I recalled the mandatory drills my classmates and I used to do, all the way through from elementary, middle, and high school.

  All of them were disaster-preparedness drills meant to teach us how to respond to a certain kind of emergency. From what I remember, there were earthquakes, fires, and intruder drills.

  Back then, I didn’t really know any better, since I was young, so I simply went through the motions because the teachers told us to.

  Now, I realize that there were things the school couldn’t have prepared us for. The only thing you could do is make the best judgment in the situation you’re in.

  Earthquakes occur when tectonic plates move, either into or away from each other, producing vibrations. You can’t exactly tell because the ground is shaking, and trying to figure out the type of earthquake when the ground is shaking would be the last thing on anyone’s mind. What people think about in such an event is being in the safest possible place at any given moment when an earthquake occurs, a places people should often avoid is being near anything that’s an earthquake environmental hazard. Shelves not fastened to the wall, chandeliers, furniture, kitchenware, and, possibly more severe cases, windows made of glass, buildings, or even the ground itself, possibly being split open.

  Simply put, the best locations at a given moment during an earthquake are a large, open area or a secure location with minimal environmental hazards.

  Fires are different. They can start small, but can spread rapidly if left unchecked, even capable of destroying entire buildings, towns, forests; if it can burn, it can be destroyed by flames.

  The best course of action would be to put out a fire before it spreads further, but sometimes we aren’t fortunate enough to have that option. Either the fire starts in a place no one can check, or it spreads because someone fans the flames, either by intentionally starting it, or attempting to put it out, but not realizing what kind of fire needs to be put out.

  Yeah, fire has plenty of different fuels, so simply using water isn’t the best choice. It’s because of the nature of disaster fires that different extinguishing methods have been created to best combat these different types. Wood, gas, and electrical, or, in the case of electricity not being discovered yet in this world, wood, oil, and metal.

  For the latter 2, water could easily make the fire worse. It’s why alternative extinguishing materials are used, either being non-combustible powder or non-flammable gas.

  But what if putting out a fire isn’t an option for you? Simple, you run away. Get as far away as you can from the fire, ignoring possessions if retrieving them puts you at risk. Luckily, we have fire alarms. Just trigger one, and everyone should evacuate safely, assuming they know what they’re doing. There are safety measures in place for fire prevention in the form of sprinklers, but I’m not sure what the equivalent is in this world.

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  Intruder drills are probably the weirdest. In the event of an intruder, we’re usually told to turtle up and hide inside our classrooms, barricading the door if necessary. An intruder is simulated by having one of the teachers try to aggressively open the door, but those are usually locked by the room teacher, usually to check their preparedness and if they’re following protocol. If it were an actual intruder, things would likely escalate to more aggressive attempts, and that would be the least dangerous of possibilities.

  I wonder how this school prepares for such disasters.

  If magic is an element in disaster planning, they either get students with water or wind magic to put out fires, possibly even earth mage students. But if that arena is any indication…

  What safety measures would they have if magic were used?

  I was curious what disaster-prevention drills would be like in this world. It’d be annoying having to communicate it in my current state, but I’ll just have to eyeball it. If disaster drills here are anything like they are in my world, people are told to move toward a certain location.

  I sighed.

  Tomorrow, my life would change.

  I remembered this feeling. Every time I had to take a new step in life, I always felt scared. I always felt that the world was going to end because I was going to confront something new.

  What if I mess up?

  What if I fail?

  What if I can’t meet their expectations?

  I can’t meet their standards. It’s best to avoid it.

  I’ll only disappoint them.

  I never liked doing anything I didn’t want to, or doing something because someone else told me to. It’s part of why I liked playing video games so much. I get to decide what to do or how it ends. Even if I made a mistake, there’s something so cathartic about being able to navigate a world of your own volition, instead of doing it because someone else deemed it necessary.

  I felt a smile creeping on my face.

  This isn’t the time to be nostalgic.

  I looked at the map Mr. Blonde gave me, seeing the numerical order of the classes I’ll have to attend.

  I duplicated the map, printing it on a sheet around the size of printer paper. Even though I remembered the dimensions of the paper, I didn’t conjure a ruler. Instead, I simply manifested the paper’s size on a whim, remembering the few times I’ve seen a sheet of paper in my past life.

  I need to make it big enough for there to be room for new notations, but not too big to need its own carrying case.

  I copied the layout of the original map into the newly created paper, only adding the numbers of the classes I’ll attend while discarding the notations and symbols I couldn’t understand.

  Let’s see… that spot is the closest exit to the dorms, and there should be the main entrance I saw when I first stepped onto the campus.

  I made sure to mark landmarks I saw during my exploration of the interior. The 10 statues, the garden square, the absurdly tall library, the cafeteria, the hospital, and the arena room where I saw the vine and wind mage fight. Then I marked the entrances/exits of the building. There were six of them, four on the longer sides, two on each side, and two more opposite sides of each other on the widths on the building.

  Then, I traced a line from the numbered classrooms to the nearest exits, and traced a line of a different color to represent exits of lower priority, second nearest to them.

  After a few minutes of tracing emergency routes, I finally produced an escape plan.