Chapter 7 - The Invisible Jason

Jason was one of my best friends from the Michael's Magic days. He was at the store most evenings, sometimes roleplaying but usually sinking his disposable income into the newest collectible card game. He was notoriously weak-willed in this regard, having blown a lot of time and effort on such collectible cul-de-sacs as Magi Nation, Young Jedi, the RIFTS CCG, and the Shadowrun CCG. I don't think he ever regretted a single purchase, though. I lost track of him when he joined the Air Force around the turn of the millennium.

Nobody called him the Invisible Jason but me, because it's a story that only I know and Jason claims was too drunk to remember. And while I will admit up front that this story is nowhere as bawdy or as riotously obscene as most tales that involve a strange nickname and a guilty subject too drunk to remember the night in question, it does neatly encapsulate my experiences with LARPers in one very puzzling night and helps to explain why I tend to avoid them, lest they get some of their crazy on me.

LARPers are a peculiar subsect of roleplayers who have somehow managed to paradoxically become far more social and yet way more geeky than your average gamer nerd. They participate in what is known as Live-Action Role Play (as opposed to Dead-Action Role Play), eschewing the normal RPG trappings of funny-shaped dice, rulebooks, elaborate character sheets and handy bowls of Doritos and instead emphasizing the role-playing aspect of the game. The way LARP groups do this varies, but usually it involves dressing in costume and arguing loudly in public places, making strange hand-gestures at one another, and inexplicably getting into games of Rock-Paper-Scissors, then arguing loudly about the results of the game.

It can most easily be described as a six-hour improvisational acting exercise from Whose Line Is It Anyway, except nowhere near as funny because almost everyone is pretending to be a vampire or a werewolf, and everyone is wearing far too much leather than should be allowed. This is because the most common LARPs out there are the World of Darkness games, where everyone plays a melodramatic creature of the night, bemoaning its own immortality and dark supernatural gifts. Then the entire vampire coven heads to Denny's afterwards.

If it seems like I'm rather down on LARPers, it's because there are limits to how geeky I'm willing to look in public. The only reasons I went the first few times were because my friends were doing it, and I heard they would be girls there. And this was true, but here's a fact you can take to the bank: LARPer chicks are, without exception, completely goth-nuts psychotic. And uh, I'm pretty sure they were lesbians, too, because none of them were into me at all. How could any hetero woman resist this sexy beast? And why is it the only women I see dressing in sexy leather vampire garb are the absolute last people who should be cramming themselves into lace-up bondage gear?

But seriously, I haven't spent a lot of time in LARP circles, but I've been dragged to a few games and spoken with quite a few regulars. They've all got a ton of great stories, but it seems to me that most of them hated about three-quarters of the other players, and many of their stories are of complete meltdowns of violence and arson. On the other hand, most gaming stories end in fire and blood...ugh, never mind. I'm not really making any sense. I guess I'm just saying that if I want to game, I'd rather not have to stand around outside for hours in costume playing Rochambeau while trying to take some fifteen-year old dillhole wearing sunglasses at 2 in the morning.

The crazier LARPs tend to be the furry/fantasy games, where the costumes start to involve tails, armor, and body paint. A friend of mine participated in one for quite a while dressed as an anthropomorphized cat, where combats were resolved not with the noble rock, paper, or scissors (as God intended), but by constructing their own weapons out of rubber foam and clobbering other people with them while screaming things like "two magic two magic two magic!!!" as a running damage tally. It takes the luck factor and guessing out of roleplay and puts destiny back into the hands of the gamer! My buddy sent me a picture of his weapon: a five-foot buster sword made of PVC pipe, wrapped in gray foam three inches thick. Or as I liked to call it, "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

There have got to be easier ways to get kicks than painting my body blue, pretending to be a drow, and running around in the woods with twin PVC blades, shrieking "DARK VENGEANCE" as four people chase me with enchanted Nerf products. I'll settle for the relative ease of tabletop gaming and slowly killing myself with alcohol, thanks.

Actually, the worst part of these games is the politics that creeps into large groups. It's hard for new players to get involved because the long-time veterans will often monopolize major story-lines, minimizing other players' involvement in major events, if not excluding them altogether. This essentially ensures that they'll never advance to any real importance in the group, and eventually drives them away or breeds a lot of hostility between groups. I've seen it get ugly. I'm sure there are some great LARPs out there, but to me, LARPers are like those hip swinger couples; I'm sure they have a blast doing...whatever they do, but it's just not for me.

The tale of the Invisible Jason begins at my third Hexacon, on the second night of the three-day event. I was in a particularly surly mood as I stomped outside to my car at 11 PM, just beginning to ride the downward edge of a massive caffeine crash, having just subsisted for the last 24 hours on nothing but potato chips and a nightmarish amount of soda from the consuite. I was also still fuming over how Zarek had just ruined my three-day Shadowrun campaign by suicide-bombing about a hundred kilos of C-12 plastique when it became apparent his troll street samurai was about to bite the dust after I'd just burned his knees off with a flechette pistol.

