Vastator - The turian version of the bogeyman. In ancient mythology, the vastator crept through sleeping armies, threatening or tempting the soldiers to see who would turn their back on honour and their brothers/sisters. Anyone who gave in to the Vastator was immediately consumed.
Trirco - The most notable of the turian trickster spirits.
"Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch nar Rayya asking permission to dock with the Rayya."
Garrus watched over Tali's shoulder as she spoke over Joker's. Despite wringing her hands almost constantly—only stopping to cross her arms and pace a few steps—her request came out strong, decisive.
"Our system has your ship flagged as Alliance. Verify," the stiff voice of the controller called back, his tones clipped.
Although Garrus could pass the man's attitude off as efficient or business-like, it unsettled him. It felt as though they were being brought in as enemies rather than allies. He tried to shake it off, to remain open and calm. Approaching the Admiralty Board as an adversary wouldn't smooth the process or help him get their cooperation for his investigation.
Tali sighed, but her shoulders squared, her spine stiffening instead of softening. "After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, I have returned to where I began."
A small, wry twitch of his mandibles answered the quarian's resilience. A couple of hours worth of sleep and she'd sprung back, biting a little harder, but with her usual energy and guts.
"Verified," the controller said simply.
"We need a security and quarantine team to meet us. Our ship is not clean," Tali replied, her voice becoming just as curt and cold as the one on the other side of the comm.
"Understood. Approach exterior docking cradle 21. Do not disembark until the security team clears you and your escort arrives."
Escort. Garrus looked to Tali, using her reaction as a gauge of how concerned he needed to be, but she didn't move other than to give the controller an icy, "Acknowledged." She turned toward Garrus, practically vibrating with indignance. "If the frost in the air is any indication, we're in for an uphill battle," she said, striding past him and out of the cockpit.
"No, don't worry about me," Joker called over his shoulder. "I'll just connect all the calls and fly the ship and coordinate all the decon. Can I wash your undies? Sort your socks? Anyone who hasn't called home to mom? My pleasure."
Garrus chuckled and patted the pilot's shoulder. "You're underappreciated. Get over it."
The pilot winced. "Ouch. Don't sugar coat it or anything, General."
Garrus followed Tali. "So, I wasn't imagining the extra layer of attitude there?" he asked as he fell in step beside her.
"Since we're expected, I wasn't anticipating that level of suspicion, but this is an Alliance ship." She shrugged.
"So, it might be nothing," Garrus filled in, stepping ahead a little to look down at her face, hoping for some hint through the mask, "but your gut is saying it is."
Tali paused, but didn't even tic in his direction. "We'll find out, I suppose."
"Garrus," Joker's voice snapped off Garrus's next thought. "You have a call on the QEC. It's Weaver."
Hope broke through Garrus's growing dread. Maybe they'd managed to track Legion. Halfway down the CIC, the darker possibilities registered. Maybe the quarians or geth had fired opening shots. He sped up, running the rest of the way to the comm room and down to hit the control connecting the call.
"Martin," he said, listening for the sounds of bombardment in the background. "Are you and Kasumi all right?"
The kid nodded. "Better than. Kasumi rigged me a cloak. Not quite as good as hers, but good enough." Preening, he said, "I like it; I'm considering switching over to infiltration."
Garrus sighed. "Martin, we've arrived at the flotilla. Brevity would be appropriate." Despite trying for gruff and forbidding, a smile tugged at his mandibles. "Why did you call?"
"Kasumi and I staked out the upper entrance. We were there about twelve hours when Arox came out and headed off into the desert alone. He was scanning, like he was tracking a signal. After hiking up into the mountains for nearly two hours, he found a transmitter." Martin started acting out the story as he told it, hands gesturing wildly with his excitement. "He'd just started investigating the transmitter when a shuttle came out of nowhere—it was cloaked! Completely cloaked!— and eight people in black robes jumped out, grabbed him and took off." He held up a foreign-looking datapad. "He dropped this. It looks like he was tracking Reaper signals within geth transmissions."
"Did you get a look at the one in robes? Enough to tell me quarian or geth? And the shuttle?" Garrus held off on the celebration. "Any idea where it went?"
