Cerise Magazine

Autumn, 2005

I smear my cheeks with brown face-paint and drape a frayed cotton tunic over my shoulders, tying it at the waist with a strip of muddy fabric. The Monster Mistress, Jenn, taps me on the shoulder and hands me a slip of paper.

“Break a leg…” She smiles evilly. “Or eat one.”

I laugh at her melodramatic tone and glance down at the freshly-printed Stats Card. 20 BP… 4 Assaults…. 2 Impales… Yes! Twin claws. A giant pile of boffer weapons covers two of the bunk beds, and I shuffle through them until I find a pair of red swords.

“Who’s with me?” I shout, glancing around the one-roomed cabin. There are people everywhere, talking rapidly, typing on laptops, making new swords, and shuffling through the heaps of costumes that sprawl across most of the bunk-beds.

Three wide-eyed high schoolers — two boys and a girl — look up at me anxiously, their faces smeared with brown grease-paint.

“Grab your claws and follow me,” I say, leading them out into the frosty air of an October midnight. “Let’s come-into-game at the swamp.”

They all nod. It seems I am the leader, no questions asked. I feel like a sergeant guiding my men – and woman – into battle.

“Let’s move out.”

The grass is thick with condensation and our shoes soon become soaked as we scurry through the fields to the other side of the summer camp. In one of the fields, we approach three cloaked figures that are standing and chatting. Suddenly the group grows quiet and they raise their swords.

“Who goes there?” one of them shouts.

“Out-of-game,” I yell in reply.

They lower their weapons, relieved. “I guess we’re just jumping at shadows,” one of them says as we brush past.

We finally reach an area that is overgrown with reeds and blackberry bushes, and scurry into the underbrush. The warm yellow glow of the West Village is visible through the brambles, and we can hear far off voices: people talking, laughing. I smile evilly. Fresh meat.

I look around at my comrades. Their eagerness is like electricity. “Ready?” I ask.

“Ready,” they reply in unison. Ready to kill.

“We come into game ONE….”

Ready to die.

“We come into game TWO…”

Ready to devour the flesh of our screaming victims.

“We come into game THREE!”

A lone elf has wandered away from the noise and hustle of the village to gaze at the stars, which cling like ice crystals to the window of the sky.

Such a gorgeous night! But what is beyond that celestial window, he ponders. Another realm filled with spirits of the dead? A massive ocean of magic? A palace filled with Kami and fairies? Or perhaps nothing: the sky is simply a decorative crown over the endless plain of earth and sea.

A twig snaps nearby.

He raises his sword and stammers, “W-who’s there?”

Something in the darkness growls, then a pack of wolves slinks from the shadows.

The elf stumbles backwards. “HELP!” he shouts, and turns to run, “Someone, please—” but his cries are cut short and the wolves sink their claws into his back. He flops to the ground and they descend upon him, slashing open the tender flesh of his belly and spilling his steaming entrails across the mud.

A distant voice says, “Hey! Over there! I heard a call for help!”

Now people are crunching through the underbrush, their chain mail clinking as they run. The warriors are coming.

The lead wolf howls and the others follow her into the swamp, scurrying through the brambles and jumping over logs. But the warriors are gaining on them.

Suddenly a flaming arrow pierces the lead wolf in the back. She yelps and falls in the mud, dead. The pack turns to avenge her. They lunge, snarling, into the group of warriors. But their blood-stained claws are no match for swords and magic…

That night, four fresh wolf skins are hung on display in the tavern, and a timid elf, whose body has been repaired with first-aid and magic, quietly sips his ale, shivering.

Meanwhile, back at Monster Camp, four sweaty, mud-covered individuals pass around a bottle of Gatorade and congratulate each other. Mission: accomplished.

Two years earlier…

Morning. Day Two of my first Live-Action Role Play game. An hour ago I was killed by a necromancer, resurrected as a zombie, beaten to death by my new guardian, Arcturus, then healed, and somehow, in the course of it all, I didn’t lose any of my three lives.

“You only lose a life if you’re dead for more than five minutes,” Arcturus explains. “At that point your spirit leaves your body, you lose a life, and the town healer has to resurrect you.”

“Oh,” I reply, trying to mentally file this information away. So many rules! How do these people remember them all?

Most of my face-paint has flaked off during the night, and I can feel the cracks and creases in the thin layer that is supposed to be my mask. Where the heck is my makeup? I’m actually not sure where any of my belongings are.

