#also. I've mentioned this before but we literally have. a peer mentoring service called G.E.A.R.S. at my school.

[high-voltage-rat]

Having some G.E.A.R.S. University thoughts. Based on real, actual things that have happened over my real, actual university experience, things aren't actually *that* far-fetched.

Houses stealing each others' mascots and holding bitter grudges over it? So real. We regularly steal other schools' mascots and ransom them back in exchange for silly and embarassing acts. Our mascot, a miniature functioning cannon, was once spirited away overseas by a former student. (We now have a team of cannon guards who chain themselves to the cannon for its safety, and an anonymous chief who wears a blacked out face shield attached to their hard hat and keeps the cannon safe during downtime). Mystraven stealing the Drakylon Cube and the Wolfblade to put them in the Labyrinth is pretty in-line with engineering prank culture, if anything it's not intense enough. I just want to see them demand Wolfblade and Runehawk provide "a hand-painted portrait of the other house's logo done with their non-dominant hands", "9 bottles of mocha cola cooled to exactly 2.7⁰C", and "one first year student to join mystraven as a human sacrifice" in exchange for their mascots (all based on real prank ransoms I've seen). Maybe the other houses should establish a mascot guard.

Pizza stuck to the wall indefinitely in dorms? On move-out day in my residence I witnessed a toothbrush embedded in the ceiling and garbage bags piled to the ceiling of the garbage rooms and down the hallway. People let mold grow on their food in the communal fridge until it was 4 different colours and thick as chinchilla fur and I, someone who didn't even USE that fridge, disposed of it. The hero's dorm room is actually pretty clean in comparison to some of the stuff I've seen. When their desk is piled in papers and their floor is covered with dirty laundry, I'll believe they're an average university student.

I've never had a professor make anyone wear a dunce cap, but my first year physics prof probably would have if he could have. He called students idiots to their faces in front of a whole lecture hall, and had a list of "content-free phrases" on his official department website- including such terms as "stakeholder", "partnership", "facilitate", "leadership", and "ecosystem". He has tenure and is a federal research chair. Aleysia probably has incredible job security and just does whatever she wants in response.

The real-life equivalent of the G.E.A.R.S. entrance exam was the frosh week "entrance exam" we were told was administered by the faculty. It was intentionally so hard it was improbable to get more than ~4 questions in, and even included ones that were literally, mathematically, impossible to solve. It was, in fact, a prank by upper years. But it did accurately set the tone for the rest of the program.

The real-life equivalent of Aleysia's "I'm pitting you against 4 enemies because I want you to fail" is a calc II prof who declared the class average of 58% on a midterm was "too high" and increased the difficulty of the next one. (Said prof also learned the school was ending in-person classes when the pandemic hit, decided to try and teach the rest of the course material in the final in-person one hour lecture slot, told us to read the textbook, and never taught us another thing for the rest of the remaining month of classes. And then the exam was 24 hours long (yes, actually. 24.) and the hardest thing I've ever done.) You just know Mecha Combat 101 students are chanting "pray for the curve" after every assessment.

The hero having 4 jobs around town AND doing Hero Stuff on top of schoolwork is just a turbo-charged version of my dear friend who had a full-time job, was head of a club, and was acing 8 courses (standard is 6, he had to petition the faculty to let him take more than 7).

Not to feed a mean stereotype, but our electrical engineering common room smells so badly of body odour that they have air fresheners everywhere. The cockpits of student mecha probably smell atrocious and people probably need a bundle of those little rearview mirror air fresheners for cars dangling over their pilot's station. G.E.A.R.S. student welcome package: mecharoni coupon, baby's first pilot uniform, directions for how to get to Specific Hospital, and 50 air fresheners.

