Martin Greenberg - Crime Spells

He then swept an arm at his cardboard tables, complete with a DM screen at one end.

“Aren’t we going to wait for Dave?” Floyd asked.

“He’s on his way,” Gary replied. “And if memory serves, his character was asleep for the first part of the battle anyway.”

Sage nods went around the group.

“And Brian?” I asked this one. I wanted that dick there… for sure.

Gary smiled. “In the bathroom. You know how he likes to wash his hands before handling the dice.”

Everyone laughed as if it were the fond in-joke they all remembered with teary eyes when they considered their misspent youth.

I’m not sure I kept the grimace back that time. So I pretended to cough so I could cover my face.

And then the damndest thing happened. Trent and Daryl took their seats at the table and produced character sheets, yellowed and smudged with twenty-year-old erase marks, stuffed inside protective plastic paper holders made for three-ring binders.

“You still have them?” I could feel heat rising in my cheeks.

“Yup,” they said in unison.

The characters had been drawn on legal pads. The yellow, lined paper took the hue of canary piss now, but the sheets had been well-preserved. And from the looks of it, the stats had been lovingly retraced often enough that the lead hadn’t faded.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Brian entered the room, his shoulders almost too wide for the bathroom doorjamb. “Let’s go to town first and get some wenches.”

Everyone laughed and got up for more hugs.

All this goddamn hugging. I made a quick finger survey and found rings on the left hand of each man. Then the hugging made sense, or at least could be explained.

I could practically hear them saying that gaming was the process, the journey, not the prize at the end.

Gentrification. That was the word that came to my mind. Don’t know why. But I wanted to slap some gentrification off some faces.

But I kept my cool and gave Brian one of those half-hug things. His back mooshed in when I squeezed him. I used to be afraid of him. Man, do things change.

“Everyone sit,” Gary called. “Let’s see if we can recreate it all. How many of you remember the sequence?”

“Are you kidding?” Daryl asked, flipping his character sheet over. “It’s still here.”

Everyone inclined close to look. In all caps, he’d scrawled it at the top of his weapons list: Stormbringer. Elric’s sword. A nightmare of a weapon if you came up against it in battle. A relic, really. And a preposterous thing for a few fools to game for.

But we had, and of course Gary had seen to it that we defeated Elric and took his blade. The start of an auspicious quest for everyone to hunt down their favorite special item or weapon. Manipulating the dice. Neglecting the actual mechanics of the world we were playing in. Tromping around like demigods when we were really just ninth-level hack-and-slash artists.

Except for me.

I read those manuals over and over, creating authenticity to my play. I built new spells with logic and study (even then) that Gary mostly laughed about before pulling a chit and telling me the whole thing failed.

“Your ship is coming into the harbor,” Gary said, setting the stage. “A black ship is moored to a dock. It looks… otherworldy.”

I have to admit some tingling crept up my back. I loved this shit.

“We’re going to board,” Daryl called.

“Of course, this is your quest.” I tried to play down the bitterness with a smile.

“Don’t join in if you don’t want to,” Daryl shot back. “For Chrissakes, we’re just having a little fun.”

“Is that what we’re doing…”

No one responded to that; Gary was already calling out the opposing layout. “Two men arrears.” (Like that meant any fuckin’ thing.) “Two in the nest above. Six on the deck. And a man clad in black at the bow. His sword is glinting in the moonlight.”

“Stormbringer.” They all said it like a Greek chorus whispering the name Oedipus.

“We need light to battle, none of us are elves,” Floyd called. “Quick.” He pointed at me. “Light spell.”

I rolled the dice and failed, but Gary allowed the light anyway… in the interest of the recreation.

“The deck flashes, streaks of light illuminating the decks and the ready faces of your foe.”

Who talks like that…

“And one who has begun an incantation near the mast.”

“Silence spell, man, now!”

I rolled again. Ironically, this time I made the roll. But again, in the interest of recreation, Gary kept things historically accurate.

“You’ve just pissed off an eighteenth-level magic user, dude.” And he giggled. “His hands are rising in the light of your spell.”

“Guys, hit him with something, fail out his spell!”

Their silence came the same way it had twenty years ago. I stood on that black deck in the dark night under a moon and the light of my own goddamn spell… alone.

“You’re going to let me fight alone?”

“It’s the quest that matters,” Daryl replied. “While you distract him, we’re boarding in the dark up the ship, closer to Elric. We made our stealth rolls.”

And that’s when eighteen months of role playing Gareth the Young, my first serious character, came to an end. Storm clouds gathered above the mast and lightning flared down out of the sky as the mutterings of the wizard I’d failed to lock began to end.

“Hold it! I have a new spell,” I yelled, before Gary could call my damage.

Confused expressions lit the faces of my party. I paused long enough to enjoy that before proceeding.

“How about this?” I said, and pulled some twigs from my bag.

“I don’t remember this being part of it,” Gary said.

I smiled at that and tossed the sticks at Daryl and Trent. As they tumbled in the air, I muttered a few things and watched the sticks lengthen, fatten, and begin to writhe… and rattle.

Slack jaws and wide eyes grew as hands and arms shot up to protect their faces. It happened pretty fast, but I think they each took four or five bites. “It’s a fucking game!” they were yelling, as they scrambled out the door.

I never heard their motors start, so I’m thinking good thoughts there.

Brian, of course, wasted little time coming right through the table at me. “You’re an asshole!” he shouted. “Just a crybaby pouter over a stupid magic-user character. Did you ever wonder why we let you take the fall for Stormbringer…” A shit-eating grin curled in the pinched face barreling down on me.

As my chair began to topple back, I fished the fireball jawbreaker from my bag and made one easy motion toward Brian’s chest. Heat scorched out from my palm in a blast, singeing the hair on my knuckles and wrist and venting in a lateral geyser, slamming Brian back against the far wall. I hadn’t planned it, but Floyd got caught in the blast. Good fortune.

Their bodies dropped in a flaming heap, the smell of burning flesh already thick in the small room. I took a bit of delight in seeing Daryl and Trent’s character sheets as so much melted plastic and ash.

That’s when I looked over at Gary, hiding behind his Dungeon Master screen. There emblazoned on the two trifolds were matrixes for hits and damage and terrain movement, and they quaked with the fear of a bald DM. The guy who hadn’t had the balls to call his players on their ethics when they’d left me to die twenty years ago so they could take possession of a fucking sword.

I mean, for godssakes, Gary was a school counselor, even then. He should have known better, right? The whole idea of role playing is to better the self. To rise to heroic action you can’t sustain in real life. Didn’t they get that? Even now. Didn’t they just fucking get it?