I don't think I ever bothered calculating the scale of the devastation Zarek's dumb ass inflicted on Seattle-- rest assured that a tenth of the explosive he had in that backpack would have erased the entire block-- I was more outraged at how in the name of Zeus' butthole he'd purchased enough military-grade boom-boom to orbit the fucking Punisher.

"Hey man, you looked at my new sheet and approved it," Zarek shrugged in a queer mixture of nonchalance, slightly-wounded feelings, and not really giving a shit that he'd just impulsively wiped out the entire group and flushed a week of preparations down the toilet.

I looked at the sheet again. He was right. He'd taken a million bucks and blown almost all of it on armor, a gun, and a backpack jammed full with the most insanely butt-puckeringly powerful explosive he could find in the supplement books. I just glossed over the inventory and handed it back to him eight hours ago. I needed sleep, and I needed it yesterday. I resolved to head home, and I was in no mood to argue with Zerek. After two days of dealing with the guy I was about ready to kill him by ramming my thumbs into his eyes.

"Hey man," I heard one of the other recently-deceased gamers grumble to Zerek as I left the table. He was about to get into the argument I'd decided to avoid, "Why'd you have to do that?"

Zerek kicked back in his chair, "Look, I paid for that shit, and I was gonna use it!"

Asshole.

"Besides," he grinned, "I bet you coulda seen that fuckin' explosion from the moon!"

I got out of there before I pushed a couple of four-siders into his eyeballs, twisted his head off and used it for a dice boot.

I stepped out of the hotel, but there was still a lot of gaming going on outside. Arizona's gaming community was still very anemic at the time, and Hexacon was the only convention around that had any appreciable gamer attendance. At the time, gaming at Hexacon was pretty chaotic. Since then, conventions separate the games in a very orderly fashion, segregating the wargamers and miniatures players into two or three rooms, card gamers into a couple others, the roleplayers into two (when there's space to spare, usually splitting organized RPGA play in one room and unsanctioned "rogue" games into another), and the Steve Jackson Games "Men in Black" usually managed to finagle their own room out of the convention organizers to run their demos of Tile Chess and Cowpoker that nobody ever gave a crap about.

There's also usually a room for LAN computer gaming, and there's always an anime room. Trust me, you don't want to go into the anime room. It's like walking into the pod chamber in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You enter a dark room, illuminated only by an eerie blue glow coming from the back of the room. Clustered around this are about sixty mouthbreathing ghouls with skin the color of Elmer's glue, watching a cartoon with Japanese dialogue and no subtitles, but not really caring because the plot generally revolves around children piloting giant, horribly beweaponed robots against an effeminate Anglo villain and his own giant robots.

"You are surrounded!" I imagine the blond Amerivillain leering, "You have no chance to survive!"

"Urnnh!" grunts the hero, fists clenching as the background streaks in speed lines behind him.

"I won't run and hide until there's no one left to fight!" shouts the chipper cheerleader sidekick, her eyes wide and dewdrop-shaped. She'd be sexy if she weren't clearly eleven years old.
"That's right!" says the dim-witted, rotund sidekick whose eyes are never drawn as anything but horizontal lines, "I won't give up! As long as we believe, we can't lose! For great justice!"
"Never give up until the end! Omega Strike!" they shout, launching their mandroids at the enemy, deploying some titanic superweapon that instantly decimates the bad guys.

I really hate Gundam.

Anyway.

As you enter the damp, musty-smelling anime room, the sudden influx of foreign light frightens and confuses the otaku. Their heads swivel towards you in unison, their eyes hollow and black from the backlighting of the television, their skin ashen and zombie-like. Seeing that you are not a woman, they cease to care about you and turn back to their Macross marathon. If you are a woman, you've clearly wandered into the wrong room and should run as quickly as possible to a safe location and barricade the door. Nobody inside an anime room has seen a real woman up close, and if one of them captures you they'll take you back to their nerd lair full of Faye Valentine posters and Ranma 1/2 fanart, and subject you to their weird tentacle-based fanfiction porn. Trust me, don't get taken alive.

That particular year all the gaming took place in one large room about seventy yards square. The noise of hooting geeks was a guaranteed two-hour migraine, and with no clear delineation of gamer turf, there were games of a dozen different genres clashing together in a confined space. Warhammer gamers were fighting for table space with the playtesters for American Megafauna and the guy running a double-blind Boot Hill deathmatch. It was madness. There were registered events, of course, if anyone cared to consult the table near the entrance and sign up, but that didn't guarantee you'd ever be able to find the game in question. You had to follow directions on the fliers like "turn left at the guys playing Formula De, and if you run into the Blood Bowl league, you've gone too far."

