Racial Ads and Disads Carlos Wyrick I had my eye on it, the little plastic prop book, coated with cheap spray paint, it looked so bad it barely served its purpose as a prop. I had a quest to get one, they had some kind of magic or something. I didn’t look into it, I was happy to have a quest. The shoulder bag, adorned with a purple hand-sewn patch with a black design, white stitches adhering it to the brown bag, lay all alone on the “porch” of the cabin. It was a covered area with a poor excuse for a pit stove, built sometime in the 80s. The light, an anachronism for the period we were supposed to be in, cast a redorange glow on the area, but at this hour I didn’t need to worry about onlookers from other cabins. I needed one of the books for my “employer,” a character being portrayed by Jake Hemmit, my least favorite staff member at this LARP. I have seen what happens when you don’t take quests and participate and it’s a real bummer and a waste of money. So here we are, I’m walking around like anyone else, I’m the only one who pays attention to who is sleeping where anymore so nobody would think twice about my being in this part of camp. I move into that horrid orange light to slip the book out of the bag and then I’ll be off, but then I hear a raucous cackle from within the cabin, the players were still awake, and they had the door open. One of them saw me just as I plucked the book and I heard a “hey, who’s that?” from inside. These amateurs had clearly shed their game personas as it got later in the night, thinking the game was more or less over, but the game don’t stop ‘til Sunday morning, baby. I woke up in my cabin, I’m the only one there as is my preference. I’m sticky, the air is sticky, the camp’s “mattress” on this bunk is sticky. It’s more like the hardest bean bag you’ve ever felt wrapped in linoleum, cracks at the corners and god knows how old. My real life possessions and food for the weekend in one corner, and my “in-play” bag hanging on a nail in the opposite corner. The walls of the cabin have little gaps in places, a knothole popped out of the plank left of the window. This camp doesn’t open in winter for a reason. The graffiti on the bed frame doesn’t register in my periphery as I rise up and dig into my various nutrition bars and Gatorade as breakfast. I don’t hear anyone outside, and it’s not bright enough to be noon so it must be around nine. I will have had 6 hours of sleep, my magic number at LARP events. I don my cloak and bag. Jake had gone to sleep by the time I got the book for my quest, so effectively half of the non-player characters (or NPCs) had gone to sleep with him, as he depicts
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