Predictably, we were late for school. Not entirely because of the fight between Mole Man and The Fantastic Four we got caught up in, no, that ended in minutes. But because the road had lots of potholes making driving slow and the amount of people that were stopped just so they could record what happened, make calls, or otherwise be unproductive.
In the end, we got to school about ten minutes late and were forced to quickly run to our lockers, grab our stuff and then run to our classroom.
"Go ahead and gat-" The Teacher's words were cut short by Gwen's and my arrival as we burst through the door and his eyes turned to us.
"Sorry for being late. We got caught up in a superhero fight." I quickly made an excuse for the both of us. The teacher simply nodded and accepting such an excuse instead of calling me insane really reinforces how weird this world is.
"That's alright, I already saw the news. I'm glad you got here in one piece. Go ahead and take your sea- ah I forgot, I gave your seat away Reo." The teacher suddenly scratches the back of his head, embarrassed. I look over at my seat and see the silver haired girl from a few days ago waving back at me with a sly smile.
The teacher takes a moment to think before waving his hand dismissively. "Actually, this works out just fine. Reo I gave your seat to our new transfer student since I thought you would be missing but we will be doing group work today anyway so you and Gwen can just push the two tables together and the three of you will be in a group."
"Yes Mr. Young." I say and move forward to my occupied table with Gwen right behind me. I turn around to take a look at Gwen, and she shrugs, going off course to pick up one of the spare chairs next to the wall while I push her table against my own, which is now occupied by the new transfer student.
As I do so, Gwen comes back, placing her new chair at the edge of her table, pushing the free one in the middle. Guess that's mine then. As I get my butt seated comfortably, a dainty hand is extended in front of me.
I sit down at the same time as the teacher tells everyone to get into groups of three for the upcoming tasks. With everyone in the class moving around trying to find teammates, we are able to talk freely.
"Looks like we're stuck together." The girl says casually as I grab her hand. "Felicia Hardy, I just transferred in today but I think I remember seeing you at the gate before, when I visited."
"Reo Hill," I introduce myself. "Professional seat owner, recently evicted. And yeah, we passed by each other last week."
This earns a soft laugh from her as I let go. Felicia then leans over to extend her hand to Gwen as well for a greeting.
"Gwen Stacy." Gwen says, taking out her things and laying them on the table, just as the teacher comes by our table and drops a huge piece of paper for us before moving on.
I grab the assignment sheet Mr. Young dropped on our tables. A group project on modern urban architecture. The government has been building a new prison called 'The Raft' on an island off the coast recently, and a lot of people think it's an eyesore. It's our task today to make a better design while keeping the essentials of a prison still intact.
"Anything you're good at?" I ask Felicia as I skim the worksheet.
"Besides showing up and looking fabulous?" she says, stretching and showing off her curves. Is she flirting? Option C, can't tell. "I'm good with structure. Layout. Details. Stuff like that. I've done some research on how prisons keep people in, so I can help on that as well."
"Perfect." Gwen says. "I can write and handle research. Reo can pretend he's in charge and put himself down as team leader."
"Hey, don't be like that, I'm invaluable to the team." I say, getting a side-eye from Gwen.
"How much of the work would you say you usually do when we work in pairs?"
I don't want to answer that question. "You've made a fair point. Still. I can flex and help wherever it's needed. Just point me in a direction and I'll do what's needed."
Felicia smirked at our exchange, her silver-white hair catching the sunlight leaking through the windows. "You two work together often, I take it?"
"Too often," Gwen deadpanned, even as the corner of her mouth curled up.
"Gwen just doesn't appreciate good management. It's called being hands-off and a lot of employees would kill for a boss like me" I replied, stretching my arms behind my head.
While I leaned back, I catch Felicia's eyes flick to the table. Just for a second. Then she looks away like nothing happened.
Five seconds later, Gwen furrows her brow.
"…Did anyone take my marker?" she mumbles, patting around her notebook and checking under her sleeve.
Felicia leaned her elbow on the table and twirled the marker between her fingers with a grin. "Looking for this?"
[Whoa, I didn't even see her move.] Gali, who was lying on top of my head which had become her standard seat admired. I didn't see her move as much as a finger, either.
Gwen stared, confused. "How did you…? I didn't even see you take that."
"Just a little trick I picked up from my dad." She says with a frown before quickly grinning. "Sorry, I have a bad habit of taking things without asking first."
"Careful with that, or you might end up in a prison of your own design." I say half jokingly, bringing our attention back to the project, as most other groups are already hard at work. "Let's make it look like less of a glorified oil rig."
Gwen nods at my words and starts flipping through the booklet of instructions Mr. Young had included, already scanning for what categories we're expected to cover.
