Ch 1 1/2 Well I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you about myself and the team I play for. My name is Patrick, but my team calls me Ecks. I play paintball for St. Johns Northwestern Military Academy. Our school is broken up into seven companies. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, and Golf. I am in Echo Company along with the other forty members of the team. We call the team EC40, short for Echo Company 40. Each company does something for the school. We play paintball. Our company is broken up into seven squads. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta are the main attack groups. Fox squad takes care of base defense and Golf squad are the medics. There is also an HQ squad that exists only when we are playing, the rest of the time they were part of the other six squads. Alpha squad is the special forces, you know, the ones that sneak around and take out buildings and "terrorists". Bravo is the infantry, the grunts. There only job is to shoot at any thing that moves. Charlie is the sniper/scout squad they gather intel and shoot people from along ways away. Delta is may favorite they are the armor, like tanks. We had two tanks and an assault jeep, all very useful. If I have time I will tell you about them later. I am in charge of Alpha squad; we are the ones that are always right in the middle of the action. My team is made up of six people, not including myself. The first is Angel. Angel's real name is Jess. She is also my girlfriend and the point guard. When we move she is always at the front of the group watching for anything that could be trouble and she is amazing. She can pick out people that are wearing full camo 100 feet away. She can hear a pin drop in the woods. And she's a great kisser. (Trust me, I speak from experience.) The second is Bree, we call her Aimz. She is 16 and boy is she small. I think she weights 85 pounds, and that includes the 15 pounds of equipment she carries. Ok, so maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. What she lacks in size she more than makes up for in skill and determination. Then there is Toland, he is the radio operator, Tweak. He is not your average person. First of all he is a bit hyper, he makes Chihuahua look clam. He's good at what he does though. He is also a bit chunky, not overweight but still large. He clamed he was big boned. But I know the real story. He was born with a disease that I can't remember or even pronounce. What is dose is turn everything he eats directly in to fat, rather than burning it right away, and storing a little, like our bodies do. The result is he gets fat. He really works hard to keep it under control. I have found him on a tread mill at 12:00 at night running. That was when I found out about it, he made me promise not to tell the rest of the team. Maxine is the local tom boy. She has her hair cut shout, she wont ware the plaid skirt that the rest of the girl wear, and she wont let us call her Maxine, she makes us call her Max. she doesn't really have a specific job. She is a gunner, I give her a target and she shoots it. And she is good. I don't think I have ever seen her take more than three shoots at a target with out hitting it. Then there was Matt, the squad psycho, which ironically is what we call him. He spent a lot of time in one of the many labs on campus, we have everything form a standard chem. lab to a Quantum Physics lab. Lastly there is Katie. She is the brains of the group. I don't know why we call her Spot. Some one just called her that one day and it stuck. She was a genius; literally she had an IQ of 165. If I could not come up with a plan she could and if I came up with a bad one she would tell me, and I always listened to her. The last spot was open, there were supposed to be seven people total but we had lost one. He had left to go back to public school, so we were one man short.