Fandom High School

Today Oz and his students stood in front of a simulation of a bank. Did he look disappointed that he didn't have an excuse to go all beatnik on his class again this week? Possibly, though he'd deny everything if asked.

Oz gestured at the bank. "Welcome to your final. You have one objective, get into the safe, get the loot and get back out, without being caught. You may use whatever equipment you desire, you may work alone or with either or both of your classmates. In short, tackle this however you see fit. The only caveat is no harming anyone within the building, doubly so if that harm is fatal. In the real world that's felony murder, in here it's an automatic fail."

He clapped his hands. "Have at it."

If Oz's students had been paying any attention to the radio, it probably wouldn't have come as any great shock that there was a skinny looking kid with floppy hair and an oversized trenchcoat waiting for them today. That the class was being held in a secluded part of the preserve instead of the Danger Shop might have though. Or maybe not, considering this was Oz, they were talking about.

As it was the secluded part of the preserve in question was a large clearing, with a trench dug along one edge, and everything within the clearing, well, cleared. Oz stood off to one side, next to a tarp covered stack, and reading a novel.

"Good, I see you got my e-mail." Someone had spent the last few days discovering the internet and looking over lesson notes. Of course, that same someone was also unaware that the class was at least hypothetically about not actually committing the planned heist. "Now I've been going over your plans for the whole job thing, and they're pretty good for a first effort, but you haven't really taken into account how to get the vault open, but don't worry I know exactly how to take care of that." Which would be their cue to start worrying.

Because why, yes, that was a modest stack of explosives which Oz had just pulled a tarp off of.

"Now personally I'm a fan of plastic explosives, they're pretty stable and inert as things go, but they can be hard to get hold of." Yet there some were. Just over there. "If you want easy to get, a fertiliser base is much more your style. At the same time, different explosives have different yields, so the only real way to figure out the right bang for our buck is by testing them, which is why we're out here, because you know people could get hurt if we did this back at the school." And that would be bad.

"So, you know, lets just put on our safety goggles." They all had their safety goggles, right? "Hop in the trench, and test these babies."

The TV was back up on the wall of the apartment again this week, which could only mean it was a movie day again.

"For obvious reasons, we've mostly been focused on discussing the kinds of jobs you can do with a small crew," Oz began. "But sometimes you just want to say to hell with the small stuff, you want to go for the big score. The kind of job you'd need a well oiled crew that hits double-digits in size to pull off. But the thing is that the difficultly and complexity of making a plan work doesn't just increase additively with each new person joining the crew. No it goes up exponentially. But while that might dissuade any sane person from running that kind of job, there's the movies, where not matter how much it seems to fall apart, things smooth out right in time for a happy ending."

There were racks of clothing, assorted wigs, and changing screens in the apartment sim today. Three guesses what today's class was going to involve.

"Covers and disguises," Oz said. "If you're going to be working a complicated job, there's a good chance those are going to be vital at some point, whether it's for recon or the job itself, which is why today you're going to come up with covers, then your classmates will come up with a disguise that fits."

They were once again back in the apartment this week, but the whiteboard had been replaced with an electronic display, and there were three laptops on the coffee table.

"Target. Plans. Fallbacks for if the plan fails," Oz listed off. "By now you should have a pretty good idea of all these things, especially if you want to succeed, but you all have to be willing to 'kill your darlings'. No matter how attached to an element of a plan, if you can't justify it, then you need to get rid of it." Of course, Oz was able to justify pretty much any single aspect of one of his plans, no matter how seemingly ridiculous, he had mad skills that way.

"So for your midterm you will all take turns displaying the plans you have no doubt been developing to the rest of the class, who will then rip any flaws in them to shreds and hopefully by the end of class you will have melded your separate plans into one epic, unbeatable plan. I'll give you say, ten minutes to get ready."

Today the Danger Shop resembled an interrogation room. Oz sat on one side of the desk, and two empty chairs, each with a stack of papers in front of it, faced him.

"Trust," he began once the chairs were occupied. "Trust is paramount in these endeavours, not just for successfully pulling off this kind of scheme, but also if they happen to fall apart. Because if the worst happens and one, or more, of you get hauled in by the police, you need to be they won't rat you out for their own benefit. The prisoner's dilemma is the perfect example of this, both guys keep their mouth shut, everyone benefits more than they would if they both talked, but since most people are going to assume they're gonna get sold out anyway, three guesses what usually happens.

"Now let's assume for a minute, you guys are said prisoners, and we're actually in two different rooms, and I offer you both the deal, what do you do? Honesty is encouraged, but since you can actually hear each other we might take it as given you'll say you won't sell each other out, so what happens if I change it up further? You're both in here with me and your absent classmate is the one in the other room, you leave him to take the fall and he stays silent you both go free, he sells you out and you keep mum, you're both sent down the river. What do you do then? I'll let you talk about it if you want."

Instead of a holding cell, this week Oz had the Danger Shop set up as the living room of a small, dingy apartment with a whiteboard handing where the television should have been. There was pizza on the table. Because Oz cared.

"So last week you formed your crew, and for the sake of argument we'll assume you all trust each other. Maybe not fully, but enough." Though Oz would be more than happy to organse some trust exercises if they didn't. "And you've got an idea of each other's skills. The next step is the finding and choosing the job, which in some ways is the hardest part because if you pick the wrong one then you haven't got a chance in hell of pulling it off."

"Now there's a lot of factors that go into choosing a job, starting with the kind. A general rule is the bigger the crew, the bigger the jobs you can pull, but that's only a general rule, you get the right combo of skills and smarts and the smallest crew can do the biggest heists. One way you to go about finding a job is to figure out what your end goal is, and how the pros and cons of each kind of target factors into that." Oz started writing on the whiteboard. "For example, you want to get rich quick, you can hit a bank, but they tend to have good security, plus they might have marked the bills somehow, you don't mind waiting for returns, you might go for jewels, gold, that kind of thing, but then you need to find a fence. Maybe you're in it for the challenge, the notoriety, then you go for museums and art, but then you mightn't be able to find a buyer, and high-profile jobs make you a high-profile target."

"So for today's class, I want you guys to talk turkey about what kind of end goals each of you have, and start suggesting targets and why they work or don't work for the crew."