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Welcome to GSD!
Chatterbox: Inkwell
Welcome to GSD!
Welcome to GSD!
No catagory of classes are more important than the other, and you will all be doing the same general activities.
If you got mostly A's on your survey, read this letter (please).
Hey students!
Congratulations on getting into GSD, and welcome to Aim! This letter is proof that you have mad skills, a tolerance for weirdness, and (hopefully, because you're going to need it) an excessive amount of energy.
In Aim (the class led by yours truly), we ask the big questions, like; "Is fire a hazard or a tool?" "Are the cupcakes poisoned?" "Is it possible to split an arrow down the middle with a second arrow?" And "Who is more important, Snape or Buckbeak?"
For class, please remember to wear flexible (preferrably nonflammable) clothing, and bring a whole lot of enthusiasm.
Can't wait to meet you!
Winston (GSD head trainer of Aim, etc., etc., etc.,)
P.S. The cupcakes are most certainly poisoned.
If you received a majority of "B"s on your survey, please read this letter.
Dear student,
You have been accepted into the Griffinfeather School for the Determined. This letter alone is proof that you are strong, ambitious, and extremely bright. However, I accept nothing but the best from my students, and therefor expect all of you to keep up with our rigorous classes and extensive training.
When attending class, please remember to follow rules that will be set for your own safety. Inflammable attire is a wise choice. Also, please take precautions against electrical shock when working in the robotics lab.
You may have realized by now that you have very special talents that most people at your age do not even dream about practicing, let alone perfecting. Since you were accepted into "Build", that means that you are, to some degree, a strategist. You have the power to plan and create and take action. Even at your age, you can save, protect, and summon armies of creativity beyond your wildest dreams. It all starts in this school. You are the earth's future in more ways than you understand.
I look forward to seeing you in class.
Sincerely,
Sasha Night, Headmistriss of Griffinfeather School and leader of the "Build" training.
P.S. When attending class, please remember to follow rules that will be set for your own safety. Inflammable attire is a wise choice. Also, please take precautions against electrical shock when working in the robotics lab.
If you received mostly "C"s on your survey, please glance this way.
Hello students!
Congratulations on making it in to GSD, and more importantly, on being selected for the "Cabriole" training group. Here, we treat life as a dance; it escalates into tension, elongates into beauty, and falls back into patterns that are forever changing. You were chosen because you are a dreamer. You are a prodigious thinker and are full of art. You are more than welcome at this school and in these classes. The only rules are; no fudgeling, no smickering, and no coprolalia.
I await your arrival with eager anticipation.
Sincerely,
Miss Brunn, librarian and head of "Cabriole" training agglomeration.
submitted by Rose bud
(July 13, 2017 - 1:59 pm)
(July 13, 2017 - 1:59 pm)
Drew~
I found the door. It had seemed so baffling, and then it was totally clear. Miss Brunn would expect us to expect the expected. Which made perfect sense. She would use the cliche "sliding bookshelf" or the "hidden staricase". It was the bookcase, obviously, because there wasn't a staircase, and the "password" had to be a book. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Of course.
~~~~
I grin in triumph as the token glimmers in the girl's hand (so sorry, can't remeber names). Winston yanks open a door I hadn't seen before and pokes his head inside, assessing the situation. He sees the token and grins.
"Well, that wasn't exactly supposed to happen, but who doesn't like and unexpected and highly dangerous pop quiz now and then?"
(August 22, 2017 - 3:35 pm)
Okay! We are editing everything below the squiggles of Elizabeth's post (remember, Rose bud is almost always typing in a group post).
DREW (BELOW THE SQUIGGLE)~
As we slog through the knee deep snow, a distant rumble reaches Narnia. Suddenly, static crackles to life over hidden speakers, and Adrian's voice yells,
"WARNING! TECHNOLOGY IS MALFUNCTIONING! IT IS NOT MY FAULT! IF YOU HAVE TO BLAME SOMEONE, BLAME WINSTON! BEGIN EMERGENCY PROTOCOL!"
"What the Gandalf?!" someone yells. The rumbling gets closer.
"What's emergency protocol?" I mutter.
"This is serious! What do we do?" the tall girl says. The snow begins to swirl lazily around us.
"Let's all hold hands! This feels like magic!" a boy calls. I glare at him. This isn't a book!
"We need to stay together. This is a blizzard, not magic!" I say. Suddenly, through the nearly blinding snow, I see someone dive away from the group. "NO!" I yell.
"I found it!" The figure yells. Then, through the snow I sense an elctric presence. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I scream, and feel a heart-stopping electric shock stab my body.
