“Are you okay?” Adam turned Cassandra to face him.
“Guess we forgot assailant,” she said breathlessly. “Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks.”
They turned back as security was closing on Randy, struggling against a dozen black-shirt clad gamers who were pushing him away from the truck. He spat a stream of profanity toward Cassandra, and she turned her head. “Tom?”
Tom the driver raised his free hand, still holding his phone up to record. “A bit shaky in spots, but I got it!”
She nodded. “Thanks, Tom! You’re awesome!” She looked at Adam. “I was just hoping to catch his reaction to the dispatcher thing, but I’m guessing this will blow up big enough to wipe out any allegations against you, too.”
Adam shook his head slowly, grinning at her. “You—you were—you pickpocketed his phone?”
“What can I say? I’m a rogue at heart.”
“Or you have a heart for rogues?” Adam put his hands on her shoulders. “I love you.”
One corner of Cassandra’s mouth lifted. “I know.”
“Adam!” Brenda called. “We need you for the Hellraisers game.”
Adam slid his palms down Cassandra’s arms to take her hands. “When the game’s over, we’re each going to go to our hotel rooms and shower and sleep. But after that, do you want to get some coffee?”
Cassandra made a face. “Ugh. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to face caffeine again.”
“There’s a smoothie place in the food court. Sound exciting?”
“Guys!” Brenda’s voice was sharp. “Come on!”
Cassandra kept her eyes on Adam’s. “A smoothie with you isn’t quite enough to get me excited.” She waited, one eyebrow raised.
Adam was ready. “Sorry, sweetheart, haven’t got time for anything else.”
Cassandra laughed. “You’re on. Now let’s go debut some Hellraisers.”
Laura was born at a very early age and never looked back. She overcame childhood deficiencies of having been born without teeth or developed motor skills, and by the time she matured into a recognizable adult she had become a behavior analyst, an internationally-recognized and award-winning animal trainer, a popular costumer/cosplayer, a tabletop gamer, a chocolate addict, and of course a writer. Find her at www.LauraVanArendonkBaugh.com
Critical Hit
Cori Vidae
“Ragnar’s hammer crushes the beast’s skull, popping its eyes out. Still attached to their optic nerve they dangle, bobbing freely—”
“Gross! Do you have to be so graphic?”
“What? I’m painting the scene.”
“Next thing I know,” Lila said, wrinkling up her nose. “You’re going to be telling us how it smells.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Terrance said with a shrug.
“Right?” Hallie agreed, peering over the taped together binders she was using as her dungeon master screen. “We’re telling a story here.”
“You could just say, ‘Natural twenty. Critical hit. You do double damage’.”
“I could, but that wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“You mean it wouldn’t be as gross,” Lila said.
“Whatever,” Hallie flipped her reference books closed and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You killed it, saved the village, yay.”
“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.” Terrance stretched and leaned back in his chair. His stretch pulled his shirt from his jeans, revealing a band of olive skin just above his waistband. A sprinkling of dark hairs, two shades darker than those on his head, trailed down from his belly button to disappear into his jeans. Now that was a treasure trail she’d like to follow—
She looked quickly back behind the screen, hoping Terrance and Lila hadn’t noticed her distraction, the track her thoughts had taken—the same track they took more and more these days. “I’m just tired of the same campaign again and again. Why don’t they ever do anything different? It’s always find the missing item, save the village, rescue the maiden, kill the dragon… blah blah blah.”
“I like saving the village and killing the dragon,” Lila said, pulling a nail file out from somewhere and going to work sharpening her talons.
“You like playing the pretty maiden that all the NPCs can’t help falling over because of her crazy high charisma score. You don’t care what the adventure is.”
Despite their differences, they had been friends for far too long for Lila to be offended by Hallie’s blunt talk. They’d met in junior high and stayed friends all through high school. When they both applied to the University of British Columbia they’d arranged to be roommates, and somehow still remained friends despite living together.
