Crime Spells

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-shit 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 damn 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 passed off as a geeky game played by pasty-faced youths when they’d finished their calculus assignments.

So I went to Rome.

Took me four years of nonstop study to ferret out the real stuff on magic. Bypassed 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 masses 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 Assinians 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 Assinians. 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. God’s honest truth.

Problem was, turns out magic is mostly about offense. It’s not meditation for self-improvement, it’s not defensive bullshit 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 hell happened. How the Saturday 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 choreography 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-ass 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. “Damn, 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. Asshole 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-bitches both. Fighter and thief who managed to vanish when shit started hitting fans twenty years gone now.

Everybody was hugging, and I turned to look back at the table, which (by God) 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 passed 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 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?

I did.

I spent a lifetime making it real.

And someone had to be accountable.

Someone had to do the accounting.

Reunion, indeed. Everyone just the same as twenty years ago… until I was through with them.

I pushed the screens down and caught a sheen off Gary’s sweaty forehead. “Ain’t so funny this time, is it, pal? I mean, what the hell was that, you having a character in the damn party. Everyone knew you were angling for Mourne Blade, sister sword to Stormbringer. You can’t do both, man! You can’t play and DM. You’re either in or out. You’re either playing or making it happen!”

“You’re not talking about a game anymore, are you? We can talk about that.”

“Save the counsel, Gary. The semester of psych won’t work on me. Maybe your twelfth graders, but I graduated from that business twenty years ago…”

Gary sat frozen for a long time, his eyes darting back and forth like a rabbit in a trap. Loved that. Then he asked, “What do you want?”

I knew he was stalling, but I also wanted to tell him. And besides Brian’s burning body, there wasn’t anything else to be distracted by, so I let it out. “I wanted you to take it seriously, man! No bullshit pacts with members of the party. You were supposed to be above that!”

“But-”

“You sold me out!”

That’s when I pulled the deli toothpicks from my bag. The ones with the little frayed ends, used to hold large sandwiches in place.

Like little arrows, they are.

I didn’t really notice Gary’s pleas. That’s typical, I imagine, of those receiving a reckoning, right: pleas. I’m pretty sure the Assinians told me that, too. The power of God manifest to men in the flesh was about reckoning-thus sinners wanting restitution when they think God’s a wink away.

So, he was blubbering something, his eyes darting again and again. And in the end, just as I called forth the most inane spell imaginable to put an end to the miserable son-of-a-bitch, I think his face was less concerned with dying and more with something he was looking at.

Magic missile.

Three arrow ‘’ideas” pulled from smaller forms lit the room and air and dove into Gary’s face and chest. He gurgled a bit as he fell to the floor. I believe he flopped once or twice with indignity.

Liked that, too.

And that’s when the first of two things happened.

As I stood and looked down at Gary’s body, feeling vindication at last, I felt my vision tug around to the place he’d been spying as he prepared to die.

Peering around the entry to the kitchen were two small faces, both agonized and wanting to run to their father, both afraid to enter the room, frozen in their pain and fear.

I hadn’t known Gary was a dad.

I felt the pain of it hit me. A goddamn game. Old Ironsides. Revenge pushing me to Rome and a hundred nights in a dark forest reading and studying the ancient ritual for calling the form from the artifact to impose my will on another.

Lusts in the body and the blood that might have lain dormant until this friggin’ reunion.

It was just a stupid sword.

Why did I care?

Before I could answer, the second thing (the last thing) happened that night.

Dave showed up.

The screen opened slowly-he must have seen Daryl and Trent out on the lawn somewhere-screeching on its hinge. And when he stepped inside, I smiled in spite of myself.

Seeing me standing over Gary’s body, he asked in a calm voice, “What the hell happened here?”

“A bit of vengeance a long time in the coming.”

Dave looked down at the two kids, who immediately ran for the safety of his strong legs.

It took him only a moment to put it together. “All because of a sword?”

“Your character was asleep, but I think you’d have stopped it. Paladins are Lawful Good.”

Which was why I smiled and what made it so ironic that Dave should come late again, tonight. Somewhere along the way, he’d made his own transition from fantasy to reality in the form of a Utah State Patrolman.

And me without anything to do a Knock spell as Dave pulled out his cuffs.