the sixty ninth story

Previously mentioned- there was a surprisingly active live action role playing club at my high school. I was part of it. My English teacher, one year, had done some in that past. She also felt that role playing increased kids vocabularies, helped them get past that first hurdle of starting to tell a story, and generally made for better writers. Her way of giving back- she would respond to anyone using the accepted signs as though in a game- that is to say, if you entered class just a bit late, but did so very quietly, while making the handsign for invisibility, she wouldn't mark you late.

the Fifty Ninth Story

In light of recent events, I think i'd like to tell some Newtown stories. Yes, it was a sleepy suburb, but if anything, that forced us to use our imaginations to entertain ourselves, and we had a hell of a good time.

This story that comes up sometimes in conversations about my interactions with police (and the fact that I love them). I was in the role playing club, and we were the pinnacle of geeky- live action, vampire based games. Hell yeah. I loved it. Sometimes, we would have weekend games, not at the school, and sometimes these games featured boffer weapons- that is, pipe covered in foam with which two people might beat each other fairly safely. We would refer to these games as "going into the woods and hitting our friends with sticks". One of these games, though, was not in the woods- it was in the local cemetery, very late at night. Sure enough, a cop showed up. We didn't scatter, or not fast enough, and when he drove up, we were all standing there, looking foolish. He got out of his car. He asked us what we were doing. We explained. He asked us what kind of foam we used. We told him it was from an old couch. He said that some other, very specific foam was much better. We asked where to get it. He said he had lots extra, as he hadn't really had the time to make any new boffer weapons since joining the force, and he'd drop it by our club meeting the next friday. Then he told us to get out of the cemetery and go into the woods if we wanted to keep the game going. And, in a final note of awesomeness, as he was getting back into the car, he took a moment, turned himself into a gamemaster, and told a short story about why all the vampires had to run into the woods.