Post by Theloria Shadecloak on Mar 8, 2019 21:37:19 GMT -5
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Instructor Shadecloak[attr=class,punkihover1]
1705 Words
It was all set up now.
The school employed a retired Huntsman who had a manipulation type semblance that could create and manipulate concrete, and that decision was honestly pretty genius. Teardown was easy because it was just stone, and different arenas or types of environments could be done along the way for different lessons so that the students didn’t just learn to game one scenario and had to think on the fly and adapt to each of them.
This particular scenario forced students to work in groups of two in a very limited area, with plenty of room for ambushes or other tricks along the way… especially for the side of the defenders. The first day of Team Combat would also tell her a lot about each individual student and where they were at in terms of mentality and skill level. How people reacted to success, failure, and challenge were unique to the individual – as was how they treated others.
For some people, their weaknesses would be rather simple if time consuming to correct. Being awful at fighting, for example, was a very correctable weakness. If that was the main one a student had, they were in good shape in a setting like this because even though their time table was much shorter at Haven than it normally would… it was something with a clear blue print to follow when it came to mitigating and then removing that weakness entirely.
The bigger issues, and the ones that claimed the most lives in any group of Huntsman would always be personality related. The people who simply can’t work well with others for whatever reason, the ones who think that they’re better than everyone else and the ones who think they’re good enough to do the work of an entire team by themselves. In a class like this with a lot of nontraditional students, there were bound to be a lot of them. These were the type of people who would look around at classmates who were behind them and instead of extending a helping hand to lift them up, they would kick them while they were down to maintain their superiority.
They didn’t have to all like each other, but they needed to not hate each other so much that they were unable to work together for basic tasks. Just as it was a learning experience for her to see the skill levels and attitudes of each student, it was a learning experience for them as well. The area, and really all the areas that were set up today had cameras throughout them so that the rest of the class could see the action on cameras as well. It added another element to the exercise, because especially on the first day everyone wanted to show off what they could do for both the teacher and their fellow classmates. It was a lot of pressure, and how each person responded to that pressure would be critical.
Each round of students was chosen at random in groups of four, with a nice little roulette program making all of their faces and names flash across the screen like a tournament set up. This further increased the stress, because nobody knew when it was going to be their turn to go up there. Today the rules for the scenarios were simple, one group would get about five minutes to set up a defense of a very important objective, and another team would come in and do their best to destroy the objective within an allotted time. The defending team won if their defense of the object was successful when time ran out, and the attacking team won if the object was destroyed.
The objectives were enormous stuffed animals that would be placed somewhere within each area before the match started but after the competitors were selected so that the offense had no idea where the objective would be put. Everyone would know the general layout of the area due to being privy to the cameras, but the stuffed animal could be anywhere. It was absolutely enormous, being several meters tall and wide and essentially being so comically large that it was damn near impossible to miss one even in the bigger rooms within the scenario area.
The names that popped up on the side of the defense were Rosario Rosada and Colton Deraine. She had read both of their files, and their psychological assessments couldn’t be more different despite similar affluent backgrounds and both going to Sanctum Academy up in Argus. Rosario had potential but chose to stop giving a shit partway through his time at Sanctum for whatever reason, doing the bare minimum to skate into Haven and ride the wave of lowered standards in admissions. Colton was the winner of the Mistral Regional Tournament the year before he graduated, and by all accounts as an ego the size of the shattered moon to go along with that feat.
The names that popped up on the side of the offense were Qiu’Li and Huli Renard. Both contestants got to Haven Academy the same way – they had essentially for all intents and purposes randomly shown up to Argus to participate in the Mistral Regional Tournament and advanced far enough to impress scouts with their very powerful if raw semblances. Neither of them had attended a formal combat school, but Qiu’Li was clearly trained by someone given his fighting style and Huli… Huli was a loose cannon but was far more energetic about it than someone like Rosario.
As the names flashed across the screen, Shade walked over to the big stuffed animals in the corner and grabbed one of them – a big green and orange dragon and lifted it up in the air as she walked towards the door. ”Defense, come with me. Offense, please pick one of the two entrances in the five minutes. Step outside the room until I come out as well, I trust the rest of your classmates will call you out if you attempt to cheat and find out where I’m putting this.”
”Defense team, follow me inside. You can set up however you want, but the objective’s going to be hard to move between rooms. Offense moves in when I come out and give them the signal to start, you have until then to work out your game plan. Once the aura is broken, you’re out. Aside from that, you’re free to do as you wish in terms of combat. Opponents defeated is not a measure of success in this exercise, just the condition of the objective when the timer runs out and the buzzer sounds.”
