Wild Goose Chase

For a change of pace, this Saturnight's mission launched directly from
an extended shore leave at Fort VaVaVoom. Having spent the day eating
tasty BBQ snacks, lounging in the kiddie pool, and romping around on
the lawn, pilots were refreshed and ready for the mission.

Tonight's mission had two objectives:

1. Ride around and have fun.

2. Scout out a possible location for our upcoming chop-in-theater
mission. More specifically, there was a particular parking lot that
was visited many years ago on href="http://www.scul.org/skynet/index.php?
action=view_mission&entity_id=2025">Operation
TheQuickenin' that we wanted to find. Of course, we only vaguely
remembered where it was. But that's not a problem, right?

Hackworth christened his new ship ARP Torpor and then we were off. YT
took the helm and led us through a twisty turny ziggy zaggy route
all through the North Cambridge system. This way and that way and back
and forth and over the river and through the woods 'til pilots had
lost all sense of direction, time, space, and.. who am I again?
Plasmonster lost his sense of which way was up and took a nasty spill
off of Skylab, but fortunately escaped unharmed. We took a brief rest
and regained our sense of selves and were on our way again. Spirits
were high, the high-fives were plentiful, and the stereoboxen were
loud.

We stopped for shore leave at Luna SevenEleven which included the
obligatory snack refueling and grooving with the populace. There we
met one civilian who was a Funkadelic expert, and another who was
obsessed with the Billy Idol song Rebel Yell. All was proceeding well
until.. oops! USB PaleHorse fell
over and bumped a transport with its handlebar. And.. uh oh! Now
there was a dent on this shiny new transport door. YT wrote up a note
with our contact info and was about to place it on the windshield
when the transport operator walked up, and.... omg could this guy
have been any cooler? We showed him what happened and he was
like, "yeah, whatever." He gave us a bottle of touch up paint that he
had inside the car and asked us to touch up the dent. Stogie to the
rescue! (he paints things, in case you didn't know that.) Let's all
applaud the transport operator for being a totally awesome guy who
didn't yell at us! Woo hoo!

At this point we were ready to fulfill our second mission objective,
find the parking lot. Skunk and Vomit had a vague recollection of
where it might be, so we rode to a point close to where we thought it
was and planned our strategy. Scouts were sent out in various
directions to scour the area and find the parking lot. But alas, the
truth became all too clear.. a massive construction project in the
Allston system was sitting right where our secluded parking lot used
to be. In other words: Harvard ate our parking lot. *shakes fist*
Harvard!! But then again, it allowed us to contemplate this age-old
zen conundrum: If you are looking for a parking lot that doesn't
exist... and you find it... but it's not actually there.. then.. uh..
what is the sound of one wheel tacoing in a forest and all that? So
yeah, we all achieved enlightenment and after a short break were
ready to continue on our way.

We had a brief SCUL history lesson in the form of a fly-by of the old
Fort Easton, the birthplace of SCUL. YT then led us to a secluded
hockey rink and two derbies took place. Excess won the first with the
help of a third wheel on VID Angry Candy, and Wombat took out
Nosepicker in a head-to-head showdown to win the second. A civilian
who met up with us on the way let us try out his brand new shiny
electric-assist civilian ship. We each took turns piloting it and
shouting "woah!" as soon as it took off. What fun! After some more
hanging out we were ready to head back to base, and did so without
further incident.

So we found/didn't find our invisible parking lot, but..let's see, we
rode around all wacky and fun, we escaped a possible difficult
situation with a transport without harm, we achieved enlightenment,
and we derbied twice. Sounds like a success!