Chapter 1

In hockey, every child wants to believe that they will make it to the InterNational Hockey League. Some spend many years (and most of their parents’ time and money) gaining skills and perfecting their craft.

Some make it, most don’t.

The rest of us usually give up when we hit our mid-teens and then go years before lacing up the skates and hitting the ice again. It might be a chance to recapture some of the Glory of our youth, or it might just simply be a middle-aged guys attempt to get some exercise and find some more friends.

That’s beer league.

Two dozen amateurs, has-bins, and never-were’s sharing an hour on the ice followed by a case (or two) of beer in the change rooms afterwards.

Mostly the guys will forget how many goals you scored, but they’ll never forgive you if you bring cheap, shitty beer.

If you forget the beer entirely, you might as well not show up.

... ever again...

Portal Beer League has some similarities, but with the added complications of having to find a new place to play every 10 weeks, putting together a balanced team, and paying the upfront reservation fees...

... and the possibility of death.

Certain Weapon Skills will always have an easier time finding a team. Like Goaltenders in Hockey, a Healer is always welcome (often an established team will drop their weakest ‘second line’ if any healer even expresses interest). Frontline fighters are often considered interchangeable but, in any case, you need one at a minimum (usually two). Ranged fighters and second line support fighters have a harder time of it.

Just the title of ‘Archer’ or ‘Slinger’ perhaps even ‘Javelin’ puts an immediate image in someone’s mind. You’d get a decent idea of their skill and where it would fit in a team.

Whenever I told someone my weapon was “Staff-Sling” the usual response was: ‘Hunh?’

Whoever assigns these weapons probably thought they were doing me a favor. I’d been a pretty good lacrosse player in my teens, and the action of throwing one of those 3-inch hard rubber balls was very, very similar to chucking a similar sized rock.

If you haven’t seen a lacrosse game before, the sticks aren’t just used for throwing and catching. Slashing, cross-checking and full-body contact is literally part of the game since the Iroquois first created this form of controlled mayhem.

The sticks eventually went from traditional wood, leather and sinew to a lighter aluminum and para-cord with plastic heads. This meant that the weight of the sticks went down, and the number of broken arms, ribs and collar bones per game went down too.

All us Hunters seem to be granted a general training in their new weapon but I just happened to have a real head start compared to most. I could smash a watermelon with a rock at 20 yards, 9 times out of 10 right out of the gate. (It’s on my linked MeTube page if you don’t believe me). I could block and strike with my staff at close range as well as (or better than) most mages too.

Unfortunately, all that just wasn’t enough to get any traction with a fixed team. That and the fact that I was a 30-year-old single mom. Yup, that might have been part of it too.

Perusing the ‘People with Weapons’ version of the ‘Dating Apps’ I found a group that could really work for me. (Apps like ‘Band-mix’ were quickly co-opted by new Weapons, and team builders to try to find like-minded groups until the people who run them created the now widely used PortalDiver app.)

Jimmy Jones (Tower shield and Lance) was looking to put together a team for a 10 week ‘Tour of Duty’. He had two portals booked and they were only 2 hours north of me, one of which was in a trailer park. Requirements were that you had to ‘Cover’ (guard or ‘stand watch’) the portals for two of those weeks as well be able to attend all 10 dives.

Since he had prepaid the reservation fees, anyone signing up had to pay him their share of the fees to him in advance to secure their spot. I’d worked with Jimmy once before and had almost all of the silver required.

I sent a DM, cringing because it was public.

[Leslie here, Staff-Sling. We ran two level-one Pink in September. I have 19 of the 20 silver, but what I also have is a trailer that sleeps 4. We could park it for the whole 10-week run nearby for those standing guard duty. Here are the links for my MeTube videos: ranged weapon and a solid second liner for melee fighting].

I crossed my fingers and hit SEND.

Jimmy was one of the most serious ‘Beer-League’ people I had ever met. If he had been granted a larger sword (or even a proper spear) everyone figured he’d be a shoo-in for a sponsored team. I found him to be a bit of a desperate and bossy young man, but he was actually a great frontliner once he let go of his usual bitter distaste for his assigned Weapon.

A Lance isn’t meant to be used without a Mount. A spear, or other pole-arm would have been better for a man on foot. I can only imagine just how dangerous he could be if he had anything like a warhorse.

That was only hyperbole, since no Weapon I’d ever heard of had ever mentioned having a mount ... yet.

That was the collective term we all used to refer to people like ourselves: Weapons. There was the tool itself; sword, bow, staff, etc, but the people were the Weapons. I don’t know who coined the word exactly, but it made us seem cooler and more dangerous than a majority of us actually were. Jimmy being an excellent case example. 99.9% of the time he was a mechanic, only rarely was he a dangerous fighter. Not to say that were weren’t potentially lethal, but so is anyone with rifle, or even a kitchen knife.

I closed the PortalDiver App, ensuring that notifications were selected ‘on’ and started making dinner for Ashley and Seneca. The school bus would be dropping them off soon, and if I wanted to have any hope of fixing something from what I had on hand and serving it up before I had to leave for work, then I had to be started basically as soon as I woke up. It was that or order pizza again, and I couldn’t afford to have takeout that cost $65 more than once a week.

Jimmy had made that post at 10 a.m. while I was fast asleep. I hoped I had enough to offer and had gotten in fast enough. Some other Weapons made their own ‘offers’ (cough) offline to Party Leaders, securing a place on a dive and gaining experience (and cash/prizes) where others wouldn’t.

Most Party leads were honest and open, but often enough it was just a guy thinking with his ‘little head’. At worst the team suffered injury or death because some really junior and weak Weapon got included on a dive where they had no right being. At best, the girl (usually) got a bunch of experience and maybe even a drop, moving them up the ‘food chain’ and giving them a real, honest chance of joining more dives and rising further.

My 2 runs with Jimmy came from a failure of one of these girls to hold her own. The other four (and Jimmy) mutinied after their third run when she apparently failed to provide any protection at all to their Archer when the horde of zombies pressed them. I got a call from one of the women in the group asking if I could join them on late notice. I jumped at the chance, since it was Dave’s weekend with the kids and there was no Overtime being offered at the Hospital.

It was my first run in that violet, and I ‘held up well’ according to their archer, who appreciated not being eaten when I used my staff to hold back four very persistent (weren’t they all) zombies while the other three took down the two Ghouls. That got me an invite back for their last run, where I bagged my first Ghoul with a (lucky) sniper shot at about 50 yards. We found two marbles on that run, and I won one of them (armour piercing 10%). I traded it off to the other winner of the day (swordsman) who decided that he could do more with that than the ‘intelligence 1’ marble that he’d won.

I’m pretty sure that I got the better end of that deal since I eventually ended up selling it for a high bid of 600k to some group from Chicago. Once the government took their taxes it left me with enough to buy my ex-husband (mostly) out of our house (you’re welcome Dave!) and avoid moving and changing the kids’ school.