Interlude: Outside
Melanie arrived at Tyrone’s house for the Sunday gaming session. Standing on the doorstep, she watched a trail of her breath rise into the damp air. She tucked the heavy map of Gamearth wrapped in an old blanket under her arm. It had begun to drizzle outside, and she did not want the wood or the paint to get wet.
Melanie was surprised to find herself the last one to show up. Normally David came late just to annoy them, but this time he appeared anxious, as if he knew exactly what he wanted to do. That worried her.
David’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked tired—Melanie wondered if he had been sleeping well, or if he had been plagued by nightmares.
She greeted everyone as Tyrone returned from the refrigerator carrying a round of sourdough bread. The bread’s center had been hollowed out and filled with a white and green coagulated mass.
“Leek, spinach, and feta cheese dip,” Tyrone said.
Scott frowned at the loaf and straightened his glasses. “I thought you were kidding when you told us that.”
Tyrone set down a plate of bread chunks he had cut from the middle of the loaf. “It’s good—try it. Have I ever let you down?”
“Yes,” Melanie and Scott said in unison.
“Oh, just try it.”
David sounded gloomy when he spoke. “Are you sure we want to keep playing?” Melanie caught an undercurrent of hesitation in his voice. She didn’t even feel like speaking to him. He made her frightened and angry at the same time.
She uncovered the map, draping the damp blanket on a chair. The blue line of the Barrier River stood out like a scar, reminding them what had happened the week before.
“What’s going to happen this week?” he asked. “Are you sure you’re not afraid?”
“I’m not afraid,” Melanie said.
Scott could barely keep his eyes off the blue line that had appeared by itself the week before. “I’m not afraid really, either.” He frowned. “But I’m very curious to see if anything else happens.”
“We pretty much finished up Mel’s adventure last week, with the dragon being killed and all,” Tyrone said. “What are we going to start with?”
“There’s more to the adventure than that,” David said.
“A lot more.” Melanie realized she had snapped at him.
“Come on, guys. Make nice.” Scott kept his voice down, then caught himself.
“I’m going to send my characters on a quest to the east,” Melanie said. “Delrael, Vailret, and Bryl—the usual bunch.”
“For what? What are they going to do?” David asked.
“They have to find out about that Scartaris monster you sent against them. No better way than to go there themselves.”
“I’ll squash them. I’ve got so much to put in their way.”
Melanie stiffened. “Yes, but you can’t know they’re coming unless one of your characters encounters them. By the rules. Just because you know what’s going on yourself, David, doesn’t mean your characters will know.”
She tapped her fingers together. “And speaking of that, I want to introduce a new character tonight. It’s a golem.” She looked at the map, but in the bright light over the kitchen table she could not tell which hexagon she had repainted. “I’m going to have him encounter my characters in Tyrone’s section.”
“You can’t just do that!” David stood up.
“Why not? She hasn’t introduced anybody new in a long time.” Tyrone took a sip of his soda. “And we’ve never played a golem character before.”
“I rolled all the details already. Here’s a printout of his statistics.” Melanie passed around a sheet of paper with numbers jotted down in columns. “His name is going to be Journeyman.”
“You should do that when we’re around.” David frowned at the paper, the numbers.
Melanie made a disgusted sound. “Come on, David. I’m just saving us time. You think I’m trying to cheat or something? Look at the scores.”
“I think a golem would be neat,” Tyrone said.
Apparently seeing he wouldn’t win any arguments on the subject, David shrugged. “Doesn’t matter you know. Not against Scartaris.”
“It might,” Melanie said with a slight smile and looked at the map in the light, tracing the line of the Barrier River, the sections of terrain between her characters and David’s ruined portion of Gamearth. She hoped her plan would work.
She distributed new printouts of the log sheets. She kept track of every week’s game in her father’s computer. Over the years she had compiled a three-ring binder, a book-length journal of all their games and adventures.
They glanced at the new pages and shuffled them aside, except Scott stopped, picked up his copy, and stared down at it. “Hey, when did that happen, Mel?”
“What?”
David blinked at his printout and turned pale. He pressed his jaws together.
Tyrone looked at Melanie’s copy as he reached for his dip. “This says that Bryl’s got the Fire Stone. And what’s this? ‘Enrod came to destroy the land with the Fire Stone. He tried to cross the Barrier River on a raft and was stopped by the return of the Deathspirits, who cursed him to journey back and forth across the River forever. They presented his Fire Stone to Tareah, who gave it to Bryl in his quest.’ Interesting, Mel, but … well, shouldn’t we have played it?”
Everyone looked at Melanie. She blinked her eyes, baffled. “But … this isn’t something I wrote up at all.”
Scott made his mouth a straight line. “Nobody else has access to your Dad’s computer, Melanie.”
David sighed and put both elbows on the table. He looked pale and afraid. “Of course it happened that way! You know it’s right.” He stared at them, then shook his head. “Didn’t you guys dream it? It was so vivid I woke up sweating.
“I could see Enrod. I could hear what he was thinking about blasting all the trees around the Stronghold, and building his raft and crossing the River.” Sweat appeared on his forehead; he brushed it away in impatience. “And those big black hooded things coming up and yelling doom and gloom at him and taking away the Fire Stone. You had to dream the same thing.”
“I don’t remember my dreams,” Scott said.
Tyrone scratched his cheek below his ear. “You know, now that you mention it, I do remember something like that. And it was weird because it wasn’t me in the dream. Yeah, I remember it now.”
Melanie recalled the dream too, like a vivid slap in the face. “There’s more going on here than I thought.” She felt a perplexed hope, but she didn’t know what to do with it. “If the Deathspirits came back, what about the Earthspirits?”
Scott pursed his lips. Melanie watched him; he became very uncomfortable when he didn’t know how to explain things. “Wait a minute—I thought we decided not to play the Spirits. They were gone for good because they were too much for us to handle.”
“The game is starting to play itself,” David insisted. “It’s coming alive. It’s out of control. This is reality—” he slapped a palm on the tabletop. Their glasses of soda and the dice jingled on the table.
“We have to stop it!” The urgency in his voice was frightening. “Let’s all agree, all right?” David’s eyes pleaded with them. “We can try a trivia game or something if you still want to keep meeting on Sunday nights. Let’s just stop this game.”
Melanie swallowed hard and drew herself up. In annoyance, she flicked her hair behind her ear.
“If it’s truly coming alive, David, then it’s a wonderful, magical thing. Something here is greater than we ever dreamed of. We have no right to kill it.”
She snatched the dice on the table. “Let’s get started.”
***