A secret cavern deep beneath the tunnels underneath Wriston. Later the same night.

After leaving the arch sing the ninja disperse across campus—across Providence, in fact (they must go to great lengths to avoid being followed by the pirates). Each stalks out a snaking, interwoven path until he is quite sure that he has not been followed, and then stalks around a bit more just for the fun of it, jumping from rooftop to rooftop and running down dark allies and such. He then enters one of several dozen secret entrances into a pitch dark tunnel system, and here enters another secret passage which leads to another, maze of tunnels full of deadly traps and pitfalls. Only one path leads to the secret ninja meeting cavern, which the ninja use only on the rarest of occasions. These assassins know their duty: kill pirates and subvert their plans whenever possible.

While the pirates have cornered the drug and alcohol market, the ninja have, over the course of their history a complete control over what academic life still persists on campus. No students actually go to class anymore. In fact, classes no longer take place. After several years of no students going to class, the professors themselves ceased as well, and now only papers and tests remain. Even if anyone were to write a textbook it would not sell enough copies to pay for the webspace it would be printed on, so the only source of answers are essays and exams from the past. The ninja have collected and stolen all of these, and had by now accrued several decades worth of answers. The ninja turn a profit by selling answers and essays to students, and invest this profit into state of the art stealth technology and light weight weaponry.

A ninja’s most valuable possession is his identity. For anyone except a fellow ninja to discover a ninja’s identity signs his death warrant—if the discoverer is not a ninja or a pirate he will most likely sell the ninja’s identity to the pirates for a fair sum of McDollars. And once the pirates find out a ninja’s true identity his best bet is to leave the country and never show his face in Providence again. For this reason the ninja take a number of precautions to protect their identities above all else. Only two people ever know a ninja’s true identity: the ninja himself, and the current ninja leader. When the ninja do gather, none speak or make eye contact, and all dress rather uniformly.

The ninja also must disconnect themselves from WebCT while operating in their ninja personae. Because the pirates quickly discovered the potential of the system to track individual location, a pirate could pinpoint a ninja’s location and identity by correlating their location in the web with their location in physical reality. The ninja adapted to this by simply removing the nodes from their foreheads while conducting ninja raids. Having to be constantly wary of WebCT engendered a general distrust of the system among ninjas, so they focus on perfecting their physical and mental abilities outside the web, unlike the pirates, who operate mainly within the web.

Dozens of ninja stand within this dark subterranean cavern, each awkwardly trying to avoid any sort of contact with each other, made difficult by the close confines of the space. Finally the ninja leader, Arrr Away, addresses her crowd, who are excited to have something to focus on and end the uncomfortable silence.

“My fellow ninja, tonight marks the end of one era of Brown University and the beginning of a newer, unified campus, with justice for all. Tonight we ninja will kill every last pirate.”

The ninja maintain their simultaneously respectful and obligatory silence. One fellow, a ninja who goes by Flight-of-Errant-Eagle, feels that this would be an appropriate place to clap, but decides against it after remembering where he is.

“Tonight we shall steal a weapon from the pirates which far transcends even our most potent implements of killing and torture. What is this weapon, you all must be wondering. Well, I tell you, it is what every one of us aspires to be but can never actually achieve. A cyborg. Of course, every one of us is a cyborg; we each augment our bodies with tools and technology, weapons and armor, and in some cases even replace our own limbs with stronger prosthetic counterparts. Every student on this campus is equipped to become a cyborg when he arrives through the nodes implanted in our heads, giving us otherwise unavailable networking abilities. Even babies become cyborgs when they are outfitted with McWasteRemoval devices.

“The cyborg we will steal from the pirates goes beyond all of this, because it is fully synthetic. By escaping the confines of our fleshy, flawed bodies this cyborg unlocks a potential which this world has never before awakened. And with this potential I will lead us to forever eradicate the pirate menace. I have chosen three of you to steal the cyborg, and you know who you are—any more would attract attention and blow the mission. Ninja, disperse!”