fandomhigh | The Day After Doomsday: Getting By In a Post-Apocalyptic World, Wednesday, Period 4

When the students stepped into the Danger Shop for Reno's class today, they'd find themselves stepping into the lobby of the dormitory all over again, with a few pointed differences. There seemed to be a barricade built against the boarded-up windows, consisting of a good deal of the furniture that had clearly been dragged down from the floors above them. The power to the simulated building had been cut off completely, which meant that they were sitting in near-absolute darkness, because naturally Reno was going to be an ass and set this scenario for the dead of night.

There were cans of food lined up against one wall. There were weapons, what looked to be the entire contents of both the weapons locker and sharpened, weaponized versions of the practise fare from the Salle, laid out against the other. A sign hastily scribbled down on a piece of paper pointed deeper into the building, directing any possible injured to a first-aid station in the rec room.

Reno was sitting in the middle of the floor, grinning up at the students as they came in, legs splayed out in front of him and his elbows on his knees, Danger Shop supplied stun baton in one hand.

"Trust me," he said coolly, nodding back to the doors that closed themselves and instantly fell behind another barricade the moment the last of the students stepped in, "you don't wanna go back out there. This ain't your everyday Fandom invasion, where somethin' shows up, tapdances nasty around us all for a week, an' then gets sent packin'. This is the real friggin' deal, yo. This is your doomsday scenario, where there ain't no cure for bein' dead. Where if you get bit and infected and turn into one of them, you ain't snappin' out of it. Where the weapon that blew up the school took half of you with it, and you don't got time for so much as a head count to figure out who's left."

He leaned back, the cool metal of his baton scraping against the floor of the lobby, playing an eerie harmony to the sounds from outside, which alternated from complete silence to screams to gunfire, to the sound of something not remotely human calling out into the dark, answered by what had to be a hundred more just like it, all converging in on one point: The Dorms.

"I ain't gonna pretend there ain't heroes among you, I ain't gonna sit here and point at you one by one to tell you the likelihood of comin' back alive, either. If you're one of them who's gonna run out there, then there ain't nobody who'll be able to keep you inside. And that'll cost the island one of its first big advantages early on. Because once you guys are dead, what are the people who ain't fighters gonna do?"

And then, all at once in a flash of speed that was jarringly unnatural, Reno was on his feet, baton on his shoulder, and he was prowling back and forth in front of the students.

"What the enemy out there is don't matter in this scenario. What's out there is the predator, that thing that goes bump in the night, that sees you as prey or pest, but whatever the case is, it don't want us here, and it's lettin' us know with extreme prejudice. This is the Danger Shop, so if you go out them doors here, you'll just be steppin' out into the school again. This lesson ain't about fightin'. This is about stayin' alive. Look around. Take in what's been set up, here. Let it sink in that there isn't a single resource in this lobby that'll last even a severely reduced dorm population more'n a few weeks at best. And then, try an' figure out what the hell you're gonna do about it."

[Open! Go nuts!]

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Who seems right at home, here. Seriously. No big.

"Here's your coffee," Barry said bringing Reno what was probably the most worst tasting coffee ever brewed in the United States. Possible the Northern hemisphere. "Given the subject matter of the class I brewed it only from items I would find in a doomsday scenario."

Reno pursed his lips a little, and then shrugged and reached for the cup.

"Yeah? I spent a few years only drinking booze that could be distilled from whatever would grow at ground zero. You're gonna have to try pretty hard to make me make faces, yo."

He lifted the cup in a toast, and then took a mouthful.

... Yeah, this was pretty shitty coffee.

"I used some shitty looking standing water and filtered it through something that I think was pantyhose," Barry offered. "And since I couldn't find coffee beans I used ground up acorns."

Actually he just used a regular coffee brewer and ground up acorns. But Barry liked giving Reno a visual.

Reno took a moment to mull that one over, and then shrugged and took another mouthful of the acorn coffee. Hey, if it was good enough for squirrels.

"Resourceful," he decided. "I like that."

He was silently plotting different ways to make the rest of Barry's semester miserable.

You do that, Reno. There's always more acorns.

"I'm a resourceful guy," Barry replied. "Anything else you need me to do, Boss?"

Heh... boss.

Reno loathed being the boss.

"Yeah, Rookie." He smirked, nodding down at the coffee. "You did good. Next time, treat yourself to some, too."

"May I ask you something?" Eleanor asked. Do not mind the huffy attitude, Reno. It was not directed at you. "We're supposed to try to get all of us out, correct? Not, say, just the ones who are especially fast or not at a considerable physical disadvantage."

Those people were threatening to stay behind with ordinance. Well, one of them was.

"I didn't say I was looking to throw people to the monsters outside, did I?" Reno gave his shoulders a shrug. "Yeah, I'm kinda aimin' for all of my students to get outta here alive, yo."

He wasn't about to start playing favorites just because one could make generators run on condiments, or another seemed hell-bent on organizing an insane mad dash into town.

"So, anybody being bloody stupid and trying to sacrifice themselves as dead weight, they're violating the spirit of this bloody assignment," she said.

Just trying to clarify, here.

"Did you really expect everyone to work together? Because that kid's some demented genius and no one can agree on anything. If this were real, I'd grab whatever people I gave a damn about and just get them out."

Morals were for the people who had the luxury to indulge them.

Reno gave a dismissive shrug of his shoulders.

"Spirit of the assignment is on all of you," he replied. "This is our second class together, like hell I know what's going through anyone's heads, yo. I got one girl sittin' on the floor waitin' to die. I got another one trying to move into a refrigerator. You have a game plan that works for you, I'm not going to stop you."

He nodded at the chaos.

"Right now, I'm trying to figure out what the hell to do with you lot in the classes that aren't hypotheticals. We got a lotta work ahead, yo."

Seriously. He was tempted to tell Rikku about all of this tonight. Maybe start a betting pool to see who bumped off first after high school or something.

"I'd say that depends on what the point of the class is," she mused. "Teamwork? Survival? Faith in humanity? I'm not very good at some of those."

She shrugged, a little awkwardly. "I don't like ... the thought of leaving people," she said. "Or the act of it. I don't like those choices."

Or, say, some of the ones she had made. Aunt Grace might still be alive.

"Well, what do you want to get out of this class? If you wanna not die in a situation like this, then your plan to just cut and run is gonna get you a passing grade, easy." Reno shrugged his shoulders. "You want faith in humanity? That's gonna be a little harder."

Nobody, right now, was getting a passing grade at teamwork.

"Leaving people behind is a tough call to make. Sometimes, though, it's a call that's got to be made. Depends on the situation. Looking at this one, does anyone know enough yet to even say if you're all takin' off or not? Has anyone reached any sort of consensus anywhere?"

"I'm not sure a consensus is possible," she said. "I think we're packing up and taking the sewers, to either a freezer or a library. I'd still prefer if we check the Causeway first. We need to get off this bloody island."

As for the rest of it ... she wasn't sure what she wanted out of class. Certainly nothing she could put into words.

"Do you have faith in humanity?"

Oh, shit. Now there was a loaded question.

"Faith in humanity? No fucking way. I've been a member of 'humanity' long enough to know just how thoroughly the whole goddamn race can fuck everything up, yo."

See, wasn't that reassuring?

"Faith in humans, though? In individuals, in the odds and ends that get swept under the rug and still step up to do the right thing, even though it'll probably kill 'em? Yeah, I've had reasons to have faith in that, before."

The Day After Doomsday: Getting By In a Post-Apocalyptic World, Wednesday, Period 4

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