Is There Ever Too Much Laser Tag

Saturday was too good to be true. Sadly, it turned out to be a dream. I woke up and said, "But if it was possible to have a giant pet crab, I would totally ride him through the abandoned metro system of Moscow." Then I got a call from a girl who invited me to play laser tag. LASER TAG! As it turned out she was looking for my roommate. I told her I'd pass the message along then I went in his place. Oh, sorry, Nathan couldn't come tonight. But I'd love to play laser tag.

There were maybe eight of us at Fastlanes in Rogers, which is like a really big Chuck E. Cheese that sells beer. Scratch that. It's like a really big Chuck E. Cheese. Apparently thirsty dads provide a steady flow of income. The laser tag arena there is shaped like a pirate ship. They play music from the Disney movie Pirates of the Caribbean. Laser pirates? This place is like every scifi novel cover that I've ever ripped off the spine and mailed to Emma Watson as a part of our "correspondence." She sends her replies via her lawyer.

For some reason, Fastlanes divides all players up into three teams - Blue, Red, and Green. The vests actually light up with the team color, so it's easy to tell who you're betraying when you shoot them in the back. The eight of us were supposed to be Red; then my date and I switched sides. There was a single dad and his two boys - Isaiah, 7, and Michael, 9. They were Green. We wanted to be Green, too.

(The dad had a shaven head and the word "STYX" tattooed onto the back of his skull in Old English letters. I asked him if he was willing to die for the Green team. Immediately afterwards I regretted asking him that.)

Inside the pirate ship, we tried to stick together; after every small victory I would yell, "Green Team!" and the two little boys would echo me. Soon my date and I were separated from the family. We did a little bit of sniping, a little bit of close quarters combat, and a little bit of trickery (I would send her into an ambush to take the brunt of the fire, then I would mop up unsuspecting enemies. I told her later that teamwork was the key to any relationship. She said she never wanted a relationship with me. I said that was because she wasn't a team player.)

Every so often we would see sorority girls fleeing some monster, then Isaiah or Michael would pop out after them firing wildly and yelling, "Green Team!"

We were great at this. Eventually, the little boys and I set up a kill zone near the cannons. We slaughtered an entire team of Asians (Blue Team).

After the match ended, we exited proud only to find a scoring error. According to Fastlanes, Blue won with 1225 points, Red was second with 500, and Green was last with 0 points. I asked the attendant why it was so, and he said we were disqualified because I had been using my date as a human shield. I told him that's what girlfriends were - human shields. She told him that she wasn't, nor ever would be my girlfriend.