fandomhigh | Try Not to Die!, Monday, June 1, 2020

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try not to die

Try Not to Die!, Monday, June 1, 2020

"Good morning, everyone," Anakin said with a tiny smile. "I hope you're ready for some hot, humid weather because today we are going to Ghana, a country in West Africa. Please, please be sure to look both ways before crossing a road. Or getting off the sidewalk. Traffic's terrible, that's what I'm telling you."

He smiled again. "Try not to die, and this time I actually mean it."

Try not to dwell on times when he might not have, folks. Off you go!

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So, so hot.

Astrid Magnussen

Tisarwat

Grog Strongjaw

Alara Kitan

Nell Ingram

Duke Crocker

You will assist the fantasy coffin makers walk one of the ~~moddable~~ huge coffins from the workshop to the showroom several blocks away.

Yes, it's hot. Yes, it's heavy.

No, Anakin doesn't feel bad about this.

[OOC: RNG says the order goes:
1. Julius Heartstriker
2. Astrid Magnussen
3.Beaker
4. Ino (Iris) Yamanaka
5. Alexis Rose
6. Tisarwat
7. Alara Kitan
8. Duke Crocker
9. Owen Corley
10. Grog Strongjaw
11. Juillenne Milone (and Camden)
12. Nell Ingram]

Edited 2020-06-01 16:01 (UTC)

So. Duke had finally made it to one of these again. He was . . . only slightly hungover this week.

He was really regretting showing up for class this week.

"Seriously? Look. I respect your work here. I really do. But did you have to give this thing teeth?"

If he ever finished arguing with the artists (and negotiating a price for one of his own), he'd get around to actually lugging one of the damn things.

How Astrid managed to pull this off as well as she did was far beyond her understanding, but she supposed it was all thanks to her ever increasing ability to just...disappear inside her own head for a little while whenever confronted with anything difficult or uncomfortable. After all, what was the hot Ghana sun compared to Krampus's caldera? What was a heavy coffin but the physical represenation of the deaths she already carried on her thin shoulders?

Astrid set to this task not expecting to do well, expecting only to get through it, as with anything, and found herself blinking with surprise once she'd arrived at the destination, pulled herself back out of her head, and saw only one person had gotten here before her.

She definitely didn't care about winning; she was mostly taking the 'try to die' aspect of the class to heart, but it still felt surprisingly good to have done well.

It wasn't the heavy that was the problem as much as the hot. Grog was going to melt his way through these tasks today, he could already tell.

So the carrying the coffin part wasn't the issue for Alara but it turned out she had an issue with the heat so it took longer for her than she would have liked to complete the task.

Nell's skirts got tangled around one of the things and sent her and everyone else toppling over. By the time everything was righted and everyone apologized to it was amazing she got to the end at all!

In Bicycle Parts, you have use a stick to roll a bicycle wheel's rim down the length of a soccer field and back without touching the rim with you hands or letting it fall over to receive the next clue from one of the school children. In Language Arts, teams chose a proverb with eight highlighted phrases that corresponded to a series of eight Adinkra symbols. Using a nearby decoder key, you have to locate the eight symbols in a massive word search-like puzzle and circle the correct set of Adinkra symbols to receive the next clue from one of the school children.

[OOC: RNG says:
1. Owen Corley
2. Astrid Magnussen
3. Duke Crocker
4. Nell Ingram
5. Beaker
6. Grog Strongjaw
7. Juillenne Milone (and Camden)
8. Alexis Rose
9. Ino (Iris) Yamanaka
10. Alara Kitan
11. Julius Heartstriker
12. Tisarwat]

Duke had a talent for languages and a certain "goofy uncle" style way with kids. So not only was he kind of killing at this challenge, he was also having a ball doing it.

"So what do you think? Sleepy eyeball next, or dancing goose? Dancing goose? Oh, drunk turtle. Yeah, no, that's a good point. . . ."

The coffin carrying had been physical enough for Astrid, thanks, and she loved languages, besides. So, trying not to be too distracted with the symbols and curious about their meaning, she set to the task of figuring out the puzzle with an eagerness to get to the end, perhaps inspired by the job she'd done on the last one and just because this really was her kind of challenge.

Yeeeeah Grog was going to go with the activity that didn't involve words, but using the stick didn't involve as much strength as he was expecting so... it didn't go horribly, at least?

Alara decided she wasn't even going to attempt to decode the languages and ended up trying the bicycle wheel, which still took her several goes before she was finally able to complete the task.

Hah! This was a game Nell was familiar with so even though she was the last one to get started she managed to make up a lot of time here. Who'd have thought there was something to be said for being brought up in a backwards community.

Before you can find Anakin, you have to attend a lesson on African geography with the school kids and help them to identify five African nations on an unmarked map.

This...this could take you some time. Once you've done it, you can find Anakin (and a lot of bottled water) back in the soccer field playing with the school kids.

Yeah, Duke and the school kids got very distracted with this one. Duke's grasp of non-coastal African geography was over 30 years out of date.

"What do you mean 'there is no Zaire'? What happened to Zaire? . . . Oh, yeah, no, that's fair. Okay. No Zaire. What about Chad? Chad's still a thing, right?"

And it just kept getting better. Astrid considered herself a mild globetrotter, wanted to one day travel the whole world, and part of that had been from wasting hours pouring over atlases in the long stretches of time where she had to entertain herself, drawn in mostly by all the creative shapes that borders created with each other, inspired to create new pictures out of the figures they cut.

Of course, Astrid's familiarity with Africa was also about thirty years out of date, like Duke's, but she expected that, turmoil in Africa was one of the things her mother frequently references at parties and readings to make herself seem worldly, and Astrid had rarely had a problem with adapting and understanding brand new shapes...

"Congratulations," Anakin said, beaming at her as she arrived first.

The only reason Grog got through this was that the kids were super fascinated by him, and eventually took some pity on him to get through the activity. But he gave them the best high fives in return, so he figured that was pretty fair.

Alara was not familiar with Earth geography at all let alone African geography but she actually surprised herself at how quickly she was able to pick it up and help the school kids work out the locations of the African nations on the map.

Somehow she was able to quickly finish the task and make it to check in, making up for quite a bit of ground that she lost earlier.

Nell and the kids were giggling together too much to get anything done in a timely fashion, but she didn't really care.

Final results go:

1. Astrid Magnussen
2. Alara Kitan
3. Tisarwat
4. Ino (Iris) Yamanaka
5. Beaker
6. Alexis Rose
7. Grog Strongjaw
8. Nell Ingram
9. Owen Corley
10. Duke Crocker
11. Julius Heartstriker
12. Juillenne Milone (and Camden)

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Try Not to Die!, Monday, June 1, 2020

Sign in 6/1

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Roadblock: Checking Out!

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Detour: Bicycle Parts or Language Arts

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Check In!

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OOC