The room is a massive circle; the walls are perfectly ring-shaped, the roof forms a colossal dome, and there are no corners due to the rounded nature of the installation. Four curved double doors, all aligned, provide easy access to and egress from the room. There are zero windows located anywhere within the structure's inner confines; it is impossible to see the inside of the planetarium from the outside or vice versa.

The lowered central area of the room is prominently visible from all other parts of the room; it houses the nucleus of the facility, a projector based on the latest real-world technology. Around this central well orbit rows and rows of seats in an almost-perfect loop around the room, broken only in the areas aligned with the northern exit of the room; in the center of this gap resides a desk, which houses the planetarium's controls.

It is readily apparent that the terrorists have made significant modifications to this room. The planetarium controls are entirely disabled; the lights are inactive, and the projector is locked in a powered-on position. When one is inside the room, they feel an immediate change; there is no gravity within the bounds of the chamber. The walls and floors now contain handrails, such as one might find on a space station; they serve to ground a student, should such a thing be needed.

There are enough access points to the roof, strewn across both hallways used by the students and the maintenance tunnels used by the staff, that the rooftop is impossible to barricade or hold—even with the combined effort of multiple coordinated students. There used to be safety fencing twice as tall as the average student, but it's gone now; there's not even a little ledge to demarcate between safety and falling off the edge. The upside of the roof was used, in better times, for student projects, a popular hangout spot for friend groups and smaller clubs without rooms of their own; however, there are no pieces of dedicated furniture native to this area of the school, and it is very sparse now save for the number of steel pylons and contraptions that serviced the illusion of HVAC and water supply. One sight here is the imposing dome of the planetarium, which rises a good ten meters above the rest of the roof. The roof also features the exhaust of the central Air Conditioning (AC) system, which still runs hot, with fan blades the size of a grown man still spinning. The metal mesh used to protect people from falling in is nowhere to be seen.

Most of the schoolyard lacks awnings; only the bridges above provide much in the way of a shaded area. The school's glass façade is one-way tinted, making it nearly impossible to see inside the classrooms, even on the first floor, unless right up against the glass. The open expanse includes stone tables and benches where outdoor lunch is an option, and some strips of greenery, though nothing taller than manicured grass a bit yellowed from the dehydrating Californian sun. There are two greenhouses on the southern end close to the Common Area where biology classes and more specialized classes sometimes take place; the insides of these greenhouses are severely humid, with rows of neatly arranged foliage and gardening supplies.

The eye-watering, immense slabs of heat-sink asphalt were a crucial part of the ubiquitous Californian aesthetic; what is less typical to the average student's eye, however, is how this parking lot extends past the school block, on all sides, a repetitive grid of white and yellow pavement guidelines onto infinity. The vehicles that populate the area are now far stranger than the pretense of middling-salary teachers' cars, never used or needed. Now, there are limousines, school buses, and even the odd tank haphazardly strewn about the bitumen expanse; some of these vehicles seem perfectly operational, while others are mere wrecks. Even the functional ones offer no escape from the arena; around one mile in any direction lies an invisible, indestructible wall, which marks the border of this modern hippodrome. During the night cycle, all the vehicle lights are on, which provides illumination through the area—so much so that it might be hard to move around undetected.

The majority of the time, this two-story, wide-open space serves as the school cafeteria. The food line is on the first floor, with food served by buffet-style warming stations operated by the school's cafeteria crew. There are enough oval-shaped bench tables to seat the whole school over the remainder of the two floors, along with a few vending machines on the second floor serving branded products. The stairs in the cafeteria go in both directions, up and down, for easy movement between floors.

Controlled via the inaccessible admin areas of the school, the two rooms of the cafeteria can convert into an assembly hall with seating for hundreds, the floor slowly expanding upwards to make a series of bleacher-like seatings spread in a semi-circle around a viewing area complete with a large projector screen in the far wall, the warming stations for the food and tables for the students vanishing to accommodate. The lighting becomes moodier and more atmospheric than the bright and sterile cafeteria lights, and the windows facing outwards get covered by retractable dark foam walls that provide decent acoustics.

As a result of the tampering of the terrorists, the common area now switches between being the cafeteria and being the assembly hall every three hours on the dot. Students that remain inside the room during the shifts will suddenly feel nauseous to the point of having to close their eyes; after a few seconds, the feeling will slowly pass, and the room will have entirely transformed into the other configuration.

Two suspended glass bridges connect the East Wing and West Wing, one bridge each for the upper (second and third) floors. The bridges are wide enough for four students to stand next to one another, shoulder to shoulder. The bridges are fully accessible to those with disabilities, as they connect directly to the main corridors of the proper school building without any elevation changes. The flooring is the same blue-and-white checkered vinyl composite tile as the rest of the school. There used to be waist-high metal guard rails here to stand between students and the heat-tempered glass panels that offer a view of the schoolyard below, but it seems that the terrorists saw fit to remove this particular barrier...

...and to make the glass unrealistically brittle. Before, someone would need industrial power tools to break through the mighty panes; now, some action movie shenanigans that shouldn't work in the first place almost seem like enough to crack open one of the transparent panels.