"Hey, can I borrow that?" I ask Sticks. He's holding a rock in one hand as he stares into the woods.
"Hm? Oh, sorry, I need it." He replies.
"Well, I need it." I insist sternly.
He looks at me.
"Okay, let's try again." I relent. He turns his back to me again.
I tap him on the shoulder. "Hey, mind if I borrow that?"
"Oh, I'm using it."
"I'll be quick."
"I'm using it RIGHT NOW." He states.
I gesture with my hands as I prepare to say something. "Fuck, I'm not good at this, am I?"
Sticks breaks character. "No you aren't. You think this is being assertive?"
"No, I don't know what that means."
He rubs the forehead of his mask. "Okay, you hold this." He hands me the rock. I straighten up again. He turns around, then turns around again. "Hey, that's a rock, right?"
I check the rock that I am now holding. "...Yeah, what about it?"
He grabs it from my hands and walks away. I look at him, then at my empty hand, then back at him. He spins on his heels and gives it back to me. "Thanks for letting me borrow it, man."
"I... uh..."
"Yeah, exactly. That's what being assertive is really about. If you're brash enough people will just let you get away with it, they assume you aren't worth the hassle. Be aggressive, but in a chill way, you know?"
I rub the back of my head. That girl from the cabin shootout a few weeks back nearly kicked my ass. Most of the bruises and cuts from that night have healed, but not the one from where she caught me in the jaw, that one's sore to this day. Weirdly, the head blow was from someone else, and even though I don't feel it anymore, I still habitually act like I do. Maybe that's just part of the job. My new life is a lot of fun but it's still not great. "Come on, it's a bit more complicated than that."
Sticks is leaning against the car right beside me. "Nah, not really. Oh, also, I think you already know this, but I remember the last guy so I want to make super sure, don't get yourself too involved in torturing anyone. You're going to need to move fast and keep your head in the game."
I throw the rock aside. In the distance, a car's engine is getting closer. "I ain't going to fucking torture anyone, don't worry. It's not like it's what I want to be doing."
"Ah, right. That's why you were so into it that you got distracted and let someone pop you from the side." He comments.
"I ain't the last guy, Sticks. I ain't a sadist. I'm here to help you guys clean up the place and go home, not to live out a serial killer power fantasy."
He waves a hand at me ineffectually. I pick the cardboard sleeve off the ground and pull another french fry from the packet. I have no idea what these are called here, France is currently in five pieces for refusing to let their Indochinese colonies join the Chimerican Federation back in the 50's. "More ketchup?" Sticks asks, offering me a collection of plastic packets. I won't turn it down, the soyburger turned out to taste like total ass so these fries are my breakfast and that means they need as much mass as possible. Frankly these also don't taste right but at least I like them. I don't even want to check the ingredients. They might not even be made of potatoes, it'd be, like, spores and tree bark or some shit.
My tastes change when I'm wearing a deer's skin so maybe whoever they got this off of was just a picky eater.
After a new layer of red sauce lays atop my meal, I hear a slurping noise and look at Sticks. His fingers are pulling out of his mask and moving towards the next ketchup packet. "What the fuck are you doing?" I ask.
"Eating. Same as you." He replies, mouth full.
I exhale and let the noise be carried away by the wind rustling through the trees around us. We pulled over on a dirt path off a rural road, and our contact is driving to meet us. We can hear her tires in the distance. That's why we stopped play-acting.
A bomb-black luxury car waxed to a mirror sheen pulls up beside us. A maidservant steps out of the driver's seat. "Sorry about the delay, we got stopped at a checkpoint on the way here."
"No problem, we hit it too." Sticks shrugs.
The servant opens the rear door to reveal a well-dressed deer kid about my age. He doesn't quite look like my disguise, but he's male and vaguely the same species, which is close enough. "What the hell is this?" He complains. "The camp is an hour up the road." The maid nods at us.
I grab him by the arm and pull him out. He grunts and fights against me but my other hand has pulled out a revolver and is pointing it at his head. Sticks has a gun of his own and is a few steps away, also pointing it at the kid.
"Oh, I get it. For your information, my parents don't negotiate with kidnappers. They don't have to." The snotty rich kid growls and spits at the maid. Her professional smile has become far less professional. She quietly wipes the saliva with a napkin. "Let me go right now or your asses are fried."
"Kid, I'm not wearing a mask." I tell him, dragging him over to our far less luxurious car. "It's because I already know you ain't going to be telling anyone shit."
