"Welp, this was a swing and a miss," Thad sighed as he swept his flashlight across the area.
To put the things they learned to the test, the teens were told to choose a building within the camp and find enough stuff to fill a regular school backpack within thirty minutes. Thad had picked what he thought looked like a big shed near the back of the campgrounds, hoping to come back with a bag full of power drills, angle grinders and other goodies. It was a good hunch, with the structure housing what might have been a shop class once upon a time, but the material shelves were bare and whatever tools had been attached to the tables were long gone.
Thad grabbed one of the shelves to test how heavy it was and frowned as the cheap metal warped under his grip like it was made of clay. It was definitely trash, but he couldn't think of a way it could be useful.
"Guess I made the right choice going WDF; I'd make a terrible Scav," the jock muttered to himself.
And as he continued to pan his flashlight around, he felt more and more secure in his career choice. Because even with a full-auto hate-hose hanging at his side, he was feeling less and less secure in the cabin. Didn't even matter that it was still daytime; if anything, the light streaming in from the windows made the shadows that much darker.
It also made the dark lump in the back corner much more ominous.
"Dude, if there's someone under that tarp, please don't make me shoot you," Thad said firmly as he inched closer to the black mass, before remembering that he had a gun and distance was his friend. "If you're cool, I'm cool. But if you need to tell me you're cool."
When five seconds passed without an answer, Thad picked up a nearby chair and chucked it at the mysterious lump. The resulting metallic rattle was incredibly loud in the otherwise silent confines, but it was a familiar noise that made the teen perk up and smile. He quickly made his way over to it and ripped off the tarp, revealing exactly what he thought he heard: a rolling tool chest.
"Score!" Thad laughed as he opened one of the drawers and found it stuffed with crescent wrenches of various sizes and conditions.
The other drawers contained similar bounties of a socket wrench set, screwdrivers, grinder wheels, drill bits and saw blades. And, in the largest drawer at the bottom, the power tools themselves. An incredible haul, and he wasn't about to bother picking and choosing what to put in his not-incredible backpack.
He frowned slightly as he tested the drawers and found they were held closed by weak magnets that would do nothing to stop them from flying open if he picked it up. A lightbulb icon appeared on his screen and he went over to one of the cheap shelves, easily ripping it apart to harvest the garbage-spec sheet metal. He then used two strips of it as makeshift rope, bending them vertically around the tool chest.
"Look at you, thinkin' on yer feet!"
Thad jumped and whirled around with his machine gun, only to immediately point the barrel away as he spotted Uzi's purple eyelights.
"Dude, not cool!" the green-eyed drone let out an explosive sigh of relief. "You can't just sneak up on someone who has a gun!"
"Sorry, sorry," Uzi smiled, though Thad could barely see it with her standing in the dark.
"So...find anything good?" he asked when it became apparent that the girl was just going to silently watch him.
"A little something, but I wouldn't call it 'good'," the alt girl shrugged. "Need any help?"
"Nah, I'm good, just needed something to keep those drawers from opening," Thad replied, then proceeded to lift the whole chest up onto his left shoulder with ease. "But thanks for the off...er..." he trailed off when he turned around to find himself once again alone. "Uh, later?"
