A long, long time ago, when everything was just starting out, and even the planets and stars were so young that they were still going to school, there was a special class which was everyone's favorite, having by far the most fun filled classmates. The class members were a bunch of rather mischievous colors; from black and white, through to red and blue, yellow, and all the rest. They hoped to grow up to be wonderful colors and this is what they were training for.
In addition to being funny and joyful, the colors were very naughty; particularly the black and white ones, so preoccupied with causing mayhem that they were almost always late for class.
One morning there was a great commotion in the sky. The clouds were up there, practicing raining, but they had been raining for so long that they'd gone and created a storm so terrible that absolutely everyone had become saddened and depressed at having such little light. Even when the sun started shining again, it did not manage to cheer up the world.
The only solution was to appeal, as a last resort, to the naughty, mischievous colors, even though they were still very young and weren't yet trained for anything like this. The authorities went straight to their classroom. It was still early, and, as ever, black and white hadn't yet turned up. However, there was no time to lose; they couldn't wait for black and white. The other colors had to do something fast. They ran down the corridors, out of the door, and flew up into the sky.
On their way up to the clouds each one of the colors left a resplendent trail but the effect on the world was unfortunately either very high and too striking or very low and too dim because of their incomplete education. This situation marked the entry of the colors black and white. They came and settled right under the rainbow, where the colors had left their bright trails and dimmed and brightened the effect accordingly. Surprisingly, they did their job with utter