The room was tiny, two beds, two desks, two closets and a teeny little table barely big enough for the three of them to sit around. Lila’s side was decorated in pink, feathers and boy band posters—you’d never guess from looking that she was on year two of a degree in Biochemistry. Hallie’s side didn’t scream her major either though, it looked more like it belonged to a future photographer than an engineer.
“I do like being the pretty maiden that all the NPCs can’t help falling over because of her crazy high charisma score,” Lila said with a laugh. “It’s just like real life, only amplified.”
“It’s good that you’re so modest,” Terrance said, tucking his shirt back into his jeans. Hallie watched his hand disappear into his waistband once, twice, three times, and her belly tightened. Oh, for that to be her hand—
“Are we done for the night?” Lila asked, glancing at the clock. “I have a date.”
“Well, I did…” Hallie paused, suddenly uncertain—so many things could go wrong. So very many. Was it worth risking so much?
Go big or go home, Terrance always said whenever their characters were faced with a choice between easy and heroic. She took a deep breath and smiled despite her nervous flutters. “I did create a quick dungeon crawl of my own. Something a little different than saving the village…”
Lila stood and stretched her arms above her head and then pointed her nail file at Hallie. “Can you play it with two? I think I’m done for the night. I don’t want to be late for my date.”
Hallie looked over at Terrance, who was conspicuously silent. “If you want to, I could easily rework it to be a two player campaign.”
Terrance looked at her, one eyebrow raised. Was she giving herself away? Could he tell what she was up to? She schooled her expression into one of nonchalance and forced herself to maintain it while one second stretched into three, then five. Finally, Terrance shrugged. “Sure, I don’t have any plans for tonight. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Again her tummy clenched with desire. Did he realise the double-meaning to his words? Was it intentional?
“Ta!” Lila said, vanishing her nail file as quickly as she’d made it appear, then snatching her purse and heading out the door.
“Who says ta?” Terrance asked.
“The kinda person who gives up a really cool D&D session for a date with Brock?” Hallie said, though she didn’t care what Lila was doing, just that she was gone, leaving her and Terrance alone.
“That’s a good point—” Terrance said, glancing over his shoulder like somehow the slowly closing door was going to have the answers he was looking for. When it shut with a clunk, he turned and looked back at her. “Do I need a new character for this campaign?”
“You do. Sorta.” She laughed and could hear the nerves in it—Terrance had to have noticed too, but he was doing a fabulous job of hiding it. “I made one for you.”
She opened the folder, keeping it hidden behind her screen so Terrance couldn’t see her notes, and shuffled through the papers within. “We won’t need Lila’s sheet,” she said casually, mentally adding ‘Thank god’. She’d had a contingency plan in case Lila decided to stick around for this crawl, but she wasn’t sure if she’d have had the guts to go through with her plan in front of an audience, even if that audience was her best friend. Perhaps especially if that au
dience was her best friend.
Lila had known every single one of Hallie’s boyfriends, she’d been there from the exhilarating highs of falling for them all the way through to the ice cream binge-eating breakups—but there was something special about how she felt about Terrance, something she hadn’t been able to share even with Lila.
She pulled out Terrance’s character sheet and handed it to him over the Macgyver-ed dungeon master screen, ridiculously pleased her hand wasn’t shaking. At this rate she just might get through this without embarrassing herself. Maybe.
Terrance’s chocolate-colored eyes scanned slowly across the page. At first she pretended to be setting things up behind her screen, but soon gave that up in favor of watching him read it. How long until he—
“Is this me?” he asked, looking over the edge of the paper at her.
She nodded. “I thought it might be fun to play characters that resembled ourselves—sort of like the game amplifying reality like Lila says. I even made an NPC who was just like me.”
“You only gave me a ten for constitution.”
“You get sick a lot. Remember last term how you got the flu twice—” she’d brought him chicken soup both times, despite the fact she didn’t eat meat. “—and you only just got rid of Strep Throat last week.”