"You motherfu-" I smash him in the face with the grip of my gun to knock him unconscious. It fails and he howls in pain, holding his forehead with his free hand. I hit him again, hoping that putting in all my force again will make it impact harder. On the third try, it finally works. A few zip ties and one gag later and he's in the trunk and away from the prying eyes of the world.
Sticks hands me the contents of the kid's pockets. Wallet, ID, a few caramels. Apparently my name is now "Darnell". My clothes ain't quite as fancy as those of the real Darnell's but I think I can pass for a millionaire's uppity spawn. I slide into the back of the new arrival, feeling the softness of the luxury seats. I'm assuming it's fake leather. I hope it's fake leather.
Sticks looks around awkwardly. "You ain't ready for the new personality, are you?"
"No," I admit sadly.
He grunts. "Well, good luck."
I throw him an energetic thumbs up and the car jolts backwards, getting ready to leave this isolated gravel road in the mountains. After the cabin adventure, we decided I needed to be popular, and that meant learning how to act like someone who would be popular.
Darnell was the perfect target. He was homeschooled and his family had moved to this part of Appalachia only recently, and before that they lived in the far-off city of Toqua (formerly Nashville and unrelated to Taqua, which is formerly Memphis), so no one at the camp would know how he was supposed to act or what he was supposed to look like. He was also a spoiled rich kid who was used to having things work out his way because of other people's efforts, leaving him deeply unsuspicious. Most importantly, his family's top maid was not nearly as loyal as they thought. She was a dedicated environmentalist and hated the little brat and had no problem talking about both of things. That's how we realized what we could use him for.
If everything went according to plan, Darnell would be last seen mingling with the other campers at Defense Against Serial Killers Study Camp, and then would be just one more tragic loss.
My eyes scan the cabin and stop on a bunk bed with no one in it and nothing around it. One last time, I pull with all my force and drag my luggage just a little further. I don't reach for the top bunk, not that I could keep it if anyone else wanted it, and my main concern is having to haul this piece of garbage as little as possible.
When I entered Cabin C, every head turned to look at me for a second. I get that a lot. When deer would wander over to Death Valley, all the sheep would look at them, too. I'm the odd one out in this, although the idea of a foreigner isn't so radical that the talking stops entirely. The chatter and clatter only stumbled.
The amount of complaining I did about this trip only multiplied once the whole area got put under martial law to try and catch a wandering serial killer. I, for one, think I have the right to be mad. I mean, I get that the money's awesome, but come the fuck on! As if being the only sheep in every room wasn't bad enough, now people are getting murdered in the woods! People in my age demographic!
I wordlessly let my suitcase fall to the floorboards and undo the lock. This crowd looks classy enough to not steal from me, but I'd be an easy target, and either way I'm going to be keeping this closed so all my stuff isn't exposed to the elements constantly. The single air conditioner in one of the windows doesn't look like it's enough to keep this whole place cool once the sun gets high in the sky, especially when the room is full of warm bodies.
That's another thing about Appalachia. The deer deal with temperature a lot better than sheep. I am sweating all the fucking time.
"I cyan't believe this!" A deer complains in a thick Siberian accent. She's clearly an immigrant and that's why she hasn't adopted the pseudo-Southern drawl that most of the deer from old families have. I think she's a TUNDRA but I'm not an expert in deer species yet. "I finally gyet out of god-damn Post-Trans-Eurasia and its god-damn haunted forests after tyen god-damn years and we hyave to syettle in the one place in Chimericah where the woods are exectly as full of boolshit!"
"Your family came to the one place in Chimerica where this has happened before." Another deer points out.
"Not really," I interject. "Last year we found out that, like, a dozen murders in Death Valley had been committed by one wolf." Wow, thinking back, that was the headlines for, like, months. Mostly because they could make unlimited jokes about the albino perpetrator having been a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'.
"Wait, really? How often does this stuff happen?" The native-born deer wonders.
I shrug. "Hell if I know, who gives a shit about serial killers in another region?"
"This doesn't syound any safer than Buryatia!" The ex-Soviet complains.
"Ah, ain't nothing to worry about, Tundra." Another deer (I think a WHITETAIL?) speaks up. "If it's anything like last time, fucker'll be in a body bag by Saturday."
The ex-Soviet TUNDRA snorts with feigned derision on a layer of worry. "I hope so. Oh, my nyame's Karouk."
