Fellowship Fantastic

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “Sounds like fun to me,” smirked Dweezer. “What slot do I put my quarter in?”

  “Quarter? More like a penny, I’m sure,” replied Lucinda, the edge creeping back into her voice.

  “Keep it clean, guys . . .” said Ian with authority.

  “And always use protection,” quipped Carmen. “Unless you’re married . . .”

  “My wife is correct in every way,” blurted Gabe, right on cue. Ian did a rim shot with his fingers on the edge of his desk.

  “Let’s cut the banter and get back to the quest,” said Dweezer, obviously bested.

  Ian looked at his watch. “We’ll never finish tonight and no game pauses are allowed once you breach the fortress walls. We’d better call it a night.” He flicked the screen over to his calendar. “What about Wednesday?”

  “Yoga,” said Lucinda with a sigh. “You know I have yoga on Wednesdays.” If the tracking sensors had still been on, Ian knew he would have seen Lucinda’s eyes roll and brows furrow as she spoke. “How long have we been playing as a group? Two years? Yet you keep asking if Wednesday is good. How many times are you going to keep doing that?”

  “ ’Til you give up yoga?” volunteered Dweezer.

  “Not going to happen,” responded Lucinda. “Just because I spend an ungodly amount of time in front of a gaming screen doesn’t mean I don’t care about my body.”

  “Believe me, I care about your body . . .” responded Dweezer with his typical smarmy cockiness. “Tell me, just how accurate is your avatar in terms of proportions . . .”

  “What about Thursday?” interjected Ian with a weary tone.

  Gabe responded. “That begins to impinge on packing and travel time. We’ve got a longer trip to the cabin than you guys, you know. Toronto’s not exactly next door to Colorado. And border control has been a real pain lately.”

  “I think we should wait ’til after the cabin. We can plan strategy while we’re there,” agreed Carmen.

  “Are you sure there isn’t an internet hook-up at the cabin?” complained Dweezer for the umpteenth time. “We could all bring our set-ups and game together.”

  Ian looked around at his bulky and expensive gear. “Like I’m going to lug all this stuff around in a carry-on.”

  “Besides,” said Lucinda. “The whole point is that we’ve been playing Armies of Blood, Fire & Magic for two years together without actually meeting in person. It’s time to connect on a different level. Chat, take a hike, make popcorn, whatever. Get to know each other in reality.”

  “It’ll be nice,” cooed Carmen. “Colorado is supposed to be cool and crisp this time of year. The aspens will be golden and there will already be snow in the high passes, just to make the backdrop pretty.”

  “And stars, guys,” volunteered Gabe. “Zillions of stars. They say you can really see the Milky Way in the mountains.”

  “I guess,” grumbled Dweezer. “I mean, I know I said I’d come. But it seems a long way to go to sit around a cabin and look at the trees during the day and the stars at night.”

  “Don’t worry,” offered Ian, always the leader. “I’ll bring some board games and cards and stuff. It’ll be fun.”

  “No wonder this place was cheap,” Ian said to himself as he shifted the white Subaru Outback into second gear at the bottom of yet another 6 percent grade on the winding gravel road that led to the cabin. At least it was only early December. He would hate this drive in January when snow would make the edge of the road even more difficult to discern. He hoped whoever had already arrived at the cabin was cooking dinner. More than two hours driving since he left the airport after his delayed and snackless flight, Ian was hungry.

  Twenty minutes later, he found the driveway to the cabin, a half-mile long single vehicle track that was overgrown with scrub and weeds. At least, he noted, he wasn’t the first to show up. The weeds in the middle hump of the track were bent down toward the cabin. Someone had already driven up the lane today. When he arrived at the cabin, he saw a Chevy Geo pulled over to one side of the looping turnaround. The Geo had New Mexico plates, so he knew it was Dweezer, who had promised to pick up Lucinda from the Colorado Springs airport on his way up.

  Ian pulled most of the way around the driveway loop and parked, blocking the exit. That way, if they went on any excursions, he would be the one to drive. The Geo was too small for five—Lucinda no doubt had felt it was too small for two, riding for close to four hours next to Dweezer to get here. And Gabe and Carmen were so moony over each other that he doubted either one could keep his or her eyes on the road for long. Besides, the Outback had four-wheel drive and Ian, party leader, always liked to be the one in control.

