make toplevels and yell about yr pals and gamemates except for len who made a loss.jpg joke because i had the gall to use the word loss in casual conversation so she's banned from this post

GOOD MOOOOOOOOOOoooohhh my god are you fucking kidding me?!

[Ah, yes, what a fantastic and reassuring thing to hear first thing in the morning, super great, love it, thanks. After a moment of speaker crackling, Raquelle's voice comes, kind of distant:]

GET OUT OF THERE!

[Aaaand then the speakers shut off.

...

Great!

Anyway, you're awake now, so, uh, better do something about that.]

((This investigation is going to work a little differently! There are toplevels for each floor. No one is allowed on the fifth floor until someone has tagged on the fourth, but no one is allowed on the fourth floor until someone has tagged on the third, and so on. The basement is excluded from this! Except in the case of the first floor and the kitchen, this does not include the toplevels labelled "INVESTIGATION." There should be some other generic interaction happening before anyone tries to go any higher up, or before anyone tries investigating. Also, travel in between floors and rooms is going to be kind of important for reasons very soon to be discovered, so please don't make any assumptions about your character ending up somewhere in the first tag made! Give me an idea of where they're going and I'll set the scene for you. :)

2-3 people per investigation thread, as always, but do what you want for generic interactions.

Setting
Recyclr
Shrine Offerings))

[You know you must have died—nothing is ever easy around here, certainly not quick, so you must remember burning, bleeding, falling, dying?

And yet. You're waking up.

Do you recognize it here, once you pick yourself up off of the hard floor, maybe half-strewn across a couch or beanbag chair? This room died, too: you're in the library, good as new and maybe better than that, only barely smelling of burnt paper and you only sometimes kick up ash, just like those old wounds that finished you off only ache every now and again, dully.

The book selection isn't quite the same as you remember it—all the bad erotica that didn't die is missing here, sorry to say, but so are the books on everyone's home worlds. Snoop around enough and behind the librarian's desk, you'll find tablets: one for each participant of the game, and with enough experimentation, you'll find the one that reacts when you press the button. You're already logged into your Recyclr account and can read the feed, but the same rules apply: 140 characters, one tweet a day. The voting app is gone, replaced by a sort of security monitoring kind of app. Characters can view different rooms of the school, or even place a few side by side so they can view a few at a time, and they'll be able to see the living go about their day to day lives. There's even an archive of recordings, but only the important ones: murders, executions, investigations, trial highlight reels, and major events like libraries being burned down. Was watching yourself die once not enough? Boy have I got good news for you!!!

It's kind of exciting that you can go around touching stuff, probably, despite being super dead and vaguely transparent in a way you notice like your own breathing; you don't and then you do and it's all you can think about, but your tangibility only extends to the inanimate: try to touch any of your fellow deceased and you'll find that you just pass right on through like touching cold air.

The windows aren't bolted up with those big metal plates on this side of things, but look out of them anytime and it's just pitch-black and still outside, so that's demoralizing. There is, of course, the door out of the library—but for now it's locked up tight. Whatever is a ghost to do?]

((Recyclr

Offerings/Letters
Day 11
Day 14
Day 16))

Welcome to Nope's Peak Academy, the school of your dreams! It is, in many respects, a normal enough modern school building, besides being excessively large—better comparable to a city college campus than a high school—and is neatly maintained throughout. The lights in the halls and classrooms are harsh, making up for the complete lack of sunlight: every single window and any door that could possibly lead to the outside is completely blocked off with massive metal slabs screwed deeply into the wall. They're well-constructed, as is the rest of the building; try as you might, they refuse to budge at all. It would seem there isn't really a way out...

MAIN FLOOR

Main Entrance

I—wait, what the hell kind of front door is this? What the fuck is that? Are those guns pointed at it??? Is this even a real school???????

The main entrance area is large, but rather empty... That door isn't going anywhere for sure even if you are daring enough to get that close to those guns, and there isn't anything to see but hallways and staircases to other places, so you may as well get going.

Cafeteria

There's easily room for hundreds of students to sit here at any of the long white tables, though the metal fold-out chairs aren't very comfortable... There are some potted plants here, too, and surprisingly plenty of space to weave between tables and chairs, assuming you're about regular human size.

