1??????????Soul Bound


    1.2????????Taking Control


    1.2.2??????An Awakening Epiphany


    1.2.2.23???Pirates versus ninjas


    It took a few minutes before Nadine was ready to set out along a goat-track that, though stony and meandering, was still the easiest way to reach the wide and (relatively) flat glade on the sunny mountainside high above the village that concealed Jasic''s barn (and personal distillery). Raised by his forefathers more than a century ago, the sturdiness of its dense timbers remained a testimony to their skill long after their names had been forgotten and, if it could just survive being rented out to Heather, it might still be standing long after Nadine had passed away too. Assuming, of course, that some vindictive billionaire didn''t blow up the barn and every other building in the village.


    She sighed to herself about rich men and grabbled her violin as she left the rich scents and cool shade of Kafana Sabanagic, reminded at the last moment about her promise to Heather to play "If I were a rich man", as she had on so many other occasions since the event that had started it all. That had been years ago, when they''d both been studying at UCL, but even now as Nadine trudged along she was able to remember it clearly.


    A bunch of engineering students had come up with a workable way of using smart phones and smart watches as a primitive augmented reality headset and glove, using a hat attachment to keep them in place. For a week, engineers had been seen wandering around campus in a variety of headgear, and then a group of students from computing had dressed up as “software pirates”, wearing not only tricorn hats with orglife attachments, but the full clothing, and even matching virtual avatars.


    The craze took off. Cosplayers from UCL’s Anime Society dressed up as ninjas, and worked out a way to throw virtual shuriken by having the accelerometer in their watches detect the throwing motion. Security cameras on the campus were declared to be lethal to ninjas, and as term went on, students could be seen commando crawling under virtual obstacles on their way to lectures, or engaging in mass duels between rival ninja clans in the cafeteria.


    The pirates, not to be out-done, formed into crews and invented rules for ships. A virtual ship needed a minimum of four people; one for the wheel, one to set the sails, one to bail and one to shoot the cannon. If a crew member left the outline of the virtual ship, they drowned, so the crew needed to walk in close formation. They created a virtual map which overlaid the outdoors spaces of the campus, with an archipelago of islands and prevailing winds, and held cannon battles and races to collect or bury treasure on the islands.


    The craze culminated in a big event run by the Live Action Roleplaying Society near the end of term, after exams when the students needed a bit of wacky silliness to blow off steam. Each team consisted of one pirate crew and one ninja clan, and had a ‘home’ island that others couldn’t attack. The other islands each had a lighthouse (a slowly rotating security camera) and chest which might or might not contain gold bars. The chests and gold bars were virtual, and their weight was implemented by limiting the speed of the person carrying them - if you tried to move faster than the chest would move, you dropped it. The team in possession of the most gold at the end of the hour would be the winner.


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Heather was a ninja of course, and her ninja clan had teamed up with Bungo who was enthusiastic about roleplaying a pirate if not particularly skilled at sailing, to form the “Black Cats” team. Wellington had helped them pick a strategy and was standing on the side-lines with Nadine, watching.


    The other two teams, the Crimson Parrots and the Blue Seadogs, had set out to gather gold as quickly as possible. After 10 minutes they’d both reached the island halfway between them, and the Parrots managed to hit the Seadog ship while the Seadogs were trying to knock out the island’s lighthouse to let their ninjas approach safely. The Seadog ship started to take on water, its virtual form slowly sinking, forcing them to stop and bail. The Parrot ninjas, who could only attack ships while they were stationary, piled into the attack.


    Meanwhile, the Cat ninjas, having collected 4 chests from the islands nearest to their base, were making slow but steady progress. At each new island, instead of disabling the lighthouse, the first ninja would wait until the beam had passed, then run in and carry the chest as far back as he could before the beam came around again, ruining his stealth and forcing him to respawn. But two ninja would approach where he’d dropped the chest, one of them carrying a spare chest, and then both would move away from the lighthouse at the maximum speed of a loaded chest, even though one of them was carrying an empty chest and could have moved much faster. Before they died, they would both nearly reach the limits of the lighthouse’s beam, and 4 more ninjas carrying 2 more chests would rendezvous with the dropped chests, carrying on the pattern.


    Because the virtual chests were all identical to the sight of watchers, nobody except the Cats could tell which of the fleeing ninjas was actually staggering under the weight of gold, and which were just pretending. It wasn’t worth the Parrot and Seadog ninjas time to attack them all; better to go for targets they knew contained gold. And because the Cats had left most of the lighthouses intact, Bungo’s ship could keep sailing in circles around the Cat’s base without fear of being ambushed. The decisive moment in the game happened when the Seadogs sank the Parrot’s ship, and Heather managed to sneak away with most of the Parrot’s gold while the Parrot ninjas were taking furious revenge upon the Seadogs.


    The game finished soon after that, and Kafana had produced her violin and led the whole Black Cats team, ninjas and pirates both, in a spirited rendition of “If I were a rich man”, dancing along in a line around their home island near the lecture theatres. The following term, a note from the university admins banning use of the headsets outside the faculty of engineering had quietly ended the craze, but from then on Heather had started requesting Nadine to play the tune again on special occasions.