ALRIGHT BOYS GIRLS AND EVERYONE WHO THINKS THE GENDER BINARY IS FOR SQUARES IT’S STORY TIME.
Today, we’re going to talk about the time Paul’s desire for superior firepower turned into a mini arms race that ended with me setting Eric on fire with a homemade flamethrower.
No, Matt Boomer, you sexy motherfucker, I am not kidding you. Let’s begin with some details.
So when I was at the University of Iowa, several people, including myself, bought Nerf guns for impromptu battles in the hallways when we had free time. Mostly this was all good, clean fun, except for two of the guys down the hall, my roommate, and I.
We all thought, rightfully so, that factory built Nerf guns are bullshit. They’re weak, darts are too fucking light, the barrels cause too much friction, which makes them inaccurate and slow, and you have to re-cock them after each shot. That’s some fucking bullshit right there. So we fixed it.
We bought new, higher tensile springs. We bought PVC pipe and lubricant. We put BBs in the tips of our darts, and my roommate and even put in a second spring to automatically cock the gun, essentially turning them from bolt action pieces of shit into semi-automatic friendship-ruiners.
So when I moved back to Chicago, and into the apartment, I obviously brought my Nerf guns (my roommate gave me his when we moved out), and I obviously attacked my roommates the first opportunity I had. OBVIOUSLY this led to everyone buying Nerf guns and modifying the shit out of them.
However, some of us were terrible shots, so certain measures had to be taken to make it possible for them to keep up. Brad practiced in his room every day, Josh built an extended clip for his gun, and Kyle bought the fucking Vulcan and built a 600 dart belt for it because he decided aiming is for people who can’t fire 6 darts a second (he modded it for doubled firing speed using a small car battery and replaced mechanics).
And then there was Paul.
Paul was fucking terrible. Like almost so bad it couldn’t be for real. He once tried to ambush me coming around a corner from 2 feet away and missed by a good 6-7 inches. He literally could have slapped me and he missed. Whatever moving on.
So Paul decides to solve his aim problems in the most Paul way possible: online shopping. He bought 500 foam pellets for a marshmallow gun, two dozen foam discs, and a motherfucking t-shirt cannon.
You see, Paul, much like Kyle, decided aiming was for lames. So he would pour foam pellets into the cannon until it was half full, slip in a disc to keep them from falling out, then shotgun people in the face. I was his first victim and boy let me tell you that shit is terrifying.
So Paul became the big dog in the house during Nerf battles, and the rest of us found ourselves unable to compete. So we all escalated in our own insane ways. Eric and I, the former champions, modified our guns to fire faster, Brad added an extended magazine to his gun, Kyle built a harness so that he could shoot his fucking stupid fucking bullet-storm piece of shit while moving. Josh booby-trapped various parts of our apartment. Suddenly, we were all better than Paul again, so he decided to step his game up.
He started making paper cartridges that would explode open once fired. Suddenly, he could actually fire multiple times a minute, which meant once again, he was at the top. It didn’t help that our reluctance to shoot back out of fear of getting shot was allowing him to take his time, therefore drastically improving his aim.
So we stepped up again. I smooth out the cocking mechanism on my guns, improving my firing speed even faster. Eric adds more weight to his darts, making them heavier and faster and much more painful. Kyle buys a bigger battery, newer parts, and he perfects his belts, which increases his firing speed to 12 darts a second.
So Paul steps up to take advantage of his improved aim and buys something called a Pucker Chucker which basically is a t-shirt cannon except it shoots foam pucks. This means we can’t just shoot at him from the other side of the apartment anymore, so we all step up again. I modify the rail on top to make aiming easier, Eric modifies his grip to make it more comfortable, Kyle and brad modify their barrels to make them more accurate, and Josh jumps on board the crazy train and builds a goddamn under barrel cherry bomb launcher.
And this is where shit starts to spiral out of control.
Brad starts making smoke grenades, Kyle solves his weakness against close quarters combat by using his battery to create a cattle prod to keep people back. Eric breaks the head off an old golf club to use the shaft as a weapon, I put pins in the tips of all of my darts, and Paul realizes that the Pucker Chucker can also shoot real hockey pucks after he steals my bucket of pucks from my room.
So it escalated a couple more steps but I’m going to leave them out partially out of a desire to keep moving forward and partially out of shame anywhoozle when we pull out our final contraptions and modifications that day we shifted from light-hearted fun that was a bit too far to literally combat. Josh had a sword. I don’t know where he got it from.
