Flashback/src

Flashbacks

Chapter 4: "Reaver" (intro)

Look, you probably want to hear more about the sexy motorcycle mechanic or the punk gangs or the giant zombie creatures, but before we go too much further, I need to tell you about my D&D group. I know, I know, but so much of Aerb is a reflection of my scribblings while DMing, so there is a point to this. I’ll try my best to keep it to what’s important.

To start with, “D&D group” is probably a misnomer, because we played a lot more games than just D&D, and the group had a Ship of Theseus thing going on where people came and went until Arthur and I were the only constants, and then eventually it was just me. The only real point of continuity was the Collection. The Collection actually predated the group; when Arthur’s brother had gone off to college, he’d left Arthur with two dozen source books for various tabletop RPG systems, though about half of them were for D&D. We’d added to the Collection over time, keeping our names in the books and sometimes taking them home with us, but for the most part the Collection stayed at Arthur’s house, taking up first one, then two sagging bookshelves in his downstairs den.

Arthur was the backbone of our group. Even when he wasn’t playing a leader, he would take point and ensure that the plot kept moving forward. He was a total geek, but he knew that he was a geek, and didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought about him. When we played, he was usually the only one to put on a voice and stay in character. I was the one making the worlds, but Arthur was the one that really made them come to life, because he had this ability to just instantly invest himself in whatever was presented to him.

More than that, he could read me really well. It was my habit to get an idea in my head and start up a campaign with reckless enthusiasm, then get bored of it after a few weeks and keep chugging on without really feeling that spark of inspiration anymore. Arthur was always the one to bail me out, to say “How about we try something new next week?” without ever calling attention to the fact that I had lost the thread. The first few times he did it, I just breathed a sigh of relief, not noticing that he had been acting in my interest. He was a great guy, super busy with basically every non-athletic activity that our school offered (academic decathlon, mathletes, mock trial, yearbook, etc.), but always there for me despite that.

In the summer of our junior year, Arthur was taking his station wagon through an uncontrolled intersection when he got T-boned by a truck going twenty miles over the speed limit. He spent eleven days in a coma, then died from complications.

There were times, months later, when I would be eating lunch in the school cafeteria and turn to tell him something, only to realize my brain had been running on auto-pilot and he wasn’t there, and would never be there, and whatever dumb thing I had wanted to tell him was just going to get added to the stack of things that he was never going to experience. I’d used to think when people talked about death leaving a hole, they were talking about roles and responsibilities, but after Arthur died I started seeing it in a different light. It was more that he had become a part of me, a person so important to my life that my interactions with him were on the level of instinct. With his death, a long stretch of wiring in my brain became faulty.

Anyway. The Collection moved to my house. His parents offered to let us keep using their den, but my mom told me that it wouldn’t be good for them to have their dead son’s friends coming over twice a week (and yes, those were pretty much her exact words). We kept on playing, though it obviously wasn’t the same. Arthur had been the group’s de facto leader, but now that duty fell on my shoulders, and not only was I the one making things up and running the game, I wasn’t in the best mental state.

I’m telling you this because Aerb had features that were stolen from my D&D games, and all the stuff I was most scared of came from the post-Arthur era. Fel Seed, Nightsmoke, the borogoves, the mimsies … I sent the party into the thresher because I was angry at the world. It was more than just making the encounters too hard and the world unfair, it was beyond the fact that everything I made was grimdark, it was the hopeless despair that infused everything. I introduced villains whose evil couldn’t be undone, where their murder would just be a matter of futile revenge and the world would never be set right.

And now, I was worried I was going to have to face them.

Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"

“I’ve always thought it was dumb,” said Reimer. “You roll a 20 and you get an automatic hit? So a level 1 commoner with cerebral palsy goes up against the greatest warrior of all time, a man in magical full-plate with a frickin’ tower shield with little mini tower shields floating around it, and there’s a 5% chance that he’ll hit? How is that not dumb?”

“It’s not about simulation,” Arthur replied. “You’re not supposed to think that the whole world is made up of people with levels who are acting in accordance with these abstract rules, that’s what’s -- I don’t want to say dumb, because I can see where that might appeal to people, but that’s not what these games are usually about. They’re about telling this small, improvised story that no one but a handful of people are ever going to hear. Having a rule like an automatic hit on a natural 20 is just in service of story-telling.” He turned to me. “Joon, tell us that story.”

“Which story?” I asked. “The one about the level 1 commoner and the best warrior in the world?” Arthur nodded. He was putting me on the spot and we both knew it, but that was part of how things were between us. Arthur considered it part of the implicit contract between player and DM. “Alright,” I said. “The commoner’s name is Moxit, he’s got cerebral palsy, and he’s depended on the kindness of strangers pretty much his whole life. He hates it, but there’s not really any other option for him. Eventually Kerland, the big bad warrior comes to town. He knows that he’s basically invincible to these people, which is why he likes these out-of-the-way places where there’s not even a hedge druid to send a messenger bird for aid. Now, the villagers know that Kerland is unstoppable, so they’re ready to submit right away, giving Kerland roasted chickens, loaves of bread, spare coin … and if he pushes, one of the village’s daughters might volunteer to keep his bed warm. And when Moxit sees this, he’s enraged. All these people he’s known all his life are acting helpless. Moxit spends his days struggling, trying to do what he can, trying not to be this burden. And now, now all these villagers are just giving up. So when Kerland is in the village center, Moxit steps out of a building with his bow at the ready. Kerland sees him and goes into a defensive stance, because while he’s incredibly powerful, he’s not so stupid as to give someone a free hit for no reason. Moxit looses his arrow,” and here I rolled a die behind my screen, a 15, which I quickly flipped to a 20 before holding it up to show the group. “His arrow releases at the perfect time and though at first it looks like it won’t, it eventually curves to just the right angle, going just over the tower shield in front of Kerland, passing right by the small floating shields of Romoc, and striking at one of the few weak points in the armor, a place between the plates where it’s soft leather. The arrow doesn’t kill Kerland, not even close, but it does graze him, and in that moment Kerland feels a real fear, because now they know that underneath a small kingdom’s worth of magic items and a body that would make the God of Might green with envy, Kerland is still just a man.”

“Hax,” said Reimer. “And the commoner could have just as easily rolled a 1. And the epic level fighter goes and straight up murders him with a single swing of his sword, and cleaves into someone standing next to the commoner just to make a point.”

“In which case it would be a different story,” said Arthur, “One about the futility of fighting, or about ego, or something like that. There are so many paths, the dice roll just shifts you from one path to another, from one story to another.”

And then the pizza came, and the argument was more or less forgotten.

Chapter 7: "Twenty Questions"

“Tom, character name?” I asked.

“Elhart Cloakshield,” he replied in his most pompous voice, the one he reserved for elves and wanna-be elves. “Signature move: twirling his cloak and using it like a shield.”

“So he decided that he couldn’t let a name like Cloakshield go to waste?” I asked.

“There is literally nothing in the rules that allows that to work,” said Reimer.

“Maybe Cloakshield is a family name?” asked Arthur. “The Smith family name comes from generations of blacksmiths, it’s not totally insane to think that they’d get a name that identified their most defining combat ability.”

“An ability which, again, the rules do not provide for,” said Reimer.

“Eh, we can do it as a weak custom magic item,” I replied. “I’ll figure it out later. Arthur, character name?”

“Uther Penndraig,” he said with a smile. “Mechanically he’s a pretty standard sword-and-board fighter, but I’ll be taking some paladin levels later on, just to warn you.”

I jotted that down in my notebook. The start of a campaign always saw my notebooks more organized and the first session started with a page neatly divided up so I would have places to write down details of all the player characters. It would only be later that it would descend into scribbles of names and places I never remembered a few days later.

“Arthur Pendragon?” asked Reimer. “I thought we weren’t doing copycat names.”

“I said you couldn’t be a warforged named Megatron,” I replied with a roll of my eyes.

“He’s the leader of the Decepticons!” said Reimer.

“Technically I picked Uther , who is Arthur’s canonical father,” said Arthur. “And I picked the Middle English version of Penndraig so it would be less immersion breaking. But yeah, I always wanted to have a character that was something of a King Arthur ripoff. Not that I think I am King Arthur or anything, but I grew up with the name and I’ve always thought there was a connection to famous people you share a name with, like if your name were Alexander you might have an interest in Alexander the Great, or if your name were Benjamin you might think about Benjamin Franklin.”

“Didn’t he have syphilis?” asked Tom. “Also, why are there no famous people named Tom?”

“Tom Hanks?” asked Reimer.

“Historical Toms, I mean,” said Tom.

“Thomas Aquinas,” I said, holding up a finger. “Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison,” I continued.

We went around the room like that for a while, until eventually Craig went to Google and began listing off every single Tom of note since the New Testament. Arthur leaned over to me while that list was being read off.

“I can change the name,” he said.

“No, it’s fine, I get it,” I replied. “I mean, obviously you can’t start as the King of England, but I’ll see what I can do about a watery tart throwing a sword.”

And that was more or less how Arthur had started down the road to becoming the Best King Ever.

Chapter 14: "ELEVATOR facts"

“There’s this thing called the unspoken plan guarantee,” said Tiff. She had turned her chair to the side and was propping her feet up on Reimer’s chair, which he disliked but allowed. “Basically what it means is that if you hear people talk about a plan in a movie or novel or TV show, then that plan will fail, or if not fail, then run into some unforeseen complication.”

“I’m not sure I get it,” said Arthur. “We’re not bound by traditional narrative rules.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it either,” I said. “The unspoken plan guarantee exists because there’s no tension in hearing a plan and seeing it in action. In tabletop, the dice provide the tension.”

“The dice provide some tension,” replied Tiff. “But if the plan is good enough, then there’s the same problem, and we have someone at this table whose job it is, at least more than others, to make this whole shebang entertaining, and who also has the power to introduce complications ex nihilo.” She made a finger gun at me and mouthed a pew sound. I smiled and rolled my eyes.

“So you’re saying that we should keep things secret from the DM?” asked Reimer. “In my experience, that doesn’t work too well.”

“Oh, well not big secrets,” said Tiff. “We should keep little secrets, tiny things we hold in reserve that we agree not to mention out loud in the hopes that Joon forgets about them, or parts of the plan that can legitimately surprise him so he doesn’t feel the need to insert things into the game just to make it more interesting.”

“Seems a little adversarial,” replied Arthur. “In the tabletop-as-performance model … well, I guess there you could make the same argument, that the performance is better if there’s some aspect of hidden things being shown.”

“Or,” said Tom. “We could just not ever plan anything.” He tapped the side of his head. “If you have no plans, then you don’t have plans that need hiding.”

Chapter 15: "Whys and Wherefores"

“The city of Barren Jewel lies at the heart of the Datura Desert, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of sand dunes and rocky cliffs. It’s a city of cutthroats where the guards either turn a blind eye or are in on the take, a place of powerful magics lurking in the shadows, with just enough of a veneer of civilization over it that the rich can still sit on the backs of the poor. You crest the hill and get your first look at it just before nightfall, when the sight of city lights after your long journey might seem almost welcoming.” I was reading off my laptop screen, which was always awkward, even when I had done some rehearsing beforehand.

“It’s just a model,” said Tom, which he said after pretty much every description of a big city, and somehow it caught me off-guard every time and still managed to be funny.

“So wait, did we pass any caravans while traveling?” asked Reimer.

“No,” I said. “There’s almost no trade going to or from Barren Jewel.”

“So … why does it exist?” asked Reimer. “No, how does it exist? How do they get food and water?”

“Easy, Create Food and Water,” said Craig.

“That’s not,” Reimer began, then he opened his book and began reading without finishing his thought.

“That seems like it would require a lot of magic,” said Arthur.

“It does,” I shrugged. “The Datura Desert wasn’t always a desert, it was once thriving farmland and quiet woods. All that changed when a creeping blight started spreading across the land, killing plants and livestock. It was the mage Alvion who gave his life to create a well of magic in the city that would later become Barren Jewel, a magic that allows that place to thrive even as the lands around it have died.”

“Aw, I liked Alvion,” said Tom.

“He’s … a historical figure?” I said as a question.

“You’re thinking of Alvino,” said Arthur. “Who was from the Scattered Asches campaign and not even a mage.”

“Okay,” said Reimer. “Create Food and Water is a 3rd level cleric spell, they get one of those at 5th level, plus another if their domain is creation, so a single mid-low level cleric can provide 24 hours' worth of food and water for maybe thirty people, and a 20th level cleric would cap out at providing food and water for maybe two thousand people, if that was literally all they were doing with their magic.” He looked up from the books he had open. “So it doesn’t work out unless there are a hugely disproportionate number of really powerful clerics in the city.”

“We actually moved past that already,” said Tiff. “Joon said there’s some kind of magic that lets the city not have to worry about food and water.”

“All casters in the party are now able to cast Create Food and Water as a 5th level cleric once per day,” I said. “You feel the magic in your bones as soon as you’re within city limits, a promise from the great mage Alvion that you will not starve from the horrid blight that covers what is now the Datura Desert.”

“Eh, fine,” said Reimer. “But why do people live there? Why not move someplace else?”

“Yeah,” said Tiff. “Why do people live in Flint, Michigan, why don’t they just move somewhere where there’s clean water and functional city services? Why do people starve to death in Africa when they could just fly to America and buy food from supermarkets there? Why do those dumb Chinese peasants toil away in factories making cheap cellphones for pennies an hour instead of just moving to San Francisco?”

And that led to Tiff and Arthur having one of their famous “discussions” where they argued about upward mobility and late-stage capitalism, or something like that. They were a staple of what I’d call the Tiff-Arthur epoch of our D&D group, because Tiff had strong opinions and Arthur really liked arguing about things.

I wasn’t really paying attention, because I was trying to revise my notes on Barren Jewel to match what I had just improvised.

Chapter 20: "Desert Course"

Tiff’s room was on the second floor of her house, with a window that overlooked the roof of their back porch. The first time I’d come over to her place she’d popped out the screen and led me onto the roof to look at the stars with her.

(Tiff always felt like she had moved to town around the middle of high school, but that wasn’t actually true. She’d grown up in Bumblefuck, Kansas, same as the rest of us, it was just that she lived out in the country and she had mostly kept to herself, cloistered within her own group of friends. That group of girls had collapsed at some point freshman year, first with Laurel, a keystone member, moving away, and then with two of the girls dating boys a few grades ahead of us. Tiff was adrift for a few months, until she fell in with us. Her alternate trajectory into our D&D group always left me feeling like she hadn’t actually been in Bumblefuck until sometime before that first session with us. Whenever I was reminded that she had been there all along, it felt like a sloppy retcon, because how could I have not been aware of her?)

We sat on the roof of her porch, where she’d laid out a blanket for us. I was on my back, looking at the stars, trying to remember some of the constellations we’d made up together but not able to focus. She was curled up beside me in one of her father’s sweaters, three sizes too big for her so it covered her hands in the cold night. Her head laid on my chest, rising and falling with my breathing. She’d been crying earlier, but had mostly stopped, her shaky breath returning to normal. It was a month after Arthur had died.

“I’m worried about you,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh?” I asked.

She lifted up a hand that had been wrapped around me and poked me in the chest. “You’re hurting.”

I did as much of a shrug as I could without dislodging her. “He was my best friend,” I said. “It’s supposed to hurt. I’d have to be pretty fucking sociopathic to feel nothing.”

“I worry that you,” she stopped and bit her lip, “I worry there’s a part of you that’s sinking into it. It’s … well, my uncle, he has a CCW license, and the way he talks about maybe having to use it one day it’s like you know that he’s just high on this fantasy of getting to shoot someone to death.”

“You think I wanted Arthur to,” die, but I couldn’t get the word out. The words were coming out monotone anyway, devoid of the anger that I should have been putting behind them.

“No,” said Tiff. “No, no no no, it’s, the thing I’m trying to say is that it’s like you’re waiting to show people how much you’re hurt. And I get that. I want to scream at them too, to ask how they can just keep carrying on when he’s,” dead, she couldn’t say it either, “gone. And I know that I was this, interloper, I wasn’t his best friend, I know it’s harder for you.” She was quiet for a while as she blinked back a fresh round of tears. “I’m worried that you’re hurting, and there’s something alluring about the pain, because it’s a righteous, meaningful pain. I,” another sigh and a deep, steadying breath, “don’t want you to keep going down this dark path.”

“You think you understand me better than you do,” I told her.

She was silent for a long moment. “Maybe,” she said softly. “I’m trying though. I know there’s this void that can’t be filled. I know that. It’s the same for me --”

“It’s not the same,” I said, almost by reflex.

She was quiet again, until she started crying, but it was quiet, soft crying, not wracking sobs this time. I looked up at the stars, but couldn’t see them because I was blinking back tears. I didn’t mean to make her feel bad. I couldn’t hold back though, I couldn’t tell her the lies that she wanted to hear. She wanted me to say that I missed Arthur, but at least we could still take comfort in each other. I couldn’t say it though, because at the time I didn’t think it was true.

Tiff missed the next D&D session because of a doctor’s appointment, then the one after that because of a family thing, and then she stopped giving excuses and just didn’t show up, which was probably for the best given how those sessions went.

Chapter 23: "Siege"

I put down my can of Mountain Dew, gave the group my best evil smile, and began chuckling. “You fools, so quick to believe that I would be willing to put your vile past behind us, so ready to believe that others would fall for the self-righteous fictions you’ve spun for yourselves.” I steepled my hands. “The meal you’ve just eaten was poisoned. And with that, my son’s death will be avenged.”

Tiff made a T with her hands, which we had started using for “timeout, I am speaking out of character now”. It was just the four of us, with Arthur gone for mock trial. Craig would show up later in the night, without explanation, like he often did.

“Yes?” I asked.

“We still have the tongue-wigs, right? The little bugs that we replaced our tongues with, along with the glamour on them?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure those were supposed to eat all poisons or something with their alien biology.”

“Yes, you have them,” I said.

Reimer looked up from his notes. “They confer poison immunity.”

“Yes, they do,” I said.

“So …” said Tom, before belatedly making the T symbol. “I don’t get it, why is he poisoning us?”

“You had a long conversation about this,” I replied. “You killed his son during the werewolf epidemic, before you found out there was a cure.”

“No,” said Tom, “I mean --”

“He’s trying to poison us,” said Tiff. “He just picked a strategy that was never going to work on us, because no one knows about the tongue-wigs but us. Makes sense, from his point of view.”

“It’s about frickin’ time,” said Reimer. “You remember that rogue I built, and then we spent like three months real time fighting only things with sneak attack immunity?” He brought that up a lot. “Sometimes things have to go our way.”

“It’s not really about that,” I replied. I wished that Arthur were there, because I knew he would be able to word it better, and I knew I was about to pull back the curtain a little bit too much. “People need to have their own plans in motion that don’t have anything to do with you, that imperfectly counter your strategies because they don’t have the right resources or information. So, imagine Count Gardner, distraught over his son, angry with the Vibratos for absolving you, and plotting his revenge. He hates you, sees you as a law unto yourselves, which you pretty much are, and he wants you to die, right? So he decides that you’re all foolish enough to sit down to dinner with him, if he made the right monologue about how it took him some time to put the past behind him. He does his own research on poisons, talks to various alchemists, pulls black market sellers up from his dungeons to acquire some for him, and after a significant amount of planning, time, and money, he gets you all to ingest powdered green-elk horn, its flavor perfectly masked by a combination of herbs in the meal you just ate. He called you self-righteous, but right now, that’s his sin. A cleverer man, or one less consumed by retribution, would have just waited until you were dead and not gloated about it. Then the poisoning fails, for reasons that he couldn’t comprehend.”

“I stand up from the table and say the command word to materialize my blade,” said Reimer. “Not today, Count Gordner.”

“We’re going to need to gather some proof of this,” said Tiff. “Probably not smart if we kill another noble and only have hearsay in our defense.”

“Either way, roll for initiative,” I replied.

Chapter 25: "Rocket Man"

“All we need is sunlight,” said Craig. “We have the linked portals, right? So we just hold onto one of them and get the other into direct sunlight.”

“Range is a mile,” said Reimer. “London is cloaked in fog out to much farther than that.”

“Okay, so we just send the portal up instead,” replied Craig.

“How?” asked Arthur. “We can’t fly. I know we talked about one of us becoming a vampire and infiltrating their side, but that doesn’t help us in this specific case because we’d have to fly into the sunlight.”

“Step one, steal a cannon,” said Craig. “Step two, point it straight up. Step three, fire one half the portal instead of a cannonball.”

“While we’re inside, fighting Dracula?” asked Arthur. “I guess we could get someone to do it for us, timed to the bells of St. Mary’s …”

“Joon, how high up does the magical fog go?” asked Reimer. “Also, how high up could we shoot a cannon?”