The whitetail grins. "Selig, nice to meet you. Oh, so besides the massacres, how do you like Appalachia, Tundra?"
"My nyame... is Karouk." The TUNDRA complains. I try to look away. This is the song and dance every immigrant gets to go through and it's never fun to watch. Lots of foreigners take their names very seriously. It's a post-colonial thing.
But here in Chimerica, we take a more progressive view. It's not just deer. Away from the other ungulates, I'm not Kowen, I'm a SHETLAND. The Whitetail starts explaining. "Listen, you're a Tundra deer. That's the important thing everyone can see about you. Not a lot of them around these parts."
"Once you get used to it you realize it's liberating it its own way," a deer from a rarer species chimes in. A SAMBAR, maybe? Possibly?
The conversation lulls again with a new entrance, but not because he's a non-deer, it's because he's a non-female. The room of around twenty only has one other male and he's at the far end, chatting with his own cloud of girls. Statistically, Appalachia has a normal male-female ratio, so I guess us having two guys is nothing special.
The two dudes are very different, though. The new arrival stands awkward, his face downcast, his eyes cautious and guarded as if he's expecting a challenge. His hair is messy and his clothes are ill-fitting. Maybe the lock I have on my stuff will get some use after all.
There was a period in my life where I was in the Cub Scouts. The people were the most friendly any group ever was to me, but that is a very low bar, and I wasn't learning anything I didn't already know anyways. By the time it ended, my Scouting adventure was best measured in months. I have no idea where the badges and patches from that era wound up.
Years on, it's bizarre to be at a scouting retreat with armed guards.
Oh, sure, there's the pretense of this being some sort of survival skills camp, but I've been here before. Literally. There was a resort at this exact location. My family couldn't afford it, but we passed by a few times. This one is a fair bit more built-up, but it's nothing I haven't seen before. The walls are thin, the beds are stacked on top of each other, the climate control is... well it's actually better but it's still not nearly enough. These kids should count themselves lucky they didn't have to bring their own tents and sleeping bags.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Of course, the new world comes with new problems. I don't even know what the fuck I did but I think I managed to make a poor impression just by selecting my bunk. I bet it's the clothes. The designer jeans alone are worth more than my dad made in a month and somehow I can't tell the difference between them and Walmart's okayest denims. I think I'm supposed to be able to feel the money and put out an aura of maximal disposable income. Or some shit.
"Hey," a Whitetail says, standing tall as I sit on the edge of the bed and unpack as much of my things as are necessary. Whitetails are the most common race in Appalachia, there's like... one, two... four in this room, five if you include me.
"Hi," I reply, looking up at her. "How's it hanging?"
"It's alright," she replies.
"Cool." She waits for a second, staring at me. "Oh, uh, I thought you had something in mind." I continue. She looks at me askew. "Can I help you?" I ask.
She gives up on us having a real conversation and turns to leave. In Chimerica, my standby is to talk about race (it took some getting used to) but I can't do that from one Whitetail to another. And in normal America, my standby was, uh... nothing. I should have expected this, though, Chimerica has a wide-ranging and comprehensive system of birth control to keep males at about %10 of the population (to reduce public aggression, OBVIOUSLY) and while that means women run the country out of necessity it also means that every male is a hot commodity no matter how disheveled he is. It's going to be hard to keep a low profile, especially if I don't seem like I'm used to girls hitting on me. Chimerican girls treat inexperienced boys the way sharks treat bleeding swimmers.
After a few minutes of me not introducing myself, the camp started according to the schedule I got at the sign-in tent. We all filed outside and to the far end of the grounds. Now I sit, separated from my neighbors by a few inches of bench space at one of the lunch tables. It's just a bunch of folding furniture in an open field. A short ways away there's a stage so that camp officials can make announcements and speeches, like one is doing right now. She's going on about how the odds of dying to the serial killer are low but if they listen to their teachers they can make it nearly zero, and how capital-G God is looking out for them, and how, even if they never use what they learn directly, they will still likely discover something about themselves.
I'm the serial killer that old fuck is talking about. I'll be the judge of how the odds stack up here. Although I think it will come down to those pseudo-cops with rifles standing around us rather than what they teach these dumbfucks.
I look down at the coursework for the next two weeks. At the very least, I mostly won't be bored. It will be interesting to see what they talk about in "Violence Psychology" since I already know it will be dead wrong. Most of these are either theory or extended playtime. Sometimes my new role lets me do cool stuff.
