Nick: I’m thinking, look. I’m thinking we both head south and wait right at the edge of the WKU field. We sit a few days and we wait for other teams to pass on through.

Then we can meet up again. Soon as we’ve let a few teams pass on their way to Tech, you and me meet back up and head northwest on WKU. I know we talked about heading up to Iowa before we cut west, but I’m saying don’t fuck with any of that. We gotta get these balls cross-country fast as we fuckin’ can. You know?

I think we just cut west on Oklahoma State and run our asses straight to Stillwater, meet up with Mike and them at Grambling there. That’s a lot of time to spend on one field, but fuck it. The west was pretty empty to start with.

And there’s just two of us. We can hide if someone comes through. Probably up in a tree somewhere, if we have to.

You know?

Nick: Well, what do you think?

Manny: Okay.

Nick: Plus, I issued a challenge. They say they can give me back those 10 seconds of OBT, they said it was a scorer’s error.

Okay?

Manny: Babe, why the fuck did you do that?

Nick: It’s the only way I could’ve done it, Manny. Only way.

Manny: You know it wasn’t.

Nick: Look, you gotta trust me to throw. You said you trusted me to make the throw.

I tried to do the math with all the cars on it and there was just too much involved. Way more weight, that could make it coast too long. Way more wheels, that’s way more resistance. There was no way I could … I had to simplify.

Like, I had to feel it. The engine and three cars, I can’t get a grip on that. But if it’s just the engine, that I felt like I could.

Manny: You punked out. You fuckin’ punked out on that shit.

Nick: Oh, come on.

Manny: Mike tell you to do that shit?

Nick: I mean not exactly, no.

Manny: I don’t understand why you, if breaking off the cars was such a big deal, I don’t understand why you can’t just break off the uh. The connector thing.

Nick: The coupler. I told you! I already told you why I couldn’t do that. With these new ones you can only do it from the cab. There’s no release on the coupler itself, you gotta do it remotely.

And it just took me a minute! For the whole thing to boot up and all. It just took me a minute.

Manny: Yeah! Literally a minute! More than that! You needed every second of that to cross the desert.

You and me, we’re a team, you know? We make decisions together. You have no right to just pop off and do shit like that.

Nick: I know, I just knew that–

Manny: I mean what the fuck am I gonna do without you, Nick? If I can make it home but you can’t?

Nick: I still can. I still can try.

Manny: Yeah, with fuckin’, what’s the math? You’re gonna run five 3:20 miles?

Nick: I mean you know I’ve been training.

Manny: Yeah, on the treadmill in Atlanta. In air conditioning. Running flat. And you still couldn’t hit that.

Nick: But look at you, though. You’re still gonna have almost all your time. I mean look what I did for you! I made a fuckin’ miracle happen and I’m like, you’re puttin’ me in the shit here! And I pulled off a fuckin’ miracle!

Manny: Did for ME?

Best thing you coulda did for me was keeping your time! Giving me a partner! Givin’ me my fucking husband!

Nick: Look, come on.

Manny: I mean what happens if Coach calls you back? I bet if I was Coach, I’d look at your time and be like no, you gotta wait. You gotta wait on the field another hundred years. And then she’d make me try and run it by myself.

Babe, I don’t wanna do a hundred years without you.

Nick: I know.

I could do it. I’d wait a hundred years.

Would you wait for me?

Organizer: Hi everybody, if I could please get everybody’s attention?

Hey folks, if I could just have a minute before we get started.

Thank you.

I’d just like to welcome everybody to game night at the Ilinois Chess Club. This is the first night of the fall season, and I’m happy to see so many new faces!

I think some of you have already met her, but if you haven’t, I’d like to announce that we’ve got a celebrity in the room tonight! Over there at table number seven, we’ve got Lori Irving as a special guest. Lori’s a college football player with Texas A&M, if everyone could give her a hand!

Lori, how familiar are you with Illinois chess?

Lori: Hi, uh, actually, this is my first time playing Illinois chess. I’ve played some standard chess tournaments, but this is a new one for me. I’m sure I’ll pick up the rules as I go.

Organizer: Well, we’re so happy you’re here, and I hope you enjoy the Illinois variant. What brings you to Illinois? Unless you don’t want to leak too much of the playbook!

Lori: Oh no, not a problem at all! I’m playing prevent for Texas A&M. I was just assigned to this position a couple years ago.