“I suppose.” He shifted his legs beneath the table, stretching until his calf was pressed against hers. A little thrill went through her and she held her breath to see if he was going to move away. When he didn’t, she concentrated hard to force the muscles in her leg to relax before they gave away her hyper-awareness of the pressure of his body against hers. “But you also gave me a fourteen for charisma.”
I wanted to give you an eighteen, she thought but she forced a laugh, deflected. “Want to know the funniest part? I only gave Lila a thirteen. It’s a shame she didn’t stick around to find out. The look on her face would have been brilliant.”
Coward, she chastised herself. You had an opening right there and you let it go.
“What did you give yourself?” he asked.
“You don’t get to know the NPCs stats,” she said. “You know that.”
He raised an eyebrow, set down his sheet and looked at her, pinning her in place with his gaze. “I think in this instance you can make an exception. What did you give yourself for charisma?”
She looked down at her sheet, at the nine in the box next to ‘Charisma’. Originally it had been a seven, but she’d erased it and written in a nine—average—just in case this exact conversation had come up.
Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to answer his question. Somehow it seemed vain to say she was average, and at the same time, considering how she felt about him, it also felt too self-effacing. She cleared her throat, then pointed over her screen to his character sheet. “Did you see I gave you an eleven for strength?”
“Really?”
“Yeah I—” she stopped. He wasn’t talking about the stat.
“Really?” he said again, tilting his head down and looking at her through the flop of brown hair that fell in front of his eyes. “Really? You think I’m going to be that easily distracted?”
She was distracted. His leg was still touching hers beneath the table. Was it because he hadn’t noticed, or did it mean something else? And if it meant something else, what? Did he like her the same way she liked him, or was he just oblivious to her because he thought of her as only a friend?
“I kinda hoped…” she said, truthfully.
“Oh fer—Hallie, just show me the stupid sheet.”
Reluctantly, and against her better judgment, she handed it over, but she made him tug on it twice before she let go. She leaned back in her chair while he read it, wishing the binders that composed her DM screen were higher so she could hide completely. This was almost as bad as having someone read her diary while she watched—she’d been pretty brutally honest on her own stats.
“You gave yourself a fifteen for intelligence,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yeah.” It was the highest score on her sheet. Truthfully she’d wondered if, given her GPA, she ought to make it a sixteen but decided against it. In high school grades had come easily to her, but ever since she’d entered the Faculty of Engineering she’d had to work at them. Hard. Maybe she wasn’t quite as smart as she’d always thought she was.
“That’s probably too low,” he regarded her steadily. “And an eight for strength? Are you kidding me? I mean, I’d say a seven at best.”
“Oh you would, would you?” She looked for something—a pillow, a stuffy—to throw at him but found nothing so she settled on the pencil that was in her hand. She flipped it, end over end, and watched as it landed on his chest with a tiny thunk.
“See?” he said, tossing it back to her. “Definitely a seven.”
His smile and the way he looked at her then gave her butterflies. There was definitely something in his expression that suggested he wanted something more than friendship from her. She stared at him, her mouth suddenly dry. When she licked her lips he turned away and the moment was gone, the spell broken. He cleared his throat and passed a character sheet back to her.
The wrong character sheet.
“Uh, this is you.”
“Yup.”
“So…?”
“So, you play me and I’ll play you.”
The idea of having him control her, even in a D&D session, was enough to make heat flood her belly but she remembered back in junior high when she and Lila had played a role reversal game. What had started out all in good fun had soon turned catty. The game had lasted an hour but it had taken them over a week before they were speaking to one another again, and even now some of the damage lingered. “I don’t think—”
“C’mon,” Terrance shifted beneath the table so that his leg was between hers, resting against the inside of her right calf. She couldn’t focus on anything else. Had he done that on purpose? Did he know? “I’ll be gentle, I promise.”
