Fandom High School

Kennedy wasn't in the room when students showed up at the Danger Shop today, but the room was programmed to look like the interior of the Hollywood Egyptian Theatre, so ... guess what today was going to be, kids!

(Hey, she'd gone the extra step and made sure the simulation included the exterior courtyard as well, so you could check that out, but no wandering off onto the Walk of Fame today, sorry.)

When the lights went down and the curtains opened, a message displayed on the screen: Things came up of the demon-y variety. Sorry. Enjoy the movie! It's really good, possible initial reactions notwithstanding.

"So," Kennedy began, with her hands tucked behind her back as she paced back and forth in front of the class. "What do you do when you end up in a situation that might jeopardize the secret part of your vigilante gig? Say, there's no way you can do your thing without people seeing, and it's not a safe assumption that they're going to just blow it off as something too weird to explain?"

She pressed a button on the Danger Shop controls, and the room became a small club venue with a four-person band set up on the stage. The lights were down in the club, so while it was pretty dark in most of the room and toward the back corners of the stage itself, the area just in front of the stage was well lit. The crowd and the band were frozen in place like someone had just hit the pause button -- and so were the couple of shifty-looking people in ski masks who were trying to make a break for it across the back of the stage with what looked like a couple of large bags of money.

You could tell, because they actually had the dollar signs on the bags and everything, like it was right out of a cartoon.

"Question first. Do you still do your thing? Totally legit question, by the way. Situation-wise, people knowing might put them in danger as much as, or maybe even more than, you. It's not always totally clear-cut, yeah?" From the look on Kennedy's face, she still thought the existence of that particular complication was annoying. Something to be resigned to, but still annoying. "If not, what do you do? Try to find another way to keep the bad from going down, or do it later if that's a doable thing?"

She glanced up at the currently unmoving scenario on the stage.

"And then, if it turns out that things are gonna go down here and now, are you gonna try to keep it on the down-low as much as possible? If so ..." She gestured toward the stage, then shot a grin at the class. "How creative are you gonna get to do that?"

Time to fake performance art or something like that, kids!

"So we're gonna do something a little bit different today," Kennedy said cheerfully, perched atop the desk in the classroom as usual. "This is gonna be more of a discussion class, a sort of round table thing."

Not that kind of round table, though. Although what an interesting collection of knights this would be, huh?

"So here's the big burning question of the day. Secret identities," she went on. "Useful, or not? What are the pros and cons, in your opinion, and what kind of circumstances do you think would call for them? How would that go down in your world, if you're cool sharing that?"

She drummed her fingertips against the front of the desk in a rapid staccato burst. "I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and opinions on this. So no pressure, this is a totally depressurized learning environment, no wrong answers, blah blah blah. Today is a really kickback kind of day. But with snacks."

Because yes, up on a table at the front of the room there was a collection of various snack-size bags of pretzels, chips, and cookies, along with little packages of hummus, grape tomatoes, and other moddable snack-able items.

Oh, look, the industrial hipster gym setup from last semester was back in the Danger Shop today, and Kennedy, who looked ... world-weary, for lack of a better term, was standing in the middle of it with a fancy thermal bottle full of cold, cold water. You could tell, because every time she took a sip from it, which was often, the ice cubes clanked against the sides of the bottle.

"Yeah, I don't expect any of you to be able to focus on the subject matter today," she said dryly. And took another pull from the water bottle, clanking ice cubes and all. "So I'm just gonna let you all have a sort of free period to ... burn off that energy if you need to, in a nice PG-rated way."

She paused. "And before anyone asks, yeah, there are locker rooms programmed into this simulation. With showers. And no hot water." See, Kennedy was looking out for you, kids!

"I also brought in a ton of ice water," she added, nodding at the giant insulated water jug on a nearby bench, next to a stack of paper cups, "but if sticking around is going to be har -- more difficult for you than staying --" and watching your classmates get all sweaty -- "you're free to go. We'll pick things up again next week."

Look. She wanted to get home too, okay?

Blood Stain Removal Etc., Thursday, Period 1 (1/30)

"Sorry about last week," Kennedy said, once it looked like everyone was there. "Things came up, of the fang-y variety, and those tend to not come with a snooze button."

The Danger Shop just looked like a regular classroom today, except that anyone who looked closely enough would notice little Vampy Cat stickers and doodles scattered around on the bulletin boards and desks, because Willow liked to troll Kennedy a little bit sometimes. And that was just what Kennedy got, really, for getting too comfortable in relying on Willow to help her program the weekly scenarios. She didn't particularly seem to notice from where she was sitting atop the teacher's desk, though.

"Which actually ties pretty well into this week's lesson." Or had given her the idea for the lesson, but that was a chicken-or-the-egg thing, if you asked her. "Cover stories for when unexpected badness happens. As opposed to regular patrol badness, or anything like that. What are you gonna do if you end up late for work, or miss curfew, and when you do show up you're covered in purple goo and your shirt looks like a pair of jeans from 1985, because you didn't have time to clean up? Well, a tip, first off: maybe keep an emergency stash of clean clothes and wet wipes, et cetera, somewhere you can get to them without having to backtrack all the way home."

She paused.

"Or ... in case you can't show up at home looking like that without drawing unwanted notice. That said, there's no guarantee you can get to that stash, so you really want to have a cover story ready."

She hopped down off the desk now, and started pacing briskly back and forth in front of it.

"You kind of want to know your audience for that, though. Are superpowered vigilante types just showing up on Main Street in the middle of the day a same ol', same ol' kind of thing in your world? That's one thing. Then, for example, there's mine." Kennedy paused and shook her head, smiling a little bit. "Where people will come up with any kind of explanation to dance around the reality of vampires and demons being an actual existing thing. The entire population of a town had their voices stolen by some creeptastic demon minions once, and they reported it as a mass laryngitis epidemic."

Yeah. The look on her face said a lot about what she thought of that. (Though maybe some of it was remembering how wild it was that she'd somehow managed to be there for that one, in not-her-reality.)

"... Aaaaaaaaaanyway," she went on with a wry chuckle. "Factors to keep in mind when you're coming up with a cover story. And don't get too wild with it, either; that just makes people pay more attention to it than you really want them to." She hopped back up to perch on the edge of the desk again, kicking her feet back and forth lazily.

"So, we're going to do a couple of scenarios here. You come up with a cover story for each one and share it with the class, and your classmates and I will try to spot the holes, help you make it a little more waterproof. Nicely," she added, louder and more pointed. "No being an ass and calling it constructive criticism."

She'd be enforcing that stipulation. It was pretty obvious from the look on her face.