Organizer: And I know we’ve got a lot of football fans in the room, but for those who aren’t familiar, what does it mean to play prevent?

Lori: Well, Northern Illinois is one of the fields we think of as sort of the gateway to the west. It runs north-south, and my job is to patrol up and down the field, and sort of be ready to try to make an interception if someone tries to bring a football out west. Or, if there’s a whole team and I can’t take ‘em on, I’ll just scout ‘em out and let my teammates know.

Organizer: So you’re playing chess in the middle of a football game! I guess you can do it all, huh?

Lori: Ha, well, we’ll see. Wish me luck.

Organizer: Of course. Good luck to Lori and to everyone else here.

And I think everyone’s aware, but I’m obligated to let everyone know, just for the record, this building is on Northern Illinois’ field. We don’t expect any disruptions, and we’ve never run into a situation like that, but if there is football coming through the area and we’ve got action in here, I’ve received approval from the Illinois Chess Association to suspend matches or nullify results. If there were to be any disruption in play, I’d meet with both players of each match and find a resolution that works for everybody.

All right, that’s all from me. Unless there are any questions?

Okay, great. I’ll be here in case anyone has any questions or needs any rule clarifications. Have a good match, everyone!

Chess Guy: Good luck.

Lori: Good luck!

Chess Guy: Oh uh, so you’re the banker. Whoever plays black is the banker.

Lori: Oh. All right, sure.

Chess Guy: I’d like to buy Joliet, please. Here is … $400.

Lori: So what does that get you?

Chess Guy: Well, now I can charge rent on this square. It’s 10 percent. So if you ever move a piece to Joliet, you have to pay me 40 dollars every turn you spend on it.

Lori: Jesus Christ.

Chess Guy: Is everything all right?

Lori: No, yeah, no, sure, yeah.

All right. e5.

Chess Guy: Are you gonna buy Aurora?

Lori: Nah, I don’t think so.

Chess Guy: So I’ll just tell you this because you’re new. You definitely want to buy as many squares in the middle of the board as you can. That’s why they’re so expensive.

Lori: I’ll pass for now.

Chess Guy: Suit yourself. d4.

Lori: Knight c6.

Chess Guy: Declining the gambit, huh? Okay!

Here’s … $1000. Annexing Rockford and Joliet.

Lori: What’s that?

Chess Guy: Rook factory. Every four turns I get a rook now. If I annex a third adjacent property, that accelerates to three turns.

Lori: Okay!

Uh, capturing on d4 then. Gotta bust up your factory.

Chess Guy: Can’t do that.

Lori: I can’t?

Chess Guy: No, sorry. You need to build a Consortium first.

Lori: How do I do that?

Chess Guy: To build a Consortium, you move both Bishops to the same file and leave them there for ten turns. For those ten turns, you can’t move a piece. Basically, building the Consortium counts as the move.

Lori: This is something else.

Chess Guy: You’ll pick it up pretty quickly.

Lori: Is there any significance to the city names themselves?

Chess Guy: Nah, not really. It’s pretty much just the biggest cities in the middle, then kinda just spirals out into smaller towns.

Too bad Iuka didn’t make it on here. We’ve got more history than almost any city in Illinois! I mean, this is where Alexander the Great is buried!

Lori: What?

Chess Guy: Okay so you’ve got one more turn before you earn the Consortium. Once that happens, you

Lori: Wait, tell me the Alexander the Great thing.

Chess Guy: Oh! Well yeah. Somewhere around here, the remains of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra are buried.

Lori: Okay.

Chess Guy: I’m serious! Ask around, anyone in this town will tell you.

Lori: Ha, all right.

Chess Guy: We’re not sure of the exact year, but around 100 B.C., a bunch of colonists from Greece, some Phoenicians, and some people from northern Africa fled the old world with a bunch of treasure, and that included the remains of Ptolemy, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great. They sailed their ships up through the Mississippi River, then started exploring the land. Eventually they got to Illinois and found some caves around here, and evidently they thought it was the perfect place to hide the treasure.

Now around that time there was ...

Chess Guy: … and you see, the thing to know about that is, these were clearly Phoenician ships. And they found rock carvings of Alexander the Great in the classic Greek style. Now as to exactly where, that’s what NASA’s secretly been trying to find out for quite a long time, but it’s very difficult to ...

