Post by Theloria Shadecloak on Mar 27, 2019 23:13:58 GMT -5
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Instructor Shadecloak[attr=class,punkihover1]
2023 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 two faces that popped up on the side of the defense were those of Elena Thorne and Argent Steele. Everyone knew which four students would be selected, because there were only four left that hadn’t gone at this point. It was just a question of what order they would be selected in, and this defensive setup was probably for the best. There was no charitable way to say how terrible Elena’s file looked, though if she ever learned how to master her semblance she’d be frankly pretty terrifying. They were a long way from competency, let alone mastery of that power though.
Her partner, Argent, was another nontraditional student who apparently apprenticed under a licensed Huntsman for a while. Shade didn’t recognize the name of the guy, but that didn’t mean anything in and of itself. There were a ton of Huntsmen that were scattered throughout the world, after all. His teammate was inexperienced with combat and would likely make some mistakes, so this would be a fantastic opportunity to show some leadership chops if he had any and to see how well he actually acted under pressure. Would he lash out and blame his teammate that was doing their best, or would he improvise and seek ways to win as a team?
The two faces that popped up on the side of the offense were a fun combination as well that on paper worked very similarly to the first. Flower Fiorella was the only combat school educated participant of this round and had a very strong transformation type semblance. She wasn’t the biggest stand out in Sanctum Academy, but transformation types tended to run the school for the first year or so because that type of power had an incredibly low skill floor. It was simple and easy to use, so the only thing could be trained was really judgment and the general types of training designed to expand aura reserves as well as make the use of it more efficient for the individual.
Physical Boosts tended to be the next contenders, with clone semblances and manipulators lagging behind until sometimes well into the second year where things started clicking. It was rare for a manipulator in particular to be particularly noteworthy early on, but when they were they tended to be a generational type talent. Neither of the defensive team seemed to be that type, but Shade had been wrong before on people and would be thrilled to be wrong again.
Flower’s teammate, Mika Willow had a physical boost type semblance that let him move fast and hit hard. He was abnormally large, though that would only intimidate people who were completely inexperienced with combat… which is probably why the instructor saw Elena looking over with her eyes slightly widened at the enormous student she was about to go up against. While Flower couldn’t close the gap very quickly, Mika could and might just choose to try and barrel through both opponents at once if given half an opportunity. Scouting reports questioned his intelligence but let him through on the basis of a simple and powerful semblance, so on paper this round would be about which experienced competitor actually stepped out and prevented their ally from throwing the match early on.
If Mika rushed in like a brainless lemming or Elena panicked like the world was falling apart the winner would be decided very quickly. Hopefully, though, that wouldn’t happen, and she’d be able to get a good read on power levels from this exercise. Going by their files, Flower and Argent should be the standouts. Mika would have a strong power that was misused, and Elena would have a mediocre power that was used cleverly. Whether reality matched the picture the dossiers painted, though, was another question entirely. Scouts rarely rated students perfectly, and some reacted to stress better or worse than others.
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 consisted of both ranged combatants who have shown next to no proficiency in melee to this point. The offense had two combatants who were more than capable of forcing the issue up close, though only Mika had the speed to really close that gap without getting beaten up along the way.
”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.
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. The planning round has no posting order, but once Shade posts the second time the posting order will remain consistent throughout the rest of the thread in terms of offense posting or defense posting.
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: Flower, Mika
Defense: Argent, Elena
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 two faces that popped up on the side of the defense were those of Elena Thorne and Argent Steele. Everyone knew which four students would be selected, because there were only four left that hadn’t gone at this point. It was just a question of what order they would be selected in, and this defensive setup was probably for the best. There was no charitable way to say how terrible Elena’s file looked, though if she ever learned how to master her semblance she’d be frankly pretty terrifying. They were a long way from competency, let alone mastery of that power though.
Her partner, Argent, was another nontraditional student who apparently apprenticed under a licensed Huntsman for a while. Shade didn’t recognize the name of the guy, but that didn’t mean anything in and of itself. There were a ton of Huntsmen that were scattered throughout the world, after all. His teammate was inexperienced with combat and would likely make some mistakes, so this would be a fantastic opportunity to show some leadership chops if he had any and to see how well he actually acted under pressure. Would he lash out and blame his teammate that was doing their best, or would he improvise and seek ways to win as a team?
The two faces that popped up on the side of the offense were a fun combination as well that on paper worked very similarly to the first. Flower Fiorella was the only combat school educated participant of this round and had a very strong transformation type semblance. She wasn’t the biggest stand out in Sanctum Academy, but transformation types tended to run the school for the first year or so because that type of power had an incredibly low skill floor. It was simple and easy to use, so the only thing could be trained was really judgment and the general types of training designed to expand aura reserves as well as make the use of it more efficient for the individual.
Physical Boosts tended to be the next contenders, with clone semblances and manipulators lagging behind until sometimes well into the second year where things started clicking. It was rare for a manipulator in particular to be particularly noteworthy early on, but when they were they tended to be a generational type talent. Neither of the defensive team seemed to be that type, but Shade had been wrong before on people and would be thrilled to be wrong again.
Flower’s teammate, Mika Willow had a physical boost type semblance that let him move fast and hit hard. He was abnormally large, though that would only intimidate people who were completely inexperienced with combat… which is probably why the instructor saw Elena looking over with her eyes slightly widened at the enormous student she was about to go up against. While Flower couldn’t close the gap very quickly, Mika could and might just choose to try and barrel through both opponents at once if given half an opportunity. Scouting reports questioned his intelligence but let him through on the basis of a simple and powerful semblance, so on paper this round would be about which experienced competitor actually stepped out and prevented their ally from throwing the match early on.
If Mika rushed in like a brainless lemming or Elena panicked like the world was falling apart the winner would be decided very quickly. Hopefully, though, that wouldn’t happen, and she’d be able to get a good read on power levels from this exercise. Going by their files, Flower and Argent should be the standouts. Mika would have a strong power that was misused, and Elena would have a mediocre power that was used cleverly. Whether reality matched the picture the dossiers painted, though, was another question entirely. Scouts rarely rated students perfectly, and some reacted to stress better or worse than others.
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 consisted of both ranged combatants who have shown next to no proficiency in melee to this point. The offense had two combatants who were more than capable of forcing the issue up close, though only Mika had the speed to really close that gap without getting beaten up along the way.
”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.
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. The planning round has no posting order, but once Shade posts the second time the posting order will remain consistent throughout the rest of the thread in terms of offense posting or defense posting.
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: Flower, Mika
Defense: Argent, Elena
Each square on the map is 5 meters by five meters
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