The speaker finishes waffling and we all stand up to go to our first lesson. I'm in Group C, which means I sleep in Bunk C (I already have a suitcase there, and lost top bunk privileges) and I follow Schedule C (which means I need to go to Clubhouse 2 for Community Organization within the next few minutes). The groups are all basically interchangeable, being made primarily of female deer with a smattering of males, non-deer, and the exceedingly rare male non-deer, much like the rest of Appalachian society. My own group has only one obvious stand-out, a sheep-girl-thing. I'm somewhat sad we aren't the group that got the platypus-girl-thing I think I saw.
The camp's layout is uninspired. It's split into two levels to fit with the terrain better. At one end there's a bunch of bunkhouses, 8 in all in two rows of four more-or-less. On the other, there's a loosely-organized pile of clubhouses used for activities, classes, housing the faculty, that sort of thing. The mountainous terrain means that there are multiple levels of terraced ground to the resort, but there are a few places where there are stairs or ramps because the grade is too severe for walking. This place is only a hundred meters off a real road and if we go further away there's more buildings but the lockdown has shuttered the resort for the near future and this batch of happy campers and their guardians isn't enough to take up the whole neighborhood, so they just send some guards to check the extras to make sure the teenagers ain't doing teenager bullshit. There's also a river in the distance. You can't see it from the buildings because it's on the other side of a layer of trees, but it's only a few minutes away on foot. They didn't clear that much land for this, only the bare minimum.
The sun outside is as warm on my magically-attached fur as it would be for my skin. The morning dew wipes off on my overpriced jeans. A lot of the animals I saw in my bunkhouse are moving in the same direction as me, along with those who arrived before or after me. Many of them already know each other and are chatting loudly about the local boys. I don't recognize any of the names.
Stepping onto the floor of Clubhouse 2, I can feel under my feet how flimsy the construction is. As a replacement for tents, the buildings are hardly sturdier. Possibly less so. I bet I can use that.
The desks are sized for preteens rather than high schoolers, but whatever, this is not going to be a place of intellectual rigor. There's a deer police officer with the nametach "DRACHMA" and one of the blue-coated strangers standing by the chalkboard. Drachma is also a whitetail deer. When I was waiting in our cabin, I was seeing how many of my peers had species that I could guess. I was confident in my guess for fifteen out of nineteen (I'm not counting myself in this Whitetail disguise or the sheepgirl). One of the students was from the country formerly known as the Trans-Eurasian Soviet Republics and currently known as a total shithole made of competing warlord states. I got a freebie off of her because they started talking about race and called her a tundra deer.
Officer Drachma spends the first half hour explaining tasers, handcuffs, and all the other tools of the trade that aren't lame as shit. Kids won't be enticed to join the force if they realize it's mostly paperwork and documentation. One of the girls enthusiastically let herself get pepper sprayed for the lesson. She groaned and complained about how much it hurt as she clutched her eyes and tried to rub the powder out, stumbling back to her seat. I can't imagine why she thought it was a good idea.
The blue-coated stranger was more interesting. The police officer wasn't the pinnacle of health and youth, but this other girl was even less inspiring, a slouchy old fat chick in an archaic blue petticoat. She was part of the "Continental Scout Rangers", which was apparently what Chimerica had instead of the various rural militias. I had to stifle a laugh when I realized that she was carrying a breech-loaded black powder rifle straight out of the wild west. Then I remembered that my bolt-action Kar98k is closer to that ancient firearm than it is to a modern assault rifle.
She went into the history of the group and its founding supposedly during the Revolutionary War, told us what they do and how, and how to get into contact if we want to join them instead (or alongside) the police. It seemed like a military-themed riflery club more than anything. They concern me. Cops have training. They'll move from cover to cover, avoid running across open ground, wait for reinforcements or more information if they're in trouble. It makes them harder to fight but easier to plan around. These Continentals, though... when will they run? When will they charge? Is there even a "them" to act, or will each one think and act different? I can't predict a bunch of random assholes.
They're probably better shots than Drachma, and there's a lot more of them. Those rifles can't fire quickly, but a single good hit will definitely take me out of the fight, and I'll be lucky if I survive. If only a few of the dozen-odd Continentals hold their ground and use cover, then that's probably the end of any plan.
The Continental at the head of the class is showing how to use her rifle. I wonder if it's loaded. The thing fires giant straight-walled cartridges and I remember how much difficulty their smaller .22LR cousins gave me whenever I tried to get them out of the breech. She offers to let some of the students hold it and a few hands shoot up. The cop comes to the same conclusion I do and tersely demands, "We're not giving a loaded gun to some children."
