"I don"t understand!"
I have to raise my voice to be heard above the rushing of the world. "One good master, ages ago, wished for you to have a wish of your own. Do you remember?"
She frowns in thought, then nods. "That was a very long time ago."
"Being a genie, you would ask for nothing for yourself, but he insisted. Unwilling to make a selfish choice, you put off the decision. You wished for one wish that you could call upon later, when you needed it most."
Magda smiles. "And you are that wish?"
"I am." Reality spins so fast around us, it is a blur of color and motion. I know that my work is almost done. "I waited for centuries for you to call on me, and you never did. I lived many lives, staying as close to you as I could, watching and waiting. Finally, I decided it was time for me to step in and give you a push."
Magda touches her belly. "So you really can help us."
"You have asked for what you need, and I will grant it. I will set you and your child free."
"Free." Magda says it like she"s tasting it, like it"s the first time she"s ever spoken. "Free from Rudolph Gunza?"
"Free from all masters. Free to go where you want and do as you choose." I shoot her a grin and a wink. "Free to start a new life with your child."
Magda wipes a tear from her eye. She removes the veil from her face and kisses me on the cheek with lips like tender plums. "Thank you, my wish."
"My pleasure," I tell her. "You deserve to be happy."
"I only wish I could help you in return."
My fingers ache as I weave the last glittering sigils. "You can"t. No more magic for you." I shrug. "But it"s not all it"s cracked up to be, is it?"
"Sometimes it is." Magda hugs me. "I"ll never forget you."
"Then there you go." I finish weaving the new world and wrap my arms around her. "I will get my wish after all."
We squeeze each other tight as the world spins around us. A single tear crosses my face as I cease to be, dissolving into glittering gold dust that curls skyward like a puff of smoke from a dying lamp.
RPG Reunion.
by Peter Orullian.
I learned magic was possible the day I toured Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor.
Ten years before I get this stupid-s.h.i.t invite to see the old gang. Came by courier. As if that harkened back to medieval communication or something.
I was on my graduation trip. I think mostly we were in Boston because we thought the bar for Cheers was a real d.a.m.n place. That, and Salem sat just up the road a piece. Easy drive to where they hanged and pressed some nice folks because they wanted their land. No magic going on there-I did the research.
Anyway, I"m on the underside of Old Ironsides (the oldest commissioned ship in the United States Navy), and the tour guide tells us that the ship used to carry the wives of officers, and that when they were in battle and shooting off their cannons, the pregnant ones sometimes went into labor. Thus, "son of a gun," as the saying goes.
At the time, I was mostly doing sessions of Traveler-a pretty good role playing game. (After it all went down with the old gang, I couldn"t even do speed sessions of D &D. Too much baggage.) But when I heard the term "son of a gun," something got into me. Like, maybe kernels of truth live inside the old sayings. Made me think that the notion of magic was just too pervasive to be pa.s.sed off as a geeky game played by pasty-faced youths when they"d finished their calculus a.s.signments.
So I went to Rome.
Took me four years of nonstop study to ferret out the real stuff on magic. Bypa.s.sed college and all that nonsense in favor of a parking job that gave me hours to read (if no real compensation).
Turns out magic, for the most part, descends from religious things. Not in the way you"re thinking though. Not like transubstantiation to feed the ma.s.ses or the regeneration of cells to wake the dead. It"s more like Lucas"s Force. Kind of sapping the inert life in things, calling forth the idea from the form. You could say Aristotle was onto something.
Point is, a group calling themselves a.s.sinians professed to teach from texts the true method of drawing the idea from the form and using that "energy" (for want of another term) on the next guy.
They"re a cultish bunch, the a.s.sinians. More like gypsies than ecclesiastics, roaming the dark hills some eighty miles north of Rome. Lots of lamps at night and star charting.
I spent six months with them. Cashed in my trust; gave half to the Primero (he liked to call himself that) that led the tribe, and used the rest to eat and get laid. ("Fraid I haven"t gotten better looking since the old days, either.) But I don"t regret it.
Not a minute.
I learned real magic. G.o.d"s honest truth.
Problem was, turns out magic is mostly about offense. It"s not meditation for self-improvement, it"s not defensive bulls.h.i.t like karate. It"s commanding things to inflict damage. I suppose it would require a revision of all editions of D &D.
But that"s just a game.
And then I get this invitation: "RPG Reunion" it says.
Like they"ve forgotten what the h.e.l.l happened. How the Sat.u.r.day Night sessions came to an end. Friggin" idiots.
Though, to be fair, that night was what sent me on the quest for the real thing.
So, there was just one thing to do: Get my artifacts.
The reunion was being held in Cedar City, Utah. Our old dungeon master wound up doing stage combat ch.o.r.eography and a few creative writing work-shops out of CSU (Central Southern University), renowned for its Shakespeare festival every summer.
Just like him to make us all travel to where he lives.
And it left me just a few weeks to conceive my spells and determine what physical items I needed in order to give those spells life. You see, the whole idea of combat spells (spells without material components) is bunk; every spell requires a material component. And as I"ve said, the whole notion of innocuous spells just doesn"t exist in the real world. I think they are fanciful ideas: read languages, purify water, shield. Why bother? Really?
So, in the end, it wasn"t hard to figure out what I needed. I hit a deli, a candy shop, and the maple tree behind my house. I figured that would do it.
Gary looked the same. Opened the door with a big-a.s.s grin tucked into his neatly trimmed beard-now spotted with silver. Still looked as though he polished his head. He took me into a bear hug, which I thought kind of weird, given how it all ended. But I could bide my time.
"Good to see you, man." He took my coat and dropped it on the sofa beside the door. "d.a.m.n, you haven"t aged a bit."
"I know." I nodded, distracted already by three cardboard tables laid end to end and strewn with all the fixin"s for a night of gaming. a.s.shole meant to actually have us play.
I wheeled around to lay into him, when the screen pulled wide again and let in Trent and Daryl. Fine sons-a-b.i.t.c.hes both. Fighter and thief who managed to vanish when s.h.i.t started hitting fans twenty years gone now.
Everybody was hugging, and I turned to look back at the table, which (by G.o.d) had not just dice, but chits. Can you believe it? Original box chits-you pick one and turn it to get your number.
I wanted to vomit.
Last to come was Floyd. I could smell the bakery on him from the door. Loser had been working nights scrubbing pans, prepping trays, and knifing croissants for twenty years now. I hope he had a union, otherwise his career path could surely be mapped to minimum wage increases.
They all pa.s.sed by, giving me firm handshakes and half-shoulder hugs. I kept the grimace off my face, I think.
That"s when Gary formally announced the reunion: "Gentleman," he said, trying to sound cute and semi-formal, "it"s been twenty years. And I think a trip down memory lane is in order before we get to the food and beer."
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 d.i.c.k 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 d.a.m.ndest 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 p.i.s.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 demiG.o.ds 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 s.h.i.t.
"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 f.u.c.kin" 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 p.i.s.sed 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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.