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G E E K C U LT U R E , L I F E S T Y L E S , A N D G E N R E F I C T I O N

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Mission Statement:

We are geeks. We are the ones you saw in the

back of your high school cafeteria wearing Star

Wars t-shirts laughing about movies and video

games the other kids had never even heard of.

We love arguing about whether Spider-Man

could beat Batman in a fight. We love our twen-

ty-sided dice, foam swords and capes. We love

computers and robots and lasers and lolcats. We

love the subcultures we embrace to help us cope

with or escape from our everyday lives. We are

passionate, articulate, intelligent and unapolo-

getically nerdy.

I, Geek is a quarterly magazine that lives and

STAFF

LUKE WILUSZEDITOR

ERIK NELSON RODRIGUEZART DIRECTOR

Contributors

Jonathan Allen

Michelle Cachey

Richard Harting

Rebecca Lopez

Maurice Meaway

Jon Natzke

Heather O’Connor

Heidi Unkefer

Brianna Wellen

breathes geek culture. We love fiction, with a

strong preference for genre, and nonfiction deal-

ing with geek lifestyles and culture in the modern

world. We love comics and original artwork. We

love well-reported and written journalistic work,

although we won’t shy away from good essays,

columns, and opinion pieces, either. We love the

things that geeks are passionate or angry or ob-

sessive about, and we hope that shows with every

page we print.

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BE ALL YOU CAN’T BETHE MONSTERS, MAGES, AND MASTER SWORDSMEN OF LIVE-ACTION ROLE PLAYING

BY LUKE WILUSZ

THERE AND BACK AGAINONE OBSESSION TO RULE THEM ALL

BY BRIANNA WELLEN

NOT A HEROIF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE A ZOMBIE APOCA-LYPSE, YOU HAVE TO BREAK A FEW FRIENDS

BY MICHELLE CACHEY

TEMPLE OF TIMEA LIFETIME OF NINTENDO

BY TIELA HALPIN

CLOSET MONSTER

BY JON NATZKE

STAR FIGHTERS & STREET WARS

BY MAURICE MEAWAY

QUETZALCOATL

BY MICHELLE CACHEY

Non-Fiction

Fiction

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Be all youBecause you’re never too old to play pretend

by Luke Wilusz

A small, green-skinned orc dashes up to me in the town tavern and eagerly shakes my hand. “Hi!” she shouts cheerfully. “I’m Gor-

ka! We’re friends now!” She wears a long gray dress beneath a gray and yellow cloak. A large daisy adorns her dark hair, and two white tusks protrude from her mouth, curving upwards from the corners of her lips. A small gold-colored ring is pierced through the right one. A foam-padded flame sword hangs at one hip, and her best friend, an orc doll named Gubba, hangs at the other. She’s a bundle of energy and childlike excitement, eager to get a group together so they can go out and adventure and she can hit things with her sword.

Of course, the “tavern” is actually just a group of picnic tables near the parking lot of the McDowell Grove Forest Preserve in Naperville, Ill. The adventures going on aren’t real, per se, but these kinds of quests nonetheless provide hundreds of local role playing gamers an escape from the monotony of everyday life and a chance to flex their creative muscles in real time with their friends. Simply put, role playing is just playing pretend, an ex-tension of the games of cops-and-robbers we played as kids.

Modern-day role playing can gener-ally be lumped into two camps: tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons that involve dice, paper, statistics, and a healthy dose of imagination and narra-tion; and live-action role-playing games,

or LARPs, which involve players acting out their adventures in the real world, fighting with prop weapons and literally becoming their characters for hours or days at a time. Both varieties, however, are essentially about taking on a new per-sona and telling a collaborative story with other like-minded people.

Gorka is a character in a LARP game called Alliance, played by Andrea Rognli, 25, of Otsego, Minn. She made the seven-hour drive from her home state to join the Alliance Chicago chapter for its first event of the year.

The makeup required to turn herself a green-skinned orc takes about 20 minutes to apply. She uses stage makeup for her face and neck and green food coloring on her hands. She made Gorka’s costume herself, and estimates that most of it—two dresses, a corset and a pair of pants—took a combined 24 hours to make over a three-month period. Rognli says part of the rea-son she loves LARPing is that it keeps her busy and gives her a reason to keep up with her love of crafting. “We may meet only once a month, but I always have a project that I’m doing.”

A group finally forms to take on a ban-dit problem that’s been plaguing a nearby farming community. It’s a motley crew, to be certain. Some notable standouts are the excitable and energetic Gorka; a black-skinned, silver-haired Dark Elf warrior named D’rezz, armed to the teeth with three swords at his side, a blue and black wooden shield in his left hand and a longbow slung across his back; the fierce swordsman Nova Blade, wearing hand-

crafted leather armor and gauntlets, two small horns protruding from his forehead from beneath a red bandana; and myself, a humble traveling scribe following these heroes in order to chronicle their adven-tures and tell their tales.

Role-playing games, or RPGs, were born when Dungeons and Dragons and similar tabletop games took the world by storm in the early 1970s. Gamers of all ages spent countless hours and weekends gathered around tables in basements and living rooms across the country, roll-ing a wide variety of polyhedral dice and slaying monsters with their friends. One player would act as the Dungeon Master, an overall storyteller that made sure the rules were being followed and played the parts of various characters, enemies and monsters that the players would run into on their adventures. Over time, players grew tired of simply sitting around tables narrating their adventures, and some of the first forays into the world of LARPing ensued. In 1988, Michael Ventrella and a few of his friends in Boston heard about a live-action event happening at a game store run by a man named Ford Ivey.

“At the time, we’d never heard of such a thing,” Ventrella says. They went to the event and saw that it wasn’t run particu-larly well. Ivey’s game consisted about 12 or 13 players going through an adventure while Ivey followed them with a clipboard and kept track of their characters’ statis-

BRINGING THE FANTASY TO LIFE

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and get our reward.

WHY DO PEOPLE ROLE-PLAY?

