The Moon Hiding at Dawn

Chapter 4: The Calm

It's the fifth on August. A warm and shining blaze from the sun patches through our classroom window, blinding the sleepless eyes that almost everyone wore. Not a surprise. Leave it to ten people to handle a school-wide event and you'd surely get the same results as that of our faces. The calendar just simply gets shorter and shorter, the date of the event closing-in like a wolf tracking a poor mouse with its glaring eyes and bared fangs.

Only that we're not really as poor of a mouse as it would seem.

Everything's done in the programming end so it's just us testing it around... actually more on playing around at this point. We just run any additional errand as logistics when we are not fooling around with equipment. We added helmets as part of the package in case people decided to be unruly and we made it targetable as well to make it realistic. The official event launches at the fifteenth but we have scheduled orientations on the thirteenth and fourteenth for all colleges.

We from programming are to 'fool around' with equipment to be sure that it is fool proof and won't malfunction in the last second. We added casings to the guns so it could withstand rigid conditions. We also added paralyzing effects on the armor so elimination and hits would seem realistic. We just need to hire people to clean up unused parts of the battlefield and take the 'dead' students away. So as not to bore those who are out of the game, we customized lenses attached to the helmet which transfers vision to an overview camera (just a drone flying around with a high-resolution video cam) so they can still see the action happening around them while waiting to be cleaned-up.

All of these things possible with sponsorship agreements with big firms in gaming equipment. They provide what we want and we give them test data for their own use. We might as well have helped in making a new and revolutionary gameplay option. I honestly don't advise the use of our body equipment though since playing anywhere with it would just turn weird when someone just suddenly flops down a busy street, nevermind that it is already weird in itself for people to walk around like dark colored storm troopers just to play a game. Nonetheless, the world is a weird place so I'll leave it to the future to decide on that.

As much as I hate to admit it though, it's a pretty good deal where props goes to Chris and Clyde for sealing the agreement on that one.

For this day, we've been test firing all of the guns... Which is to say a whole lot of them. Imagine Business, Social Sciences, Law, and Engineering students in this school has to be accounted for. I'll refer to Engineering and Computer Sciences as Engineering since our Com-Sci department does not really have a lot of students. Anyways, we've scheduled practice drills for each college from the seventh to tenth so that we won't have technical issues during the actual competition. Before all of those, however we have a fun day planned.

We, programming team, called the rest of the seven here. They're done with their respective works as well so we won't be delaying anything. For the moment at the very least.

"So... Why the assembly?" asked Cynthia.

"Get an armor and gun. We'll all be playing!" Exclaimed Randy who couldn't seem to hide his excitement and was already in his custom armor and machine gun and prancing around like a madman while Ramus was just patting him on the back, like an owner trying to calm down his pet bear.

"Perfect" said Kallen. "Let's get the three of you to the test then since that's what may happen on the third night."

"Let's practice controls then until sunset so we could use the night setting better. I've never fired a gun before or something similar so I'd like to be familiar with it." Nina suggested of which everyone agreed.

We had all of them instructed. The standard gun is shaped like an MP5 (The P90 plan had a lot of complications so we threw it to the bin) with the 'safety' lever having three adjustments. Topmost being burst, middle as singular, bottom as automatic. Burst shoots three bullets at once and the trigger must constantly be pulled. Same case with the singular except that it only fires one bullet per pull. Automatic sends endless stream of bullets while the trigger is held after pulling. I know that the actual gun or even its airsoft version only has single-fire and full-auto but we added the burst-fire regardless so as to allow dynamicity or versatility for the players. Something within those lines just so gun enthusiasts won't be chasing our backs and bashing us for inaccuracy. Some people can actually be that rude.