“Glad I could be of assistance,” Kevin mumbled humbly. She was thanking him?
“Have you kept writing since college?” Joanna asked.
Kevin was stunned. He couldn’t believe she even remembered that! “Uh… sort of,” he stammered.
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?” she asked with a smile. Joanna had a beautiful smile…. He realized she was waiting for him to answer.
“I don’t write as often as I should,” he admitted.
“Ah.”
“I’ve got the story, I just don’t know how to write it.”
“Try paper… pencil…” she said teasingly.
“Pa…per….! Wow!! I...I…” he said cheerily, playing along.
Joanna had a sudden flash of insight.
“Is that the story we’re playing?”
Kevin nodded, a little embarrassed to be found out. “Uh...yeah…”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh”
“So now I’m in your story…” Joanna smirked. Kevin had thought he hated it when people smirked at him, but he found he didn’t mind it much when it was Joanna. In fact, her smirk was kind of… alluring... Wait – what had she just said?!
“Uh…yeah….”
“I’ve never been somebody’s story before… in someone’s story,” she corrected herself quickly.
“Well, uh, you know, I guess in a way, we’re all in a story. If you wanna think about it that way….” Lodge countered. Oh. My. God. Is it even possible for me to sound like a bigger dork?
“I guess that’s true…” Joanna mused aloud.
Wait…what?! As clumsily as he had fallen over that, she had understood what he meant. By all the gods, she was a remarkable woman.
Joanna stopped in the doorway of an empty building, sitting on the stairs. Kevin sat down beside her. Joanna reached into her pocket, her hand reappearing full of gummi bears. Kevin wasn’t actually all that fond of gummi bears – but when she offered him some, he accepted as though they were a gift from the stars themselves.
Well, he thought, she seemed to understand me before. Might as well try to give her a real answer.
“I give them as real a world as I can,” he explained plaintively, “but they’re just interested in ‘winning.’ It so doesn’t help.”
Joanna stared for a moment, the various events and interactions of the evening swirling in her mind until they coalesced into a single, crystal-clear picture.
“You blame them for not being able to write your own damn story!”
“No…” Kevin demurred.
“You do!”
Yeah, ok, maybe I do…
“Caught ya….” Joanna exulted quietly. Kevin didn’t necessarily like what he was hearing, but something about hearing it from Joanna made it… ok somehow. He opened his mouth to protest, and then realized that she was right. This was quickly followed by the realization that this beautiful, amazing woman got him – better than he got himself, in some ways.
“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” she offered. “Maybe you should just let the story go where it will.”
Wait…what? Oh. She’s talking about the game… isn’t she?
“But I know where it goes! It goes to a very clear end… it’s just not getting there…”
“All I am saying it that maybe it would be easier if you didn’t decide how things were going to end before you start.”
Wait... Was she…? No, of course not. She couldn’t hear what he was thinking, after all – and if she knew what he was thinking, she’d probably run off to catch the next possible bus, and never come back. Lodge let out a deep sigh.
“What?” she asked, thinking the sigh was about the advice she had just offered. “What’s wrong with that?”
“If I don’t keep them focused on the story, they’re just going to run around” he ticked one finger with the opposing index finger, “killing,” he ticked the middle finger, “looting, and” he ticked a third finger, “impregnating my entire world!”
Joanna smiled - Kevin was so cute when he got intense and impassioned like this. She stared intently at him as he spoke, wondering if he ever got impassioned about anything but gaming. She couldn’t keep herself from giggling just a little self-consciously at the thought. Fortunately, she had timed it just right – she was pretty sure he thought she was giggling at the accuracy of his description of the gamers.
“I’ve got to keep them under control!” he finished.
Joanna stopped walking, suddenly serious. “That’s why they don’t trust you!”
“They don’t trust me?” Kevin replied in utter astonishment.
“No!”
“They’re the ones who kill people before they have a chance to speak!”
She could see his point – so she backed up and tried to explain hers – theirs – a little better.
“They know you don’t trust them to play your way, and that’s why you keep them on such a short leash. That’s why you dropped a policeman into the middle of the group…”
“Paladin!” Kevin protested.
“Whatever,” she dismissed his protest. “To keep tabs on them. It’s no wonder they screw with you.” Joanna stepped in closer, hoping Kevin would take her very seriously, and hoping he’d listen to all of the things she was about to try to convey to him.
”You’re a good enough storyteller to handle whatever they throw at you,” she assured him. “Just let the story evolve naturally. The ending might even surprise you.”
