Here is a clever parody that mixes the Lord of the Rings movies with The Princess Bride:  Is This A Kissing Book?

And we continue from our interrupted narrative...

Wednesday, Steve, Troy, and I had brunch in the Circle Centre Mall food court (I went for Chick-fil-A).  They we went to the convention center to buy events tickets, pick up a program book, and pick up our freebie bag.  Bill was busy with the Forum Stink, but he met up with Steve and Troy as I left them to attend mass for the Assumption.  When I got back to the hotel Brian and some of his HeroClix friends were there, too.  We all went to dinner at Battery Park.  Our waitress was a cute twentysomething who, as we left, Troy asked about late night opportunities in downtown.  We had noticed that most things were closed by 17:00-18:00.  She said that she and a coworker always go to a bar on Wednesday nights to play Trivia, but that the two of them never have a chance to win because they're competing against teams of six and seven.  So, when we got back to the hotel I suggested that we go join her team of two.  As gamers, we'd likely be of some great help.  None of the others were willing to go fourteen blocks.  This caused Steve to be concerned for Troy, a theme that lasted until we left him at Sky Harbor on Monday.  I wasn't willing to walk alone fourteen blocks at night in a strange town, so I was stuck doing a whole lot of nothing with the others.

Thursday, I ignored my wakeup call.  By the time I got up and showered I ended up skipping breakfast to rush over to the convention.  I showed up too late to play an 08:00 game in the Mayfair area, as had been my tradition.  So I wandered on down to the Guardian 6 area, despite the fact that the game didn't start until 09:00.  There was already one woman there.  We worked out the GenCon Puzzle Hunt for Tiamat before others came, including my friends from a few years ago, Kristin and Dan.  They had Dan's brother Eric in tow, and they expressed how they had missed me last year.  Well, once it was 09:00 we started pulling out our tickets when I discovered I had left my event tickets in the hotel room!  So, I said my goodbyes and headed back.  The others were finally getting up, showering, and headed to breakfast (to which I was invited).  I just grabbed my tickets and headed back.  By the time I got back, the Guardian 6 folks had just arrived!  So everyone told me to get back in line (luckily, as it was very long by this point) and I was still second to sign in.  They didn't have their dossiers yet, so we created a second line after signing in as we awaited the dossiers.  Eventually Mike Selinker came with the dossiers, and we began Operation Firefly.

Troy decided to join me that day, so I met him on the steps of the capitol.  The first puzzle we chose to tackle was set inside.  After we finished that puzzle we moved onto the only unfun puzzle of the entire G6 event:  the phone tag in the exhibition hall.  At least it gave me a chance to stop by the Fiery Dragon and Flying Buffalo booths.  We also ran into Mike, who Troy gave a hard time for having such a small picture and text in the program book (a mere quarter page).  Aparently Steve had just recently gave him a hard time for the same reason.  Other than the phone tag mission, we had a lot of fun doing the G6 event until Troy had to go to the World Series of Poker Tournament.  I finished what I could by myself before I had to go to the Comrades in Arms Tournament.  I passed on what I could to Troy when he was done, and the two of us rushed to the G6 booth to both get credit for finishing.  Then I rushed back to the Whirlpool of Blood Tournament.

During the Comrades in Arms I used my Jammers Ape City deck while Ken used my Ascended Monkey King deck.  Ken had a horrible time with the deck, which is one of Monte's favorite decks to borrow.  I did OK with my deck, often fooling players into using the designator "Monkey" with their Discos then playing "Simian"s out the wazzoo.  Neither of us made it to the finals. 

Ken couldn't stay for the Whirlpool of Blood, as his ride to the hotel wouldn't wait until midnight.  The Flying Buffalo crew was staying at a low budget hotel miles from downtown, and he wasn't willing to spend that kind of cab fare just to play another game.  It was the first draft I've played with pods.  We drafted Six Guns and Shurikens, Critical Shift, and Dark Future.  I ended up taking two Shadow Syndicate pods, and built my first Syndicate deck.  It worked fairly well, but my unfamiliarity with the 6G&S and CS cards worked against me.

Friday saw Steve choosing to join me for Guardian 6 and Operation Pandora, but Troy bowing out.  Steve got very frustrated with the first mission at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument.  He gave up on the game, chewed out the G6 staff at HQ, and Troy took over his slot.  Friday's G6 "failure" was that people couldn't operate a simple eTrex unit during one particular mission, so by the time I went to do the mission they skipped out on giving me a unit.  I was kind of disappointed, as folks at work call me a "GPS guru."  (I really hate the term guru, but that's another blog entry all together.)  However, there's nothing cooler than meeting a contact in a back alley and being driven around downtown with a black hood over your head.  That's immersion storytelling at its finest. 

I have apparently run into the limit on the number of tags I can put in my blog yet again.  Oh well, I'll just split the week yet again and continue further in the next entry.

Thanks to otaku-d for this quiz: