This game is full of inside jokes. Most of them funny to maybe like 5 people in the entire world. Anyway this is a brief reference in case you were really confused about things. Since this was High School / College there were all kinds of interpersonal relationships, dating, crushes, fights, etc, involving this cast of characters. I'm mostly leaving that stuff out but believe me it was there. Mirror Lake Might look mysteriously like Yosemite. Had a friend who was a Tolkien nut. U of M / College Park Where I went to college Talbot Hall Dorm where I spent Junior year. It was in the basement. A suite with 3 rooms and a common room. Liz+Will would come and everyone would sit around having fascinating conversations but I really should have been doing my engineering homework but usually I didn't, much to my detriment. Liz is related to an early Microprose employee and thus was a big Civ2 player. She'd spend many a weekend methodically taking over the world. That spool there was used as a coffee table, I think it was liberated from a construction site at some point. Pete there is mildly famous these days. He's playing the super Nintendo, probably Super Metroid. Pete was the initial instigator of all of this. As he was not an engineer he had time to play video games and we'd waste time watching instead of doing work. He played FF7 and we'd do other things when he was level grinding but we'd run in to see the cutscenes when he'd yell "Plot!" Kenjesu was Pete's roommate. That's a stuffed tiger by his feet, not an actual cat. Mathemagician is a famous college professor now. Darth Tater is spouting some poetry we wrote in a misguided "write poetry about your dorm" contest the RA tried doing. We had lots of awesome poetry (I have some posted online here: http://www.deater.net/weave/poetry/talbot_poems.html ) but none of ours won. Though Mathemagicians "Talbot Hall the Beautiful" got honorable mention. South Campus Dining Hall We used to meet up for meals here, a short walk away. Target your Points was the crazy way the meal plan worked. You got so many "points" (money) towards meals, but they expired throughout the semester to end up avoiding the problem where people with extra points at the end of the year would buy out all the food in the cafeteria. It did mean if you were hungry you could actually run low on money at the end (and you could hope to be friends with someone with extra). Very different from the all-you can-eat-but-no-carryout found at other schools. Oscar was my roommate. Nicole was Pete's fiance. I'm being silly here as though her family is from Australia, she herself is from New Jersey. Cindy often ate with us. Most of the Talbot people roomed together at (Denton Hall?) and I was a late addition to the group so it wasn't always clear why people knew each other. Her dad was possibly a high-up in some US Gov't agency and we possibly illicitly borrowed his very rare copy of the Last Starfighter at some point, luckily we didn't damage it. Elaine is a good friend and fellow Electrical Engineer. It was entirely her fault I ended up in Talbot Hall with this group. Cafeteria Lady was there every day. You really did get a free cupcake coupon on your birthday. Killer Crabs We played a lot of Tetris Attack for the SNES (the only video game I actually could hold my own on versus the rest). There is one music track we swore should have the lyrics "Killer Crabs, they want to meet you, they want to eat you" And then we started noticing that pretty much *any* music could have its lyrics switched to be about killer crabs. Mermaid in the Fountain There wasn't one as far as I know. Though people did put bubbles in occasionally. Also the band all jumped in every summer. Waterfall Anachronistic. This is more of a finger-lakes / Cornell waterfall. Metro Station DC Metro station The "closing entire line for smtarttrip" thing is an anachronism, that happened more in the 2017 time frame Bel Air Not the one in California. The over-developed and annoying county seat of the county where I grew up. I went to high school there, but I actually lived in the stereotypically more unsavory "route 40 corridor" Minigolf Not sure why that's there, the nearest one would have been in Churchville. I lost my original high school class ring there somehow. Never found it, but my friends bought me a replacement (how nice of them). CMW High School Another high school in Bel Air. Their Academic quiz team always mysteriously wore black trenchcoats (technically it turns out they were German surplus coats?) The mystery of this was never really resolved, even when coincidentally two of the team members ended up being roommates in college. JC Where I went to high school. It's apparently gotten a lot better since when I went there. Back then there still were no lights on the football field and the roof of the gym still leaked during basketball games. There was a dress code. At the time for the girls it was transitioning from ugly brown (herringbone in the winter) skirts, and yellow/brown sweater to some sort of horrible green for the people a few years younger than us. It's not the Apple II palette making things ugly, it's actually fairly accurate. Math Office Where the academic team practiced. We had a decent team the years I was there, though apparently their modern team is way better. Mree there was a Tolkien nut and would write Elf runes on the chalkboard. Rachael YRBK was my AP Bio lab partner. Her