THE MUDDLED MYSTERY OF THE MURDERED MUSE, Chapter 30: The Loaded Die
The Muddled Mystery of the Murdered Muse is a full-length novel, presented to you in Medium-sized chapters twice a week (Tuesday and Friday), that tells the story of Sebastian Holden, a paranoirmal investigator who solves the strangest cases this side of Jersey City and Brooklyn.
If you missed the previous chapter, read it here; if you’ve already read this chapter, read the next one here.
CHAPTER 30: THE LOADED DIE
The dice rolled that night as they do every Friday night at the abode of Matt Roller. The Funyuns were half in a bowl, half on the table from multiple grab-and-stuff strategies as each of the five players and their player characters calculated their remaining hit points after a particularly gruesome battle with a doppler beast.
I was still in the watching phase, though unknown to Gregory Maxwell, our DM, I had played Dungeons & Dragons for five straight years. That’s five years of my acne-scarred and sexless adolescent life gone south for a set of dice and my own sordid imagination. I even had an amazing night with a drow princess in the town of Elvendorf, which marked the summit of my sexual encounters between the ages of twelve and sixteen.
So what was I doing here on a Friday night hanging out with this fine batch of DragonLancers?
There was one player in their midst, playing as a ranger, wielding two swords and sporting a dexterity of eighteen. To attack with two swords while coming down for a landing after leaping eight feet into the damp air, you have to roll two d20s during a battle. Which means you have a chance to hit the orc or other monster with a possibility of inflicting some serious damage. And based on a somewhat complicated mathematics that only scientists and Dungeon Masters fully comprehended, you needed to get a score of sixteen or higher to even hit your foe.
Well, this guy, this ranger –– he always hit his foe.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but he always seemed to score a forty-two, despite the fact that the highest you could possibly score on rolling two twenty-sided dice was forty.
Matt Roller –– The Dice Man himself –– also sat by and simply watched like an old sage in the corner of the kitchen table, analyzing the ranger’s every move, weighing it against his own charisma of six, dividing it by his strength and hoping that when the shit hit the fan he could count on this ranger’s low constitution to kick in and keep him from escaping the apartment, let alone the dungeon they were all trying to escape from in this particular module, which was actually created by Gregory Maxwell himself, who would one day go one to become a legend.
See, it seemed as though the majority of these players gathered around this vintage marble-top kitchen table were under some sort of spell to allow this ranger and what I believed must be a pair of loaded dice to keep rolling and racking up the levels and the hit points. The only two who didn’t seem fully hypnotized to this were yours truly and The Dice Man.
And at the same moment I realized this, out the corner of my eye, I felt the Ranger’s head lift up from his latest calculations and turn to look in my direction.
When I looked over at him, he was staring right at me. Right into my eyes, and the last thing that popped into my head were the eyes of no Doctor T.J. Eckleburg from The Great Gatsby, but the eyes of Bela Lugosi from White Zombie.
And that’s all that I remember of that night, until…
>> Continue reading: Chapter 31: …The Next Morning >>
