Page 43 of Looking for Group

As the band stepped onto the third floor of the ill-fated house, the half-rotten floorboards creaked ominously beneath them.

“Evil is here,” whispered Torin. Mail-clad and grim-faced, he was toying nervously with a holy symbol slung around his neck. “Some malign presence hangs over this whole building, and we will not be able to leave until it is purged.”

Beside him, his bodyguard—a statuesque woman named Anja—nodded silently.

“Why must you always speak of purging ?” asked Ethramir, tall and serene in his magister’s robes. “This is not some morality play. There is magic at work here, malign certainly but no less comprehensible for it.”

Twitching her tail impatiently, Sharwyn glared at her less materialistically motivated companions.

“Less talking,” she said. “More looking for useful stuff.” Without waiting for further commentary, she crossed the ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot landing and pressed her ear against a nearby door. “Nothing.”

“Still,” Ethramir told her, “you should be cautious.”

In silence, Anja nodded.

With an impatient huff, Sharwyn glanced over her shoulder at her companions and then slipped a long, slim piece of metal from somewhere about her person and began carefully probing the floor tiles and the doorhandle, just on the off chance that somebody had set up a trip wire or a pressure plate.

When she was satisfied they hadn’t, she swung the door open and peered inside, relying on her infernal heritage to let her eyes pierce the darkness.

“Storage room. Nothing but sheets, blankets. A few old bars of soap.”

“Then we move on,” Torin insisted. “There are unquiet spirits to be laid to rest and—”

But Sharwyn was already slipping into the gloom of the storage room. “Wait, there might be something further back.”

A weathered broomstick lay propped against one wall, cobwebs clinging to it and concealing…what?

Outside, the party gathered closer. Anja, unspeaking, drew her two-handed greatsword from the scabbard across her back. Turning his hand in a gesture of mystical power, Ethramir conjured a tiny ball of light, so that his human companions could see what was happening.

Still moving cautiously, Sharwyn used her thieves’ tools to lift aside the cobwebs so she could see what lay beneath. But the moment she did, the broom twisted and, seized by some unholy will inherent to that terrible place, lashed out at the unsuspecting rogue.

Its first attack caught her sharply across the temple but its second—by luck or malice or fell influence—was still more brutal, spearing her full in the throat and sending her sprawling to the floor, blood bubbling from between her lips.

***

“No!” Bjorn slapped a hand on Tiff’s dining table in frustration. “No, the Mighty Bjorn does not die to a piece of…of irate kitchen furniture.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Jacob reassuringly. Or as reassuringly as he could manage while also smirking. “It’s hard to actually die in this edition.”

Tiff gave an evil grin over the top of the DM’s screen.

“Now that sounds like a challenge.” Reaching down, she moved the little cocktail stick she was using to represent the evil broom over Sharwyn’s prone figure and placed it between her and the door.

“You’ve got until she fails three death saves.

Assuming the broom doesn’t finish the job quicker. ”

As Drew’s first introduction to the world of tabletop roleplaying games, this was turning out to be a bit of a baptism of fire.

With Kit’s help he’d rolled a Human Fighter because that seemed simplest and closest to the kind of gameplay he liked, although he’d quickly come to realise that “tanking” wasn’t a thing in D&D, which had taken some getting used to.

What was taking even more getting used to was the mental double load of thinking tactically about the Extremely Dangerous Broom Situation while also trying to imagine that he was actually inhabiting a fantasy haunted house.

It was much easier when there was a computer to do the atmosphere for you, although Tiff had done her best with candlelight and mood music.

“You’re up, Drew,” Tiff reminded him. “What’re you doing?”

Drew’s gaze flickered over the board. “I can’t go past the broom, right?”

“No.” And then, anticipating his next question, Tiff added, “And while the official rules are a bit vague about this, I am going to rule that the rest of the party can’t shoot over your shoulder in a five-foot-wide storage closet.”

That wasn’t great news, but it could have been worse. “But I can move-attack-move?”

***

Unspeaking, Anja danced forwards to engage the malevolent broomstick, swinging her greatsword down and around in an arc that didn’t make complete sense in the confined quarters.