Lodge briefly wondered once again whether Joanna was still talking about the gamers, or if she were listening to his thoughts…trying to tell him something else. For some reason, he couldn’t dismiss the thought quite so quickly this time.
“All right,” he spluttered mildly. “I’ll uh... see what I can do…” He stared down into her face. Gary was right, the big infant – a man could get lost in those eyes…
“All right,” Joanna smiled back at him. “You do that.”
She waited for a very long moment, hoping Kevin had picked up her hints, and just needed a second to gather his courage. The pause drew out until it started to become awkward, and Joanna finally decided she would have to work on a better strategy for next time. Kevin clearly wasn’t going to be the one to make the first move…
Finally, before the silence could grow uncomfortable, Joanna gave in and sighed “g’night Kevin…”
“Night,” he replied gently as she walked away. Kevin waved to her back as she left, wondering if she realized how he was hearing what she said, and wishing he had tried to kiss her. Just as he reminded himself that a girl like her could never be interested in a geek like him, Joanna turned and blew him a kiss. He smiled dreamily, thinking maybe…just maybe…she wouldn’t have refused…
He finally realized that he probably needed a better plan than standing there in the dark daydreaming. How long had he been standing there? Who knew? Who cared, really? He raced through all of their conversation, filing the gaming stuff for later, looking for hints he might have missed or things he might have misinterpreted. Finally, he asked himself the question that would have the biggest impact on his evening.
“Where the hell did I park?”
* * * *
Nodwick waited impatiently in the cave where the heroes left him, still holding two lit torches. He sighed and kicked the nearly-empty trunk, knocking it closed.
Acknowledgements
: As we grow older and it’s tougher to find the time to get together and sit around a table, one of you is always online and ready to go moosh monsters with us. 24/7 gaming with awesome people is the best lootz of all.
Bernie Brown: The most interesting guy at the gaming table. None of my worlds would be worthwhile without you in them.
Dead Gentlemen, The Gamers, & ZOE: Gaming Geeks are legion. Thank you for telling our tales, and for being the changelings we want to see in the world.
Matt Vancil: Matt, your kindness in making time to review my draft and offer your feed
back is still much appreciated and deeply felt - though we must continue to cordially disagree on that whole “print is dead” thing… :) Hope it made the flight to Gen Con a little more entertaining.
The Sunday Night Crew: Thanks for being there, week after week. Keep it up! (Because if you miss gaming night, we will use your character as a shield while you are gone…)
Author’s Note
As adults, it gets tougher to cultivate and maintain a gaming group. Jobs, parenting, and the increasing requirements of life make it difficult to match schedules, and hard to find time for adventure prep. We cherish our gaming buddies. We trust them with our backs when the orcs arrive.
So, when we turned up for gaming one Saturday and were greeted with “you have to see this,” we established a party order on the sofa and watched.
They were right.
Since that time, all new members of our gaming circle are exposed to Dorkness Rising (if, for some incomprehensible reason, they have not yet seen it). When we spotted the Kickstarter campaign for Gamers 3, there was no question.
Wait - Gamers three? We immediately located the original Gamers movie and added it to our DVD collection. We went to the first-ever ZOECon and discovered Standard Action, JourneyQuest, GamerChick,
[email protected] and Transolar Galactica, among others - an entirely new world of ‘stuff that was just made for us!’
But… something was bothering me…. The more I watched and re-watched Gamers 2, the more clear it became.
Throughout the movie, Lodge speaks of writing his module – but the document on his computer screen says ‘Chapter One.’ Modules generally begin with an introduction, or just charge right into the content. Every time I looked, I became more convinced that no matter what he said, Lodge was trying to write a book.
There have been two Mask of Death modules (in addition to the recent release, there was a limited release version the year the movie was released) – but no book.
I felt a disturbance in the Force.
As I am one of those annoying ‘if you don’t like it, fix it’ sorts, I decided to write the book. Such a book, of course, couldn’t be just any traipse through the module – it had to be Daphne, Silence, Flynn, Osric, and Luster. This would require careful review of the film, to ensure that what we already know of their adventure was faithfully represented.
In the process, I spent a lot of time with the film. And the commentaries. And interviews, podcasts, posts on the ZOE forums... On the quest for detail about the Shadow (The Shadow? The Shadow!) and the Mask, I found myself writing so much of Dorkness Rising that it just made sense to tell Lodge, Joanna, Leo, Cass, and Gary’s story...
Diana Brown, on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CleverNinjas
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