Felicia, meanwhile, doesn't look at the sheet at all. "You'll want to reinforce all exterior walls with high-strength concrete and embed the support structure with magnetically sealed rebar to stop people from trying to phase or vibrate their way through."
"Vibrate?" Gwen repeats, blinking.
"I read about The Raft a lot online before. They aren't building this for normal prisoners, but high effort ones like mutants or whoever The Fantastic Four catch to throw in there." Felicia explained methodically. "It needs to be able to hold people with weird powers, and that's the reason it looks bad. They are more worried about security than looks. Not that the security part isn't flawed and heavily criticized too but it is hard to account for every mutation or power out there."
She brings out her phone and shows us pictures of the island the prison will be built on and some of the foundations that have been built already. "There is plenty of room left on the island. You are going to want high-angle watchtowers with 360-degree visibility, optical and thermal sensors, preferably. Then there's anti-air measures for those that can fly…"
She says the word carefully, and Gwen just nods slowly. "Right. Superpowered folks. Makes sense." She starts typing notes into her tablet, but I can see her switching between browser tabs. She's googling things like how do anti-air systems work in modern prisons and what's a magnetically sealed rebar.
Meanwhile, I reach for my phone and start scrolling too. "How many escape attempts happen from island prisons per year? I know Rykers has breakout attempts like every month." I mumble as I type, then glance at Felicia. "You've definitely thought about this more than a normal person would. You study prisons?"
Felicia gives a lazy smile, "I just like to know everything about them. Never know when you might get… falsely convicted and end up in one. Would be good to know their weaknesses and how to escape."
"That's not a concern most people have." Gwen mutters, still researching. Gali lets out a suspicious little hum from the top of my head.
"So do we need to build a model or just draw up plans?" Gwen asks, looking over the requirements. "Says here we need to explain our decisions too."
"We could build a blueprint using this site," I say, flipping my phone around to show them a simple prison layout simulator I found after a minute of searching. It is from a game from both my past life as well as something that exists on this one. "Drag and drop. Not super precise, but should be good enough to show a design. We can screenshot and print it out for the board."
Felicia leans over to look and smirks. "That's the one from Prison Architect's promo site, right?"
I blink. "You play it?"
"I've played it." She says smoothly. "It's great for layout flow and resource management, but the AI is dumb as hell."
Gwen leans over to take a look. "Ooh, me and Reo played it last weekend, you should join us sometimes. We play lots of different games."
"Maybe, we will see." Felicia answers, neither dismissing nor accepting fully. "I'm mostly into simulator games, they teach a lot more than you'd expect. Like how a prison cafeteria needs choke points and no dead angles to avoid riots."
"Okay, seriously, what is your background?" Gwen asks, only half-joking.
Felicia waves it off with a shrug. "My dad's into security. Kind of rubbed off on me."
That's one way to describe his career.
I watch the exchange quietly, letting Gwen and Felicia handle most of the talking while I use the simulator to start sketching out a layout. A circular perimeter, with a central tower, and multiple wings branching off. I show it to them after a few minutes of quiet work.
"Here. Something like this. Central monitoring, so no blind spots. Two outer walls, layered. Put the intake and processing in one wing, cell blocks in another. Medical, psych, and solitary in their own sections."
Felicia gives it a thoughtful glance and then points at the corner. "You'll want an underground maintenance tunnel, too. Staff-only, but if you make it too narrow or straight, it'll be a vulnerability."
"How do you even- never mind," Gwen says, writing it down. "I'm just gonna assume every idea you suggest is from the game. Hopefully it is all applicable to real life too and not just game mechanics."
Felicia's grin doesn't answer the question.
We spend the next half hour refining the design, with Gwen typing up explanations for each major feature. I help where I can, mostly googling terms and occasionally checking measurements, while Felicia seems to know the numbers offhand. By now, other groups are still debating over what shape their prison should even be, while ours is already coming together with technical justification and layered defensive strategy.
"Okay," Gwen finally says, sitting back and rubbing her eyes. "That should be everything. A design, feature breakdown, justification, and a risk analysis section for potential escape methods and how to stop them."
"Still think we should've installed shark-infested moats," I say.
Felicia raises an eyebrow. "You'd be surprised how ineffective that is."
"…Wait, seriously?"
"Yeah. Sharks are surprisingly fragile. You want piranhas or electric eel fields if you're going aquatic."
We hand in our work long before the other groups and…. Fail spectacularly. Just like the original designers of the prison, we ended up going purely for security and defenses, forgetting about the task of making it look pretty for the people.
All the multi-layered defenses did get us some very weird looks by the teacher, though. In the end, he had to give us credit just for being so thorough with what we made.
***
Author Note: Potentially no chapter tomorrow. I'm going out of town and coming back very late. If I end up uploading, it will be late again.