“I think that’s akin to asking why do people get into religion,” says Michael Shorten, 45, who’s been an ardent role player since Advanced Dungeons of Dragons came out in 1979. “It’s such a unique, individual experience.” When the bald, silver-goateed biker isn’t run-ning old-school D&D games or getting wrapped up in the chaos of a house full of several kids, grandkids and dogs, he blogs about the hobby under the name of Chica-goWiz. He says much of the hobby’s ap-peal comes from experiencing things you could never do in your real life, whether it’s killing zombies, fighting werewolves or negotiating with a clan of vampires.

Role-playing also gives players a chance to escape, however briefly, from the hardships and stress of their daily lives. It allows them to forget things like work, school and finances and step into a world where problems are much more di-rectly-addressable through heroic feats or

the strategic slaying of fero-cious beasts. “For a lot of players, it is a

matter of just being able to let go of who they are for a little while and be somebody else,” says Kevin Czarnecki, a local role-

tics. Ventrella was relegated to playing a non-player character, or NPC, and when Ivey and the main characters (player char-acters, or PCs for short) weren’t around, there was nothing for the rest of the group to do.

After that event, Ventrella went to Ivey to create a game that would allow all players to participate. They spent several months developing the rules system for the New England Role Playing Organi-zation, or NERO. “Most every American LARP that does fantasy-type LARP is based off of that,” Ventrella says. “Most of them can tie their history back to that game.”

Since then, Ventrella has broken away from NERO because of some disagree-ments between himself and other NERO chapter owners. “It was a contractual type of thing where they were trying to kick me out even though I was one of the founders, and I basically said, ‘Fine, I’m just going to start my own group.’” He formed the Alli-ance, a similar LARP game with chapters spread out across the nation. NERO and the Alliance are fantasy-themed LARPs that take place in Tolkien- esque s e t t i n g s , c o m p l e t e with sorcery and monsters. Players wear period costumes and armor—most of which are hand-made—and wield boffer weapons, which are swords, axes and the like constructed from PVC pipes wrapped in soft foam and duct tape.

As our group begins to walk into the forest in search of bandits, Gorka hands me a small plastic vial. Inside, there is a small orange slip of paper that says “Cure Light Wounds Elixir.” “Here,” she says. “Drink this if you get hurt, or put it in someone’s mouth if they fall down.” The potion heals anyone who gets hurt in combat. As players swing their weapons at one another, they call out the amount and type of damage they do—“three normal” or “five flame” or “two frost,” for example—while subtracting any damage they take from their health, or body points. Magic spells and other projectile attacks are rep-resented by small cloth packets that play-ers throw at one another. The packets are filled with birdseed so that no animals are harmed if a few are accidentally left out

in the park.Players track their own statistics and

are expected to be honest under the hon-or system. Gorka’s potions come in handy when a player reaches zero body points. The player lies down on the ground and begins to count to 60, after which point the character dies.

As we make our way through a parking lot towards another part of the forest pre-serve, we are halted by an Alliance rules marshal in order to give the NPCs time to set up the encounter. While we wait, he tells us some of the things our group notices as we travel to our destination. The two characters with the best sense of smell—D’rezz and an Arctic Fox named Tarqaq—notice that the air smells like a highly-addictive chemical called “eupho-ria” or “happy gas.”

Our path is littered with fishing line tripwires that stretch from tree to tree, representing traps set by the bandits to keep intruders out. The fox is eager to trip them, just for fun. He’s almost as excitable as Gorka, who, ironically enough, is the one to restrain him and keep him from blowing himself up. A clearing at the end of the path represents a cave where the three bandits we’re after have holed up.

It turns out they were only stealing to sup-

port an un-

h e a l t h y euphoria habit.

After a tense nego-tiation with weapons drawn on both sides, D’rezz manages to knock them all out in a whirlwind of expertly-tossed orange birdseed packets (sleeping gas), al-lowing us to apprehend the brigands without anyone getting hurt. I hang back behind the rest of the group, essentially defenseless, so that they can protect me if things go awry. With the imaginary stolen goods secured and the criminals safely bound with imaginary rope, we head back towards town to speak to the sheriff

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

JONATHAN ALLEN

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player and veteran LARPer at the young age of 24. “In a way, that’s a lot like a vacation.”

Czarnecki is something of a jack-of-all-trades. He’s been role-playing since he was 13, and as a student at Colum-bia College Chicago in 2007 he started a company called ThirdShift Realities, which he runs in between his work as a freelance voiceover artist and random stints in odd jobs like massage therapy, delivery, and being an overnight door-man. He speaks with the enthusiasm and careful pacing of a natural storyteller, and even over the phone it’s easy to imagine the animated facial expressions and ges-tures that almost certainly accompany ev-ery anecdote.

The company got started when a con-versation with a fellow student after a dra-ma class turned into an impromptu role-playing exercise, with Czarnecki playing a vampire and his friend playing a young woman who just discovered his secret. All throughout a walk to the Harold Washing-

ton Library, they engaged in meticulous verbal sparring as he explained that he must either kill her or turn her into a vam-pire and she tried to talk her way out of a tough spot. After the exercise, Czarnecki’s friend was blown away by the intensity of the experience. She suggested that lots of other people who were unaware of role-playing would love to try it.

He started ThirdShift to provide play-ers with the most authentic and immer-sive game experience he could. “When I was a kid,” Czarnecki says, “I always thought, ‘Someday, when I play pretend, I’m going to have the cool toys. I’m going to have the cool props and the costumes and the set pieces. When I play pretend, I’m going to throw one hell of a party.’” His connections with other students and creative types gave him the perfect op-portunity to make that party a reality. He knew enough actors with ties to art gal-leries, night clubs, and warehouses to be-gin setting up very intricate scenarios. He had access to enough professional and

realistic props and costumes to begin telling detailed, immersive stories.