The Continental looks around awkwardly. "Well, nevermind I guess. You'll just have to swing by a training meeting for that part."
"It's weird being back in a school without armored doors," I admit to one of the deer as we walk outside between classes. She's chatting with her friends and I don't expect to be seriously let into the conversation but I'm bored and have time to kill and there's nothing better for me to be doing.
"Yeah," She admits as her friends all turn to look at me. "We all got used to the extra security so quickly, didn't we? Oh, hey, if you don't mind us asking, what are you doing here?"
"Like, here at this camp or here in general?" I ask loudly to be heard over the crowd of jean-wearing schoolgirls milling about around us in this interim period.
Another of the deer speaks up. Her Appalachian accent is so thick that I wouldn't have been able to understand her when I first arrived. "Shetland, I think we can guess why you're here at this camp. They convinced your parents that it would help you not get shot in the head by a crazed killer AND get your education back on track." She grumbles and leans against one of the shacks. "That's why I'm here. Where the buildings are flimsy and a bunch of fat old chodes are the only thing stopping any terrorist from walking in and killing us all."
"That makes sense. Well, like, my family's in Appalachia because one of the big logging companies needed a maintenance girl for a bunch of their equipment and, oh, it's so specialized and old that it's cheaper to fly out a technician from Death Valley than have someone figure out how it works from scratch." I explain.
"Really? God damn." The accented deer mutters. Appalachia's economy has three pillars, logging, coal mining, and tourism. Coal mining is not a stable industry, tourism is not a big industry (it's specially-taxed by the government to avoid cultural dilution), and that's why logging is the favored child even though the good forests for it are all in The Gulf just to the south. My mom brings home more money than some entire families do keeping the logging firms' outdated trash machines running smoothly.
"Yeah, I don't want to be here, either." I admit.
"What I don't get is why, in this day and age, we still have to have specialists who move across state lines. Why won't businesses just train their own?" A third deer speaks up, squatting in the grass since it's late enough for the morning dew to be gone.
"It's because a lot of these machines are... they're fucking old and esoteric. And they might not be repairable except by a few people who happen to know how they work and everyone else has retired. There was, oy vey, there was this one sawmill thing my mom was messing with last week where the firm couldn't afford to replace the whole building to make a new one fit but it was so weird that a normal tech couldn't fix it. I think she told me how old it was and it was older than any of our parents." I motion to all the deer around me. "So you take a normal technician and they open it up and it's running off a computer so old it has nixie tubes and every broken part requires a custom-made replacement and they're all like 'what the fuck am I looking at?' 'cuz nobody uses those anymore and it's easier to just import someone who can deal with it and eat the fines than go through the effort of training a whole new maintenance girl for the one time every few years something serious happens involving these."
The deer don't know how to respond. Most of the people at this camp are the rich who own the companies and don't have to deal with the technical minutiae, or are part of the IT economy.
"I'm mad about the guys." One of them speaks up.
"Yeah, fucking Sika's already got a small harem to himself." Another complains.
"Think they're fucking yet?" Mrs. Accent asks.
"Come on. Darnell is still available. Hey, that's his name, right?"
"He's setting off my gaydar." Mrs. Accent says. A set of loudspeakers in the distance imitate a school bell ringing, telling us to move along.
"Every guy sets off your gaydar, Barbie." Her friend points out.
"So? They usually tell me I'm right." Barbie argues. "Besides, he also looks like he went into credit card debt for that bling."
"More for me. I don't know how sheltered he was before this, but I'm going to grow him up. So no touch, got it?" The last deer suggests, smiling.
"I'm not in the mood to fight over a guy." The squatter mutters. "Man, I wish I could smoke."
Physical Training is my second class of the day. Deer are fucking strong, so even though I'm a lot more active than they are, I'm glad I get to sit this one out. They're also cruel when they want to be and I've been picked last enough times. It really is gym class, too, calling it PT is just rebranding to make it sound like actual preparation. I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad that this level of discipline is how society plans to beat me.
Technically, I'm not supposed to be standing on the sidelines watching, but they're playing tag, and Chimerican tag is very... "odd" is one way to describe it. "Fucked up" is another. The rules aren't quite like normal tag, more like a Zombies gamemode in a multiplayer FPS where getting hit means you become another tagger. The other part is that you don't just touch the other person, you assault them. Sexually. Which is interesting from a gameplay perspective but I don't want to be a male on that field.
