While P:S is in editing mode, I thought I'd write up a few stories about my life. These are things that I have wanted to talk about, but haven't really been able to because P:S is written mostly from the perspective of my seventeen-year-old self.
Today's story is from a time in my life when I behaved very differently to the police than I do now. In short: my mother would call the cops frivolously and frequently while our lives were unraveling; accordingly, my five-to-twelve-year-old experience was that cops came running at her beck and call, wouldn't point out her Obvious Bullshit, did nothing to fix the problem, and left after telling my parents to sort out their own issues (which they clearly could not do). Point being: I no longer treat the police like I do in this story, though I had well-established (if personal and improbable) reasons for doing so.
While I was in ninja training, two of the other students and I would get together almost every night to practice on our own. C was a junior who was skinny as a rail, drank way too much Mountain Dew, and once tried to make us watch him play a hentai game (but we shut that shit down for good). Z was stocky but buff, a better student than me at both school and ninjutsu, and an original fan of P:S from a year before we'd met (the conversation started with hobby talk and ended with him asking, "Wait, you're that D Faust?!") One night we'd throw rubber shuriken at each other and block them with wooden swords; the next we'd see how tall of things we could dive roll off without hurting ourselves; another night we'd try to access and navigate unfamiliar areas in the dark without making any noise. You know: normal college stuff.
One of my favorite games, which we only played a handful of times, was Ninja Capture the Flag. There was no flag, so it was a misnomer, but two people guarded a landmark at one end of the quad with swords, while the third had two shuriken and two tanto (all practice weapons) and tried to reach it from the other end without being detected. The second night we were going to play Ninja CtF, I met Z on the quad with our bundle of practice weapons, but C was late. Z and I stretched, practiced our sanshin, and when C still didn't show, we decided to stash the gear and practice our stealth techniques by sneaking around the quad. We tried to get as close to people as we could without alerting them to our presence, because that would be scary, and we're both Good-aligned (Z's more Lawful, I'm more Chaotic, but C was Chaotic Neutral at best).
We got thirsty and found our way into a building by the TV studio door, which had been propped open with a brick. This building has a huge bank of water fountains, and it was the fifth or sixth building we'd tried to enter, so it was our Mecca. After slaking our thirst, we sat and chilled in the foyer. Still no sign of C. Then we heard the distinctive clunk of the front door opening - apparently it had been unlocked the whole time, or at least not securely closed, and we just hadn't pulled hard enough. Some ninja apprentices we are, eh? As a bunch of obnoxiously loud voices filled the little "airlock" between the outside and the foyer, Z and I did the only thing we could think of: we immediately ducked down behind our chairs. These were weird half-back chairs, too, where there's like an eight-inch band across the back and a sixteen-inch square for the seat, but a six-inch gap between the two with just a couple steel rods connecting them.
One of the kids broke off from the pack and went down the hall, and the rest just stood there, talking amongst themselves, less than three feet from us. Then a security lady came out to the second-floor balcony overlooking the foyer and started yelling at them to leave. "You kids can't be in here!" The door was open. "Well, you need to leave." Our friend's in the bathroom. "You still need to leave, and I'll tell him you left. Now go." They all turned around and left, and after she was satisfied they'd gone - completely oblivious to Z and I, even though she was looking almost directly down on our position - she came down the adjoining stairs to go tell Potty Boy his friends were outside. It was at this point that I made a mental note to take back every mean thing I'd said about the absurdity of stealth in video games, because here we were doing more or less exactly the same shit and it was working.
While she was in the stairwell, we hustled silently to the same bathroom and entered, communicating with improvised hand signals. Potty Boy was in the middle stall, so Z and I went into the stalls on either side of him and got up on the toilets. Seconds later: knock-knock! "Yeah?" You almost finished in there? "Yeah." Your friends are waiting for you outside, all right? "Yeah." Anyone else in there with you? Insert sphincter-clenching time-dilation effect as Z and I hope desperately we haven't been noticed. "Nah." All right, then - finish up and get out. "OK."
He finishes, flushes - does not wash his hands - and leaves. Z and I came out, gave each other a look of Holy shit what the fuck woo, and left out the window. At this point, the moral of the story is: always wash your hands, because you never know when a ninja is around to judge you. But this is only the first half.
