Subject: Dundracon (part 1 of 4) Date: Tue, 30 May 95 11:31:32 -0700 From: Liralen Li It might say something of our lives, at the moment, that my journals of what happened in February isn't coming out until NOW. We flipped the calander to June, wailed to see that it was COMPLETELY FULL, and John said, "We're doing something wrong." Well, we'll see. The first parts of the Scotland trip are also going to come out after this... Phyllis ------- Every year I take a pilgrammage on President's Day weekend. It's not that long a pilgrammage... just to the Bay Area, only an hour or two by plane; but it's a real pilgrammage in that I leave home, John, and work and set aside a whole weekend to play game, feed my imagination, and meet the people that, throughout the year, have helped me with my stories, breathed life into my characters, and fed the imaginary side of my life. Misquoting Rich Rosen: "Life is complex... it has a real part and an imaginary part." DunDraCon, each year, feeds my imaginary part. I usually get to meet up with Hubert Bartels, Carl Rigney and the gang of Caltech gamers that game with Carl. Hubert wrote the Nekoko story that I became involved in on alt.chatsubo and Carl was the person that I stole most of the Shadowrun background that I used not only in the stories of Liralen Li but later stories involving other characters that I created. Most of that writing I did in 1991-1993. My first DunDraCon was in 1992... so this was my fourth. My fifth will be next year. In 1992 I met up with a guy named Mark Friedman through a story that bled off of the Nekoko story through a guy named Jim Gaynor, who had a character named Blackjack, who was in love with Nekoko. Complicated enough for you? One of my other characters, Saraquael got involved with Blackjack in a search for Nekoko. Sara got rather messed up in the search. Blackjack ran off to miss finding Nekoko where Sara told him she'd be, so when Sara faints in the Chatsubo, she fell into the arms of one Freddy Marx. Freddy was Mark's character. 1993 was a year of changes in the Chat... and in my life, that was when I moved from AMC to Data I/O and work got interesting and fun again, so i devoted very, very little time to writing. Mark wrote for that incarnation of the Chatsubo fairly regularly, but I didn't. We did get to be pretty good net aquaintances and finally promised each other that we'd write *something* before 1994. We got one issue of Loki's Gun in JUST under the deadline of the end of the year. Barely. We posted it the day before New Years. We got twelve 'issues' of _Loki's Gun_ out in 1994, and those twelve issues involved a lot of work, a lot of talking and generated a very, very deep friendship as well. A friendship that fed all the imaginary sides of me most excellently. So, when we finally spoke of actually meeting it seemed natural that it would be at DunDraCon. As it turned out, Mark's flight came in well before mine, and mine came in well before Hubert's, nearly two hours, so between Hubert, Mark, Carl and I, we set it up simply so that Carl would meet all three of us at Hubert's gate. Mark was going to meet me at my gate. One of the quirks of Mark and I was that we decided, early on, that we wouldn't send each other pictures. So, while we had general physical descriptions of each other, we didn't really *know* what the other one was going to look like. But Mark did give me a splatter-bleached, air- brushed t-shirt with NOISIA, the name of his 'band' on the front... and I wore it to make ID'ing me a snap, well, especially in conjunction with the fact that I'm a nearly six foot tall Chinese woman. So it made it really easy on *him*. All I knew about him was that he would have long, past shoulder length brown-blond hair, would be about as tall as I am and about the same weight, maybe up to twenty pounds heavier, and would be wearing white high-tops and, perhaps, a black trenchcoat. Maybe. In the warmth of the California weather, I didn't think he'd need it. So I got off the plane, and looked around and *none* of the people that were standing there, waiting for folks coming off the plane looked anything even close to the description. For a moment, I wondered if he'd gotten lost, if he'd missed the plane, if it was late, and was starting to formulate plans on how to check that stuff, when I noticed, after I'd walked into the main hallway, that there was one guy still watching me. He was half sprawled in one of the lounge chairs. Long brown hair, wry smile, and I looked down and he had on dirty, white high tops. He waved kinda languidly and I grinned this huge grin at him that he grinned righ back at me. He got up, I walked over, and we hugged for nearly fifteen minutes straight before we even said a word to each other. He was slender and lithe, and there was no way that I could believe that he weighed much more than I; and the fun thing was finding out that most of the mannerisms that we'd shown each other on MUSH's and in email were translated from very real mannerisms. The next hour and three quarters went by incredibly fast as we caught up on things. It was really, really incredible not