Carlos and Neil Ruin a LARP

The central cabin of the 4-H Horse Camp was a flurry of activity as people checked weapons, unpacked bags full of props, supplies, and foam weaponry, and above all socialized with the intense, frenetic energy of people who shared extremely niche hobbies, only saw each other once a month at best, and were paying eighty dollars to be here.

Off to the side, a well-used 2016 Toyota Corolla rolled into the parking lot, and a tall, thin, nerdy-looking young man with a long ponytail emerged. "Alright, we're finally here. Welcome to Saga."

A less-tall, almost as thin, and significantly less intelligent-looking Latino got out of the driver's seat, and looked out at the activity with an air of vague interest and general enthusiasm. "Woah."

Carlos was Simon's classmate in General Psychology 101, which Simon, a junior, was taking out of curiosity, and Carlos, a freshman, was taking because it had 101 in it, so it sounded easy. They'd connected over a shared love of anime. The overlap in the Venn diagram of Alan's tastes ("medium-pushing pieces of art") and Carlos's tastes ("boobs and explosions") was limited, but by no means non nonexistent. (Kill la Kill. Evangelion. Berserk).

And Simon was always on the lookout for new blood to bring into Saga, the local and long-running fantasy Live Action Roleplaying Game, mostly made up of college students and graduates who still lived in the area. He thought Carlos might be a good fit. Although LARPing had a reputation as among the nerdiest of all possible activities, this particular sort of fantasy LARP was just as social and physical as it was academic, and the scene benefited from the participation of a few amiable lunkheads.

"God, look at all these fucking nerds!"

Carlos's friend Neil hauled himself from the back seat of the car, where he had been sitting in the back seat immersed on his phone for the whole ride. This was probably a blessing. Unlike Carlos, it would be hard to imagine any situation that benefited from the active participation of Neil. Simon had immediately clocked his vibe (4chan troll come to horrifying physical reality), but unfortunately Carlos had invited his friend along without consulting with Simon, and Simon was too much of a nebbish to push back when the greasy townie had arrived at his dorm's parking lot and declared that he guessed he would tag along, as if he was doing them a favor.

"Where are the goth vampire chicks?" Neil demanded, casting his eye around.

"It's not that kind of LARP," Simon stated patiently. "This is a fantasy LARP with SCA-derived boffer combat and..."

"Where losers throw beanbags at each other and shout 'lightning bolt' and shit?"

Simon would have liked to quibble, but he had beanbags in the pocket of his tunic. "... yes."

"Well, whatever," Neil said. "There are actually plenty of hot pieces of ass here." He gazed around the area, nothing that many of the players were clearly college students, many of those were female, and a reasonable subset of those were wearing faux-archaic adventuring corsets, tight leather leggings, or frilly blouses that laced up over full, nubile chests.

"Sweet!" Carlos added, his gaze falling on one particular dusky-skinned adventuress with a straining corset that featured a full five horizontal buckled straps, which forced the rich brown flesh of her tits into high, prominent display. The young woman caught him staring at her chest, waited a beat for him to notice that she had noticed, and when his eyes showed zero signs of moving upward, turned her back on him, instead. Carlos had to settle for staring at her ass.

"Yeah, uh, this group has a reputation for really good roleplaying," Simon explained, "so we have a lot of theater majors show up. Some of them, are, you know... confident." HE, however, was getting uncomfortable with his guests' behavior, so he dragged them over to the area racks of loaner costumes, worn rulebooks, and character creation worksheets.

"Let's get you ready!" Simon suggested, mustering his enthusiasm for introducing newbies.. "See if you can find a few things that fit you, and we'll make you some characters too."

"Do we have to wear this shit?" Neil asked, his nose wrinkling at the uncoolness of these crappy thrift store brown slacks and era-indeterminate button-up shirts. (He himself was dressed in the height of fashion, an armpit sweat-stained t-shirt featuring full art of the MCU's Thanos.)

Carlos, meanwhile, jumped right in. "Look at all this cool stuff!" he enthused, holding up a tan-colored vest. "Like, check out this jacket thing with like, no sleeves!"

Carlos quickly covered himself in several layers of mismatched garb, topped off with a helmet that someone had made out of a cap covered in layers of duct tape. Neil reluctantly put on a feathered cap as his token effort.

"Great," Simon encouraged. He gestured to them to sit down at the character creation workshop table. "Now let's figure out your character skills. It's a point-based system - your new characters are going to get 16 points to work with."

Carlos and Neil each flipped through one one of the small green spiral-bound, Kinkos-printed handbooks. Carlos handled his gingerly - he didn't trust books with no pictures in them.

"16 points doesn't get you shit," Neil complained as soon as he saw the skill chart. "Magic goes up nine levels but I can only afford three?"

"Three levels of magic is pretty good," Simon contented. "And you know, part of the fun is character growth. If you keep coming back, you get more experience points to spend." Neil scoffed under his breath at the idea of repeatedly spending time interacting with other human beings in an outdoor, physical environment.

"It's enough to get a long sword," Carlos said, peering carefully at the book. "Hey, is there a bigger sword than longsword? Like... super-long sword?"

"Well, there's a polearm," Simon informed him.

"Oh cool, then I could, like, jump hella far."

"What?" Simon asked, confused.

But he was interrupted by a raised voice. "New players, gather over here for weapons training!" called a short, bearded man in a rather Robin Hood-esque hat and tunic, brandishing a padded 'longsword' into the air.

"Oh yeah, if you want to use a weapon you're going to need to do safety training," Simon confirmed.

"C'mon, dude," Carlos urged Neil.

"Ahhh, I'm not gonna fight," Neil demurred. "But I'll come watch, I guess." Neil maintained a healthy self-image by never doing anything that he had a chance of failing at. His success at physical activities was far from assured, but he had a 100% success rate at sneering condescendingly from the sidelines.

