Capture the Flag

     Varston looked up from his alchemy as if he hadn’t been listening. He had made almost no progress on the neglected worksheet all afternoon. His tail anxiously tapped against the side of his chair. “What? Sorry—I’ve got to work on this problem set.”

     Hale, his roommate, shrugged. “I’m just saying, you’ve got your entire life to do alchemy homework. But this capture the flag game only happens once a year.” He straightened his bandana in the mirror. “Arrr.” He bared his lupe fangs. “ARRRR. Do I look like I could menace some ninjas?”

     “You look absolutely swashbuckling,” Varston said blandly. “No eyepatch?”

     “Lynn’s going to wear one, but I thought an eyepatch might be bad for depth perception.”

     Hale’s friend, Lynn, popped his head into the dorm room. His eyepatch had a felt skull and crossbones taped onto it. “Hey Hale, ready to go? The pirates’ pregame meeting is in five.”

     “Comin’, matey.” Hale grabbed his backpack from his desk chair. He paused and turned back halfway out the door. Softly, he said, “You sure you don’t want to come? There’s still time to sign up. It’d be fun, all three of us on the pirate team.”

     “That’s okay,” Varston said. “Go have fun being a pirate with- with Lynn.”

     “Lynn likes you, y’know.”

     Varston rolled his eyes and forced a smile. “I’ve got homework to do. Get to the pirate meeting before they make you walk the plank.”

     “Aye aye, captain.” Hale saluted and closed the door, leaving Varston to stew in the dorm alone. The sentences of his alchemy homework undulated, and he rubbed torpor from his eyes after a few minutes. Outside, a group of neopets dressed all in black headed towards the petpeterinary building. Probably where the ninja team was starting out. A pair of lupes dressed like pirates went into the Shenkuu Studies building, barely visible across the darkening quad. Hale and Lynn?

     “Whatever,” Varston muttered. “I don’t care.” He forced himself to sit down at his desk again.

     Balancing Alchemical Equations. Problem 3 of 20.

     If he had to look at the alchemy worksheet for another second he was going to do something dumb, like crumple it in a ball and chuck it out the window. Instead he went down to the dorm common room to get a snack out of the vending machine. The vending machine dinged, but nothing came out.

     “C’mon…” Varston knew he shouldn’t shake the vending machine—it was undignified, and apparently ten neopets are injured in vending-machine-shaking accidents every year. But there was no one here to see him. He couldn’t remember the last time the dorm had been this quiet. He glanced up and down the curiously deserted hall, and then gripped the vending machine with both clawed hands and rattled it violently. “C’mon, gimme my snack. Gimme!”

     No dice. The vending machine must be completely out. Maybe it was for the best; he couldn’t afford to be wasting his money on vending machines.

     His stomach rumbled.

     Well, there was a gross foods vending machine in the next dorm over, right? And the gross foods vending machine never ran out because it was—well, it was gross.

     But nothing came out of the gross foods vending machine either, and the next dorm over was also mystifyingly empty. Varston trudged back to his room, his annoyance compounded by hunger.

     The belltower rang. Three tolls, marking sundown. Capture the flag was starting. And the alchemy homework was never ending. He wondered what Hale and Lynn were doing right now.

     There were three neutral zones in the game: the dorms, the dining hall, and the library. Neither Team Pirate nor Team Ninja was allowed to hide their flag in a neutral zone. The dining hall was already closed since it was the weekend. But the library was probably open.

     And the library had a vending machine in the basement.

     Balancing Alchemical Equations. Problem 3 of 20. Maybe he’d find it easier to get work done in the library; sometimes all it took was a change of setting to get his gears turning again. Plus, a snack always helped…

     Varston packed up his bookbag, peering out the window at the twilit campus. He had expected chaos to erupt the moment the game started, but it had already been half an hour of eerie silence. Maybe he had gotten the wrong idea about how capture the flag worked.

     The fresh evening air made his eyes water. He hadn’t been outside all day. He was prone to extreme hermitude; if Hale didn’t drag him out to the dining hall or to see a free movie screening in the Campus Center, he would go entire days without leaving the dorm. Varston didn’t mind when Hale forced him to get out of the dorm, but more and more recently, Lynn was also joining these outings. When Lynn was there, Varston didn’t know what to do with himself. He found himself patterning into the wallpaper as Hale and Lynn talked and talked, and sometimes Varston couldn’t sleep at night anymore because he was certain that Hale was going to want to be roommates with Lynn next year, instead of Varston.

