Posted on January 1, 1  •  3 minutes  • 586 words

I was playing an IRL capture the flag game inside a mall. Each shop had a giant segmented light bar with the colours of each team (I think there were four teams? I was on yellow). At the beginning of the game each team has their own home buildings which they fully control, capturing a building requires turning the light bar (which varies in size based on the size of the shop) entirely to your team’s colour. I think it would overwrite the oldest one of a different colour. So for example if you have a shop like [🟨🟨🟨🟨🟦🟥] then if a yellow person walks in who already owns one of the slots, nothing happens, but if they don’t own one of the slots then they will replace one of the non-yellow ones (the oldest one) turning it into [🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟥]. Of course the information of which is the oldest slot/who owns a slot isn’t displayed to players so you have to remember if you’ve previously captured a shop’s slot. Teams earn bonus points for controlling a shop, I think the earning period was every 10 minutes? No idea how long this game was supposed to be. You can also reserve a square in fully controlled shops by paying a certain amount of points every earning period. Also every team gets a home shop that can’t be captured by others until they lose all other shops. I don’t know if you could kill people, but probably? Anyway, I was hanging out in my home shop messing around with the spare laptop that one of our team members brought over to be our server (no clue what we needed it for). It was apparently too slow for our needs and I was put in charge of trying to optimise the services running on it. I noticed that we were using wi-fi for everything in our home shop, which was kinda like an office (no clue why there were people sitting down at desks and doing office work). there were ethernet jacks but we needed someone to enable them, so I had to go outside to find someone who would know about it (maybe the game organisers?). I sat down next to one of my team members and noticed that the desk was pretty dusty, also there was a spare laptop just sitting there, covered in dust. I turned it around and saw that it had my deadname on it, the lady next to me said “oh yeah, that’s your desk from back when there were plans to invite you”. I think this shop was a college for gifted computer nerds? idk why they didn’t end up inviting me, but either way we now could have a better server. I opened the laptop lid and saw that it had a custom keyboard, so they went through all this effort and didn’t invite me? I wonder what stopped them. I thought ethernet was more important than this so I put the laptop back on my desk and went out of the shop, noticing that we have heads up displays and it showed that yellow was ahead in the game and that green was eliminated, so it was just yellow, red, and blue left. The arcade next to my home shop was taken over by red so I stepped inside and tried to reserve a slot but it wouldn’t let me because it wasn’t fully controlled, sad. Then I woke up before figuring out how to get the ethernet to work.