“Three hundred yards is maximum range for a Napoleonic 12-pounder, and the fog rises up to about 300 feet, meaning that St. Paul’s Cathedral just pokes out over it,” which is where I’d planned for the climax of the arc to take place, but I guess we’re not doing that.

“Okay, easy peasy,” said Craig.

“Except for the part where we’re basically subjecting a magic item to ballistic velocities,” said Reimer.

“What kind of a roll would I need to make to know whether the portal would survive?” asked Tom.

“Knowledge arcana,” I replied. He rolled and told me 19. “You think that it would probably survive the firing, especially if you take the time to magically reinforce it, but you have no way to control its descent or prevent it from landing in the Thames or similar.”

“Okay, so, we can’t test it and we have one shot, but it’s certain death if it works,” said Reimer, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And we’re also going to probably lose the portal rings, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay given their restrictions. By my calculations we’ll need some kind of parachute to slow it down once it’s at the apex ...”

They agreed on a plan, and moved on to the next things, which was getting a cannon from somewhere and finding out a way to sneak into Whitehall, where Dracula had set up shop. In the meantime, I was trying to figure out what to do about this cockamamie scheme of theirs. I couldn’t just say that it flat out worked, because then they’d only succeed by DM fiat, and I couldn’t have them fail either, for the same reason, but I’d never liked turning major moments on a roll of the dice, not when we were so far outside the bounds of the systems we were playing in.

So I decided to split the difference.

Chapter 34: "Weik Handum"

“Look, my character’s entire motivation is the loot,” said Tom. “He doesn’t really care that much about the cult of Epsilon, and he doesn’t believe that the gods would allow them to reincarnate a demon, so why should he accept an offer for a ‘fair share’ of the loot?”

Arthur frowned. “You’re right, actually,” he said. “I’m doing it because I think it’s the right thing to do, to appease my god, because I think that the gods won’t allow it but I’m their instrument for not allowing it, for the praise and adoration that provide the crux of my character flaw, because it needs to be done … I would go after them even if there was no loot, so why should I advocate for an equal share?”

Craig looked to Tom. “Doesn’t that just reduce us to being sellswords?” he asked. “I’m not sure that works from a keep-the-team-together standpoint once the adventure is over.”

“Here,” said Reimer, having finally found his place in the book that was open in front of him, “DMG, page 135, there’s a table for character wealth by level.” He turned the book around, offering for someone to look at it and confirm, which no one did. “The game’s assumptions about player power level rests on us getting equal amounts of treasure in line with our experience gain, it’s what makes the math on combat encounters mostly work out. If I’m following my alignment and backstory then yeah, sure, I would give up a share of the treasure if really pressed on it, but that screws up the game balance.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t screw up the game balance then you screw up the characters,” said Arthur.

“I can fix it,” I said. “You can hammer out an in-character agreement about how to distribute the loot, then I can wiggle things around on the backend so that you get less loot from the adventure and are individually compensated by your paladin’s order and druid circle respectively.”

“Does that work?” asked Craig. “I was under the impression that we were going to get thousands of gold for this adventure, if the church has thousands of gold to spend, why aren’t they spending it on us right now, it doesn’t make sense that they would wait around until after the quest is complete, if they think the quest is so critical.”

I sighed and rubbed my face. “Okay, fine, it’s an iterative thing,” I said. “It’s important for Uther and Zackum to defeat the cult for their own, personal, moral social reasons, but if they just give in on loot negotiations then they’re going to be constantly starved for resources, especially when it comes to the next time, and they know that the risk/reward proposition is already favorable enough with an equal split. And from a keep-the-team-together aspect, the sellswords know that they’ve got a good thing going by being able to pair up with two half-healers that will keep them alive and raise them from the dead.”

“Okay,” said Arthur. “Now let’s do all that in character.”

Chapter 35: "Friendship is Magic"

“I’m not saying that D&D is sexist,” said Tiff with a roll of her eyes. “I mean, the core rulebooks from third edition on aren’t any more sexist than your average Hollywood action movie, it’s just stuff like women in sexy armor and men in functional plate, or the way the portraits are posed, but it’s mostly genderless and it is making an effort on that front. The problem is that the default assumption D&D uses is of this mostly Middle Ages world that draws on the actual Middle Ages, and both the books and the players are usually going to whitewash that by pretending that the Middle Ages were a time of racial and sexual equality, except that there’s still all this other stuff leftover from the Middle Ages and mythology that will always keep creeping in.”

Tiff was a voracious reader, which wasn’t unusual among our group, but her tastes turned more to non-fiction than was the norm, and she once told me that she read about three words of analysis and commentary to every one word of actual fiction. She said reading what other people thought about the things she’d read or watched was her version of girly gossip, and I took that at face value for quite a while before I realized that she was being a bit impish.

“So there are some monsters that you don’t want to be fighting?” I asked.

“No, no,” said Tiff. Her ponytail had a way of swishing side to side when she shook her head that brought a smile to my face. “I’m saying that, like, the Monster Manual has hags and succubi, right? And I just don’t want them dropped into the game as that, as these unexamined representations of the fucked up way that the Middle Ages thought about women. If we’re going to face them, then I want them to be considered representations.”

“Ugh, Jesus, please no,” said Reimer. “Please don't ask Juniper to get fancy. You weren’t here for when we played Long Stairs, it was supposed to be this neat little dungeon crawl thing where we were army guys going into an endless fantasy dungeon in Oregon, but we just got constantly bogged down in these moral dilemmas and parallels to American imperial jingoism in the Middle East, or something.”

“It was great,” said Arthur. “Third best campaign we ever played.”

Tiff looked to me. “I wouldn’t mind trying that out sometime,” she said. “Sounds neat.”

“It ran its course,” I replied. And maybe it wouldn’t have, if I had gone with the simpler version of marines using machine guns against fantasy creatures, but there was only so much that you could do with the ‘are we the baddies’ schtick. “Sorry you weren’t around for it.”

“Don’t feel bad,” said Craig. “They talk about the Cranberry Guilds constantly, eventually we’ll just drown out the old campaigns with new ones.”

“Yeah,” said Tiff. “I’m down with that.”

Tiff was still pretty new to the group at that point, and while she'd been enjoying herself, that was the first time she really seemed like she was going to be a permanent fixture. So of course I made a unicorn just for her, a majestic, terrifying beast that was obsessed with virginal purity in the way I suspected a medieval man might be.

Chapter 36: "In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet"

The party had been stuck on a puzzle for quite some time, but at least they were working together to figure it out rather than getting bored or frustrated. The puzzle took the form of blocks with lines on top of them, arranged in a particular way and responsive to the touch with displays of lights. There was an underlying, discoverable set of rules that governed the patterns of lights, which they’d slowly figured out and written down, but after that it was a case of beating the puzzle using those rules against an adversarial intelligence. It was, in essence, a boardgame, one that I had developed and then practiced until I was good at it. I had the advantage of that practice, and of not having to discover the rules, but I was pretty sure that I was going to lose, because it was five brains against one.

“Can I roll Intelligence to figure out our next move?” asked Tom. He was playing a gnomish wizard with 22 INT; 18 INT was supposed to be where intelligence maxed out for a human, though that sort of depended on edition. Tom was a great guy, very understanding and funny, but he wasn’t really a thinker, and certainly not on par with his character.

“Eh, no,” I said. “Maybe we’ll do that if you guys can’t beat it on your own.”

Tom shook his fist at the heavens. “Curse my useless gigantic brain!”

“You kind of have to roll with it,” said Craig. “Pun not intended. I mean realistically you’d figure out how to beat the puzzle right away, because you’re going up against Joon, who is decidedly not at 22 INT.”

“Hey,” I said. I mean, it was true, but you don’t just let stuff like that go unchallenged.

“I’m in class with you, you’re like a 15 at best,” said Craig. He held up a finger. “Which is still really good, that’s like a standard deviation above normal.”

“No, it’s not,” said Reimer. “Average for 3d6 is 10.5 with a standard deviation of 3, but that’s for adventurers, not commoners, and if you used 3d6 for commoners you’d get absurd results like one in every 216 people having an IQ of like 145, which is three standard deviations above normal.”

“I didn’t mean literally,” said Craig with a wave of his hand.

“You meant that 15 was figuratively a standard deviation above normal?” asked Reimer. “Do you not know the difference between figurative and literal?”

“We’re saying that Joon would hypothetically have an IQ of 130,” Arthur cut in, “Which would put him in the top 3% of people, or something like that. That doesn’t actually seem that unrealistic to me, there are about 150 people in our class, so he’d be in the top five or six? But the point is that Tom is playing a character who would have an IQ of 160, which would make him Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, and while you could fake being as smart as them, in order to come up with the same things that they came up with in the same amount of time, you’d have to actually be as smart as them. Tom could never come up with general relativity just by pretending to be Einstein.”

“Okay,” I said, “But I don’t want to give you a riddle and have you roll some dice and then I tell you the answer to the riddle. That’s lame.”

“I agree,” said Arthur with a shrug. “But it seems like you have to cheat at some point, because you aren’t Stephen Hawking and neither is Tom.”

We never really did figure out a good solution to that problem, which was present not just for intelligence but for other aspects as well. It was a bit easier for wisdom and charisma, but the problem was still there, and Reimer got some painful comeuppance when he tried to play the most charismatic bard in the world and then kept sticking his foot in his mouth.

Chapter 38: "Don't Split the Party"

“The daji hits you, take 23 damage,” I said, without looking up from my notes.

Craig made a few marks on his character sheet. “I’m down,” he said.

“And that’s why you never split the party,” said Reimer with smug satisfaction.

“Should I roll a new character?” Craig asked me.

“Flora and Ike are across town,” I said, pointing to Tiff and Arthur, “Finch is two blocks away, but he’s got no idea that you were attacked, and at best he’d be doing a check to stabilize.”

“Which I could do,” said Reimer. “If I knew that you were dying, which I don’t, because we split the party.” He looked to me. "My turn next?”

“Hang on,” I said. “Craig, do you have anything that can save you? Any special equipment, any magical effects you forgot about, something like that?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“Alright,” I said. “You’re dead. It’s plausible that your body will be found and later recovered by the party, and then you’ll be raised from the dead after that, but most likely all your stuff is going to be gone. That’s the best case scenario for you right now, if you’re really attached.”

Craig waffled, which made me feel bad, because that meant he was actually considering it. “No,” he finally said, “I’ll figure out something else.”

“Now me?” asked Reimer.

“So the argument against splitting the party is that we’re stronger together than apart, right?” asked Tiff. “Like, if we’d run into that daji as a team, then we’d have smoked it without any problem.”

“The game’s balanced around a team of three to six adventurers,” said Reimer. “They’ve got non-overlapping magisteria, so it’s not just that they’re stronger together, though they are, it’s that between all of them, they can do pretty much anything. By themselves, most of the classes can only take on a very specific range of tasks, except high level wizards, because wizards are OP.”

“Actually, I think it’s mostly about the story,” said Arthur. “You can cover more ground if you split up, but not really, because you can’t actually do things at the same time and the players are still sitting there. Half the party is out of the narrative spotlight, which is boring. The reason you’re not supposed to split the party isn’t that people will die, it’s that you’re taking the ‘collaborative’ out of ‘collaborative roleplaying’.”

“Yeah, no offense Joon, but I’d like to join back up with Reimer as soon as possible,” said Tiff.

“Thanks for the eulogy, guys,” said Craig.

Chapter 39: "Strategic Reserves"

“You’re a few miles into the woods when you spot the Unicorn for the first time,” I said.

“Any sign of the girls?” asked Tiff.

“I shoot it,” said Reimer, who was playing an archer/cleric, and who uttered the words ‘I shoot it’ at least twenty times a session.

“Roll for initiative,” I replied, “Tiff, no sign of the girls.” When everyone had given me their numbers, I gave them a description. “The unicorn is tall and shockingly white, not just with a horn atop his head that’s nearly two cubits long, but a billy-goat’s beard, a lion’s tail, and a cloven feet like a swine rather than a horse. Its body is that of an immense stallion, rippling with powerful muscles. Its pure black eyes look at the four of you, then it disappears behind a tree you don’t think could possibly hide its bulk.” I rolled some dice, then looked at my turn counter. “Reimer?”

“I can’t see it?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Fine,” he replied. “Readied action to shoot it when it appears.”

“The unicorn goes just after you, and you see him step out from behind a tree that he, again, could not possibly have been hiding behind,” I said. “Fire your arrow.”

“18, hit?” he asked.

“The arrow flies through the air, but the unicorn’s horn has shifted position, and it knocks the arrow away with a loud snort as it charges in toward you,” I replied.

“Shifted position how?” asked Arthur. “Like, it moved its horn really quickly to knock the arrow away, or it did a teleportation effect, or what?”

“Roll Perception,” I said.

“22,” said Arthur.

“You realize that you have two distinct memory tracks,” I replied. “In one, the arrow was loosed from the bow and was about to hit the unicorn, but that memory ends before that would have happened. In the other, the unicorn moved naturally and fluidly to get his horn into position before the arrow was loosed.”

Craig rolled his dice around in his hand and frowned at that. “Okay,” he said. “So it’s like deja vu, but we remember it both ways.”

“Deux fois vu, I’d think,” said Tiff.

“So not precognition or supernatural reflexes,” said Arthur, “More like … reality warping.”

“Or timeline collapsing,” said Craig. “It sees that it’s about to get hit, then picks a timeline where it didn’t get hit, and merges with that one, dragging us along.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense,” said Reimer, “Why would we remember it? That’s not how the brain works. And anyway, this isn’t really helpful to us, because it doesn’t give us a clue about how to beat it. Do I think that it would be able to keep doing this to every arrow I fire at it?”

“I don’t know, do you?” I asked, which was my response pretty much every time he tried to weasel information out of me. “But anyway, that was your readied action, so it’s still his turn, and he’s charging right for you, horn out in front of him.” I rolled some more dice behind my screen, glancing at them only briefly. “His horn pierces straight through your metal armor, going through it like soft butter, and making a hole that punctures your shoulder. Again, he shifts away from you, and you have two memories, one of him charging and goring you, and the other of him coming to a stop next to you. His horn is bloodless and clean, but you are still very much injured. Take 16 damage.”

“Alright,” said Arthur. “This thing has stolen thirteen girls and killed twenty men, some of them supposedly better than us. We have some measure of it now, does anyone have any bright ideas how to kill it?”

Chapter 42: "A Pleasant Interlude in Kansas" (first flashback)

Tiff had taken to driving me home after D&D. She didn’t live anywhere near me, but she’d said she lived so far out in the country that the extra few miles didn’t matter to her, and I naturally accepted the rides, because she was Tiff.

“I have a question about the unicorns,” she said.

“Unicorns in general?” I asked.

“No, your unicorns, the creepy rape monsters,” she said.

“They weren’t actually rapists,” I said. “Just, rape adjacent. And that was a long time ago, so I’m not sure that I’m going to remember anything.”

“Well, you can make something up for me then,” she said. “The thing was, I kind of didn’t get the time powers.”

“Oh,” I said, “So, the unicorn kind of merges alternate realities to put himself in a position --”

“No, sorry, I mean I get how it physically works, or at least I think I do, I just don’t understand why that’s a power that unicorns have,” said Tiff. I watched her as she kept her eyes on the dark road ahead of us. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, which was one of her most attractive looks. “Not to pull back the veil too much, meaning don’t tell Arthur that I asked, but why did you give them time powers? I thought it was just random, but you usually don’t do random.”

“Eh, it’s dumb, and we didn’t really do anything with it,” I said. “Cutting room floor type thing, happens a lot.”

“You may proceed,” said Tiff, in her best impression of a Star Fleet captain.

“So, I had the unicorns as like this hyper-masculine, purity obsessed, possessive creature, right?” I asked. “That much came through?”

“Yeah,” said Tiff. “I really liked it.”

“Well, the time powers were supposed to be more about manipulation and gaslighting,” I said. “Like, I had this idea of the unicorn as this abusive guy who just beats and abuses his wife or daughter and then pretends that nothing happened, or says that it’s only because he loves them so much, or … whatever. It was more about making his victims question the nature of their reality, I guess?”

“Okay, but we rescued the girls, and you said that they seemed fine,” said Tiff. She pulled up to my house, an unremarkable blue rambler with a pair of trees blocking most of the windows from sight. It was late at night, and all the lights were off.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at my house. “I chickened out. We were getting toward the end of the session and I just, didn’t really want to have this messy, complicated ending that was going to bring everybody down.” I made no move to get out of the car. “I used to do those a lot, and I think I was the only one who enjoyed them, because it was like, that’s how the real world is, things don’t have these nice conclusions, and sometimes even if you save someone they’ve got issues that, maybe don’t scar them exactly, but that they’ll have to work through on their own. There’s not always a panacea.”

“Don’t want to go in?” asked Tiff, after I kept looking at my house for a bit.

“Eh,” I said. “Church tomorrow. Dad’s stopped going and it’s always,” and then I stopped there, because I didn’t really see the point in continuing. I’d been wishing that my parents would just get a divorce for the last few years, but it didn’t seem like either of them were at their breaking point yet.

“Did you want to spend the night at my place?” asked Tiff. I turned to look at her. She was barely visible under the reflected light of the car’s headlights.

“Yeah,” I said. The car started moving again, and I only took my eyes off her for long enough to send my dad a text I knew from experience he wouldn’t read until the morning, keeping the details vague. “Are your parents going to be okay with that?”

“They’re in Toulouse for the week, so I’m all alone,” said Tiff. She cleared her throat. “I don’t want you to think that this is, like, a thing. I mean, I know that your parents are being, whatever, and we’ve been going late so you can avoid them. Just, remember that it’s a position of vulnerability for a young woman.”

“Ah,” I said. My heart was beating faster and my breathing was a little deeper. Tiff had just invited me to spend the night with her, with her parents gone, and she didn’t want me to think that this was ‘a thing’, but everything in my teenage boy brain was screaming that if I ever had a chance with her, this was it.

Whatever my troubles at home, there suddenly wasn’t space in my brain to worry about them anymore.

“I’m really horrible about signals,” said Tiff. “I get that, about myself. But it’s so embarrassing to just plainly say things, right?” She was normally more articulate than this.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or, no. Embarrassing isn’t the thing I feel. For me it’s like I’m walking through this minefield and I get really tense because it feels like one wrong step is going to get me blown up.”

We drove in silence for a bit as we made our way out into the country, past the occasional too-bright reflective sign.

“I don’t want to make things weird between us or in the group, but I have a huge crush on you,” I said. I’d rehearsed that in my head three or four times in the silence, and my chest felt like it was constricting as I said it. “I just, thought you should know, because maybe it would be easier for both of us if I didn’t spend the night, so I’m not torturing myself thinking about the minefield.”

“Oh,” said Tiff. There was a long pause. “Well I like you too.” There was another pause, as a wild grin began spreading across my face. “I like like you.”

“Well,” I said. “Good. Good to know.” I was sure that my smile could be heard on my voice. Relief was washing over me, because I had stepped out into the minefield and not gotten my foot blown off, or at least, not yet.

“When I say that I don’t want to make this, tonight, a thing, I mean,” Tiff was speaking quickly, her voice unsteady. “I mean there are certain assumptions that a boy might make if a girl invited him over for the night when her parents were gone, especially if they’d just confessed their feelings to each other. And I don’t want you to think, not that you would, that this was a proposition of some kind, or a promise on my part, that asking you over is consent of some kind.” She let out a breath. “See? Just incredibly embarrassing. I feel like I’m going to melt.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t try to kiss you or anything,” I said. My heart was flopping around in my chest like a fish out of water, because the ground still felt unsteady. Was it enough that she like liked me? She hadn’t said that she wanted to go out on a date, and I hadn’t asked her, and I could think of plenty of reasons why it would be a bad idea, like what things would look like if it didn’t work out, and the fact that Arthur had the biggest crush in the world on her -- everyone knew that, did she know that? I had no idea how I would explain things to him, if Tiff and I ended up, impossibly, as a couple, something I’d been fantasizing about for months but never whispered a word of to anyone.

“It’s more the ‘or anything’ I was thinking about,” said Tiff. She cleared her throat. “You could try to kiss me.”

So I spent the next five minutes of our trip trying to surreptitiously see whether my breath was still fresh, to make sure my lips weren’t chapped, to think about everything I knew about kissing (not much), to plan and strategize and run scenarios in my head until I was almost dizzy.

And then when we pulled up onto the dirt patch that served as parking, I got out and went around to her side, where she was waiting for me, with her chin tilted up and her lips slightly parted, and maybe it was the anticipation of the car ride, or the warmth of her mouth in the cold night air, or the prospect of not just spending the night together but all the nights that might lie ahead of us, but kissing Tiff somehow managed to not just exceed my expectations but transcend them, so I forgot that I even had expectations.