Last night, several friends and I had driven to the game together and unloaded our gear into the same cabin, and, anxious to start playing, I had wandered off alone while they were still changing into their costumes. I had expected to run into them (or their characters) eventually, so we could pretend to meet (and I could join their group and sleep in their — i.e. my — cabin). But I haven’t seen hide nor tail of them, and I wasn’t sure how to find my way back. I had been forced to spend the night with a group of strange men, and now these men are my avowed protectors.

“You can use my makeup,” one of the elves says. (I can never tell them apart, all the elves running around.)

He strides over to his cabin and returns with a bulky metal case. I stifle my laughter: when a man uses makeup, he carries it in a toolbox. The elf sets the box in front of me, pops the latches and flips the lid, revealing an arsenal of fake ears, hand mirrors, makeup brushes, and dozens of vials, bottles, and pencils. Holy shit!

He hands me a mirror, three tubs of face paint, and a black makeup pencil. “Will this be enough?” he asks.

“Y-yeah,” I stammer. “Thank you.”

I carefully draw the spots and stripes around my eyes and forehead and straighten my cat ears. Perfect! My mask is whole again.

I close the tubs and pass them back to him. “Thank you very much,” I say meekly.

“Anytime.” He carefully sorts the makeup back into the correct compartments, then latches the box and carries it back to his cabin.

Everyone here is so kind, so attentive to my needs. I’m supposed to be playing a rude, gutsy, outspoken character, but with everyone treating me so well (both in-character and out-of-character), how can I not return their courtesy with kindness?

My guardians are gathered around a picnic table at the far end of the field, and I notice Arcturus anxiously watching me, as though he is worried that something might attack me at any moment. I feel guilty about making him nervous, so I move closer to the group.

The game has hit a lull — no monsters for over an hour — and the men have run out of conversation topics, so they have moved on to comparing things: battle techniques, magical abilities, sword construction, etc… Ugh. It would be no great surprise if they all suddenly dropped their pants and passed a ruler around.

A balding man with huge glasses is sitting at the edge of the group and he also seems bored by the blatant display of machoism. Oh good, a normal person. I sit down next to him.

“Hi, I’m Ellie,” I say. “What’s your name?”

He jumps, startled, as though he wasn’t expecting to be spoken to. “Brock,” he says. “Brock Stonebridge.” Something about his mannerisms reminds me of Milton from Office Space.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. “So…what do you do?”

“Me?” He puffs out his chest. “I cast the Magic of the Stars!”

“Oh, that’s pretty exciting.” For some reason, I visualize him in a basement cubicle playing with matches.

“Actually, I’m a griffin,” he continues.

“Really?” I glance up and down at his costume: a simple beige shirt with long, poofy pirate-style sleeves and a lace-up collar. His large belly spills over the rim of his black pants. “I don’t see any feathers.”

“Well, yes,” he says indignantly. “You can’t see it, but my Magic Levels are so high that, for casting purposes, I’m a Griffin.” Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler.

Arcturus flashes me a sympathetic look.

Brock proceeds to talk about himself for the next ten minutes, delineating his many honors and abilities. I would later learn that Brock is what is called a “power-gamer.”

Power-gamers become obsessed with the imaginary skills of the game (because they have little pride in their real lives?) and they tend to reject the social aspect of the game, so, for the most part, they are ignored by the other players. For some reason, during my next few years as a LARPer, almost all of the power-gamers I’d meet would be male.

I have tuned out Brock’s self-glorifying monologue and am frantically looking around an opportunity to change the subject or escape.

A woman suddenly emerges from the trees, holding a weapon to her head, signifying that she is out-of-game and invisible to us. I recognize her as one of the vampires from the night before. “Monster Camp is running low on NPCs,” she announces. “The Storytellers are offering double XP to anyone who wants to double-hook.”

“Double-hook?” I ask Brock.

“Yeah, that’s where you NPC for a couple hours, then go back to playing your character.”

“Oh.” I pause. “How do you ‘en-peace-ee’?”

He seems horrified that I didn’t know a simple gamer term like “Non-Player Character.”

“The monsters,” he explains, “those are NPCs, and when you are playing a monster, you are ‘NPCing’.”

“Ah…” I reply.

“Last call,” the girl shouts.

“I’ll go!” I say.

She looks me up and down. “Well, come on then.”

I jump to my feet and follow her into the trees. Destination: Monster Camp.

Next Month: Samara describes her first experience as an NPC while exploring the causes for the disparities between the female-to-male ratio in Monster Camp vs. the rest of the game.