LARP goes unnoticed

To the St. Olaf community:

We are LARPers and it has come to our attention that many of you do not take what we do seriously.  You see us walking around campus wearing pop-can top chainmail, throwing spell pouches at each other behind Larson and beating each other up with foam swords outside Hilleboe.  

You think that these things are stupid; that we're just "freaks" living in some "imaginary" world.  But let me tell you, there is nothing imaginary about trying to kill the evil demon-army of Urgrar, the evil space dragon, who shoots lasers. We are in the midst of an all-too-real intergalactic battle of good versus evil. We LARPers are mere avatars of our other selves who are asexual alien life-forms from a planet you've never heard of.

We fight our battles on Manitou Heights, here on Earth, under the guise of faux warfare because we are space "ninjas," in an intergalactic tussle. This may be difficult to comprehend, but if you combine the "Matrix" with "Avatar" and "Groundhog Day," you'll get close.  

When someone "pretends" to die in LARP, their avatar literally dies, in real life, on the spaceship.  Then another one of us takes the body of the one who "pretended" to die – but is actually dead. This is how you earthlings cannot detect our imperative super-secret, galaxy-spanning mission.  

When you see one of us getting whacked in the face with a foam pool noodle, cheer us on, knowing that a real body is spitting out blood in an avatar-pod on a spaceship, in space, in real life.

Thanks.

Matthew Geisendorfer-Lindgren ‘10 (geisendo@stolaf.edu) is from Maple Grove, Minn. He majors in long names. Olaf Samuelson ‘10 (samueloj@stolaf.edu) is from Albert Lea, Minn. He is a ninja studies CIS major.

"Editor's note: this article appeared in the April 30, 2010 satire issue of the Messenger."