And then we kissed some more in her house, and she took me onto the roof where we looked at stars in the cold, and I kissed her on the head from time to time, because that was a thing I could do now. I didn’t try to go any further than kissing, not even when I could feel her pressing her body against mine as we kissed, or her shaking hands touching my neck as my tongue entered her mouth.

She gave me a ride home in the morning, after I slept on the couch, and the whole way I couldn’t stop staring at her and smiling.

Chapter 42: "A Pleasant Interlude in Kansas" (second flashback)

This might sound dumb, but we never ended up telling Arthur or the group that we were dating. At first it was because we didn’t want to make things weird. We were very conscious, especially in the beginning, that it might not last. Some of it was a desire for privacy, or a segregation of social roles, because if we were suddenly dating in all contexts then that would place this huge pressure on us, with questions and probes coming from everyone we knew. And yes, some of it was about Arthur.

“Yeah, I know he likes me,” said Tiff one night, as we lay on her couch together with her DVD player bouncing its image around the corners. “Promise not to be jealous?”

“The mind is a funny thing,” I replied.

“I did like him,” said Tiff. She was watching my face as she spoke. “Especially in the beginning, when we’d get into these big arguments, he was just so passionate about all these stupid little things.” She placed a finger on my collarbone. “You’re like that too, but about different stupid little things, and it’s hard to notice sometimes because your thoughts are like these icebergs, and you only ever reveal the tip.”

“Just the tip,” I said. “Just to see how it feels.”

She gave me a playful slap and then kissed me. “I was saying something. Oh, how is your funny mind?”

“Fine,” I said. “You were saying that you liked him.”

“I did,” said Tiff. “And I knew that he liked me. I kept waiting for him to ask me out or even just confess to me, but months and months went by and he never did, and then my interest started to fade because there was this other handsome boy, so what was I supposed to do?”

“Make the first move?” I asked.

“Not making the first move is a woman’s privilege I will happily take,” said Tiff. “I get clammy just thinking about it. Feel how clammy I am.” She stuck out her hand, and I clasped it in mine.

“You are not at all clammy,” I replied.

“No, but I like when you touch me,” she said with a faux-shy smile.

“Do you ever get sickened by being so cute?” I asked.

And anyway, this part of it was all fun and games. There was something charming about the cloak and dagger aspect of secret dating, passing coded messages to each other, that kind of thing, and no one was any the wiser, which meant that we didn’t have to tell the group or Arthur and make things awkward or painful for anyone. We carried on like this for about five months.

Then Arthur got in a car accident, and eleven days later he died, and it all went to shit.

Chapter 42: "A Pleasant Interlude in Kansas" (third flashback)

We were playing at Reimer’s house, and I’d shown up half an hour early because I had been dragging my feet on preparing for the session. We had started a new, temporary campaign when Arthur got in his accident, because we all felt bad and didn’t want him to miss out on any sessions of the regular one (and if he hadn’t been in a coma, I think we would have tried to play during visiting hours). I’d decided on Long Stairs, vol. 2, because army guys going through an infinite fantasy dungeon sounded like the sort of brainless thing we could use to occupy our time. After he died, I kept running it, because the thought of going back to our old campaign and just dropping his storylines seemed like it would leave me a sobbing mess.

“So, how long have you and Tiff been a thing?” asked Reimer as I looked at my notes.

“A few months,” I said. I didn’t ask him how he’d found out, and I didn’t particularly care. I didn’t even make a token denial. The cloak-and-dagger covert dating thing had, understandably, lost its luster, so we weren’t really bothering.

“Seems like the kind of thing that you should have shared with the class,” said Reimer.

“Fuck off,” I replied.

“Do you wish you’d told Arthur, before he’d died?” asked Reimer.

I picked up my black novelty d20, hard acrylic and the size of my fist, and whipped it at him as hard as I could. He brought a hand up to block it and grunted in pain as it hit his forearm.

“You are such a fucking asshole,” I growled.

“Yeah, I am,” said Reimer, rubbing his forearm. “The difference between the two of us is that I know I’m an asshole, and you prance around like you were his bestest friend in the whole world. You and Tiff could have told him, he’d have been upset but at least it would have spared him being made a fool of. He died a virgin, pining after her, and you were just laughing behind his back about what a moron he was.”

“You know it wasn’t like that,” I said. I could feel the rage building up, and it hadn’t been more than a week since I’d been arrested for attacking Victor Clark over his whole 'god has a plan' thing. But in the wake of Arthur’s death, nothing seemed like it mattered anymore, and I kept thinking about how good it would feel to smash Reimer’s face in. “He was my best friend.”

“Maybe when you were growing up,” said Reimer. “After that, Tiff was your best friend, because you chose her over him.”

Tom showed up a little bit after that, walking into the stony silence and asking if everything was okay, to which we both replied that it was nothing. What Reimer had said cut deep, because I had already been thinking those same things, and it wasn’t like you could just call dibs on a girl, they weren’t property, but at the same time, why hadn’t I told him, if I knew he was still hung up on her?

I killed Reimer’s characters eight times that session, an all-time record by a very wide margin, sometimes without looking at the dice, and one time without giving him so much as a (meaningless) roll. After the second death he stopped making new characters and just brought back the old ones with different names, and I kept killing them in various ways with little regard to the rules, the narrative, or the increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere of the game room. Reimer just took it without saying much of anything, except maybe to tip over a mini, and the party trudged on, battling the endless horrors of the Long Stairs until they found another of his characters, a lost marine or something equally contrived, who would proceed to die within a few minutes.

“Fun session,” said Reimer at the end of it, without a trace of humor or warmth in his eyes. “Same time next week?”

When Tiff asked me what that had all been about, I shrugged her question off, because I didn’t want to have to repeat what he’d said to me.

The funny thing was, while Reimer and I never actually made up, we kept playing together, and in the end, just before I left Earth, he and Tom were the only ones still willing to play with me. For Reimer, it was because he was something of a masochist when it came to tabletop, not to mention a stubborn asshole, and Tom, I guess, because he was a great guy who thought that the final death of the group before we all went off to college would have been a travesty, or maybe just an insult to Arthur’s memory.

Looking back, I have to wonder how much of Reimer being a dick to me was just him trying to process the grief in his own way, in the same way that I started to lash out at pretty much everyone around me for every little slight, or anything that could possibly be interpreted as disrespect to Arthur. I was his best friend, and he was mine, that was how I saw myself after his death, and I applied as much paint to our relationship as possible, until it was sometimes hard to remember that I’d been anything but a perfect friend.

My relationship with Tiff was one of the early casualties. It was hard to take joy from her kisses when I felt like I didn’t deserve them. It was hard to comfort her when doing that felt like a betrayal to Arthur’s memory. He might have wanted me to be happy, but I didn’t want myself to be happy, and that was probably the death blow for things between Tiff and I. We drifted apart by inches until she was sitting somewhere else for lunch and the last text message from her (an unanswered ‘how are you doing?’) was months ago.

Chapter 45: "Keep Magic Weird"

“That’s always been my biggest gripe with D&D,” said Arthur. “The magic almost never feels magical, and that’s because it’s bound by rules. Joon solves a lot of that by just giving us weird stuff --”

“It’s the ‘Keep Magic Weird’ initiative,” I said.

“Is that a reference?” asked Tom.

“‘Keep Portland Weird’, right?” asked Tiff.

“Yeah,” I said. I gestured to Arthur to continue. We had seven people for the session, including Craig’s kid sister Maddie, which made it a bit of a madhouse, especially when Arthur was trying to talk seriously about something.

“The problem is that there are rules, and once you know those rules, you can’t be surprised by them,” said Arthur. “It’s a map that has all the lines drawn in, with nowhere left to explore. Wizards are supposed to be magical, but they just boil down to a list of a few hundred spells to choose from. You get the buzz of magic from those spells when you first read them, but after that, it falls flat.”

“You can’t fix that though,” said Reimer. “Not unless you want to go full freeform roleplay without any rules, and that always sucks.”

“That was basically what we did for Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf, and it worked great,” said Tiff.

“Shia Labeouf?” asked Maddie. She was three years younger than us, not really a kid, but that was how I had always thought of her: Craig’s kid sister.

“No talking when it’s not your turn,” said Craig. She pouted at that. “Whose turn was it?”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my turn tracker, which was a mess of dry erase marker. I had horrible handwriting. “Tom, you’re up.” (And, as usual, the conversation continued on while I tried to deal with combat and Tom’s questions. I listened in, splitting my attention, unable to contribute without bringing an already-slow session grinding to a halt.)

“You could totally do a purely DM-mediated magic system,” said Arthur. “The player says what they want to do, the DM places a difficulty on it, and then the player rolls some dice. I thought of that in two seconds, I’m sure there are better ways.”

“But the DM is just arbitrarily assigning difficulty?” asked Reimer. “And the player just has to take a guess at how hard it is to actually cast a spell or do whatever unstructured thing it is you want to do? I mean, you’re going to have to introduce rules at some point, even if they’re just meta-level rules like Wish or Miracle, and it’s the rules you dislike.”

“If you had a good DM, I think you could do it implicitly,” said Tiff. “You could do like a social contract type thing, develop an understanding, and then build from there. You’d basically be praying to your god, but the god would be the DM, and maybe he would have his own rules, but you’d never know them, and you’d be discouraged from knowing them.”

“Wanna homebrew it?” asked Reimer with a grin. “If you pitched it, I think Joon would go for it, and then I can cheese the shit out of it.”

“I heard that!” I called out to them. “Tiff, don’t you dare go over to the dark side, stay over in the light with Arthur.”

Nothing ever came of that homebrew plan, which I was thankful for, because I liked the rules. Arthur was right that magic seems a little bit less magical once you stuck everything to a cork board, but it wasn’t less magical for me, because everything I thought up I could make a reality, and that process of making these ethereal ideas into something concrete was one of the things I loved most about tabletop.

Chapter 47: "At Arm's Length"

“Well that’s why women in fiction are virgins so much of the time,” said Tiff. “It’s this purity obsession that Western culture has, where men want women to be basically untouched by anyone so that they can be the first, so that one man will just be the focus of her sexual energy for the rest of her life, and she'll be unable to compare him to anyone else.” She held up a hand in Reimer’s direction. “And yes, I know all the evo-psych reasons for that, doesn’t mean it’s not kind of screwed up.”

(Part of the subtext here, which only Tiff and I knew, was that we’d had sex for the first time a few weeks prior, which was the first time ever for either of us. I would guess that was why the topic, ostensibly about the unfaithful Duke of Lagrange and his plot to kill the party, had turned to the concept of virginity in popular culture.)

“Well, if my part in the conversation can just be assumed, then good, I don’t have to say it,” said Reimer with a smile. “But men and women have different evolutionary reproductive strategies and everything you see is part of that.”

“I don’t think that’s why women in fiction are usually virgins,” said Arthur, setting his can of pop down on the table, “Tiff’s thing, not Reimer’s. I think it’s the same reason that young protagonists are orphans.” He sat back in his chair just a bit without continuing.

“Oh,” said Craig, “That reminds me, I made bingo cards.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a sheaf of papers, each one printed with a five-by-five grid with words in each space. “You can all put an X in the square that says, ‘Arthur sets up obvious bait’.”

“This had better not be why you were late,” I said.

“This is amazing,” said Reimer, looking over the sheet and making a few marks. “Does that one count for ‘Joon complains that Craig was late’?”

“Obviously,” said Craig with a smile my way.

“‘Tiff says that she’s not a feminist’, do I really do that?” asked Tiff. “I mean, I don’t consider myself a feminist --”

“Count it,” said Craig.

“-- I didn’t think that I said it that much,” finished Tiff with a kick under the table in Craig’s direction that hit me in the knee.

“The Duke of Lagrange looks at the four of you in incredulity as you consult these sheets of paper,” I said.

“‘Joon tries to get the game back on track’, this literally has everything,” said Reimer.

“Arthur, why are virgins like orphans?” asked Tiff. “I’m not okay with leaving that dangling.” She glanced at me. “Sorry Joon.”

“I’m glad you asked!” said Arthur with a gleeful smile. “Well, the reason that you see so many orphans, besides setting up the various orphan plots, is that if you’re writing a book or screenplay you always have to deal with the parents question somehow, at least if your protagonist is a teenager or young adult. Parents are inconvenient to a lot of plots, because the audience is left with this question about why the parents aren’t important or being brought up, and conservation of detail means you can’t just say, ‘oh, well he didn’t like his parents, or they kind of sucked’, because then the audience starts to think that’s important. So, writers just do the easy thing and kill the parents off. That can either tie into the plot somehow, or just allow the character to start as a blank slate, without having to take up screen time. And in this analogy, prior relationships are like the parents.”

I looked around the table and tried to think about character backstories. No one but Arthur had defined parents, siblings, or prior love interests. There was some baggage, quests that stemmed from their backstories, falls from grace, things like that, and for Tiff and Reimer, explicit dead parents, but it was all stuff that could reasonably be expected to be resolved, if the game actually went on long enough.

“And you don’t think it has to do with a culture that places importance on purity, innocence, and naivete, at least in women?” asked Tiff with her arms crossed.

“That’s a bingo,” said Craig. “I think I made these too easy, version two will be better.”

“I think that’s part of it, certainly,” Arthur said to Tiff. “But I also think that if I were a screenwriter faced with making a 90-minute movie, and I had the choice between having a one-line, ‘I’ve never done this before’ or having this whole long thing where I explained what both parties were bringing into their new relationship, I know what I would choose. Virgins are narratively convenient.”

“Wait,” said Reimer to Craig. “Let me see your sheet, how’d you get bingo?”

“There and there,” said Craig. “Arthur and Tiff have a long disagreement on gender, sex, -- see, I made them different things, just for you -- race, or socioeconomics. And the other one was ‘session goes for 30 minutes without even tangentially engaging with gameplay’.”

“I tried,” I said.

“Yeah, I marked that,” said Craig with a grin.

It was only after the session, when Tiff was driving us to her place, that Tiff picked the thread of conversation back up, this time with just me and her in the car.

“It kind of bugged me, what Arthur was saying,” she said. “About relationships being baggage.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “I think he was mostly talking about narratives, not real people. For people, the narrative starts when you’re born and ends when you die, and usually it’s not very compelling.”

“Disagree,” said Tiff. “For other people, the narrative starts when you meet them, and then you have infodumps with each other to get them up to speed on the plot thus far, which basically boils down to where they are in whatever plot threads they have going on. In that context, baggage is all the existing plot threads that everyone just has to acknowledge will never get solved, because there’s no way to solve them. So Arthur is looking at these past relationships as not being character defining arcs that happened in the past, but unresolved threads instead.”

“I’m going to be honest, I don’t really have a dog in this fight,” I said. Maybe it was just who we were as people, or because I was a guy and she was a girl, but everything had changed for me the night we’d first kissed, not when we had sex. It wasn’t a non-event, at all, but the kiss had actually felt transformative.

“Yeah, I know,” said Tiff. She tapped her hands on the steering wheel. “Just venting. I kept thinking about you, and this thing between us, and how it feels like I’m more the person that I’ve always wanted to be now, you know? And I don’t want that diminished as mere baggage.”

Chapter 51: "Blood in the Water" (aside)

This was how Arthur had died. He’d had his car accident and ended up in a coma. ‘Cerebral edema’ was what they called it when there was too much fluid in your brain, and that was Arthur’s most pressing problem, as the days in a coma went on. His brain was swelling, and if your brain swells too much, there are issues from compression, and then you die. The doctors decided that they were going to go with decompressive craniectomy, which means removing part of the skull so that the brain can expand without squishing itself. The doctors -- look, I don’t actually know any of this, I wasn’t in the room when they were deciding it, and most of this I only learned because of morbid curiosity after the fact -- they must have seen the swelling in his brain and made a list of all the interventions that they could try, weighing the risks and outcomes, and finally they had settled on the craniectomy, and maybe, sometimes, you made the right choice given the information that you had, but the dice just weren’t in your favor. They did their decompressive craniectomy, and that was how Arthur died.

Chapter 57: "Place Your Figs"

“Okay, I kick the door open,” said Arthur.

“Alright, where is everyone standing?” I asked.

“Fuck,” said Reimer.

“Well don’t say that,” said Greg, “Then he knows that you’re going to try to game it.”

“I already knew that,” I said. “But if I had asked for your positions as you approached the door, then you would know that something was up.”

“Yeah, like how in old cartoons the cel-shading let you know that some particular bit of rock was going to move and wasn’t part of the background,” said Arthur.

“So place your figs,” I said, gesturing at the dry erase battlemat. “But do it as you would have in-character, and I will remind you that no one was taking this seriously as a threat, so you can’t retroactively have been on high alert and optimally positioned for a trap and slash or encounter.”

Chapter 61: "Animus"

“Alright,” said Arthur, “Let me do the talking.”

“Me no talk good,” said Tom, with his best half-orc impression.

“But I want to talk,” said Tiff.

“Arthur has the best rolls,” said Reimer.

“Sheet,” said Tiff, holding out her hand. She had only recently learned that people would just hand over their character sheets if she asked, after having mistakenly believed that this was private information, and she was taking advantage of being able to look over what other people had done. Arthur handed his character sheet over with a smile, and Tiff narrowed her eyes as she looked at it. “Okay, that’s ridiculously good, but you’re lawful neutral, I’m chaotic good, I can’t let you do all the talking.”

“You don’t trust me to represent the average of the group view?” asked Arthur.

“First, no,” said Tiff with a laugh, “Second, that takes all the roleplaying out of it, doesn’t it? If you’re the one that always talks, then the rest of us are just, at best, talking out of character.”

“This is going to be a clusterfuck,” groaned Reimer.

“Well I think it’ll be fun,” said Tom.

“I didn’t say that it wouldn’t be fun,” replied Reimer. “Joon, I’m going to apply drowfire poison to my daggers before we go in. I have my special sheaths, so I should be able to keep them concealed.”

“Okay, sounds good,” I replied as I made a note in my scratchpad.

“What does the average of our values mean?” asked Maddie.

“Ugh, please no,” said Reimer. “Never let Arthur --”

“What I mean is that all of our alignments could potentially be plotted on a two-dimensional grid, like so,” said Arthur, sketching two quick lines in his notebook and giving them simple, one-letter labels. “The C-L axis is Chaos and Law, the G-E axis is Good and Evil. We can use this to map everyone in the group.” He made six quick points on the piece of paper. “And with some more lines, we have the basic alignment grid.” He drew in four more lines, two vertical, two horizontal, then held the paper up for our inspection. “So once we have that, we can average the points on the C-L axis, then average the points on the G-E axis, which would give us a new point about here,” he poked the paper in roughly the center of the dots, toward the corner of the square that would traditionally be labeled ‘neutral good’.

“Objection!” cried Tiff, who had been watching let’s plays of Phoenix Wright (she did this instead of playing them, it was weird). She jabbed a finger at her character sheet. “Cleonia feels very, very strongly about chaos, and if you were just averaging alignment, then you’d get people like Plunder -- that is such a ridiculously stupid name --”

“Thank you,” said Reimer.

“People who don’t care about the abstract concept of law at all get counted the same in the average,” continued Tiff.

“They do,” said Arthur, “You’d assign a numeric value to each of the alignments --”

“No,” said Tiff. “It’s like, if we were talking about abortion, --”

“No, please, please, not again,” said Craig with a groan.

“You can hold the same pro-life beliefs as someone else, but feel it less strongly than they do,” said Tiff. “There are people who have some particular position on abortion as being central to the core of their identity, and there are other people with that same position who only really put forward their position when pressed about it.”

“So there are some people who are firmly neutral, and others who are wishy-washy about their neutrality,” I said.

“Point taken,” said Arthur with a frown. “I mean, we can fix that by making each point into a vector instead, and then averaging the vectors, but the alignment system is just notional anyway.”

“No, it’s not, it’s mechanical,” said Reimer. “If you can detect it with a spell, then it’s not just a norm.”

“Sure, fine,” said Arthur. He looked down at his graph. “The real problem is that for any given issue, we would need to figure out what everyone thought about it, and then how strongly they felt, and then as the voice of the group, because I have the best rolls, I would deliver whatever that position was to the NPCs.”

“Which wouldn’t work, because half the time conversation is about getting information from someone rather than delivering it to them,” I replied. “So with every line I deliver, you have to go back to the group and see their individual reaction to it, then synthesize a new position based on the change.”