~~~~
I SHIP WINSTON AND SASHA!! :)
Sasha~
My heart jumps and the sound of foosteps outside the door, and I open it too quickly, heart pounding. It takes me a second to register the person standing outside. Treena, the new assistant. I force my lungs to breathe normally.
"Hello Treena! I'm so glad you could make it on such short notice. I planned to give you a tour of the school and outline what we do here so you can decide whether or not you want to stay. However, we have a computer system malfunction a few minutes ago and the whole school briefly shut down. But," I say quickly before she can answer, "we're going to get everything under control. Are you ready for some on-the-job training?"
She looks stunned as she nods slowly.
"Okay, we have to hurry. Follow me." Please let the students be all right.
(August 22, 2017 - 5:31 pm)
~Treena
The door opens up a moment later to a tall woman, who I believe to be Sasha Night. She looks at me, then recognition sweeps across her face. "Hello Treena! I'm so glad you could make it on such short notice. I
planned to give you a tour of the school and outline what we do here so
you can decide whether or not you want to stay. However, we have a
computer system malfunction a few minutes ago and the whole school
briefly shut down. But," She says extreamly fast "we're
going to get everything under control. Are you ready for some on-the-job
training?"
I gulp. What did I walk into? I nod, trying not to show my confusion.
"Okay, we have to hurry. Follow me." Sasha Night says, sweeping out the door.
I follow quickly behind her, almost troting to keep up. Where exactly are we going? I wonder.
(August 23, 2017 - 2:32 pm)
-Myra
It's my first day at GSD, and I'm very excited, but also kind of nervous. I'm weird already, so the most this school can do is make me more weird, which I don't care about.
I arrive about an hour before the students, and don't bother to even put my stuff away. I quickly walk over to Adrian's office to find out what I need to do. He isn't there, which I mostly expected, so I call him from the communication system on his desk. He asks me to come to the fountain, where he's setting up.
When I get there, I see him crouched over inside its well, fiddling with controls. "Um, hello?" I say.
"Oh, hi, Myra. I have the perfect job for you. After the elemental game, we're going to have a slightly less dangerous activity in the hidden cavern. I'd like you to set it up. There's a video of last year's activity on the computer in there, and you should make it similar but not the same," he tells me.
"That sounds fun!" I say, and walk off.
A few minutes later, I'm behind the gym. The maps said the opening was in a tree, but I have to find which tree it is. Five minutes and three trees later, a trapdoor opens beneath my feet and I fall down to a slightly padded mat.
I find the control room and watch the video on the computer, smiling as I watch students fall into cleverly disguised holes. Yup, I can do that. I start setting up the activity, mentally measuring the distances between each item as I set it down. Busy working, I don't notice that the students have begun their activity until I hear a loud crash.
"Adrian? Winston? Sasha? Anyone?" I call.
Nothing.
I climb out of the cavern and look around. Something's certainly amiss.
--
I hope I didn't control Adrian too much! I don't know exactly what this activity is, but I was thinking something to do with blindfolds.
(August 25, 2017 - 11:20 am)
(August 27, 2017 - 10:20 am)
(August 29, 2017 - 11:53 am)
Hey guys! Sorry for not posting in a while. School has started again and.... well.... let's just say it's been a bit of a rough transition. So, yeah, sorry.
Jela~
Jela, Caden, and Zan lay on the roof, panting.
Jela relished the sound of her breath echoing off into the cerulean sky. Free. Unrestricted.
A few moments later, Zan sat up. "So, what now?" Jela barked out a laugh. "What do you mean what now? We almost died. We leave. This place gets sued, shut down, whatever." She pushed herself up onto her hands and found herself staring into Caden's disbelieving face. "Leave? Why?" Jela felt her jaw go slack. "Seriously? Are you kidding me? Did you not just hear what I said about the whole dying thing?" Zan fixed her strange eyes on Jela too. "Don't you understand? This is the only place where we can be ourselves. The only place where we can discover the things we can do. If you left, you'd deprive yourself and others of that opportunity." Zan gestured with her hands to the school that sprawled out below them. "Isn't that something worth risking death for?"
Jela was about to say no, say that she didn't care about potential or saving the world or any of it, when she paused. Did she really not want to know what she could do? Was she not the slightest bit curious about what her powers held? Did she truly not want to experience the joyful hum that filled her chest when she fully listened to the world around her?
Was it something worth risking death for?
Jela closed her eyes and let the sounds crash into her. She breathed in the chattering of distant students, the chirping of far away sparrows, the quiet orchestra of sounds that made up their world.
