Schuster Hall is the central administration building for the campus. Originally, the south wing held a small concert hall. That has been eliminated to make room for the geodesic dome of Crystal Hall. Schuster Hall also holds classrooms on the upper floors. Also includes the Homer Gallery. Attached to it is the Crystal Hall (or just “the dome”) is the cafeteria and a main hang-out spot on campus. It has a fountain and tropical arboretum in the center. There is a separate dining room for the staff off to the side.
Kane Hall has a brick smokestack-like tower along the north end. Atop the tower is the gleaming white dome of the campus observatory (16” telescope). The dome also contains sophisticated satellite communications facilities. Cellphone antennae, direct-link microwave feeds, and other antennae are concealed within the body of the “smokestack”. Campus security is located in the first floor and three basement levels. The Llewellyn Annex houses the above ground Devisor labs.
The Beck Library also holds the servers for the campus net, and the main firewall and gateway for Whateley’s outside internet connections. (The administrative computers are located elsewhere.)
The stadium that would later come to be named Holbrook Arena after the first Champion Harry Holbrook was already part of the original Whateley Academy in the form of a classic Track and Field stadium. It was later extensively refurbished as part of a senior legacy. In its current form the stadium proper is designed as a multi-sports arena, capable of being changed into a basketball, ice hockey, swimming, football or soccer venue or used for various public events, for instance the senior Halloween parties. Below it, there are areas suitable for all kinds of sports, including racquetball, paint ball wars and laser tag. There is a Dragon dojo here, which appears to be a named dojo for open use.
The Doyle Medical Complex is a modern, well equipped hospital, able to handle the various accidents and injuries that happen at Whateley. Besides the tunnels that connect the central campus, there's a tunnel directly to Hawthorne for medical emergencies.
Dunn Hall is one of the Whateley Campus main buildings constructed after the reopening of the school and was finished in 1969. It is a vaguely L-shaped Brutalist concrete building located on the east side of the campus next to Kane Hall and about 100 yards north of Kirby Hall on the other side of Whateley Boulevard.
Dunn Hall houses the biological sciences as well as biology oriented power research, the School House Restaurant, which is used as an alternate to the main cafeteria in the Crystal Hall, as well as the advanced French classes (possibly all foreign language classes), several photography studios and the Venus Inc. club house.
Kirby Hall is one of the historic buildings dating back to the original Whateley Academy. It is a barrel shaped Tudor style building not really fitting with any other building on campus, and houses the rivaling Mystic Arts and Psychic Arts Departments. While the introductory mystic classes and the psychic classes are taught above ground in Kirby Hall proper, the advanced mystic classes are taught below ground. Kirby Hall proper and the underground rooms together are called Kirby Complex. The entrance door to the underground part is concealed by magic and there is a rule against taking persons past the door who can't find it themselves, being able to find the class rooms functioning as a de facto prerequisite for taking advanced classes. Due to the intense rivalry between the departments both students and teachers of the psychic arts program have tried to locate this entrance, without success. They suspect the Mystic Arts Department to have more, larger and better equipped class rooms than they have, a suspicion that is entirely correct. Beyond the advanced class rooms the underground part of Kirby Complex also houses the Mystic Arts department library and the teachers’ lounge.
Laird Hall is used for Physical Education classes of all kinds, including martial arts, flight classes, and briefings for Applied Powered Combat otherwise held in Arena 91, the start booth of which is also below Laird Hall. Attached to it is the Eastman Annex, where the martial arts classes are held.
Dickinson Cottage is a girls-only cottage located about 300 yards to the north-east of the central campus, on top of Dickinson Hill. It's exclusively for non-GSD students, although students with very mild GSD probably slip in from time to time. Dickinson was one of the two original cottages present at Whateley after it reopened as a mutant school, the other being Emerson, and has the same floor plan as all the other cottages except Melville and Hawthorne.
Emerson Cottage is a Boy’s Only cottage, located on Emerson Hill about 300 yards to the northwest of the main campus. It has a much more sober and scholarly culture than Twain. Emerson is a low-GSD environment. Interestingly, while there are rivalries between Emerson and Twain boys, it hasn’t developed into a house vs. house thing, as it has between Whitman and Dickinson.
Crassly nicknamed the ‘Freak House’,Hawthorne Cottage is specially built to meet the needs of ‘extreme cases’- Bricks who can’t control their strength, Ultra-Heavy types, extremely trigger-happy blasters, human torches who can’t turn it off, ‘loud’ projective telepaths and so on. By necessity, Hawthorne is co-ed. A tunnel leads from Hawthorne to the main school building, Schuster Hall, for use on red flag days. There's a spur from this tunnel to Poe, added after the Halloween invasion in 2006. There is a second tunnel that leads directly to the Doyle Clinic for use by EMT teams. Due to space considerations, Hawthorne only houses 85 students. Almost all of the rooms in Hawthorne are singles, for obvious medical and safety reasons. Many of them are equipped for teleconferencing so that students can attend classes from their rooms.