correspondence often said YRBK on them as she was in the Yearbook homeroom. Though in this case this is mostly a reference to my "Tragedy of Steve" play I wrote back in the day (you'll note some overlap in the characters). Steve was the captain of the team, and a very good one. Reyerson's Rule is quoted verbatim. It is named after our team advisor's husband. Video Homeroom The school was outfitted with "Channel One" TVs and there was a video homeroom that in theory would make a school-wide TV show but as far as I know that happened like once a year at best. It was in the library and some of my friends were in it. Yes, gus is a girl. Raistlin and Ford were the Sysops of Utopia BBS where we'd all hang out. Ford's handle was misspelled "Ford Perfect" from HGTTG and Raistlin's was from some book, he changed his somewhat often. The library was indeed run by a scary nun, but I'm exaggerating here as the school was full of scary nuns and this particular one barely would make the scary top 5. Patriot Room The school newspaper. Various of my friends spent an inordinate amount of time here. Homeroom 12E Homerooms were alphabetical so I was in the last one with the odd assortment of characters you find in the T-Z part of the alphabet. Trapani was always having crazy parties. "Weave" was the common nickname for me (Deater was my BBS handle). I also got called worse things like "Vinnie" or "Vinnels" and many others. My German teacher knew me primarily as "Axel" Warwick was an excellent swimmer, and was often followed by hordes of girls asking for him to flex his arm muscles. He was also an excellent low-res graphics artist. Anachronistic though as he changed schools after 9th grade and this homeroom is 12th. Mean Lady. A Spanish teacher. Some underclassman called her "that mean lady" once, which she was proud of. We somehow got away with calling her that during homeroom. Homeroom cleanup. Yes, at our school once every few weeks it was your job to stay after school and help clean up your homeroom (wash the boards, sweep the floors, etc). AP Calculus A fun class. Senior year we won the arch-dioescean math competition as team "I-1" It is true, at least 10% of our high school class was named some variant of Jennifer. Jenni was a nexus for this, always surrounded by at least two other Jens at any given time. Padrino would sing "She's an Angel" by TMBG on demand in a nice deep voice. He'd also break into "Youth Culture Killed my Dog" too if you weren't careful. He and I were supposed to run for president in the far-off year of 2016 (first year we'd be old enough). Maybe we should have. Deutsch Klasse German class was also fun, though possibly more fun for us than it was for Frau Potter who had to teach us. We called her just "Frau" for short, which didn't bother her, but it shocked all the German exchange students as being excessively rude as it was sort of like calling her "Woman" or "Lady". The agents are some weird thing I did where everyone in our class was a secret Starfleet Agent, and were assigned letters. No, it didn't make any sense at the time either. Half the class was actually male, but we mostly sat on the near side of the room for some reason. The girls all sat on the pictured side by the windows (view from where I sat). For all 4 years. I have no idea why we did that. There were actually some interesting people in this class, feel bad for leaving them out but the game engine only budgets 5 talking spots per room. Interesting fact, 3 of the 4 students pictured have gone on to get PhDs. Acting Principal One of our favorite teachers. He wore a robo-leg when playing Badminton. The "Since we have no electricity we have no lights" is an actual quote from a transformer explosion incident. Susie the Guinea Pig A bit anachronistic as I didn't get Susie until a few years later. She was a black American crested pig with a tuft of white hair. A good friend through most of grad school. She traveled from NY to California and back by car, as well as to Canada at least twice. Summons: Metrocat was a gnomic cat who made the front page of the Washington Post metro section. We ran him for head of the UM Student Government twice. He lost both times, and after the second they banned write-in candidates. We actually did build a Vortex Cannon. There were directions on how to build one in the kids section of the Washington Post. It required a large cereal box. As a joke I asked random people in my EE classes if they had a giant cereal box I could use, and to my surprise a few days later one of my classmates brought in a giant Honeycombs box. You cut a circle in the proper place, and indeed you could shoot air vortices across the room at people. Other interesting things that I can't figure out how to fit into the game. Freshman Steve / Freshman Jenny -- people with duplicate names we'd assign names based on class rank, which would then follow them even as their class changed. '66 Mustang / Chevette / Topaz -- we drove an odd assortment of cars which had their own adventures, but not really possible to fit them into the story. Language Lab: another place of horror, stuck one "mod" (our school had a 16-mod modular schedule) a week listening to foreign language tapes. Run by one of the scary nuns. During the senior variety show skit, which took place on the enterprise, my brief part was to report the destruction of the language lab before dying (I was wearing a red shirt of course).