being limited to just serial textual communication, not having to wait for the other to type things, or for email. Mike Wasson had one noted that he and Neal had worked together on writing games for years and got more done the first weekend they'd visited each other than they had in the previous several *month*. I could now *well* believe it. Mark did the clock watching for the two of us, and got us to Hubert's gate ten minutes before the plane was supposed to arrive. Carl was already there waiting, so I hugged him and I introduced the two of them. Carl had the local newspaper and it spoke of Netcom's problems with the hacker that had stolen all the credit card numbers and all that. Only in San Jose does that make front page news... and it made for interesting reading 'cause Carl's company, Livingston, had made some of the equipment that they'd used to track the hacker down. That was cool to see. Then the three of us sunk into the lounge chairs and just talked for a while, some about the article, some about the game that Carl, Hubert and I were playing by email and which Mark was able to read through a Web page. Carl and I got into a bit of a discussion about something about the game when the plane had already pulled up and people started walking off the plane. I commented that maybe we should be watching for Hubert, but Mark piped up, "I'll look out for him!" "But you're the only one of us that doesn't know what he looks like." "Oh, yeah." And I said, "Maybe he *should* point Hubert out to us." But then Hubert walked out of the gate, looking bemused and heading into the main hallway without looking our way, so I yelled his name. He turned and waved and came over, I hugged him and introduced of Mark again. Mark greeted Hubert while Carl and I gathered up stuff, and Mark kinda looked bemused. Hubert said that he had to pick up luggage from the luggage pickup, so we gathered up Mark's stuff as he stood there, and whoosed off on the way to the luggage claim with Mark trailing behind going "Waaaait... waaaiiit, I've lost all my *stuff*..." He gradually gathered his stuff from us as we swept towards the luggage claim; but he asked me if I was a Chinese fox fairy who stole stuff... and checked the palms of my hands to see if they were covered with a downy fur. A luggage claim later, and we were out in the parking lot looking at insanely tightly packed lots and then out to Carl's wonderful car with the lovely leather seats that I love to slide around on. Yum. Carl took us on the path to San Ramon, and both Hubert and I commented on how familiar this all was. Another year, another DunDraCon and the same path we'd taken before. It really was fun and familiar having all the old voices and all the history and old habits. Finding parking, going to get registered for a room, leaving stuff in the rooms and calling John to tell him where we were. Then it kinda deviated from the script. It turned out that Hubert, Mark and I had been given a room with just a king sized bed in it, whereas Carl had a room with two double beds. Faced with the possibility of all *three* of us having to sleep in one bed, we asked Carl if we couldn't trade. Carl was really nice and said yes. So we did. Unluckily, I forgot to tell John that we'd traded rooms. The four of us then went down, went to the pre-reg for the Con, got our badges, the game schedules and went to dinner at the Hotel's restaurant. The food was good and we commented, quite a bit, on the fact that in the menu they said that they would do specials for anyone that ordered them and wanted them. I got my traditional Onion Soup, thick with cheese and hot and salty. Exactly what I needed after the dehydration of the plane. Hubert got a rack of BBQ ribs and a pile of thin, crisp french fries so big that there was no way on Earth he was going to eat them all, so Mark and I stole them steadily. We also talked over all the game possibilities as we read through the schedules, as usual, planning the weekend on Friday night. Saturday was going to be the day that the other Caltech gamers in the area were going to be able to make it, and Carl's offical Con game was going to be Sunday morning and Hubert's was Sunday afternoon, immediately after Carl's. So Sunday was easily planned out. Saturday was going to depend on when the Caltech bunch could make it, and Monday was going to depend a bit on when Mark was going to be taking the shuttle out, as, just like coming in, his plane was leaving well before Hubert's and mine were. After dinner Carl and Hubert went off to see another game. My traditional plan for Fridays was to sleep so that I'd be ready for Saturday as, as usual, I'd worked like crazy to get everything done so that I could take Monday off at work and still have everything done. I'd been low on sleep for the last three nights 'cause of packing and prep. So I just went up to the room, and Mark followed me. So much for sleeping. We just sat and talked until I started falling asleep, and then we went to bed and talked until I was asleep. Hubert came in sometime after that... and left before I woke up. I think to game. --- end part 1 of 4 ---