Lander, WY – Wyoming Catholic College’s annual outdoor competitive sports day Ludi Mariales is set to be upgraded and replaced this year with “real live gladitarorial games” according to the school’s Executive Vice President Saul H. Ciwoknot. “We’ve been looking to upgrade to a more ‘exciting’ format for the annual competition of strength between the cowboys, poets, and philosophers for a while now,” Saul added. “Unfortunately, we never found the proper venue until just about a week ago, when we found a spot on the edge of town big enough to have gladiatorial contests betweens dozens of armed warriors at once as well even enough space for staged trireme battles over a pool we intend to build near the spectator stands.”
Lest students be too concerned about the danger from what is typically thought of as “fights to the death”, Saul comments that “WCC’s teams of fairy-god-WFRs (Wilderness First Responders) will be ready for action at all times. Mortal combat can be approached a little Platonically,” he added. “We’ll probably cut out that part of the tradition of gladiatorial combat where the crowd decides who lives and who dies but we can still keep a simulacrum of the essential form intact.”
Students across campus are “highty excited” over the new development, with members of St. Athanasius Dormitory in particular finding it hard to wait for the games to begin, May 4th, 2021 being the current planned date for the first round of fighting. Since the dorm raids which St. Athanasius’s members are involved are “almost as violent and epic” as gladiatorial games already, commentators believe members of that dormitory will perform the best in the fighting, but since the competition will, as with Ludi Mariales today, be between the three student groupings of cowboys, poets, and philosophers, the “outcomes will be a little hard to predict” CNN news commentator Alexandra Aleybert commented.
An unnamed member of an organization known as the Dark Brotherhood will reportedly be providing all of the weapons to be used in the coming gladiatorial games. However, IIT commentators now believe this entire story was made up in his head, and there will be no gladiatorial games at WCC after all, as “Student Life doesn’t like the idea,” one of our sources told us.
Will they happen? Or is it all in Michel’s imagination?