  He grabbed his pack and a collapsible shopping bag filled with board games and snacks and headed back along the loop toward the cabin. For such a crappy driveway, the cabin itself looked remarkably roomy and nice. There was a large porch with two rocking chairs and a side table, and a great view behind and to the east, over a small lake and then a drop off toward a ponderosa pine clogged valley. A propane tank, partially hidden by an immense stack of fire-wood, supplied fuel for cooking and heat. A few solar panels on the south-facing roof and a farmer-style windmill back by the lake obviously supplied electricity—he had seen no phone or electric wires in miles. The layout on the brochure had indicated that three out of the four bedrooms were tiny, but they would all be in the living area and kitchen most of the time anyway.

  All in all, he was surprised that the cabin actually looked as good as the picture on the brochure—he knew what you could do with PhotoShop. The rent for the week had been inexpensive, especially when split five ways. But then, it was an out-of-the-way spot. The nearest ski resort was more than thirty miles distant as the crow flies, twice that when traveling on twisty-turny little mountain roads.

  He knocked on the door just to be polite, though he couldn’t imagine Dweezer and Lucinda engaged in anything he couldn’t interrupt without warning. A tall young woman with flaming red hair answered the door, no doubt Lucinda. She looked relieved to see him.

  “Ian,” she called out in a husky baritone as she moved to engulf him in a hug. “So glad you didn’t get lost. We were beginning to worry.”

  Ian dropped his stuff and hugged his old friend—who he was just meeting for the first time—back. As he squeezed Lucinda, at first tentatively, then tighter as he realized she didn’t have a cracked rib in this reality, he saw a wiry young man with greasy black hair leaning on the doorway to what looked to be the kitchen.

  Dweezer was wearing a Metallica concert T-shirt. He flashed Ian the metal sign as Lucinda continued to compress the breath out of him. Either it was genuine affection for a friend or she was trying to exact a rib-cracking revenge for his faux pas in the game last weekend. Ian waved weakly with his fingertips at Dweezer in greeting.

  Finally, Lucinda stepped back and held him at arm’s length for a moment. “Grand to finally meet you, Sir Ian.”

  “Uh, great to meet you in person, too, Lucinda . . . and, uh, Dweezer.” He gave Dweezer a broader wave now that his arms were not pinned to the sides of his torso.

  “Don’t worry. She gave me a hug, too, when we met at the airport. Freaked out the rent-a-cops who were watching me to see if I was meeting someone trafficking drugs or something.” He scrunched up his face. “I don’t think my hug lasted quite that long, though. I’m pretty sure, in fact, ’cause I remember it really, really well, being short and all.”

  Lucinda’s pale skin reddened until her freckles almost faded from view. There was an awkward silence for a moment before Lucinda noticed the shopping bag Ian had dropped when he entered. She whooped in delight. “Whaddya bring? Any good games?”

  “Any food?” called Dweezer from his position guarding the entrance to the kitchen.

  “Just munchies,” responded Ian, snatching a bag of nacho cheese Doritos from the top of the sack and lobbing them to Dweezer, the party scrounger/healer.

  “Cool,” said Dweezer as he snagged the bag an
d quickly pulled it open. “I got caffeine in the fridge. You want?”

  “Yeah, Mountain Dew if you got it,” replied Ian. “Otherwise anything cola-like that has sugar in it.”

  As Dweezer disappeared from view, Lucinda leaned in toward Ian. “Thank God you’re here. I’ve spent almost five hours listening to Dweezer’s stories about the other three massively multiplayer RPGs he’s playing in. Please start a conversation about something else, anything else.”

  Before Ian could respond, Dweezer came back in, tossing a can of Dew toward Ian. He snagged it, without jarring it so much it would fizz, and popped it open, taking a deep swig. But before Ian could start a conversation about anything, they all heard the slam of a car door, followed rapidly by another.

  “Gabe and Carmen are here,” trilled Lucinda. “Let’s help them with their stuff.”