Carlos was soon watching intently as the 'weaponmaster' (an official role in the organization, apparently) demonstrated the basics of the LARP's boffer combat system. If you got hit in a limb, you couldn't use it, dropping to your knees if one or more legs were incapacitated. A hit to the torso incapacitated you. No hit points or different damage ratings, but armor could block attacks. There was other stuff too, but it exceeded Carlos's attention span by a significant margin. Even the armor thing was pushing it.

Soon it was time to put a weapon-like concoction of fiberglass, foam, nylon, and duct tape into Carlos's hot little hands, and face him off against a fellow newcomer.

"Okay, now try a swing at your opponent's arm, and..."

"Yaaaah!"

"Ow!"

The weaponmaster blew his whistle immediately. "No, that's dangerous! All swings must be 120 degrees or less." He demonstrated the proper range. "Let's try again."

"Yaaah!"

"Hey!"

"Carlos, only weapons with white socks on them are approved for stabbing. No stabbing with your black sock weapon. Okay, let's try this one more time."

"Yaaah!"

"Gah!'

"NO HEAD SHOTS!"

---------

Carlos slunk back to Simon, followed by a smirking Neil. "They said I'm not allowed to use a weapon," he confessed.

"Yeah, well, that guy was a power-tripping asshole," Neil said, in a rare demonstration of perfunctory emotional support. "I'll bet he flunks people all the time just for kicks. Right, dude?" he asked Simon.

"I mean..." hesitated Simon, who had never heard of anyone failing to get approved for weapons combat.

"But I wanted to be a fighter," Carlos complained. "What am I gonna do now?"

"Well..." Simon thought out loud, his nerdy problem-solving brain kicking into gear automatically. "I guess there's Brawling."

"What's that?" Carlos pressed.

"It's for, like, unarmed combat?" Simon recalled. "Nobody really uses it, but you just have to touch someone's shoulder and say 'Brawling,' and then you Rock Paper Scissors until someone loses three times, plus one for every point of Brawling you..."

Carlos was already sold, visions of supa-buff anime fighting mans punching the hearts out of fools dancing through his mind. "Hiii-yah," he exclaimed to himself as he punched the air. "I'm gonna put ALL my points into Brawling!"

After that, he could not be dissuaded. Simon had to content himself with hammering into Carlos's head that he was NOT allowed to actually punch people. He hoped that it stuck.

"Okay, how about you?" Simon asked Neil, who had been casually perusing the rulebook. "Any ideas for your character?"

"Eh," said Neil. As a noncombatant, the obvious thing to do was to make a spellcaster, but it was immediately obvious that compared to the nerds who had been raking up experience points and building their skill levels game after game, he would be kind of a shitty one. His cis white male privilege recoiled from the thought of other people being flat-out better than him, so he went by the rule of thumb that had guided him his entire life: become an absolute expert in a dumb, pointless field that absolutely nobody cared about. "I'm just gonna dump all my points in Fast Talk." The rulebook said that the skill let you make people believe any "plausible" lie, once per session per level in the skill.

Simon felt himself getting a headache. "Okay," he processed. "So your character is going to be like, some kind of con artist? Trying to see what personal profit you can eke out of the situation? Reluctantly drawn into heroics in spite of himself?"

Neil looked at him disdainfully. "I just want to fuck with people, dude."

---------

The game geared up to start. There was standard briefing on expectations and social norms, which Neil ignored while he was investigating the cleavage of a zaftig healer. There was an introduction to the adventure (a call for aid from a border town plagued by increasing tensions with the local orc tribes), which Carlos didn't listen to because CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA was playing on repeat in his head.

Soon the motley crew of adventurers was following an NPC guide along a side trail that would wind them around the long way to the central lodge that represented the town. The more experienced players in the group were already fingering their weapons as they approached a certain large clearing off to the side of the trail. There were only so many safe spaces in the camp for large-scale buffer combat. True to form, the group was attacked by an orcish raiding party, dark-clad humans with dabs of green paint on their forehead to indicate their race without going into full-on and potentially problematic green face. Although to be honest, it was probably problematic anyway.

"Form up!" shouted one of the veterans. Everyone with weapons fell into a loose line of combat, with the orcs doing similar as they charged in. Experimental thrusts and swings were deflected as the players probed their opponents' abilities and reach.

Carlos charged right in, Leroy Jenkins-style. "BRAWLING!!!" he shouted as he dashed forward and touched the shoulder of a beefy white guy orc. He held out his hands in Rock-Paper-Scissors position, eagerly.

"Uh, you can't use brawling on me right now," the orc said, putting his fist on his head to indicate that he was speaking out-of-character.

"Huh? Why not?" Carlos demanded.

"Because I hit you in the torso while you were charging me," the orc pointed out. "Doesn't look like you have armor, so you're probably bleeding out right now."

Carlos looked down at himself, it finally registering that yes, that had happened. "Oh yeah, okay." He carefully sat down on the ground to die slowly.

Neil hung back with the spell casters, who had their spell books open in one hand and whistles in the other, ready to call a "spell freeze" and cast magic when the tactical situation required it.

"Hey, who's that?" he nudged a portly wizard next to him, who was wearing rather stylish layered red robes. Neil pointed at a curvy, blonde orc woman, who was working up a rather erotic sweat as she pressed her longsword-wielding opponent backward.

"Why, that's an orcish raider, my good sir!" the wizard retorted, affecting a speech pattern reminiscent of a blustery Southern gentleman. "Draw your steel or fall back to safety if you..."

"No, like," Neil eyed the mobile curves of the orc. Like the other orcs, she was wearing plain a black standard-issue NPC top, but it must have been a little missized, and the outline of her sports bra was clearly visible as she worked up a sweat and the thin material found places to cling to her chest. Her blonde hair was in a warrior braid going tightly back across her scalp, and the fact that she was currently maiming a sweaty chainmail-clad warrior with a boffer axe somehow only increased her appeal. "Who's the chick? Like actually."

"This is hardly the time or place, sir, to discuss any wild fowl you have observed!"

Looking extremely put-upon, Neil curled his hand into a fist and put it on his head, the one piece of gameplay that he'd happened to catch during the rules briefing. "Just tell me who that hot fucking piece is, you fucking nerd."

