Capture the Flag (Ninja style)

I'm not entirely certain that this is the day that we played (in fact, I'm almost entirely certain that it wasn't), but it was, nonetheless, an event worth recording.

Bedcheck occurs every night at 10:30. My initial thought upon discovering this was that I'd have trouble staying up that late. This did not turn out to be true, but it did mean that late night activities were, really and truly, very late at night.

On this particular evening, the activity was capture the flag. We were told to meet downstairs at 11:30, wearing either a white or black t-shirt and carrying one of the opposite color.

For this event, in case you were wondering, I actually wore my athletic sneakers, proving that I did actually wear them, so they so totally were worth bringing.

We will ignore the fact that my time spent actually running was very, very limited.

The sorted us out based on which shirt we came down wearing, but the numbers weren't quite even, so a few people were asked to swap. This inculded guys, who just changed shirts where they were, and Ava and I, who slipped away to the girls' bathroom. We then trooped down to Lobby 7 and a variety of other locations as the various bases were described.

It was dark, the buildings weren't what I was used to, and I was very, very confused, and, besides, I was horribly out of shape, so running really didn't strike me as the best idea. As a result, Gopika (who is female) and I elected to play defense. We were assigned one of the hallways that went into our base, and we performed preliminary investigations. Gopika wanted to pace up and down and look threatening, and I wanted to sit in the bottleneck portion and be efficient, so we ended up doing that, chattering about nothing for a considerable time before we heard a noise.

Abandoning our bottleneck, we rushed up the stairs and caught a glimpse of James's flaming red hair. Gopika raced after him, and I returned to my initial location, determined not to leave it unguarded for long.

She came back after a bit, entirely unsuccessful, and we resumed out wait.

We heard more noise a time later. She opened the door to the stairs and screamed. Donny, a member of the opposing team, was standing there, reading a newspaper. He yelled back. She yelled again. He dropped the paper and she chased after him.

I didn't find out that was what had happened until later. I had, as before, been left to guard the door.

Gopika eventually got back, unsuccessful once again, and, soon after, due to complete and utter exhaustion, I left, informing Miles (who was, more or less, directing our entire team) of my departure and pulling the flag from the pants of a possibly-captured-but-maybe-lying Anders for good measure.

I was able to do this because Anders, unlike Dawson and Tramar (I'm uncertain if it was those two--either one may have actually been Nicholas), hung his flag from the side of his pants. The others, of course, had hung theirs from the front, so as to deter people from grabbing at them, as girls, at the very least, would be worried about grabbing other things.

I never did find out if they found that strategy effective.