  “Nobody helped me with my stuff,” grumbled Dweezer.

  “Aside from three cases of pop, I didn’t notice you had any stuff,” Lucinda called over her shoulder as she brushed past Ian to open the door.

  Ian turned to join her in helping the couple, but they both stopped short as they spied the twosome opening the trunk of their rental car, a two-door Mustang. Gabe was the nerdy-looking computer jockey that Ian had expected, but Carmen—Carmen was not the trim fighter/tech that they knew from the game. She had a sizeable belly.

  “She’s preggers,” Ian said softly. “Why didn’t they tell us?”

  Lucinda grabbed his arm. “Don’t say anything until she says something about it,” she whispered, squeezing his upper arm. “She might just be fat.”

  But after a few moments filled with exclamations of greeting and hugs and handshakes and another metal sign from Dweezer, who was now leaning on the door-jamb to the main entrance, they all found out that Carmen was, indeed, pregnant.

  “Surprise!” called out Gabe, gesturing with both hands towards Carmen’s ample belly. “We’re gonna be parents!”

  “Well, I guess somebody’s been busy when they’re not playing the game,” remarked Ian.

  Lucinda cuffed Gabe lightly as she breezed by him to give Carmen yet another hug, a squeeze that threatened to pop the kid out on the spot. “Why didn’t you tell us? That’s no way to treat your friends,” she chided as she ended the hug.

  “I wanted to,” said Carmen, with a sidelong glance at her beaming husband, “but just as we were going to, we started to talk about getting together with all you guys in person and Gabe, well, he likes to tell people in person.”

  “Just so I can see their admiration of my studly accomplishments, sweetheart.”

  Back at the doorway, Dweezer gave a mock salute. “Good work, soldier. Say, did you guys bring any real food?”

  “I brought the ingredients for my world-famous hot dog soup,” volunteered Gabe. “It’s got green pea soup and cream of potato soup and . . .”

  “That’s a real recipe?” asked Lucinda, her nose crinkled in disgust.

  Gabe looked stunned. “That’s the ingredients. The recipe is to heat the mixture until thick, then add ketchup until the green sludge turns brown.”

  “So caffeine and Doritos it is,” Lucinda quipped as she turned toward the cabin with Carmen’s carry-on bag.

  They guzzled soft drinks and chomped various salty, crunchy snack foods as they talked and played games late into the night, ending with a round of Oh Hell! that wound up about three AM. Then they toddled off to their assigned bedrooms (Carmen and Gabe sharing the master bedroom) and slept the dead sleep of all travelers. It was almost noon the next day when Ian woke, showering and then shaving with the gyroscopic shaver he used on camping trips before sauntering out to the common room. He heard some noise and smelled something greasy and salty from the kitchen. He pushed the swinging door open and saw the rest of the squad at a dinette table, chowing down on a lumpy brown concoction.

  “I can’t believe I’m eating this,” marveled Lucinda as she took another glopping spoonful.

  “Hey,” shrugged Dweezer, “it’s salty and creamy and ketchupy and has chunks of processed meat in it. What’s not to like?”

  Peer pressure is an amazing force. Ian ate the hot dog soup.

  It was pretty good.

  The plan was to play a few games in the afternoon, then head out around four o’clock toward the nearest ski resort area, where they could find a restaurant and get a decent meal before picking up supplies and coming back to the cabin for some more late night gaming and the big strategy powwow on the quest to take the fortress in Armies of Blood, Fire & Magic. But the game of Rail Baron they had started in midafternoon dragged on forever. It was well after dark when Ian finally managed to squeak past Dweezer’s pursuit and complete his run for his home city.

  “Thank God that’s over,” exclaimed Lucinda as she started to put the game away. “It only takes a half hour to play the online version.”

  “You guys were just being wussy about declaring your run for home—it could have ended an hour ago,” whined Dweezer.

  Ian turned to Dweezer. “Patience, my friend, is not one of your strong points, which is why we need to talk strategy for ABFM later tonight.”

  “Talk later,” said Gabe as he headed to the master bedroom to wake up Carmen, who had decided to nap after being bankrupted early in the game. “Let’s go eat.”