In addition to providing a sim-ple escape from real-life drudgery, Czarnecki says he’s seen players in his games use the experience as something more cathartic, as a way to deal with every-thing from rela-tionship problems and addiction is-sues to phobias through the use of role-playing tech-niques. He recalls one girl beginning to overcome her a r ac h no p ho b ia during a game. “She learned how to put that aside, how to be some-body else for five

minutes to forget your own fear.”However, such benefits of role-playing

are largely ignored by people outside of the culture. The popular idea is that any-one who plays tabletop or LARP games is a social reject with no life. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Matt Shiplet is not the stereotypi-cal basement dweller that’s supposed to embody the hobby. But he certainly doesn’t look out of place at his first Alli-ance game. As a swordsman named Nova Blade, he’s dressed from head to toe in au-thentic medieval garb, including ornate leather armor that covers his chest, shoul-ders and forearms. He says he often rides his motorcycle to events in full armor, his foam weapons strapped to his back as he shoots down the highway. Shiplet was pulled over once just because the officer was fascinated with his outlandish getup.

The 24-year-old Naperville resident graduated from Lycoming College in Wil-liamsport, Penn. with a major in psychol-ogy and a minor in theater. He rides a 1981 Yamaha 850 Special and plans to enlist in the Navy this summer to join the nuclear engineering program. He’s been role play-ing for about eight years and LARPing for about five. He says the mass appeal of these games is enough to debunk the idea that they’re solely for maladjusted nerds.

“This is a national thing,” Shiplet says, noting that he’s been to LARP events where the attendance numbered in the thousands. “This is bigger than people want to give it credit for.”

According to Paul Foisy, owner and founder of the Chicago chapter of Alli-ance, role players are people of all ages, genders and walks of life. He says he’s seen everything from students to doctors, teachers and police officers at Alliance events. “It is a very wide breadth of people that do play this game. There’s no real one demographic that chooses to play.”

There’s also a hint of hypocrisy to the broad brush role-players are painted with. Czarnecki finds it amusing to hear people complain that only geeks role-play. “But only geeks were playing video games 20 years ago, and now, every jock plays Halo.”

However, critics of the hobby haven’t only called it nerdy—they’ve also called it dangerous. Role-playing was one of the original media whipping boys, considered a menace to society long before rap mu-sic and video games took the blame for everything wrong with America’s youth. Parents, politicians and religious leaders

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said these games were warping the minds of the nation’s children. Negative conno-tations have remained with role-players long after D&D left the reactionary media spotlight.

When Czarnecki tells people he plays D&D or LARPs, he says they act appalled, as if he’d just admitted to a heroin habit or something. “I’m not telling them that, I’m telling them ‘Yeah, I play role-playing games,’ and they get roughly the same re-sponse.”

Much of that bad reputation comes from a few isolated incidents that have

given the hobby a bad name. “The worst of it—and I mean the worst of it, the sharp edge of malign attitude about role play-ing, comes from those very rare individu-als who have taken it too far.” He recalls a particularly disturbing case in 1996 when a group of teenagers playing Vampire: The Masquerade in Murray, Ky., degener-ated into a violent, murderous cult. While Czarnecki admits that such behavior is reprehensible and unacceptable, he says people who commit such atrocities had problems long before they played any games.

Czarnecki compares that situation to the pundits who blamed video games like Doom for the Columbine shootings, argu-ing that the people who committed those crimes and violent acts had problems that were not caused by their hobbies. The fact that a hobby appeals to people who happen to be unstable does not mean that there’s anything wrong with the hobby. At worst, Czarnecki says, the game tends to attract outcasts, misfits and people who don’t quite fit in with mainstream society. “If this gives them a place where they can get together and hang out and play pre-tend, whatever, I’m aces with that.”

Despite those lingering connotations, role playing has slowly been making its way into mainstream American culture

Maybe you want a bit more realistic

combat in your LARPs. Maybe sword-and-

sorcery fantasy just isn’t your thing. Maybe

you’d rather be a vampire or a werewolf.

Maybe you want to be part of a paramili-

tary task force dropped into the middle of

a city overrun by ravenous zombies. Worry

not, brave adventurer, the LARP world is far

more diverse than just a series of Middle

Earth knockoffs.

Dagorhir Battle Games and the Bele-

garth Medievel Combat society are fantasy

LARPs that aren’t concerned with story and

character so much as realistic combat. While

they still use boffer weapons, the combat is

full-force and full-contact. Functional protec-

tive gear is a must, and many players make

their own leather, chainmail or plate armor.

A number of different groups in Chicago

run games based on White Wolf Publish-

ing’s “World of Darkness” and “Vampire:

The Masquerade” series, which combine the

real world with vampires, werewolves and

all kinds of other things that go bump in the

night. Many of these put a greater empha-

sis on story and character interaction than

physical altercations, and actors often use

them to hone their skills.

The Great Chicago Rising lets players in-

dulge in all their zombie apocalypse survival

fantasies. Dressed in military surplus uni-

forms and armed with boffer sticks, shields

and NERF guns, players fight their way

through haunted-house style rooms full of

actors dressed and painted like the ravenous

undead. The objective is simple: kill zombies

and stay alive. Imagine a Resident Evil game

come to life, and you’d be pretty close.

THE WIDE WORLD OF ROLE PLAYING

For a lot of players, it is a matter of just be-ing able to let go of who they are for a little while and be somebody else. In a way, that’s a lot like a vacation.

–Kevin Czarnecki

and, in doing so, becoming more and more socially acceptable.

Foisy says increased media atten-tion, including spots on the G4 network and a few different documentaries, has done a lot to legitimize the hobby. He also says getting made fun of in the Paul Rudd film Role Models has become a feather in the community’s collective cap. “You know, at the very least—hey, if you’re not worth laughter, you’re not worth much. At least it makes people not think that we’re really scary.”

As the sun begins to set behind the

trees of “South Napers”—the fantasy name Foisy gave Naperville’s McDowell Forest Preserve—the costumed crowd of 15 or so sit around wooden picnic tables, their swords and shields leaning against the benches. They chat, bicker and yell as they attempt to divvy up the spoils from the day’s final adventure. They bid gold and silver coins—minted specifically for use in Alliance games—for the right to claim slips of paper rep-resenting various potions, spell scrolls, weapons and magical items as their own. They pat one another on the back, congratulating each other on the day’s escapades. They begin to disperse into smaller groups as they gather their weapons and equipment and pick up any stray birdseed packets that have been left on the ground. Gorka runs alone across a field in the distance, screaming with childlike glee and wav-ing her sword adamantly at the air in front of her.