Kitchen

A direct offshoot of the cafeteria. There are lots of raw ingredients, but very little in the way of things to eat if you can't cook, besides instant mashed potatoes and the stuff for a grilled cheese... Also, you have to be mindful of what you're using, as some of it's moldy and more of it's been left in strange places for dubious amounts of time, but if you're determined, certainly you can find what you need for your meal! There are multiple knife blocks with impressive arrays of cooking tools, as well as some pointy skewers best suited for putting into comically large pieces of meat.

Also, we don't have an oven anymore. The oven, no joke, has been converted to a dumbwaiter. What the fuck. It looks like an ordinary oven still until you open up the door and then it's like, well, okay, I guess I can't cook anything in here??? The up and down buttons used normally to adjust temperature control it. It leads to a basement-level hallway so insignificant that it isn't even worth its own section under the basement heading, and at the end of the hallway, there's an elevator. The elevator is a straight shot up to the fifth floor.

Gymnasium

Any jock's dream! The gymnasium is wide and expansive, with a big storage closet where all the unused equipment is kept. There are bleachers along two of the four walls, and a stage on the third, directly across from the entrance. There are basketball hoops on either side, but in the closet, you'll find a volleyball net, baseball plates, jump ropes, and those gym scooters which range in size from "I got a matching one for my doll" and "giant alien of your choice," among other more standard sports equipment. Get fit! —Okay, hold on, this door by the stage wasn't there week one, was it?

Indoor Playground

Accessible through a door in the gymnasium, this is basically just an adult-sized McDonald's Play Place. There are tubes and ropes and ladders and rungs to climb on and over and through in all kinds of colors and sizes. There are slides and balconies and even a ball pit that a slide will drop you right into! This would have been life changing if you'd found it as a child. Honestly it's a pretty big deal now. Score. There's a trapdoor at the bottom that leads to the third part of the basement.

Greenhouse

Oh! You can see the trees and sunlight and grass of a courtyard from the tall glass walls and ceiling here! We're saved, we're fre—

...Ah. Upon closer inspection, it appears there are actually just well-drawn murals pressed up against the clear walls... If you knock on them, you can even see the boards shake a little. They won't fall, though, and the walls won't break.

The flora in here are very much real, though! There are lovely flowers among rich green grass, and a variety of workbenches and such that contain potted plants. There are even fresh fruits and vegetables growing, and two real trees crowding their respective far corners. The light in here is more natural, and spending time in here will make sure you get enough vitamin D to not die of not having enough of that. No promises about not dying for other reasons, of course—including but not limited to the fact that there are things like belladonna and hemlock growing here...

It seems as though some foliage has been moved out of the way, because there's a door visible that wasn't before. Maybe? If you go through, it does not, tragically, lead to the actual outdoors, but an offshoot of the greenhouse. It looks like it could be a real little grove, with a pond full of real fish circling around and the occasional bug, but the bird noises recording playing in this room keeps skipping and sputtering.

Nurse's Office

The walls and floor are all sterile white tile, though there are some cheesy motivational posters and posters simple, cheesy medical puns hung up here and there. There are a few comfy chairs to sit on and one hospital bed. In the closet, there are a couple of fold-out wheelchairs and some crutches. The drawers and cabinets contain burn cream, painkillers, bandaids, bandages, rubbing alcohol, and some other very simple basics, but you're going to have to wade through an absolute fuckload of q-tips to get to them. Literally if you open a cabinet, q-tips just pour out. Why are there so many of them?? Who did this?????? Among the q-tip carnage as well are scalpels and syringes.

Auditorium

With both ground floor and balcony seating, the auditorium can fit a bullshit huge number of people, some of whom get better views of the big stage at the front than others. These seats are really comfy, actually! There's a tiny control room high up behind and just above some of the back balcony seats, accessible through a back entrance, and a big panel of switches lets you control the lights and speakers over the stage.

