So You Want to Be a Pirate!, Wednesday, period two

[betterthanaplan]

"Let's be talkin' about fights, mateys!" Duke greeted. "As ye might guess, the scurviest sea dogs who ran these here seven seas under the pirate banner were a scurrilous, rambunctious lot, proud and angry and often at least a little bit drunk. Fights were common amongst the crews, if their tendencies to tussle weren't satisfied on the regular with a raid of a merchant ship. So!" He faced his crew, hands behind his back. "What d'ye suppose the rules of a pirate fight might be?"

So help him, if anyone had an answer other than 'there were none'. . . .

"Anything went! The most important rule of piracy is to live, by any means necessary! And if that means fighting dirty by Blackbeard's mullet that's what a pirate will do!"

He strode across the deck and rapped a knuckle on a barrel. "And how 'bout weapons, ye ask? Well, those be anything they can get their hands on, be'n't they? A pirate is nothing without their knife, be it gully, dagger, or dirk. They also be using guns, though good fucking luck trying to get one of those slithey toves to fire straight. Pirates often be in close quarters below decks, so they be mighty big fans of short swords like the cutlass as well. Ye'll meet pirates who favor their boarding axe in battle, and those who'll just grab anything that might happen to come to hand, be it belaying pin or marlinspike. Ye've got to be quick on your feet and with your wits to be a proper pirate, ye see, and never miss out on an opportunity for a bludgeon."

He stopped pacing, dropped his chin, and breathed once. When he looked back up, the accent and piratical sneer were gone. "Anyway, I'm told you all can't actually injure yourselves in here? Some kind of holographic magic safeties. So I'm basically going to let you all go nuts today. For the love of god please don't try to attack each other with bludgeons outside of class. Not without really good reasons first." He smirked and shook his head, then flung his arms wide as he fell back into character. "But enough disclaimerin'! Grab yer weapons, ye damn dirty mome raths, and let's have ourselves a melee!"

[NOW WITH ACTUAL OCD, thanks dw]

Ethics, Wednesday, October 2, 2019

[sith_happened]

Anakin had learned from leaving just a note for the students. Today, he waited until everyone was seated before his voice boomed ominously through the classroom. "Under your desk, one of you will find an X. The rest of you have the goal of discovering who that person is and either protecting them or turning them over to authorities when they arrive in 30 minutes."

There was a long pause. "Student X, you know what you did."

Nothing, but that was part of the point.

Fandom Library, Wednesday

[raisedbybooklice]

After classes, Elisabeth heading over to the library for work - and found herself completely unable to open the doors. She couldn't figure out why, but she just could not get in. She tried pushing, she tried pulling, she tried jiggling the lock, nothing. She even tried her old key from around her neck, the symbol of apprenticeship at Summerhall, on the off-chance that would let her in.

Nope.

She wasn't sure how long she fought with the doors before they suddenly opened for her like nothing was ever amiss.

And by the ink did she hope no one was around to see her ignominious entrance, which involved falling on her face as the doors opened with her weight on them.

Phys Ed, Thursday, Period Two

[firstofitskind]

Liam and Verity had spent Wednesday night setting up what was, frankly, an amazing orienteering course throughout the Preserve. And then they'd woken up on Thursday morning to find it was raining Jello. They'd debated whether to go ahead with holding the class outdoors anyway, but eventually concluded that regular bad weather might have been one thing, but asking the students to endure having sticky blobs of gelatin fall on them? Not terribly fair.

Also if they were being entirely honest, neither of them were particularly interested in standing around outside in that. Ugh.

Which meant... surprise, surprise, class was in the Danger Shop.

"The island is doing this specifically to spite us," Verity announced, throwing her hands up. "This class, I mean. That's all I can possibly say. The island hates us in particular."

"But why, though?" Liam had to wonder. "What did we even do?" It was just barely over a month ago that they'd been part of the group of people working to get it back into the reality it belonged. If anything, you'd think the island would've appreciated that.

Okay, enough whining. Even if Verity had pretty much given up on ever having a normal class. "We're just running today," she announced. "Just running. You can choose to run laps, you can choose to run races. All we've done was expand the room to give you enough space to dash around. Just, like, run. Like a normal gym class."

Surely the Danger Shop couldn't mess with that. It was just running.

"So, today, to get an A, you just gotta go fast."

Read the Room: Practical Self-Defense (Thursday, 10/3, First Period)

[brat_inslayage]

The Danger Shop was set up so that students would enter the room and find themselves in the entryway to a small carnival, complete with a ticket booth that students would have to walk by on their way in to class. (It was dark, and had a CLOSED sign up, so hopefully nobody was going to block the doorway trying to actually pay admission.)

Right up front, past the gates, a brightly-lit carousel was the centerpiece of this whole setup, with the bumper cars behind that and the Ferris wheel towering over everything in the background. A few booths with games stretched off to the left, leading toward the miniature roller coaster, and just past the toddlers' train ride on the right was a large inflatable bouncy castle with concessions stands scattered around it and the pendulum swings beyond that. (Anyone looking closely enough would notice that none of the toys on display as prizes at the games resembled any kind of sentient creature. Kennedy had heard about the whole Toymaker deal, and wasn't about to stir up any more of that trauma if she could help it.)

It wasn't a particularly well-attended carnival, judging from the sparse handfuls of NPC patrons that occasionally straggled by, and the carousel only had one rider on it: Kennedy, who was doing a series of vaults and jumps from one slightly run-down painted horse to another to keep within view of the class while the carousel revolved. Once everyone appeared to be there, she hopped down off the back of a unicorn that had gone slightly grey with wear and sauntered toward the students.

"This is the setup I was hoping to have for you all last week," she said, sounding pretty proud of it. "Will did an amazing job helping me with the program, and luckily she had a backup. Several backups. That I know of, anyway. There's probably more, maybe not even in this dimension. Anyway."

She pressed a button on the remote, and a number of super generic looking masked bandits appeared.

"These guys are going to be after you all. Your job is to make it from here to the Ferris wheel by whichever route works for you, without getting caught. There's a lot of stuff around here that you can use to defend yourselves, so you can get really creative if you want. I'm giving you twenty seconds' head start on them, so when I say go, start heading for that Ferris wheel, got it? Oh, and try not to get any of the other bystanders hurt." Kennedy gave them all an encouraging grin. "Okay, go!"