Many books have been written on the subject of the collapse of the American Government, and it is likely that no one will ever be able to figure out exactly what happened. Essentially, a very large number of adverse factors—the economy’s unfathomable inflation, the populace’s unfathomable obesity, and the exponential proliferation of McDonalds are but a few examples—converged on New Years Eve of 2047, and by the first morning of 2048 what had been thought of as America was no more. That morning the sun rose on the splinters of a fragmented superpower, split into regions of various sizes held together solely by the common convictions of their members. Twenty-four hours would not pass before these regions began attacking their closest neighbors, each fighting a private holy war, except for the small bands Anarchists—they fought for the sake of creating disruption—and the Society for Creative Anachronism—they thought the whole thing was a big game. For more information, s ee the many books published on the subject.

Many find the survival of ex-America’s institutes of higher education in these circumstances quite remarkable. However, the few people clever enough to see America’s collapse coming who weren’t written off as crazy happened to be employed by these universities, and had recently worked with the universities to develop plans to ensure their survival despite the loss of centralized government. So Brown, like other Universities, walled itself in from the outside world and continued operating. At first the administration tried to enforce laws, but being far outnumbered by the student body as they were, they quickly came to let the students just act however they felt and deal with justice on their own.

By this time the pirates had gained a large edge over the ninja thanks to their exploitation of WebCT, and the ninja found themselves closer to complete than they ever had before. Luckily for them, the collapse of the government and law enforcement allowed them to gain back the ground they had lost to the pirates by capitalize on their freedom to act without fear of repercussion of law.

The first casualty in the pirate-ninja struggle occurred on January 29th, 2048 when a ninja climbed into the pirate captain of the time’s window in the middle of the night and beheaded him in his sleep. Of course there was an outcry on campus, especially among pirates and pirate sympathizers, but to this day no one has ascertained the identity of that ninja who spilled the first blood. This did not stop the pirates though. When a few days had past and they failed to find the perpetrator, the pirates began a massacre which stained the campus red, killing every student they suspected of being a ninja, yielding dozens of casualties.

Even when order was restored to the North American continent, the gory precedent of 2048 was never abolished, and for the last fifty-seven years murder has been a mainstay of the ninja-pirate rivalry.

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To Cyberspace Web! To Pirates! To Ninja!