stagemanagers | Locations [act 3]

Gershwin High School Academy University

▶ LOBBY

There’s not much to say about the lobby. There’s linoleum floors and fluorescent lighting, and two doors that appear to lead outside. You can see out of both of them, but the windows are unbreakable; you can't get out that way right now. The brick wall between the cafeteria and the lobby has a large round window in it - just to be cool and decorative! A rolling metal sheet blocks off the hallway to the west.

▶ Cafeteria

This is a classic public school cafeteria. There’s far more tables than your group will require, complete with attached plastic stools that fold up. On the eastern wall, there’s an elevated area like a stage, but there’s just a single table up there. Maybe it’s the popular kids' table? Two buffet tables along the north wall have metal troughs where you can serve food, either hot or cold, but you will have to serve it yourselves; there’s nobody here to cook for you.

Along the west wall, there’s several vending machines. One contains various sodas and bottled waters, and another contains packaged snack foods. These do not require payment. The third vending machine, on the other hand, is mysterious and opaque, and will require a coin.

▶ Kitchen

The kitchen was clearly intended to do cooking in bulk; you’ve got several stoves and refrigerators back here, plus a walk-in freezer. The ingredients have clearly been bought in bulk as well, and none of them are particularly high-quality. You may be able to put together something nice with them, but you might also be able to request more options!

▶ Principal's Office

The door to the principal’s office is open at all hours, although you will only find your Assistant Director at the receptionist’s desk from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. This is primarily where you can have private conversations with her. Though there’s an actual office in the back, it is always closed and locked.

▶ EAST HALL

▶ Gym

The school gym is typical: a large open room with a basketball court and collapsible bleachers to one side of the room. The floor here is polished and has the lines delineating a basketball court, though without any other decoration. There’s also a small storage closet here where you can find various sports equipment, like balls of all kinds, volleyball nets, and folding ping-pong tables.

▶ Weight Room

This is your basic weight room, with both barbells of varying sizes and a few different pieces of workout equipment. They're higher-quality than one might expect from a place like this - you could pump some iron in here. There’s also a couple of tubs off to one side - judging from the freezer nearby, they must be meant for ice baths. Fun!

▶ Locker Rooms

These locker rooms are large, and include showers - though they’re the sort of creepy tiled ones where you can see other peoples’ heads over the walls. Oh, well. You can find a store of jerseys and equipment for various sports in here; there’s no school name on them, but they’re all green and white.

▶ Concessions

The concessions stand is initially blocked off by another metal sheet that rolls down to cover the counter, but if anyone tries, they'll find pretty quickly that you can just...roll it up. It isn't locked. Inside, there's a selection of pre-packaged snacks and bottled water and sodas. It's the sort of thing you might sell at intermission at a school play.

▶ ???

This door is locked, with no nameplate or anything on the outside to distinguish what it might be. There's a narrow window by the door, like all the other classrooms, but it just looks pitch black in there.

▶ LIVING AREA

▶ Scene Shop

There’s a large loading dock door - locked - and racks containing stores of boards and plywood. You can find a cabinet containing paint cans and paint brushes, and a smaller room to the side contains a supply of power tools as well as some tables and a dingy couch. Most of the space, outside of these, is empty. Plenty of room to get to work! Beneath the stairs leading up to the loft is a mechanical lift, which comes with absolutely no instructions or safety manual.

The loft on the eastern side of the shop appears to be a storage area. There’s old props and set pieces from what seems like a small variety of shows up here, as well as a lot of different pre-made costumes.

▶ Dance Studio

The dance studio has mirrors lining the walls, and a bar circles the boundary of the room, for balancing if you want to practice your ballet moves in here. Around the door, someone's painted a lovely red poppy design! Other than that, there’s not too much in here: just a few mats that you can put down if needed, and a boombox containing a single CD. Deal with it.

▶ Costume Room

This room is where those costumes from the scene shop loft were clearly created. There’s sewing machines, bolts of fabric, mannequins, and anything else that you might need to create your own outfits! There's...a lot of mannequins standing around, honestly. That's probably fine.

This also serves as a storage area for things like wigs and stage makeup, including some pre-made prosthetics and some interesting special effects stuff. Mind you don’t freak anyone out with the blood squibs!

▶ Band Room

The band room seems a little dingy, like no one's been in here for a while. There's a lot of instruments lying around or sitting on shelves. Basically anything you might possibly find in a school is available, as well as a decent standing piano! Unfortunately, pretty much everything seems to be out-of-tune. You might have to dig around for some instrument maintenance supplies. There's also sheet music available, if you like your musicals more on the realistic side.