As everyone prepares to leave, the Duke (Paul Foisy) makes an announce-ment: There will be a feast in celebra-tion of the day’s success, free of charge for those who wish to join him, hosted in Lord Portillo’s nearby dining hall.

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For as long as I can remember, I have been a nerd. Not just a nerd in the glasses-wear-ing, book-toting, good grades getting sense of the word (though all of that is certainly

true), but in the obsessive, won’t stop talking about it, will learn every single thing about the things I love and annoy everyone nonstop with “fun facts” sense of the word.

It’s entirely possible I’ve always been like this. When I was 3 years old, everything I owned reflected my extreme love for “101 Dalmatians.” At the age of 6 I would watch nothing but that PBS show “Ghost-writer,” in which a ghost spells clues to solve myster-ies in the air. But aren’t all children like this, to a cer-tain extent? It’s what I convinced myself of, anyway. No, it wasn’t as a 3 or 6 year old that I truly became a nerd. The journey began in my fifth grade honors English class, and the destination was Middle Earth.

At the age of 10, my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. White, handed me “The Hobbit.” It was the begin-

ning of the end of any chance I had of being cool. Immediately I was sucked in to Tolkien’s

world, embarking on a treasure hunt with dwarves, solving Gollum’s riddles, and

fighting a dragon. And so the obses-sion began.

One obsession to rule them all

by Brianna Wellen

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there

and back

again

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD HARTING

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“I would bring them to school and read them at the lunch table, hoping someone would take notice and ask me about the books.”

there

and back

again

It was slippery slope. First I discovered the 1977 animated retelling of “The Hob-bit” and watched it over and over again with my dad, who had loved it just the same in his youth. Then I read “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” and “The Return of the King.” I would bring them to school and read them at the lunch table, hoping someone would take notice and ask me about the books. My conversa-tion became riddled with phrases such as, “This is just like the time Aragorn hunts the Uruk-hai to save Merry and Pippin.” To many of my friends, this was tiresome, but my excitement could not be contained. And then came the movies.

My timing, it seemed, was perfect. In 2001, right after I had finished reading the entire series, “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out in theaters. I saw it four times and immediately bought a poster of Legolas, which I am not ashamed to admit is still hanging up in my childhood bedroom despite my mother’s pleas to tear it down. It was the end of the end of any chance I had of being cool. When I asked my par-ents to borrow a credit card to order the Elven Brooch Leaf Clasp from Skymall (If I wore one, it would be like I was a mem-ber of the Fellowship! Like best friend rings with fictional characters!), we all knew there was no turning back.

Ask any of my middle school friends about my favorite phrase to greet them with, and they would inevitably tell you how much I loved saying, “A red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night.” I marathoned the movies, and when the extended DVDs came out, I marathoned again, not sleeping for days so I could

read the book, watch the movie, read the book, watch the movie, forever

and ever until I knew ev-erything about anything

having to do witheither.

This behavior has repeated itself in many forms ever since, always

resulting in a few scoffs from others

who don’t understand the magic and wonder

of all the things I find my-self obsessively drawn to. I’ve

been called “Nerd!” and whatever the intentions of those using the term, it’s one I accept with pride. Why wouldn’t someone want to be a nerd? It’s so much fun! When you like something, why wouldn’t you want to be immersed in it? Learn everything about it? Become an ex-pert in that? It’s a practice I’ve carried on with joy, nerding out pretty much always. Thanks to Bilbo Baggins, Middle Earth and J.R.R. Tolkien, I am nerdy and proud. tique metus in tincidunt.

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nOt

a

herOIf you want to survive a

zombie apocalypse, you have

to break a few friends...

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by Michelle Cachey

Immanuel Lutheran Church and its rec center are a pair of aged buildings in Steger, Illinois. Quaint, I’d usually think. How nice they looked. The church’s pointed

white roof bent over the parking lot in the distance, watching over us, holy and quiet, framed by the pink evening sky. My friends and I weren’t there for any god, though. No- for something like that to happen to the world, all the gods must have been murdered. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself without bursting into giggles.

I’d made the mistake of wearing a t-shirt and shorts. The flimsy clothes wouldn’t protect me from grabbing hands and gnashing teeth, I realized. I thought it was the right choice when I got dressed. The July air was still hot even as the sun set and the gnats whirled around us.

“You guys ready for this?” Luke grinned down at me and the rest of us college kids. About a dozen of us stood there in a row, ready to fight for our lives. Most of grinned back at him, but a few wore steely masks; they were facing their new roles with absolute seriousness, glowering from behind their bandanas and army vests. Luke hoisted up his makeshift stop sign shield.

I saw the game manager move across the field. He raised his hand and shout-ed, “Game start!”

The zombies shambled toward us from the edges of the church property. They were just actors, but they made convincing zombies: tattered clothes, well-practiced groaning, mouths drip-ping with red, the works. Luke and had somehow roped the gang into partici-pating in a survival horror LARP, a live action role play, called the Great Chi-cago Rising. We had transcended the highest level of geek, and I felt like a fool. I wouldn’t have even been there if someone hadn’t purchased my ticket as a birthday gift.

The rec center- which was now an abandoned lab in the altered scenery of our imaginations- was about one

hundred feet away. Nick, the manager, jogged behind us and called out our ob-jectives as though he were the narrator of our lives. We were to “blow up” the fa-cility by placing a “bomb” in the deepest basement. That night, I was one of the operatives sent to complete the mission. We all bolted through the field, kicking up grass blades and dodging endless zombies, and spilled into the parking lot as we shouted plans of action to each other. The sounds of sneakers slapping against pavement and the plastic click-clack of firing Nerf guns peppered the air.

Tom and I, the appointed engineers, dropped down in front of the lab’s entrance with a pile of plastic “circuit chips.” The first step was to get the door open. Engineers are basically the puzzle-solvers of the group. If we couldn’t figure out how to fit the plastic bits together quickly, the group would not be able to progress, and we would eventually be overwhelmed by the zombie horde.