“So we’re agreed on me talking?” asked Tiff. “Not a free-for-all, but if Arthur doesn’t do a good job of representing the truth and beauty of medieval ancap?” The historical context was really more like Early Modern Period, borrowing from the Scientific Revolution, but I refrained from making that correction.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Craig. “Joon can force the issue, and in-character there’s usually a reason to not let the snake oil salesman be the only one you talk with.”

“None taken,” said Arthur.

“Actually,” said Reimer, “The real reason it doesn’t matter is that we’re never actually going to get to that part of the night where we actually talk to anyone.”

Chapter 65: "A Kindred Soul"

I loved books. Of all the forms of mass media, books were the most personal and the most intimate, not just because they took longer to consume than anything except maybe a season of television, but because reading was something that you did in private. And maybe more than that, reading had an element of interpretation that was rare in film and television, because prose was meant to be evocative rather than strictly literal, abstract by the very nature of the medium.

So the first time I went to Tiff’s house, months before we started dating, I paid special attention to her bookshelf. We were working on our half of a group project together, just Tiff and I, alone in her bedroom together but with the door open, and I had gotten bored enough that my attention was drifting.

Most of what was on her shelf was nonfiction, and most of that nonfiction was in the form of popular, layman’s level explanations of a field or subject: books like The World is Flat, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Guns, Germs, and Steel. Mixed in with those were older classics, Wealth of Nations, The Origin of Species, Plato’s Republic, and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. A section of books caught my eye, The Second Sex, Sexual Politics, and The Delta of Venus, all feminist works, judging by their titles, all well-read, judging by their spines. Her fiction section was less interesting, given that it held few surprises, and almost no fantasy or science fiction beyond the staple series of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Harry Potter, none of which really counted, since I considered them part of standard cultural literacy.

But none of that interested me as much as a set of ten slender moleskine notebooks, each one embossed with her initials.

“Let me know if you want to borrow anything,” said Tiff. “It’s not really a lending library, but I’m always happy to talk about books.”

“Those?” I asked, gesturing to the embossed moleskines.

“Ah,” said Tiff, sitting up a bit. “I’ve been keeping a diary since I was twelve. Decidedly not for lending, but you can take a look if you’d like.”

That felt like a trap to me, but I had no idea what kind of trap. I reached over and pulled down one of the notebooks and opened it to a random page. Instead of text, I was greeted with lines and dots in different configurations. I stared at it for a moment, trying to see a pattern, then gave up and looked at Tiff.

“It’s a cipher!” she said with a smile. She bit her lip as though to stop her smile from growing too indecently wide. “I made it when I was eleven, after I found my mom snooping, prior to the start of the diaries proper -- got them from my aunt, best present ever. Totally uncrackable.”

“That’s … not likely to be true,” I said.

“It was a joke,” said Tiff with a frown. “You remember us talking last week about how you don’t roll your own crypto?” We’d had a long discussion on the topic after the party had broken into a mausoleum and blown through five of my six prepared puzzles in the space of an hour. It was a conversation that I was sure would have made someone actually knowledgeable on the subject facepalm. (They’d gotten stuck on the last puzzle for about an hour, to the point where they were getting bored, which made it a bad puzzle.)

“Right, sorry,” I said. I looked down at the book in my lap and flipped through it, looking at more of the dots and lines. It took a bit to see the first pattern, which was that you could sort the dots and lines into glyphs, no more than four lines per glyph, no more than four dots per glyph. Line position seemed to matter, as did dot position, not just whether there were more or fewer of them. “Still, having a custom cipher like this means security through obscurity, and given that it’s on paper in your room, you’re probably safe.” I looked through the pages some more. “There are more glyphs than letters.” Meaning that it wasn’t a simple substitution cipher. There weren’t spaces either, which meant that one of the glyphs indicated a space, which I didn’t think would be too hard to figure out, but it strangely wasn’t visible at a glance.

“Well, definitely not letting you borrow it,” said Tiff. “I know you’d be overcome by the urge to crack it.”

“Is there anything in here that I’d be interested in?” I asked, leafing through it again. Here and there I saw pictures, small little doodles that were set within hand-drawn boxes separate from the ciphertext itself.

“Eh, it’s personal stuff,” said Tiff with a shrug. “Most people don’t care about personal stuff, except because it’s personal. Like, most of your life you don’t pay that much attention to anyone else unless they’re a close friend, and even then, probably not.”

“I think I pay attention to you,” I said. “I mean, the appropriate amount of attention.”

“Are we close friends?” asked Tiff with a raised eyebrow. “Not that I’m saying you’re not --”

“I mean, you’re part of the group,” I said. “We spend something like, I don’t know, ten or fifteen hours a week together outside of school, plus another few hours at lunch, plus more hours in class. It’s part-time job levels of friendship.”

“Yeah,” said Tiff, straightening up somewhat. “I just sometimes feel like I’m the fifth wheel.”

“Arthur, me, Reimer, Craig, Tom,” I said, counting quickly on my fingers. “You’d be the sixth wheel.” We had other members who only showed up inconsistently or for special occasions who made for seventh, eighth, and ninth wheels too.

She reached over and grabbed a pillow from her bed, which she flung at me. “It’s an expression, you dolt.”

“Just joking,” I said, batting her pillow aside. “And we do think of you as one of the guys.”

“Blegh,” said Tiff, briefly sticking out her tongue. “I hate that.”

“‘Guys’?” I asked.

“No, ‘guys’ is normally fine,” she said. “Except in that context, where it’s clearly gendered.”

“Ah,” I said. I set the diary to the side.

“It’s like saying that I can be part of the group, so long as I pretend I’m male, or masculine, it’s an implication of or suggestion towards tomboyism, which is fine, if you’re a tomboy, but I’m not,” said Tiff. I didn’t have much to say to that, except ‘sorry’, which felt too weak, so I kept quiet. “Arthur would have jumped at that bait.”

“Would he?” I asked. “And was it bait?”

“Arthur bait,” said Tiff with a shrug. “See, this is why I think I’m not a part of the group. Just ... makin’ things weird.” She folded her arms across her knees. “That’s the hardest part about finding new friends, you don’t have all those grooves worn into place. You don’t know how to talk to each other, not really, not about things that are outside the bounds of the everyday normal-person back-and-forth.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really know, because it’s always been other people coming into our group, not me trying to -- infiltrate is the wrong word.”

“Like I’m a spy?” asked Tiff, smiling at me.

“Hey, I said it was the wrong word. Integrate?” I asked. “Brings up too many associations with Jim Crow to me.” I tapped the diary. “I sometimes wish that it were possible to data dump. I mean it would be, in a sense, possible for me to get to know you really well by reading through four or five years of diaries, but then you’d also have to do the same for me, and I don’t actually think that we’d get those grooves worn into each other.” That sounded a little too intimate to me, as far as imagery went, with the suggestion of friction, and I regretted it immediately. “And anyway, a diary isn’t really a record of who you are, it’s a record of who you’ve been, it’s the component elements that served to make you, not the actuality of you. It might be helpful for a reconstruction of Tiffany, maybe.”

Tiff was watching me, in a way that made me feel self-conscious. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Tiff. “Have I ever told you that I find you interesting?”

“Literally no one has ever told me that,” I replied. “They used to call me the default character.”

Tiff laughed, covering her mouth. “I am so sorry, but I can completely see that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But that’s not who you actually are,” she continued. “I think that’s what reading the diary would be like, maybe, you would see all this stuff in there that was totally typical of someone my age, the kind of things that are completely innocuous and interchangeable, and then packed there in the middle you’d find these little revealing sparks of me. And that’s why I don’t feel like I’m really one of the guys, because you’ve all known each other long enough that you’ve seen those flashes of truth in each other.”

“It’s like a signal to noise thing, sure,” I said. I looked down at the enciphered diary again, one of many up on the shelves. “And you’re sure that you don’t want me cracking this?”

“One hundred percent,” said Tiff. “Top secret, eyes only. If you want to get to know me, it’s got to be the hard way.”

There was a little game I played, later on, where I tried to figure out whether she had been flirting with me, or saying things that were meant to have double meanings. She was self-confessedly bad at giving signals, and in that heady state of infatuation (and later, love) I kept seeing strands of it in every interaction we’d ever had. It was hard to know whether I was just making things up, when I played back those memories over and over.

She was right about the diaries. I didn’t think that they contained anything all that important, because my own diaries would probably have been equally uninteresting, and she was ready and willing to tell me anything that I wanted to know about her. But because there was a puzzle sitting there waiting to be solved, and because it was information that I wasn’t allowed free access to, my eyes were drawn to her neatly ordered diaries every time I came over.

Chapter 66: "The Long Night"

“Okay,” said Reimer. “But be explicit. Give it in mechanical terms.”

“You don’t get to just know the mechanics,” I said. “That strips back everything interesting.”

“It shouldn’t,” said Arthur, frowning at me. “Yes, it reduces the mystery, but most of what’s interesting about this place isn’t in how the rules work, it’s in seeing what impacts those rules have on the world.”

“Besides that,” said Craig, “Presumably everyone in Parsmont is aware of the rules, they should know those rules backward and forward, so we can just talk to a fishmonger or something.”

“Fishmonger?” I asked. “That’s the most random -- there aren’t any fishmongers, it’s a city on a hill, at best there are some river fish, but it’s a place of meats and grains.”

“So fish are only for the hoi polloi?” asked Tom.

“No ‘the’,” said Arthur. “‘Hoi’ already means ‘the’. And ‘hoi polloi’ means masses, which -- Joon, are the fish a high class or low class food? I can see the argument either way, the fish are river fish and a food of convenience for those who live near the rivers, but they’re also in limited supply, which suggests that they’d be valuable, assuming that they weren’t all fished out. Happened a lot historically, commoner’s food making the jump to fine dining.”

“I just want rules, dammit,” said Reimer.

“I mean I’m pretty sure that we just agreed we’re going to find a fishmonger,” said Tom, with a small grin.

“No, veto,” said Reimer. “I know I don’t have veto power, but veto.”

“Do we find a fishmonger?” asked Arthur, looking to me with a smile.

“I ... “ I looked down at my notes for Parsmont, then over to the table of randomly generated names I used for times like this. “You eventually find Homeleron, a Kandrian merchant who sells some of the river fish brought in to him from the Pellmance. Kandria is on the sea, and Homeleron is the guy that all the Kandrians go to when they get a little bit homesick and want to make one of their traditional dishes, albeit with some substitutions. You think that he’s probably a well-connected man.” That was a load of frantic bullshittery, and I was hoping that no one would call me on the fact that I had just said that there weren’t any fishmongers in Parsmont.

“Greetings, Homeleron,” said Arthur, “You seem like a man who knows a thing or two.”

“That I might be,” I said with a laugh. I didn’t tend to change my voice much in-game, if only because I never knew how long a character was going to stick around, and some of the more extreme voices I’d tried in front of a mirror were really hard to hold. I had a picture of Homeleron in my head almost immediately, and let some of that creep into my speech; he was uneducated but knew a lot, a man with many connections and maybe more self-importance than was warranted. A poor man, I decided, but only poor in the sense that he had his small stall and few possessions, not the kind of poor where he was scrambling to make rent or hurting from taxes.

“I’d like a list of mechanics,” said Reimer. “I have pen and paper, and want you to write down everything you know about the workings of the orb at the center of Parsmont and the abilities that it gives to the people within it. I’ll pay you … ten gold.”

“His eyes light up at that,” I replied, inwardly groaning. “Well, I’m not sure I know my letters so well, but I can tell you whatever you’d want, he says.”

“Everyone has a vote, right?” asked Arthur. “What does it take for us to vote?”

“Well you can feel it, can’t you?” I asked, as Homeleron, playing the part of someone who was pretending to be shocked by their ignorance. “At the back of your head, the votes sitting there?”

“I touch the back of my head, cautiously,” said Arthur.

I gave Homeleron a belly-laugh. “No, in your head, like you’re looking backward without using your eyes.”

“Okay, I do that,” said Reimer. “Seems like the sort of thing that you would immediately realize was there if you had 18 Wis.”

“You see two indents in your mind’s eye, one with a hundred gleaming jewels, the other empty, but with room for far more,” I said.

“I move the jewels from one indent to the other,” said Craig.

“You die, instantly,” said Reimer.

“No, you don’t die,” I said with a sigh. “Nothing happens, you can’t do it.”

“Okay, then I try to transfer my jewels -- a single one of my jewels, actually -- to a theoretical receiving indent in Berberous’ head,” said Arthur.

“Berberous,” I said, turning to Craig, “You see a single jewel appear in the empty indent.”

“Do I feel any different?” aske Craig.

“No, not especially,” I replied. I turned to Arthur. “You have a slight feeling of connection to that jewel still, like you could pull it back if you wanted to.”

“I do so,” replied Arthur with a slight frown.

“So whoever gets the most jewels gets to be a badass, but people can take their jewels back at any time?” asked Reimer. “Meaning that all power in Parsmont is transitory.”

“Are you asking me, or Homelaran?” I asked.

“Homeleron?” asked Arthur.

“Right, Homeleron,” I said. I had already forgotten his biographical details, and tried to recreate them from scratch. He was a fishmonger, world-weary, selling goods that had been carted in from too far away, losing their freshness in the process. It wasn’t what I’d decided before, but none of that had been exposed to the players anyway.

“Sure, I’ll ask him what the power structure looks like,” said Reimer.

“Oh, people come and people go,” I said as Homeleron. “But less than you’d think, because the people up top fight each other, and not too many want to put themselves in that fight, so it’s mostly about putting your vote behind the guy you think has the best chance of fighting against the guy you hate.”

“And they literally fight each other?” asked Reimer. “With as-yet-unspecified powers?”

“Once in a blue moon,” I replied.

“Two point seven years,” answered Reimer.

“That’s …” I started, then stopped. “More often, they pursue their own goals, and try to keep people happy enough that they retain the vote.”

“That’s Homeleron saying that?” asked Arthur.

“No, it’s me,” I said. “Look, is anyone going to buy any fish?”

“All I want is for you to stop teasing and just be explicit,” said Reimer. “That’s not so much to ask. We’ve got the fluff out of the way, right?”

“And now you want some crunch,” I said with a sigh. The night didn’t seem like it was going my way, for reasons that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Sometimes a session just got away from me. “Okay, a thousand jewels gives you a +1 bonus to skills, stackable up to +10, two thousand gives you a bonus of +1 to AC, stackable up to +10,” and this continued on for a bit, as I read through the things on my list. At the highest levels, with a million people pledging their full support, an NPC didn’t quite become epic level, but that was the only restraint I’d shown.

“Well how are we going to beat those guys then?” asked Craig. “Poison?”

“The answer is always poison,” said Arthur with a nod.

“Except not, because D&D poison is awful,” said Reimer. “And I doubt that Joon is going to let us get away with homebrew again.”

“You all understand that your goal is not to come into every town and murder the people in charge, right?” I asked. “Please, someone tell me that you know that. You have a quest.”

“Yeah, we’re here to get a MacGuffin,” said Craig. He paused slightly. “So what I’m thinking is, we bus people in and get their votes.”

And if we’d been teetering on the brink before, that was when the session went off the deep end.

Chapter 69: "In Mutual Congress"

“Okay, so your plan is to bus people in?” I asked Craig. “How do you plan on doing that?”

“We pay them a silver for their time, get big old wagons, and bring them in to vote for us,” said Craig. “We’re the equivalent of millionaires with fuck-you money, almost all of which is liquid.”

“No, it’s illiquid, tied up in weapons, armor, and other magical equipment,” replied Reimer. “If you’re playing right, you shouldn’t have more than a few percent of your money as gold.”

“Fine, fine,” said Craig. “We’re billionaires with millions in money that we’re not doing anything else with, because we don’t have mortgages or children or pay taxes.”

“Don’t give Joon ideas,” laughed Reimer.

“The minute someone assesses a tax on my looting is the minute I start a one-man civil war,” said Craig. “I will burn this fucking place to the ground.”

“Noted, in case I need you guys to start a civil war,” I replied. “You’d be non-state actors, making warfare a little hard, but … okay. With this bussing plan, has it occurred to you that other people might already have tried it?”

“NPCs aren’t that smart,” said Craig.

“It’s literally the first thing that anyone would try,” I replied.

“Not me,” said Tom. “Wait, I ask the fish guy about that, whether I can get paid a silver for my vote.”

“You shouldn’t be able to,” said Arthur. “Votes are transitory. I mean I guess if you can see the voting jewels, or vewels, if you will, in your head, then maybe people could confirm that vewels had been transferred over, before the people -- wait, do the jewels stay voted when the person who voted leaves the area?”

“They do,” I said. “Once transferred, the only thing that can remove them is the person who did the transfer taking them back with a thought.”

“Even death?” asked Tom.

“Please, please don’t get any ideas when I say yes, you keep them even if the person who gave them dies,” I replied.

“In an unrelated note, we should kill people after they vote for us,” said Reimer.

“How’s that going to work, if they can revoke the vote as the sword is coming toward their throat?” asked Arthur.

“Threaten their families, obviously,” said Reimer with a snort.

“What’s your alignment?” I asked with a frown. I knew damned well what his alignment was.

“I’m trying to think like a criminal would,” said Reimer, using his most pious voice. “Obviously those dastardly scum would try any dirty trick in the book, and part of my job is to anticipate and then stop them.”

“I don’t think the bussing thing is going to work,” said Arthur. “The transitory nature of the jewels makes it too unwieldy and kind of unworkable on the larger scale, because you’d need to verify every transaction personally, and then also have to have some way to not have people take their vote back if they’re ever in Parsmont again.”

“Also, it’s not what you’re doing here,” I replied. “You’re here to retrieve the MacGuffin.”

“Which we’re under no time pressure to do,” said Arthur.

“So Homeland --”

“Homeleron,” I interjected.

“So Homeleron,” said Tom. “Who are the top vote getters in Parsmont? Is it like a Mount Olympos type of deal, with a bunch of people everyone loves, or is it more like a, what do you call it,” he made a shape with his hands.

“Bell curve?” asked Arthur.

Tom snapped his fingers and pointed at Arthur. “Yes, exactly.”

“It wouldn’t be normal distribution,” said Arthur. “I mean, it could be, with the center being something like a hundred jewels or whatever we start with, but the lumps of distribution probably look different.” He turned to me. “Power law?”

“Homeleron doesn’t know what that is,” I replied. “But he will tell you that in Parsmont, there are those vested with the power of their peers, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, but almost all of the power is in the hands of only two, Abswifth and Bendon, not so much people as appointments that people ascend to, two powers that keep each other in check.”

“Cool,” said Reimer. “Let’s kill them.” He smiled at me. “Is what I would say if I were a villain.”

Chapter 70: "Moral Agency"

“We’re not killing a baby,” said Tiff.

“You know, I’m actually surprised that it would take Joon so long to spring the ‘evil baby’ thing on you,” said Reimer. “He’s grown soft in his old age.”

“It’s an evil baby,” said Arthur, “You have to kill evil babies. You’d kill baby Hitler, right?”

“No?” said Tiff, more as a question. “Assuming that I have access to baby Hitler, I can just kidnap him and raise him not to be evil. Most of him being an authoritarian fascist probably traces back to his experiences in the trenches of--”

“Okay, pretend that your options are either killing baby Hitler or leaving everything how it is,” said Arthur.

“But it’s complicated,” Tiff complained. “I personally think that World War II happens anyway, just not in the same way, and if it happens after the invention of nuclear weapons, then,” Arthur opened his mouth to interject, “Yes, I know, I’m saying that it’s possible that we live in the better timeline, and you want to know whether I expect it to be better on average, and what I’m saying is that I don’t know what the impacts would be. I don’t really subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of history, it’s all structural forces and background effects, so … no, I don’t kill baby Hitler. And I don’t think that we should kill this demon baby.”

“Classic mistake,” said Reimer, shaking his head.

“It’s the lawful good way,” said Arthur with a nod.

“It’s not actually a demon,” I muttered. It was a penadran, a custom creature that they’d spent the evening slaughtering their way through, more like a spider-dragon than it was a demon.

“I don’t think that’s lawful good,” said Tiff. “I’m not saying ‘don’t kill baby Hitler because there are laws against that kind of thing’, I’m saying don’t do it because it’s not the right thing to do.”

“So, good or chaotic good,” said Tom.

“The alignment system is braindead anyway,” said Reimer. “That’s why they got rid of it in 5E.”

“They didn’t get rid of it,” I replied.

“It’s gone in every way that matters,” said Reimer with a wave of his hand. “In 5E it’s just flavor, but here,” he said, jabbing his 3.5 edition character sheet, “It’s an actual, concrete thing. There are spells that detect it or protect from it. We could literally do the baby Hitler test, if we had a D&D time machine, and the universe would get us a definitive answer on whether or not that was an evil act.”