  “Wow, look at the time,” said Ian as they gathered their coats. “It’s gonna be late by the time we trek all the way to the ski resort.”

  “And there could be a wait, depending on how many skiers are looking for sustenance after a day on the mostly-fake-snow slopes,” noted Carmen. “I can’t believe that game lasted four hours after I got eliminated.”

  “I’m too hungry to wait two hours to eat something,” complained Lucinda.

  Dweezer shrugged. “Maybe we can get pizza.”

  “No way,” Ian responded. “We’re in the dead zone. Nobody delivers out in the mountains.”

  “Not delivery, doofus. There’s a little town not that far northwest of here. There was a coupon on the edge of the map from a pizza place there.”

  Ian considered for a moment and then looked around at the rest of the group. “Pizza?”

  There was a roar of assent. Ian turned to Dweezer. “You navigate. I’ll drive.”

  Dweezer nodded and opened the door. A flurry of flakes was sucked into the cabin as the group looked out over three or four inches of white smothering the landscape beyond the edge of the porch roof. “Dude, when did it start snowing?”

  “It was misting a bit when I went in to sleep,” Carmen replied.

  “Not a problem,” Ian assured the others as he stepped out into the vigorous snow flurry. “It’s not like we’re going all the way to the ski resort. Besides, I’ve got four-wheel drive on the Outback.”

  “Four-wheel drive doesn’t make you stop any better if you start sliding,” said Lucinda as she stepped out cautiously onto the porch, glaring at the white mass beyond with clear hostility.

  Dweezer exited next, dashing past Ian and Lucinda, leaping off the porch and twirling about in the snow. “C’mon. We’re supposed to be adventurers. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Well, it is only a few inches,” mumbled Carmen as she stepped out onto the porch.

  “My wife is correct in every way,” declaimed Gabe before he realized the unintended double entendre.

  Everyone laughed and headed for the car as Gabe shut the cabin door, his face reddened, and not from the flush of the cold.

  “It’s a quest,” declared Dweezer. “The Quest for Pizza!”

  Gabe tucked himself into the back seat with the women as Dweezer, designated mapper for the quest, took up the shotgun position. Ian started up the vehicle and brushed snow off the windows while it warmed up.

  Then they took off into the dark, the headlights of the car illuminating almost nothing but swirling snow and a carpet of untracked white ahead. Every once in a while, they passed a tall, bright orange pole along the side of the road.<
br />
  “What’re those?” asked Dweezer, looking up from his map.

  “They’re guides for the snowplows. That way they can tell where the edge is and stay on the road, no matter how deep the snow gets.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Lucinda in the back seat. “How deep does the snow get here?”

  They made steady progress, turning left at a hilltop crossroads onto a narrow roadway at Dweezer’s direction. The unfamiliar route twisted and turned, hugging a mountainside as it dipped and climbed. The Outback did well on the steep slopes upward, but there was a bit of sliding on the increasingly infrequent downhills.

  “Maybe you should slow down a bit,” suggested Lucinda as the vehicle picked up speed on a dip in the road.

  “Momentum is the key for not getting stuck in snow,” responded Ian, goosing the accelerator as the vehicle was reaching the bottom of the dip before heading up yet again. “You need enough oomph to make it up the next slope.” The snow was more vigorous and much deeper as they progressed.

  “Maybe I’ll just close my eyes,” Lucinda murmured.

  “I’ll sit on the downhill side on the way back,” volunteered Gabe, “not that you can really see how far you’d fall in the snow and the dark.”

  “Spidey-sense,” laughed Dweezer in the front seat. “You can’t see the danger, but you know it’s there.”

  “How much farther?” asked Carmen.

  Dweezer held up the map, a ragged corner showing where he had already ripped off the pizza place coupon, and pointed toward their path, before handing it to the group squeezed into the backseat. “Not far. See how much closer this place is than the ski resort? Probably cheaper prices, too, even before the 25 percent off coupon.”

  Gabe flicked on the backseat light as he and the two women hunched together to look at the map.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Lucinda.

  Ian instinctively took his foot off the gas as he heard the exclamation, just in case she had seen something in their path.