Which might have explained why she missed.

Not wanting to keep her companions from making their own contributions to the battle, she fell back at once, and although the broom took the opportunity to attack her as she did so, she was too nimble for it and its strike went wild.

From outside the storage room, Ethramir drew once more on his arcane power, and sent a bolt of flame hurtling into the darkness where it vanished harmlessly, claiming only a few cobwebs and some unlucky spiders as casualties.

***

“Stop using cantrips!” cried Bjorn. “I’m going to die—this is no time to get stingy with spell slots.”

Jacob—who Drew had been surprised to find looked way younger than he’d expected for an about-fifty-year-old, with bright, kind eyes and only a smattering of grey in his beard—gave Bjorn a look. “We’re level one. I have two spells, and one of them is Sleep.”

Bjorn clutched at his hair. “Why did you bring Sleep to a Ravenloft game? The only enemies that matter will be undead.” He glared around the table. “This whole party is full of noobs!”

***

Sharwyn continued to cough up blood as if trying to speak or—possibly—trying to rant angrily. As she lay there, bleeding her third-to-last, Torin appeared, standing just five feet away from the deadly cleaning implement. He raised his hand and…waited.

***

“The fuck, Kit?” sputtered Bjorn, sounding a little bit like he’d been jabbed in the throat with a broom himself. “Fucking heal me.”

“Typical DPS.” Drew rolled his eyes playfully. “You should know better.”

With his usual instinct for staying on the right side of dickhead, Bjorn wound it in just slightly. “Okay, you’re right. But actually I do want to know why you’re holding your action.”

Kit gave Bjorn a wicked smile. “We wouldn’t be able to have this conversation in character.”

“You utter bastard.”

***

Sensing confusion, but driven by an otherworldly urge to kill, the broom renewed its attack on Sharwyn’s helpless body, thwacking its handle down across her ribs with a sound like a watermelon bouncing off a kitchen cabinet.

***

“Sorry,” said Jacob, “a sound like what?”

“A watermelon bouncing off a kitchen cabinet,” repeated Tiff.

Jacob looked perplexed. “Is that a sound you hear a lot?”

“Honestly”—Tiff gave an awkward half-smile—“I might just be getting hungry. I do actually have some watermelon out back if somebody wants to grab it.”

Bjorn stood up theatrically. Unlike Jacob, he’d looked exactly like Drew had expected, tall and Nordic with wavy shoulder-length hair that definitely read Viking. “I’ll get it. After all, I’m just lying around bleeding anyway.”

“Okay, now I cast Healing Word.”

“It’s funny, Kit.” Bjorn settled back down in his seat. “I didn’t think you were the trolling type.”

Drew didn’t think Kit was the trolling type either and he knew Kit really, really well.

He also knew games, and he’d just worked out what was going on.

“He’s not trolling. If he’d healed you at the end of last turn, you’d have stood up and then the broom would have instantly knocked you down again.

This way it wastes its action and we get another round to try and deal with the damned thing. ”

***

Bloody but newly unbowed, Sharwyn rose and sneered at the broom. “All right you wooden son of a bitch. It’s payback time.”

Whipping her twin daggers from out of her boots, she drove one point-first into the haft of the broom and then, with the other, cut and wrenched and twisted until her wooden nemesis split in two, leaving nothing but dry sticks and broken enchantments scattering the otherwise empty floor of the storeroom.

***

“Oh yeah!” Bjorn was on his feet again doing a kind of victory dance. “Critical hit. On a sneak attack. And the offhand goes through as well. Nineteen damage baby.”

Drew frowned. “I still think it’s weird you can sneak attack something with no internal organs.”

“You couldn’t in third,” explained Jacob, stacking his own dice into a neat little pile. “But that made it really unfun to play a rogue in modules with a lot of undead enemies.”

“And look at how happy he is.” Kit nodded at Bjorn, who was still doing the dance of DPSer Joy. “Do you want to take that feeling away from him?”

Bjorn was still very much in his own world. “In your face, broom. In the face you don’t have because you’re a fucking domestic appliance.”

