Post by TheDart on Aug 16, 2009 13:42:48 GMT -5
Facilities & Resources
Located near Millennium City’s central Renaissance Center, Halcyon Academy is, on its surface, composed of two buildings on adjacent lots – the Academy itself, and the school’s dormitories.
In addition to these facilities, students receive additional personal resources that are covered under their tuition.
The Academy
The Academy itself is much larger than it looks. From the street, it looks like a rather standard, if large, inner city high school – three stories with a gymnasium for sports and theater events, an open grassy area in back, and so on. It’s what’s inside the Academy – and beneath it –that makes it unique.
The entire facility is state of the art, thanks to donations and funding provided by the school’s investors. Throughout the facility – as well as the dormitories – is an advanced computer system with a Tanaka Industries Artificial Intelligence unit serving as its user interface.
Known as Holly, the AI recognizes voice commands and it is her job to answer questions, give directions, and generally help the faculty keep an eye on the student body and their visitors to make sure that no one is getting into too much trouble, or into parts of the campus that they aren’t supposed to be in without supervision, due to safety concerns. In addition to responding verbally to requests, holographic emitters throughout the school and dorms allow her to manifest in a form of her choosing when dealing with students, and she often tries to be more personable and relate to her charges. She does not always succeed.
In addition to Holly, each classroom has its own workstations, and the teachers are able to access their classroom’s holoemitters themselves to highlight the topic of the day in lieu of a more traditional chalkboard.
The Academy extends into five additional sub-levels, which is where the super-powered curriculum is typically handled, leaving the visible school above for more traditional classes such as English, math, and so forth. The sublevels are accessible only to faculty, mentors, students, and supervised family members, not out of any desire for secrecy, but due to the inherent danger of having an area dedicated to helping people learn to control potentially dangerous abilities – it wouldn’t do for someone to walk into the wrong place and get set on fire!
Amongst these facilities is a training area affectionately dubbed by the school’s comic book fans as the Danger Room. It is exactly what its name implies – a programmable room wrought with dangers, designed not only to teach students how to deal with such situations in a safe environment, but also to help the experienced heroes in residence stay on top of their respective games.
Also in the sublevels is the school's series of laboratories. These labs are staffed at all hours by technicians and scientists, utilizing the Academy's resources to do their research. Students are able to use these labs under their supervision.
The Med Bay is a state of the art medical facility, a sharp contrast to the rather simple nurse's officer on the ground floor. Medicine in the Champions universe is advanced to a point where most diseases no longer exist or are simply obsolete, and the Med Bay reflects this.
The last of the Academy’s primary facilities is the hangar. While the Academy is happy to utilize the transportation provided by the Champions whenever possible, sometimes there is no time to arrange it. In those cases, they have their own hangar, with craft donated by retired heroes, philanthropists, and good-intentioned gadgeteers.
One of these craft is the ship formerly used by the hero known as the Crescent – the Arc-1. Sleek, small, quiet, and armed to the teeth, the Arc-1 seats one pilot and four passengers comfortably, but is capable of carrying more in the event of a rescue mission or similar – it would just end up a bit cramped. The Arc-1 is not an easy craft to fly, even for trained pilots, but the Headmaster has trained several of the school’s mentors in the controls. Students who prove themselves mature enough and trustworthy enough may also be approached for lessons in flying the versatile little craft, though Holly’s interface makes the chances of anyone – student or otherwise – running off with the ship without permission a somewhat unlikely scenario. Still… nothing is impossible.
The Dormitories
When Headmaster Lockheart purchased the site of the Academy itself, he also purchased the hotel that already existed on the lot across the street. This hotel was extensively renovated and remodeled, and today, it serves as Halcyon Academy’s student housing facility, with Holly as the resident denmother.
The first floor is primarily dedicated to common areas – the lobby is a common lounge, there is a game room with a handful of arcade machines and a pool table, there’s a cafeteria with decent-quality food provided free with a student ID, and the heated swimming pool was not removed when the school moved in. As with all of Millennium City, the dorms have access to free high-speed wireless internet, making for a rather comfortable environment for relaxation and recreation.
The rooms themselves come in several flavors, and can be personalized via paint or wallpaper, if the residents so choose, provided they help clean the room back up if they should decide to leave.
Singles tend to be fairly small and modest, but also come at the lowest cost. It’s plenty of room for one student to live comfortably, akin to a studio apartment – one room for sleeping, studying, etcetera, with an attached bathroom and shower.
Doubles are a bit like the singles are, in that you have a single room with an attached private bathroom. Rather than just the one bed and desk, however, there are two, and the room itself is larger to accommodate this.
Groups are a mix of the two. There is a common living room with two bathrooms and a kitchenette, and four small, single bedrooms branch off of it. It grants both privacy and a bit of socialization, for those who are seeking a middleground.
Resources
There are two personal gadgets that are covered under every student’s tuition that they receive upon their arrival to the Halcyon Academy.
The first is a laptop. While it is intended for academic use, the school’s laptops are advanced enough that they have no trouble with most current generation computer games, and they have enough storage capacity that one wouldn’t have to decide between one or the other. The laptop is theirs to do with as they please, after all – but it goes without saying that anyone playing Battleaxe 20,000,000 instead of paying attention to their English lecture would be in for a detention.
The second is a communicator. The comm is customizable to a degree – some students prefer to wear it like a watch, others a headset, some just a simple earbud – but it always works the same way, providing a line of communication between the students and the school itself. Most mentors also possess a communicator, though whether or not they leave it on when not officially on-duty with the school is a matter of personal preference.