Chess Guy: … and I mean, think about it! Those academic types have every reason to discredit us! If people from Greece and Libya came to Illinois a thousand years before Columbus did, that topples over every pillar in their ivory tower! It disrupts their whole worldview. So of course they’re gonna say that all this is made up. But ask yourself this: if it’s a hoax, how come every time you ask someone in Iuka about Alexander the Great, every single one of ‘em will tell you his bones are nearby? Are all those people just magically wrong? You know what I think, if we’re being honest, is that ...

Chess Guy: … but of course, he blew up the cave entrance because he didn’t want anybody looting his treasure he found. And in all the years since, we haven’t been able to find the entrance. But based on his journals, we know it’s somewhere south of Iuka. That much we know to be a scientific fact, and ...

Chess Guy: … kind of a breakaway segment of us who think it was extraterrestrials. Me, you know, I’m a scientist, so I think every theory is worth exploring, but I don’t think there was anything of an extraterrestrial nature at work here. Nothing supernatural or anything, just a lost chapter of history. Anyways, I’ve been rambling.

So it’s been ten turns now, so you’re eligible to challenge my factory in the annexed squares. Could you move your stuff off the table here?

Lori: You actually believe this. All of this shit, it’s not a joke, you actually believe it.

Chess Guy: Well, yes. Could you move your stuff off the table? We need it for the Arbitration phase of the game. Now that you’ve earned a Consortium, you can now use Arbitration to try to take my Factory off the board.

If you could just, we need more room on the table.

Chess Guy: You’re now in Arbitration mode. In order to enter the Four Sanctums, you’re going to need either a Rook or a Queen, or a King if you’re really desperate, since you have have to move horizontally along the corridors.

Lori: I–

Chess Guy: To win Arbitration, you must defeat the Knight, Bishop, Pawn and Rook you see before you. Beware the Four Sanctums, traveler! Wizards and warlocks await ye! Goblins and ghouls ‘round every corner!

Lori: Wow.

Chess Guy: So you can move, you know, you can move whenever.

Um, I was wondering.

You’re really cute. I mean, I think you’re really pretty. And I was wondering if you might want to go on a date sometime.

Or like this could be a date right now, if you wanted to count it as a date.

I’ve got a lot more stuff about the ancient hidden treasure cave I could tell you. There’s other variants to this game we could play too. Like there’s an expansion set where if you land on Chicago, the game transfers to another board that represents Cook County. And you’re awarded a new type of piece called the Councilman who like, you roll a set of dice and however many you roll is how many spaces the Councilman moves. Personally I don’t think it’s a very strong piece, but there are some strong players who play up in the Rockford chapter who have found some interesting ways to utilize it. Since the Vizier moves both horizontally and vertically, it’s a good way to establish control of a given rank or file, especially in the early game, when you typically haven’t developed your Rooks yet. The Vizier, on the other hand, starts the game on the second rank with the pawns, so you can immediately seize control of a rank or file, even if you can’t do so with much precision. There’s no way of knowing how many spaces the dice will let you move, but it does discourage your opponent from stepping into its field of attack. Of course, the Cook County board is about ten feet wide and even though you get 304 pieces and 304 pawns, you only get one Vizier. So essentially it’s a gimmick option in the vast majority of options. I usually just sacrifice my Vizier early in the game so I can set up a strong pawn structure in the Cicero area of the board. Or Skokie, depending on how the game’s going. Or wait, I’ve been saying Vizier instead of Councilman. Did I say Vizier? Anyways, it used to be called the Vizier but it’s the Councilman in the new version. I’ve actually got both versions at my house so we could play either one. There’s no actual difference between the two versions except in one of them the special piece is called the Vizier and in the other newer version, it’s called the Councilman.

There’s a really good gas station next to my house.

Phone: *BZZZZtt* *BZZZZtt* *BZZZZtt*

*BZZZZtt* *BZZZZtt* *BZZZZtt*

Lori: I’ve got to take this. Excuse me.

Chess Guy: Just for your information, according to chapter rules, if you leave a table during a match you have to surrender $1.38 in in-game money for every minute you’re absent.

Lori: Okay.

Coach! Christ, thanks for calling. You got me away from a situation. There’s this guy, you know I told you I’m at a chess club tonight, and this guy keeps talking about–

Yeah. I’m in Iuka right now.

From here? I guess I’d just take the WKU field and hit Georgia Tech that way. About 300, 350 miles, probably.

What happened?