A few dozen meters away, one girl tackles another to the ground on the empty field, sticking one hand down the loser's shirt and fondling her. That's how you get tagged. You get molested. I am so, so, SO fucking glad that Chimerican society has agreed that males need not participate. Everything in this country happens so much, and that makes no sense but I don't know how to describe it any other way. Nothing just sits there, someone else always comes along to one-up it. That's how we got gender ratio re-balancing to reduce aggression, mandatory hormone therapies to reduce aggression, and mass ethnic separatism to reduce species-conflict-related aggression. This world isn't mostly deer, it's actually fairly balanced, but generations of "antler-measuring" about "genetic and cultural purity" and "inter-species tension" has turned the country into a patchwork of ethno-state "bioregions". Appalachia is, in theory, a place where deer and only deer live. The upper Mississippi river area is called the Eastern Plains and is, in theory, a place where horses and only horses live. To the East, both Carolinas have been merged and filled with foxes, antelope control the non-Florida Gulf Coast, cats of all sizes live in Alaska, bunnies own California, sheep and goats own the Western Rockies, et cetera. This is not merely a cultural attitude, a large part of the war with Zagrostan (Iran) is that Naharaim (Iraq) agreed to split their own country the same way. The RHEA, the government agency that maintains ethnic purity in the bioregions, would be one of the Chimerican government's biggest expenditures if it weren't for the fact that it gets most of its funding either directly from bioregional governments or from fines levied on mixed-race workplaces.
I turn away from the degeneracy unfolding in front of me and sit next to a male from the opposing group, who is propped up against a tree and staring off into the distance, also not watching the spectacle. I sit besides him, feeling the familiar crunch of old pine needles under me.
"Hey," he says. I suddenly wonder why I sat next to him. There's plenty of other places. Well, the answer is obvious, spending an hour doing nothing is a lot of time when you don't have a smartphone to play on, and I left mine behind.
"Hi," I say back.
"What brings you around here, bro-migo?" He talks slowly, at peace with his situation.
"Here sitting next to you or here to this camp?" I ask.
"I meant 'next to me', but if the story's good enough I'll take either."
I put my hands behind my head and lean against the same tree trunk. "I'm here at camp because my parents are paranoid and I'm here next to you because I'm bored and really don't want to play..." I wave my hands in the direction of the running girls. "...THAT."
"I do not blame you one bit." He replies. "Well, at least you're not gay."
I sit up. "You got a problem with that?"
His face twitches. "Oh! No, it's just, uh... I got tired of all the advances girls were making and started telling them I was gay, and now every time a gay guy comes out of the closet they send him to me. It's heartbreaking. Not a lot of guys in general, if you're a gay guy I don't know how you're supposed to find someone. They get so hopeful when they hear about me."
"Shit, maybe I should try that." I mutter.
"Maybe. All in all, I think it was worth it. These chicks don't have a lot of decorum, but at least if they think I'm not into women they won't do..." He imitates the way I waved my hand just a minute ago. "...THAT."
"What's even the deal with that, anyways? I thought schools didn't like kids tackling and touching each other like that."
"Wow, how sheltered are you?"
I look into his brown eyes and study his face. It seems like he's a Lyre Deer. I don't know what makes a male deer attractive but he seems like he takes good care of himself. "Very."
He laughs. "You're missing out on some grade-A comedy. That stuff over there? There's a big push going on to change it."
"I see that."
"You do, actually." He smiles knowingly. "You can tell because they called it 'tackle tag' and not what everyone else calls it. Fucking, 'tag you're gay'. That's the real name."
"No shit?" I look back at the spectacle. Holy fuck, that sheep is getting ASSAULTED.
"No shit!" He yells excitedly. "That's the part they took issue with. And in the 'traditional' games, if the last one standing can't get away for five minutes, she gets stripped, tied to a bed, and they play with her body all night! And this is an extremely heterosexual game, right? But just about every guy around quickly realizes how much this sucks so it's just chicks raping chicks to prove how straight they are!"
"God damn! They actually try and get dudes to play this?"
He nods his head in mock disappointment while he's laughing. "Yup! How's that for an introduction to girls, mister-homeschooled-male? Women are crazy, they're fucking crazy! Can you believe they think I'm the gay one?"
"Haha, man, I don't fucking know!"