Located near Millennium City’s central Renaissance Center, Halcyon Academy is, on its surface, composed of two buildings on adjacent lots – the Academy itself, and the school’s dormitories.
In addition to these facilities, students receive additional personal resources that are covered under their tuition.
The Academy
The Academy itself is much larger than it looks. From the street, it looks like a rather standard, if large, inner city high school – three stories with a gymnasium for sports and theater events, an open grassy area in back, and so on. It’s what’s inside the Academy – and beneath it –that makes it unique.
The entire facility is state of the art, thanks to donations and funding provided by the school’s investors. Throughout the facility – as well as the dormitories – is an advanced computer system with a Tanaka Industries Artificial Intelligence unit serving as its user interface.
Known as Holly, the AI recognizes voice commands and it is her job to answer questions, give directions, and generally help the faculty keep an eye on the student body and their visitors to make sure that no one is getting into too much trouble, or into parts of the campus that they aren’t supposed to be in without supervision, due to safety concerns. In addition to responding verbally to requests, holographic emitters throughout the school and dorms allow her to manifest in a form of her choosing when dealing with students, and she often tries to be more personable and relate to her charges. She does not always succeed.
In addition to Holly, each classroom has its own workstations, and the teachers are able to access their classroom’s holoemitters themselves to highlight the topic of the day in lieu of a more traditional chalkboard.
The Academy extends into five additional sub-levels, which is where the super-powered curriculum is typically handled, leaving the visible school above for more traditional classes such as English, math, and so forth. The sublevels are accessible only to faculty, mentors, students, and supervised family members, not out of any desire for secrecy, but due to the inherent danger of having an area dedicated to helping people learn to control potentially dangerous abilities – it wouldn’t do for someone to walk into the wrong place and get set on fire!
Amongst these facilities is a training area affectionately dubbed by the school’s comic book fans as the Danger Room. It is exactly what its name implies – a programmable room wrought with dangers, designed not only to teach students how to deal with such situations in a safe environment, but also to help the experienced heroes in residence stay on top of their respective games.
Also in the sublevels is the school's series of laboratories. These labs are staffed at all hours by technicians and scientists, utilizing the Academy's resources to do their research. Students are able to use these labs under their supervision.
The Med Bay is a state of the art medical facility, a sharp contrast to the rather simple nurse's officer on the ground floor. Medicine in the Champions universe is advanced to a point where most diseases no longer exist or are simply obsolete, and the Med Bay reflects this.
The last of the Academy’s primary facilities is the hangar. While the Academy is happy to utilize the transportation provided by the Champions whenever possible, sometimes there is no time to arrange it. In those cases, they have their own hangar, with craft donated by retired heroes, philanthropists, and good-intentioned gadgeteers.
One of these craft is the ship formerly used by the hero known as the Crescent – the Arc-1. Sleek, small, quiet, and armed to the teeth, the Arc-1 seats one pilot and four passengers comfortably, but is capable of carrying more in the event of a rescue mission or similar – it would just end up a bit cramped. The Arc-1 is not an easy craft to fly, even for trained pilots, but the Headmaster has trained several of the school’s mentors in the controls. Students who prove themselves mature enough and trustworthy enough may also be approached for lessons in flying the versatile little craft, though Holly’s interface makes the chances of anyone – student or otherwise – running off with the ship without permission a somewhat unlikely scenario. Still… nothing is impossible.
The Dormitories
When Headmaster Lockheart purchased the site of the Academy itself, he also purchased the hotel that already existed on the lot across the street. This hotel was extensively renovated and remodeled, and today, it serves as Halcyon Academy’s student housing facility, with Holly as the resident denmother.
The first floor is primarily dedicated to common areas – the lobby is a common lounge, there is a game room with a handful of arcade machines and a pool table, there’s a cafeteria with decent-quality food provided free with a student ID, and the heated swimming pool was not removed when the school moved in. As with all of Millennium City, the dorms have access to free high-speed wireless internet, making for a rather comfortable environment for relaxation and recreation.
The rooms themselves come in several flavors, and can be personalized via paint or wallpaper, if the residents so choose, provided they help clean the room back up if they should decide to leave.
Singles tend to be fairly small and modest, but also come at the lowest cost. It’s plenty of room for one student to live comfortably, akin to a studio apartment – one room for sleeping, studying, etcetera, with an attached bathroom and shower.
Doubles are a bit like the singles are, in that you have a single room with an attached private bathroom. Rather than just the one bed and desk, however, there are two, and the room itself is larger to accommodate this.
Groups are a mix of the two. There is a common living room with two bathrooms and a kitchenette, and four small, single bedrooms branch off of it. It grants both privacy and a bit of socialization, for those who are seeking a middleground.
Resources
There are two personal gadgets that are covered under every student’s tuition that they receive upon their arrival to the Halcyon Academy.
The first is a laptop. While it is intended for academic use, the school’s laptops are advanced enough that they have no trouble with most current generation computer games, and they have enough storage capacity that one wouldn’t have to decide between one or the other. The laptop is theirs to do with as they please, after all – but it goes without saying that anyone playing Battleaxe 20,000,000 instead of paying attention to their English lecture would be in for a detention.
The second is a communicator. The comm is customizable to a degree – some students prefer to wear it like a watch, others a headset, some just a simple earbud – but it always works the same way, providing a line of communication between the students and the school itself. Most mentors also possess a communicator, though whether or not they leave it on when not officially on-duty with the school is a matter of personal preference.
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