The wizard shrugged and put his spellbook-holding fist on his head. "You mean Alisa? I don't know her well. She never plays a PC, she just comes to crunch. You know, playing the combat opponents and stuff. She's a really good fighter."

"So has anyone gotten into her pants, or..."

A whistle blew and all the combatants stopped, indicating that spell-casting was going to happen. "Sorry, need to cast spells," the wizard responded, getting out a beanbag to toss at an orc who had circled around to threaten the assembled spellcasters. Neil shook his head, more determined than ever to score today. The universe certainly fucking owed him for putting up with this shit.

---------

The orcs were driven off, a kindly PC spent a few spell points to mend Carlos's torso (although he couldn't fight for an hour in real-time). The player characters finished their journey to the town / central lodge, where most of the PCs eagerly clustered around to converse with the NPC leaders, who provided backstory, plot hooks, leads on adventuring locations nearby, and other shit that neither Carlos nor Neil really cared about.

Neil flopped into an uncomfortable folding chair, the long walk outside having exerted a variety of muscles that he rarely used while playing his favored sport (Call of Duty). Soon, Carlos soon walked up to him, proudly holding a cheap glass tankard full of an amber drink.

"Dude, they have mead!" he exclaimed in delight, quaffing back a big gulp of honey mixed with water and flat coke. "Woah. It's so sweet you can hardly taste the booze." Carlos beamed at his friend. "You should go buy one, man, you've got the same starting money as I do."

Neil poked around in his hand-made shoulder-strap felt pouch. He found some plastic coins, and also a thick pile of yellow cards that he had been given when he'd turned in his character sheet. "Oh yeah," he said out loud. "Yeah sure, let's try this shit out."

Neil approached the bar, a folding table in front of the counter, and flagged down the innkeeper, a middle-aged Asian woman. He held up one of the cards, which just read 'Fast Talk.' "Hey, uh, you forgot to give me my mead that I totally paid for," he said.

The woman waited a beat, then kindly put her hand on her head and explained, "You need to tear the card in half to show that you're using it up." Neil shrugged and did so, dropping the halves on the ground like the badass, litter-law-defying motherfucker he was.

"Oh, my mistake, sir," the innkeeper replied, gruffly, slipping straight back into character. She deftly poured Neil a tankard of "mead" and slid it over to him.

Neil returned to Carlos, pleased with himself. "Dude, I just got free booze with my Fast Talk. It's like, I can talk people into any old shit."

Carlos nodded, impressed. "You can, like, basically do that already, man. Remember at that anime con when you totally hooked us up with those hot cosplayers?" Presumably he did, since they had been reminding each other of the event on a daily basis ever since.

"Uh, yeah," said Neil, who still had no idea how he had pulled that off. That memory did bring his mind right back down to the gutter, though. He cast his gaze around the room, finally falling on the dark-skinned, corseted adventuress who Carlos had been leering at earlier. She was, for the moment, separated from any friends, purchasing iron rations (i. e., energy bars) from a villager.

"Y'know what?" Neil asked, rhetorically. "I'm gonna call her bluff on this 'roleplaying' bullshit. Watch this."

Taking a swig of his extremely non-alcoholic drink to fortify himself, he strode up to the woman, standing close enough that she got a whiff of his body odor even before she turned away from the stall. She raised a dark eyebrow and gave a brief nod. "Hail."

"Yeah, uh, hail," Neil said, distracted from his task by her stylishly-supported cleavage.

"I recognize you from our travels," the woman continued, promptingly, "but I don't believe we've been introduced. I am Nyva Kree, paladin of Galruna."

"Oh yeah, we've totally been traveling together," Neil repeated, working that into his improvisation, "and, uh, last night at the camp, you got shit-faced and lost a bet with me. You never gave me my winnings." He held up a Fast Talk card.

The black woman frowned. "Well, it wouldn't be the first time. I'm afraid I don't remember, though - what exactly did I wager?"

"That you'd give me a blowjob," Neil replied with a leer.

The woman forced a thin, humorless smile. "I don't believe I would have bet that."

"Yeah, well, you did," Neil insisted. Smirking, he took out a second Fast Talk card and tore it in half as well. "Believe it."

A born troll, Neil was looking forward to seeing the woman get all flustered and shit. She deserved it anyway, she obviously wasn't into LARPing at all and just wanted male attention, dressed like that. (Neil was so good at gatekeeping, he could do it even for hobbies that he himself hated and disdained.)

The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise... but only momentarily.

---------

It was a little-known secret that the Saga LARP had been founded by wizards. Jack Chick had been right - study the occult esoterica of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks hard enough, and you COULD learn actual magic. Not lightning bolts, just little nudges to the world's game mechanics, but real magic nonetheless. And like most actual magic-users, the RPG nerds who had discovered this exercised their powers in pursuit of some spectacularly useless shit.

There was an enchantment on Saga: subtle but very real, woven by long-since graduated college students in an attempt to make it the most fun and engaging LARP it could be. The spell mentally influenced its players, encouraging them to abide by the rules of conduct and to roleplay their characters as well as they could. This, not its large budget or ambition, was why it had a reputation for being immersive, and drew in so many attractive college acting students. Sinking into their characters felt like being carried along by a lazy river, the momentum of the spell and the community wrapping around one like a comforting warm blanket.

None of the Saga players would ever attempt to trick another's character into sex under false pretenses. Such harassment was explicitly against the rules of conduct, which also suggested that sexual topics be avoided as a general rule, just to be safe. And in an attempt to ward off disruptive inter-PC conflict, the rules also stated that your player character must be a basically heroic person. The enchanted players behaved as such, generally orienting themselves towards rescuing innocents and completing quests rather than fucking around, literally or figuratively.

Carlos and Neil hadn't listened to the rules of conduct, and they effectively didn't have characters. In their minds they were playing themselves, with a high punching ability or a stack of dumb yellow papers, respectively.