▶ Choir Room

The choir room is largely identifiable by the risers where you're meant to sit or stand to do choir things. There's choral sheet music to be found here, but it looks like you'd have to roll that piano in from next door or bring some other instruments if you wanted to actually have some accompaniment.

▶ Dorms

These rooms seem to have started life as classrooms, but someone has gone to some effort to turn them into living spaces. Fuzzy rugs have been laid down over the linoleum, and there are several four-poster beds in each room. All of the dorms are virtually identical, and the doors to these can lock, although every student housed there will have a key. For additional details on the dorm areas, see the housing page!

▶ WEST HALL

▶ Library

Here’s the school library! You’ve got the standard fiction and non-fiction section, mostly containing books that seem appropriate for a high school audience. Behind the checkout desk, there’s also a few cameras (with film, not digital) and camcorders that you could check out, and a couple of those televisions on the rolling carts. You know, when the teacher just wants to keep everybody quiet for a half-hour. There’s viewing material around here, too, all either educational or film adaptations of plays or movies that one might read in school.

▶ Lounge

This is the teacher’s lounge; you can tell by the coffee machine and microwave! There’s a few tables, and also a couple of couches up against the wall. Two mannequins are sitting at the tables; one of them has some tupperware that might’ve contained their lunch, if they were a real person. You can find good coffee and tea in the cabinets, as well as some snacks provided for the teachers, like M&Ms and Fig Newtons!

▶ Nurse's Office

Oh, look, it’s the school nurse’s office! Unfortunately, there is no school nurse here to save you! Instead, there’s just a mannequin dressed in street clothes sitting behind the desk here. Luckily, she will not stop you from accessing all the first-aid stuff! It’s not a particularly great stock; most of what you’ll find here is basic first-aid supplies like bandages and over-the-counter painkillers, although there’s also a little cache of stuff like epi-pens. On the far end of the room, there’s a couple cots and a standing curtain that can be drawn between them and the rest of the room for privacy, or if you just need to take a stress nap.

▶ Computer Lab

This is a pretty standard school computer lab, which does mean that the computers here are like twenty years old, probably. They’re set up in rows, with the teacher’s desk in the back along with a printer. Every machine has the same set of programs installed - your basic Office suite and standard games, along with some surprisingly good art and image/video editing software.

▶ Auto Shop

Auto shop! That totally normal thing that high schools apparently have???

This room is really more of a garage, with concrete floors and no heating or cooling to speak of. Luckily, it seems like it’s pretty temperate outside for the most part. You’ve got a lot of tools in here, and one of those things that will lift a car up for mechanics, upon which is sitting one car! This car is automatic...it's systematic...it's hyyyyyyydromatic. Why it’s not currently functional. Hope one of you knows how to fix that or is good at learning! The mannequin who’s standing around in here, dressed sort of like a mechanic, doesn’t seem inclined to give any hints. For the record, that garage door doesn't seem too inclined to lift for the moment, either.

▶ THE GROUNDS

▶ Courtyard

The brick courtyard outside the cafeteria is clearly an extended lunch space. There’s a few scattered picnic tables and trash cans, and the area is lined with trees and bushes. There's also one of those large outdoor chess sets - gosh, too bad the SQUIP isn't here to see this!

To the north, there’s a tall staircase leading down to the sidewalk that goes between the parking lot and the football field.

▶ Football Field

There’s not much to say about the football field - it’s just your typical regulation school football field, circled by a running track. Bleachers off to one side provide the only shade here, although standing underneath them feels somehow nefarious. The small building directly behind the bleachers appears to mostly be for game announcers; it’s tall enough to see the field, and there’s an intercom system here that you could probably figure out how to use. There’s also some foldable soccer goals in a closet in here, if you wanted to use the field for some other sport.

Outside the fence and behind the bleachers, there’s also a shed with a riding lawnmower and other typical gardening and landscaping tools, as well as chalk for marking the field.

▶ Gayseball Field

It's a regulation baseball field! There's an electronic scoreboard, which can be manipulated from the announcer's booth over by the bleachers, and a shed containing baseball equipment. Other than that, it mostly just seems like a great place for something incredibly homoerotic to occur.

▶ The Woods

Behind the school, beyond the fences around the football field and the gayseball field, there's woods. It's mostly just forest, but there's a narrow gravel trail leading through the woods at one point, towards the garden.

▶ Garden

Tucked away in the woods, the garden is nonetheless clearly delineated. In the center, there is a long shallow ornamental pond. Around the edges, there are beds of flowers and herbs, separated by stones. There's also four wooden benches, each engraved with the name of one of your number who has died.