And she decided that it was.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sorry that was kind of short. Post more later.
(August 29, 2017 - 5:22 pm)
Hi Autumn! Good to see you!
I'm having trouble with restarting school again too. We have our first essay due this week, and I'm kind of nervous, since I'm pretty sure our teacher reads them in front of the whole class. So far, during discussion/unstructured debate, I've been one of the few ninth graders to tentatively state my opinion, sometimes in the face of opostition. So far, I've been supported by other classmates and haven't been completely wrong yet. When I can just get past the stressfulness of being in a class with 10, 11, and 12 graders who know what they're doing and who are all watching me to see if I can't take the difficult course, I love school, and my new class is SO AWESOME! I love my teacher too. And I got assigned to sit between a sweet dancer and a real artist. Yay! We're like the artsy table!
Okay, sorry, to writing!
Adrian~
Notices flicker across the screen as my fingers whiz across the keypad. I'm following a trail, trying to track what happened to our systems. I know this much: something stole our video feeds, and hacked into the main system to cause chaos in order to cover it up.
A stream of seemingly random letters and symbols show up on the screen and I scroll through them quickly. Great. I don't recognize the coding. This is a dead end. I squeeze my fingers into a fist. NO ONE and NOTHING gets past my security like that.
"Sasha? Adrian? Everyone here's okay. A little sandy, but hey, Aim's got a token!" Winston's voice buzzes from the headset on my desk. Scraping it up quickly, I fumble with the tiny microphone, doing my best to speak in its general direction while jamming in instructions for possible decoding across the keyboard.
"'Kay, good. I don't have video feed, so I don't know about the others, hey—"
"Cabriole's fine. Scared us with accounts of an errant electric wire, but everyone's okay, thankfully. I don't know, here hold on, I have to—"
"The other group just came down to meet us. They're all right too. And they're carying...is that a coin?" An unfamiliar female voice interjects. I say something really computer-geek worthy, like "ummm..."
"I'm Treena. I came here to audition, and apparently..." Her voice trails off into static. I hear my name, then Sasha's clear, crisp voice intervenes.
"The situation is under control, Adrian. Although this is a warning of what can happen. Now, we must proceed with our evening activities. You have Myra on the job, right?"
"Myra...evening activities...OH RIGHT! MYRA!"
"Adrian? Adrian?" I throw down the headset, and Sasha's voice fades away. I'm not the only reasonable technological genious on campus. Maybe Myra can help. Now what did I have her do? Oh right. Videos. Blindfolds. Our "Jedi" training for after supper athletic hour.
Pushing my chair back, I jump up to leave. The computer flashes a warning sign. "Hang in there, I'm not finished with you yet."
~
Is it okay if I include Myra in the text chat?
(August 29, 2017 - 8:20 pm)
Yep, totally.
-Myra
Adrian comes rushing toward me just as I start leaving to try to find him. "I need your help. You have the activity done, right?" he says.
"Almost done. I can step away from it. What happened?" I respond.
"Someone hacked into our video feed. Everyone's okay, but I'm trying to figure out who it was."
We reach his office and he pulls something up on his computer. It looks to me like a bunch of code. I study it, trying to figure out what language it is.
"I don't know very much of this code, but it looks like here it's putting random text on your screen, and here it's grabbing your video feed, and down here it's doing something else, something involving getting files from your computer, but which files?" I say, thinking out loud, "Do you have any files named N5267 and A2645?"
"That's what they got? How on Earth did they figure out our file-naming scheme? Those are the two most important files in the whole database. But the database is protected! They must have had really good hacking skills to get in."
"They did. See that phrase right there? That looks to be what got them in, and it's really mysterious. It's not a common code, which means they aren't a common hacker."
---
I hope that works okay with the story! Those files can be anything, which is mostly why I gave them mysterious names.
(August 30, 2017 - 10:24 am)
Top! Sorry, I'll try to post tomorrow. In the meantime, check the Text thread! I updated the Text thread!
(September 3, 2017 - 7:48 pm)
(September 3, 2017 - 7:49 pm)
Top! Top! Top! Who's been stealing the files? Any ideas? It could literally be anyone. Although I've tossed a few hints out as to who the main villian could be *text message thread hint hint hint.* Although, perhaps the students are hiding secrets too...mwahahhahahah!
(September 4, 2017 - 3:17 pm)
Sasha~
Treena helps me round up the students. I make a mental note to hire her right after I make sure everyone's alive. Finally, with all students, teachers, and a good deal of staff members gathered around the fountain (which peacefully bubbles lava), I take a deep breath and call everyone's attention.