The creators of the enchantment had not accounted for people such as them, free agents of chaos in a world of earnest roleplay.

---------

The woman who was playing Nyva Kree only needed a moment to orient herself. As it happened, her patron Galruna was the goddess of luck and pleasure. Gambling, drinking, and casual sex were all rather in-character for Nyva. The fact that this greasy white boy weirdo was clearly taking advantage of her did not bother her at all - his lie was backed up by the rules in the form Fast Talk cards, so her character believed it, and her decision-making was entirely based on how to play her character.

"Well," she said, acting out her chagrin with a rueful smile and tilt of the head, "a paladin always keeps her word. Let us adjourn to a private room."

"Uhhh..." said Neil, as the paladin pulled him three feet to the side of the lodge's main area, near a nested stack of blue-seated chairs. She took a few down and started arranging them in a loose square around the two.

"Help me out here," she said, putting her hand on her head. "These will represent a private room."

"Uhh..." Neil continued. He was 99% sure that he was now the one being trolled, but the 1% chance that he was wrong meant that his little head was calling the shots, and he did not yet flee. He cast a glance over to Carlos, who gave him a thumbs-up with his non-mead-holding hand despite having no idea what Neil was doing. Suspiciously, Neil took down a chair with a grunt and helped finish the symbolic barrier.

Then the gorgeous black woman sank to her knees and, with only a moment's hesitation, unzipped Neil's pants and pulled them down, then repeated with his slightly crusty tighty whiteys. His pale member flopped out like some kind of pale, tubular deep-sea fish that has unexpectedly washed ashore to die.

Sauna's nose inadvertently wrinkled at the faint but distinct smell of smegma, but her character was a warrior priest accustomed to being knee-deep in viscera, so she figured this should be nothing. Her dark lips wrapped around the member, which, finding itself back in a hospitable environment, quickly started stirring to life. The overhead view down her corset helped speed the process along, the volume of her tits pushed up above the dark leather like foam on a beer.

Witnessing all this from across the room, Carlos exclaimed "Dude!" Then, needing a dude to exclaim to, he elbowed a six foot-tall dwarf nearby. (Dwarfdom was indicated by a fake beard, not by height.) "Dude! Are you fucking seeing this?"

The dwarf cast his gaze around the room, passing right over the public fellatio, which was obviously in a private room that his character wasn't able to see. "Aye, quite the assembly of heroes," he commented. "We'll have this matter with the orcs cleared up in a trice."

"No, like," Carlos insisted, "that fucking chick blowing Neil, man!"

The dwarf shrugged, and glanced over in that direction without recognition, his eyes glossing over the exhibitionistic display. "I see nothing out of the ordinary. Also, not familiar with this Neil fellow."

Carlos furrowed his brow and tried to figure out which of them was crazy.

Meanwhile, the woman had found a rhythm of suction and a grip with her long, delicate fingers that seemed to be producing an effect. The schlorp, schlorp sound of her oral forfeit from a gamble she never actually made was a soft but steady addition to the normal noise of character socialization in the large room.

Maybe she was being too straightforward, though. The woman pulled back off of Neil's cock for a moment. "Sorry, pretend I'm better than this," she said apologetically. She wasn't completely sexually inactive, but as a goal-focused, hard-working black woman, dating had been secondary her whole life, and her character Nyva surely sucked a lot more dick than she did.

"Okay?" gasped Neil, eyes darting around the room for eyes of judgement or mockery but surprisingly finding neither. Emboldened, his swimmers started churning in preparation for their upcoming race.

As the paladin felt the man meat in her mouth swell and twitch, and noticed Neil grip the chairs behind him tightly as his muscles started to lock up, she had only a moment to decide what to do with the deluge of hot cum that was coming straight toward her. Ordinarily she would pull back and catch it on some easily-wipeable surface like her hand or chest, but what about Nyva?

Neil moaned and the first spurts of glutenous cum shot hit the roof of the black woman's delicate, warm mouth. No more time for character introspection. Looks like Nyva swallowed. The veteran LARPer was, at least, discovering new little emergent quirks about her character - one of the joys of any true roleplayer. Instead of pulling away to let it spill, she only pulled back enough to make room, her full dark lips still tight around Neil's rarely-serviced cockhead as she swallowed the salty, viscous load.

Then, taking a moment to recompose her face after she involuntarily grimaced at the unpleasant, sour taste, she rose to her feet and adjusted her corset. "There, adventurer. I trust you are satisfied I have kept my word?" Neil made a grunt of agreement as he hurriedly stuffed his spit-covered dick back into his underwear, taking one more look around the room to see if anyone was reacting. But nobody even looked their way as they moved aside the chair that represented their private room, and stepped two feet back into the main space of the lodge.

Well, almost nobody looked their way. Neil staggered back to Carlos, who immediately demanded "Dude, did that chick actually just suck you off like, right here?"

"Uh... yeah," Neil muttered, unusually subdued with his nuts emptied.

"Oh, good," Carlos said, with relief. He'd still been working on the 'am I the crazy one' question, and had gotten as far as 'maybe I'm in the Matrix, but like the porno version.' Then again, he didn't seem to be able to go into bullet time, so he'd been getting a little confused. It was good to know that he and Neil were on the same page, at least.

"Dude, what a total slut!" Carlos continued, enthused. "You think she'd, like, suck me off too?"

"No way, dumbass," Neil replied, regaining a bit of energy from insulting his friend. "It was because I used Fast Talk on her." He intuitively felt somehow that this was true, although normally he would have been 100% on-board the "calling women sluts" express. He looked thoughtful. "It's like, these fucking nerds will do anything in character." He pulled out his remaining handful of Fast Talk cards and looked at them speculatively.

"Ooh! Ooh!" Carlos was practically hopping up and down. "Dude, you've gotta talk one of them into getting with me, man. Like, what about that cleric with the tits? She's gotta be like a fuckin' E-cup, right?"