     His ear perked as a bush next to him shifted. Probably just a snowbunny. In movies, someone was always getting scared by a strange sound in the woods, and it was always just a snowbunny.

     It was too early in the evening for the campus to be this quiet…

     “Stop right there,” said a menacing voice.

     Varston peered around. He was passing through a short tunnel of trees, and in the dark he couldn’t spot the source of the voice. “Hello?”

     “We’ve got you surrounded. Put your hands up.”

     The voice seemed like maybe it was coming from above. Varston squinted. “Um—I’m not playing, so…”

     “You’re a purple draik. Varston, right?” The voice sounded less menacing and more confused now.

     “...Yeah.”

     “I have a list of players right here. It says you’re signed up with Team Pirate.” Leaves rustled and a piece of paper floated down from the branches above. Keeping a wary eye on the trees, Varston kneeled and picked it up. It was a copy of the players roster.

     He scanned the list of names who had signed up under the pirates, tilting the paper and struggling to make it out in the dying twilight. Under ‘Lynn, yellow lupe’ and ‘Hale, blue lupe’, in Hale’s handwriting, were the words ‘Varston, purple draik’.

     “No way.”

     “By the rules of the game, if you’re on Team Pirate, you have to wear a pirate bandana, and Team Ninja has the right to capture you at any time.”

     “But I’m not playing-”

     “Enough of this!” shouted a different voice from up in the trees. “Team Ninja! Capture the pirate!”

     Varston sprinted blindly. Footsteps pounded behind him, and as he tried to turn towards the library he saw a molten ixi charge out of the corner of his eye. He spun on his ankle, heading towards the Shenkuu Studies building, but could feel his lungs tightening up. He wouldn’t make it.

     “Hey! Hey, in here!” A white paw waved from the entrance of the Campus Center, and Varston dove through the door and it slammed shut behind him.

     A bar dropped across the front of the door with a clang, and he sank to the floor, hacking and fighting to catch his breath. “Thank- thank you- I’m not playing, I don’t know why-”

     A vaguely familiar white xweetok kneeled down. “You okay?” She offered him an unopened water bottle. “That was pretty close. I heard you saying you were neutral. Is that true? Team Ninja shouldn’t have been chasing you.”

     Varston gulped at the water bottle greedily. Once his heart had slowed, he said, “I think my friend secretly signed me up for Team Pirate. Thanks for rescuing me.”

     The white xweetok patted him on the shoulder. She was wearing a tattered t-shirt and a leather belt across her torso like a sash, with water bottles strapped on. “It’s a tough world out there. We’ve got to look out for each other when we can. My name’s Ellie. Maybe I can help you.”

     He remembered where he knew her from. “Oh—hi, I’m Varston. We had Advanced Potionry together last semester.”

     Ellie frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

     “I, uh, I sat in the back.” Varston looked around at the Campus Center. Newspapers and dry torn papers littered the atrium, like a hurricane had swept through. “Are you Team Pirate?”

     “I’m neutral, I didn’t sign up.”

     “But… you’re still playing?”

     Ellie suddenly looked over his shoulder out the front window of the Campus Center door. “There are ninjas out there. We need to get away from the door.” She led him to the student lounge on the lower floor of the Campus Center. “Welcome to Marsyas’s Outpost.”

     A cardboard sign at the entrance to the student lounge read Marsyas’s Outpost in thick painted letters. Soft jazz played over the murmur of voices from inside. A pair of jubjubs in neutral white bandanas guarded the doorway.

     “All pirates and ninjas have to leave their bandanas at the door,” one of the jubjubs said gruffly. “That’s Marsyas’s rule.”

     “I’m- I’m not playing.”

     “Varston the purple draik?” The jubjub looked him up and down with distaste, and checked her copy of the team roster. “It says right here you’re on Team Pirate.”

     “That’s a mistake—my friend signed me up without telling me.”

     “He’s with me,” Ellie said. “We’re going to talk to Marsyas about his situation.”

     The jubjubs exchanged glances. “Alright,” they said. “But if this goes south, we’re telling Marsyas that you let him in.”

     “Why is this so intense?” Varston whispered to Ellie as they entered the lounge. “Didn’t the game start, like, half an hour ago?”

     “It’s capture the flag,” Ellie said, as if that explained anything.