The kid shook his head, his expression falling for a half second. "Negative on the ID. Their entire heads were covered and they moved fast. They weren't playing around or doing the snatch and grab for the first time. They moved as a single, well disciplined unit." He grinned. "Now as for the shuttle … ." Martin rooted in one of the pouches on his belt and pulled out a card of trackers. "Please, Garrus. I graduated from the school of slap trackers on everything and always carry four days of rations years before you did. I'm on the Passch right now. We tracked the shuttle to the relay. That was a no brainer, because it's a primary, so we jumped into Dholen and tracked the shuttle to Haestrom." He stuffed the trackers back in his pouch. "What do you want us to do?"
"Wait. Keep the Passch in Dholen, full stealth. Scan for Reaper signatures, heretic geth signatures … communications from everyone." Stripping off his glove, he scratched at his temple. "Damn. Haestrom is our biggest ship manufacturing facility." Running through scenarios, he replaced the glove, pacing back and forth across the pad a couple of times before he turned back. "I can't do anything from here. Keep an eye on everything, but unless missiles start flying, don't move. Make sure Kal'Reegar and the rest of the Archangel frigates keep in touch hourly. I want to know if anything in those two systems sneezes."
He heard the door open behind him and glanced back. "I've got to go meet with the Admiralty Board. I'll be in touch as soon as I'm out, but if anything happens, don't wait. Call."
Martin saluted. "Yes, sir. Weaver out."
Garrus returned the salute with one starched crisp by the chance he could end this without blood being spilled. He turned to face Nihlus. "We've caught a break."
"Our escort has arrived, as has the team to decon us." The Spectre winced. "Took three months to get the reek of their decon agent out of my armour the last time." He nodded toward the door, a sliver of impatience embedded in his stare. "We'd better go. You can fill me in on the way."
"Okay." Garrus followed, retrieving his helmet from the cockpit before following Tali and Nihlus into the Normandy's airlock.
After their very thorough decontamination, the trio stepped through into the docking tube and made their way down to another airlock. On the other side, a quarian reception committee awaited them, eight Marines in a one-metre flanking spread. Never a good sign.
A single male at the center stepped forward and held his hand out to Tali. "Welcome back to the Rayya, Tali'Zorah. I'm just sorry it's under such troubling circumstances."
The weight of those words tore down through Garrus's belly, landing hard at the bottom. His gaze slid over the people in the dock. Every single one bore arms, and every single one jumped at every move the three of them made. The atmosphere pressed in on him from all sides, not quite heavy enough to be suffocating, but definitely uncomfortably close.
"Thank you, Captain Danna." Garrus didn't miss the Marines stiffening as Tali stepped forward, taking the quarian captain's hand for a moment before retreating. She swept a hand toward he and Nihlus in turn. "Captain Kar'Danna, this is General Garrus Vakarian and Spectre Nihlus Kryik."
Garrus accepted the captain's invitation to shake his hand. "Excuse my saying this, but the armed reception committee and your greeting seem fairly ominous, Captain." The weight began to somersault, tangling itself into his entrails.
The captain replied only by stepping to the side and indicating the way forward with a beckoning arm. "The Admiralty Board and Rannoch Resettlement Committee are waiting." He cut a glance at Tali as he fell in stride beside her, leaving Garrus and Nihlus to follow. The Marines brought up the rear, the hands on their guns far too twitchy for Garrus to feel good about having the weapons aimed at his back.
A moment of awkward silence stretched long and thin, their footsteps ringing hollow and metallic on the deck plating, before Kar'Danna spoke again. "The quarians you reported killed on the surface … the committee hasn't released their names. It wasn't anyone from the Rayya?"
A lilting, pained sigh formed Tali's only answer to the question for so long that Garrus thought she didn't intend to answer it. But then a tiny lip smack announced her words. "They were not from the expeditionary team, Captain. We are all accounted for and quite alive. We don't know who those people were." Her shoulders rolled in a small shrug.
Garrus felt a shudder of fear murmur through the Marines behind them. It launched the dread in his belly, sending it ricocheting through him like a large caliber bullet.
"How did the geth take our people right off our ships?" one of them whispered.
Garrus blanched at the question, knowing that it would echo through every corridor in each of the flotilla's vessels within the hour. Accusations of people being geth agents wouldn't be far behind. Damn, he wished Tali hadn't given Danna an answer. They'd just played right into their adversary's hands, and it was a stunningly brilliant move. If the geth were the villains, they'd just devastated the quarian's sense of security and morale. Within days, the witch hunt would begin, leaving them weak and vulnerable.