"Fuck no," Neil retorted. Having automatically shot down his friend's idea on general principle, he now had to come up with a justification for it. His mind raced quickly. "I've only got six of these cards left, and apparently it sometimes it takes, like, more than one. We need to fucking prioritize. I'll hook us both up, but not with a seven. We're gonna go straight for the ten."

Carlos frowned. "I don't think we can do ten chicks, man. Not even if its like, five each."

Neil rolled his eyes. "No, you moron. What I mean is..." His beady eyes set in the steely resolve of a warrior ready to stake their life upon a noble quest. "We're gonna fuck the Hot Orc."

---------

Thus, while other PCs at the lodge were talking with the villagers, finding points of interest in the area, and forming parties to pursue one side quest or another (What became of the woodcutter who disappeared yesterday? Is the strange obelisk on the hill the work of orcs, or something even more sinister?), Carlos and Neil had another agenda.

"Hail, fellow adventurers," Simon said, approaching the table where the two goons were animatedly gesticulating at each other and scribbling on a piece of scratch paper as they hashed out their plan of action. "Would you care to join us on a quest to investigate..."

"Fuck off, nerd," Neil said, not looking up from his work.

Carlos flashed his schoolmate an apologetic smile. "Nah man, we're good."

Simon hesitated. He felt a certain responsibility to look out for his invitees, but it's not like his character knew them from Adam. The in-character thing would be to not push. Shrugging, he withdrew and left them to their own arcane devices.

Four more glasses of "mead" and many bars of iron rations later, Carlos and Neil were very low on starting money... but they had a plan.

---------

"Oh! Oh! There's another orc patrol! Is that her?"

"With the spear? No, you fucking idiot, that's just some beanpole geek. Besides, the chick we're looking for is a fucking blonde."

"No, there, passing behind the tree! Isn't that her?"

"For fuck's sake, Carlos! That's not... oh, wait. Yeah, that's her. Let's fucking GO."

The two had been crouched uncomfortably between some bushes for a good forty-five minutes by now, trying to keep out of sight. Tracking down a specific NPC actor was not an easy task, since they could be anywhere, playing any role the GMs needed. But from interrogating the townsfolk, it sounded like "random encounter" bands of orcs should be roaming the horse camp to keep the PCs on their toes. If this blonde chick really was only here to sword-fight and not play talking roles, that was the most likely way to find her.

Luckily, they'd evaded detection so far, although they were dirty, itchy, and ill-tempered. (In Neil's case, even more so of each than usual.) But it was all going to be worth it soon.

-----

The three orcs moved through the forest, hunched and alert. Their Battlelord had ordered that this new influx of humans be monitored, and that they be turned away from the obelisk until their shaman had a chance to examine it closely. In his service, they were willing to die if need be. And they had. Or rather, the previous patrol of orcs had, and now they were playing functionally identical ones. Such was the crunchy life.

So when a pudgy guy in absolutely terrible garb and a dumb hat half-jogged up to them, they raised their weapons with no hesitation and snarled.

"No, uh, it's cool," Neil hurriedly explained. He held up a Fast Talk card. This was going to take some convincing, so they were being careful to do it step by step. "I'm, like, on your side. See, I'm a half-orc who has always been discriminated against because the humans don't accept me and shit, and like, I have important information for you."

The three orcs glanced at each other and shrugged. This was certainly a change of pace, but LARPs were all about unexpected interactions. According to the rules that governed the game, they believed him.

"Well-met, half-kin," responded the woman, a college junior named Alisa. As the best boffer sword fighter among the NPCs, she tended to be the leader of any given group of orcs, who organized their military based on fighting strength. Conveniently, Neil's eyes had been trained on her the whole time anyway. "What news do you bring us?"

Neil took a breath. "Okay, so you see that guy over there?" They all swiveled their eyes in the direction of his hand, to where a distant Carlos was awkwardly meandering among the trees, trying to pretend he wasn't sneaking furtive glances in their direction to see how it was going. "He, like, has super important information that it's vitally important that you get from him, right? But he's a trained spy sworn to secrecy and will not submit to torture." He dramatically tore up and discarded another Fast Talk card.

Out of character, one of the orcs picked up the discarded torn card, just to confirm that it was legit. It appeared to be signed and labeled properly by the check-in guy. He showed it to Alisa, who nodded.

"Okaaay..." responded Alisa, trying to get into character as an orc who believed this obvious bullshit. It was a stretch.

Neil was coming in for home. "The only way to get the information out of him is to seduce him. He's weak to hot women."

"Well, that doesn't help. Let's just capture him and bring him back to our king, let him handle it."

Neil, who still didn't quite grok LARPing, was thrown. "What do you mean that doesn't help? I mean hot women like, y'know, her."

The orcs laughed genially. "Friend, you have good taste in women - that's your orc blood showing! But how do you think a human man would respond to a fine specimen of orcdom like this?"

Neil looked the woman up and down. An hourglass figure that her crunchie robes were still not hiding. Clear bronzed skin, delicate features, and wide, intelligent eyes. Long legs that she could probably do the splits with - she looked like that kind of chick. And a single dab of green faceprint on her forehead that apparently rendered her unfuckable to humans.

He sighed heavily and pulled out another Fast Talk card.

---------

Alisa approached the unassuming human messenger. It was pretty unbelievable that this human messenger just happened to have a crippling fetish for orc women, but she supposed it wasn't that much more farfetched than anything else they'd been told by the obvious spy who was nevertheless extremely convincing.

Really, this level of improv was above her pay grade. Alisa was a Chem major, not an actor. She came to Saga to turn off her brain and hit people with boffer weapons.

'Hold, human,' she ordered, trying to deepen her naturally high-pitched voice intimidatingly. It helped that she was half an inch taller than the scrawny Carlos and probably weighed the same.

Carlos jumped exaggeratedly, and had to adjust his duct-tape helmet after it slipped over his eyes. "Oh shit!" he exclaimed. "It's, like, an orc! And here I've got fucking important information that shouldn't fall into the hands of... uh, orcs!"

