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!]

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"The garden on the roof looked pretty intact," Raven said. "There were plants there that looked okay, anyway. Some flowers and things? I don't know much about plants. We probably need to be careful going up, though, it looked like there were some claw marks on the stone."

"Because of course whatever we're up against has claws that can mark stone," Cosima shuddered. "Maybe we could rig up a fence? Or is that just asking the monsters to fly?"

She'd noticed Raven's squirrel trick, and found it fairly impressive. Too weird to think about, but impressive.

"Well, I don't know it was them and not something else, but they do have plenty of claws." Raven shrugged. "I didn't have time to really get a feel for how smart they are, or how much they can do. Yet. I guess watching and finding out could be my week-plan, so we can have the info for the next class."

"They're big enough to see from up there?" Cosima shuddered. "Gross. What do they look like, besides claw-y?"

"Basically humanoid," Raven said. "Only with a stubby extra set of arms and a tail. Really tall, pointy bits coming out of every direction. They were moving around in groups, but they seemed okay with beating on each other. Pretty fast, one of them grabbed a bird as it was flying by." Not the prettiest picture she was painting. "Most of the island's destroyed, but I don't know if they did all the destruction. Lots of smoke in pretty much every direction -- including across the causeway."

".... yikes."

That was all Cosima had. She was out of intelligent questions. After a moment more and a pointed glance at Hardison:

"It's like whoever programmed this thing doesn't want us to head out right away, or something."

"It might be worth it to try to get to know Hardison," Raven supposed. "See if we can predict what sorts of things he's likely to throw at us."

"I like the way you think. You're the TA and he's a friend of a family friend for me," Cosima told her. "We could probably do a decent job feeling him out without making him suspicious."

"I'll have a chat with him after class," Raven decided. "I need to anyway, just to make sure he's not expecting me to do anything special as the TA. That's lucky, that you've got that connection, though. Is that why you came to school, here?"

"I'll catch up with him later so he doesn't think we're up to something," Cosima decided ~~because her mun is kind of pinged out for the day~~. "And nah, I just got sick of my old school and needed a change. It's a cool coincidence, though."

Day After Doomsday, Thursday, Per 2

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