Laurie and Julio - Friday night

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backdated to a little earlier in the evening. There is laser tag. Julio teaches Laurie the fine art of being a sniper.



Sport of champions, where winners would go onto glory untold and losers would taste naught but bitter defeat. Laurie eyed her opponent with steely determination, lining up her shot as she made sure she had enough cover to not get shot herself. She grinned as she pulled the trigger, Julio would never know what hit him.

Julio looked down at his chest as the lights on his vest were informing him he'd been shot. "Who the--" He looked around before spying the bit of blonde behind the holographic rocky outcrop. Who knew they'd had all this under the mansion? Certainly not Julio. He raised a fist and cursed creatively at her in Spanish.

Laurie laughed evilly and stood up to do a proper victory dance, complete with circular hand motions. "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" she asked, grin wavering for a second as her own suit informed her she'd been shot. Wha? Damn, one of the teachers. They'd decided to start off with a free for all and then play a teachers vs students later. So far she'd been going fairly well, until she got cocky of course.

"Rule number one of tracking someone," Julio said, leaning his laser rifle against his shoulder casually, "Is to never let them see you. Ever. I saw your hair from even before you stood up." Why hadn't he seen her before that, though? His track record for today was insulting. He really was going to have to swallow his pride and see one of the doctors about an eye exam. After they brought his friends back.

Laurie's hand reached up to her hair, which was placed in a ponytail currently due to all the running around required by laser tag. She never really liked having her hair up but she didn't like having her hair turn into a giant ball of knottiness either. Blonde was not the easiest colour to disguise, although she supposed she could have put on one of those black knit caps. They were currently kitted out in standard black BDU's, so it wouldn't have looked out of place.

"Yeah, but not until I'd already shot you." Laurie replied, grinning and leaning her own rifle against a nearby shrub until she could go again. "How many times you been shot?"

"Counting this one?" Julio looked down at himself and then held up one finger.

Okay, so perhaps knew a little bit more about tactics then she'd given him credit for. It would take something of an adjustment in thinking, since she wasn't used to thinking of her fellow students as terribly spectacular with the more military style pursuits. "Help me Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope." Laurie replied, making with the kitten eyes. "We should team up."

"Yes, we should," Julio agreed. They needed to recharge first though. He felt a very small twinge of guilt about working with Laurie instead of Angel, but Laurie would give him the better advantage. And he would be a gentleman and not shoot her either. "We shall make a sniper out of you yet, my young padawan."

"Recharge it is, and then to see our enemies driven before us and listen to the lamentation of their vomin!" Laurie replied, putting on a bad Arnold accent. "Well, that or listen to them complain about camping. I was so not camping, I was just taking a really long rest by an easily defensible rock formation is all."

"You were just waiting for someone to walk by," Julio said dryly. "Which is what a sniper does, really. But you also must change positions when you have a kill, otherwise you will be figured out." Having a conversation like this with a girl was weird, as in Julio's experience girls hated guns ...and all things masculine anyway. American girls were weird. His several months of dating Angel only confirmed this.

"How do you do that without someone else seeing you though?" Laurie replied, jumping over a ditch that she'd used a few hours before for cover. Conversations with Julio were always interesting, although she was curious as to where he'd gotten all this knowledge about sniper tactics.

"You learn how to blend with your shadows, stay very still. Camouflage also works very well. You also must be very patient." Julio spoke with the assurance of an old master to a young pupil. They recharged their rifles at a convenient drop-point, and the lights on their vests ceased to blink. "Now, to find your first target."

"We should find a spot where we can get them in a crossfire." Laurie replied, grinning at Julio's tone as they moved quickly through the holographic scrub bushes.

Julio matched Laurie's grin with his own small smile. It was good to be doing something. Especially when the something was what he was frighteningly good at. "My father is the one who taught me this, we used to pick off rattlesnakes in the desert."