"I am very sorry about this evening's malfunction, and I can assure you it will NOT happen again. You have permission to go to your dorms and rest or clean up before supper, and a social activity." The sentence hangs at the edge of my mouth; uncertain period wavering in the air. "Oh I'm so glad you're all safe," I breathe.
"What about the tokens?" Jela asks, holding up her clenched fists.
"Yes! Tokens! Each team, hand them into me." Jela, Drew, and Carly push through the buzzing crowd. All carefully hand in their tokens. I press my thumb into Aim's, first, prefering to do things in alphabetical order. Instantly, the blank gold face converts into a glittering "A."
"For absolute determination; 1 point for Aim," I announce, holding the token high. I do the same to the Build token.
"For teamwork and trust; 1 point for Build." Last, I press my thumb onto the Cabriole token's cold, metal surface.
"And for resourcefulness; 1 point for Cabriole. Tokens will be hung on the walls of the auditorium to keep track of the points throughout the following weeks. Thank you, you are dismissed."
Slowly, the students disperse, chattering steadily and laughing nervously. Lizzy and Winston turn to leave, and Treena prepares to follow them.
"Wait," I say, "you have a job as my assistant, if you so desire." Great, I sound like Lizzy.
"Thank you, I...accept," she answers; hesitating slightly.
I watch everyone disappear into the dorms. The courtyard is empty. Slowly, too slowly, I make my way back to my office and into the shadows.
"Sasha," comes a voice, and a shadow, making my heart leap up in suprise as I whirl around.
(September 5, 2017 - 6:09 pm)
Veryveryvery short post:
-Myra
I join the crowd of students and staff clumping around the fountain. Sasha says something about being sorry, and go back to your rooms, and there will be an evening activity. Yes, there will be an evening activity. I have made sure of that. But my mind is not on the activity. My mind is busy trying to figure out who would have stolen the files.
(September 9, 2017 - 1:57 pm)
Sasha~
My racing heart jerks to a sudden halt, then gradually slows back to normal as I face the unfamiliar man behind me.
"May I help you?" I ask. He smiles, flecks of grey glinting in his brown hair.
"I see 3 years can be a very long time for some people," he says, his voice amused, but face unsmiling.
And then I knew.
He had aged much more than possible in the last 3 years, but he is the same person. The shadow of my nightmares; the darkness always lurking at the edge of a dream.
I stumble backwards, and the heel of my black shoe catches on the edge of the sidewalk. He reaches out to grab my arm, and I picture my very skin racing away from his touch.
The ghost.
His fingers feelt cold on my arm.
I should feel more surprised. I just always new he would come back.
"Y-you have no p-place at this s-s-school," I spit out," you...y...you are d-dead to us." Instead of answering, he surveys me up and down. My breath catches in my throat and I choke on my own lungs.
"You're terrified," He states. This time he doesn't sound amused, but rather disgustedly disappointed, like I am some great person gone to waste. Or perhaps I am.
"This isn't the Sasha I knew."
"You took that person from me!" I exclaim, kicking him in the shins and trying to twist my wrist out of his hand.
"I'm willing to give her back," he says softly, "I never meant any harm. This is my proof. All you have to do is help me again. We can become a team and run this school together. Three years ago was a misunderstanding. Trust me, Sasha. After all, I taught you everything you know. I made this school, Sasha. I made it to teach and to train and to achieve great things. Those acheivments are still in sight, trust me."
"I will NEVER trust you!" Even with my voice shaking, I'm surprised at how brave I sound.
"Ah. Perhaps I pushed the negotiations too far. Well, we'll start with a simple agreement. You let me work towards regaining my old prestige, and turn the other way whenever I take my rightful data files or videos—"
"The malfunctions were your fault then! And if you think I'm ever going to—" He stops me with a wave of his hand before continuing.
"And in return, I'll help you get your powers back. That's right, Sasha, you can be the best architect of your wildest imagination—yes, I know all about that little daydream—and the bold genious you always were meant to be. I'm not harming anything Sasha. I never meant to. Let me help. Then Griffenfeather School can be everything it was always meant to be; with John Griffinfeather at the helm. Think about that. I'll meet you in the usual place tonight."
He drops my wrist and strolls away, leaving me to fall against the wall of my office building, staring into the distance.
~
Drew~
I am going back to my dorm. The day's events pound through my brain, giving me a headache. I am too tired to think, so I decide to do my thinking tomorrow.
(September 9, 2017 - 3:18 pm)