The Lords are taking a break

My WarCrack addiction took a backseat to something far more adrenaline packed yesterday.
PAINTBALL!
This is going to be a complicated sentence, so try to follow along eh? It was Jamie's brother-in-law's stag party (get all that?) so we went Paintballing at a course between Tofield and Ryley named Tags Paintball. Pretty nice outdoor course, but some of it was flooded with water, including the safe house. And there were rules for the course, it went like this:
No ...
Alcohol
Drugs
(and something else that I can't remember because I was stuck on the alcohol part).
Fortunately one of the owners said "you can drink, but don't let anyone else catch you", and if they did, well we had guns and they didn't. Paintballs can break skin y'know.


We did the Ghost town course first, a bunch of shacks, dead cars/vans/a trailer and segregated into teams. I was on Team Blue, so I got a blue ribbon tied around my arm. Although, my helmet stands out more than people who want to go professional in the sport and buy their own. It has a red and black color scheme and a Japanese flag decal across my visor. Cuts down on glare a lot.

So, blue team started in the far east corner while green team started near the safe zone we ended up designating. There were 10 of us for the stag party of Hardeep's, and four guys joined our group, they were definitely going beyond the recreation aspect of the sport. They were divvied up, two on each team. Noll and Tom took our team, mainly because they had blue on already.

First game I covered Noll as he advanced, he took out three guys and I tagged Dosman, then Noll was tagged out, so I moved back closer to our start position to help Jamie and Tom take on another guy behind cover. We won the first round with three of us left, not too bad.

Second round, we switched ends on the Ghost Town, and Noll wanted to do a death charge up the center to try and get 6 greens that were in a single shack. I agreed, but we only got to the third shack up, maybe halfway there, when we came under fire, I moved back to the second shack, hoping to spot a shooter, but one of the greens was trying to flank us from the outside, I warned Jamie, Noll, somehow made it back there without me noticing, and then I ended up tagging Dosman again. He was the little bastard trying to outflank us. Serves him right. Hardeep and Tanner were left as well, until Noll and Jamie were taken out. That pretty much left me to charge, and then I ran out of paintballs. Stupid damn hopper.

Next game we moved to the Castle, surrounded by a moat and mosquitoes aplenty. Blue took possession of the Castle first, trying to get the greens as they advanced under cover of bushes, stacks of pallets and large wiring bails. One of them snuck around the north side of the moat and crossed, and I was certain I had heard someone moving over there, I didn't see anyone. He shot me with two balls and I jumped so high, both from pain and surprise. I've got two nice welts from him.

Second round we switched, and I decided to forgo my mask and just stick with my helmet because it was getting hotter. That would turn out to be a mistake. I took the mask along so if I was shot in the head I wouldn't have greasy paint in my hair (now that I have hair again), and the round I took it off, Dosman ended up tagging me in the head with two rounds. The first broke on the top of my helmet while the second broke on my head.

Finally, last game we decided to do some speed ball to finish up our paintballs. Don't let the name deceive you, you don't usually advance very fast, it's a game designed around machine gun warfare: fire 1000 rounds and hit two guys once each. This is where I got shot a lot. A lot a lot. Noll covered me and I made it to the third cover up before I got shot with two balls in the finger, one on the arm and one on the mask. Back to safety, respawn and shot a death charger as he took out two of our guys.

Most of them ran out of balls quickly, and as the game ended, I painted an old light fixture orange to use up mine. Needless to say, a real-life FPS rocks the fuck out of any video game.