“Guys, hurry up!” Heather stood at the bottom of the stoop and swung her foam bat at an undead assailant.

“We’re working on it!” Tom shouted back. The pieces were shuffled around again and again, turned and flipped. The rest of our friends, armed to the teeth with bats and guns, fended off the swarm as we tried to complete a circuit. I felt like something was at stake, even though just a minute ago, I felt reluctant and dumb. None of it was real, but the pressure squeezed my chest. The game brought out a tone of earnestness that I’d never heard in my friends’ voices. Solv-ing a puzzle had never been so intense. I was having fun, and I was terrified.

Minutes passed. The shouts behind us became more desperate as I heard barking- not a dog barking, but a person- and Tom and I yelled as a zombie burst through the bushes next to us. Heather whirled around and swore, puffy hair flaring up around her face. The actor was wearing a dog mask now and leapt on all fours, far more agile than the other shambling monsters. We all laughed

PHOTO BY HEATHER O’CONNOR

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and screamed, scrambled to get out of the way, defeated the monster with a few clean hits, and then finally got the door open. The completed blue circuit thrummed with energy.

It was a church rec center, but things were different when all the lights were off. When the sun set. Our flashlights made the tile floor glow sickly yellow; the humidity suffocated our pound-ing hearts. Every closed door made you worry. Each corner we turned left a deeper unknown behind us. The environment was perfect- it evoked a channel of adrenaline I never knew I had, or maybe had just sealed off since I grew up.

It was a haunted house that we could play in. The only rules were the ones that formed the barriers of the world we were playing in. There were no clear

paths to guide us, and these actors were out for blood, not just screams. Meta-phorical blood, of course.

The apocalypse was way too much fun. We got better at being operatives as the time passed; it flew by without us noticing. Farther we plunged into the abandoned laboratory until we’d made it past three hours’ worth of undead abomi-nations and puzzles. At some point we lost track of what “floor” we were on- the rec center only had three floors, but the game was structured so that we were pre-tending there were more. Going upstairs was really downstairs, or downstairs was upstairs sometimes, and it wasn’t long before it got too confusing and we just stopped paying attention.

During our adventure, I’d been stuffed in a locker by a giant zombie who’d taken a liking to me, stabbed by the

most vicious monster in the game, and tumbled into an out-of-play actor as I screamed and dodged a zombie crawling at my feet. The bullet I shot didn’t even count because I was too busy screaming to call out the damage. The actor I fell into laughed past his scary make-up and said, “I like your style,” in a mischievous voice.

Really, my friends and I were just play-ing pretend. It’s easy to turn your nose up at the idea; that’s what kids do, what nerds and escapists do. But I know now just how much I would have regretted missing out. We ran and jumped and laughed as though we were children on a playground. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d pushed my body so hard and just didn’t care, panting, sweating, my t-shirt clinging to my back.

As fun as the game was, the whole

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was nothing compared to the final few minutes. We’d been trapped. Two hulk-ing zombies, one of which was Nick, looking far less jolly than he usually did, guarded the elevator in front of us. They shoved us away with riot squad shields and lunged at us with their bats, moan-ing and snarling, trying to police even in undeath. They were broad and armored, there was no room to squeeze past them, and more zombies kept flooding in from behind.

The medics were out of supplies. Our allies were getting slowly worn down, picked off, and lay wounded all over the floor, unable to move or fight. I loomed in a corner I thought would be safe, glow stick in one hand and the bomb held to my chest with the other. It was just a plastic box with toy grenades and a but-ton inside, but it was the most important object in the game. At that rate, we were going to fail the mission.

Luke cursed as he went down, again- there was nothing that could be done for him after that many hits. Soon he’d rise up as one of our enemies. A few of my friends had slipped past the riot zombies as they mauled Luke and cried out to me from inside the open elevator doors. The light spilled into the room like visible hope and they waved their arms. They looked like crazed angels in the light at the end of the tunnel.

“Come on!”“Let’s go!”Amy tried to drag Luke to the eleva-

tor. She made it about a foot before the riot zombies groaned and beat her

down with frantic swings. I was the only one left up in the room. The monsters swelled toward me. Voices rang out from the safety of the elevator.

I yelled with my heart in my throat and tossed the glow stick on the ground, wishing, hoping that it would serve as a distraction. With comical, questioning moans the zombies turned their heads and swayed towards the neon blue glow. I was overwhelmed with the strang-est combination of glee and panic as I vaulted over Luke’s body and slipped past the pair of hulks. There was a cheer as I tumbled inside the elevator.

And then, as Josh hit the first floor button, a scientist we saved said, “you know this is the basement floor, right?” The young woman crossed her arms over her lab coat.

There was a long silence, and then a collective, dull, “oh.” For a moment we all felt like morons.

“Set off the bomb!” Josh yelled.I stared into the room, at the piles of

my wounded friends, and cracked open the box as the zombies lurched towards us.

There were no rules here.“Sorry guys, I love you!”I mashed the button and slid

the bomb through the closing elevator doors.

“The apocalypse was way too much fun. We got bet-ter at being operatives as the time passed; it flew by without us noticing.”

JONATHAN ALLEN

14

Neverin a million years would I have guessed that I would have the opportunity to combine my love of outdated, analog photography techniques with my love of Nintendo. Boy, would I have been wrong. My

very first project in an Experimental Techniques photo class was themed “time.” The students were to display the passing of time, by their own interpretation, using either Van Dyke Brown or Cyanotype printing processes. I won’t get into the techni-cal aspects of the processes, as there’s a lot of jargon and fairly esoteric mumbo jumbo.

I. Love. Nintendo. Sure, I’ve played games on other consoles and genuinely like many of them, but at the end of the day, my gaming heart belongs to Nintendo. It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that started it for me. Sadly, Zelda fell off my radar for several years until Ocarina of Time was released. That game, and my love of it, changed my outlook on video games as a whole.