“Much evil still lurks here,” said Kit in a passable middle-aged-cleric voice. And Bjorn, who was never to be outdone when it came to taking nerd shit seriously, sat down at once and snapped back into character.

***

“No shit,” said Sharwyn. “What was your first clue? Was it when the evil broom nearly killed me ?”

Ethramir gazed at his companions over steepled fingers. “This is a place of wicked enchantment. We would be wise to expect more such tricks.”

There were three more doors leading off the landing, one directly to the party’s left, another two around a short five-foot-wide corridor.

Striding confidently ahead of her companions, Sharwyn set off into the dark, her daggers in a reverse grip.

“Well okay then.” She placed a hand on a set of double doors.

“Let’s see what wants to eat us through here. ”

***

They got most of that floor cleared before Bjorn and Jacob had to head back to their hotel while Kit and Drew sloped off to Tiff’s spare room.

“So,” asked Kit as they slipped into bed together. “How did you like your first taste of D&D?”

“It was good,” Drew replied, glad that he actually meant it. “Might take a bit of getting used to.”

“Yeah, it took me ages to get comfortable talking in character. And not everybody does. Jacob says that the examples of play in second edition used to make that really clear.”

Drew stretched himself out on the bed and let Kit curl against his chest like a really well-animated vanity pet. “The problem-solving aspect is good, though. Like there’s a lot more of a…” He waved a hand.

“A what-would-I-do-if-this-was-real feeling?”

“Yeah.”

Kit nodded. “That’s what I like about it, I think. It scratches a different itch from raiding.”

It was late, and using his imagination so much had left Drew even more tired than he’d usually be, so he just made a sort of mm-hmm noise and left it at that.

“If you really enjoyed it, Tiff was saying we could continue the campaign online.”

“Don’t you need minis and that?”

Kit was playing absent-mindedly with the front of Drew’s T-shirt.

This one had cartoon pictures of Marie and Pierre Curie and the slogan Is it love or toxic radiation?

Baby it’s both but who cares? “According to Jacob, no. And according to Tiff, there’s websites that will sort that stuff out for you.

I was thinking it might be a nice thing to do especially if… ”

The if sort of hung there. “If I’m not in Leicester next year?” Drew finished.

He felt Kit nodding against his chest. “Unless…unless you want to make it a clean break?”

“Hey.” Drew slid himself into a sitting position so quickly that Kit almost tumbled out of bed. “Nobody’s breaking anything.” A horrible thought occurred to him. “I mean. I’m not breaking anything if you’re not.”

“Nonono.” Kit seemed as panicked as Drew felt which, honestly, was pretty normal for them. “I just mean. Like. I’d understand if you want to go meet other people when you’re off…”

“Off having no idea what I’m doing with my life?”

“Off doing whatever great thing you wind up doing once you’ve taken a bit to, y’know, apply for jobs and stuff.”

Kit’s unyielding faith in Drew was sweet, but Drew wasn’t entirely convinced that a degree in game art design from a former polytechnic was actually going to put him into the setting-the-world-on-fire place Kit thought it would.

“I suppose the nice thing about having no real direction is that I’m not in a major rush to go somewhere else. ”

Having survived his near-debedding, Kit had recovered and was sitting opposite Drew now with a serious look on his face. “Drew, you’re only just old enough to drink in the States. Nobody actually has direction at our age.”

“You do.”

“I don’t, I’m just doing a Master’s so I can go another year without thinking about it.”

Something about that made Drew laugh. “You’re right. Guess we’re both still losers who have no idea what we’re doing.”

“See, isn’t that comforting?”

It was, in a way. And perhaps to distract himself, perhaps to distract them both, and maybe just to let him know quite how comforting he’d been, Drew leaned over to Kit and kissed him.

They’d been together two years now but kissing Kit was still special.

Everything about Kit was still special. The way he felt.

The way he tasted. The way he talked and thought.

Occasionally Drew would think back on how close he’d come to missing out on that, just because of what his friends might have said, and it made him feel a little bit small and scared.

“Whatever happens,” Kit whispered in his ear, “we’ll work it out.”