TWO HUNDRED ONE: A Weird Place
201
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Friday evening’s MPE class ended with a bang, a scream, and some whimpering.
The bang came from Reinhard’s final shot blowing a hole in the regenerating barricade that had been added at the halfway mark. The instructors and volunteers must have thought they needed to up the difficulty level since everyone knew in advance what was in store for them. The new obstacle was similar in appearance to the usual gym barriers, but much more penetrable. It extended to the ceiling and had to be broken through to complete a run.
The scream was Marsha’s as she arrived at the finish just in the nick of time to connect with her teammates and win, but not fast enough to engage Galecourse in a fight, which seemed to have been a personal goal for her all class.
And the whimpers belonged to the members of the four teams that had failed to achieve a single victory.
There was no prize for a second win, but Alden’s team had managed one about halfway through the session. That success came courtesy of Lucille, who’d smashed a hole in the barricade for her own team that they’d been able to reach before it closed, and Air Kon. Traveling with him required strong stomachs and nerves of steel. A couple of the trips they’d braved had ended in deaths, but it worked out on flight number four.
Afterward, Haoyu declared the large wooden turtle shell they’d flown on lucky, and mused that it looked like it might have been a stylish piece of interior decor before it broke and ended up in Big Snake’s projectile pile. In response, Lexi announced that residents of the huntski lodge were only allowed to have one oversized personal item at a time in the living room.
The other winners were Søren’s team and Max’s. He, Finlay, Jeffy, Astrid, and Lucille had reached the finish three times. Even Lucille had cheered on their last victory, and Max was looking pretty smug as the wind, the Zhang-Demirs, Big Snake and Klein all stopped attacking for the day.