The Blake, er- Wiggle, er- Pheonix, er- Uber, er- Paradox Wars! Part I

 The MCU is all the rage nowadays. As of writing this post, the last installment was the show, Hawkeye. Eternals was close, and I saw it after I saw Hawkeye, but only because the show went straight to streaming, while Disney decided not to do that same day release in theaters and streaming. But, that being said, Hawkeye came out most recently. I liked it, quite a bit, actually. It was the closest to the old Netflix Defenders shows that Marvel has come out with. It still doesn't quite measure up, but it's as close as I'm pretty sure Marvel is going to get. That said, I'm dreading the new Daredevil show that Charlie Cox will be heading on Disney+, because as long as Marvel insists on making all of its content effectively PG-13, it can never be as good as the Netflix shows were. 

I digress. In the Hawkeye show, and there is a tiny spoiler in this, there are a group of people that become very useful supporting characters. LARPers. LARP is an acronym that stands for Live-Action Role-Playing. They're adults who pretend to be fictional characters, usually in a high-fantasy setting, and act out their characters' actions as genuinely as they can. It has elements of an improvisational acting troupe, because they all act out the parts of their characters, and cosplaying, because they dress up like them, sometimes in armor, sometimes in wizard's robes and whatnot. Even as someone who is totally into role-playing, whether it's on a console, on a computer, or even in person around a table, I always had a kind of haughty attitude towards those that role-played as LARPers. It probably came from performance anxiety or something, but I couldn't help feel superior. I mean, who goes to those extremes, without shame, when the rest of the world thinks it's stupid, when the rest of the world thinks these adults are acting like big kids. 

And that's where my own experience comes in. Of course, as a kid, I had a lot of fun playing "pretend" with my friends. My cousins and I used to play a lot in this vein. I remember jumping through sprinklers, pretending they were magic mirrors through which we could access magical worlds. I remember pretending to be merfolk in the pools we swam in. And then there was Ray. He liked/likes to go by the name Raemon in the games we played. He would give me the written name Qertus. I think he liked how words could be spelled different and you could still get the same phonetic pattern. I remember him being frustrated that we had C, K, and Q in the same alphabet, because they all made the same sounds. The same was true with U and W in many cases, or S and C. Again, I digress.

We were young enough when this started that my memories of playing "pretend" with my cousins were still fresh. As you recall, like I pointed out in my Nostalgia post, Ray was an aspiring game designer when we were kids. We were his playmates and his test subjects. This game started innocently enough. It started some time in middle school, I think. Now that I think about it, I'm sure, as I remember Mr. Keene, my Earth Science teacher, was in my middle school and he had a part to play at some point. 

Ray and I had a mutual friend, Albert, who was Chinese, a little nasty, pretty funny, and a great artist with a pen or pencil. Back then, he wanted to draw comics. He was good at it and he was obsessed with Batman. One of my first classes with him was a Contemporary Issues in Biology and Biomedicine class. He liked to make fun of me because I was fat, I returned the favor with the help of his spectacular underbite. Anyway, Ray had a class with Albert and another kid, a kid named Blake. Blake was one of the more popular kids. See, in our school system, we had jocks who were popular, but the kids that were really at the top of the pyramid were the preppies, the smart jocks, the ones who applied themselves scholastically, as well as extracurricularly. They played sports, but were in the honors classes and ran the yearbook club and whatnot. Well, most of us nerds shared one side of their pyramid, the academic excellence aspect of it. Interestingly, they provided a kind of buffer against the pure jocks, the kids that otherwise were total jackasses and kind of bullies. Because the preppies befriended us, they kind of blunted the efficacy of the jocks. 

Anyway, Blake was one such super-student, while Albert was more like me, more of a straight nerd. But the three of them, Blake, Albert, and Ray, all had a class together. I don't even know what class it was. I don't even know how it started. But Albert and Blake started to pretend to shoot each other with finger guns during their classes. You know, when you hold out your pointer finger, or your pointer and your middle, and hold up your thumb as if it were the hammer on the back-end of a pistol. Then you snap your thumb down in the act of pretending to fire the pretend gun. Obviously, Ray seized the moment, and him and Albert started to escalate. Blake played along at first, bringing his friends into it. There were times when Blake and Albert would bring their game into our Contemporary Issues class. 