Props Room

Directly behind the auditorium stage, the presumable drama club's equipment is scattered about. There are props, set pieces, and costumes for all sorts of shows. Some may recognize pieces belonging to (among others) The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, and Little Shop of Horrors. Yes, there is a giant Audrey II. Other pieces don't seem to really have much of a cohesive theme. You could put on a fun show! Oh... Hold on, is there really a trapdoor down here...? It leads to part of the basement.

Storage Closet

There are, as you'd imagine, a few of these littered about the hallways, with mops and pencils and extra toilet paper and such, but this one is special. Open up this door and you'll find yourself on a thin concrete balcony with a rather unsteady metal railing. At the end of it is a set of stairs leading down to the maintenance room that the balcony overlooks. The light switch is all the way at the end of the stairs, so be careful!

BASEMENT

All areas of the basement are entirely separate from each other, each accessible from its own unique entrance on the first floor.

Wine Cellar

Accessible through a trapdoor in the props room that opens up to a long set of narrow, steep stairs. It's dark, but if you bring flashlights from any given supply closet down here you'll find that the space is built of uncomfortable concrete and it's dusty and ill-kept. Some broken desks and chairs are stored by the bottom of the stairs, and by "stored" I mean "strewn around the floor." If you push them around, you might discover some slightly smudged chalk outlines of human bodies! Fun!

The unbreakable caution tape has disappeared. The space isn't huge, so it may be that there are other entrances to other parts of the underground in the school, but given the concrete walls, it seems this is it for you for now.

The good news: you've found the wine cellar. What the hell is one of these doing under a school building? Who runs this place?? You can see alcohol neatly organized on shelves, and, if you know anything about alcohol, the labels indicate that this is some good shit. And there's so much of it! But...you can only see it. A big grated gate blocks it off. A padlock keeps it shut, and it won't seem to budge... Maybe you could find the key?

There's also a pool table! Yaaay!!!

Maintenance Room

Accessible through the stairway in a particular storage closet, the maintenance room is where the magic happens. By magic, I mostly mean heat. Also electricity? A flashlight isn't necessary, but recommended; there are a few lights along the high ceiling (the stairs go quite deep) and a switch at the bottom of the staircase, but they aren't enough for just how big the room is, and a few of them flicker and most seem like they're dying. It's not great.

This place is also a goddamn labyrinth of pipes. They're too low, too high, all twisty and turny on their way to the big boiler in the corner of the room and the wall and god knows where else, honestly, it's such a mess in here. Please take care to duck. The room also has some fuse boxes along the wall, all of which will open easily, which couldn't possibly lead to anything problematic, though the fuses are unlabeled. Not all of the pipes are in active use, it would seem, since if you touch them, they aren't always hot, and a few even are rather loose if you bump them...

On tall shelves in the middle of the floor, you can find all kinds of supplies: tools, mostly, for maintenance purposes (wrenches, hammers, the occasional shovel, bags of dirt) as well as spare parts (screws of all sizes, circuitry parts, PVC pipes) and miscellaneous repair items (spackling paste, paint).

Morgue

There was a rope ladder leading into this room from a trap door at the bottom of the indoor playground's ball pit, but someone cut it down, so now you're gonna have to get creative if you want to get down here. Creative shouldn't mean jumping down. Don't do it. That said, this room is...exactly what it sounds like. The lights are dim and flickery, and the room smells painfully sterile, which at least is better than it smelling like decomposition? There are tags on the handles of some of the cabinets, but they're labelled with bad drawings of types of garbage, like apple cores and tin cans... No matter how hard you try, the cabinets that presumably lead to the drawers where bodies are kept won't open, but, like why do you want to?

SECOND FLOOR

Accessible primarily through a main staircase at the front entrance, though there are some side stairs at the halls near the gymnasium and auditorium, as well as an elevator. There's a small entrance area with nothing of note to see except a giant metal slab on the wall that blocks a window which surely once offered an excellent view, but the area quickly breaks up into several hallways.

Most of these rooms are probably classrooms... It seems most of them are locked, though. The doors aren't unbreakable, but it isn't recommended to try, and you can peer in through the little windows into almost all of them and they sure look like ordinary classrooms, so why would you want to?