In circumnavigating the building to get back to the quad, I spotted an open second-floor window and wanted to know what was inside, because weird flashing light was coming from within. So Z boosts me up, I look in, and see that a TV is on - an old-school CRT; this was like early November '02 - and it was all staticky. Z talked me out of turning it off - I'm Chaotic Good, he's Lawful Good - so I got down from the window and we moved on. Some guy in a polo and khakis (or similarly bland preppie attire for an odd Tuesday night at 1 a.m.) had just rounded the corner, though, and he saw the two of us in all black - one of whom was just getting down from an open window.
Back on the quad side of the building, Z said, "He's probably calling the cops." I agreed, in light of the dirty look he gave us and the fact he stopped walking and pulled out his flip phone. "We should get out of here." I disagreed and said we should hide - we were practicing our stealth, after all, and mostly on a roll. We got between the access ramp and the facade, then covered ourselves in the leaves that had piled up back there and just leaned back into the corners. Three to five minutes later, two male officers walked up - we could hear them talking on their radios. One came right up the ramp, less than six feet from Z and within arm's reach of me. They looked around for a bit and then walked off. I counted to 300 - a full five minutes - and said to Z that now we should go.
As we walked away from the scene to get our gear, we passed by where they guy had been and saw that he was still there, still on his phone. He spotted us and became much more animated. We broke into a light jog, and Z said we should change our appearance. At this point, I remembered that underneath my black clothes, I was wearing a tie-dye shirt and powder blue gym shorts, so I readily agreed. But just then, a bike cop screeched to a stop about twenty yards ahead and shouted, "Freeze!"
We complied.
The officer called in backup and had us kneel in some gravel with our hands behind our backs and our foreheads against the exterior wall of a building. Backup arrived, and two cops separated and questioned us while the third retrieved the witness. I was adamant that we'd done nothing wrong. At one point, the cop questioning me said, "You know, I've got a kit that can find footprints in a room, and you've got distinctive footwear. It's in your best interest to tell the truth." I insisted I was, and implored him to use his kit because it would exonerate us. When the third cop returned with the witness to positively identify us, my cop explained to me that they were keeping us at a distance so we couldn't identify the witness and retaliate against him.
I asked, "What magical distance will allow him to identify us, but prevent us from identifying him?" At this point, he told me he was going to double up my cuffs, and then did something behind my back that made me much more uncomfortable. They eventually took Z and I to separate squad cars and drove us to the campus police station.
We cooled our heels in separate cells, and then they had us write out statements. While we'd been kneeling with the bike cop, Z had been freaking out. I told him to just tell the truth and cooperate fully, because we had actually done nothing wrong. Which, thankfully, was true: we had entered through an open door, leaving through a window is suspicious but not illegal, and I hadn't set foot in that second-floor room. I didn't get to say all that before we were ordered to stop talking, it was just to clarify our situation to You, Dear Reader. Because we were telling the truth, our statements matched just fine, and they eventually let us go. My cop said to me, "You know, I took karate when I was your age. If I ever pulled something like this, my sensei would've kicked my ass."
I said, "Your sensei sounds like a real asshole."
"What did you just say to me?"
"You heard me just fine. And that is not how you treat a student." He assured me that this would be on the police blotter and I'd better watch my ass. I thanked him for his advice in the most obnoxious way possible and left. Z and I retrieved our gear from where we'd stashed it and headed to my dorm, where he was going to sleep on the spare bed (my roommate had withdrawn at the last minute, and the university hadn't arranged a replacement, so I just had a spare bed that I made available to guests). On the way, we ran into C and my then-girlfriend, Jennie Fae, who were on their way to the quad to look for us since neither of us was in our respective dorm rooms (or at least hadn't answered the phone). Turns out, C had skipped out on Ninja CtF to get drunk with Jennie Fae, and then he went and took a dump on the 18th green of the university golf course. Classy guy, C.
The next day, Z and I went to our sensei and told him everything that had happened, just so he'd hear it from us first. He asked us at the end of the story, "So what was the one mistake you made?" Getting caught. "That's right. And what are you not gonna do next time?" Get caught. "All right. Lesson learned." The End.
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