Makoto Nagano is a champion. He has appeared on the Japanese sports entertainment show Sasuke nineteen times out of its twenty-five seasons. He has made it to the final stage of the intense four-part obstacle course five times, holds the speed records for the first stage, and out of the 2,500 competitors to attempt the challenge, he is one of only three men to complete the entire course.
Wow, wow. I have a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff for this one.
First off, all of the characters were named after famous explorers. All of them.
Dr. Willoughby Shackleton = Hugh Willoughby + Ernest Shackleton
Isabella Verrazzano = Isabella Eberhardt + Giovanni da Verrazzano
Monte Hensen = El Monte is the name of a place or something somehow associated with exploration expeditions (I had a reason for this originally but I can’t remember, I wrote this over a year ago) + Matthew Hensen
Porter = Russel W. Porter
Other factoids:
- This story was published in my college’s literary magazine, The Lightkeeper
- The inspiration for Shackleton was Hemet Nesingwary and his expeditions in World of Warcraft. Nesingwary’s name is an anagram of Ernest Hemingway, who also provided a small amount of influence.
- Hemet Nesingwary is a dwarf. Dwarves in World of Warcraft are basically Scottish. Thus, Shackleton was originally Scottish.
- Similarly, Isabella was originally British, not Italian.
- Shackleton’s character may have been based on Nesingwary, but the inspiration for the story was Dr. Livingstone and his discovery of Victoria Falls in 1855.
- My infatuation with Dr. Livingstone was sparked by an anecdote told to me by an American history professor I had. The story involved Dr. Livingstone getting hired to report to some American newspaper, and everyone thought he was lost because he stopped sending letters, when really they were just getting lost in the mail. This is what the whole “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” thing is about.
- This was completely coincidental, or maybe subconscious, but my inclusion of tiger lilies framing the Falls as a way to find them was purely because I liked tiger lilies and they were a unique enough flower to constitute Shackleton recognizing them. Turns out, in one of the areas Hemet Nesingwary frequents in World of Warcraft (Sholazar Basin), there is a huge lake that five waterfalls run into, called the River’s Heart. Around the waterfalls in the River’s Heart, one can usually find a vast amount of tiger lilies.
The more you know.
Dr. Willoughby Shackleton was not aware he was lost until somebody found him. In fact, he had been in Africa for thirty-three years and had already mapped out the southern half of the continent by the time he was located. He was fairly positive he knew exactly where he was.
In the castle chamber, I carefully poured the ingredients into the grand cauldron, doing my best not to spill. Magic was a delicate art, and therefore a slow process. I did my work by candlelight to set the mood, reading each labeled bottle in the soft glow. The High Mage of the Magic Council watched anxiously as I prepared my potion. I was a great sorceress, and I was about to make a mess.
“It is your least favorite house because they have a dog and their neatly-tied black bags always smell like old beer cans and remind you of the litter box of your cat that you hate for clawing up the furniture.”
I hate that line so much. It will never work. I have edited it like a billion times.
Your job is to throw things away. It’s how you make your money. It’s how you support the woman who wears a ring to match the one you leave at home everyday so you don’t accidentally toss it. It’s how you support the little girls who draw pictures of themselves and their daddy to hang in the office you don’t have. It’s how you live.
Humans Versus Zombies is a nationwide game play by hundreds of college campuses in the United States. According to the site linked above, it’s also played at summer camps and high school and stuff. I’m not surprised, because it’s wicked fun.
The game is pretty simple. Some of this was covered in Versus, some of it wasn’t, so listen up. Also, I’m going by the rules we used on my college’s campus. The other versions may be a bit different.
HvZ runs over the course of one week, Monday through Friday. There’s usually a sign-up period beforehand that ends a couple days before the start of the game. Everyone gets an ID number (you have to sign up on the website) and a bright green strip of fabric. Humans wear it as an armband and zombies wear it as a headband. On the first day of the game, everyone starts out human. Only one player is made the Original Zombie, and they remain anonymous and hidden as a human until they make their first kill. Once a human is tagged by a zombie, they remove their band for fifteen minutes to allow for a “transformation” period, and then they become a zombie.
Humans can defend against zombies, though. A lot of campuses use Nerf guns, but at our school you can’t have those on campus, so we throw marshmallows. That’s nice since marshmallows are biodegradable, meaning we don’t have to worry too much about clean-up. No tagging or throwing ‘mallows indoors. The game is only played outside. This makes getting to and from class really fun.
Throughout the week, the mods host storyline missions designed to give power-ups to one team. I didn’t get a chance to participate in any except one plus the final mission, so I dunno much about them, but it’s stuff like escorting a scientist to get a vaccine or powering up a back-up generator to “call for help” and then the humans get a shorter route to take on the final mission. Stuff like that. Zombies can get invincibility, which really, really sucks. That means they are unaffected by marshmallows.
The final mission was pretty well detailed in my story, so I’ll leave it at that. Fun game.
I’m being chased by zombies. I know I’m about to die, and I can’t help but be pissed about it. We started off with roundabout twenty-something humans going into the final mission, and we’re all going to be killed before we even reach the first checkpoint. To make matters worse, the guy with the broken foot is going to last longer than me. He can’t even run.
Obviously, since this is nonfiction, it actually happened.
This was all in the story, but as a refresher, I made a trip to Chicago last summer to meet up with my friend Kitty. She’s from Canada, but was passing through Chicago on her way to a gaming convention with her buddy, Wade. We hung out for a couple of days and a grand time was had by all. Part of our trip included visiting the Occult Bookstore.
Enjoy this really craptastic picture I took of the outside. I thought I had another, but apparently not. I wish I would’ve taken better pictures. I don’t have any of the inside, but I found this picture of behind the counter on Google images:
If anyone’s interested in learning more about the store, if you just Google “occult bookstore chicago” it should come up. There were a few different links so I’ll trust you to find it on your own.
Anyway, yeah, so that happened. Also I really did buy the mandrake root, and that guy really did babble on at me about the proper uses and invite us to the Wicca practice meetings. I wasn’t quite so introspective during the trip itself, but it was quite an experience.
I wrote this piece in the fall, a couple months after going to Chicago. Now it’s summer again, and almost a year has passed since I made the trip (I went in August, it’s June). I haven’t used the mandrake root. I probably never will, since it’s a great souvenir to go along with my story. Kitty ended up using one of the packs she bought, I think, but I never asked her how that went.
The Wicca Spellbook is pretty boss but I haven’t done anything with that, either. Mostly I just leave it on my bookshelf next to another more modern-looking spellbook I picked up from Barnes and Noble at a discount. Sometimes people ask me questions. Answering is always pretty fun.
The bus is taking us into the outskirts of Chicago. I’m not sure where we’re going. Kitty mentioned something about a magic shop, and Wade has been our designated navigator for this trip. I’m content with being ushered from place to place by someone more familiar with public transit than I. In my suburban hometown, we never had much use for buses and subways.