On the other hand, if the quarians had orchestrated everything, they'd just turned the geth into the Vastator, setting everyone up to start jumping at shadows until they all screamed for war just to kill the uncertainty. Not to mention that the threat of infiltrators facilitated the easy disposal of anyone who opposed the war. Accusing people of being geth agents would go a long way in an atmosphere riddled with enough paranoia.
As the ground beneath Garrus's feet shifted—solid stone turning to heavy sand that quaked under his tread—he wished he'd turned the Normandy toward Dholen and Martin's heretic geth lead. A specter loomed over him, whispering that before the day ended, he'd be up to his chin in quicksand without a rescue line in sight.
The sand turned to bog as Captain Danna opened the door to a large garden area, half of which looked like a sunken amphitheatre. At the bottom, standing on a raised platform, four members of the Admiralty Board waited, while off to the side, seven quarians sat behind a narrow table. Even though all of them were masked, their stares impacted like icy slaps.
Garrus cleared his throat, his mind racing. He needed to think of something to get them all free of the swamp before they sank, and he needed to do it quick.
"So, that could have gone better." Nihlus leaned back against the bulkhead and stretched his legs out along the cot. Garrus heard the Spectre's jaw crack as he let out a hearty half-yawn, half-sigh. "I wish I could take this damned helmet off."
"You don't really think they'll charge us with anything, do you?" Tali asked, pacing along the front of her cell. "How can they think that I'd side with heretic geth and Reapers against my own people? Treason? It's insane!" She stopped wringing her hands to slap both palms hard against the transparent barrier. The silver reflections of her eyes sliced straight across the corridor and through Garrus's armour. "This is all your fault!"
Garrus shrugged as he turned away to pace the depth of his cell and back. "The head of your Rannoch Resettlement Committee punched me, not the other way around. I still have a piece of broken visor stuck under my eye and my left mandible doesn't move." He grumbled. "I really liked this visor."
Nihlus settled into the corner and let his head loll back. "Who knew someone that size could hit that hard? I thought you were going to go down for a minute there." Crossing his arms under his keel he shifted a bit, then yawned again.
"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Tali said, her voice lowering to a growl. "We were supposed to be finding a way to convince them to cooperate with our investigation." Smacking the barrier again, she spun away and went back to pacing. "Who knows what they're doing out there. They could be pulling all my people off Rannoch, or … or bombing the geth without evacuating anyone."
"They aren't, Tali. Relax." Garrus sat on the side of the low cot. "Right now, all the Admiralty Board is doing is feeling like a bunch of ineffective, short-tempered idiots—"
"Shhh!" Tali hissed, storming back to glare at him. Or at least, he assumed she was glaring at him, the reflection of her eyes had narrowed to slivers. "They're listening."
"Good, because they should be embarrassed by that performance. If I led Archangel that way, it wouldn't have lasted the first three months." Garrus twitched his left brow plate and nose, trying to work the broken piece of composite out of the tender skin beneath his eye. Medigel had stopped the blood flowing down his jaw from a torn mandible and eased the pain back to a five on the Shepard scale—slammed my toe in the bathroom door—but still, he wanted to rip his helmet off and yank the damned glass out of his eye.
He stretched his neck, grumbling as his spine crackled like walking on spilled cereal. After cracking it the other direction, he said, "So, yes, the Admiralty Board is feeling like a bunch of bickering children, the absent Admiral Xen is surely still working to cure the plague on her ship, and Beret'Zol is realizing that she admitted to committing sapient rights abuses against both the geth and your people on the planet before she punched me." As he finished, he allowed a thin vein of pride to pulse through his words.
Nihlus chuckled and shook his head. "Shepard would be proud."
Garrus closed his eyes, Shepard's image appearing behind his eyelids, her features hard and sharp with Trirco's smile. He caressed his thumb along her bottom lip then opened his eyes as he replied, "I did learn from the best." He grinned at the assortment of dismayed noises fired at him from across the corridor.
"You mean, you caused all that on purpose?" Her barrier hummed like someone plucking a high tension cable as she slapped it again. "You big, stupid, spikey … bosh'tet. You could have gotten us all killed. You could have gotten all my people killed. You still could."