I don’t know, I don’t think they have a TV here.

All right! All right. Checking.

Excuse me. I’m sorry. Little bit of a weird question, but I don’t suppose you happen to have a TV here?

Organizer: We do.

Lori: Sorry to be annoying, and I hate to ask, but could I turn on the news for a minute?

Organizer: Did something happen?

Lori: Apparently. I’m on the phone with my coach. He says something’s going on.

Organizer: Oh, well all right, sure.

Something about the game?

Lori: Yeah, he’s just saying to look at the scoreboard.

Organizer: Hmm.

What channel?

Lori: What channel?

He says any channel.

Organizer: Okay.

Television: –some really stunning movement here, Chuck. So if you follow me over to the big board, if I could get the camera to follow me over here, these are the college football rankings. What you’re seeing here is what we just saw live in the newsroom just minutes ago.

Television: In an instant, 58 teams jumped up a spot on the leaderboard. So if you’re South Carolina State, congratulations to you, you now sit in sole possession of third place. If you’re Cincinnati, Howard or Texas, congratulations to you, you’re now tied for the fourth-ranked team in the nation.

Lori: Jeeeeesus. Georgia Tech.

Television: Congratulations also to Oklahoma. After some 400 years out of the top 25, you now find yourself back there as you pull into a tie for 12th.

But the big story of course, Chuck, and the movement that shifted more than half the teams in college football up the rankings, is Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets are in free fall. One second, they were the number three team in the nation. The next, they plummeted into a tie for 40th place.

Given that teams with equal numbers are listed alphabetically, it seems almost certain that Tech, however many footballs they held, lost every single one of them. What we’re seeing here, folks, is not the fading of a dynasty. It’s not the crumbling of a dynasty. It’s dynasty that’s vanished in an instant.

And I can only imagine what the scene is tonight at Bobby Dodd Stadium.

Lori: I don’t believe this.

Organizer: Do you need to leave?

Lori: In a minute, probably.

Television: The question now for all of us in the newsroom, for every team in the nation, and for all the amateur sleuths on Internet message boards, the mystery we’ll be trying to solve in the coming days, weeks, perhaps even years, is this: where are those footballs?

Two schools of thought are already forming among our news team here in Los Angeles. One supposes that they’ve all moved to Georgia Southern, whose field shares an intersection with Georgia Tech’s.

Organizer: Ohhhh.

Lori: Nah, it wasn’t that.

Television: But Chuck, this would require a very specific set of circumstances here. Let’s zoom in again at the top three.

Lori: Because, yeah.

Television: You’ll notice that the top two teams in the country, Michigan State and Georgia Southern, didn’t move an inch. Of course, we don’t know exactly how many football they have. Our best estimates previously put Michigan State at around 25, Georgia Southern at at least 20, at Georgia Tech at 15 or very close to it.

So let’s just do some pretend math here. Again, these are nothing more than guesses, but let’s play it out here.

Television: If our estimates are anywhere near correct, Tech’s footballs could not have transferred to Georgia Southern. That would give them 35, which would have knocked Michigan State out of the top spot. That did not happen, the Spartans didn’t move.

And since we can be virtually certain that Georgia Tech lost every one of their footballs, not just a portion of them, I think at the moment it’s much more likely that either Tech moved them just off the field somewhere for safe keeping, or an opponent stole them and did the same.

At any rate, we’ve now got half the teams in the country making a beeline for Tech’s field. We’ve got reports that TCU is sending 35 players. Kentucky’s sending dozens.

There is blood in the water. And Chuck, this is the most seismic event college football has seen in hundreds of years, if not a thousand years.

Lori: I’m sorry to bail on a match, but I need to pack up.

Organizer: It’s fine, no problem.

Chess Guy: Wait, you can’t leave! You haven’t finished Arbitration!

Lori: Sorry. Nice meeting you.

Chess Guy: Abandoning a match will lower your rating from 1200 to 1150 automatically! It’ll take you years to re-establish your rating. You’ll never be able to play a match against someone of my caliber again! I’m a third-category regional master!

Organizer: Stop! Please stop. You are out of line. We’ve worked for centuries to build the reputation of the Illinois Chess community.

Chess Guy: This is bullshit.

Organizer: It was an emergency situation. Rule 37-C permits a player to abandon the match in the event of an emergency situation. This qualifies under that rule.

Chess Guy: Oh, what? Did a sportsball happen?