AAAAAAAAAAAAALL RIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!
Do I have your attention? Good! Hello, everybody! Welcome back to another weekly installment of the Nerf Wars Rundown! If you’re still unsure as to what Nerf Wars is, you can read a brief summary in my article from last week, which can be found here: Welcome to the Origin Story.
…We good? Awesome! So, for at least the next couple weeks, I’m going to start off my Nerf Wars posts with a detailed description of one of the many games we play at Dart Gun. This week, I’m going to teach you guys about a little game we like to call Necromancer.
Necromancer is a relatively simple game of humans versus zombies. To start off, two players are picked by the Master at Arms, one as the Head Zombie and the other as the Corpse Burner, the head of the human team. Once the heads are decided, the teams are split with a three to one ratio in favor of the humans. Teams are picked playground-style, oftentimes using the assorted nicknames that several Nerfers have earned.
“I’ll pick Jailbait.”
“Chase, Jason, and Pikachu, get over here!” (Pikachu’s me, by the way!)
“Watson!”
After the teams have been decided, the zombie team disperses through the second and third floors of the building while the humans remain in the main lobby. The humans then line up single-file and walk one-by-one past a small alcove in which the Head Zombie is hiding.
Here’s where things get interesting.
Out of all the unsuspecting humans, the Head Zombie gives a signal to one individual as they walk past the alcove. If you’re a human and you see the Head Zombie give you the sign for “rock and roll”, congratulations! You’re officially the Necromancer! At this point in time, you and the Head Zombie are the only ones who know that you are the Necro. Once you’ve been chosen as the Necro, your job is to lie in wait, disguised as a human until the game begins. As the humans wait in the lobby, the Head Zombie goes up to his zombie minions and identifies the Necromancer to them. The Necromancer’s initial goal at the start of the game is to sneak past the humans and high-five a zombie in order to go active.
Once the Necro goes active, they now have the ability to raise the dead. Usually, when a player dies, they head immediately to the dead room. In Necro, players who get shot must stop moving and sit down on the ground. Once shot, players must lie in wait for either the Necromancer or the Corpse Burner to come find them, whether they’re human or zombie. If a dead player is tagged by the Corpse Burner, they are burned and proceed directly to the dead room. If a player is tagged by the Necromancer, they are raised from the dead and join the zombie team. Basically, the humans want to kill and burn as many zombies as possible, and the zombies want to kill and raise as many players as possible. The game ends either when the Necromancer is shot dead or when the Necro manages to survive for the entire duration of the game (15 minutes).
Now that you all hopefully understand the basics of Necromancer, I can tell you of all the fun antics that went down during Nerf Wars. Remember, this club runs from 9pm until 2 in the morning, at the earliest, so things can get a little crazy. This week was especially nuts for a multitude of reasons. For one, we had Homecoming this weekend, which meant we had several alums who dropped by and added their own dash of excitement to the meeting. And two, we had a series of extraordinarily short games, due to some key characters in each game getting killed off within the first minute or so.
Most of the night’s shenanigans were started by one of Skiffy Nerf Wars’ most hardened veterans: Greg. Y’all will get a chance to hear more about Greg in our new, upcoming, running segment “Skiffy Spotlight”, but to tide you over, here’s a quote that pretty much sums him up from our resident caustic commentator, my boyfriend Thomas (Huge 8itch):
“Greg resembles nothing so much as a ponytailed, unshaven lightning bolt. Behind his blue eyes lurks the steel-trap mind of a born predator. The man deals out more damage per second than a Dual Dagger-build Assassin in Ragnarok Online. The average encounter with him lasts about as long as it takes his dart to leave his gun and find its way to you.”
As Chase already mentioned in an article from earlier today (Titles Update), he and Jason have been officially adopted by Greg after Chase was the only one to get his Metal Gear Solid joke. After earning the title of Greg’s son, Chase was subsequently subjected to Greg’s orders when on the same team and outrage when on opposing teams. At one point during Necromancers, Chase willingly volunteered to be a zombie when Greg was already on the human team. This earned Chase plenty of disappointed shouts and almost a spanking before the end of the night.
But Greg wasn’t the only one picking on Chase last night, either. At one point during the very beginning of Necro, several humans were guarding a stairwell. A few redshirts were goofing off and were instructed to “get their heads in the game”. Horrifyingly enough, Chase found this to be an opportune moment to sing a few lines from the song “Getcha Head in the Game” from High School Musical. Within seconds, Chase was shot and burned, effectively Team-Killed for singing the wrong song at the wrong time. Unfortunately enough for Chase, that round of Necro ended up being the longest and most interesting of the night.
The two rounds of Necromancer before that were just a tiny bit shorter. In both of those rounds, a rather unlucky zombie managed to kill the Necromancer within 2 minutes of the game’s start. This is disorienting enough when it happens once in a night, let alone twice. The trend of short-lived games continued when we moved onto Animators (a game that I’ll detail in one of my upcoming posts). This time, one of the key players, one of the two opposing Animators, was killed off in 45 seconds flat.
In short, this week’s Nerf Wars were incredibly eventful, as per the norm. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Nerf Wars Rundown and you’ll hear from me again next week! (Or hopefully sooner!)
This is Elena, signing off.
(P.S. – If any of you can come up with some sort of witty title that preferably alliterates with either ‘Dart Gun’ or ‘Nerf Wars’, please leave me a message in the comments! Thank you! :3 )
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