Fun with Magic | Friday, First period

[nuclear_snide]

Class was out on the lawn again today. The muggy, hot, summer lawn. Not that Bob was bothered by the temperature.

"Well!" He clapped his hands together. "I hope you've all had a fun time and learned a bit about what magic can and can't do for you. I realise that mostly we've been using spelled objects or illusions, but for our last class, I won't be the one supplying any of it. Well, except for these."

He nodded at the box Anders had set in front of him, which this time contained ten flags - five red and five blue, each on a stake about two feet long. "You'll be in teams for this one." He mimed cutting the class in half and shoving them apart. "Red team, your leader is Anders. Blue team, yours is Elsa." The colours were completely unintentional, naturally. "The object of the game is to capture all the other team's flags. You can't outright hide your own, but you can make them difficult to find."

He grinned and nodded at Elsa and Anders, then cheerfully turned to the rest of the class. "Mind the cold!"

Didn't every summer class want to end with a massive snowball fight?

Survive the Island, Thusday 3rd Period

[wrongkindofsith]

Cara led her students to the Danger Shop today, so at least they were likely to emerge from whatever final she'd cooked up mostly unscathed.

Inside the Danger Shop turned out to be a simulation of the preserve, albeit one that seemed slightly denser in terms of undergrowth than usual. If they were paying attention to their surroundings, her class might have noticed a flicker of bright green here and there out of the corners of their eyes.

"The island throws a lot at you, and the only real test is dealing with it all," Cara said, once they'd made it to the simulated campgrounds, bare except for the firepits and the occasional treestump. She leant against the sole one that was conveniently tall enough to do so. "So deal with it."

Well, that wasn't at all ominous.

Practical Philosophy, Friday

[endsthegame]

"Hey," Ender greeted the group, smiling faintly. "It's traditional for my class to spend the first week reflecting on the future, and the last reflecting on the past."

"Specifically," he continued, stretching his legs out in the grass of the dorm lawn, "How much have you changed since you got here? How do you see your future, on the island or off? Has the island been an interruption in your life, to be skipped past and left there once you graduate? Or going by your experiences, do you think it will forge lasting changes that will stick with you in the times ahead?"

He smiled briefly.

"I realize this isn't a particularly philosophical series of questions," he said. "But it's something worth reflecting on, not just with me, but between yourselves. I have a feeling your viewpoints will be as diverse as you are."

He sat back.

"But to pull it larger: do you think there's a shared experience here on this island? Something similar we all take away from it? Or none at all?"