The Fundraiser-Exhibition gala, the blizzard relocation, and the arriving "wheelchair contingent"

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, immediately pre-Fundraiser, during the unprecedented mid-November blizzard
• What: One of E.T.A.'s signature institutional events — the Fundraising exhibition and gala, where "the friends and patrons of E.T.A." (the Warshavers, Buckmans, Mrs. Warshaver with her designer canes, et al.) arrive to watch the students exhibit against a visiting provincial Québec junior squad, after which "the guests who become the participants and performers" at a catered gala. The scene captures the ceremonial pre-match locker-room ritual (Head Trainer Barry Loach shaving and taping ankles; the autopilot rites) and the whole thing thrown into chaos by the blizzard: the Eschaton is snowed out, the courts are buried, Logan and Dorval are closed (stranding the visiting squad's travel picture in rumor), and Tavis and Schtitt charter three buses — guests re-contacted "by cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in venue" — to relocate the entire meet and gala to "several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain tissue of the M.I.T. Student Union," arranged via alumnus Corbett Thorp's "mammoth favors." The dramatic-irony intersection with the A.F.R. plot: an "hysterical rumor" sweeps the locker room that the Québec players stepping off a charter-bus "were by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent" — and the sub-14s who scamper up to verify "failed to return." Prorector Poutrincourt (the academy's Québécois staffer) is ominously AWOL. This is E.T.A.'s ground-level glimpse of the Wheelchair Assassins' plan to seize and replace the junior squad en route to the gala. See the AFR thread (event 16) (the mirror-ambush plan targeting exactly this gala vector); the U.S.O.U.S. thread.