fandomhigh | Day After Doomsday, Thursday, Per 2

Hardison just wanted it on record that he loved this room, all right? He was willing to stay on Fandom island forever and always, amen, so long as they kept letting him come up and geek out over the Danger Shop. Going through some of the saved scenarios, he'd found the one that had correlated to the radio report he'd based the class off of, and with a few tweaks and changes, he'd had it set up to his exact specifications.

Perfect.

When the students stepped into the Danger Shop for his 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. There were no lights on, though the hum of a generator could be heard by anyone who was quiet enough to listen, and Hardison had been kinder than the previous teacher and programed it for daytime, with beams of sunlight coming through the cracks between the wooden slats.

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 practice 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.

Hardison was sitting on the staircase leading up to the next floor, lines of code flashing across the screen of the laptop sitting in his lap processing.

"Sup," he said, as the last of the students entered the room, "I'm Hardison, your teacher for Day After Doomsday. Don't worry about callin' me Mr. or Professor or none of that, just Hardison'll do. Welcome to class. Pull up a patch of floor an' I'mma tell you how it's gonna work." As he finished speaking, the doors to the dorms closed themselves and a barricade made of couches and tables and other odds and ends sprang up to block it. Once the barricade was in place, the soundtrack kicked in, a chorus of howls and moans that didn't sound even remotely human. It was hard to pinpoint where the noises were coming from, save everywhere. While some were faint enough, others were distressingly close. "So, the End happened. There was a lotta screamin', a lotta shoutin', a lotta bleedin', an', yeah, a lotta dyin'. You've managed to survive the initial catastrophe, yay for you, but now you gotta deal with the scariest question of all: what next? What you know is a mad outweighed by what you don't. You know you're all here, that there ain't nothin' in the dorms tryna get you--yet--an' you know you got a few more hours of daylight before it's gonna get too dark to see."

"What don't you know? Damn near everything else. Are you the only survivors or are there others? What kinda supplies do you have? How safe is this place? Will the barricades hold? Who knows--you ain't even sure what's out there. All you know is that there's a lot of them an' they don't seem real keen on lettin' y'all live in peace." There was a loud BANG as something large flung itself against the front doors. The barricade shuddered, but held, and whatever it was withdrew with a low growl.

"Now, what happens next is completely up to you. I'mma be around an' can answer some questions, but don't be surprised if what I say amounts to 'find out for yourself.' Your choices determine everythin' here. At the end of each class, I'mma ask you what you intend to do for the next week an' the scenario you face in the followin' class is determined by those decisions. I ain't gonna tell you what's a good idea or a bad one, what's liable to keep y'all alive a little longer or end up with a TPK--err, total party kill. If y'all make terrible decisions across the board, then the class after the majority of y'all die, we'll start over from scratch an' see if you learned anythin'."

"So, I don't know y'all. I don't know how well any of you know one another. Some of you might be friends, some might be strangers, some of y'all might hate each other. Bit of free advice? I'd figure out a way to work together anyway, cause you are all y'all got. This class is all about stayin' alive for as long as you can, an' comin' up with ways to make that time last just a little longer. Figure out what you need to do and get to it, a'ight?"

There was another loud slam into the door from the outside and Hardison grinned. "Good luck."

[Open, have at, and make threads as messy as you'd like!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Hey, I'm Cosima," Cosima said. "We have a whole huge pool that we can't drink the water from, and if we let it sit it's going to turn into slime central. I say my first move is figuring out a way to use it. Maybe we could pump it out and distill it enough that it'd be okay to wash with. Or if we don't have the parts for that -- I don't know if you can hydrofarm or raise fish in water with chlorine, and also I also don't know that we have fish or anything like that, but that's, y'know, a thing to find out in the next week. And deciding what to do with the pool is probably what I'll spend the time working on."