With that, Shade started her walk over to deposit the objective within the actual scenario area. It was simple enough in construction, with thick concrete being used for the walls so that even a student who could smash through stone like most of them could would have to hit it repeatedly to cause any structural damage and a tarp on the top to dissuade people from just climbing up and peeking over the top. It wasn’t explicitly against the rules, mostly because she didn’t know who was capable or clever enough to do something like that yet. As far as she was concerned, anyone who did that got praised for thinking outside of the box. Making new students act according to arbitrary rules from the start only narrowed their creativity and ability to function without structure, and it wasn’t like a Huntsman on the field had a lot of that at all. To make them dependent on instructions was to cripple them, so she preferred general guidelines to handbooks of regulations when teaching these things. Don’t kill your classmates, objective is the stuffed animal, don’t cheat by looking at the cameras, don’t kill your classmates. Easy to remember and barely constricting at all on the types of things they were allowed to come up with.
The rest of the class would have full view of each of the rooms in addition to a map of the entire place with the rooms numbered in the bottom left corner of the large set of screens in the ‘control room’. They all came from different backgrounds, so it worked out pretty well that this was the first set of students selected for today’s exercises. The defense were both swordsmen with many years of training under their belts who liked to fight in close quarters, and the offense were two students with very arguably better semblances but less training years combined than even one of the defense had individually.
”The defense can deploy however you want. The offense can only choose one entrance to both come in. This should be an interesting one.” she commented offhandedly as she did her best to scrunch up the oversized toy that was the dragon and just barely got it through the door. How exactly she had gotten six of them through the door in the first place was very much a story for another time and involved a lot of trial an error. One weakness in her own thinking was Shade really liked doing unique things, but didn’t often stop to think about whether those things were smart or effective. It would have been so much easier to just keep the oversized toys outside… but once you got one through the door you know it just became mandatory to not give up and haul the rest in.
It was like the rules of nature or something… plus they didn’t get dirty from the rain or the dirt or anything! Yeah, justifications! It was kind of nuts how it all worked out, too, especially because they got a probable semblance counter in the very first match. Huli’s Fever Pitch could almost certainly cancel out Polarity if she got a hand on any of the metal that Colton was carrying, so that was an interesting thing to watch out for. Ranged capabilities across the board were rather poor aside from if Colton wanted to fling around metal and risk it getting heated enough to be useless to him, so it was very likely that this particular group would devolve into melee combat sooner rather than later.
This first round is a setup round for both offense and defense. Shade will post once more after the initial planning round and then the offense will move into one of the two entrances to the area and the exercise will start.
Posting timer is 72 hours, and the post order can be changed slightly from the original order as long as the other person posting is on the same team. One member of the offense switching spots, even temporarily with another member of the offense is allowed in the posting order – but a member of the offense cannot swap with a member of the defense in the posting order.
Teams:
Offense: Huli, Qiu'Li
Defense: Rosario, Colton
Each square on the map is 5 meters by five meters
The school employed a retired Huntsman who had a manipulation type semblance that could create and manipulate concrete, and that decision was honestly pretty genius. Teardown was easy because it was just stone, and different arenas or types of environments could be done along the way for different lessons so that the students didn’t just learn to game one scenario and had to think on the fly and adapt to each of them.
This particular scenario forced students to work in groups of two in a very limited area, with plenty of room for ambushes or other tricks along the way… especially for the side of the defenders. The first day of Team Combat would also tell her a lot about each individual student and where they were at in terms of mentality and skill level. How people reacted to success, failure, and challenge were unique to the individual – as was how they treated others.
For some people, their weaknesses would be rather simple if time consuming to correct. Being awful at fighting, for example, was a very correctable weakness. If that was the main one a student had, they were in good shape in a setting like this because even though their time table was much shorter at Haven than it normally would… it was something with a clear blue print to follow when it came to mitigating and then removing that weakness entirely.
The bigger issues, and the ones that claimed the most lives in any group of Huntsman would always be personality related. The people who simply can’t work well with others for whatever reason, the ones who think that they’re better than everyone else and the ones who think they’re good enough to do the work of an entire team by themselves. In a class like this with a lot of nontraditional students, there were bound to be a lot of them. These were the type of people who would look around at classmates who were behind them and instead of extending a helping hand to lift them up, they would kick them while they were down to maintain their superiority.
They didn’t have to all like each other, but they needed to not hate each other so much that they were unable to work together for basic tasks. Just as it was a learning experience for her to see the skill levels and attitudes of each student, it was a learning experience for them as well. The area, and really all the areas that were set up today had cameras throughout them so that the rest of the class could see the action on cameras as well. It added another element to the exercise, because especially on the first day everyone wanted to show off what they could do for both the teacher and their fellow classmates. It was a lot of pressure, and how each person responded to that pressure would be critical.
Each round of students was chosen at random in groups of four, with a nice little roulette program making all of their faces and names flash across the screen like a tournament set up. This further increased the stress, because nobody knew when it was going to be their turn to go up there. Today the rules for the scenarios were simple, one group would get about five minutes to set up a defense of a very important objective, and another team would come in and do their best to destroy the objective within an allotted time. The defending team won if their defense of the object was successful when time ran out, and the attacking team won if the object was destroyed.