Classrooms

Though most of them are locked up, there are a couple of standard classrooms accessible. They have enough desks and chairs for ~20 students, generally, set up to face a teacher's desk and a blackboard. There's graffiti on most of them, drawings of flowers and raccoons and apples, but there's room to draw your own graffiti, too, and some chalk to do so with. Even if you investigate, you aren't going to find anything more interesting than someone's forgotten and poorly-taken biology class notes or stray pencils, though.

Dormitory Wing

There must be more of these elsewhere, right, because thirty bedrooms can't possibly be enough to house all of the students this school has to fit. It isn't even enough to hold everyone here? Bedrooms are small but cozy, all with the same design: one twin-sized bed, a nightstand, a closet, a shelving unit, a desk with drawers and a suitable chair, and a private bathroom with a shower but not a bathtub. If you really want to rifle though people's things (how rude!) you may be able to find some makeup or a change of clothes, but nothing especially interesting.

Art Room

You could make all sorts of wonderful things with all the supplies here! Fabric, paper, paint, stickers, glitter, yarn, ribbon, stuffing; if you can imagine it, surely you can bring it to life with your own two hands! Incredible! Naturally, you'll find scissors of all kinds, as well as some exacto knives and box cutters. There are even pottery spinning wheels! It takes a little digging, but you'll also be able to find a drawer with tattoo guns and the appropriate ink. No instructions on how to use them are provided, though, soooo have fun. Everything was neatly organized in here once, but it's been two days already, so so much for that.

Library

Not much has been done to fix this up since the incident, huh... There's still seating space, and the place is rather musty and ash-covered. If you look, you may be able to find the occasional biology textbook (all of it is wrong for every species) or even some poetry, but mostly all that's survived the fire and the foam is really bad erotica.

Interrogation Room

The entrance to the interrogation room has been boarded up with heavy wooden planks...

Rec Room

A little jam-packed, but only with good things: a foosball table, a variety of board games to play with a friend, a couple of arcade machines with classics like Pac-Man, and Wii Sports. It's hard to find sitting space, but the couches and beanbag chairs are comfy. There's a magazine rack with titles like TRASH FEVER and GARBAGE FAVORITES, all of which are about actual, literal garbage. Like, crumpled up newspapers and apple cores and discarded watermelon rinds. There is absolutely no reading material in here that isn't about actual trash, like you would ideally put into a literal trash can, rather than the metaphorical kind you call the character you're playing here or at least their friends.

Recently, a few new magazines have been added to the rec room, all with old school 3D images with red and blue blurs. There's even a set of paper 3D glasses to go with them! A few are misprints, and only have red lenses, though... Also, the Pac Man machine is no longer playable. It's asking for a four-character name to put in for a high score, but it won't take most of what you type...

THIRD FLOOR

The caution tape blocking the stairs and elevator here has been taken down! There's more in its place keeping you from a presumable fourth floor, but for now, it seems your school life has expanded.

Like the second floor, there are lots of generic classrooms here, as well as lots of locked doors.

Weapons Closet

Well, having a third floor was great while it lasted, but it's over now. Time to shut it all down. This is a small space, but there's an impressive variety of things you could kill people with in here: swords, axes, daggers, spears, javelins, n...nunchucks? Throwing stars? There's a flail in here. There's a glaive in here. Hilariously enough, there's nothing particularly modern in here: no guns. Even more hilariously, absolutely fucking everything in here is covered in glitter. COVERED. IN. GLITTER. Some of it is half-assed dumping a bunch of glitter onto knives to make sure it's all sparkled up but she's also going to at least try to make some of it look actually nice, like gluing rhinestones and pastel construction paper shapes to all the blades. Basically everything looks like if you asked a six year old girl to design weapons for the new Precure show.

Good luck everyone!!!

Holding Cells

Every single time you go anywhere in this stupid building it seems even less like a school, doesn't it.

Yep. This place genuinely looks like a jail, with three barred cells. The cells are small, with benches too small to really lie down on in each. At the moment, the cells can be opened and shut as you please, but there aren't any keys... There are two chairs and a small card table outside the cells.

