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Keeping Your Advantage: Terrain and You, Week IV [Monday, Period 4]

"Hello, students," Ghanima said as they gathered in the Danger Shop. "Today, we're back in a slightly more familiar climate: the prairie."

"Prairies are considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type. Temperate grassland regions include the Pampas of Argentina, and the steppes of Russia and Central Asia," she said, the Danger Shop starting to cycle through various landscapes as she spoke. "This type of terrian is found on many planets, and in many varieties."

"Lands typically referred to as "prairie" tend to be in North America. The term encompasses much of the area referred to as the Great Plains of the United States and Canada. In the U.S., the area is constituted by most or all of the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, and sizable parts of the states of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Minnesota. The Central Valley of California is also prairie. The Canadian Prairies occupy vast areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta."

"While the prairie might seem harmless, there are a number of dangers," Ghanima continued. "Flash flooding, prairie fires, and wild animals can all strike at any time, no matter how safe you might feel."

"Don't camp by a river, stream, or dry creek bed, no matter how tempting," she cautioned. "Not only can floods spring up at any time, but predators often frequent those areas at dawn and dusk. If you see wildcat or bear tracks, or any tracks bigger than your hand, really, go in the opposite direction. You don't want to stay there."

"A good way to deter predators is to keep your food in closed plastic bags in your pack, and don't leave crumbs around. If you're lucky enough to have a tent with you, keep it zipped when you sleep, no matter how hot it is," Ghanima said. "If there's nothing there for them, most animals will leave you alone."

"If conditions are dry, try not to light a fire. Grasslands burn like you would not believe, and the last thing you want is to be caught in an inferno."

"But enough of the doom and gloom. Sometimes, the danger isn't immediate. Sometimes, it's as simple as getting lost." Ghanima turned around, looking around the vast, featureless landscape. "When dealing with grasslands, you have a severe lack of landmarks. You can try orienting yourself by the sun - which, on this planet, rises in the East and sets in the West for those of you that are new - but the sun shifts its alignment bit by bit every day. The much more accurate method of finding your way is the art of celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation." A wave of her hand, and the Danger Shop settled to one landscape and switched to night, the stars sparkling above them.

"On Earth, your best bet is to steer yourself by the North Star," she said as she pointed it out, making it pulse for a moment. "It is the fixed point that does not change."

She went on to explain how to use your fingers to count the degrees, and how you could use that to discover longitute and latitude. "Some of this may be familiar to some of you from sailing," she said, "but it works well for any landscape where you don't have landmarks to work with, and nowhere to stop for directions."

"Your assignment is to find your way to a campsite, about two miles due East of here," she said, handing out star maps and flashlights to people, including a bi-lingual one for Kenshin ~~if he was there~~. "Once you get there, you'll find supplied for pitching tents, and s'mores. Of course, you'll still need to get your own firewood, and find a way to get the fire started."

"Now hop to it!" Ghanima laughed, clapping her hands. "There's chocolate waiting."

[OCD is ready and waiting!]

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You made it! Now it's time to pitch the tents, and try to get a fire started. If you fail completely, Ghani will step in, but she's going to make you work for it first.

The tent took a bit longer than it should have, perhaps. She'd seen Earl Kestrel's men assemble them before, but she'd always preferred to just sleep outside with Blind Seer. If this were the 'real thing', she would've left the tent alone and done just that, but the point of the class was to complete the exercise as instructed, and so she did.

The fire? Well, there's a reason her name was Firekeeper, after all. After she and Blind Seer gathered enough firewood, she took the flint and steel that had helped earn her that name from the pouch around her neck and used them to strike up a fire.

The tent was a simple matter of working out the design, and the brush she'd collected on the way, but the manner of starting a fire she was a little stumped on. A bit of careful slicing and the string of her yo-yo made her a little friction set that she was attempting to work, but it wasn't going anywhere and she kept cutting through the stick.

...this was going to be very annoying, she thought.

The tent wasn't hard to set up. The fire? It got cold on Tatooine at night, and survival was the hard-and-fast first rule of the Sand People. It wasn't easy to find combustible materials out there, granted, but Tahiri'd learned long ago how to start a fire. This time, though, as she crouched by the side of her firepit striking a rock against the tiny file in her multitool, she didn't have any compunction about using a touch of the Force to keep the sparks from flying in the wrong direction, or speed things up a little once the sparks actually caught the tinder.

Ben's fire was set up incredibly quickly--that kind of survival stuff Mara had been especially insistent upon--and the tent went up with a little help from the Force.

Ben didn't think his character was going to be vastly improved based on exactly what hammered the stakes into the ground.

"Still in one piece, I see," Tahiri said, wandering over from her tent.

Ben grinned at her. "I didn't turn into a rancor snack, no," he agreed. "Hi!"

She grinned right back. "Hi yourself. As your TA, I have to check on these . . ."

Tahiri trailed off, and smacked herself lightly in the forehead. "How'd I know you'd manage to find trouble?"

"You've met me?" Ben replied. He gestured to the ground next to him. "Want a s'more?"

"And here I thought you couldn't cook. Being a trouble magnet's right up there on the list of qualities I look for in a guy," Tahiri said solemnly as she sat down. "In between 'smart and capable' and 'good looking,' you know."

"I can burn things on a stick," Ben said, blushing hard enough that it could be seen even by firelight. "I'm pretty sure that's not cooking."

"I'm going to have to argue that it's cooking if you eat the end result." She couldn't help teasing him. "Wow, Ben, maybe you should move back from the fire a little. You look like it's too warm for you."

Ben reached up to cover his cheeks with his hands. "Yeah, well, shh," he said inanely.

She grinned over at him in the firelight. "Shh? That's a pretty tall order."

"I aim high," Ben teased, grinning back. "Missed you this weekend."

"That's what happens when you don't stop growing. Missed you too." Tahiri scooted a little closer, ostensibly going for the s'more ingredients, but if she happened to brush his hand in the process she wasn't going to argue. "Did you have fun at least?"

His pinky finger might've stretched out to catch hers. "Sure. We went rafting."

After being trapped for most of a day before in a cave. Details.

She curled her pinky finger a little more closely around his.

"Anybody fall off the raft?" Tahiri had to ask these things. More importantly: "Was this before or after almost being a rancor snack?"

"We didn't fall off the raft," Ben said with a grin. "This was the day after hiking and rancors."

And Tahiri took that completely in stride. "So, other than rancors, a nice trip then."

"Yes," Ben said. "We didn't get bought by Dathomiri women or anything."

He was a little proud of himself for that.

Tahiri looked like she was caught between wanting to laugh and facepalm at the same time, and ended up doing a little bit of both. "I'd have had to buy you back, you know, and I don't have enough credits for both of you."

"It would do Ender some good to be on Dathomir for a while," Ben decided.

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