“Isn’t that a god thing?” asked Tom.

“No,” replied Arthur. “Gods only come into it where paladins are involved, and a few other corner cases. Reimer is right, at least within the context of the game.”

“So there’s an objective right answer to whether killing this baby demon is good, neutral, or evil?” Tiff asked, turning toward me.

“Technically, yes,” I said.

Tiff frowned. “Well that’s dumb.”

Chapter 76: "Date Night"

Movie marathons were something of a tradition for Arthur and me, going way back to before we’d even started playing tabletop games. Arthur had a deep and abiding love for series and sequels, but especially trilogies, and he often said that it was part of our cultural duty to see as many of the classics firsthand as possible, instead of just knowing about them through cultural osmosis, which gave you parodies of summaries of half-remembrances.

“I don’t know,” I said to Arthur during a lull in our Lord of the Rings extended edition marathon. “There are some ideas that seem like interesting premises, but actually aren’t.”

“Explain that one to me,” he said. “That’s like saying that someone looks beautiful, but actually isn’t, it’s a logical contradiction. I mean, maybe you can say that it’s an illusion or something.”

“Yes, right, that’s it exactly,” I said. “It’s an illusion. It’s looking at a pretty girl and then realizing on closer inspection that she’s a mirage.”

“Or has a lot of makeup on,” said Arthur.

“That’s,” I said, but my objection died on my lips as I realized that we’d probably end up talking about the socio-cultural role of makeup instead of the more interesting thing that I wanted to talk about. “Yeah, I guess. So you have ideas or premises that look interesting, but they actually aren’t once you start in on execution.”

“You’re just talking about a deep slash shallow distinction?” asked Arthur.

“Maybe?” I asked. “Well, maybe not, because there are different kinds of depth, and I’m not sure that we’re talking about the same thing here.”

“Okay,” said Arthur. “Taboo ‘deep’, taboo ‘shallow’.” That was, at the time, his new thing, declaring certain words taboo so that you had to more fully explain the concept you were pointing at. He’d told me once that all debates were ultimately debates about definition, but to me that sounded like one of those things that people say to be pithy rather than correct. “Actually, also taboo ‘interesting’.”

“Alright, but I need to think for a bit,” I said.

“That’s fine, we’re almost to Isengard,” replied Arthur.

So I sat there, half watching a movie that I’d seen three times before, and half thinking about how I wanted to frame things. My favorite part of watching movies with Arthur was that there was more time for silence and thought; I always felt like I was half a step behind him, if it was just the two of us talking.

“Okay,” I said, when the action was over. “I think it might be about minimal descriptive length.”

“MDL, sure,” said Arthur.

“For me, a good, compelling idea can be described in very few words, but the effects and results of that short description would have a very, very long MDL,” I said. “Or at least, that’s the starting point for describing what I guess I mean when I say that something can only seem interesting on the surface.”

“There’s a problem there,” said Arthur. “Which is that MDL is a wobbly term.”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew that was going to be a problem.

“I mean, you could rephrase it as the point of diminishing descriptive utility,” said Arthur. “I think that works a little better, like you can say that Merry is a male hobbit and that gets you a lot of conceptual power per word of description, but eventually you hit this point where you’re not talking about his hair, you’re talking about the individual placement of hair follicles. But then you have to take culture and cultural dictionaries into account, like ‘hobbit’, for example, where you’re packing a lot of description into a little term -- that pun, Juniper, was just for you -- and that’s just because someone has already done the hard definitional work for you.”

“Okay, sure,” I said. “So the problem I’m trying to get at is that there are some short, interesting elevator pitch type ideas that have a lot of consequences to them, but those consequences have a shorter descriptive length than you would think just looking at them. They might be evocative, but there’s no meat on the bones when you get down to it.”

“And you think that the Boundless Library is one of those ideas?” asked Arthur.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, the core idea of a library filled with books that haven’t been written yet is a good one, but I sort of slipped sideways into this subplot about librarians, and if it’s just going to be about political infighting, what’s the point in including the library?”

“So it wasn’t a bad idea, it was bad execution,” said Arthur.

“Ouch,” I said. I’d always thought that ideas were basically worthless, when compared to execution. I wondered whether Arthur had remembered that; I’d always been the one to carelessly slight people, it wouldn’t have been like him to just outright hurt me like that, even if it was true.

“You told me that every session was a failure you could learn from,” he replied with a shrug, eyes still on the movie in front of us. “And to be clear, I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t have all that much to say. Like if you wanted it to be about fate, then make it about fate, or if you want it to be about, I don’t know, the difficulty in getting people that are nominally aligned with each other to actually work together, then it really needs to be about that. It wasn’t even that the librarians fighting with each other was bad, it was that they weren’t fighting about anything. There was this whole surface level thing about library classification schemes, but it wasn’t interesting, and that was just a proxy war that they didn’t care about, because they were factions competing to see who could get their guy to be head librarian. But the factions were just factions, people who hated each other for personal reasons, and we didn’t care about them either.”

(Arthur was the best. We sometimes played without him, and it was always a struggle for people to remember what had happened the time before, who their characters were, and what they were supposed to be doing. Arthur made notes, he kept to his characters, and more than that, he paid attention. He had an ability to absorb and digest plots and then spit them back out in a more refined form. Our art teacher had talked about how sculptors saw the piece within the marble, and to me it always felt like every game saw us both looking at the same piece of marble and him being able to see the shapes better.

That conversation, offhand on his part, showed a better understanding of that plot than I’d ever had, and while it felt almost venomous at the time to be told that I had spent dozens of hours of my time creating something boring, later on I could understand where he was coming from. It was maybe the closest that we ever came to having a fight, and the only reason that we didn’t was because Arthur was the best.)

“So what do you suggest?” I asked, my voice tight.

“Obviously we can’t play it again, obviously you can’t run it again, so …” he shrugged, still watching the TV. “Honestly, I would have made it more about the library, like there’s one faction that thinks the library should be sorted on the basis of people, and a different faction that thinks it should be about objective, people-less truth. Or, they’re all books that have yet to be written, so there are activist librarians trying to correct history, which changes the library, or conservative librarians who want as little change as possible because they’re worried that knock-on effects of change are going to make the future worse, and then maybe a few people in that camp who just don’t see it as their place. Those are things that I think we’d find interesting, because Reimer would probably call one of them dumb, and Tom would maybe try for reconciliation, and Tiff and I would get into some big fight about objective truth or whether conservatism makes sense as a political philosophy, or something like that.”

“And that’s your idea of fun?” I asked, still feeling a little wounded. “Everyone at the table getting in a fight?”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. He finally tore his eyes from the screen. “I kind of think that it’s what we’ve been missing lately. We all know each other, and our characters, and so the infighting and cross-purposes have more weight than anything else would. I don’t know, call me a drama queen, but it’s what I’ve been craving.”

Chapter 78: "The Sacrifice"

Tiff wore a black dress, one that came down to her calves, and black shoes with a slight heel. She’d come into my room without knocking, and sat down on the bed beside me, without saying a word. Her lip was trembling; from her eyes, she’d been crying, and though her cheeks were dry, I doubted that they would stay that way.

“Why didn’t you come?” she asked. Her voice was shaky.

“I,” I began, then stopped, because I didn’t want to cry. I was wearing black socks, black pants, a black tie, and a white buttoned-down shirt. It was an outfit that I had picked out with Arthur, when I’d been a witness for mock trial. He had thought it would be fun, a thing we could do together, and I didn’t really take to it.

“People asked, and we didn’t know,” said Tiff. She reached over and rested her hand on top of mine.

“‘Never count a human as dead until you see his body,’” I said. “He used to quote that. Dune, I think.” I tried to keep my tone clinical, to take refuge in dissociation. It wasn’t really working.

“Joon,” said Tiff. “I needed you.”

“I know,” I said. “I just … I couldn’t. I got dressed and I was sweating, I felt like I was going to puke. All of those people. And they didn’t know him like I did, to them he was just someone they saw in the halls.”

“He was in a lot of clubs,” said Tiff. “Activities.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if she was rebutting my point or not.

“Yeah,” I replied. It should have been me. He was a keystone. If it had been me, only the D&D group would have even noticed. No one understood him like I did, but he at least left his mark.

“Are you going to be okay?” asked Tiff.

“No,” I replied. I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that question.

“Please don’t say that,” said Tiff. She leaned over and wrapped me in a hug. She was crying, with a hitch in her breathing, but they were the tears of a person who’d been crying a lot.

“He’s not coming back,” I said. “There’s never going to be anyone like him again.” I wasn’t sure that she grasped the enormity of it. How could she?

“I can’t lose you too,” she said. She was shaking her head. Her hand was gripping mine. “Not you too.”

Suicide. It slowly dawned on me what she was talking about. Not actually, ‘are you okay’, but ‘are you going to hurt yourself’. I might have flashed back to old conversations, if I weren’t so numb, times I’d told her about feeling lost and hopeless even when things were going well, standing on the edge of the dock at my uncle’s cabin and contemplating how nice it would be to slip beneath the water and never be seen again. I wished that I had kept my mouth shut, during our nights together, that I hadn’t revealed so much of myself.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. It came out wrong, the most obvious lie in the world.

Tiff hugged me. I hugged her back, but it was awkward because of the way we were sitting. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that she would go to me for comfort, or try to comfort me, only to realize that there was a gulf between us.

Eventually she did lose me too. She had to, for her own sake.

Chapter 83: "The Familiar and the Foreign"

“The necromancer reels back from your attack and drops his evil tome, then begs for his life!” I yelled. I’d been young, ten years old, early days as far as the D&D group went, so imagine me as played by a child actor who doesn’t quite look the same as the Juniper you know and love.

“I wanna hear it,” said Greg with a grin. It had been his axe that had dealt the mortal wound.

“‘Please!’” I cried. I leaned across the table, clasping my hands together. “‘Please, oh powerful warrior, spare my life, I’ll reform, repent, do anything that you want!’”

His grin turned into a smile. “I pick my axe up over my head and throw it right into his fa--”

“Wait,” said Ricky. “Anything?”

“‘Anything!’” I said.

Ricky reached out his hand to me. “Join us.”

“He’s a necromancer,” said Arthur, with an aggrieved sigh.

“Correction,” grinned Greg. “He’s our necromancer. We fought through a bunch of skeletons and zombies trying to get here, those could be our skeletons and zombies. He could do necromancy for us.”

“Why would we need anyone to do necromancy?” asked Arthur.

“Are you saying all this in front of him?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Ricky. “Come on, do the thing.”

“I’m not going to beg for however long this takes,” I replied. “He’ll just be looking between you while you talk, I guess.”

“I keep my axe leveled at him,” said Greg. “‘No funny business.’”

“I’ll pick up his book and leaf through it,” said Ricky.

“I don’t get why we’d have a necromancer,” said Arthur. He had his arms folded across his chest. “We were sent to kill him.”

“Because it’s fun?” asked Greg. “Do you really want to just do the right thing all the time? We can do whatever we want. Something new? Like how many times have you ever seen adventurers have a necromancer friend?”

Even at ten, that was what got Arthur’s attention. “Joon, can I make some changes to my character?” he asked.

“What kind of changes?” I asked.

“Just background stuff,” said Arthur. “And my alignment. I can’t be lawful good if this is what we’re going to do.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. I looked between the three of them. We’d lost our fourth, Nate, two weeks prior, and I was really worried that D&D, the highlight of my week, was going to come to an end.

“We’re going to have to tell the duke something,” said Ricky with a frown. “Joon, were we supposed to bring back his head or what?”

“Yeah, his head,” I said, trying to think. “But as you say that, the necromancer, who is still on his knees, says that if you need heads, he has plenty of them, and if he has some time he can make one of the zombie heads look enough like his own.”

“Nice,” said Ricky.

“So what’s he going to need to work for us?” asked Greg.

“He --” I stopped, then started again. “He really just wants to work. The bodies that he’s been working with were mostly ones he dug up from graves, but I guess he’d work a lot better with fresh corpses.”

“I don’t really want to kill innocent people,” said Arthur, stopping in the middle of whatever he was writing.

“‘Innocent?’” I asked, trying to find the character voice again and failing, “‘No, there are bandits, the duke has a price out on their heads just like me, all you would have to do is bring the bodies here and I could work on them.’” I stopped, thinking that was it, then added. “‘And with fresh bodies, there’s so much more that I can do.’”

And somehow, the game came alive again. It took me a long time to try to figure out what had been going wrong, where I’d started to lose people, and eventually -- years later, after I’d already internalized the lesson -- I concluded that it was the element of buy-in and choice, and in following the path of fun. The party started doing things for the necromancer, stealing equipment, killing his rivals, bringing him bodies, and this was somehow better than taking very similar orders from the king. The novelty was part of it, but it was also the fact that I’d been willing to let them take the lead.

Chapter 85: "The Great Train Robbery"

“Okay, while Arthur and Tiff are arguing from the bushes, I’m going to sneak off and kill the guards,” said Craig.

“You can’t do that,” said Tiff with a frown.

“Joon?” asked Craig.

“Tiff, you can’t dictate someone else’s actions,” I said. “By the way that Craig has been playing Miaun, it’s entirely in character, and even if it weren’t, I don’t like being character police.”

Tiff frowned at me. “Well okay, then I roll Perception."

“I’m the one that rolls Perception,” I said. I rolled the dice behind my DM screen, red for Arthur, green for Tiff, and blue for Maddie, in case she wanted to be a part of any of this. Low numbers for Tiff and Arthur, high for Maddie. “And Craig, you’re going to have roll Stealth. I’m assuming from the way you worded it that you did intend to be hidden from the party.”

“With all bonuses, 25,” said Craig after he’d rolled the dice. He was smiling, pleased by the result.

“Okay,” I said, turning to Maddie. “Raven, you’re the only one that sees your brother moving out of his position as he uses the available cover to close in on the guards while the other members of the party engage in a furtive whispered conversation. What do you do?”

Maddie smiled at me. She always liked getting the group’s attention, but never seemed to be willing to take it. I’d often wondered whether she’d be any different without her brother around, but she only showed up when Craig deigned to bring her. That was a question that I’d have to wait years to get the answer to. “Can I cast the ghost sound spell without drawing attention?”

“It’s got a verbal component,” I said. “DC 0 Listen check, plus 1 per 10 feet, and you’re 120 feet away, so DC 12 for them to hear.”

“She’s got Silent Spell,” said Craig.

“Maddie, those guards are people, with lives,” said Tiff.

“You were having an in-character conversation with Titon,” I said. “If it’s a silent spell, you’re not going to be able to hear it, which means that all you would be able to do is see it, and I’ll let you roll Perception against Maddie’s Stealth, but --”

“I’m making an out-of-character argument,” said Tiff. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face, then turned to Maddie. “The margrave’s guards don’t deserve to die, and we should especially not be the ones to kill them.”

“I’d be the one killing them,” said Craig. “She’d just be providing a distraction for me, right Madds?”

“Think of what Raven would do,” said Tiff.

“You know these aren’t actually people, right?” asked Craig.

“They are to Atticus,” said Tiff, folding her arms across her chest. Chronologically, this would have been way before we were dating, and before I’d really even developed feelings for her. I’d always liked her, and always been able to see what Arthur saw in her, but there was a time when she’d been nothing but an opposite-gendered friend.

“A better argument would be that these men signed up to be guards,” said Arthur. He caught a look from Tiff. “I’m not saying it’s a good argument, but they took a paycheck knowing that they would be defending the margrave with their lives.”

“That’s terrible,” said Tiff. “Those men probably have parents who care about them. They’re probably married with kids. And even if they were orphans with nothing and nobody, I wouldn’t want to kill them.”

“You’re not killing them, I’m killing them,” said Craig. “And Arthur’s right, they signed up for the margrave, they must have known he was a dick, reap what you sow.”

“To clarify, he wasn’t actually a dick, he just didn’t believe you about the horn,” I said. Craig rolled his eyes.

“I don’t think it’s your place to say whether he was a dick or not,” said Arthur. “It’s a question of interpretation, not fact.”

“I can’t say how I intended his character to come out?” I asked. “I’m just -- I don’t want to go down the wrong path here because I screwed up the character. He wasn’t supposed to be a dick, he just didn’t believe you, because you didn’t have any proof.” (That had been the whole point of an earlier plot thread that was now, apparently, dropped. The margrave saying he wouldn’t give up the horn without some proof was supposed to spur the party to find proof. This whole ‘steal the horn’ thing had been spun up from whole cloth, and I was happy that the party was getting in fights, because it meant I had time to prepare something new for them, putting down people and scenery just ahead of their questions.)

Arthur shrugged. “If you screwed up the character, we’ll just go with the screw up, it’s fine, that’s how improv works,” he said. He turned back to Craig. “Titon isn’t going to back you up if this goes badly.”

“Atticus isn’t either,” said Tiff. She seemed annoyed, but there wasn’t really anything I could do about that, other than delivering Craig a harsh comeuppance that I had already decided that the circumstances didn’t warrant.

“Okay,” I said. “Leaving all the OOC stuff aside,” stuff that should be interpretation of characters, not stated outright, if we’re being fair, “Maddie, you were about to cast a silent ghost sound, presumably to create a distraction.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do that.”

“Okay, where?” I asked. “What does it sound like?”

“Like,” she said, gesturing with her hands for a minute as she tried to think. “Like knocking? Like someone is knocking on the door from the other side.”

“Good,” I said. “Miaun, you see the guards turn away from you. Titon, Atticus, you hear the knock, but you don’t see Miaun anywhere around you.”

“I stay silent, watching, with a cold feeling in my gut about what’s about to happen,” said Arthur.

Tiff frowned, keeping her arms crossed.

“Atticus?” I asked. “Any reaction?”

“Assuming that I can connect the dots?” she asked. I nodded. “Then … Atticus stays quiet. If we have the time later, I’m going to track down the families of those men and anonymously give them some money, just to make myself feel less guilty.”

“So I’m finally good to attack?” asked Craig.

“Yeah,” I said. “How do you want to do it?”

“What level are they?” he asked.

I sighed. “You have no idea,” I said. “You know that they’re rank and file guards for the margrave, and he’s not likely to have posted his best men around this time of night. They’re a little more alert because of the knocking, but before that they didn’t seem exceptionally well-trained, and both their armor and weapons show wear, not the kind that comes from fighting on a regular basis, but more from being put on and taken off over and over again for years without seeing much action.”

“So, low level,” said Craig with a nod. I shrugged. “I throw a dagger at one, then the other, the ones I’ve got on my hips.” He rolled the dice without waiting for me to say anything. “19 and 23, hit and hit? They should both be sneak attacks.”

“You don’t need to roll damage,” I said. “They both fall, one with a dagger in his throat, the other with a dagger going through his eyes.”

“Fuck,” said Tiff, leaning back.

“Should have stopped me if you cared so much,” said Craig with a shrug.

“I would have, if I did,” said Arthur. “Sometimes a guard is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m not so far along the law/chaos axis that I was willing to tank the mission. Don’t go murder-happy again though, not without talking about it first.”

Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" (intro)

A lot of what I told Zona was background information on Earth, which she was only passingly familiar with by way of published writing on the dream-skewered. If you wanted to paint a picture of Arthur, you had to have the context of the world he’d grown up in, with comparatively endless information available at all times, the fact that we had voting and representatives instead of kings, the spectre of distant threats like terrorism and far-off wars broadcast home, and our absolute safety and security in comparison to Aerb, a world filled with numerous horrors and wild imbalances of power.

(I like explaining things. You’ve probably already figured that out about me.)

Arthur’s brother was nine years older than him, and I was never quite sure which of them was the mistake, if either was. It seemed like a long gap between children, enough that in a lot of ways, Arthur was effectively an only child. Arthur’s father was an engineer, and his mother worked part-time at a store that sold wool, which she did mostly to fill her days, since it wasn’t like they needed the money. He didn’t talk about his family that much, except to say that his brother was fairly distant and his mother was on medication for depression and anxiety. Arthur’s father was an old-school geek, with a small library of fantasy and science fiction, but most of it was ancient and yellowed -- and, honestly, kind of trash, the pulpy kind of stuff that had mostly gone out of fashion.

When I talked about Arthur, I tried to stress that he’d been more or less normal. He was smarter than average, and active in more clubs and activities than most, but he wasn’t exactly popular, probably because he liked to talk at length about things he’d been reading about, or because he liked to argue just for the sake of it. He wasn’t very athletic at all, and a little bit overweight, which maybe didn’t help how the other kids felt about him. After he died, of course, no one had a word to say about any of that, and people he’d complained about were suddenly, unaccountably, presenting themselves as his friends.