At first, it was a one shot, one kill kind of game. It would reset, I guess by default, every day. But then Ray got his hands on it and started adding rules to make it more fun. Like everyone participating would regenerate every period, which was thankfully marked by the bell heard all around the school. Bathrooms were off-limits because, "no one wants to get 'banged' in the bathroom." We got a bunch of kids to play. Ray called it the Blake Wars. Then, Blake, who in his wisdom, decided he didn't have the time or the social currency to invest in this anymore, he bowed out, no longer wanting to be connected. The rest of us were having so much fun, however, we wanted to keep going. So, we no longer called it the Blake Wars, but rather the Wiggle Wars. That's when Ray really started to have some fun. He introduced more powers, and a storyline to go with it. 

The new powers in the Wiggle Wars were based on level of embarrassment they created. You could go out in a blast of power that took out everyone around you by screaming "Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!" You could become invulnerable for a time as long as you danced weirdly and repeated the word "wiggle" pretty loudly. This doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but you have to remember that at this time, we were pretty much high school age....

We agreed to make a way for use to end the game. To end the game, everyone in the school had to be "d.e.d.-ified". We were fresh off the Columbine//9-11 days, so we had to be careful to make very clear we weren't actually talking about killing anybody, or suicide missions, or anything that could be misinterpreted by uninformed bystanders. D.E.D. stood for Defenistrable Existence Deficient. Defenistratble should have been demonstrable, but whatever. Ray and Albert had together started the gaming club. Clubs in my high school were allowed to write announcements relevant to their clubs that would be read to the whole school in the morning. So, one day towards the end of the school year, one one of the announcers over the PA system used the Wiggle-bomb, saying wiggle three times, "killing" everyone in the school. 

It might have ended there. But we had had way too much fun. So, after the summer, into the new year, we decided to bring it back, but make it less soldiers in a jungle and more Hong Kong Fuey fantasy. This is where the backstory came in, for justification purposes. See, in our game, there was no good and evil. There was "education" which was the stand-in for evil, because we were at a school, and there was "funkilicity" which was the opposite of education and equated with fun and good things. So, we decided that we would claim that after everyone had been blown up at the end of the Wiggle Wars, Ray encountered the Dark Lord of Education, making a dark pact with him for the power to come back to life as some undead monstrosity, where he can come and take over the world now that everyone else was gone. In that afterlife moment, I, Curtis, had been present in spirit to witness this compact, and somehow called on the powers of funkilicity to will myself back to life, like a phoenix. In this new game, the Phoenix Wars, we relied on Hong Kong Fu movies to set the stage for us. Looking back, this might have been Albert's influence, as his family is from China. We all came back, splitting up into "clans". We no longer had the guns we had during the Wiggle Wars, but swords, with which we "slashed" each other in combat instead of "bang"-ing each other. That meant we couldn't fight from across the room, but had to be near each other to engage.

Each kill gave you one experience point. And you didn't die after one attack, anymore, either. We had hitpoints. Meaning when a person attacks, you say "ouch" to signify the loss of a hitpoint. Ray was proficient with guerrilla tactics, running up with a slash and then running away to get himself out of reach before you could respond. When you had enough experience points, you could invest them in more hitpoints, or you could invest them in special abilities that were basically magic spells or powers. You could upgrade your weapon, so that it did more than one "ouch" per attack. There were ranged powers, there were area of attack powers. There were powers that were specific to each clan. As the founding member of the Phoenix Clan, I was able to resurrect myself a limited number of times a day, each time with limited function returned to me. The most basic resurrection meant I could come back and just "slash". More advanced forms meant I had access to unused powers. The most powerful meant I came back more powerful than I was to start with. Ray had Ghost-like powers, and he had powers that let him attack even after he had been killed. That was particularly powerful because as he became more powerful in the realms of undead mastery, that meant he didn't actually have to come back to attack. Meaning he couldn't be killed again. There were other clans, bestowed among our friends. The Serpent Clan, Albert had the Bat Clan, due to his obsession with Batman, the Dragon Clan. We had a lot of fun with this, until enough of us had reached the most powerful versions of ourselves we were going to have. We'd still have fun battles every now and then, because we had a lot of tactical choices with all of our different abilities, but in general, it became boring. So we ramped it up.

Where we go after the Phoenix Wars will be where I pick up next time.