     Varston had never heard of a student named Marsyas, and tried to guess who it might be as he looked around the lounge. A group of haggard neopets leaned over the billiard table, holding their billiard sticks casually and nodding along to the music. A peophin and another xweetok had curled up in soft armchairs and were chatting with exhausted rings under their eyes. Far in the back, next to the vending machine, stood a wild-eyed mutant, and Ellie headed straight for him. Varston trailed behind, swallowing nervously.

     “Marsyas, we’ve got a problem,” Ellie said. “This draik here says he’s supposed to be neutral, but he got signed up for Team Pirate on accident. Is there any way to remove him from the game?”

     The mutant stared Varston up and down with glassy red eyes and a too-wide grin, as if his face was stuck that way. Varston tried to smile but gave a weird grimace instead. He had never talked to a mutant before—everyone said they tended to be a bit odd in the head.

     “Well well…” Marsyas’s slithering whisper made Varston’s brain itch. “He certainly doesn’t look like a pirate. He could get out of the game if he removed his name from the official roster, the one hanging in the library. It’s a magical contract. Anyone whose name is on the roster is bound by the rules of the game.”

     “So I’ll go there and-”

     “The library is in ninja territory…” Marsyas blinked slowly, his gummy red eyes seeming to recede into his head for a moment. “Not an easy journey, these days.”

     Again, Varston was pretty sure the game had only started about half an hour ago. “So—could someone who’s actually neutral come with me to vouch? What do you guys get out of running this outpost anyways? This is-” He laughed nervously. “This is kind of insane, guys.”

     “Every year, we play capture the flag,” Ellie said, her face utterly serious. “And every year, it gets out of hand. Neopets get hurt, homework is shredded, friendships are ruined. Team Pirate or Team Ninja may win, but at what price? The only way to win is not to play.” She gestured around. “That’s what Marsyas and I are doing. We emptied all the vending machines last night. If you want snack food during capture the flag, you have to come to this outpost. That’s how we stay neutral. We have something that both teams want.”

     “I turn a tidy profit,” Marsyas said, patting the vending machine next to him. His smile was full of sharp teeth.

     “Um-” Varston tugged Ellie away from Marsyas. “What do you mean, ‘friendships are ruined?’”

     Ellie’s expression turned stormy. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

     The xweetok and peophin from the armchairs looked up. “We’ve lost a good friend to capture the flag,” the peophin said solemnly. “Monique. They call her Monique the Mad Pirate Queen. She’s ruthless.”

     “I’m sorry,” Varston said, shifting from foot to foot. “This happened during last year’s game?”

     The peophin checked her watch. “No, it happened… forty-seven minutes ago.”

     Had everyone on campus gone insane? This was just capture the flag! And it had barely been going on for an hour! “This is ridiculous,” Varston announced. “I’m going to the library to study. And if I get caught by Team Ninja, they can lock me up in a basement. I don’t care. I’ll study there.” He marched out of the lounge and toward the barricaded front door.

     “Wait!” Ellie ran after him. “Wait, Varston, you can’t go alone. The ninjas—they’re ruthless. Their leader, Flick-” A shadow passed over her face. “They call him Flick for a reason. Because he- he’ll-” She drew a finger across her neck, her eyes wide and frightened. “With one flick.”

     “S-seriously?”

     “Well, no, Flick is just his name. But he’s not kind to Team Pirate captives. He’ll take your homework away. He won’t let you study. You need to stay at Marsyas’s Outpost, where it’s safe. Do your homework here. Who knows, maybe Team Pirate will win, and you can go to the winner’s ice cream party without doing any of the work.”

     “I don’t want free ice cream. It’s a matter of principle. Hale shouldn’t have signed me up without telling me. I want my name off the roster.”

     “Then let me come with you,” Ellie begged. “I’m neutral. If I’m with you, it’s more likely the ninjas will believe your story.”

     Varston gazed down at the little white xweetok, certain deep in his bones that if he let her come with him then he would be buying into the game in some irreversible, irrevocable way. The madness that had infected the rest of the campus would catch fire in him as well. But he needed his name off the roster. “Okay,” he decided. “You can come with me.”

     “Follow my lead.” Ellie squinted out at the dark quad through the glass front door of the Campus Center. “I don’t see anyone… but that doesn’t mean there’s no one there. We need to be quick and quiet.” She lifted the bar from the door and slowly pulled it just wide enough for Varston to slip through. She slipped through after him, carefully closing the door behind her. “Okay, on the count of three, we run for the library. Ready? One… two…”

     “Three,” said an unfamiliar voice, and then everything went dark.

     To be continued…