Melville Cottage is a Coed cottage, located about 300 yards south of the main campus on O. Henry Hill. It is the newest and physically largest cottage, resembling a luxury hotel more than a student dormitory. Melville has a very social — almost party — culture, and is a popular hang-out, even with students from other cottages. On the downside, Melville is also the home of the Alphas. At 8 stories tall, it's taller than the other cottages, and houses more students (150 students instead of 100); it has quite a few single rooms as well as an entire floor devoted to function rooms. It's shaped like an elongated "O", and the inner patio houses a hot tub among other amenities.
Poe cottage is located south of the main campus, about 300 yards beyond Melville (total of around 700 yards), in the lea of O. Henry Hill. While Poe can hold 104 students, it is usually only at 50-to-60% occupancy. Poe is the home of the notorious Team Kimba and associates, most of whom are main characters in the story cycle. It's also the GLBT (Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) cottage, although this fact is heavily disguised. The wards around Poe are very difficult to penetrate, and almost as difficult to detect. Protecting the Poe "secret" is a major factor. The House Mother, Mrs. Horton, is very strict that outsiders must sign in and out. Also, when outsiders are present the cottage color is red, meaning that residents should not engage in same-sex displays of affection. If anyone notes oddities about Poe, there is a second-tier cover story: Poe has more than its share of “head cases”. Not to say that everyone in Poe has a problem, but you probably wouldn’t want to have to room there, would you?
Twain Cottage is a Boys-Only cottage, and it houses some of the more unusual GSD students. Twain houses more normal students, as well. Like Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe, there is a tunnel directly to the main campus buildings for Red Flag days. One advantage of Twain is that the normal-looking students can use the tunnel on rainy days, to keep from getting cold and wet. In keeping with its mascot, Twain has a genially boyish macho culture.
Whitman Cottage is the girls-only mixed normal and GSD cottage, on a similar system to Twain. It is located about 700 yards north-east of the main campus buildings, in a depression beyond Dickinson Hill. It has the same layout as all the other cottages except Melville and Hawthorne.
The Whateley Academy aims to present the façade of a common boarding prep school housing common students, while in fact offering decidedly uncommon classes for uncommon students. An essential part of this strategy is keeping a lot of things underground, in an extensive and elaborate system of tunnels.
The original school already had the seed of this system, in the form of narrow facility tunnels linking the outer buildings to the central campus. At the time the school was built, it made sense to have a central facility supplying steam for heating to all buildings, for instance. Many contemporary schools have similar tunnels. Those are too narrow for regular foot traffic, however. These facility tunnels are still used, although nowadays they also house electric and fiber optic cables for power and data.
Some of those tunnels have been greatly enlarged to offer an underground path from the cottages to the central campus and the Doyle Medical Complex. Originally, only the three farthest cottages, Hawthorne, Twain and Whitman, were accessible by tunnel. The reason is that those are the cottages that house students unable to pass for baselines, who therefore need the tunnels to avoid being seen on red flag days. In November 2006, a spur was built from the Hawthorne tunnel to Poe, which means Poe might receive GSD students in the future.
Beneath the central campus there is a veritable rabbit's warren of tunnels, descending deep into the bedrock under the school. Most of the student labs, where devisors and gadgeteers study and develop their projects, are underground, as are part of the research labs and powers testing facilities. Also of note are the three combat arenas, Arena 77, Arena 91 and Arena 99, all underground. Those tunnels seem to have been dug without much forethought and are laid out in a very complex way, making it easy for an uninitiated to get lost.
Besides the official teaching and research facilities, the underground complex houses many student hangouts. The Cape Squad, the Bad Seeds, the Alphas, the Underdogs and the Lit Chix all have their own underground "clubhouses". The tunnels are so extensive, in fact, that there are entire branches that haven't been used in years, and are sometimes discovered and used by students without official permission. Some students even manage to make their own unofficial "extensions" to the tunnels to house unauthorized "secret labs," to the point that not even the school administration knows how big is the complex.
Digging such an extensive underground network, particularly without disturbing the buildings above, would be probably unfeasible without the help of mutant powers. Fortunately, Whateley being a school for mutants, these are not in short supply. For instance, the very large Arena 99 was built as a student project — a Senior Legacy — with no official help from the school. Of particular note in the history of the tunnels is the former student MoleFinger, who had the ability to quickly and easily dig tunnels.
