ringing Literature To Life--Through Violence! [Tuesday, Second Period]

[furious-maximus.livejournal.com]

Class today was in the woods. Well, in the Danger Shop set up to look like them, anyway. And not old woods with massive trees and good sight lines around the trunks. Oh, no. These woods were young. The trees were tall enough to provide cover, but hadn’t gotten big enough to cut off sunlight near the ground. And that meant a huge tangle of vines, shrubs, bushes, and smaller trees. That meant that you couldn’t see very far at all.

And while Max wasn’t anywhere to be seen, his sudden voice was certainly loud enough. “Camouflage,” he boomed. “The art of concealment. Whatever you want to call it. While it’s hard to actually move an entire army around without being spotted doing it, proper understanding of camouflage can let you keep the size of that army from being obvious, and with smaller groups it does become possible to move around undetected.”

“They key to camouflage is tricking the eye,” Max said, stepping away from a tree (and ceasing to cheat, letting his aircrafted sight shield drop). He was dressed in muted colors which had then been splashed with mud in a few places, and his face had been darkened by soot. “And tricking the eye means understanding how it works.” He flashed a grin, his teeth looking especially bright with his face so dirty.

“Primarily the eye works by sensing differences. Differences in color, shape, or motion. These are the three big ones to consider.”

“Color is relatively straightforward.” Max gestured at himself. “If you want to blend in, make sure you’re dressed in the colors of the area you’re in. And,” he gestured at his soot-covered face, “make sure you cover any exposed skin, too.”

“Shape is a little bit more complicated. It turns out that we’re pretty good at picking out human silhouettes, so even if you’re the right color to blend in, if that color is shaped like a person, you’ll still stand out. This means that you actually want to use multiple colors, and mix them up so that you don’t have any meaningfully-shaped blocks of it. Also consider wearing bulky clothes that make you appear more like a blob and less like a person.”

“And, finally, movement. Even if you’re shaped like a blob and colored to blend in, if you’re moving really fast you’re going to stand out. Now, in nature, pretty much everything’s moving, so movement in and of itself isn’t bad, but if you move differently enough from the things around you, you’re going to stand out. So move slowly. And move in occasional spurts rather than at a constant pace.”

Max shrugged out of the large backpack he was wearing and tossed it onto the ground in front of his students. “Here you go. Moddable supplies to try this out yourself. Which you’re going to need since you have five minutes to go and hide before I start looking for you. And anyone I find will join in the search, so the longer this goes on the more people you’ll have to hide from.”

That wasn’t a very reassuring grin, Max. “Good luck.”