Well, I'm more settled in now. By this time, I have a desk to go with my PC, so motivation to keep up my blog has heightened remarkably. Something about a nagging pain in your back because you're either crouching over the keyboard or bending backwards to type while lying down just isn't very inspiring.
The desk is a gift from my aunt. She just turned 70, she's been diagnosed with cancer in her spinal cord, breasts, and probably some other places (still being treated), she lives alone (never married), she just had her home adjusted to the possibility that she'd get stuck in a wheelchair, and amidst all that loneliness and fatality I am her godchild. ... If you call it that way. She's my godmother, anyway. She wants to give me something now that I'll enjoy and remember me by for a very long time.
Now, a desk probably doesn't sound that personal to you. But it is. My aunt never throws anything away that's mildly useful, and as the old math teacher she is, she has had a lot of desks in her life. There's 4 in her upstairs living room alone, a few more in the working room further upstairs, she's ordered more to go downstairs for the wheelchair scenario... Even her very first desk, bought with sweat and labour when she was still a student, is still in use. All in all, my aunt really is a desk-lady. And it really is a beautiful desk.
So now that I can actually sit in my chair while writing my blog, I have a secret to tell about something that happened recently. It may not be very shocking, it may not quite be bribe-material... heck, it's not even in the slightest bit "naughty behavior". But I just can't tell the people that keep bringing up the event, and it's nagging at me.
A short while back, I went on another Larp. (Now, don't worry. I had two in a row, and that's all I'm having for the following 6 months. And I don't long for more.) I play a young, innocent, and only slightly corrupted child there, and have enjoyed myself heartily by stalking random people, trying to get them to give me sexual education. Which no one really dares to do. Hilarious.
Anyway. At saturday, after dinner, the whole 'village' (all the players) was gathered just outside the 'city walls' (camouflage nets) for a game of 'pigball'. Now, pigball only really has one rule: the pig (a big pink stuffed animal) has to get to the side of the other team for you to score. There's a lot of diving, hitting, kicking, and running. Wonderful to look at, exhilirating and painful to participate in. Of course, it's still larp, so the hitting and kicking is overly dramatic, somewhat slowmotion and very badly aimed, but the victims play along wonderfully.
Especially the pig. In the later matches, it became unclear which part of the pig had to cross the finish line in order to score a point.
During this game, my sweet little character noticed that one of the members of her House (clan) wasn't paying attention to what happened to the bottle of wine he'd won earlier, so she took it and went to put it away at the camp. When he noticed it missing, she/I was halfway there. He came at a full sprint, and in the brief moment I looked over my shoulder he grabbed for his sword (to secure it in his running, but heck if I knew).
So I ran like crazy. I dumped the bottle at the camp with only some care for its safety and more for my own, and kept running. When I stopped a moment to look back, he held my gaze, and froze me in my tracks. I think he said something about me being a naughty girl, and left it at that. I considered myself dismissed, and went right on running.
Because that's what my char does. When she's scared, she runs and runs 'til she isn't. In this case, the only place to go was the forest, so I ran into the forest. And got myself nicely lost in the process.
It was perfectly bright when I left the 'village'. It was pitch black when I finally got back. An hour and a half after the elf terrified me, I drifted into the monster-tent, asking something about whether I was supposed to have had an encounter in that time. And when it hit me that people had been looking for me for ages, and that I was lost, not just playing out my role, I crashed.
The rest of the evening was spent in rehydrating, calming down, and calming others down.
But here's the thing.
I found the village back in no time, but I was playing out my role. And my character would never have found the village back so quickly, not without running into something first and getting nicely traumatised in the process.
So I stayed away.
At one point, I even hid from a guy who later turned out to be my search party. As he walked away, he put on his game-master shine-in-the-dark hat, so I dismissed the encounter altogether.
I have heard plenty of signs of life, but they were not in character (a farm, the sound of a road, something that sounded like a construction site), so I stayed away. I have come across the 'village' two or three times before I finally returned, mostly because I felt it had taken long enough, and I'd just sort something out with the monsters to get that encounter I was stalling for.
My way of coping with the forest, out there on my own, was by staying in character. I wasn't afraid; my character was. I wasn't lost; my character was. I wasn't faltering in strength and voice, but you can probably guess who was. I just kept right on, a doll in one hand and a marble in the other, singing about an immortal spider getting boiling oil over it all the time. Because that's what my character would do.
But in staying in character, I also kept the factors that I'd decided were in character true. I made sure that I stayed lost, though I kept some track of which way the village lay. I started staggering because I figured my character would be tired, rather than firmly walking straight to where I needed to be. And, okay, I really was losing my voice. I was singing non-stop and parched; go figure.
When I talk to the people that were there, they keep repeating how worried they were. At the things I do tell them about what happened out there, they keep telling me how I should have sought out civilisation. How I should have stepped out of my role the minute she'd got so scared she'd run away. How, basically, I should have stepped out of my character and considered the situation as such. Which was exactly what I was avoiding.
And I just can't tell them. I can't tell them I was so keen on doing the reverse, that I actually kept myself lost. Even to the point where I avoided the large roads because, well, that's no fun. Lost is lost. And lost in the woods means small trails, if any. I've even stabbed right through the forest, without a path, in full night. That's just about when I started to have enough of it. And even then, I found the village, and headed the other way for a while, only the lack of forks in the road got me so bored that I finally turned back and 'handed myself in'.
They knew straight away when I was lost. The guy that scared me into it realised it just minutes after it happened. They snapped out of their roles within half an hour, and have been searching me for an hour more outside of their roles. They were just about to stop the entire game, and organise a huge scale search with the 100+ people present. And there I was, playing along, singing, and turning back when I saw lights. I just can't tell them. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to.
Think on it,
Erane
No comments:
Post a Comment