I was obsessed.I made my parents buy it all for me. From the NES to the

Wii, we had all the systems. So when it came time to do this “time” project, I had an immediate and clear concept. I was go-ing to show the progression of time through the consoles. I did this by photographing myself sitting and holding each console in my lap. I remained unchanged to signify my consistence with the system and then in PhotoShop I warped the consoles into each other. I printed transparency negatives and contact printed with Cyanotype on cardboard and finally arranged the hard copies in a flipbook style and a scanned version that I made into a GIF.

The final product was exactly what I’d hoped it would be and it was received well by both classmates and professor. My pro-fessor was impressed at my combination of such an old school photo process with modern technology. I hope for many more memories to make with both Zelda and Nintendo.

Photos / Story by Tiela Halpin

A lifetime of Nintendo

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CHARACTERSGuyMonsterWoman

LIGHTS UP

Minimalist bedroom of a twenty some-thing, bedroom door stage right; bed, stage left; closet door, back stage; swivel chair in center of room.

Guy enters, walks halfway to the bed, then doubles back and clicks off the light switch. The lights fade down, his hands go out as he works his way to the bed in the dark, knocking against the chair, then making it. He rolls in and pulls the blankets over him.

Pause where Guy goes to sleep.

Monster emerges from closet, stands a bit away, looking at Guy. Monster plays with bottle in his hands and walks to the chair. He sits. Beat where he takes a sip from the bottle.

Monster takes a long drink.

Beat

Monster drinks again and rubs his face.

Monster: I don’t get this drunk on Sundays, but tonight is special. Our anniversary.

Guy rolls over to face monster.

Monster: There’s my guy. My big guy.

Beat where Monster looks Guy over.

CLOSETMOnster

Monster: We haven’t seen each other in years, but, but you know how it is. Fondness grows with distance. Humans say that, right?

Guy rolls over in his sleep.

Pause, monster sighs and takes an-other drink.

Monster: It never felt right with anyone else.

Beat, Guy snores.

Monster: And I know it hasn’t been the same for you, I mean, look how soundly you’re sleeping. Not a care in the world, dreaming of the sweetest thing that pink melon can dream up.

Beat

Monster: How can you live with yourself? What keeps you going?

Beat, Monster takes another sip and coughs.

Monster: I mean you were never the biggest kid I scared, or the smallest. And sometimes I whiffed with you, but, boy-when I could get it right, could you scream.

Beat

Monster: I got you so good when you were eight that you couldn’t sleep anywhere but the kitchen for a week. Never told your parents, but they knew, carried you back to your bed every night.

A short play by Jon Natzke

Beat

Monster: I used to be so good at that, scaring people. I was so proud of myself.

Monster shakes the bottle to see how much is left.

Monster: I was the best in the business, probably the best in the world

Beat

Monster: And then you learned the secret that they all learn.

He leans forward and runs a hand just over Guy.

Monster: I can’t touch you with the blanket over your head. God damn Pasadena Neutrality Act, ru-ined everything for all the monsters. Once kids figured it out…

Beat where Monster takes a drink and coughs again.

Monster: It’s been rough, for a long while. And you were my last. Isn’t that funny? (Beat) You were my last ,ever. Fucking Pasadena Neutrality Act spread like rot up a dead guy’s pecker. The Chinese kid after you figured it out, so did the Danish girl, and the South African…Everybody. It got so bad I couldn’t get a claw within swiping distance of a bedpost. And after a while, if you can’t scare anyone, then…Then you don’t get to anymore…

He takes another drink.

Monster: But its not all bad, you know. I’ve been getting back into

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writing.

Guy snores loudly.

Monster: Yeah, I’ve been trying to get a collection published. There’s not much to do in the daylight for me now, so I write. I got this typewriter and I sit down in my cellar behind the aban-doned courthouse and I write stories. A collection. A short story collection of my past. I think it has real potential. Basement monster likes them too.

Monster plays with the bottle.

Monster: Nobody is telling it from the Ghoul’s point of view. Nobody’s talking to ME, you know?

Guy snores loudly again.

Monster: I know the publishing industry is shot, but there’s always hope right? I think so. Its better than wither away like Attic Monster. I’m sorry, but you’ve lost it, big guy. Let me take a drink for you.

Monster drinks again.

Pause.

Monster: I’m sorry that I came. But I feel like I need to. Everybody needs an ear to pull, everybody. Even me.

The door cracks open and Woman slowly enters, taking slow footsteps in the dark.

Monster: I’m sorry.

Monster drinks

Monster: You were the last person I ever scared, the last person whose eyes lit up when they saw me. And there was fear there, yes, but there was energy too. What we did was…excit-ing…fantastic…Maybe I’m being too nostalgic. I know it’s been a while, but, would you ever…would…

Woman: (Quiet but stern) You can’t keep doing this.

Monster blinks and drunkenly turns.

Monster: Hmm?

Woman: You can’t keep coming back drunk. You wander in, decades old enough to know better...He doesn’t deserve this.

Woman puts a hand on Monster.

Woman: How many more times are you going to stumble into our bed-room?

Monster stares at Guy.

Woman: I think you know it’s time to go.

Monster: I know, I’m just drunk, I’m just-

Woman: That’s not an excuse. You know it.

Monster: (beat) I know.

Woman helps him to his feet and begins walking him to the closet

Woman: C’mon.

Monster tries to shrug her off.

Monster: Wait.

Woman: This is not healthy, for either of you. We’ve talked about this.

Monster: I said wait. Give me a minute.

Beat

Woman: You’ll leave after?

Monster nods.

Woman lets him walk to the bed.

Monster stands over the bed.

Long Pause, Monster laughs under his breath and takes another drink. He goes back to Woman, who holds the door to the closet open for him.

Monster: If he asks, I was just drunk. Tell him—

Woman: Please. You promised.

Beat, monster enters and Woman closes the door behind him. Woman walks slowly back to the bed in the dark, gets in, Guy and Woman settle, his arms around her.

Beat

Guy: He came back again, didn’t he?

Woman: Go back to sleep.

End.

