Magic leaves you without any clues

[austin_dern]

Let me see if I can finish explaining March Hare Madness or if I even adequately remember the end. So, I was in finals, third seed, along with league regulars IAS and MWS, and guy we know TY. IAS, top seed, had first pick of the three games we'd be playing for finals. Also had a hand full of cards, as they apparently had not hoarding them for the boss battle. IAS picked Tron, a decade-old Stern game based on the Tron Legacy movie that's ... uh ... well, it's got a great theme and uses it well. Just our particular table is a brutally hard one, with a shot that was easy on every other table a really tight, hard-to-find one here.

It happens I'd been practicing on Tron lately, partly because it was one of the last games to be played in our pinball league season. Partly from a feeling that I should get beter on the tables I'm weak on. IAS absolutely ruled the game and I think even picked up an extra ball, and extra card, which is not easy that game. I kept stumbling around, unable to find any good shots, but eventually worked my way up to, I think, third place. Not great but with a strong finish on the other two games I could make a respectable showing.

MWS had the next pick of games and so chose Game of Thrones, his specialty. Nobody can touch him on it. So TY played his card, one that lets him choose another game to play, and moved the group to Jurassic Park. And then IAS played another of their cards: one that knocks a particular table out of the match for the rest of the night. This set off a rules question: what do we play? Since IAS knocked out the game TY had picked, does TY get another pick? Or do we go to another game? If another game, who picks it? And meanwhile ...

I had one card left. It was a cancellation card. If I wanted, I could undo IAS's killing of Jurassic Park and make this rule question moot. But I know these people: they could beat me on Jurassic Park or on Game of Thrones, so there wasn't any advantage in forcing the issue one way or another to me. With bunnyhugger coming to the conclusion the thing to do was go back to Game of Thrones I decided to save my cancellation card, hoarding it against the boss.

In retrospect I should have played the card. Not to better my position --- again, each of them would have creamed me on Jurassic Park with almost as much certainty as here --- but to save time. MWS, going first, put up a monstrous, killer game, getting over a billion points --- I think my best game ever topped out at half a billion --- and going on into some of the mini-wizard modes I only ever see him and RED playing. I had an okay ball, finishing ahead of TY and IAS incredibly, because they had lousy balls. And then IAS played another of their cards, the one that swaps positions after ball one with a chosen player, MWS of course. The result was not only that MWS had had a monstrous first ball, but now he needed to put up at least as good a ball again, instead of trusting that he had lapped everyone else's score and could relax a little. IAS pretty near houseballed the second ball on what had been MWS's player-one game and he sulked that you couldn't do more than that with everything he'd set up?

Anyway MWS came close to beating his original score on the player-four game that IAS had started, so we spent just about forever on this. And I went down to last place, with TY pulling together a decent game while I did not. I probably would have finished fourth on Jurassic Park too, but it at least would have gotten done quicker.

I had my pick for the last game of the night, and while it was now impossible for me to take first place in the tournament --- IAS had locked it up --- second place was attainable, if I picked a game and won it. The trouble is what to pick against players who are, really, all better than me?

I chose The Walking Dead, which I've turned out to be a surprising natural on and that the rest of them don't practice much; we've had the game forever and more modern games are more interesting to practice on. This would have been going all right --- I had a poor first ball, but it set up stuff I could use --- except that my second ball drained on the launch, and drained again on the ball save, and while nobody put up a score that was that great, I'd have to match it on a single ball and hadn't even started a multiball. And then, there you go, I couldn't start a multiball. IAS did, though, and MWS, and TY beat me too.

So IAS would take home the big first-place trophy. And we realized the fitness of that: their shirt was one with a nice picture of a (humanoid) fairy, and the slogan 'Open to fae pacts', and you know what figure was on the base of the trophy? A fairy rabbit, that's right. There was harmony here. MWS took second place and TY third, and I at least took home the fourth-place trophy, the one with a yellow rabbit figure whose color somewhat resembled Sunshine's.

Still it was very late, well past midnight; we'd have almost no time to eat something and I'd still have to get to bed later than I should for work in the morning. And on the drive home I had to stop short: a cottontail rabbit ran across the street in front of us. Felt very lucky that we didn't hit them, for their own sake and for how awful we'd feel driving home from a charity tournament for the shelter we adopted two rabbits from if we hit a rabbit. And, of course, we had a very sick rabbit waiting for us at home.

At home after all this, bunnyhugger had to give Sunshine her evening medicines alone; I had to get into bed. That went terribly, Sunshine anxious and miserable about it all, giving bunnyhugger resolve that she would stop subjecting our poor rabbit to so many unwanted syringes stuffed into her face. Sunshine had, then, under 32 hours left in her small, soft life.

Trivia: The Belvidere Delaware Railroad Company incorporated in March of 1836. Its first line was opened, from Trenton to Lambertville, in 1851, and its official opening day was the 3rd of February, 1854. Source: Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape, Lorett Treese.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Sundays Supplement Volume 5: 1943, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.