Frothy Frothy!
And it was EPIC! Mandala are justly famous for running well-written events with incredibly high standards for props and costume, but the real star of this event was the site. Drakelow Tunnels; full of cool original features and the sort of absolute darkness that you can only find underground, was the perfect setting to encounter terrifying aliens, terrifying robots and some fairly scary fellow-players as well.
In fact the site itself was also responsible for my scariest moment of the weekend. While crouching down behind the end of a table to try and escape the notice of a marauding security robot, I slightly overbalanced. I'm a clumsy oaf at the best of times and with the sleep-deprivation and the heavy rucksack full of stolen chemicals that I was carrying, I tipped over towards the wall and unthinkingly put a hand out to stop myself falling.
Since the wall was made of plasterboard nailed over a wooden framework back in the 1940s and then left to moulder in the darkness ever since, my hand went straight through it. Worse, the bottom part of the wall that I had put my hand through seemed to be the important load-bearing bit, and the entire section promptly collapsed straight onto me and the chap crouching next to me in a sudden and terrifying shower of rubble.
As exciting and convincing as the Alone monsters are, they don't create quite as much adrenaline as part of the room suddenly falling onto your head. After thirty seconds of staring wide-eyed at each other, asking 'are you ok?' and pulling chunks of plaster out of my hair, we got back on with the game for we are Hardcore. The chap sitting next to me was allowed a moment of smug serendipity, because his costume included an actual hardhat which he had not expected to have to put to its intended use...
My group of mercenaries were very cool, and after a couple of hours were working together really well and getting things done with a surprising minimum of larp-faff. We also had all the fun of having supplied them with the most dreadful 'corporate practice handbook' that ever waffled endlessly on about continuous improvement, and more than half of them never having actually read it. This led to a lot of humorous situations in which the mercenaries would behave like soldiers and we'd behave like corporate suits, and then have to write them up for various infractions of the equality and diversity policy. We'd just agreed that they were lovely people really and that with the appropriate sensitivity training we'd happily put them on the permanent payroll, when we all died in the dark of Aliens and suicidal bravado as is standard practice for Alone.