They stared at each other blankly for a moment. Alisa shook her head in resignation and put her fist on top of her braided blonde head. "Look, I'm not really up to acting this out. My character is going to seduce you in exchange for the information you have, okay? Can we just skip the scene?"

"Oh, yeah," Carlos replied, clearly relived. "Skipping the talking and shit is cool. But we can still fuck in character, right?"

The code of conduct urged players to follow each others' leads, make reasonable compromises, and stay in-character when possible.

"Well... I guess so?"

The sexual encounter that followed was pretty awkward. For one thing, Carlos's virtues as a lover began and ended with "enthusiasm." He was on top of Alisa almost immediately, pulling up her tunic and sports bra to get his hands all over her pleasantly hand-filling, sweaty tits. He tried to kiss her but Alisa figured that wasn't an orc thing, and pushed his head gently down to redirect his mouth to her nipple. Unfortunately, his foreplay game seemed to be to suckle like he was trying to fit as much titflesh in his mouth as he could. Alisa pushed a hand down her pants and started to finger herself, sensing that if she wanted to get turned on, it was probably best to start working on it herself.

For another thing, they were outside in the middle of the day. The exhibitionism wasn't the problem - sure, Neil and the other two orcs were about fifteen yards away and could clearly see and hear anything, but that was just their players. Distances were rather fuzzy in the Epic LARP, and the camp space they'd rented was supposed to represent a much greater area than you could walk across in ten minutes. So there was no reason to feel embarrassed for being seen as they unbuckled each others' pants and Alisa revealed her well-tended, tight collegiate pussy to the cool brush of the forest air. It was just her nameless orc character having sex, not her.

But the slightly damp leaves, dirt, and sticks of the underbrush weren't exactly a plush bed. Alisa decided to get on her hands and knees to minimize surface area, her bare pale ass raised in the air temptingly in front of Carlos. She had gleaned a little wetness and Carlos had a steady ooze of precum thanks to thinking only prurient thoughts for the past hour or more, so he was able to work his cockhead into her and go from there.

As he thrust into her raw, Alisa moaned into the forest ground. It would be like an orc to jump straight into somewhat rough fucking, right? And doing it out in the wilderness? As a savage orc warrior, she should be perfectly comfortable with that too. Unbeknownst to the curvy volunteer, the spell over Epic LARP calmed her, bringing a certain amount of satisfaction that she was playing her character so well. She felt the heat building in her and held herself up on one elbow, devoting the other to frigging herself. Between everything she was able to cum, the clenching of her walls pulling Carlos along with her to fill her (luckily birth-control regulated) cunt with jizz.

Once they were done, Alisa tried to gather the cum from her dripping snatch as well as she could and wipe it off on a nearby bush. Her braid was a little frayed, but her pale skin was flush and she felt energized, not enervated, by the encounter.

"I've kept up my end of the bargain, human," she said, pleased with how she'd demonstrated her roleplay chops. "What's this secret human information you carry?"

Carlos tried to gather his thoughts as he yanked up his pants and underwear over his sticky privates. "Oh, uh, yeah, uh..." He fumbled in his pocket and produced a Fast Talk card, as well as another piece of paper to remind him what to say. Squinting, he read, "I'm actually just a decoy. The, uh, real secret important information is being carried by, like, that guy who told you to come talk to me, and you're going to have to, like, go fuck it out of him instead." Carlos beamed with pride at the genius of his and Neil's perfect plan. This was like, Shakespeare-level shit.

Alisa's head hurt. She rubbed her forehead, accidentally smearing it with remnants of jizz. Then she noticed something. Indicating out-of-character speech, she said, "Hey, quick question."

"Huh?" Carlos asked.

"That Fast-Talk card you have is labeled T3. That's the same code as the cards that other guy used before, which means they were assigned to the same character at check-in."

"What?" Carlos looked down at it. "Oh, yeah, I mean, I got it from Neil, so."

"So which of your characters actually has Fast Talk?"

"Neil's," Carlos responded, blankly.

"So your character isn't actually convincing at all."

"Uh... I've got this card?"

Alisa picked up her sword, gently laid it across Carlos's back, and said "subdual," which by the rules of the game was a torso hit that would temporarily incapacitate him. Calling back across the forest to her co-orcs, she called "Grab the half-orc!"

---------

Carlos and Neil were hauled across the camp to a makeshift pavilion formed from large blankets draped over clotheslines stretched across trees.

An assistant GM in plain black jeans and t-shirt like some kind of modern Kabuki kuroko met them outside and described the scene to them as they entered: "You're entering a large war-tent, dimly lit by flickering braziers. It's stuffy and smells strongly of incense. Dozens of orc warriors stand at attention, their piercing gazes following you intently as you're dragged in.'

Actually, it was just the three patrol-orcs, two other guards wielding boffer spears with padded tips the size of basketballs, and the orc chieftain himself, a hefty, bearded Brian Blessed type who was clearly eager to chew some fucking cardboard scenery. The guy had gone all-out on costuming, with layers of faux-skins and fabrics and even a rather convincing wolf-head hood.

"So!" he boomed, rising from his lawn chair ceremonial throne. "Spies are brought before me? Some of these newly-arrived outsiders, roaming our lands at will, eh?"

He strode forward, getting right up in Carlos and Neil's faces. Neil wrinkled his nose in anticipation of getting stray flecks of spittle in the face. The orc guards withdrew a few paces back, keeping their weapons at the ready and a loose circle around their captives and leader.

"We're not actually, like, spies," Carlos protested. "I don't even know what the fuck is supposed to be going on here or whatever."

"Yeah, just let us go," Neil added. "We don't even have any fucking weapons or anything." He still had one Fast Talk card, but Carlos had got to fuck a hot chick's pussy and all he'd gotten was a lousy BJ, so no way was he going to waste it on something stupid like saving their lives unless he absolutely had to.