"Sup, Cosima," Hardison said, giving her a quick smile. Look, even if he wasn't supposed to look out for her, the fact that she'd thought to check for wifi and cell service would have endeared her to him. "Good thoughts here. Just one question--how you plannin' on decidin' what to do? You got a book to reference? Plannin' on scourin' the dorms for pet goldfish? Gimme some details, girl"

"'Sup," Cosima echoed, flashing a quick smile right back. "Good questions. I guess the first thing to do is to check for books. Hopefully somebody was a survivalist freak and has a whole shelf on how not to die that talks about cleaning undrinkable water. If we don't get anything that way, maybe one of the scouts would check the school library?"

She called not it.

"And carp grow to fit the space they have, right? If we have a few dozen pet fish and can keep 'em alive, it might be a sustainable food source. But until we're sure about the pool thing, they should stay where they are."

Edited 2015-05-07 15:44 (UTC)

"I can tell you right now, you' ain't gonna find carp here in the dorms," Hardison said, because even if the sim did decide to include fish, it was going to be purely boring breeds of goldfish and maybe a betta if someone was feeling fancy. No pets bigger than that, because Hardison had decided not to be the cause of someone's mental break when it came time to decide whether or not to eat Fido.

"A'ight, so we have one half of your if-then statement set," he said. "If you find some useful books on makin' potable water, you're gonna embark on a project with the pool. But what happens if you don't? Then how do you spend your week?"

"Technically all goldfish are carp," Cosima said, shrugging. "But okay, no fish farming. If I can't find anything useful on making potable water, I'm going to spend the week trying to get a garden going. On the roof if it's safe, or just pots on windowsills if it's not."

"I have all sorts of books on how not to die!" Cecil piped up. "Um. In my real dorm room, I mean. Though they're mostly for back home, so I'm not sure how much applies anyway."

How to kill your wheat by-products and which glowy colors of water were safe to drink might not be relevant.

"Cool, we should at least check if they're here too," Cosima said. "Even if some of your back-home stuff is, y'know, unusual, there should be some ideas that would work here."

She hoped.

"I had no ideas about what y'all individually brought with you," Hardison reminded. "This started as like, Generic Dorm Sim #1 before it got modded. If there are copies of the books in the database, I might add some of 'em in over the week? But unless you're hopin' for a bunch of the classes an' the whole line of the extended Space Battles universe, I wouldn't hope to find anythin' specific."

He'd added the Space Battles books specifically. Because: geek.

"If I can find parts to do it, I can try to put together something to purify the water," Tali offered. "But we'll still have to come up with a system to ration it as strictly as possible."

"If you know how, you do that and I'll concentrate on the food," Cosima said gratefully. "Which -- did I hear you say you need different food from the rest of us?"

That could be a problem.

"Yes. Quarian physiology is dextro-protein based," Tali explained. She wasn't even going to get into the immune system issues right now. "There's a little bit in the food stores we have here, at least. On the bright side, all the rest of the food can get divided up among one less person?"

"You evolved totally differently," Cosima said, sounding faintly dazed by the realization -- and not only because it was less than a week before that she'd assumed Tali was a very committed cosplayer. "Is there a way to refine some of our food so you could handle it? O ris it pretty much, once your supplies are gone, too bad?"

"Probably not," Tali admitted. "Even if we could refine it --" and purify it within an inch of its life -- "it would have no nutritional value for me, even if it didn't make me sick. I can make it last a decent while, though. We're pretty good at rationing in the flotilla."

"Still. Not great," Cosima said apologetically. "Good thing this is just a simulation, but I still feel bad about it."

Tali waved a hand. "It's not something people here are used to considering. Not your fault. But you're right, it's a good thing this is a sim. Maybe I can ask Hardison to program in some dextro plants for the garden for next week?"

"You should," Cosima told her. "Since it's really not fair if you're working on a higher difficulty level than the rest of us."

"I'm used to it," Tali said offhandedly, "but we already have to worry about running out of power, not to mention something outside that wants to eat us, so why add one more thing to the list? Okay. You come up with what we can do with the pool, and I'll see what we can do about the water."

Day After Doomsday, Thursday, Per 2

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