That battle was terrifying. Our normal fights were like an hour, two hours tops, then we would clean up, get together in the living room with some beers, and laugh about what happened. Honestly we should have known this was going to happen because when we did this after our previous fight, the laughter was less “haha remember when I shot Josh in the butthole? Classic.” and more “haha remember when I missed your face with that puck? Next time I won’t miss.”
So we somehow get into a battle again and this time things go south quickly which is bound to happen when you have a dude in a speedo swinging a sword around while rolling fireworks down the hall. It was literally chaos. There were fireworks and homemade smoke grenades and Kyle made the electrical current in his cattle prod too strong and it was too close to the muzzle of his Vulcan so every few seconds you would just see a flaming dart wiz past and I built a fucking flamethrower and I don’t know what the fuck is going on so I’m just firing it in the general direction of Josh to keep him the fuck away. At some point Brad barricades himself in his room, and so we all run back to our rooms and hide.
We do this for three days. THREE DAYS. I missed classes. We all had junk food in our rooms, and private bathrooms, so that’s what we sustained ourselves on for three fucking days. I, however, try to eat healthy, so I ran out of food almost immediately. After not eating for a day and a half, with food literally less than 50 feet from where I was hiding, I decided that I was willing to risk a trip to the kitchen.
So here’s something important about our apartment: I was the only one who knew how to cook. I had tried to teach the others, but all that had accomplished was several kitchen fires. This meant when Eric also ran out of food, he knew the only way to get a meal was to make peace with me. So he had snuck down the hall to my door, intent on asking me for help.
I did not know he was there.
So when I opened the door and saw a crouching figure in the shadows nearby, I assumed, I think justifiably, that it was the guy who had been swinging a sword at all of us the last time I saw him. So I pulled the trigger on my homemade flamethrower, only to see Eric’s horrified face illuminated by the flames for a split second before they hit his torso.
Luckily, I was using a scavenged fuel source (computer screen cleaner), so the flames were weak, but still fire is fire and fire fucking hurts. So Eric is rolling on the floor with first degree burns on his stomach and chest, and I’m freaking out because Eric is my friend and I just set him on fire, so there is now a lot of screaming coming from the hall.
Now, to lighten the mood slightly, here’s a personality test. You hear the sounds of fire, followed shortly by screaming coming from the hall outside your room. What do you do?
Do you assume the crazy sword guy has finally snapped and is going to kill you all, so you climb out the window onto the fire escape? Congratulations, you’re Brad.
Do you hear the cries of pain and grab a first aid kit before sprinting into the hall to help? Hey! You’re Kyle!
Do you hear the flames so you sprint into the kitchen to grab the fire extinguisher? You are Paul.
Do you come out into the hall to see what’s going on but also bring your sword just in case you have to stab someone? You are Josh and also mentally unstable please put your sword away.
So Kyle comes out and he and I start administering first aid and luckily through a combination of the weakness of my fuel source, how quickly I stopped the flames, and the quickness of our treatments, Eric only gets some first degree burns on his torso. Paul puts out the last of the flames, Josh decides he doesn’t want to stab anyone today, and Brad decides that the lack of screaming is a good thing and he comes inside. I spend the next hour apologizing profusely while cooking everyone dinner, and we decide that hey we should probably have some rules for our Nerf fights to prevent this from ever happening again.
So we all eat, we establish rules about modifications and ammunition, and at the end of it all, we grab some beers, head into the living room, and tell Josh he needs to get rid of the sword seriously dude where did you get that from?
He doesn’t cut the string between them. That’s the cruelest part, Leia thinks—that she can still feel that cord of golden light tied around the struts of her ribs, knotted somewhere in her cardiac muscle, tying her to him. He plucks at it sometimes, and she can feel the vibrations in her throat, her back teeth. (That’s how her brother loves her, bile choking her and a blinding agony, like her heart is trying to squeeze itself through her ribs. I miss you, he whispers through the Force, through her dreams, a lover’s voice. We are all we have, Leia, why won’t you see that?)
It’s cruel, it’s cruel, she doesn’t want to feel the black mold and ice spreading out from his hands, calcifying and creeping closer, ever closer, to her. He should have cut it. He should have finished it, this, them.
But then, Leia hasn’t cut it either. She’s not sure what her reason is.
.
The hardest part is the walk.
She can choke down the greasy slop that they serve at various dodgy cantinas throughout the galaxy. She can sleep on the itchy pallet on the narrow bunk in the Falcon. She can wrinkle her nose at Han cleaning his teeth and trying to talk at the same time—both too early in the morning when she really needs the refresher—and go without a hot sanisteam for weeks. She can lie and haggle and handle a blaster, speak Huttese like an Outer Rim rube or Basic with a thick Corellian drawl that never fails to make Han laugh.