Science Lab

Are... Are we back to things that actual schools have. Please say yes. Please. A cursory inspection will net you standards like beakers, goggles, safety posters, and tongs. There's a big cabinet shut tight; a heavy metal chain wraps around it and a heavy padlock keeps that chain together. The cabinet has glass panes on the front and you don't need too much in the way of scientific knowledge to understand what the skull and crossbones or the black exclamation points in yellow triangles on some of the bottles must mean. You could do some really fun hands-on learning in here! You could also kill an absolute fuckton of people.

Also every single drawer is filled with fucking qtips.

Archery Range

A large, wide, and plain room with a very clear purpose: on the side closest to the entrance, there are a variety of bows and arrows (none of which have any kind of safety tips, thanks); opposite them are five big round targets mounted on the wall. There's a distinct lack of any kind of safety barriers or lines, though, but really, what did you expect?

Library 2

Well, having another library was good while it lasted, but we fucked that one up, too. The Cat Piano, grand piano sized and bolted to the floor, survived the carnage, but when you play the keys, its meows are horrifically distorted, like a toy with dying batteries. Sometimes it just lets out a long, echoingm awful meow note unprompted. If you play "Ode to Joy" on it, the keys retract into the mouth, and a tongue comes out and licks your hand.

Weapons(???) Closet

There are a couple of weapons here—the same sort you'd find in the weapons closet, honestly, but with a fine layer of dust instead of the glitter.

FOURTH FLOOR

Shrine

The door opens just like a regular classroom, but the room inside gets weird fast. Instead of having electric lights, the room, oddly small, is lit by candles mounted on the walls. Not more than ten feet from the entrance, there's an altar against the wall, long enough for most human-sized people to lie down on, underneath a magnificently crafted stained glass window depicting Raquelle and Tycoon surrounded by garbage. Beside the altar is a tall decorative chalice sort of thing that brings a small fire, sitting in a bowl no more than a foot across, to an average human's chest-level or so. Interestingly enough, touching the fire won't burn you at all, it just sort of feels uncomfortably warm. If you drop something in it, it...might burn. Some of the time? It's kind of fussy.

Aquarium Tunnel

This room doesn't even pretend to be a real classroom at first. Literally you're just walking down the halls and it's like, "hold on, is that a bunch of water?" and it sure the hell is. The water overhead might make this place feel a little claustrophobic but the ceiling is high and the hall is wide. The aquarium tunnel is, of course, full of fish, most of which have some combination of big teeth and pointy spines, if they aren't the sort you'd recognize as producing their own electric currents like eels and jellyfish. Most of these fish could probably kill you if they tried! The rest are there for the former fish to eat. But it looks cool.

Blank White Cube Room

Exactly what it sounds like: this room, about the size of all the rest of the classrooms, is perfectly cube-shaped, and just...completely white... Walls, floor, and the square lights on the ceiling, all a crisp, shining white. Or, like, at least they were until someone came in and threw paint all over all the walls, so now this is a paint splattery mess cube room instead.

DO NOT ENTER

It takes quite a bit of effort to get to this classroom: even at a brisk pace, it'll take a few minutes to make your way down the corridors until it gradually gets dustier and the overhead lights stop working. Your efforts are rewarded with...a bunch of caution tape over an otherwise normal-looking classroom door, with a sign over the tiny window pane that reads "DO NOT ENTER, LOVE RACCOONS" in appropriately sloppy handwriting.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

New and fresh, a certain classroom door has just a single wooden plank boarded over it, with yellow paint crudely spelling out "UNDER CONSTROCTIN" because really what else would we expect here.

FIFTH FLOOR

The elevator (except the stupid dumbwaiter nonsense) doesn't lead up here, but the stairwell does. The fifth floor consists only of one short hallway at the top of the stairwell, with the aforementioned elevator on the right side wall. At the end of the hallway is a door with a keyhole outlined in red, a keyhole outlined in blue, and a doggie door outlined in green. The doggie door doesn't push in, and can only be pulled out, but when you do, something makes a noise like an industrial garbage disposal, so uh, maybe don't?!

As mentioned, the stairwell ends here, so this may really be the end of the line...