The objectives were enormous stuffed animals that would be placed somewhere within each area before the match started but after the competitors were selected so that the offense had no idea where the objective would be put. Everyone would know the general layout of the area due to being privy to the cameras, but the stuffed animal could be anywhere. It was absolutely enormous, being several meters tall and wide and essentially being so comically large that it was damn near impossible to miss one even in the bigger rooms within the scenario area.
The names that popped up on the side of the defense were Rosario Rosada and Colton Deraine. She had read both of their files, and their psychological assessments couldn’t be more different despite similar affluent backgrounds and both going to Sanctum Academy up in Argus. Rosario had potential but chose to stop giving a shit partway through his time at Sanctum for whatever reason, doing the bare minimum to skate into Haven and ride the wave of lowered standards in admissions. Colton was the winner of the Mistral Regional Tournament the year before he graduated, and by all accounts as an ego the size of the shattered moon to go along with that feat.
The names that popped up on the side of the offense were Qiu’Li and Huli Renard. Both contestants got to Haven Academy the same way – they had essentially for all intents and purposes randomly shown up to Argus to participate in the Mistral Regional Tournament and advanced far enough to impress scouts with their very powerful if raw semblances. Neither of them had attended a formal combat school, but Qiu’Li was clearly trained by someone given his fighting style and Huli… Huli was a loose cannon but was far more energetic about it than someone like Rosario.
As the names flashed across the screen, Shade walked over to the big stuffed animals in the corner and grabbed one of them – a big green and orange dragon and lifted it up in the air as she walked towards the door. ”Defense, come with me. Offense, please pick one of the two entrances in the five minutes. Step outside the room until I come out as well, I trust the rest of your classmates will call you out if you attempt to cheat and find out where I’m putting this.”
”Defense team, follow me inside. You can set up however you want, but the objective’s going to be hard to move between rooms. Offense moves in when I come out and give them the signal to start, you have until then to work out your game plan. Once the aura is broken, you’re out. Aside from that, you’re free to do as you wish in terms of combat. Opponents defeated is not a measure of success in this exercise, just the condition of the objective when the timer runs out and the buzzer sounds.”
With that, Shade started her walk over to deposit the objective within the actual scenario area. It was simple enough in construction, with thick concrete being used for the walls so that even a student who could smash through stone like most of them could would have to hit it repeatedly to cause any structural damage and a tarp on the top to dissuade people from just climbing up and peeking over the top. It wasn’t explicitly against the rules, mostly because she didn’t know who was capable or clever enough to do something like that yet. As far as she was concerned, anyone who did that got praised for thinking outside of the box. Making new students act according to arbitrary rules from the start only narrowed their creativity and ability to function without structure, and it wasn’t like a Huntsman on the field had a lot of that at all. To make them dependent on instructions was to cripple them, so she preferred general guidelines to handbooks of regulations when teaching these things. Don’t kill your classmates, objective is the stuffed animal, don’t cheat by looking at the cameras, don’t kill your classmates. Easy to remember and barely constricting at all on the types of things they were allowed to come up with.
The rest of the class would have full view of each of the rooms in addition to a map of the entire place with the rooms numbered in the bottom left corner of the large set of screens in the ‘control room’. They all came from different backgrounds, so it worked out pretty well that this was the first set of students selected for today’s exercises. The defense were both swordsmen with many years of training under their belts who liked to fight in close quarters, and the offense were two students with very arguably better semblances but less training years combined than even one of the defense had individually.
”The defense can deploy however you want. The offense can only choose one entrance to both come in. This should be an interesting one.” she commented offhandedly as she did her best to scrunch up the oversized toy that was the dragon and just barely got it through the door. How exactly she had gotten six of them through the door in the first place was very much a story for another time and involved a lot of trial an error. One weakness in her own thinking was Shade really liked doing unique things, but didn’t often stop to think about whether those things were smart or effective. It would have been so much easier to just keep the oversized toys outside… but once you got one through the door you know it just became mandatory to not give up and haul the rest in.
It was like the rules of nature or something… plus they didn’t get dirty from the rain or the dirt or anything! Yeah, justifications! It was kind of nuts how it all worked out, too, especially because they got a probable semblance counter in the very first match. Huli’s Fever Pitch could almost certainly cancel out Polarity if she got a hand on any of the metal that Colton was carrying, so that was an interesting thing to watch out for. Ranged capabilities across the board were rather poor aside from if Colton wanted to fling around metal and risk it getting heated enough to be useless to him, so it was very likely that this particular group would devolve into melee combat sooner rather than later.
This first round is a setup round for both offense and defense. Shade will post once more after the initial planning round and then the offense will move into one of the two entrances to the area and the exercise will start.
Posting timer is 72 hours, and the post order can be changed slightly from the original order as long as the other person posting is on the same team. One member of the offense switching spots, even temporarily with another member of the offense is allowed in the posting order – but a member of the offense cannot swap with a member of the defense in the posting order.
Teams:
Offense: Huli, Qiu'Li
Defense: Rosario, Colton
Each square on the map is 5 meters by five meters
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