And she can do it all while quietly slipping transmissions for the Rebellion into the right hands, praying that there is someone to read them on the other end. (It’s gone quiet in the wake of Endor, even though the Emperor had mysteriously retreated and all but handed them the victory. Leia doesn’t know what to make of that)
But when she’s not thinking about it, she reverts to the princess, the general—she’s always been someone who commands attention, and it’s written in the way she holds herself, the way she walks. It’s a dead giveaway, Han sighs, exchanging a look with Chewbacca. They’ve been watching her walk up and down the hold for what feels like most of the day, and nothing seems to be working.
We could shoot her in the foot, Chewie grumbles. Or you in the mouth, it’d have the same effect.
There isn’t truly ‘night’ when you spend most of your time in hyperspace, flitting from planet to planet, each with their own orbital period. Once, Leia had been able to shut her eyes and simply know what hour it was in Aldera, night or day, wherever in the galaxy she was. Even after Alderaan was destroyed, she had been able to breathe deeply and know, absolutely know, just before dawn, the oldawu blooms will be opening, or, third night watch, the streets quiet.
These days, she can barely track her own internal chrono. They stumble from morning to midnight to afternoon to dawn and then back, into the timeless suspension of hyperspace. It’s disorienting. She think it’s making her sick.
Still, sometimes, Leia lays beside Han in the artificial dim of the cabin, and she is grateful. She is grateful. It’s easy to pretend in the no-time and nowhereness that they are just two unimportant humans, a man and a woman, hurtling silently through space as humans do. That they have not lost anyone or anything, they are not running. They are not waiting. They are not bleeding out internally, and they are not afraid.
They are just where they are supposed to be.
.
a dream: there is a boy with sand in his mouth, his lips stitched shut by cruel hands. he is heavy, he is so heavy, all the desert in his lungs and belly, burned sere and dry as bones in the sun.
there is another boy, and he is water. he is the flood. he lifts his hand and tears open the boy with sand in his mouth-lungs-belly—washes him away. it is a kind of terrible mercy to drown, the boy thinks.
right then, he is not sure which boy he is.
in this dream, there is a girl who watches them, and screams thunder when the flood runs red.
.
in another world, the boy is still a flood, but he says drink instead of drown. but that is another world. it has no bearing on this one. it’s probably best if you don’t think of it any more.
.
Is he okay? Han asks her once. Leia is sitting in the empty co-pilot seat, her feet tucked under her. She’s fidgeting with her hair—she’d cut it short, terribly short, after some smuggler in a cantina recognized her braids as Alderaanian and nearly blasted her through. (The bounty on her specifies ‘alive’, not ‘well’.) Her head feels impossibly light now, bare and hollowed-out and full of loss.
It’s a kind of vicious equivalence to it, she thinks. Everything about her is full of loss.
I mean—Han starts, but she cuts him off.
I know who you mean.
(If she began spooling that golden thread around her fingers and followed it, to where her brother stands waiting for her in the dark, she knows Han would follow. He would. And he would love the thing she became, however terrible, just as he would love whatever monstrous remnant of Luke they found. She’s not sure he’d even see the ice and black mold growing in the cracks of the people he once knew—she and Luke could blind him with a sharp needle and kiss him after, pet his hair, and Han would be secretly glad, grateful to be wanted, to be allowed.
Sometimes, Leia cannot breathe with how much faith Han has in her, in them. She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve it.)
Well? Han asks. His voice is soft. Is he okay?
I don’t know how to answer that, Leia says.
.
There was talk of a rescue, in the wake of Endor—Lando and Han in particular, still tired-eyed from the battle but upright, warming their hands over the ewoks’ fire. They talked about storming the Emperor’s star destroyer like it was Jabba’s palace, like Luke was trapped in carbonite somewhere and all they had to do was—
Leia had bitten her tongue until it bled. She was in too much pain, her connection to Luke howling, the whole Force digging its claws into her skin, her skull, that the blood in her mouth offered some relief.
At least it was real. She was still real, here, human, and not dissolved into light.
Leia! Han said, when she spat onto the grass. (She had still felt it, the red staining her lips, the corners of her mouth. Every atom in her body was screaming for Luke, her heart pulled against her ribcage like the string might snap if he went any further—)
We can’t rescue someone who doesn’t want to be saved, she’d said, and that was the end of it.
.
another dream:
why? the girl who is a storm asks the flood. tell me why and maybe then I will understand, maybe I will come.
