Idk how normal
families act around each other, but growing up in my family, it was the norm
for us to constantly attempt to frighten each other to death. Hiding in closets
and under beds, setting booby traps, leaving horrific things under bedcovers,
lurking around every corner, surprise blitz attacks--anything we could think of
to terrorize each other, no matter how immoral or impractical, we did it.
(Just an FYI to
anyone who is in this competition now, or whose children seem to be getting
into this behaviour pattern: there are only two possible outcomes for everyone
involved--they turn into either hyper-vigilant neurotic nervous wrecks, or they
become stone cold sociopaths.)
The attacks do
not begin until it is fair to start attacking. As in, it is not fair to try and
give an infant or toddler a heart attack, although Lil Bro#1 bent the rules
with this quite a bit with his frequent attempts on Lil Bro#2's life, and his inappropriate level of glee at seeing Lil Bro #2 suffering.
Lil Bro#2, Big
Sis#2, and myself have honed our abilities to the point where they have just
become part of our personalities. We constantly freak people out without
meaning to. Basically we have gotten so awesome at stealth, we no longer have
to try.
This little game
makes life way more entertaining, and just because you're "grown up,"
that does not mean that the game needs to stop. If anything, it should get
better as you get older because everyone playing gets better at their
particular skills, until you and your siblings are all old enough that heart
attacks resulting from fright become a real possibility, and then you keep going
until only one of you is left alive.
So here's some
lessons for anyone who wants to start terrorizing their family.
I. STEALTH.
This one is the
most important, and takes the longest to master. You need to develop extreme
patience--as in, the patience required to remain in one space (possibly a dark
and/or confined one) for extended periods of time (Lil Bro#1 holds the record
for that, with approximately 90 minutes spent in a trunk) without making any noise
whatsoever, and without fidgeting.
You'll need to get your timing right as
well, so your skills of observation should also be developed. That extra 45-60 minutes spent in the cabinet might make the difference between a pretty good
fright
and an epic
achievement.
Learn your
enemy's habits, such as your little sister's ritual of checking the closet and
under the bed before she goes to sleep.
And do some
mini-attacks when their guard is down, such as when they are exiting the bathroom.
In the end, you
could end up as fantastic as Big Sis#2 and myself, with your family constantly
accusing you of having the power of teleportation, because no human should be
that quiet when entering a room and walking right up beside you.
II. BOOBY TRAPS.
You need a
certain sort of creative cunning to be able to consistently pull this off
without your victim developing the habit of checking every corner of every room
with a metal detector in one hand and a machete in the other.
I shall use
examples of past booby-trappings:
1. The
Television.
For a while,
when Lil Sis would piss me off, I would sneak into her room when she wasn't
home, turn up the volume on her TV to maximum, on a channel with nothing but
static, and then turn the TV back off and leave the remote exactly where it had
been before I entered the room.
Lil Sis rarely
watched the TV in her room. She watched stuff on her laptop instead, in bed.
We both had the
exact same televisions in our rooms.
Which meant my
remote worked for her TV, and it worked through the wall.
You can see
where this is going.
I repeated this
booby trap an absurd number of times, always changing it slightly.
...or on the rare
occasions she was watching the TV, messing with the volume and/or channels, or
just turning it off over and over again.
I still do this
to her car, when she blocks me in and won't get off her lazy arse to move it. I
move it, and leave the radio on the heavy metal station with the volume loud
enough to shatter your eardrums.
2. Radios and
cassette tapes.
Sadly this one
has pretty much died because of technological advances that erased the use of
cassettes. But myself and my cousins enjoyed it to its fullest potential.
This was hands
down the greatest toy ever released in the history of toys. (Or it's at least
up there in the top five.)
A fairly simple
device - it came with a tape and it had a microphone, so you could record
pretty much anything, and you could also speed up or slow down the tape when
recording or playing it back, which meant you could alter your voice (or
anything else you recorded).
Whoever thought
it was a good idea to mass produce this thing for children had a twisted sense
of humour, because EVERYONE I know who had one of these used it to torture
other people.
Like M, who
stole all of his stepdad's Bruce Springsteen tapes, fast forwarded to like
halfway through each tape, recorded himself making loud and ridiculous noises,
rewound the tapes to their still unchanged beginnings, and then replaced all
those tapes back in the car where he found them.
Or my cousins,
who recorded thirty minutes of total silence, and then recorded sounds of a
door creaking, turned the volume way down on the Talkboy, and then left it
playing under one of the beds in their sisters' room right before we all went
to bed.
oh yeah and then
there was like 5 more minutes of silence before a final very quiet creak, and a
blood curdling scream.
I'm not gonna
lie. This scared the living daylights out of the three of us sleeping in the
room at the time.
3. My Size
Barbie.
My friends and I picked up one of these at the end of
someone's driveway my junior year in high school. (Don't ask.) She has since
disappeared, most likely because of how she ended up on this list.
One day, a
couple years ago, Cousin F. and I thought it would be super funny if we propped
Beef (that was her name. also don't ask.) up against the door of Lil Sis's
closet. Inside the closet, so that Beef would fall on Lil Sis when she opened
the door.
This produced
hilarious results. So we had to keep going.
For the ensuing
two years, Beef popped up to terrorize Lil Sis whenever she least expected it.
even after Lil Sis wasn't scared anymore, I still kept doing it.
...until one day I
realized that Beef had disappeared. I asked Lil Sis what happened to her, and
at first she couldn't remember.
Then she took me
into our bathroom and opened the closet. Lil Sis had apparently left Beef
propped up in there beside the laundry basket in an attempt to scare me.
Beef was in the
closet beside the laundry basket for over a year and I didn't even notice.
Since then, I
think Mum threw Beef away, because she was sick of Lil Sis's screams in the
middle of the night.
III. THE BLITZ
ATTACK.
This one is
fairly straightforward.
For some reason,
if it's not me attacking Lil Sis, it's someone else attacking me. Big Sis#2
believes that this is because even the best attempts at stealth-terror have not
managed to so much as make me flinch for the last ten years....