"That must have been...interesting." Laurie responded, scanning around her for any of their fellow students. "How old were you?"

She wasn't entirely sure if it was a normal father/son thing to shoot snakes but maybe it was one of those strange 'manly men' things that always appeared to have a lot of belching and talking about cars involved. Not that cars were a bad thing but she just didn't find them as intensely fascinating as say, someone like Forge did.

"Ten? It was around the time I learned how to ride a horse. We lived in the desert for a while." A small part of Julio wondered if he should be scared or offended that his father had taken him to such dangerous places when he was small, but they had always felt like such an adventure to him. And with his father, he'd always felt safe. "It was just my father and me, my mother died when I was very young."

"I'm sorry about your Mom." Laurie replied, stopping for a moment to place a hand on his shoulder. It can't have been easy, growing up without a mother. She knew just how close she was to her own, and how much her mother meant to her. Although, she herself had grown up without a father, so she supposed it was much the same. "My Dad, well, I never really knew him. He's still alive, far as I know. Just, never really tried to be part of my life as far as I know. I don't ask about him much, since I know it hurts Mom to talk about him."

Julio shrugged. "She died when I was two, I don't really remember her. I can't really miss what I don't remember. I always had a lot of family around, and my father talks about her constantly, so she's never really felt gone. It is harder on him, I guess." Julio tilted his head at Laurie. "And I am sorry about your father. Some men are too cowardly to take care of their families. My father has always taken care of me, even when it would have been easier to leave me with my grandparents."

"I'm not really sure what he's like. I met him, when we were in the dream, and he seemed like a good enough man, but the man my mother knew...I guess the choices we make shape the people we are. I never really missed having a father though. I had my Mom, and she always let me know how much I was loved. It must have been cool, growing up in a desert. Was it hot all the time?" Laurie asked, crouching and lowering her voice to a whisper as one of their classmates appeared to their right.

"But that was a dream, I had an entirely made up girlfriend." Julio's lip's twitched into an ironic smile. "But who knows? Your father could be a good man." That abandoned his wife and daughter. "And I didn't exactly grow up in the desert, I grew up in Mexico City, then we went north for a while, then went to Guadalajara. I grew up all over." His voice was barely a whisper as they tracked their classmate. Julio gracefully moved his rife to his shoulder and motioned for Laurie to do the same.

Laurie did as instructed, moving her feet to get a better stance for firing. "Can we get her from here, do you think?"

Their classmate had a bit of cover, a large holographic outcropping that she was using fairly successfully. If they hadn't been coming from the other direction, they might have been successfully ambushed.

"Now, we wait." Julio said softly. "Wait until she shifts, if she has been there long she will be getting tired." He squinted, cursing his eyesight. "Line up your shot and don't get too eager."

Laurie nodded, noticing the squint but turning her head back to their target. It didn't pay to get distracted in laser tag, you never knew when something would change. "Your eyes okay?" she asked, voice softening even further as she settled in for the wait.

"Fine," he said automatically. "Shh...wait for it. She's shifting." He'd let Laurie take the shot, with him as backup so they wouldn't have the tables turned on them.

Laurie moved her finger on the trigger, lining up the shot as their classmate shifted, and thus brought her into line with Laurie's gun. Laurie let out a whoop of victory as the flashy lights and loud beeping noise went off to say she'd gotten a successful hit. "I shall now do the dance of joy!"

The dance of joy consisting of cabbage patching, of course. She'd have tried dancing a jig but she wasn't terribly sure what a jig actually was and it sounded painful in any case. She supposed that her joy at shooting another student could possibly be seen as rather over the top but it was this or thinking about the three missing students and she'd much rather be doing this, then that.

Julio couldn't help it, he laughed. "Uh-oh, now Elaine's shaking her fist at us. She looks angry. Annnnd she now is coming over here. And on fire. I believe it is time for your next lesson. Duck and cover." Julio reached out and grabbed Laurie's wrist and started to run.