Teens Writing for Teens, the 5th

“General Lee wants the kid to sign a waiver if he’s going to walk around out here.”


The girl glanced at me, and I tapped my glasses to show that they were translating. I nodded.


One of the men held out a piece of smart paper. I frowned as I read it, my glasses talking to the little computers threaded through the paper, letting it know what languages I read, and highlighting the text that was actual hypertext, with links and expanding definitions and explanations and such.


BODILY HARM WAIVER: The reader does accept, by singing this waiver, that bodily harm may come through shrapnel, bullets, cannonballs, explosives, caltrops, calvery saber, horse trampling, human trampling, and other assorted battlefield illnesses – recreated and keyed to bypass modern immune systems. There are three levels of BHW disclosure clauses, selected and alterable at any time via the signature and witnessed consent of the BHW signer/participant.


I frowned, reading the three levels of BHWs.


There was Minimal Harm, where a little bracelet would guide minnie balls away from me. Apparently the Minnie balls were not actually perfect super duper recreations of the old timey ammo, but rather little hunks of smart-lead that could vaporize itself if it was going to hit someone who hadn’t signed the BHW’s third clause, Possible Death Allowed. They also had little gas jets to move themselves down and strike just the limbs for people who signed the Injury clause. For people like me, who were sane and immediately signed the Minimal Harm section, they’d try and hit the ground and such around me, providing the atmosphere of almost being shot without any of the actual being shot side effects.


A bracelet got slapped onto my wrist and the two men nodded, grabbed me, and dragged me outside into the rain and thunder. I winced as my face got drenched all over again, but before I knew it, I got shoved into an actual reeneactor tent. The inside was splattered with mud and damp, the thick cloth protecting somewhat from the overhead rain, but not the mud tracked in. A man turned from a table, where a large map was spread out.


He was short, and wore a gray coat that buttoned twice down the middle with shiny gold buttons. He wore boots, had really ridiculously pale skin, a beard that looked like a triangle, and a receding splash of hair on the top of his head, which was also silvery gray. He looked almost five hundred years old.


“General Lee, this is the kid we found in the forest.” One of the men said, my glasses continuing their dutiful subtitling.


I hit off a quick search for any ‘General Lee’ before he turned to me.


He sighed. “What is your name?” He asked, using my language.


“Trejo Telvakata, from the WTF clave, uh, four, five days walk northward.”


“I see,” Lee frowned. “You came from the…north…and you weren’t warned that this was a live battleground?”


“No, and I have mesh-linked glasses, they should have warned me. Uh, we did pass by some claves that had really really persistent drones with guns.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Also, I didn’t come alone, my friend-“


“Damn it!” Lee turned to one of his men. “Get me a courier. I need to send a dispatch to those Jackboots and tell them that their drones shot our mesh transmitters. Again.”


“Yessir!”


Lee turned back to me. “A friend you say?”


“Yeah, she was dragged off by this guy in a blue outfit speaking something called French.”


“Then, I’m sorry, but she has been captured by Napoleon.”


“Who!?” My glasses mesh search had finished searching for General Lee. I read his Wikipedia bio. “W…You’re a civil war general. Shouldn't you be fighting Grant? Not…isn’t Napoleon on the…that’…what is going on?”


Lee frowned. “Times change.” He turned to face the map, even as two men dripping with mud ran in.


“Sir!” They both said at once. Then one shut up and the other continued.


“Sir, the French have taken General Ewell’s artillery fortification!”


“Damn it!” Lee swore again. “Send word to Stuart! Tell him he MUST break the French ranks, and if he does not give a good charge, I will personally escort him to the gates of hell!”


“Yessir!” The man nodded and ran off, half slipping in the mud before scrambling up and vanishing into the rain.

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“Now, as to what is going on, you know of reenactors, Mr. Telvakata?”


“Yes, you re-enact old battles and ways of living,” I gulped. “But I don’t know much more than that.”


Lee nodded. “We are a recreation of the army of the confederacy, at the high water mark of that nation’s history. Past this point, the real Confederates had no real chance at winning, and could only delay the inevitable.”


“Oh,” I gulped. “Sorry?”


“Don’t be,” He glanced at me. “If they had their way, you’d be in chains and considered less than a man because of your skin pigmentation.”


“Oh…” I rubbed my arm. “You know, I just picked this cause I thought it went well with my hair, right?”


Lee chuckled. “Well, we don’t stick to every reality of the past, we’re not perfectionist reenactors. For one thing, we have these.” He tapped his bracelet. “And for another thing, in real life, General Lee would never have fought the Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, arguably one of the greatest generals of his age.”


“Ah.” I canceled my search for who Napoleon was. “Why are you, then?”


Lee sighed, seeming to relish taking a break from the pressures of commanding a battle without a cell phone – cause, seriously, sending actual people to physically tell people how to do things? That had to be stressful and a half. “Battles represent the extremes of the human experience. But they have all already happened. How can we really…understand what it is like to be in a battle if it is not uncertain? To create this, we shook things up by taking two armies that would never have even seen one another and pitted them against one another.” He smiled, faintly. “Now, do you want to experience a real battle, or do you want to sit it out?”


I bit my lip, and that damn line of reasoning came up again.


“Well, I am on walkabout…”


Lee chuckled. “I can always use one more infantryman.”

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