Charm School

Charm School was where chicks were trained to run the hanyo corporations and please their masters. Thes facilities were inside the corporate enclaves, although walled off in their own compound. Chicks qualified to go to Charm School by taking the Charm Test at age five. If they failed the Charm Test, they got to be slags and go to Slag School.

Objective

The objective of Charm School was to train chicks to hold V-Jobs in hanyo town, that is jobs where they would be visible to hanyos and would interact with them and take orders from them. Chick training was somewhat schizophrenic as it combined compulsory consumption of media promoting 'romance', gruelling beauty regimes, and extremely arduous technical training. However, this training was not seen as serious study since it was primarily instruction in the 'soft' subjects: communication, people-handling, humanities. The only technical skills that chicks learned were accounting and basic programming.

Chicks were the shock troops of oppression in hanyo town, which was why many of them were also hanyobait. As apologists for hanyo town, they often got themselves cordially hated by the slags whom they oppressed in the name of the hanyos, and they would often display behaviours like staunchly denying in the face of the evidence that anything like chicken-hunting ever happened, or that hanyos were capable of brutality.

However, once they had displeased the hanyos and been externed to the radiopoisoned desert, chicks often had a change of heart and could become valuable members of survivariums. Once they had completed the Hopscotch their intimate knowledge of hanyo town and its ways was very useful to Survivors.

Curriculum

For the first five years in Charm School, the chicks progress in yearly batches, socialising only with their own batchmates. They are fed a heady diet of romantic novels and movies, to prepare them to like hanyos when they meet them. They are also given rigorous training in the liberal arts to prepare them for one of the five chick 'teams'. At age 10, they would have their social debut, and attend their first party with their seniors, chicks-in-training aged 10-15. This is how Ala, a former celebrity wife who escaped to Zigsa's Nest, describes her first garden party in Hop5 of Puzzle Two:

When we hit age ten, our seniors, the girls aged eleven to fifteen, were allowed to mix with us, and we were allowed to begin attending parties. That’s what we were told, anyway, but the first garden party we went to was a meat market, because all the seniors were trying to increase their entourage. We quickly discovered that if we didn’t get picked by some senior to be part of her entourage, we’d get busted down to Slag School and have to join at the bottom, with the five-year-olds, so everyone would know we were a Charm School dropout. Seniors who didn’t get new followers were busted as well. So the next five years opened new horizons of bitchy hell for us.

Over the next five years, intense training in the skills of people-handling would be mixed with steamy romances, soul-destroying beauty regimes and fashion-indoctrination to create the typical chick mindset. Those who combined beauty with brains got the prestigious career-tracks, while those who didn't were groomed to be disposable sex-fodder. All were taught to obsess about their charm, appearance and the approval of their masters, while being brainwashed into never questioning the hanyos.

Careers

There were five streams into which the chicks were divided. Some of the curriculum was common to all, and some was specialised.

Celebrity wife

See also celebrity wife

The most prestigious job description, the one that all chicks aspire to, is celebrity wife. Celebrity wives live the dream life that hanyos imagine wives lived in the twentieth century. They are married to a Dynast, get their own reality show, and are envied to bits by everyone else, but the reality of their lives is much more sordid. Only one chick in hundreds every gets to be a celebrity wife.

Legal Assistant

See also Legal Assistant.

Then there are the Legal Assistants or 'legal asses', who mostly dealt with placating and out-manoeuvring the other corporations, when they're not helping their boss to do the other hanyos of their corporation down.

Medical Assistant

See also Medical Assistant.

The Medical Assistants or 'med asses', helped hanyo doctors by doing most of the hands-on tasks of hanyo healthcare.

Corporate Assistant

See also Corporate Asssistant.

The largest and most diverse group of V-job holders were the Corporate Assistants, or 'corp asses' as the hanyos call them. They carry out the daily business of running the various departments of the corporation, from Human Resources to Acquisitions, and constantly jockey for status and privilege among themselves.

Model

See also Model.

Chicks who fail to qualify for any of these teams get busted down to Models. Models are essentially party-fodder for hanyos, and they don't last long.

Teachers

To be a teacher in Charm School was on of the few ways an intelligent person could protect herself in hanyo town. Their vital role as trainers of the next generation of elite asses gave them some immunity from hanyo depredations and chicken-hunting. Some teachers were almost certainly rootkittens, though others were regrettably hanyobait.