PHOTO BY REBECCA LOPEZ

18

When I dislocated his shoulder, I didn’t expect him to scream so loud.

I anticipated – with false hope – that he’d surprise me. I mean, espe-cially after asking and insisting on sparring. But even the most astute observations fall victim to the faith I put into people. Maybe I should’ve taken it as a hint to let things go once I saw the ceiling light reflect from the blue hued ocean of hesitation that were his eyes. I couldn’t back down though. Have you ever played Shadow of the Colossus? For his looming form produced a silhouette that washed over my body, reducing the temperature in the area around me. Still, the injustice spat out from his chapped and curled lips rooted my feet deeper to this cause – in lame terms, he couldn’t go unpunished.

I was relaxing beforehand when he strolled into the room, lanky arms tucked into faded jean pockets, the sound of sandals squeaking on marbled floors right

AND STREET WARSstar fightersStory by Maurice Meaway

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before the multi-Technicolored dream coat looking carpet. It was the communal spot of the Hotel, located in the basement, so there were a handful of nameless people – I say nameless because I didn’t take the time to meet them – conversing, attired in paja-mas because of the hour. But my eyes were locked on a TV-screen, sleek Playstation 2 controller tucked beneath chocolate fingers; I’d been playing a match of Street Fighter Third Strike with a close Filipino friend of mine, who sat next to me cross-legged on the floor with a smile highlighting his face and glasses mirroring the screen in real time.

We’d been mesmerized by the long lapse in time since we’d last played, so it was like reliving child-hood Street Fighter gaming memories at that moment, until the unforgiv-ing stench of someone who’d been skydiving into moist and humid garbage rocked my nostrils like a Haymaker from Mike Bison: or Balrog, or Mike Tyson – whatever. Point is, my nose flared when I smelled him standing next to me.

First thing he said set the tone:“Street Fighter is for nerds.”

I wanted to SRK the hell out of him – as in Shouryuken: that rising upper-cut that the main characters of Street Fighter do, which isn’t the fireball. But I’d been playing Third Strike, and I did pick the gentlemen boxer Dudley – I had to keep it classy.

“Whoa, excuse me?” I interjected, glancing at him out the corner of my eye only to get a face full of shirt where the legendary Darth Vader clasped palms with Elvis Presley, “You’re an obvious Star Wars fan, sir.”

Checkmate.“Yeah, but that’s okay, everyone loves

Star Wars,” he scoffed, and I could feel how his strands of black hair were flicked away from his eyes with a snap of the neck, “Street Fighter is just lame and uninteresting, as I said before, it’s for nerds.”

My thumb tapped the pause button, “What are you talking about? Star Wars and Star Trek are infamous for their nerds, boss, well, at least next to them hardcore anime Otakus. Even at that,

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due to the success of Star Wars whenever it came out –“

“—May 25th, 1977.”“—um, yeah, whatever. Due to that success

they’ve spawned numerous occasions where people have parodied the creepy cats that dress up as characters, stay in self-induced solitary confinement in their house, etcetera. Star Wars is like the basis for the nerd arche-type man – and not the cool ones, the ones that smell.”

“No matter how you try to defend it, Street Fighter is still lame, and will never impact the world like George Lucas,” came the noncha-lant rebuttal, “And anyway, most of that stuff isn’t even real or even based on practical martial arts. At least the Jedi’s Seven Forms of Lightsaber combat takes from Kendo and Fencing.”

Bewilderment carved itself into the span of my dropped jaw and sparkling caramel eyes, dreaded locks moving as I looked at my friend, who ran a confused hand through his short hair, then shrugged. People began to get hip to our conversation, turning heads now focusing on the apparent focal point of the room – us. Little did this tall Star Wars fan know is that I –

“Am a Martial Artist, entrenched in the philosophy of Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do, and Street Fighter is specifically why I de-cided to research Shotokan Karate just to see if I could try their form of combat out,” With the controller on the floor, I decided to stand, the silver chain on my neck glimmering from the ceiling light that illuminated the white gi’ed, sleeve torn, bare footed, red headband wearing mini-Ryu hanging from the links.

“And Ryu and Ken’s style,” I continued, “comes from Matsutatsu Oyama – the found-er of Kyokushin Kaikan style of Karate and a man who killed bulls during demonstrations with his bare hands.”

Checkmate.“Oh, yeah?” The nameless fan questioned.“Oh. Yeah.” I replied with confidence swell-

ing my chest.“Show me—““—What?”

“You’re a Martial Artist who I’m assum-ing learned some of that faux style you’re preaching about, and I’ve taken both Kendo and Fencing so…let’s spar.”

Two things I didn’t notice during our discussion. One: how the crowd of people began to engulf us like an old school fight scene in a lunchroom, attentive heads and ears listening and watching. Two: that this lanky kid with the blue eyes was about 4 inches taller than my 5’9 stature, looked to have a physique hiding beneath that Darth Vader x Elvis shirt and hoodie, and to top it all off, had somehow hidden the fact that he’d been carrying a sword constructed by bamboo and used for practice for Kendo - known as a Shinai – this whole time:

“…Now?” I asked.“Now.” He answered.Now, by no means was I a pacifist, and

by no means was I the type to walk around with a pumped up chest starting fights, but the wandering warrior hanging on my chain would’ve been thorough in his disappoint if I turned down a spar. A caramel gaze befell my Filipino brother, who shrugged – like usual – being the passive guy that he was, and I chose to oblige the challenge. Rolling the sleeves of my navy blue button-up shirt to the elbows, I watched as he brandished the bamboo sword and slide into the natural middle level posture of a Kendo fighter: feet parallel, left foot behind right, left heel sort of raised, hips forward, spine perpen-dicular, hands gripping Shinai and holding it in front of the waist, where its white tip pointed at my throat – it was a solid stance.

Mine was a right front stance, taken from a branch of Wing Chun: feet shoulder length apart, angled to the left, knees at a slight bend, left arm close to my chest, right hand at a slight extension outward to create three rings of protection.

“Ah, from that stance, it looks like you’re more Form VI: Niman – the Moderation Form or Way of the Rancor.”

