Chapter 4: Our Weapons

I think that the hotel’s breakfast in the morning came free with the rooms, not paid for by the PRA. Although, that didn’t make any difference since the PRA had paid for the rooms. I did look at the rates, though. Man, it was gonna be awhile before I could afford a hotel room for Friday night dates.

Still, I was down at the breakfast room when Cindy texted me “Breakfast?” Apparently she was a late riser.

“Down here now.”

“CU soon.”

She was down there like 2 minutes later, in my arms and giving me a good kiss. “I missed you. Last night would have been a lot better if our parents weren’t such jerks.”

“I know. Although, I don’t know how much actual sleep we would have gotten.”

“Even a couple of hours would have been wonderful. Okay, my parents will be down soon, I gotta get down.”

“I dunno. I didn’t ask to be attacked this morning, but I like how it’s turned out so far. Maybe you can eat breakfast in my lap.”

“Maybe we’re a little too young to get married, and we’re gonna hafta get married if Dad catches you holding me like this.”

“What? You jumped into my arms. I’m just keeping you from falling on the floor and getting hurt.” She was wearing a thin set of warmup sweats, or maybe pajamas. Pajamas, they had little snowflakes and santas and reindeer on them. From how I was holding her up against me I was half-convinced that she didn’t have anything on under them. At all. At either ‘end’.

She slapped my back. I mean, the way I was holding her there wasn’t anywhere else she could reach. “Down, now. More holding later.”

Oh, okay. She unwrapped her legs and I let her slowly slide down through my arms until she was on the floor. Oops, her top slid up with my hands. It wasn’t on purpose, I was just trying to keep her from falling on her butt, but I was okay with how it happened. I didn’t see anything, and I doubt if anyone else did, but there was nothing there like a bra strap on her back. I could tell that.

It didn’t matter, when her parents came down my parents told them all about it. Although, Dad did point out that all I did was stand up. “Your daughter climbed him like a tree!” getting laughs and agreement from the other diners.

Cindy sat with me for breakfast, too, snuggling up as well as she could without spilling her food all over us both.

After we were all done eating, Eric told us to take our time gathering all our equipment, then to go out to the Portal ready to go. He told us to make sure we each carried at least one gallon of drinking water in our packs, he was going to check. Then, we would discuss who had what responsibilities before we went in, and we’d distribute weapons for the test. When we were all ready, we’d go in.

Dad had gotten some Kevlar inserts for our uniforms, which were basically canvas excuses to hang all the inserts. They were supposed to be a lot better than the plastic hockey guards I had. He had a pretty much complete set for me, as well as some extras he could hand out to my teammates. We spent a little bit of time out at the Gate sorting through that, then Eric asked us for a conference.

First, we had to compare experience and abilities, and decide who was going to lead the team. It was going to be ‘one of the veterans’, of course. Maybe on our next Dive we’d be veterans, but certainly not THIS Dive. It didn’t take too long for us to all agree that Eric should be Team Captain and lead when we weren’t in combat. That would include deciding our formation right before combat as well as assigned responsibilities.

Once the fight started, though, Eric couldn’t manage the fight. He’d be too busy. So, once the weapons started swinging, Margie would be in charge during the fight. She would tell people when to back up, when to move up, when to swap places with someone else.

She would also be responsible for keeping her head on a swivel, so we didn’t get surprised by a flanking or rear attack. Anyone who wasn’t fighting could and should help with that, but unless told to do that our main job was to assist whoever was going toe-to-toe with the monsters. Most levels had large numbers of monsters that were easily killed one-on-one, but we wouldn’t GET to fight one-to-one.

Instead, we’d have twelve rats or five Orcs or something else all attacking us at once. We needed to get in, kill whatever was in front of us, and get clear again as fast as possible so we could deal with the next one before we got overrun.