stream of students and staff came around the building, but it had slowed to a trickle. Almost everyone was here now, with a few exceptions.<br/><br/>I addressed Astrid again. "However, in one respect you are correct. The time to crack a nut with a sledgehammer is when one wishes to destroy the nut completely. You would categorise Mistress Shaw's treatment of Charlotte as overkill - using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, yes? Well in this case, we wish to utterly destroy the nut. Not Charlotte herself, no. But what we wish to destroy is the idea that attempting to escape may be worth the risk. We make it so that the price,<em>when</em>you are caught, is so ridiculously high that no one in their right mind would risk paying it, considering that the chance of success is zero."<br/><br/>I chuckled. "In fact, in all the years the college has been running, there has been one successful escape." I paused, letting the hope build for a second, before crushing it. "One of the students brought a pet mouse with him a few months back. Mistress Shaw confiscated it, and it was kept in the school science lab, as a communal pet. One morning we found that it had successfully chewed through the plastic base of it's cage and it was never seen again!"