I had no clue what he was talking about“I’m more Form VII: Vaapad – the Feroc-

ity Form or Way of the Vornskr.”

I still had no clue.But amidst the baited breaths of the

silent crowd, I swear you could hear the most official voice of an announc-er whisper: Cool Street Fighter fan verses Elitist Star Wars buff. Round One – fight!

And it was over before it started, when I dislocated his shoulder, I didn’t expect him to scream so loud. That false hope I anticipated with all the talk he was doing went to waste, I mean, I was standing in the Shadow of a Colossus in this situation. I guess the moment I sprang forward, go-ing against the tide of the blue hued ocean of hesitation that was his eyes, he didn’t expect to spar an actual Martial Artist. The guy tried to strike once, disregarding his middle stance and lifting the sword above his head, he swung down at me like a carpenter driving a hammer at a nail.

In one quick motion I interrupted and intercepted the assault, breaking the grip of one of his hands from the Shinai, pulled it so far back that the elbow pointed skyward – while sweep-ing a leg at the back of his knees to break down his tall structure – and then: boom, slammed him shoulder first into the ground. I didn’t hear the bone pop from the socket, due to the agonized and surprised yelp that echoed from his throat. But what I do remember hearing, other than the mixture of hush, laughter and chatter of the crowd, was that official voice of an announcer whispering:

You win – Perfect.With a victorious index finger

pointing at the defeated adversary, who was collecting himself, pride and dignity from off the floor, I made it a point to punctuate my triumph:

“I learned that shit from Street Fighter the Movie - Ryu vs Fei Long sucka!”

Checkmate.

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I spent the last of my savings on flinging myself into South America’s wilderness. The world was ending anyway. I thought that I should see it before it was gone. She told me that the

country would still be a pretty place without her.I pinched the brim of my baseball cap and

looked up the stairway to the temple’s altar. It was hard to believe that I stood in front of one of the buildings photographed in her books. The pictures made them look indestructible, like the stone blocks that formed the stair-step sides of the pyra-mids were caulked with magic. Nothing should have been able to destroy those.

The temple crumbled under the crimson glow of the sun. Its majesty had melted away. Vines reached up the rock in desperation, like browning, parched fingers. Even the jungle plants couldn’t survive much longer in that heat.

The wild trees leaned close to the shrine; the ferns brushed their scorched leaves against my back. Sweat rolled down my face and stung my eyes as I stepped out of the undergrowth and climbed the temple side. The thump of my footfalls marked my ascent like a drumbeat and my heart joined it in a fierce harmony.

I wanted to know why the legends and culture of the Aztecs made her smile so wide. My mind screamed that coming here was a fool’s errand, but my heart ballooned with anticipation.

What if those myths were real?When I reached the top I grabbed the pillar to

my right. My fingers clutched the stone nose of an animal face, mouth agape as though it gasped for air.

Our sun, swelling billions of years too early into a red giant, stretched across the deathbed of a sky. A few more weeks and it would reach us, engulf the world, burn away all life-

And basked in the harsh, bloody glow of the hell smeared above, waiting for that end, was a god. I tightened my grip on the pillar as a curse fell past my lips.

The emerald snake gazed at me from the altar, scales battered and body coiled. His wings were what assured me that he was divine. They hung off the sides of the platform like ancient tapestries. I could tell his plumage was bright and colorful once.

The Feathered Serpent. His legends were her

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favorite. The memories guided me forward; they silenced my panicked mind, suffocated me with awe. If only she could have seen him.

The clunk of my boots was lost to the dry air, faded into the dying canopy below us.

His mouth cracked open and he spoke in a lan-guage I didn’t understand, complex and twisted. I said nothing, he paused, and then continued in a soft, patient voice. The structure of his words rearranged until I could make out, “My people are gone.”

“Your…people?” I coughed. My throat was parched from the climb, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the canteen out of my pack. I was stricken by either wonder or insanity.

“Yes. I have returned, but they did not wait for me.” His tone was solemn. “Who are you?”

I stopped in front of the altar and placed down my quaking hands. The little god raised his head and tried to fold back his wings; the feathers jerked about in a pathetic flutter and lay limp again.

“A traveler,” I said. I squinted at him through the blazing light. “I’ve come to pay this place respect in the memory of my daughter.”

His eyes were black, unblinking, and held the same quiet ferocity as the approaching sun.

“Family is precious,” the god said, “especially when the end nears.” His tongue shot out of his maw, quick as lightning, and slipped back inside.

I nodded. Precious enough to drive me across the world, I thought. The grief burned in my chest, more agonizing than even the ethereal heat.

“I had exiled myself after shaming my family,” he said.

He slithered to my hand and started up my arm. I flinched when I felt his chilled scales but his hiss eased my eyes shut. It felt like my daugh-ter’s cold, frail hands squeezed me. His broken wings were as soft as her hair.

“No one remembers me.”When I opened my eyes, his head hovered by

my shoulder. “I cannot take care of this sun any longer,” he said. “My people gave me the blood and power I needed.”

Human sacrifice. She giggled at that. My girl never could fathom death, even as it gripped her.

“I have held on for so long. Soon, no one will

*A version of this story was previously published on EschatologyJournal.org on September 29, 2011.

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QUetZaLcOatL*A version of this story was previously published on EschatologyJournal.org on September 29, 2011.

remember anything.” His neck curved and he stared at the sky.

“I don’t want that to happen,” I said.“Nor do I, but I do not have the strength to prevent it.”I thought of my daughter spinning in the lush back-

yard, skirt twirling, a book hugged to her chest.And her endless smile.Life would burn away, and so would each and every

memory.“I can help you.”The world needed to be saved. I didn’t care about the

people left on it; they’d turned into monsters the moment they knew we were doomed. Sacrifices must be made, they said. They slaughtered one another like it was nothing, scrambled to gather weapons, supplies, and claim areas they thought would be safe.

They took her from me. The god’s dull chill sank inside my bones.

“There is very little time,” he said.“I know. It won’t be hard to get what you need.”There was enough blood being shed those days.

HEIDI UNKEFER

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