At the end of the pool opposite the entrance, there's a tall tree. It's clearly part of the garden and not the woods - there's a circle of stones around it, and it looks like someone put some new mulch in there recently.

▶ Parking Lot

The garage door in the auto shop now opens up onto the parking lot in the back of the school! The street it opens onto is to the west, and seems to go straight off into the distance away from the school. You can't see the end.

▶ Corn Field

Across the street in front of and to the side of the school, there's a sprawling field of corn. The corn is tall. You cannot see anything past the corn, save the tall figure of what looks like a scarecrow in the distance.

▶ SECOND FLOOR - EAST

▶ Pool / Ice Rink

Oh! This school has a swim team! This is a regulation-sized swimming pool, with lanes designated for swimming laps and a diving board. It doesn’t seem like it was really intended for people to play around in, but you do you. More unusually, there’s also a large switch on the wall that can turn the pool into an ice rink! It won’t freeze over instantaneously or anything, but flipping the switch does cause a pretty noticeable drop in temperature. Best to get out of the water then.

▶ Locker Rooms

The locker rooms are much like those downstairs, including showers and all of that, but you can also find swimsuits and ice skates in each of your sizes provided in the lockers! These can be period-appropriate, if you old-timers don’t want to wear modern bathing attire!

▶ Storage

This room mostly contains tools and chemicals for cleaning the pool, as well as extra skates and stuff like that. The most interesting thing here for all of you might be the single washer and dryer. They’re stacked on top of each other to save on space, which might make this a pain in the ass and also sort of hazardous, but they work! Get ya laundry on.

▶ Photo Studio

Time for school picture day! This room is half for production and half for the early stage of development. You've got several different lighting rigs and backdrops - including all the typical school-picture ones - and well as tripods and different lens options for those film cameras available in the library. In the back area, there's a sink and small jugs of chemicals for the initial development process, as well as books on how to process film and a cabinet to hang it in.

▶ Photo Dungeons

These rooms have heavy metal doors that can bolt shut from the inside. Once you do that, and turn off the light, it is completely and utterly black inside. Have fun with that! The rooms themselves don’t contain much other than a table, a chair, and a sharp tool that you can use to get film canisters open.

▶ Darkroom

This sharply winding hallway, and the heavy curtain hung across the entrance, are intended to keep any of the light from the hall from entering, because this is a darkroom! There are regular lights in here, but you can also switch them over to the red light that’s safe for development. Tools and chemicals for developing photos have been provided.

▶ SECOND FLOOR - WEST

▶ Art Room

Finally, an art room! There’s all sorts of drawing and painting materials here, as well as places on the wall to hang up your art if you like! Wouldn’t that be fun? You can also find stuff here for doing other forms of art, though not as much, and anything sculpture-related would be in the pottery room.

▶ Pottery Room

And here’s the pottery room! The setup is much like the art room, with a few tables and pottery wheels, but there’s a lot more open space for doing large sculptures if you want. There’s mostly just clay and wire, but just because Spongebob’s around, you can also have a large block of marble ;)

There’s a kiln in the back of the room here for firing any clay creations you make! Just be sure to read the safety instructions printed on the side!

▶ Science Room

Here’s where you learn Science! I guess! It looks like it might’ve been a chemistry classroom at one point, with those blacktop tables that have outlets for plugging in whatever equipment you might need. The cabinets in the back have all sorts of materials, though - some basic chemistry sets, some dissection kits (sans the subjects), microscopes, telescopes. There’s a whole diorama of the solar system hung up here, if you want to learn about the galaxy that you may or may not be in at this point!

Several mannequins are sitting at the tables here. Let them do their work.

▶ Game Room

This is...just a gaming room, apparently? It’s still very clearly a classroom; it’s got the same flooring and whiteboard and everything that all the others do. It’s just that the desks have been removed, and a few gaming consoles and TVs placed here instead. This isn’t really a full arcade - this isn’t really the place for one - but there’s a couple of arcade cabinets! And bean bag chairs! One of them has a mannequin sitting in it, he's just vibin'.

▶ Roof Access

Oh, look, what could these stairs possibly lead to..........

▶ ROOF

Congratulations! You have found the rooftop garden! The area around the door that leads down into the building (which is LOCKED because you SEQUENCE BROKE) is covered by an awning and surrounded by the most plants, mostly flowers and ferns here. There's other invidiual garden plots around the roof, though. Some contain small trees, some contain flowers or useful herbs, and some of the ones up here definitely contain poisonous plants.