He was, maybe, a little bit awkward sometimes, though I never really noticed it when he was with our group, probably because I’d adapted to it. We would have a group project for school together, and he would talk loudly with a big smile on his face about how he’d united Europe in a videogame he was playing, while the people listening to him were completely uninterested. I always envied that a little bit, even if it made me cringe; I cared too much about what other people thought, and tended to say nothing rather than say the wrong thing.

I talked about our tabletop games, and the ways that he liked to play them, which was always about story and character more than it was about rules and results. Some of that required background that Zona didn’t have, but I tried my best to get straight to the point. My ‘what is a tabletop roleplaying game’ speech had gone through a few iterations by this point, and I knew enough about Aerb to be able to draw parallels with their cultural traditions.

I talked about Arthur and Tiff.

Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" (first flashback)

“Okay, so figure there are a hundred fifty students in our class, plus the same a grade up and down,” said Arthur. We were walking home from school, with a stop at the gas station on the way for chips and pop. “But give the grades above and below us a penalty, because we don’t have classes with those girls, which means propinquity isn’t in effect. Figure maybe a hundred fifty legitimately dateable girls in the dating pool, more or less. That’s a rough guess.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

“Half of them are below average,” said Arthur. “But there are lots of different metrics you can use, and they’ll be below average in different ways. Take Heidi, right? Super hot, dumb as a brick. So if half are below average on intelligence, and half are below average in looks, then that’s something like a quarter that are above average in both.”

“Um, no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Looks and intelligence are correlated, for health if no other reason, but socioeconomics too, probably.” That was around the time I’d first discovered the word ‘socioeconomics’, and I used it a lot, probably more than I should have.

“Sure, sure,” said Arthur. “Were you the one I was talking to about the Flynn effect?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” I said.

“Well, whatever,” Arthur continued. “We’re just getting rough numbers. If we accept a quarter of a hundred fifty, that’s thirty-seven, but that’s the pool that are just above average on the first two metrics.”

“I’m not sure how important looks are,” I said.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Would you date Kimber?”

I frowned. “She’s nice,” I said. “Smart. Smarter than I am, probably. I went over to hang out with her brother once and she’d made macaroons, which was pretty awesome.”

“You’re dodging the question,” said Arthur, rolling his eyes again. “I think it’s fine to just say, ‘no, she doesn’t do it for me’, I’m sure lots of girls would say that about me, I’m not going to be salty about it. Call that metric three, maybe, and even if it were just fifty-fifty that cuts the pool down to eighteen. But, in point of fact, there are a lot of metrics to consider, and even if some of them are correlated, the actual pool of worthwhile girls in our school is in the low single digits, at least as far as I can see.”

“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t so sure I agreed with that, but maybe it was just that I’d never had a real girlfriend (not that he had either). There were lots of girls in our grade that I was interested in, maybe because I had a tendency to let my imagination run away with the idea of a relationship.

“I’m saying, basically, that you’ve got a bunch of metrics, right? And that low-single-digit pool is just for the girls who are above average in all categories, none of them are likely to be truly spectacular.” He heaved a sigh. “But Tiff is, in so, so many of them.”

I stayed silent. I knew he liked her, because he’d mentioned it before, but I didn’t really have anything to add on the subject, and talking about romance had always made me feel a little weird and unsure. I was pretty sure that I was supposed to offer some words of support, or say that I was happy that he’d found someone he liked, but everything I could think of saying rang hollow. (This was before I’d developed my own feelings for her, back when she had first joined the group, and the only thing I’d felt around her was awkward and uncertain, not sure how to deal with a girl.)

“You two argue a lot,” I said. I kicked a rock off the sidewalk and into the grass. I wished he had someone else to talk to about this, but he was the person that I talked to about girls, on the very rare occasion that I had anything to report.

“She likes arguing,” said Arthur. “Some people get super defensive when you tell them they’re wrong, Tiff just gets excited about it, like she’s finally found someone who actually wants to engage.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. From where I was sitting, I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes she seemed animated, and yeah, it was like she’d found a kindred spirit, but sometimes she’d shut down and want to blow past whatever the topic of conversation was. I always tried to move things along when I saw that happening. Arthur had a tendency to get into it with people about the most inane stuff sometimes, so it wasn’t like I was doing her any special favors. I was very conscious of wanting to treat her exactly like one of the guys.

“Do you like her?” asked Arthur.

“I don’t really know her yet,” I said.

“Well, if we do start dating, we’ll all be hanging out a lot,” he said. “I don’t want to do what Trev did and disappear off the face of the Earth just because I’ve got a girlfriend.”

But that never did end up happening. Arthur had this theory that she needed time to warm to him before he asked her out, and there were always excuses for why doing it later would be better than doing it now. Eventually he seemed to just sort of accept that he wasn’t going to, though his crush never faded. I think maybe in his fantasy world, she would have been the one to make the first move, but Tiff wasn’t really like that.

Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" (second flashback)

“It sucks, because she’s perfect for me,” said Arthur with a sigh. He was laying on my bed while I took my turn playing Mario. “Like, she’s not perfect, but she’s perfect for me. Even all of the stuff we disagree on, she’s got sensible reasons for, and it’s like,” I saw him gesture vaguely from my peripheral vision, “Like the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts.” He paused. “There’s some kind of pun there. ‘Her hole is more than the sum of her parts’?”

We were sixteen, and Tiff had been with the group for quite some time, long enough to firmly establish her as a member. She was a friend, even outside the gaming table, and it was becoming increasingly common for us to spend time together away from the others. Arthur had a somewhat hectic schedule; an evening playing videogames together was a rarity, and to some extent, Tiff filled in my need for a best friend. Not replacing him, but definitely picking up some of the slack. I was hopelessly crushing on her.

“Too crude,” I said. I was blushing slightly, and grateful that Arthur wasn’t in a position to see. I tried to concentrate on the game.

“Yeah, too crude,” said Arthur. “Works best as an insult. You know, I wonder how brilliant people like Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill really were. Like, did they prepare a bunch of stuff ahead of time, were they just really quick-witted, or is it that they were really good at thinking of comebacks in the shower? Because you have to imagine that a lot of their best anecdotes grew in the telling.” He let out a sigh as I wall-jumped up to grab a coin. “Anyway, I almost asked her out the other day.”

“Did you?” I asked, suddenly focused entirely on what he was saying.

“Yeah, I asked her whether she was planning on dating anyone in high school,” he said. “Because for her, it’s sort of like, why is she single if she doesn’t want to be? And so I asked, but she replied that she didn’t really believe in dating, and that she didn’t see herself as the dating type. It was absolutely crushing. My follow-up was going to be, ‘well how about dating me?’, but I didn’t think that she was going to just reject the institution of dating altogether. Our conversation sort of petered off after that.”

“Yeah,” I said. I felt relief mingled with distress. I cleared my throat. “I mean, she really doesn’t seem like the type to enjoy dating.”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “It’s a patriarchal institution.” He gave a hollow little laugh.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s that, I think she just doesn’t like labels. Things are complex, as a general rule, people, institutions, interlocking systems, all that kind of thing, and labels are this ham-fisted way of making sense of it all.” I paused slightly. “I think that’s more or less verbatim what she’s said.”

“So it’s not that she can’t see herself dating, it’s that she can’t see herself ‘dating’?” asked Arthur. I could see the air quotes out of the corner of my eye.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t.

“Well come on, help me figure out an approach,” said Arthur. “You know her pretty well, what would work on her?”

I didn’t like how he phrased that. “Here, I’m garbage right now, take your turn.” I tossed him the controller and sat in the chair by my desk.

Arthur picked up the controller and began playing, and for a moment I had hope that the conversation was over. It seemed like we had such a limited amount of time together, with all the clubs he was in, and I didn’t want to spend it talking about Tiff. I wanted him to monologue about the monomyth in Disney movies, or three act structure, or hell, even something I found comparatively boring like geopolitics.

“Thoughts?” he asked.

“About what?” I asked.

“Tiff,” he replied. “What she’d go for?”

“I’m not,” I began, then stopped. “That’s not really the sort of thing we talk about, when it’s just her and I. Her and me? Me and her. However that goes.” There was silence for a bit as I chewed on my words. “We talk about the same sort of stuff that you and I talk about, I guess. Stuff she heard on NPR, history -- politics, some, but I’m not really into that, and I think a lot of the election stuff just makes her angry.” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’s ever once talked about what kind of boys she likes.”

“Well, if she does, let me know,” said Arthur. “And maybe ask her, if you can figure out a way to do it?”

I said that I would, and then never did, until eventually Tiff and I were, for a certain sense of the word, ‘dating’.

Chapter 98: "Letter 15" (aside)

There was always a part of me that felt bad about crying, like maybe I wasn’t manly enough to just be stoic about things, or like I was being a drama queen. Neither of my parents cried much, and for my dad, it wasn’t so much that he disliked it as that he was exasperated. I remember, vividly, walking out of my room a week after Arthur had died, wiping the tears from my cheeks, and seeing my dad roll his eyes like he was fed up with me.

Chapter 105: "Notes" (in-universe text)

Juniper’s Notes: A Brief History of Histories (2009-2017)

Group, in rough order of appearance: Arthur, Ricky, Greg, Trev, Reimer, Craig, Maddie, Aaron, Tom, Tiff, Rache, Colin, Ana

Note: Campaigns are listed by first appearance, but many were dropped and then picked up later for a sequel campaign or two, with or without a shared continuity, sometimes with years between them. Campaigns run by others or set in established worlds are not included. Various one-shots weren’t included either.

2009

Pilgrim’s Promise - First actual campaign, where the party made friends with a necromancer and he sent them on missions, despite my best efforts. They kept ignoring the fact that he was playing them like a fiddle. Eventually they destroyed the world by accident, though I gave them a lot of outs before the asteroid hit. Amateurish and derivative in a lot of ways.

Tunnels - This was back when I liked bold, one-word titles. Took place in what was basically the Underdark, turned up to 11, which was saying something, because the Underdark was already nearly as far as you could go with the subterranean concept. It was a world without any apparent bottom or top, no sun, no sky, just endless tunnels, underground seas, and rampant claustrophobia. Ran its course pretty quickly, though I had a lot of plans.

2010

Drowned Valleys - Waterworld campaign, basically, but with a lot more land. Inspiration was more Wind Waker than actual Waterworld, though there were elements of both. Too much underwater combat, which isn’t very practical or fun. Arthur was away for the summer, leaving us with too few people, so this was one of the rare times I ran a DMPC (a drunken pirate cleric).

Eccentric Industries - Steampunk, but with more traditionally cyberpunk elements like megacorps, industrial espionage, etc. Party worked as fixers for the titular company, Eccentric Industries, meaning it was largely a patron-driven campaign. Sort of worked, but the intrigue wasn’t intriguing enough. Journeyman work.

Wickersham’s Extraordinary Adventuring Agency - Named by the players, who were making fun of the overly English names I was using for everything. The setting was nothing special, aside from the very defined gap between Civilized and Wild, with very few people crossing between the two, and lots of adventures to be had in a Wild that was absolutely chock full of dangerous places with loot. Flavor was a lot like Zendikar, but less “points of light” for the civilization.

Counterbalance - One of our only epic level campaigns, which suffered from all the problems at starting people above 20, some ridiculous builds, and all the problems of creating challenges for absurdly powerful characters. Didn’t last long.

Cranberry Guilds - Set in Cranberry Bay, which was fantasy San Francisco; it originally appeared in Pilgrim's Promise, then was refined here and transplanted to a different world (also the literal, in-universe explanation, part of the backstory to justify the 'points of light' setting). Focused a lot on guilds, which weren’t all that well-designed, but provided a lot of differently-styled fodder for the group to rip through. Their Guild was the run-down Adventuring Guild, which they eventually built up into a juggernaut.

2011

Altered Chorus - Recently discovered Eka Stones describe the true nature of reality, sort of a “new magic” setting with most of the plot and setting coming from it being a time of Magical Revolution. The nature of reality was found to be slowly changing, once copies of the Eka Stones were compared with the real thing, which always maintained a description of true reality. Heavily inspired by Fine Structure. Run twice.

Knights of the Square Table - Our longest-running campaign that largely focused around Uther Penndraig becoming (and being) king, with a few twists and turns along the way. This was the most success I ever had with one character’s motivations driving the plot. Picked back up a few times, when I had built up plot and ideas for it. Arthur’s favorite.

2012

Scattered Asches - Intended as an Asch’s conformity experiment thing, but the campaign went off the rails way, way too quickly, and all my plans went out the window. Mostly focused on ninja stuff, rather than the Eight Realms that had most of the worldbuilding work.

Long Stairs - One of the rare campaigns set on Earth. Idea came from the internet, both in original concept, and with a lot of the setting details and conceits being similar to SCP works (especially trying to nail the feel of mission reports). Ran it twice, once as a meditation on American involvement in the Middle East, the second time post-Arthur as more of a “run friends through the thresher because of personal problems”.

Magus Europa - Fantasy 1700s, played three different times, though they were set in the same world without actually sharing a canon. First ended up being pirate-themed, second was mostly about Dracula becoming the King of England, and the third was a meditation on colonialism, set in the New World.

2013

Hellpocalypse - Dante’s Inferno, the tabletop campaign, with a lot of focus on devils and demons. Really wanted to go character-driven on this one, but it ended up being the party stumbling from place to place (each place specially themed in terms of who was being tortured and how). Regrettably edgy, and conceived of when my parents were going through some stuff. Shares a few similarities with Aerb’s hells, but nothing that can’t be chalked up to common inspiration.

Laser Fleet - Pulpy space fantasy so much in the vein of Star Wars that I elected to use the Star Wars d20 system, which we had the books lying around for. I refused to use the actual Star Wars setting because there were a lot of things I didn’t like about the worldbuilding, and also because Craig was really into the expanded universe and I didn’t want to be called out on mistakes. Probably would have been better as actual Star Wars. Not much impact on Aerb, though a few of the races came over.

Sleeping Beauties - Weird West detective campaign that ran for two major arcs, one involving undead prostitutes, the other involving a meat-packing plant. It was steampunk with a bunch of hardboiled tropes to it. Tiff wasn’t a huge fan of how women were portrayed in those stories, but said I executed “well enough” -- one of her first campaigns.

2014

Infinity’s Edge - Eclipse Phase campaign, fairly standard transhumanist body-hopping, copyclans, virtual/actual distinctions, self-modifications, etc. We ran in that universe twice, both times because Reimer really wanted to. I tended to prefer coming at the same stuff from a fantasy angle, and not all at once. Very little overlap with Aerb (but that’s not surprising, because it was only about 50/50 my stuff and default campaign setting, and Aerb didn’t have much from the science fiction end of the speculative spectrum).

Flesh.txt - Extremely pornographic setting, never intended for anyone but me. Untitled, except the file name on my computer. I was fifteen and horny, I think it’s okay to have a depraved fantasy life like that which gets put into a worldbuilding doc. Included here because some of it crept into Aerb, including a few races and the fable of the Whore of Blades, a sexually adventurous warrior woman who wins a war for her country and then sets out to sample every fleshly delight her world has to offer (apocryphal, according to Amaryllis). I did tell Tiff about it, and she was extremely curious about what was in this forty-page document, but things fell apart before I could get around to sharing it with her.

Heaven’s Host - Superhero campaign that was set in Bumblefuck, Kansas, that fell apart when we got to a higher level of play because of disagreements over the point-buy system in Mutants and Masterminds, and whether it was appropriate to play as a person who could sit in their apartment and “work from home”. Velocity mages probably have their roots in Tiff’s speedster character, Hummingbird, which I helped make a lot of rules for.

Critter Islands - World of endless sand with miles-wide magical creatures that carry biomes on their backs. Each race had their own critter, but they were in a loose alliance, and the party was a finger of that Sand-Stretched Alliance, tasked with finding answers to ontological mysteries and exploring the dead critters that littered the sands.

2015

Whispering Isles - Semi-pastoral one-shot set on a bunch of floating islands, which ended up lasting three sessions on accident, and because people were having fun with it. Didn’t really fit well in the mold of D&D, which too many of the group tried to play it as, but I rolled with it.

Small Worlds - This was an experiment in microworlds, which I was really into at the time. The frame was that a capital-G God had a workshop full of bottles with worlds in them, and that the party had the ability to travel between them via skyship. Fairly undirected, and we never got to the “turn” where the God died and the bottles needed to be unified against the threat of the God’s daughter selling the bottles to the highest bidder.

Small Gods - All the players were really, really weak gods of very minor things, like Tiff was the God of the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread, and Arthur was the God of Stories Without Endings. One of my attempts to break out of the mold that classical tabletop put us in, not really that successful, partly because we were using the wrong system for it. (Titled after the Pratchett book that was the major inspiration.)

2016

Patchwork Republic - The Dragon equivalent of Stalin dies, and his kingdom becomes balkanized, with institutions holding on for dear life, industries auctioned to the highest bidder, and crumbling infrastructure. Party ended up attempting to revive the dragon, but we never actually got to that point, and it wasn’t what I’d wanted the campaign to be about. We actually did this one four separate times, with different characters, each sharing continuity with each other.

Glimwarden - Semi-pastoral setting, but with monsters on the outskirts of town. We tried using Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine for it, but it didn’t really suit us. We revisited it a second time using Pathfinder, which went a little better, but I didn’t like the traditional fantasy kitchen-sink stuff that Pathfinder brought to the table.

Tentacles of the Third Reich - Call of Cthulhu, set in the 1940s, with Nazi paranormal superscience and cults at work in the background, sinking their hooks into the apparatus of the Nazi government and military. Heavily inspired by Stross, including the adaptation of concentration camps as actually being part of a massive occult ritual. Arthur wasn’t a fan, partly because he didn’t like alt history, partly because he (maybe rightly) thought that the Holocaust having a utilitarian purpose was in poor taste.

A Manxome Foe - Post-Arthur campaign, set in a decaying, dying world full of horrible things. A frightening number of exclusion zones come from this campaign, meaning that it’s one of the most visible parts of Aerb. Lots of names from Jabberwocky, mostly because that’s also where “vorpal” comes from. Lots of character deaths. Fel Seed.

2017

Twilight Bloom - Never actually run, but most of the work was done. After the Fel Seed incident, my falling out with Craig and Maddie, and hitting rock bottom, I found myself wanting to not be such a horrible shitbag. In classic form, I did this through making another world. It was essentially supposed to be “humanity, fuck yeah”, but I had a lot of trouble not getting cynical, dark, or complicated with it. All the major fantasy races were united in mutual cooperation and understanding, with the major intended campaign goal being the clearing out of old secrets, healing of old wounds, etc. I’d wanted Tiff to play with us again. No trace of it on Aerb.

527 FE

Council of Arches - Intended as a one-shot, ended up having two sessions. Pretty basic, with most of the worldbuilding having been done after the first session, when it looked like it might turn into a full-blown campaign. Borrows heavily from the start of Patchwork Republic, but the intent was to take it in a different direction. Went on hiatus when one of the players died and another was brainwashed, it was this whole thing, ha ha.

Chapter 107: "Name of the Beast"

“You’ve come up to Craig’s cabin for the weekend, prepared for a night of gaming, but not knowing the horrible fate that awaits you,” I said. We were at Arthur’s house on Halloween night, too old for trick-or-treating. We’d each brought a bag of fun-sized candy, which were strewn across the table. The lights were off for this part of the evening, leaving us to play by candlelight.

“Spooky,” said Craig with a roll of his eyes.

“It is spooky,” I said. “There have been little things, little signs, the old man who issued you a word of warning at the gas station, a blood-smeared sign you passed by on the dirt road, which you told yourselves was just roadkill, the sound the radio made when you turned it on that seemed very much like a pained scream before the radio shorted out.” I had prepared that ahead of time. “But you’ve almost managed to forget all the foreboding and have settled in for a night enjoying each other’s company. The fireplace crackles beside you. Suddenly, your idle conversation is interrupted when one of the windows rattles,” I said.

“Must have been the wind?” asked Tiff.

“Might have been,” I replied with a small smile.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” said Arthur, “My father got me this neat book full of Aramaic, and I was going to try to read some of it.” He was putting on a bit of a character voice, a little higher, a little more nasal, classically nerdy.

“Can I be armed?” asked Reimer.

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” I replied.

“Really?” asked Reimer.

“Just get into the genre, Reimer,” said Tiff. “Horror movie rules. A gun is never enough, he’s supernatural. You go to a phone, the line is dead. You reach a policeman sitting in his car, you’re going to discover that his throat has been slit.”

“Wait,” said Arthur. “Forget the book of Aramaic, I’m going to the bathroom.”

“The bathroom?” I asked.

“We’re away from civilization in a run-down cabin,” said Arthur. “It’s a dark and stormy night.”

“Sure,” I said. I hadn’t described the weather, or even given all that much detail to the cabin.