“I—” C’mon Hallie, snap out of it. You’re not some simpering virgin whose never been touched before. Focus. And besides, what harm could it do? She grinned, hoped it looked mischievous rather than Joker-esque and nodded. “All right then, but I make no such promise.”
“Ooh, feisty.”
Feisty. Feisty was a good word. She liked feisty. Feisty felt flirty.
“Okay,” she shifted, deliberately rubbing her leg along the length of Terrance’s as she stretched out beneath the table. Then she began to read. “The woods surrounding the village of Merrin have long fueled the nightmares and imaginations of those who live under its shadow. A mercenary named Renfry recently ousted the area’s ruler, Count Saer, from his keep. Despite not having a single drop of noble blood, Renfry has started calling himself Earl Renfry and ruling over Merrin and the surrounding areas. Though it’s early days, he seems to be a fair and just leader, far better than his predecessor. He is, however, a man of little patience for his subjects’ superstitions and fears surrounding the forest.”
Terrance raised an eyebrow but said nothing, though he did move his leg so it pressed tighter against hers. Hallie offered a tentatively flirty smile at him over the improvised DM screen before returning her attention to the typed-up introduction she’d prepared. “After his woodcutters returned to the keep with no firewood, claiming evil spirits had chased them out of the forest, he hired you to explore and map the woods. He will pay you each—” She glanced at Lila’s empty seat. Oops. “He will pay you one hundred gold pieces for a complete map of the woods, and twice that much if you discover and eliminate the cause of the unusual noises and monster sightings.”
“Nice,” Terrance said when she paused. She looked up to see if he was being sarcastic, but he seemed sincerely impressed. “Very not go rescue the maiden. Unless, of course, there’s a maiden causing all the trouble.”
“Well,” Hallie said, pointing to her character sheet in his hand. “Even if there is, at least you’re a maiden rescuing the maiden.”
>
“There is that,” he nodded.
Growing bold, Hallie swung her legs up so her calves rested on Lila’s chair and her feet were between Terrance’s thighs. Her heart thudded so loudly in her chest she actually wondered for a moment if he could hear it or see the pulse jumping in her throat. “Do—” Her voice sounded deep, she cleared it and tried again. “Do you mind?”
Terrance’s smile crawled slowly across his lips and lit his eyes with a gleam she hadn’t seen before. “Not at all. Needed to stretch your legs out?”
“Yeah, if that’s cool.”
“It’s cool,” he said. One of his hands moved to rest on top of her shin and she jumped in surprise. She tried to pretend it hadn’t happened but by his raised eyebrow she knew she hadn’t pulled it off. “It cool if I, uh, rest my arms?”
Rest his arms? That was ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as her needing to stretch her legs. Okay. If this was the way they were going to do this she was good with that.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” she said, feigning disinterest. His hand was so warm against her leg it was driving her crazy. When he started to slowly, tentatively, move his finger and stroke her calf through her jeans it was almost enough to make stop pretending she had no idea what was going on. Almost, but not quite. “I, uh… where was I? Oh yeah. He will pay you one hundred gold for a map of the woods—”
“A complete map,” Terrance interrupted, with an impish grin.
“—one hundred gold for a complete map of the woods, and twice that much if you discover and eliminate the cause of the unusual noises and monster sightings. After spending the morning in Merrin picking up supplies—you can get anything you need at PHB prices—you now find yourself at the western edge of the woods with Merrin at your back.”
“Am I alone?”
“No,” Hallie gestured toward the character sheet in front of her. “Terry the Barbarian is with you.”
“Barbarian?” Terrance’s eyebrows shot up. “Terry the barbarian?”
She’d chosen the name specifically because she knew he hated it, and picked that class for similar reasons. Though he was strong, Terrance was also incredibly smart. Creating a barbarian with low constitution and high intelligence had seemed like a great idea when it wasn’t going to be her controlling it. On the other hand the kick-ass mage she’d rolled that Terrance was now controlling was a wee bit on the OP side. “Yeah,” she said. “You hadn’t read your class before you swapped me characters?”
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