Mingled among the lost and wandering, both indoors and outdoors were LARPers. Most prevalent, curiously, was a Pokémon LARP that had somehow managed to rope in more than a third of the adults registered at the con. All they had to do was wear a Pokémon card on a lanyard around their neck and play whatever kids walked up and challenged them to an abbreviated card game. Sort of a make-believe monster-hunting at the con. I questioned the sense in encouraging children to approach strange men in the hopes of acquiring free cards, but it was all good fun and the adults got to feel a bit like Santa Claus for a few hours, since the kids weren't ever really supposed to lose. I toyed with the idea of joining just so I could utterly crush some kid at the card game and taunt him with a mocking jig, shouting "I KILLED your Pikachu! He's dead! DEAD!!!"

But then I decided even I wasn't that much of a grinch. Outside was where the dark-fantasy cosplayers and the White Wolf LARPers had been exiled. You had to feel sorry for those guys sometimes. Even this late at night, in Arizona it was just too damn hot to be wearing armor and layers of heavy clothing. Most of the LARPers were newbies, though, and not in costume since it's not a requirement. Remember, it's make-believe. The White Wolf LARPers were just running some short one-evening games with newbies, probably in the hopes of recruiting more people into the Camarilla or One World By Night, whichever was running those games that night.

I didn't really care, of course, I was just leaving. But my attention was drawn by the very unusual sight of Jason standing statuesque on the hood of a car, his arms crossed over his chest, the first two fingers of each hand pointed out a bit like guns. He didn't see me, or at least didn't acknowledge my presence. He just stood there, staring straight ahead.

"Jason?" I asked after a long moment, just watching him there. No reply. I tried twice more and was about to leave when finally he spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

"Dude, I can't talk right now."

"What? Why?"

He didn't move, but made an exagerrated look with his eyes, swiveling them around in their sockets to indicate a mob of people in the distance. "If the justicar over there sees me, she'll fucking kill me."

"Asshole, you're standing on a car. Everyone can see you."

"Nuh uh," he forgot what he was doing and looked at me. He raised his arms slightly. "I'm invisible. Obfuscated." Now I understood. He was assuming the standard LARP posture for a vampire who was actively exercising his Obfuscation discipline. The game had tons of hand gestures. Walking around with your hands raised over your head like a rampaging bear meant you were a werewolf engaging in a bit of the ol' ultraviolence, or tugging at your eye meant you were using Auspex to gaze into the unseen realm. That kind of thing. Technically, Jason was invisible as long as he didn't move out of the shadows.

"And you've chosen to stand on the hood of a car."

I waited a long time in silence for an explanation to this one. Eventually he exhaled a slow breath, looking very introspective. "I don't know man, I'm drunk."

"You can't remember why you got up here, can you?"

No answer. Which was basically an answer in itself.

"This isn't your car, is it?"

"...No."

"You do realize that if the owner of this car gets back and sees your dumb ass standing here, he's gonna feed you your own balls, no matter how many ranks in Obfuscate you have."

No answer. But suddenly he brightened. "I got an idea!"

"Oh god."

"No no, just get J.D. down here. I can leave if I got some backup."

J.D. wasn't coming. I'd personally dragged him up to his hotel room earlier that night after he made the mistake of visiting the bar. The guy looked like a roadie for Motley Crue, down to his wardrobe that seemed to consist solely of black concert t-shirts and persistent nine-day beard growth. Just to look at the guy you'd think he'd done his fair share of drugs, but the guy was a complete lightweight when it came to drinking. I mean it was embarrassing; two tequilas into the guy and he was damn near comatose. I'd never seen anything like it. I thought he was kidding around until he fell asleep at the bar in a puddle of his own drool.

"That's kind of going against the spirit of the game, isn't it? I'm not playing. Besides, what did you do that would make her instantly attack you if she saw you move from that far away?

"She has Auspex, dude. She thinks I committed diablerie."

"Did you?"

"Well yeah."

"In a convention game?! You buttnugget." Gamers curse each other out like longshoremen. It's just a habit we pick up from playing Settlers of Catan and Diplomacy. "You're never even going to run this character again. It's a one-off game!"

"Dan said I could keep this one for our weekly game if I survived."

This was getting surreal, and I was too tired for much more. "Wait here," I said, "I'll get help!"

I went to my car and drove home.

Eight hours later, I return for the last day of gaming. He's still there. Still standing on the same car, the LARP long over. I don't know how many sober people could have stood on the hood of a car for more than ten hours, let alone a drunk one. Stunned by this sight, my mind reeling from the multitude of questions I had, I ran up to the car. He was asleep while standing up. I didn't even know you could do that, and I didn't know how long he'd been doing it, but he spent the whole time with his arms crossed. He was still invisible.

He made it.