“I want to start this right,” said Arthur. “I stand in front of the mirror, I close my eyes. I say it slowly, getting faster each time. Shia LaBeouf, Shia LaBeouf, Shia LaBeouf! Does anything happen?”

“You open your eyes?” I asked.

“I do,” Arthur smiled.

“He’s standing behind you, fully naked, his beard drenched in blood,” I said.

Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" (aside)

I talked to Masters about my friends from back home, whatever came to mind, both the meaningful and the inconsequential. We used to ride our bikes through a local park after school, until I broke my arm doing a trick off a little ramp that some older kids had made. In the summers, I’d worked on my uncle’s farm, running ahead of the tractor to pick up rocks from out of the field. It was hard, sweaty, work that earned me twenty dollars a day, a fortune when I was younger. Tiff had been on the swim team. Reimer’s parents had divorced when he was ten. Tom’s father had died in a farm accident. Despite my best efforts, I thought it was all pretty transparent as not important to the fate of Aerb, but Masters let me continue on. I made sure to stay away from the topic of tabletop games, Arthur’s role as player, and my own role as DM.

Chapter 114: "The Meeting of Minds"

“Alright,” said Tom. “So you know how we were talking about points and what they mean?”

“Uh,” I said. “Sure?”

“You were distracted,” said Reimer. “The argument --”

“Not an argument,” said Arthur. I made a silent prayer that we wouldn’t rehash the argument about what an argument was.

“The discussion was about what a hit point actually meant in concrete terms,” said Reimer. “Arthur began talking about luck, like, hit points are just a measure of how much luck you have until you get hit, and obviously in D&D, Pathfinder, and other derivatives, that’s not right, because there are other mechanics that interact with hit points, and how the heck does it make any sense for clerics to be restoring luck?”

“That actually makes a lot of sense,” I said. “Clerics can work with divine favor, and they’re restoring your connection to the gods that are ultimately responsible for protecting you in the frenzy of battle.”

“You don’t actually believe that,” said Reimer.

“It’s interesting from a lore perspective,” I said. “But no, I don’t think it’s literally true as the default, given it’s contradicted by loads of flavor and mechanics. I’ve always conceived of hit points as being something like exhaustion, physical damage, hunger, et cetera, all rolled into one.” I turned to Tom. “You were going somewhere with this though? About your new character?”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was thinking, like, normally all the points that you get for things represent how skilled you are, right? It’s experience and stuff. But I was thinking that instead I could play a guy that just bumbles his way through everything? Like, he’s a sorcerer, and he casts spells and things, but most of the time he’s got no idea what he’s doing, and when he levels up it just gets a little bit more ridiculous.”

“That seems like a horrible idea,” said Reimer. “Also, mechanically incompatible with the game.”

“We could homebrew something if mechanics get in the way,” I said with a shrug. “Let me think about it for a bit. Mostly it would come from narration on your end, right? You wouldn’t say that you were casting a fireball, you would say, I don’t know, that you were trying to light your pipe to calm your nerves and accidentally threw a fireball? Something like that?”

“Yes,” said Tom with a beaming smile. “Exactly!”

“Veto,” said Reimer.

“You don’t get to just veto character concepts,” I said.

“You veto my characters all the time,” said Reimer, scowling at me.

“First, I don’t think ‘how many daggers can you possibly throw in a round’ is actually a character, second, I have veto power, you don’t.” I gave him my best shit-eating grin. “And also, for what it’s worth, I feel like I really try to be acommodating, so long as it’s not bullshit like the hulking hurler.”

“It does seem like a bumbling sorcerer will wear thin pretty quickly,” said Arthur, cutting in.

“Well, I think it’s neat,” I said. “And if it wears thin, then that aspect of the character can just get phased out. Tom, you’ll figure out some stuff so I don’t have to narrate? Like, for each of your spells, figure out what you might have been intending to do instead?”

“Absolutely,” said Tom with a smile. “I’m going to be the bumblingest sorcerer anyone has ever seen.”

“So long as you don’t actually do worse on any of your checks,” said Reimer with a frown. “I can only pull so much weight.”

Chapter 120: "Deceptions" (bad dream)

“No,” said Arthur. “I’m saying it’s a numbers game, and only once you know the numbers can you play the game.”

I slid into the booth next to Tiff with my food. Ruttles’ had a burger bar, full of fixin's, and whenever we ate there, I always spent a lot of time making sure that I had created the right sort of burger. Usually I went with my parents, but this was a rare night out. After dinner, we were going to stand in line for a midnight showing of Captain America: Civil War at the local theater. It was a tradition that wasn’t really necessary, but which we did anyway, mostly for the sake of it. It was Arthur, myself, Tiff, and Tom, with others joining us later on.

“What are we talking about?” I asked.

“Women in refrigerators,” said Tiff.

“Explain?” asked Tom as he took his seat. Like myself, Tom took care in adding things to his burger. He was good people. “Are we just talking about how many women can fit in the average refrigerator? Because I would say two, if you took the shelves out.”

“It would be more, if you were talking about the average refrigerator,” I said. “Pretty much every food service place has a walk-in, so the average refrigerator is considerably bigger than a home fridge.”

“Not at all what we were talking about,” said Tiff. “So, back in what I want to say was the 90s, there was an issue of Green Lantern where Green Lantern comes home to find his girlfriend has been killed and then stuffed into the refrigerator for him to find by some villain.”

“Gross,” said Tom. “Can we not, while I’m eating?”

“That’s not really the point,” said Arthur as he dipped one of his fries in a mayo/ketchup mix. “It was just the thing that they named the trope after. The trope is basically this concept that you can evoke emotion in the reader by killing off a loved one, sidekick, mentor, etc. as a cheap trick, which you see show up a lot. But the real thing we’re talking about is Tiff’s contention that it’s mostly women. And that is a numbers game.”

“Is this going to be the Bechdel test all over again?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Tiff with a frown.

“I’m not sure what numbers have to do with it,” said Tom. “Whatever ‘it’ is.”

“So, the original version of this was just a survey of comic books,” said Arthur. “It was feminists who liked comic books pointing out all the times that it happened, which they put into a long list, and anytime you see someone make a long list like that, you need to be suspicious, because the point of a long list is usually just to say, ‘hey, look how long this list is’, as though that means anything.”

“So you’re arguing that it doesn’t?” asked Tiff.

“I call it the Problem of Long Lists,” said Arthur. “It’s a variant on the gish gallop. And anyway, I’m not arguing against the general complaint, just the rhetorical technique. Generally speaking, yes, I would agree that it’s much more likely to happen to women than to men, but I think it’s a numbers game, and the root of the issue is that most protagonists are male.”

“So this is exactly like the Bechdel test,” I said. “Do we really need to rehash it?” I was halfway done with my burger. Arthur had barely started on his, despite getting to the table first. It always took him forever to eat, mostly because he liked talking instead of eating.

“I think I missed that one,” said Tom.

“You were making a new character,” said Tiff.

“Yeah, don’t die so much,” I said with a smile.

“The Bechdel Test is basically a thing for movies where you say, ‘hey, are there two women talking to each other in this movie, but not about a man?’” said Arthur. “And you make a Long List of movies that fail it. But that, too, comes back to the fact that most protagonists are male.”

“Is that better?” asked Tiff.

“Might be,” I said. “Like, if the argument about women in refrigerators is about the portrayal of women being bad, then no, it’s not better, because identifying the root issue doesn’t actually change the portrayal. But if you’re trying to change the result, then you need to know where the result comes from. If it’s some alternate cause, then that should really be the thing that you’re trying to mess with.”

“I think you guys are too smart for me,” said Tom, looking between the three of us.

“You get it though, right?” I asked him. “Like, if you had a bunch of rats in your basement, and kept hiring an exterminator to come in, and eventually someone said, ‘hey, you’d get less rats if you walled up that hole and stopped leaving all that food around’, that would be a lot more helpful than just ‘hey, better kill those rats’.”

“Ah,” said Tom. “Got it. But can we not talk about rats when I’m eating?”

“Does Tom have a weak stomach?” asked Tiff.

“Famously weak,” I said with a sigh.

“Infamously weak,” said Arthur.

“I don’t have a weak stomach, I just lose my appetite,” said Tom, looking down at his burger. “Quick, change the subject.”

Arthur leapt at that. “Stories are fundamentally simple,” he said. “You’ve got your protagonist, your antagonist, your mentor, your sidekicks, and your love interest, just as basic building blocks. All those things need to be used economically for the purposes of storytelling, which means that there’s a clear delineation between those characters, and a lot of the parts get reused. With me so far?”

“Yes,” said Tom, around a bite of his burger.

“This is just the Bechdel thing again,” said Tiff. “Don’t repeat it for my benefit.”

“It’s a good rant,” said Arthur. “This helps refine it.”

“Fine,” said Tiff with a wave of her hand.

“So, in terms of gender,” Arthur continued. “Let’s say that you start with a male protagonist as the first gender you decide on. If we’re talking comic books, there are a lot of reasons for that, some of them economic, some social, but whatever, that’s the default. Right?” I nodded, which was all he needed to keep going. “Well, in terms of market, it again makes the most sense to go heteronormative, which means that the love interest is locked in as female.”

“Seems like you might be arguing that the real problem is actually capitalist control of artistic industries, rather than male protagonists,” I said.

“I haven’t actually agreed that there is a problem,” said Arthur. “And that’s not ground I’m willing to cede at this time.”

I waved a hand. “Fine, fine. Still seems like if you’re going to claim market forces for a lot of this stuff, then the problem is market forces. But continue with your rant.”

“Okay,” said Arthur. “So the protagonist is male, and the love interest is female, but the plot doesn’t revolve around them, because plots are conflict and conflict isn’t about that relationship unless it’s a romance, which, for the sake of argument, this isn’t.”

“‘This’ being a comic book?” asked Tiff.

“Or a movie based on a comic book,” said Arthur. “Apropos, given what we’re going to see tonight, don’t you think? At any rate, if you’re going to have the love interest be a part of the plot, rather than just being there to serve some part of the demographic, then they’re probably going to interact with the antagonist at some point, and there are a lot more interesting things that you can do with a male/female dynamic than you can with a female/female dynamic --”

“Wait, hold on, foul,” said Tiff.

“In the context of what it says about the primary male/male dynamic that defines the central conflict,” Arthur corrected. “The antag/protag relationship is usually one of mirroring, antagonists are built to highlight their differences, at least when they’re actual characters rather than just a CGI gray space alien who wants to take over the world. Point is, you muddle the main thrust of the movie by having both a female love interest and a female antagonist, right? Because then they share gender, and it looks like you’re saying something about gender.”

“Again, foul,” said Tiff. “Gender is not really that important.”

“Well, then I won the argument,” said Arthur with a smile.

“Bah,” said Tiff.

“I mean, right?” asked Arthur. “You can either say that gender is an important thing that audiences will pay attention to, in which case a female antagonist is Saying Something, or you can say that it’s not at all important, in which case who frickin’ cares whether there’s a gender imbalance in fiction?”

“Wait,” said Tom, snapping his fingers. “Oh, I know this one, wait, no one say it, I’ve got it. Ah, it’s … false dichotomy?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Score!” said Tom with a pump of his fist. “Okay, that’s as much as I can contribute tonight.”

“And our debate champ was disparaging Long Lists as being bad rhetoric,” said Tiff, shaking her head. “Tsk tsk.”

“You can’t just claim false dichotomy,” said Arthur, looking a bit annoyed. “You have to actually show why it’s false.”

“The whole argument is about stories and their impacts in aggregate, ” said Tiff. “Set aside your pet theories on causes for a second, if ninety percent of protagonists are male, and ninety percent of love interests are female, and writers kill off love interests half the time, then that’s -- I don’t know, some math, but you’d run into it a lot of the time, and most of what a girl sees growing up is women having horrible things happen to them as a way of motivating the main character or increasing the stakes. Which sucks.”

Arthur shrugged. “Okay?” he asked. “I never said that it didn’t suck.”

“But,” I said, looking at Tiff. “There are sort of different levels of sucking. Like, if someone does something that’s bad in the aggregate for their own self-motivated reasons, that’s less bad than if someone does something that’s bad all on its own. Take that original Green Lantern run, right? Most people wouldn’t argue that it was on its own bad, it’s just that when you universalize what happened to all or most other media.”

“Are you all huge Green Lantern fans?” asked Tom.

“I saw the movie,” I said. “Plus I’ve read a lot of wiki pages. That’s about it. So, sure, maybe it was bad on its own, that was just an example.”

“Can we talk about the market forces thing for a bit?” asked Arthur. “Because I think that bears some digging into, especially if we’re digging into moral statements.”

“Moral statements!” said Fenn as she slipped into the booth next to me. “My favorite!”

“You’re late,” said Tiff. “Arthur, you’re not allowed to repeat the rant.”

“Which one was it?” asked Fenn. “I have them memorized. Unless it was a new one?”

“Bechdel test,” I replied.

“Weak,” said Fenn.

“Well, I’m working on refining it,” said Arthur, folding his hands across his chest. “And I think the idea of morality in response to market forces is more interesting anyway. Like, say that you decide there need to be more female protagonists in comic books, and you take it on yourself to write one, and someone else takes it on themselves to publish it.”

“Hold up,” said Tiff. “You’re begging the question.”

“What does that even mean?” asked Fenn.

“No one actually knows,” said Tom. “It’s the Calvinball of objections. It means whatever you want it to mean at the moment you say it.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “But I don’t know enough about rhetoric to dispute it.”

“Can we back up?” asked Fenn. “I’m lost.”

From the booth behind Arthur and Tom a man turned around, pushing them slightly to the side so he could let his arms rest on the top of the booth. He was in his thirties, with a slightly crooked nose and a full beard. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. The text on his shirt, partially obscured by the booth, said ‘No More Mr. Dice Guy’.

“Uther was just explaining narrative again,” said the man. “You merge down characters until everyone carries as much weight as they can. Male protagonist means female love interest, and that takes up the quota of both serious interpersonal drama and romance in one fell swoop, which means if there’s another character, they’re plucky comic relief or a mentor figure, and there are good reasons for both of those to have the same gender as the main character.”

“Which are?” asked Tiff. She was taking the interruption in stride. Looking around the table, it seemed like I was the only one who felt uneasy.

“People like to see romance,” said the man. “Plucky comic relief can read as flirty, so that’s a no go. And for mentor, the mentor usually represents the main character as they’d like to be, or as they might be, so gender matching is preferred to strengthen the mirror, and obviously you also don’t want it to read as a creepy romantic thing, especially with a bigger age gap. But anyway, that doesn’t get to the heart of it, does it? Because the question isn’t about what gender balance looks like in a story optimized for the lowest common denominator, is it? It’s why the girl is the one to die.”

The man reached back and grabbed something off his table. He pointed it at Fenn, and I only realized that it was a gun when he fired it at her. She slumped against me, dead, with a bullet wound in the center of her forehead.

“Why?” I asked as I stared at him. The others hadn’t moved or reacted to the gunshot, nor to Fenn’s death. I had a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Wasn’t me,” he said, throwing the gun behind his shoulder.

I woke up drenched in sweat. It took me a while until I remembered the affliction the crown had saddled me with, Bad Dreams.

Chapter 121: "Maddie" (intro)

There wasn’t much to say about Maddie.

She was Craig’s shadow, as much as he would let her be, which meant that I’d known her about as long as I’d known him. On the rare occasions that I would go over to their house, she would bring chips or drinks for us while we played videogames or watched TV, and then stay there, sometimes adding to whatever conversation was going on, but usually being quiet. Craig’s attitude toward her seemed to be that he would tolerate her so long as she stayed in the background, and I didn’t ever see a lot of pushback from her on that. Craig only spoke of her in annoyance, but for the most part, he didn’t speak of her at all.

Their home life wasn’t great. Their father had been out of the picture since around the time Maddie was born, and their mother went through a string of boyfriends, but none that lasted long. Craig didn’t talk about his mom much, except to say that she was a ‘raging bitch’. The charitable version is probably that she was a single mother with too few resources to deal with her children. Craig was often put in charge of Maddie, even though he was only three years older than her. That was how Maddie had ended up joining our games.

She was awkward, enough that I noticed it. Some of that was just the fact that she was an interloper, mentally tagged by all of us as Craig’s kid sister rather than being her own person. I could make more excuses for her, like pointing out that she was a girl entering into a male-dominated game, or pointing out that she was younger than us by enough of a margin to matter. Really though, she was just awkward. She didn’t really have any friends her own age, and none of us were really interested in being friends. Tiff was the one exception to that, but the friendship never really clicked, maybe because Tiff was too well-adjusted and Maddie was too … not.

As far as I could gather, Maddie spent most of her free time online, which meant that she was at least partly raised by the internet, and not the best parts of the internet either. To my knowledge, she never fell in with the kind of people who were on the lookout for impressionable pre-pubescent girls, but she did find a lot of those incestuous websites that have built up their own obsessive mythologies, rituals, and words of power. There were times when she was talking when she would drop in some random bit of deep lore from one of those places, or use a turn of phrase that no one around her was at all familiar with. Sometimes we asked her to explain, but mostly we ignored her, in part because her explanations made it clear she expected us to have read some obscure creepypasta or watched five seasons of a show someone had given a glowing recommendation to.

(I’m aware that this is me saying that, trust me, I am, but when I dropped my references, it was either with the necessary background, or with the intent that no one would be able to connect. With Maddie, it was pure social disconnect, like she didn’t realize that other people had internal lives of their own.)

She leaned hard into whatever counterculture she could get her hands on, where “counterculture” is loosely defined so as to include Hot Topic, Star Wars, and anime. Being a teenager is, at least to some extent, a matter of trying things out, but she took that to the extremes of what people wouldn’t physically stop her from doing. The worst was probably the week she went around wearing cat ears and a tail, which made me physically cringe whenever I saw her in the halls.

(Actually, scratch that, the actual worst was when she glued circles of velvet to her face. During the 18th century it was fashionable to wear ‘beauty patches’ to cover up the facial blemishes associated with smallpox scarring. Maddie had learned about this during a session of my Magus Europa campaign, and, I guess, thought that she was going to bring it back in style? I never really asked about it, because it caused a lot of second-hand embarrassment I wasn’t eager to relive.)

She hit puberty at 13, and transformed from an awkward, gangly little girl to a slightly taller and still very awkward girl with big boobs, which mostly changed things for her in a negative way, since it meant that she started getting the wrong kind of attention. The most that was ever said about this by anyone I knew was when Reimer made a comment about no one talking about “the two elephants in the room” when she went to go use the bathroom, which got Craig more pissed off than I’d ever seen him. He made it pretty clear that his sister was off-limits for those kinds of comments, and while Reimer protested that he was just making a joke, it was the last time anyone so much as joked about her.

I should put an asterisk there, because it was about two years later that I ended up having sex with her.

Look, age of consent laws aren’t really governed by reason --

Wait, no, I can do better than that.

Kansas legislators respond to their incentives, and there’s nobody lobbying for saner age of consent laws because of the obvious assumption that they were doing so for nefarious purposes, so obviously the age of consent laws that we got were ridiculously poorly constructed, mostly to appease the religious majority, who have their own motivated reasons for --

Okay, no, let me start again.

When we’re talking about capacity to consent, we’re really talking about mental development, which isn’t a hard line, and which age is only an inaccurate proxy for, and --

Nope. I don’t think there’s any way to justify it without sounding like a creep. She was just barely fifteen and I was a few months from eighteen, and age difference aside, there was a pretty big difference in emotional maturity, so I couldn’t even hide behind her being old for her age. To make it all worse, she was Craig’s little sister.

And legally? In Kansas, having sex with a fifteen-year-old was classed as criminal sodomy, a felony that carried a sentence of up to five years in prison, with no close-in-age exemption to speak of.

All of which might lead one to wonder why the hell I did it.

Chapter 121: "Maddie" (first flashback)

Arthur had set up a wiki for our group, which I was the primary contributor to. We mostly used it for campaign notes, maps, and (more rarely) character sheets and backstories, but it was the online holding area for pretty much everything that we wrote down. I had special permissions as the resident DM, which let me make pages that no one else could see, and there were dozens of half-baked worlds that had skeletal outlines, plot threads, and characters on them, all hidden from anyone.

One of the features Arthur had enabled on the wiki was the forum, which we used to supplement our group chat, especially during the summers, when we didn’t see each other every day in school, or when there was something going on that we wanted to talk about without being realtime.