He shook his head and turned to lift his legs up onto the cot. "They won't attack the geth. I'm willing to bet the entire fleet that the Admiralty Board had no idea about the committee ordering tests on the geth and trying to confine your people for medical reasons." Leaning back against the bulkhead, he let out a long breath and closed his eyes. Exhaustion settled like snow, building up in drifts. He yawned, and shifted until he found a mostly comfortable position on the too-short cot.
"Don't worry, Tali. Right about now, they're going over the fake scans the committee used to get the conclave to order your removal from Rannoch and comparing them to your actual suit data. When they realize that everything they've been told is complete bullshit, they'll come and get us." At least, that's how he hoped it would play out. He was new to the whole 'piss them off and bring them back around' method of solving disputes and getting what he needed from people.
"When I get out of here, I'm going to break your other mandible," the quarian threatened, her voice a low growl. He opened one eye to watch her stalk over to her cot, throwing herself down on the side, her arms thumping across her chest like security gates.
His one working mandible twitched. "Get some sleep. You're going to need it when we get out of here. We have a busy couple of days ahead of us." He closed his eyes again and let himself drift.
"General Vakarian?"
Garrus bolted upright, heart racing, pain blaring through his face like a trumpet blast. He blinked quickly, trying to clear his vision, realizing dimly that it just made the pain worse. Where was he? A second before, he'd been aboard the Normandy.
"General?"
He turned toward the voice, finally registering the slender form of Shala'Raan through the fog of sleep. Swinging to his feet in a single motion, he replied, "Admiral Raan. My apologies."
The admiral looked across the corridor at Tali and Nihlus, both also just rousing from sleep. "It's been a long few days," she said, making it sound like an explanation for both sides. "The Admiralty Board is prepared to speak with you again. Do you need a few minutes?"
Garrus almost laughed. To do what? Wash up? Have a shower? They couldn't even use the toilets in the cells. Looking to his companions, he saw they were awake, on their feet and ready to go. "That won't be necessary, thank you, Admiral."
The admiral turned to her shadows, two Marines who looked even more wary than the ones who'd accompanied Kar'Danna, her order crisp and decisive, "Release our guests."
Garrus stepped back away from the cell door, looking to appear as unthreatening and cooperative as he had belligerent before their incarceration. "Will Admiral Xen be joining us this time?" he asked, waiting until the Marine moved across to Tali's cell before stepping through the door. Guarded, he stepped up to face the admiral. She'd seemed a strong force for resettlement when they first landed on Rannoch. What had happened in the intervening months?
He frowned as he looked down at her, taking in the sloped shoulders, the roundness between her shoulder blades, the low set of her neck. How much of this was his fault for believing that given a chance to move back to their homeworld, the quarians would be eager to embrace peace? He should have kept a closer eye on the process, given the Admiralty Board more support.
Should have. What the hell good was should have? What he did from now on mattered, not the past.
After considering his words carefully, he leaned down, keeping his voice low so his words wouldn't travel further than the pair of them. "Is the Admiralty Board being extorted, Admiral Raan?"
She inhaled a deep, almost revelatory breath, the conviction and energy behind it making him think of a long-held POW or slave taking their first breath outside the wire of their captivity. Before his eyes, she grew … magnifying as she straightened, squaring her shoulders.
Letting out the breath, she looked up into the dark visor of his helmet. "Not anymore. The board has informed the conclave that should we need to, we will use our veto to override any actions taken against the settlers on Rannoch or the geth. We will approve no military action until an independent investigation brings us conclusive proof as to who is behind the geth disappearances and the attack on our people."
Nihlus and Tali joined them, the Spectre stretching a little before he stood at attention, facing the admiral. "Is Admiral Xen aboard her vessel as she claims?" he asked, his tone as blunt as his words.
Raan shook her head. "The Moreh has been under quarantine for six months. Xen contacts us via communicator and appears to be aboard her vessel. Her people all claim that she is there, working on her cure for the virus."
"But you have doubts?" the Spectre prompted.
Garrus withheld his instinct to halt Nihlus's interrogation and preserve the admiral's goodwill, wanting to know the answers for himself. The problems on Rannoch had two main suspects as far as he was concerned, and if one of them truly had been locked aboard her ship for six months, that altered the landscape considerably.
Raan turned away, leading them down the corridor. "People move very freely amongst the ships. Friends and family visit one another, techs are shared as needed, and resources are transported back and forth."
