Objects in Mirror are Nerdier Than They Appear
I've been back in the Paint department for several months now, and three times now I've had guys come up to me and ask for things like foam, duct tape, and, most recently, fabric tape. They all approach me, trying to look as unassuming as possible.
"What kind of project are you working on?" I ask, as I help them gather their goods.
"Um, well, you see..." "it's for, uh..." "er, I need to make a kind of a... sword with it."
They stand there, looking sheepish, until I exclaim with glee, "Oh! For LARPing!"
Yes, folks, I am guilty of participating in the ultimate mark of the true geek. And not only did I dress up as an elf or an orc or something, I dressed as a tree.
Yes, you heard right. Limbs, trunk, leaves and all. I was an Ent. Going to a LARP as an ent was not my idea, it was something that Jeremy and Tom worked out. I was a last-minute addition to the campaign, and actually had two parts... the first night, I was to be a faery, and then the next two days I would be walking flora.
Here's how it all went down: When Tom and I started dating, he and Jeremy had made tentative plans to go to New York to participate. I thought it sounded like a hoot, and so they asked the folks setting up the shindig if I could come. I was contacted by one of the organizers, who asked me if the character I had worked up was very dear to me.
"Nope," I said, "why? Did you want me to be something different?"
"Um, no, actually, you being a fae is great. What we were hoping for is that we could kill you at the King's Feast. Is that OK?"
LOL, my first LARP and I was to be murdered. She explained why, and I agreed to it. She then asked me to keep it a secret, which I happily did.
The story was this: The King, for some reason that I can't quite remember, decided to rid his land of the faery, which were of two sorts. Seelie faes were friendly towards humans, Unseelie were not. The King decided to hold a feast, where he would announce his decision to his kingdom. I was to attend the feast under the guise of being a Seelie faery, when in fact I was really Unseelie and rather hostile about the planned extermination.
Our campaign started at this Feast, where we did, in fact, feast. One of the organizers was a home brewer, and he brought a few different kinds of beer along. I was kinda nervous about having to "act" in front of so many strangers, and wound up downing a lot more beer than I really had intended. After we had eaten, the role-playing began in earnest.
The King began his speech, and partway through it I got up and protested his plans. Imagine, if you would, a drunk girl pretending to be a faery, with a voice a la' Carol Kane in "Scrooged." Well, the King didn't care for my presence, and ordered one of his henchmen to shut me up permanently. Said henchman walked up to me with a foam scimitar, and as he was about to slash my throat, I SCREAMED.
Prior to me approaching the King, I had decided that I was going to make sure that everyone's eyes were on us, to make sure nobody missed this essential piece of the campaign. Part of my nervousness was due to the fact that I wasn't sure that when the time came, I would be able to screech loudly on command. Well, the beer must've helped, because the place went silent as I was "killed." As I sank to the floor, I noticed some of the kitchen staff running out to see what the commotion was all about.
See, this all took place at a Lion's Club camp. We rented it from them, but they were reluctant about it. We learned later that after witnessing my death, they almost asked us to leave. Whoops. Anywho...
As I lay dead on the floor, the place went nuts. Someone covered me with a piece of cloth, which made me happy because I was wearing a shortish skirt, and was fervently hoping that I wasn't showing my undies to the world. After a lot of yelling and arguing, a character who was sympathetic to the fae picked up my lifeless body to carry me out.
Now, this guy was HOTT. And he was wearing a kilt, so that magnified the hotness factor by a million. Plus the fact that he picked me up and was able to sling me over his shoulder in a fireman's carry? WOW. The only problem? Remember the beer I mentioned earlier? Well, being kinda upside down and drunk can be a bad thing, especially when someone is turning here and there to talk to people as he's walking with you. I had to break character long enough to poke him and ask him to please stop moving like that, or something bad was going to happen. He heard me, laughed, and took me outside to be "buried" with a minimal amount of jostling and spinning.
The rest of that night I spent haunting people as a ghost. The next day, I was Bonsai, the Ent. (Evidently, this LARP had some sort of Japanese tie-in with it, because some of the girls were wearing dresses with mandarin collars.) I can't quite remember Tom and Jeremey's names, but I think Tom was Nagiri. *shrug* I got Bonsai, because they were walking on milk crates as part of their costumes. I was not, because A) Jeremy had hogged up too much of the "bark" fabric, and B) one of us had to be more mobile, in order to help the other two up the hills.
I'll finish this story tomorrow... ;)