There's a guy who for years rollerbladed everywhere. I once saw him rollerblade out of the bathroom and down the stairs. No one questioned him. I once brought a rat carrier to class and no one looked at it twice. Maybe it's not quite Hugh Munn level, but you can do some really odd stuff and nobody bats an eye. They all have midterms to study for, there's no time to worry about what you're doing. So sure, maybe that guy's a suspicious alien imposter, but you missed the last tutorial and he has good notes so the rest is none of your business.

Pulling up to lecture halls and having to sit on a chair to the side because everywhere else is full does happen. I've been in lecture halls so large and crowded, people in the back were using binoculars to see the chalkboard. In first year I sat on the floor for more than a few lectures when there were no seats. I feel the hero's pain, but at least they got a stool.

The lesson in M.A.T.H. is actually legit wisdom that we discuss in real engineering classes. Standards with clearly defined metrics are important, yo. This isn't an absurd occurances bit I just thought it's important. Sarrina is correct even if forcing students to measure between half the buildings in Soluna City is a bit Much.

We have a course that for a major project, asks us to use contact cement (which produces extremely strong fumes) to build a prototype bridge. They do not provide respirators. It's basically a rite of passage for first years to get high off contact cement by accident working on this project until 3am. We have another that asked us to design a "launcher" with very little regulation as to what that meant (and we were literally encouraged to "squirrel" around definitions), and set us loose in a school building to work on it- resulting in rogue projectiles nearly taking innocent bystanders out all week. I've seen people duelling with previously mentioned bridge prototypes as swords, zapping each other with electronics components they were supposed to use for lab projects (do not do this), dropping dry ice down each others' shirts (do not do this), and genuinely wanting to eat the gel we use for gel electrophoresis (do not do this!!!). I am not at all fazed by the idea that students are invited to and willing to attack each other with live rounds in their mecha or with deadly energy blades on foot. Frankly, I could see it happening on our campus if we had the technology.

Lastly, I want you to know: all of the G.E.A.R.S. profs need to be weirder. I love Denara, Aleysia, Anastasia, Tsuba, and Sarrina- but they need to be weirder. My calc I prof is an aeronautics genius but apparently doesn't believe in climate change. My Intro to Computer Programming prof showed us a selfie he took with Snoop Dogg. My intro Civil Engineering prof spent more than half of our lecture time talking about ancient roman bridges. My Thermal Physics prof followed a math proof with "I hope you're convinced, or disgusted, or whatever.", and spouted such wisdom as "there are dangers to going to Antarctica, like you may come home to find your wife has bought you a dog.", "computers are born to suffer", "Everything is a spring at low amplitude, just ask the mechanical engineers", "If you're a level 7 log mage you can do this proof, but I'm only a level 6, so I won't", and "close is just another name for wrong". My ordinary differential equations prof was obsessed with shoehorning boba into every example problem. My developmental bio prof insisted we only call him by first name and loved fruit flies, to the point that any time he showed us an image and asked us what it was, "fruit fly" was a safe answer. My materials science prof posts pictures of grocery store fruit displays he sees to his twitter to talk about what molecular crystal structure they're stacked in. People who become professors are always just a little weird. The G.E.A.R.S. profs are too normal and serious, if you leave aside the "throwing students into mortal danger" thing.

I want to see Denara, exhausted from writing grant proposals, blasting an air horn to make her talkative class shut up so she can start lecture. I want to see Aleysia go off on a 20 minute long tangent about her extremely niche field of research when she's supposed to be lecturing because this specific style of mech is just so fascinating. I want to see Anastasia, desperate for student engagement in lectures, showing memes about course content in her lecture slides. I want to see these profs be so experienced in their fields that it doesn't occur to them that their students might not have ever heard of the concept they're covering, and just breeze right through it like it's obvious. I want to see "do as I say, not as I do"-style approaches to safety from the teaching staff who do demonstrations of maneuvers that could destroy their mech and injure them if they make one wrong move because their hubris is enormous now that they have tenure and good disability insurance (here's looking at you, Sys-Zero. I saw that gratuitous barrel roll). I want G.E.A.R.S. profs who feel like academics.