I am so tired, the flood says. aren’t you tired?
they are standing in a charnel-house. she is not the reason for all the bones that lie here, but more of them are at her feet than his. (‘skywalker’ is scored into all of them with an uneven hand.)
that’s not a reason, the storm says. that’s an excuse.
.
They’re in some nameless place that serves nameless food, smoke-filled and seedy, when the grav-ball match cuts out. There’s a collective groan from the assembled criminals and riffraff when the Imperial sigil fills the viewscreen—Han’s good at finding planets, places, where there’s no love lost for the Empire. Leia shoots him an amused look; he shrugs, grinning.
Her humor vanishes when a soft-spoken voice says, My name is Luke Skywalker.
The viewscreen is old and grainy, marred by a spiderweb crack at one corner, but Leia can still see that his eyes are bloodshot, orange-red and unsettling. They seem to find her in the crowd, piercing her through and pinning her to the grimy wall. The nameless food roils in her stomach.
His smile is the same, she thinks. A crooked, farmboy smile, undimmed; almost a smirk but meaning-well.
He smiles as he recites the death toll from some ‘uprising’ the Empire ‘cleansed’. Leia barely makes it to the refresher before she’s sick over her boots.
.
can you come back? the storm who is also a girl asks. if there’s a chance, any chance—
you cannot stopper a flood, the boy says, and turns away.
.
Han finds her in the refresher, sobbing, blood in her ears, her nose. I’m sorry, she chokes out. She gets blood on his cheek but she can’t seem to stop pulling him closer and then struggling away, clawing at his shirt. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry.
It’s okay, Han says, gathering her up, holding her close. After a minute of struggling, she goes still, like a bird with a snapped neck. (He wishes he had a different metaphor.) Hey, hey, talk to me, Han breathes, stroking her shoulder with his thumb. Tell me what’s wrong, maybe I can help. I can help.
I cut it, Leia whispers. I cut the string out. I didn’t have a reason, I just had an excuse, so I cut it out of me. I think I’m bleeding, Han. I don’t think I’ll stop bleeding.
Han exhales. Okay, let me get the medkit, it’s just—
I’m so tired, Leia says, her voice barely louder than a whisper. She’s clinging to him weakly, and there’s blood in hair. I’m so tired.
“Cassie, everyone here has problems. Ax is the only member of his species within a trillion miles who’s not a Controller; you’re a pacifist who spends half her time battling aliens; Jake is just a dumb jock trying to play General Eisenhower; Rachel is about three millimeters away from morphing permanently into the Terminator; and, oh, by the way, Tobias is a bird who lives in a tree and eats mice for breakfast.”
— Marco, summing up pretty much the entire series (via thejakeformerlyknownasprince)
Dear (circle one) Ax Marco Tobias Cassie: I know that you are trying to be extra brave today because (circle all that apply) A) You fucked up the last mission B) You are attempting to live up to Andalite cultural standards of masculinity C) You are attempting to live up to Human cultural standards of masculinity D) You are trying to (circle one) revenge/save/impress ______ E) You have a personal vendetta against _____
I would just like you to know that (circle all that apply) A) You’re right, you did fuck up pretty badly in a way that I never could have anticipated B) You actually saved all of our butts even if you don’t realize it (see back of page explanation) C) No matter how hard you try, you will never be as good as you think your brother was D) You are too close to this E) You are still very special to me
Because of that, in regards to the special mission you have asked to be a part of in order to redeem yourself, I would like to (circle one) A) Give you my blessing B) Ask you not to get yourself killed C) Ask you not to get all of us killed D) Politely ask you not to go, which we both know you will probably disregard E) Tell you no way in hell, if you go I will personally rip you a new asshole
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely (circle one) Jake Prince Jake
Dear Rachel:
I would just like to take the time to tell you (circle all that apply): A) Gold star for being brave for everyone else’s benefit today when you were actually scared B) Thanks for saving my butt C) Thanks for saving the butt of (circle all that apply) Tobias Ax Cassie Marco D) I have a special mission/some dirty work for you (see back of page) E) You are out of control and you scare the pee out of me sometimes
“Imagine you’re at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says ‘Come on, one drink!’ You say ‘no thanks.’ Later, he brings you a soda. ‘I know you said you didn’t want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty.’ For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. He’s just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, you’re teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your ‘no.’ If you say ‘Really, I appreciate it, but no thanks’ and put the drink down and walk away from it, you’re the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didn’t ask for the drink and you don’t want the drink and you don’t have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated.” —The Art of “No” (Jennifer P.)
I’ve never seen this post with the original caption before. I thought I loved it simply from the photography but the depth of the meaning behind it…. Wow.