Sensing an opportunity to ad-lib a monologue, the orc chieftain jumped on it. "Typical weak humans! I've had a weapon by my side since I was a child. I cut my teeth on a dagger and learned to swing an axe before I could talk." He patted the boffer sword scabbarded through a ring of duct taped cardboard at the side of his belt. "My sword is my brother, my friend, an extension of myself. That's how I was able to take on all challengers to lead the tribe as Battlelord for this past fifteen years."

"Cool, so you like fought your way up the ranks, kind of thing?" asked Carlos. "Strongest leads? Like some kind of Espada shit?" He'd seen this trope before, and his two brain cells started rubbing together.

The orc chieftain peered at Carlos. "What's an Espada?"

Carlos reached out and touched the orc on the shoulder. "Brawling!"

There was a moment of confused silence, so the assistant GM stepped in. "Okay, everyone take a step back, give them some space. Hands out for rock-paper-scissors. Remember, first person to lose three times plus their Brawling skill loses."

"Ha!" boasted the orc chieftain, regaining his footing. "You have spirit, for a human. Rock, paper, scissors!"

The orc chieftain won the first couple rounds, but Carlos won the next with a clever 'paper three times in a row' gambit.

"Can we just stab him?" asked one of the orcs, raising his spear.

"No, you're not allowed to use melee weapons to attack into a Brawl," reminded the Assistant GM.

The ro-sham-bo duel continued. One of the orcs squatted to get off his feet. Neil, bored, started cleaning out his ear.

"Just checking, what are your Brawling skill levels?" asked the GM.

"Four," answered the orc chieftain, smugly, which was about three more levels than any sane PC would put into the skill.

"Uh..." Carlos had to think about it. "Like eight, I think? Yeah, eight." The orc chieftain's face fell.

It came down to the wire, but the laws of probability eventually won out. After seemingly endless rounds, the orc chieftain gently laid himself down on the floor. The GM narrated off-the cuff.

"The human launches himself at the larger orc and, in an amazing display of muscle and skill, wrestles him to the ground, preventing his larger opponent from getting any leverage and banging his tusked head against the ground until he's unconscious."

"Sweet!" Carlos exclaimed, raising his fists into the air in a victory posture. "So I'm chieftain now, right?"

The orcs surrounding him leveled their boffer weapons. "An impressive display, human," one sneered, "but we would never allow a leader who was not of our people's blood."

Neil cleared his throat. The assembled people glanced at the sweaty, pimply guy who was holding up his last Fast Talk card. "No yeah, he's totally a half-orc too."

---------

"Well fuck, I guess I can see why some people get into LARPing," Neil admitted as he felt up the perky tits of the topless, nominally orkin Alisa at his side. At his friend's encouragement, Carlos had quickly turned the war tent into an extremely cheap facsimile of some kind of harem, with whatever spare blankets draped over study plastic tubs to create couches and cushions, and a couple of NPC coeds with hastily-dabbed green forehead marks who the NPC team had eventually turned up when Carlos demanded that they bring 'thy finest bitches.' (The Assistant GM had been in regular communication with GM HQ on his cell phone ever since the whole coup thing.)

"Yeah," added Carlos, who was munching on a bowl of orcish trail mix while another orc coed ground her butt up against his lap. His pecker wasn't quite up to action again yet, but he wasn't complaining.

About that, at least. He squinted at the cup of yellowish liquid in his other hand. "Hey, I, like, ordered more mead. What's this shit?"

"That's orcish wine," the orc honor guard to his side informed him. "Good for filling you with energy before battle and keeping you running under the hot sun. Only the humans make mead."

"Well, it tastes nasty." Out of context, Carlos failed to recognize the flavor of Gatorade, which he had probably drank more of than water for the last ten years of his remarkably unhealthy life. "If we don't have any mead, go get some!"

"Get some?" asked the orc, looking for clarification.

"Yeah man, you're like, orcs. Get everyone together and raid the human town. Rape and pillage and shit," Carlos ordered offhandedly. He was a little distracted as his orc girl moved up to sit on his lap, pressing her taut collegiate chest against his and nuzzling him with her imaginary tusks.

The orc raised his spear, its bulbous, cloth-covered end so padded that it looked more like a tool for loading a cannon than a weapon itself. "Gather the warriors! We strike the humans like lightning!"

The assistant GM sighed and hit the button to call his boss again.

---------

Preparations were made swiftly. The plots of player-driven fantasy LARPs were always loose, guided by player interest, time management concerns, and improvisation. A PC taking control of the orc tribe and launching an all-out attack on the town? Unexpected, but manageable. Patrolling crunchies were pulled in for the purpose, dabs of green paint applied to the foreheads of those who weren't already orcs, and boffer weapons distributed. Another assistant GM gave them a quick briefing of their characters' objectives. The NPCs, under the influence of Saga LARP's background enchantment, soberly tried to get themselves in the mindset of borderline-offensive tribal humanoids who were there to "rape and pillage and shit." With a focus on mead.

Soon, a horde of plainly-garbed NPC randos playing orcs descended on the main lodge of the 4-H camp, charging across the well-manicured grass surrounding it. The token number of town guards attempted to put up a fight with their polearms, but if they had been enthusiastic boffer fighters, they would have signed up to crunch in the first place, so it was really no contest.

A tall, lithe brunette playing a village healer hung back behind the line of town guards, attempting to keep them going with healing spells. She tried not to grin. This was much more exciting than being a town NPC normally was! "Help!" she screamed, high-pitched and theatrically. "The barbarians!" Then a flanking orc laid a boffer sword across her back and grunted "subdual." She accommodatingly fell back, stunned, into the man's arms. Noticing the heavy, pale swell of her tits heaving under her linen chemise, the lanky, pock-marked college student playing the orc decided to commit to the role. He muscled her up against one of the wooden pillars on the porch of the 4-H lounge and hiked up her skirt, one hand groping through her thin underwear as the other began to unbuckle his belt. "Help! Adventurers!" the healer shouted again. This was getting pretty intense, but no doubt a clutch of high-level PCs would swoop in any minute, cut through these orc grunts like wheat, and earn a memorable big damn hero moment.