When Arthur died, Reimer made a memorial post in the forum, which we all added to, but then no one wanted to be the one to displace that memorial with some new bit of unimportant discussion, or necro some old conversation with an update. The forum effectively died. I went to visit it sometimes, mostly to reread old stuff from back when Arthur was still around. It was, in a way, like he was there, a digital ghost that could regurgitate his old opinions on things. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but Arthur lived on in the stuff he’d written. Reading through his posts invariably made me feel depressed and anxious, knowing that he would never post anything ever again. Sometimes I would type up a response to some long-ago comment from him and sit there, crying, because he was gone.

I eventually stopped going to the dead forum, not because I’d gotten smarter about avoiding the things that hurt to look at, but because I’d read everything there was to read, and I’d grown inured to what was contained in that particular crypt.

After the Fel Seed Incident, I visited the forum again, only to find that someone had been there.

There were six posts by Maddie, none of them with any replies, all a few days apart from each other. None of them were anything too special, nor did they seem like they’d taken a lot of time or effort on her part. At a cursory glance, it seemed like she’d found some links she liked and wanted to share them, which was one of the things that the forum was sometimes used for.

I was pissed off about it. The forum was dead, a dusty mausoleum, and trying to bring it back was only going to underline how dead it was while marring its usefulness as a memorial.

The thing was, I was also lonely as all hell. Reimer, Tom, and Craig were the only three people who really talked to me anymore, and of them, Reimer hated me, Tom was so earnest it grated on me, and Craig was more or less checked out, ready to go join the Army once he had his high school diploma. I could recognize, in the way Maddie had posted, a desire for someone to talk to, and as upset as I was that she’d desecrated the final resting place for Arthur’s online presence, I felt so alone I was on the verge of a breakdown.

One of the links she’d posted was to a video of a cat failing to jump properly. I typed “heh”, waffled over whether or not to post it, and then finally clicked the button and closed the tab before I could change my mind and delete it.

When I came back to the forum a few hours later, Maddie had left a few excited paragraphs for me. She treated me like we were old friends who had lost touch, even though I saw her in the halls every once in a while, and she’d been to a handful of our D&D games since Arthur had passed. It was transparently obvious that she wanted someone to talk to, and while Maddie had never been my favorite person (or even someone that I thought that much about), she was validating my existence at a time when I was passing by the train tracks and thinking about how easy it would be to dart in front of a moving train to end it all.

Chapter 121: "Maddie" (second flashback)

Maddie and I began talking a lot, mostly online. I’d had three or four pen pals over the years, and we fell into that same sort of pattern, leaving each other long chunks of text. It gave me something to look forward to. It’s hard to say that I really enjoyed myself, because I wasn’t at a point in my life where I enjoyed anything, but talking to Maddie took me out of my own head a little bit, except when I had some heavy stuff that I wanted to talk about to someone, or more accurately, depression and anxiety that I wanted to weigh someone else down with.

Eventually we switched from that single thread on the forum to talking to each other on messenger, multi-paragraph bursts replaced by single lines fired back and forth. Maddie had a habit of splitting up her sentences into multiple lines, as though she was hitting the Enter key out of nervous habit rather than because she’d finished a thought, which drove me nuts. I tended to write longer messages, sometimes several paragraphs, which would inevitably lead to her seeing that I was typing. She would always tell me that she was patiently waiting for me to finish, which never came off as particularly patient.

There was a lot that I didn’t like about Maddie. Maybe I would come off better if I said that I liked her, or even that I’d fallen in love with her, but the truth was, she was the only person that I really had to talk to, and liking her wasn’t really what it was about. She was there, ready to hear my side of the stories that she must have already heard through the grapevine. She got anxious when she didn’t hear from me, and she was eager to listen. I didn’t really like Maddie that much, but the attention was intoxicating.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked one night, a few weeks into our let’s-call-it-a-friendship.

“It’s okay if you don’t,” she added, when I didn’t immediately reply.

“Obviously I want you to find me pretty,” she said.

“Not you, specifically,” she added.

“People,” she said.

“I just asked you because,” she said. Then the typing indicator lit up, died down, then lit up again.

“I care about what you think,” she finally finished.

“Yeah, I think you’re pretty,” I replied.

“Yay!” she replied.

“Did you have to think a lot?” she asked. “Or?” It had taken me some time to think about my reply, and one of my big problems with instant messaging was that people could tell how long you were thinking.

“It’s probably not a thing I should be saying to you,” I said.

“???” she asked.

“I don’t want things to get weird,” I replied.

“Weird how?” she asked.

“Do you really not know?” I asked.

“Is it weird that I think you’re handsome?” she asked.

“I’m not handsome,” I replied.

“You are,” said Maddie. “I was looking at pictures of you,” she continued. “Today.”

I sat and stared at my keyboard for a bit.

“Was that weird?” she asked.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Maybe I’ll just shut up now?” she asked.

“You were typing and then you stopped typing,” she said.

“Press Enter,” she said.

“Please press Enter?” she asked.

“I thought manners might help,” she continued.

“Waiting patiently, since you’re still typing,” she added. “Don’t mind me.”

Here’s what I’d been typing: “You said that you cut yourself sometimes, just to feel something. I keep thinking that if we started dating it would be that, for me. I have so much trouble caring about anything anymore. It feels good to have you flirt with me, and maybe I encouraged it because … I wanted to feel something that wasn’t pain, loneliness, and despair. I’m standing at the edge of a cliff now, with you. So far, I haven’t actually done anything. If I tell you that I like you, and you say that you like me back, then what happens? It’s mean and unfair to you, but I’d be a senior dating a freshman, and with everything else that’s happened I’d probably have to accept that I’d actually hit rock bottom. If I keep my distance then at least I can say, ‘well, I didn’t date Maddie’. Even if no one would ever give me credit for that, I would be able to hold onto it. And the shitty thing is, I don’t even like you that much.”

I stared at the wall of text. Maddie was typing, again. Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, and what I’d written was gone. She was fifteen, and it was just too fucking mean.

“Maddie,” I finally said, instead of all that. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“So don’t?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Can we meet in person?” she asked. “I don’t like IM. Too many weird pauses.”

“In person they would just be silences,” I said.

“I could see you though,” said Maddie. “I’d like that.”

“I need to shower,” I replied.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Or I can wait until you’ve showered.”

I kept staring at my computer screen. It was late in January and just below freezing. My dad kept the temperature low in our house, and the heating ducts never really seemed to circulate air to my room properly, so it was frigid. If I sat at home by myself, I was probably going to spend a half hour trying to find something to watch on Netflix, then spend an hour or two on reddit trying to find something funny enough that I would exhale slightly harder than normal, then porn and masturbation, and then the nightly few hours of staring at the ceiling thinking about how much I hated my life.

“Sure,” I said. “We can meet in person.”

Chapter 121: "Maddie" (third flashback)

We ended up dating.

It was the same cloak-and-dagger shit that I’d done with Tiff, but a bit more serious this time, and a lot less fun, because I was pretty sure that Craig would be fucking pissed if he found out. There was also the question of their mom, who had reported Maddie’s last boyfriend to the police, though he was a year older than I was, in college when they dated, and nothing had ever come of it. I didn’t know whether or not it would be worse because I was a friend of the family, but I expected that it would be worse.

I guess I had this idea that I could save her from the trajectory she was on; it was certainly a way for me to cast myself as the good guy. Maddie smoked cigarettes, which I thought was a fucking stupid idea for anyone, let alone a teenager who didn’t even have the excuse of having started before anyone knew that it was bad. She was in a few remedial classes, and talked a lot about emancipation, dropping out, and getting her GED, since she didn’t think college was in her future. I had no idea what kind of life Maddie had in front of her, but it certainly didn’t look good, and I thought that I could swoop in and fix it.

Being together was weird and awkward. We’d talked more naturally online than we had in person. Online, I’d understood the cadence of her typing, but when she was next to me she was like a totally different person, and we didn’t really mesh together. Despite that, I was determined that I was going to make it work somehow, because if Maddie liked me, and I was her boyfriend, then I wasn’t going to bow out at the first sign of trouble. In some ways it seemed like that would be the worst possible thing, because I’d prove that I was just as much of a heel as I suspected myself of being. If I was going to be her boyfriend, then I wanted to do it right, not just fuck it up like I’d fucked up everything else.

As it turned out, dumping her wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

Instead, she dumped me, after about a week.

The thing was, she said, that we were better as friends, and she didn’t want me to take it too hard, but she just wasn’t feeling it. I sat in stunned silence as she dumped me, and then she kept asking me to say something, and I just sat there, not knowing what the hell I’d done with my life that I’d gotten to this point.

It was a few days later that Craig showed up early to D&D. We were playing at my house, because my parents were out of town. I had everything laid out on the table for the session, paper, pens, dice, minis, battlemat, et cetera, and was staring at my skeletal notes. I should have been preparing, but I felt too numb to do it. Most likely the session would go the way that sessions had been going lately, with me winging it, poorly, and then us ending things far earlier than we used to. I hadn’t made anything new since the whole Fel Seed thing. After that had all gone down, we went back to Long Stairs, but I wasn’t even bringing much creativity to it, because I couldn’t think of anything suitably horrifying. There were lots of gaping, sucking voids, empty places that had once held life, all painfully thin metaphors that no one appreciated, not even me. Our gaming sessions were happening by rote, one more thing that I couldn’t take pleasure from anymore. I had almost canceled the session, but I knew once I canceled one, I would start cancelling others, and that would be one less thing tying me to the world.

Craig came in and sat down without saying a word. He was staring daggers at me. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“You fucked my sister,” said Craig.

It was pure, naked hostility, and it was almost cathartic, given how much I deserved it. “Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus fucking Christ Juniper,” said Craig. “Do you know, if it had been anyone else, I would have been okay with it? Tom? Fucking great guy, salt of the earth, probably too good for her, and she’d break his fucking heart without meaning to, but I wouldn’t have had a problem with it, except that it would be stupid. Even Reimer would at least have been the best boyfriend she’d ever had, though that’s not saying much, because she’s dated some real fucking losers. But you?” He clenched his fists in front of him like he wanted to grab me and shake me to death. “You are such a fucking cancer on everyone around you. You’re a sad sack piece of garbage just fucking intent on infecting everyone around you with all the pain, anger, and misery that you can squeeze out. And fucking why? ”

“I’m not in a great place,” I said.

“No shit?” asked Craig. “Fucking no shit, Joon, really? Because Arthur died, eight months ago? Does it have something to do with that?” He threw up his hands. “Arthur left this hole in all of us, and you grew these fucking claws and tore that hole open wide like fucking Satan himself. Arthur died, and it fucking sucked, and then you just wanted to see how much worse you could make it, didn’t you, you fucking miserable shitbag.” He was seething with anger. “Do you know I defended you? Colin was talking shit about you, and I damn near threw the first punch in a fight that I knew I couldn’t win, because I thought, you know, he’s fucking Juniper, he’s going through some shit, but he’s still in there somewhere. But no, you’re this fucking zombie, and I would stab you in the heart myself to put you down if I thought that you had a fucking heart anymore. You never even liked Maddie.”

“I did,” I said, but it didn’t sound convincing.

“Bullshit,” said Craig. He stood up from his chair. “Fucking bullshit, and you know it. You know that I fucking talk to her, right? Because she’s my goddamn sister? She came home crying and, just, fucking why would you put her through that? What in the hell was your end game?”

“I thought,” I started, then stopped. “I just needed,” I said, then stopped again.

“Yeah,” said Craig. He turned to go, then turned back. “Look me up in a few years if you ever get your shit together.”

I stayed silent.

I wanted to tell him that I probably wasn’t going to be around in another few months, let alone a few years, but I held my tongue as he stormed out of the house. I looked down at my threadbare notes for the session. I was going to have to change things around, because we were down to two players, Tom and Reimer.

I closed my eyes and let out a shuddering breath, and didn’t open them again until Reimer and Tom came in the door together.

“Got a text saying Craig’s out?” asked Reimer.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You okay?” asked Tom.

“Not really, no,” I said. “Whatever, let’s run it. Craig’s character will have died between sessions. Poison, I guess, something thick and choking that was filling the room, and he just … it got to be too much for him. And Maddie, she’s not -- she won’t be coming.”

“Joon,” began Tom. “If there’s anything --”

“No,” I said. “Let’s just fucking run it, okay? Either you make new characters or I can fill out your ranks with NPCs, party needs a healer one way or another.”

“Something happen between you and Maddie?” asked Reimer. “Last session she was a little --”

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

I was faintly surprised when they let it drop. I knew they’d hear the story from Craig or Maddie later on. Tiff probably would too. I felt a wave of nauseous anxiety just thinking about that, but I could take some comfort in the fact that she probably already hated me.

Chapter 126: "Ever Onward"

“I don’t really understand the distinction,” said Tiff. “The DM controls all of the characters.”

“DMPC is Dungeon Master Player Character ,” said Arthur, putting emphasis on the last two words. “It’s true that the DM controls all the characters, but the DMPC occupies a role as a player character in a way that NPCs typically don’t. A DMPC is a full-fledged member of the party, rather than being a patron, someone we need to escort, an enemy, mentor, side character, et cetera. It’s a little bit hard to define.”

“Is it?” asked Craig. “It’s when the DM is a player in their own game, boom, sorted.”

“The DM plays all the characters,” said Reimer. “I think more formally you would say that it’s when an NPC gets a share of the experience and loot.”

“No,” said Arthur. “The end-run around that would be leveling them up without experience and having them gain treasure through some alternate stream, which would circumvent the definition but still be,” he glanced at Tiff for a fraction of a second, “problematic.”

“Problematic because the DMPC knows everything there is to know?” asked Tiff.

“Well, no,” I said. “If you think of it like that, then all NPCs know everything there is to know, and you would be able to coerce a confession from any NPC about things that happened to the others. Which, spoilers, you can’t. No, it’s more about bias, or the implication of bias.”

“It’s like trying to tickle yourself,” said Reimer.

“That too,” I said. “But sometimes it’s necessary, when the party decides that they’re going to go completely without healing, or some other vital role isn’t going to be filled. Doctrine is for the DMPC to not have a decision-making role in the group or otherwise have actual agency of their own.”

“Doctrine,” said Craig, rolling his eyes.

“It’s important,” I said, feeling defensive. “It’s too easy to pollute the game otherwise.”

Chapter 127: "Full House"

Arthur gave a shit about things. It was one of the things that set us apart from each other.

He’d pressured me into mock trial with the argument that it would look good on a college application, that I liked the law, and that we would be able to spend more time together outside of our games. I had eventually relented, and halfway through the first meeting, had started regretting it.

After it was done, and I was supposed to be going through the facts of the case on my own, Arthur came over.

“Floating islands again?” he asked, looking down at my notepad.

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the legal pad. I wasn’t sure when I had gotten in the habit of taking notes on legal paper, but it had been a thing for a while. “Just trying to figure it out, I don’t know. It’s the pastoral thing again, Stardew Valley.” I didn’t really need to tell him more than that. We’d talked enough that he got it.

“Sorry if you’re not having fun,” said Arthur.

I noticed the if there, giving me an out, so I could lie and say, ‘no, no, I am having fun’.

“It’s just not really my thing,” I said. “I was sitting there while everyone was talking and just felt adrift, like I was floating through it all with only a vague understanding of what was actually being discussed.”

“Floating?” asked Arthur. He pointed down to a doodle. “Hence the islands?” There was something that I found irritating about the way he said ‘hence’.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.” I frowned at the paper. That wasn’t really it though. I’d wanted a place that was simple, confined, warm, and cozy.

Arthur frowned. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said. “I can go over the case with you for a bit. The big thing is having a testimony that fits the facts as presented here, one that you can answer all the questions about on cross.”

He walked over to talk to someone else, and I looked down at my legal pad, wondering how much I was going to keep up the charade of caring about something that didn’t really interest me.

Chapter 139: "Piece of Mind"

“Okay, so what counts as a chair?” asked Reimer.

“A chair is a chair,” I said.

“That’s meaningless,” said Reimer. “I’m asking for the purposes of the spell, what’s a chair? You said that it can make chairs valued under 25 gp, so what’s a chair?”

“Alright,” I said. I’d been prepared for this, after one too many arguments. “So there are a couple of different directions we can go with this. One, we do the porn test, I-know-it-when-I-see-it, but that requires me to see it, so every time you ask whether or not something is a chair, I say yes or no. That’s probably what we’re going to do, but there are other options, for the sake of a diegetic explanation.”

“A what?” asked Maddie.

“Diegetic,” replied Tiff. “Derived from diegesis. It basically means ‘in-story’.”

“It’s Juniper’s favorite word,” said Tom.

“No,” said Craig. “His favorite word is egregious. It was on the bingo sheet.”

“I have a lot of favorite words,” I said. “But to go back to what I mean, and Maddie, hopefully to help you understand, we can say that in game terms Reimer-the-player is asking me-the-DM whether or not something is a chair and I’m replying to him, but that doesn’t actually explain what Karbon is experiencing in-game. A wizard attempts to cast the spell, but does he hear a voice in his head that says ‘hey, that’s not a chair’? Probably not, though that is one of the options. Instead, maybe there’s something like memetic space --”

“From Long Stairs,” Tiff said to Maddie.

“It’s basically a conception of collective memetic strength,” I said. “So if you took all the ideas about what a chair is in all the heads of all the people, then you could make an average weighted by confidence or strength or whatever, and you’d end up with something that wasn’t really a definition, but which mapped to various real-world objects with a given strength, and then you could have a cut-off as far as how far away from the meme is too far. Similarly, you could have a Platonic realm where all objects exist in their ideals, and you could see how close to the p-space ideal the target of the spell was.”

“Or you could give a literal definition,” grumbled Reimer. “You could say that a chair has got to have four legs, a place for a humanoid to sit, et cetera.”

“Doesn’t a chair have a minimum of three legs?” asked Tiff. “Or two, if they’re curved, like a rocking chair.”

“That’s exactly the sort of the argument that you’d get into literally all the time,” I said. “It’s the stupid ‘is a hot dog a sandwich’ thing again.”

“A hot dog is totally a sandwich,” said Craig. “Meat between bread, how is that not a sandwich?”

I let out a long, low sigh.

“Alright,” said Arthur as he sidled back into the room and took his place. “What did I miss?”

“Chairs,” said Reimer.

“Great,” replied Arthur with a smile. “Are we still standing in front of the count?”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I could usually count on him to get us back on track.

Chapter 141: "Monty Haul"

“How much loot is there?” asked Tiff.

“Shhh, no complaining,” said Reimer. “We’ve been behind on loot since level four.”

“When it rains, it pours,” said Arthur.

“Now, I’m not going to suggest that Juniper forgot,” said Craig. “But is it possible that Juniper forgot? Just asking questions.”

“He always forgets,” said Reimer.

“I don’t forget,” I said. “It just doesn’t make sense for the enemies to have loot sometimes, especially level appropriate loot. If you go by the guides, the enemies have treasure parcels, but there are only certain situations in which that actually works without breaking the reality of the world. So instead, yeah, treasure gets a little uneven and the Skinner box of loot distribution isn’t working at maximum capacity.”

“What Joon is saying is that adventuring is supposed to be its own reward, rather than just numbers-go-up,” said Arthur.

“But I like numbers-go-up,” said Reimer. “Who doesn’t like numbers-go-up?”

“We all like numbers-go-up,” said Tiff. “But the question is just whether this is the right way for numbers to go up? I mean, in theory, it’s better if we’re getting loot at regular intervals, right? Both for balance, enjoyment, and whatnot.”

“Joon has been DMing too long,” said Arthur with a laugh. “That’s how he used to do it, until we got in this big argument about why this necromancer was leaving magic items on his zombies for no good reason.”

“Was that it?” asked Reimer. He looked over at me. “I remember that, is that the moment you decided that you weren’t going to give us loot like a sensible DM?”

“Arthur is trying to tell a story,” I said with a shake of my head. “If you wanted to make a narrative about it, then sure, I was a mild-mannered DM until one fateful day we had an hour-long digression about how a smart necromancer strips the magic items from his zombies and puts everything of value in the most secure, hidden place he can think of, and that argument changed me forever. That’s not really accurate though. It was more like … I don’t know, there are elements of unreality to the D&D experience, and I’ve always kind of hated them, because you bring in these game elements and that undercuts both the world and the narrative.” I shrugged. “Realistically, sometimes you’re fighting enemies that don’t have loot. Sometimes you get front-loaded on loot because someone wants you to succeed at the task they gave you. Sometimes accomplishing your goals doesn’t actually earn you anything material. So yeah, it’s a bit uneven, and yeah, that’s not the best thing for balance, though I think I’m doing a pretty good job of adjusting for that, but it at least doesn’t spit in the face of realism.”

“You can just admit that you forgot to give loot,” said Craig.

I let out a beleaguered sigh.

Chronology

• The opening of "Reaver", while not a flashback per se, is a brief overview of the events surrounding Arthur's death that serve as context for later flashbacks.