Tali inhaled sharply, making a connection that Garrus hadn't. "Even if the virus had an incubation period of a single day, unless people weren't infectious before symptoms presented, the whole fleet should have it."
"Yet," Raan spoke up, "we've seen the victims, tissue samples … everything says that the Moreh is suffering an outbreak. People have died. They were buried in space using contamination protocols."
Garrus nodded, raising a hand to halt Nihlus from continuing the interrogation. "Admiral Xen will be speaking with us now?"
The admiral opened a door, leading them out of the small cell block and into a main corridor. "Yes, via the comm." She led them in silence until they reached the amphitheatre. "Expect Xen to resist your stance on everything, General."
Garrus nodded, appreciating her desire to keep that day's meeting less confrontational than the previous. "I think she'll prove quite open to what I have to say." He held out a hand, inviting her to proceed, when she just gave him a dubious tilt of her head.
"Well, that went much better," Nihlus said and chuckled as he stepped through the Normandy's airlock.
Garrus nodded and reached up for the seals on his helmet, removing it gingerly. "It's amazing what happens when you say that you have evidence the heretic geth may be behind the entire thing." He turned to face Nihlus. "For the sake of all that's merciful, pull out this spirit-forsaken chunk of glass out of my eye."
The Spectre removed his helmet, then plucked the offending bit of visor from Garrus's hide and passed it to him. Cocking his head, he leaned in to look at the torn mandible. "You better see Dr. Chakwas about that one. It looks like the tendons are torn."
"I will be. Thank you." He laid a hand on Tali's shoulder as he passed her. "Told you it would work out." A heavy grunt answered her elbow burying itself between the sections of his armour.
"Next time, tell me the plan." She strode out of the airlock just ahead of him. "Now what?"
Garrus paused to lean into the cockpit. "Best speed to rendezvous with the Passchendaele, Joker. Full stealth."
"Full unappreciated grunt mode, aye, sir," the pilot barked sharp enough to echo.
"As you were." Garrus turned to Tali, giving her a painful, one-sided smile. "Let's go find out who's behind all this."
"You told Admiral Xen that you believed that heretic geth were to blame," Tali persisted, following Garrus doggedly down the CIC.
"No, I said that I had evidence that they could be. That's the truth." He didn't look at her until she ran in front of him and stopped. "What?"
"You didn't ask her anything about the virus or her influencing the committee. Why?" Her silver glare bored into him like a mining drill searching for platinum.
Garrus stopped at the door to the crew deck. "If she's behind all this, what's she going to do if we show suspicion? She's going to try to cover her tracks, wipe away everything that could lead to her, including any people in the way." He shrugged and lifted a hand, buttressing it against the wall. "If she thinks we're looking at the geth, doing her work for her, she's not as defensive." Shrugging, he pushed off the wall and walked through the door. "And if it is the geth, we're looking in the right direction. Both towers covered."
"Towers?"
He let out a long-suffering sigh. "It's a Hideth Turram thing."
Tali sighed. "You're still a big, stupid bosh'tet."
He nodded. "Yeah, most of the time."
"Captain?" A dark shape appeared above her, blurry and washed out into shades of grey. "Captain! I need you to remain calm. You're going to experience a great deal of pain, but we'll get this over with as quickly as possible. Try to remain still." The shape withdrew, moving around the edges of her vision.
The pain started small, termites gnawing at her cells, but as she blinked, trying to force the blurry world of unformed shapes into something that made a little more sense, the termites began to grow.
"Miranda, what are you doing?" Another shape formed of greys and black ran in from her side. It peered down, it's face thrusting so close to hers that a thin mewl of fright crawled from her throat, and she tried to pull away.
But as she tried to pull away, the termites swelled into cockroaches, their jaws devouring her from the inside out. As the pain roared, it awoke fear. Where was she?
"Moving her." The one who'd spoken to her slipped down her side. She registered pressure and touch as the woman threw objects over her body.
She tried to move, to push away the shackles and chains before they could wrap around her, but her hands didn't obey. Fear kicked at her heart until it raced, its hard, erratic thumping chased panic out to run screaming along every nerve and muscle fibre.
"She can't be unhooked from the machines. You're going to kill her."
"When I came in to check on her five minutes ago, her duty nurse was trying to do just that." Something flew through the air, just a faint streak across her vision. "By putting that in her IV. By the time you sauntered in here after your third cup of coffee, Shepard would have died of heart failure."
