Tag (Socialising II)

"Oh hey! Wanna play with us?" One of the kids said to Kaalsuo, inviting him to play some tag with them.

"Um sure." Kaalsuo said in an enthusiastic tone. However, he wasn't really enthusiastic about it. In fact, he wanted none of these nonsense but since he was likely getting monitored by his mother, he had to fake it for a bit.

"My name's Etrus! What's yours?" The kid greeted Kaalsuo, holding out his hand as a fist for a fist bump while smiling widely.

Etrus had shining brown hair with some bright yet subtle streaks of gold on his hair. His body seemed to be slightly more fit and muscular than the others which likely indicated that he was an energetic person.

It also seemed that he was at the same age as Kaalsuo since they were one way or another the same height as eachother. He was wearing nothing but only bright blue shorts that could be noticed from afar. Since he was still probably 5 years old, his and other parents which were sitting from afar didn't mind his behaviour.

Judging by his first impressions to Kaalsuo, it seemed that his personality was energetic, confident and an overall nice guy.

"Ah, I'm Kaalsuo." Kaalsuo responded in the same earlier tone. However, it was less enthusiastic as he didn't want to keep repeating his fake manner.

"Great!" Etrus said, waving him to the direction where all the other kids were playing tag. All of the kids seemed to have a great time playing together. It even made Kaalsuo a bit envious due to how carefree they were.

It wasn't to be confused that Kaalsuo too had a carefree life as of now but the obvious difference between him and the kids was that the kids was actually socialising unlike him. Besides, the mental age gap of course.

"Hey guys! Let's play Infect!" Etrus announced the others with all of them agreeing to the proposal. Some kids even had a quick short dance of excitement that dangerously resembled seizures which led to some of their parents to initially get worried but figured it out shortly afterwards.

"Um, what's infect?" Kaalsuo asked Etrus. He had never heard of that game or at least it's name from back on Earth. However, he did presume the possibility that it was just a game of zombies or something.

From Etrus's announcement, it seemed that he was the leader of the kids as he seemed to already have a great personality that was quite fit to be a leader.

"Well, basically it's tag but you stay a tagger when you tag someone." Etrus told Kaalsuo. Upon those words, he knew that this game would likely be confusing due to how kids usually don't understand rules so much. If it was the contrary, it would be harder and more aggressive but Kaalsuo figured that he could probably handle it.

"So who'll become the first tagger anyways?" Kaalsuo said to Etrus. Back on Earth, he was a master of evasion but that only applied to ones running away and plus, that was some decades ago. He asked him just in case

"I dunno. How about... you!" Etrus pondered before shortly picking a random kid amongst the crowd of children. Thankfully, it didn't seem the chosen kid was picky thus he accepted it without complaint. In fact, it seemed that he wanted to be the tagger.

Just like how he had forgotten the taste of most foods on Earth, he had already forgotten a lot of his old methods and techniques for tag but he still knew one specific methods. It was the methods of re-tagging people. However, this method obviously couldn't be applied to this game therefore Kaalsuo deemed it to be useless, for now.

The tagger immediately rushed to the nearest person at the vicinity and attempted to reach them as fast as possible. Though, he specifically targeted the slower younger kids of the group since it was easier and less time consuming than chasing the other older kids.

His tactic was to first finish off the weak and focus on the more faster kids later. He knew that if he only targeted the older kids, he had no chance in increasing the number of infected that would likely result them being vital distractions or obstacles for chasing down the other untagged ones.

By the 3 minute mark of the game, nearly everyone had been tagged which was really fast and impressive considering that truth be told, the majority of children having fun at the field were faster than the chosen tagger. It was thanks to his wits, he managed to tag most of the children.

There were a total of 27 kids on the field hanging out together and out of those that were sill untagged, only three remained. Kaalsuo, Etrus and another girl.

'Man, this is a piece of cake!' Kaalsuo thought. He would've liked to boast his easiness in playing game but he knew that it would drag the attention of the taggers thus he decided to just remain silent.

However for Kaalsuo, things would began to take the wrong turn as one of the taggers nearly managed to tag Kaalsuo from behind with Kaalsuo quickly evading.

"Woah, that was close!" Kaalsuo said while slightly sweating from the encounter. He didn't expect for the taggers to suddenly almost tag him from behind but luckily, he had quickly evaded the kid as the kid made the wrong mistake of announcing himself by shouting.

As the frequent attacks by the taggers began to dwindle a bit, so did Kaalsuo begin to catch a breather and relax for a while.

Kaalsuo glanced at his surroundings for any nearby taggers around and once he was sure that it was safe, he proceeded to glare at the distance to where the last remaining survivors apart from him were located.

Unlike him who is currently chilling, the said survivors were swarmed by nearly every tagger in the game. For one or two seconds, quick attacks would be made by the taggers. However due to the amount of people swarming the survivors, the taggers were, for most parts, in disarray and were generally disoriented from eachother which meant that teamwork and cooperation between each tagger were practically nonexistent.

Thus the evading done by the remaining survivors were fairly manageable and little to no effort. Even with the swarms of taggers, it seemed that the survivors were just relaxing. Still, they had to maintain their speed in order to evade the multiple attacks by the taggers which led them to burn out their stamina.

By the seconds, the survivors seemed to be slowing down gradually which led Kaalsuo to believe that they were likely exhausted by now. He presumed that he could be right as the kids were sweating rivers and their arms were flailing around like a ragdoll.

"I feel bad for them." Kaalsuo pitied them in a sad and quite pathetic expression. He was just sitting on the grass, waiting for the taggers to eventually tag the last two survivors and chase him next. The taggers that were chasing him had given up earlier as his evasion skills were too much for them to handle thus they decided to focus on the exhausted survivors.