Really, it was her bad luck that all the powerful, competent PC adventurers were away investigating that obelisk that the plot hooks had been leading them towards. That was emergent storytelling for you.

While the healer was getting her tight collegiate cunt stretched out by the 'orc,' the main part of the raiders poured through the front doors of the lodge, bellowing war cries and brandishing boffer weapons as they cast their gazes about for targets to subdue. The few humans inside desperately raised their cheap, low-reach short swords or other token weapons and prepared for a desperate battle for the fate of the town.

"Escape out the back!" cried one of the townsfolk.

"Submit, human scum!" shouted one of the orcs.

Suddenly, a whistle blew. The players froze in place, and all eyes turned to a black-clad GM, who removed a purple plastic whistle from her lips.

"Hey everyone, there are too many obstacles in here - it's not safe for combat," she explained. "Let's move all the tables and chairs to the side, okay?"

"Oh, right."

"Yeah, no problem."

Orcs and humans spent a couple minutes lifting stacking the furniture in the corners of the room. Once that was done, they re-posed themselves more or less where they had been before. The GM blew the whistle again and the LARPers sprang back into action.

"Flee!"

"Graaah!"

A cute Asian coed turned to fight, short sword in one hand to fend off the attackers, and fumbling for her spell book in the other, trying to flip to the page for Safe Retreat one-handed so she could call a spell freeze. This was her first game, and other than getting whacked in the head by a weedy Hispanic guy during weapons training, it had thus far been mostly pleasant. Instead of going with the big group to the dungeon thing, she'd decided to stay behind in "town" to work on some lore-related language puzzles that the GMs had put in the adventure to occupy boring nerds like her.

Before she could get her spell ready, a thrown weapon (a duct-tape covered strip of foam) bounced off her modest blouse-covered tit. A torso hit - instant unconsciousness and bleeding out. "Shit," she said automatically, then felt chagrined for breaking character. She carefully laid herself face-down on the hard, cold planks of the floor, trying to find a comfortable position.

The Venn diagram of "people harboring NC kinks" and "potential LARPers" was basically a circle, and the Asian girl's fantasies in particular were just as exceptionally fucked-up as her straight-laced looks and 4.0 GPA would imply. When a hefty orc warrior fell upon her hemorrhaging body to tear open her blouse (actually carefully unbuttoning it, so as not to damage the garb), and roughly groped and fucked her while she died, her main complaint was the guy wasn't playing out fucking the gaping chest wound itself. They could have represented it as a titjob - it would hurt but she could probably manage to squeeze her boobs up enough for some friction.

Obviously she didn't suggest it, though. It would have been super weird and inappropriate to bring her personal kinks into a friendly public LARP.

So, as the proper adventurers reached the center of the catacombs beneath the obelisk to confront the ancient spirit that had been manipulating local events to free itself from its prison, the raid on town reached its own climax. After they killed the male townsfolk (most of whose players the GM sent over to support the obelisk dungeon, which could use a few more warm bodies), an orgy of careful, safety-first boffer violence and ravishment between NPC raiders and the remaining hapless female characters.

A female NPC guard was pushed up against a wall near the kitchen door, obligingly holding her hands up over her head while her assaulter, a short Asian kid whose ass she could have kicked in real life, gently pressed one of his hands against her wrists. (His character was supposed to be stronger than hers, after all. She was just a leanly-built elf, as one could tell by the plastic gem stuck to her forehead.) The other hand alternated between roughly groping her straining tits and exploring the soaked triangle of her panties through her tight leather leggings.

Another zaftig young woman playing the village baker, her hair tied back in a ponytail behind her cute rounded face, was really playing up the performative aspect of her assault. '"Please, merciful lords!" she cried out. "Spare us from this barbaric treatment!" Cringey, maybe, but a little cringe was the price of admission to fantasy LARP. And once the orc bent her over a table, her hefty tits crushed against the shaky particleboard as he plowed her generous ass, she started to shut up. Except for uncontrolled moans once he stuck a broad finger up her asshole. "Oh godddd," she moaned as she came from the rough treatment, and was immediately chagrined; the fantasy setting was firmly polytheistic, and any reference to the Judeo-Christian deity was firmly against the code of conduct. Someone could get offended.

Only once they had satisfied their violent urges and spewed faux-orcish seed in a variety of nubile LARPer holes did the orcish horde, withdraw, victorious and carrying plastic pitchers of mead to present to their leader. They took the bread, honey butter, energy bars and string cheese, too, just to be safe.

---------

"So what did you guys think?" Simon asked, as they piled back into his car that evening, the adventure, such as it was, having officially been called to a halt by the GM. NPC volunteers were even now gathering up the props and scenery and loading them into a variety of personal vehicles to go shove in the unusually large garage of one of the members. (Speaking of members, many of the male NPCs went about the cleanup with a bit more spring in their step than usual. Meanwhile, some of the females walked with a slight wince and limp, but they tried not to stress out about it. Occasional minor injuries were just a fact of life with a physical activity like LARPing.)

"It was freaking awesome!" Carlos grinned.

"Yeah, it was better than I expected," Neil admitted grudgingly. "No thanks to whatever dumb plot shit the GMs were trying to do."

"Well," Simon admitted, "sometimes you have to bring your own fun." To help protect other players' fun by keeping Neil away from them, Simon decided not to tell them that everyone generally met up at the local IHOP after a game to socialize. A shame - he had a crush on Alisa and had been hoping to get a conversation going.

"Didn't have to bring our own food, though," Carlos added happily as he buckled himself in. A true college student, free food brought almost as much joy to his life as free sex. "I had so much trail mix and mead! I can't believe you do all this shit for free, man."

"Oh, uh." Simon turned the ignition key and the Corolla rumbled into life. "Sorry, maybe I didn't mention. Your first game is free... you know, so you can try it out... but after that you have to pay. It varies from game to game, but tickets for this one were $80, for example."

"Eighty bucks!?" In the back seat, Carlos and Neil exchanged a look.

Luckily for everyone involved, they never played in a LARP again.