The figure with the male voice dashed down her side, startling her. "Good lord, Miranda, you killed Carrie Peters?"
"Not before she admitted that the council knows about this project and intends to ensure that it doesn't succeed." The shape with the accented female voice rushed around her head, a dizzying blur of constant motion. "Now help me get her moved to L Wing."
Panic grabbed hold of her diaphragm, yanking at it all she could do was gasp in short, shallow breaths that didn't pull any air into her lungs.
"L Wing? The labs don't have half of what we need." The male shape bent over her, blurry features becoming partially visible as he leaned close to her face. "God, she's awake, Miranda."
"I know she's awake, I had to unhook her from the IV. We'll start another one when we get there."
The man's face withdrew. "What are her vitals? God, she's got to be in agony."
Pain, fear and panic all laughed at that as baby alligators burst out of the cockroaches' bodies and continued eating her alive.
"Yes, enough to send her into shock if her brain stem doesn't shut down first, so stop dithering and help me."
The world moved. She thought that was supposed to happen when the right person kissed her. Panic giggled. Not a set of kissable lips in sight, and still the world rushed by in dizzying streaks and nauseating swoops. The alligators dug in claws to hang on, every cell of her body screaming at a hundred different pitches as the surface under her back rocked her one way then jerked her another. The edges of her vision darkened, night falling. Night meant sleep. Yes, sleeping through the pain.
"How did the council find out about us?" the man demanded, a harsh, whispered attempt at clandestine shouting. She felt the rough edges of fear sawing along the underside, but it wasn't the same fear that rode along with her. Struggling to understand what she heard, she floundered through the steady current of torment, losing ground as the undertow caught her.
The woman laughed, but it cut like a shard of broken mirror. "The same way we find out everything they don't want us to know. It doesn't matter now. They know, and they won't stop at sending one assassin."
The world came to a lurching stop, the jolt pulling a thin wire from her throat as pain hooked a scream to the end.
"It'll be over in just a few more moments, Captain," the woman said, the blur of her face leaning over. "Just stay calm and breathe slowly."
Breathe slowly? She couldn't get any air.
"She's hyperventilating," the male shouted. Why did he need to shout? "Did you even give her anything for the pain?"
She winced away from a bright, orange light as it exploded above her.
"Heart rate is becoming erratic. Damn it, Miranda, she's going into v-fib. We're going to lose her before we get out of the damned elevator."
Someone threw something heavy onto her legs.
"Get the pads on her chest. We'll shock her if we have to." The woman's face appeared above her again. "Captain, I know it's difficult, but you must try to stay calm. We'll be in your new room in moments."
The alligators ate away at her until darkness closed in, opening a chasm between her and the agony of their teeth.
"Shepard," a voice whispered through the darkness. Her heart calmed the moment she heard it. "I only want this, Kahri, when it comes because this … " A hand pressed heavy and warm over her struggling heart. "… belongs to me."
Who are you? She reached out, trying to span the chasm, knowing that if she could just touch the memory of that voice, everything would be all right.
The darkness drew back as the world stopped moving, and the man and woman hurried around her.
"Hold tight, Kahri. It'll just be a few seconds before it kicks in." The voice whispered right next to her ear. "Don't worry, I've got you."
Her fear vanished, the voice chasing it away even before the pain and movement faded, drawing back behind the curtain.
"Thank God. She's stabilizing," the man sighed. "You're insane, Miranda. Who's going to look after her down here?"
"Us, until it's safe to wake her. We can't trust anyone else."
"I've always got you."
Hideth Turram - A game played by two teams of fifteen players. A drellak hide is hung on a six metre tall pole in the center of a field that measures one hundred and fifty metres long by thirty metres wide. A twenty-four metre tall scaffolding tower stands at either end of the field. The field, which begins as turf, is soaked to provide a further obstacle, one that becomes only more and more difficult to surmount as it gets churned to mud.
The object is simple, although the execution is anything but. Teams compete to take possession of the hide and move it down the field to their tower, climbing to hang it from the pole at the apex of the tower. There are few rules regarding what means may be used to take possession of the hide from another player, and center on conduct once another player has hit the ground. They may not be struck once any body part above the hips touches the ground. Games are not considered to be good sport without "Blood hitting the mud".