"We got them! Yeah!" The taggers cheered as one whole group and menacingly slowly looked towards Kaalsuo with sharp determined eyes that screamed "YOU SHOULD RUN NOW."

"What the..!?" Kaalsuo yelled in shock. His instincts were telling him to run immediately as fast as he could after seeing that extremely determined eyes by the taggers. His body didn't want to follow due to how comfortable he had become spectating the other survivors but he pushed forward regardless.

Kaalsuo initially ran moderately as he was confident in his speed of outrunning the entire group of taggers. However, as he glanced behind him for a second, he saw the horde was rapidly approaching him in great velocity. Thus he cranked up his speed to full throttle, turned back and zoomed past the entire horde of children approaching him.

"Hah!" Kaalsuo had a great laugh at the reactions of the children as he zoomed past them. Some of the kids were unfazed but most of them were one way or another surprised by the turns of events.

Unfortunately for him, fate was working against his favour. As he ran confidently as a stallion, he suddenly hit a small rogue pebble by the grass and was somehow caught off guard by the tiny object which resulted him sadly tripping and alas, tagged.

* * *

"It's a shame that you accidentally tripped, huh.." The girl said to Kaalsuo in a slightly concerned tone. It seemed that she was a bit worried about the minor injuries sustained by Kaalsuo of his fall.

"Well, by the way, my name's Syra! Nice to meet you!" Syra introduced herself as she patted Kaalsuo's back a bit too hard and ran away playfully.

Kaalsuo didn't say anything since he didn't have anything to say to her to beginning with. However, he did inwardly commented her behaviour.

'What's with her? Though, she is still a kid so it's natural I guess.'

Suddenly, Kaalsuo had an incredibly brilliant idea come up the corner of his mind and immediately set it into action. He erratically took a glimpse of his surroundings to see whether he was safe or not.

Once he was absolutely sure that nobody was paying attention to him, he had one more final step to run. It was, of course, sleeping. Kaalsuo hadn't expected himself to even play with the children in beginning thus now that nobody was paying attention, he finally had the chance to neglect and sleep however he wanted.

***

Kaalsuo eventually woke up from his magnificent slumber. It was one of the most well deserved sleep he had currently experienced on this world. Since the dream felt so delightful, he was sure that some time had already passed and hoped that the group of children had already satisfied themselves and went home.

Sadly for Kaalsuo, he was absolutely wrong. Although his dream indeed felt divine, the time that had passed was a mere 45 minutes. The likely cause to his short sleep was probably the fact he was sleeping on top of blades of grass that tended to often itch skin. However, he was accustomed to the uncomfortableness of surfaces thus he couldn't be sure.

There was also another problem. The kids hadn't gone away yet. In fact, they were still up and running. The kids truly did have a ridiculous amount of stamina in them. Of course, Etrus was still playing with them as their leader.

Regardless of that, Kaalsuo couldn't see one specific kid out of the group of kids playing around at the field and it was Syra. He supposed that she might've gone home by now thus he concluded it just like that.

"Guess she went home- oh." Kaalsuo was about to finish his sentence and catch a glimpse of her sitting beside him, merely spectating the kids from afar. In contrary to what Kaalsuo thought, she was still here.

Knowing that pretending she wasn't there was rude, he attempted to greet Syra regardless of his unpreparedness and pathetic conversational skills.

"Um, hey~..." Kaalsuo greeted Syra in an absolutely low-effort and pitiful manner. In fact, it even sounded as if he was a pervert or a molester. Akin to anime and webcomics, you'd think he was likely about to get slapped.

However, this was a 5 year old girl that barely knew about perverts and other strange stuff kids shouldn't know. Thus she was as innocent as a capybara.

"Hi!" Syra replied in an friendly and overall wholesome manner. She didn't notice that Kaalsuo had already woken up and replied in place of that.

"Are you better now? I'm gonna head out and play now that I'm ready." She said as she immediately rushed off to the field to join the others in playing. In reality, she was only there beside Kaalsuo since she only intended to take a break.

However, in that extremely short communication, Kaalsuo mind wandering off to oblivion. There was an extremely controversial issue on his mind that couldn't shake it off so easily.

It was about his real age as in psychological age. If he combined his age from Earth as of the time of his death and his current age on this planet, it would add up to 30.

He was currently interacting with children as if they were cupcakes. A 30 year old man interacting with a child barely the age of even 6. He felt guilty for no apparent reasons except one obvious one.

Was he a god damn pedophile? Kaalsuo literally wanted to commit quarantine from the entire world upon that major speculation.

"Let's just pray to god if there's one." Kaalsuo said, begging for forgiveness as he kneeled on the ground. Even if he wasn't one, he decided to proceed regardless just in case.

"Huh?" Syra tilted her head slightly upon seeing Kaalsuo's sudden behavioural change. Throughout playing with the others, she had glanced at Kaalsuo occasionally to check on him but this time, he had just become more weird.

At that single word, Kaalsuo immediately stopped whatever he was doing to cover up the goofiness he had done just now. Truth be told, during the period he was begging, his mind suddenly figured out something revolutionary. Modern rules on Earth didn't apply to this world thus it was safe. Sure, his consciousness would still feel uncomfortable but he knew that he would eventually get used to it anyways.

"You know what, I'm going back home." Kaalsuo concluded his visit to the field as he didn't want to waste more his time here.

"You're going home now?" Etrus asked Kaalsuo. He was curious to why he was going back home but whatever response that he would get, he would just accept anyways.

Kaalsuo responded by showing his thumb ups in the air and some time later, he was magically accompanied with his mother again. Going back home.