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General Information
Maintaining a superior defense is the pride of the Moon Division, defending even at the expense of attacking. However, this can be hard, especially for trainees who just got new magic weapons full of glowing and powers. Thus the Princess Island. At the center of the island sits a princess who will do absolutely nothing to protect herself, and it's up to you to build defenses that will withstand shadowling attacks so she she doesn't die in a horribly realistic manner.

There's four main paths for shadowling's to travel through, and you have 3 types of building materials to create your defenses from: straw bales, wood, and bricks. The sturdier the material, the sturdier the barrier, but the fewer you can build in the allotted time. After a set amount of time, the princess will crush a pumpkin pill, attracting varying amounts of lurking shadowlings. You get to watch helplessly from the observation station, without getting to attack yourself.

These creature are extremely weak and ill formed, coming up against a solid defense they will disperse, but in turn they also weaken said defense. When a defense goes down, they go right to the princess and attack her. Should she survive the wave, you get to go back down, rebuild, and do it again.

If you fail: the princess has died, horribly, and you've wasted a lot of time on this only to look fairly incapable. All things considered? Most pleasant course to fail.

If you win: peen points and bragging rights go to those with the healthiest princess and lasted through the most attack waves.
If you choose to go beyond 5 rounds, switch the enemy dice roll to 4 d20s.

Mechanics

• Your princess has 20 hp
  
• First, roll the strength of you defense, using the dice for whichever building type you choose.
  
  Brick: 4 d12
  Wood: 8 d6
  Hay bales: 12 d4
  
  The order of the die determine the HP for each barrier location. For example, with bricks, rolling 5/6/8/1, would mean that path 1 has 5 HP, path 2 has 6 HP and so on. With a wood roll of 3/3/3/1/2/5/5/2, the first 2 dice would equal the amount of the first path. Brick would be the least math-y of the building materials (you lazy asses.)
  
• Roll 4 d12 for the attacking forces. Once again the order of the dice correspond with the path being affected. Then do the math to determine the status of your defenses and princess.
  Example:
  My defenses are 5/6/8/10
  The attackers are 3/7/3/8
  
  The result defenses are 2/-1/5/2
  Negative numbers are taken off the princesses HP, leaving her at 19 HP.
  
• Go back and rebuild your defenses in the same manner as before, you'll be building on top of old defenses so you add the new defense HP to the remaining defense HP. Negative numbers = 0 HP for the defense, not negative HP.
  
• Minimum rounds to complete the course is 3
  
  Bonus Mechanics
  
• Their defense expertise allows them to build slightly sturdier barriers. This applies to all paths that start at 0 hp. They do not stack. So if you are re-building on a barrier that lasted from an existing round, this bonus does not apply, as it is already still in effect.
  
  
• Trainees: 0 hp bonus
  
• Moon Trainees: +1 hp bonus to each path
  
• Hunters: +1 hp to each path
  
• Moon Hunters: + 2 hp to each path
  

Typically Taym was early to wherever it was that he needed to go, which went some way towards explaining why he arrived half at a jog, in that particular type of hands-in-the-pockets, cigarette-in-the-lips jog that always managed to vaguely suggest delinquent teenagers milling around outside a liquor store.

He turned his head away from Dawson's direction to exhale as he came to a halt, and then, careless, ground the cigarette out under the toe of his boot and kicked it distractedly to the side, his days of caring whether he'd be taken to task for it long past him.

The hand he extended for a handshake was bone-thin and tattooed with what looked like a dead or dying bird and it was trembling, barely, but the grip of the handshake was surprisingly firm, and on the other end of it Taym was giving Dawson a look that was unmistakably sizing him up.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, got held up," he said, not sounding especially sorry at all. "I haven't done this yet," he added bluntly, but this, also, failed to sound like an apology.

"Oh for the love of Christ," he said. "Please don't call me sir. Don't get too ********' subordinate around here to anyone but leads and assists or you'll get led around by the nose. Take orders from people who know better than you what'll get you killed but don't--don't get subservient." And yet here he was, treating Dawson like he was a raw new employee and he was a tenured manager, doling out advice.

Turning to cough into his shoulder, he added, with a gesture at the course, "lead the ******** way."

There was a flicker, there. Taym wasn't exactly in a hurry to run out and proclaim his proud Southern heritage, but like any true Southerner the implication that he might hail from anywhere North of Kentucky was grating and required immediate correction.

"I'm from Atlanta," he said, hauling a hay bale into place primarily so that he could avoid Dawson witnessing the spectacle that was Taym driving to drive nails or even stack pallets on a bad day for hand tremors.

He'd been given an Ever golem, which made him deeply paranoid about Life labs gossip in general. It was wearing a cargo-green dress trimmed in duct tape, and he might or might not have taken a slightly-blurry picture for America's later amusement.

"You can ditch the Mr. part, too."

He watched the shadowlings coursing up the paths, for the most part vanishing in little puffs of darkness although one managed to wriggle past the hay bales, resulting in a girly little shriek from Ever that would have made Taym grin had he not been eyeing his own handiwork with grim dissatisfaction.

As the remainder threw themselves fruitlessly at Ever and Chris, Taym procured his cigarettes, tamping the pack against his shaking palm before offering one absently to Dawson.

"I don't know," he said, more troubled sounding than the topic warranted. "They're some sort of--computer program, I guess. They're not that bright. I had one ask me one time if a bottle of Dr. Pepper made its butt look big. They're unsettling as ********," he added, apparently agreeing with Dawson's assessment of their creepy spot-on-ness. "Looks like round one goes to you," he added, disgruntled and not at all a good sport about it.

"Thought I'd take a nice vacation in Bermuda," he answered, disgruntled still and slinging hay bales into place without much concern for their final arrangement. "Packed up all my sunscreen, signed a contract, mighta misread the fine print." A pause, as he considered the fact that in truth some people on the Island actually were that stupid, apparently, and hoping Dawson wasn't one of them, he added flatly: "Same way most people get here. I ******** up too bad to stay out there. That your story?"

In contrast to Princess Chris, Princess Ever let out a satisfying shriek as a shadowling flung itself against his hapless heel, and Taym's resultant snort of amusement hinted that maybe he wasn't taking this as seriously as he could have.

"There's a lot to get people up to date on," he said. "We try, but..." he trailed off, waving a hand, looking distinctly more troubled over this than the state of his pathways, which was now approaching shambles.

"There's a lot of nasty s**t. Out in the field but back at home, too. Lot of... general unpleasantness, where it's not actually homicidal maniacs. Cliquishness, uncooperativeness, interdivisional rivalries. People who'd rather hold information hostage than see to it no one dies from a lack of it." He delivered all this in the bone-weary voice of someone who'd once invested all those words with the fiery passion of a true diatribe, but had long since lost the energy. He sounded, in a word, defeated. "You managed to catch one of the orientations yet? I'm not great with faces," he added, and again it lacked an apology.

It also wasn't true, but he'd prefer Dawson not know that Taym never knew who went to his little get-togethers because he was too busy trying to avoid throwing up from public speaking nerves to make note of any faces.

"Are you volunteering," said Taym flatly, after haphazardly slinging a few more bales into place with the same general sense of apathy towards Princess Ever's fate as before, "to tag along on my heels all day? Because god knows I don't mind passing along anything useful I have--far from it--but unless I'm out on a mission--and let me know if you want to join me on one of those, I have quite a bit of leeway for who I get to bring with me to what, generally speaking--there's not a lot I'm doing that's of any novel use. Better fighters around to teach you than me, and apparently you're already," he added, irritable, "better at building a fence than I am."