Genre Systemic: Chapter One

Chapter One



For the first time in a long time we were able to game in peace; no temper tantrums and no hour-long tirades of ‘stump-the’storyteller-with-mindless-bullshit’—which had been Ricky’s favorite pastime. Admittedly, it was strange not having him around. He was like the kid brother that got foisted onto you when your mom was trying to do something important, a.k.a. sick of dealing with him and needing peace and quiet before sending the little brat off to military school unjustly.

“Shit.” Only after I’d gotten into my Jeep, started it, and shifted into first did I realize that my shiny new D&D book was on the coffee table. Debate: Leave it running for the two seconds it would take to grab the book or shut everything down and hope—pray—that my ancient steel trap’s engine would turn over again? The creek of my Jeep’s door handle was loud as I shoved at arm rest attached to the door and the cracked plastic door panel.  I realized too late that the smoothie which I’d just put between my legs was not housed in steel. In fact, the plastic cup and top burst since the force that I was putting on the door caused my leg muscles to tighten of their own volition. Great, now I look like I’ve just had a spontaneous abortion of the strawberry field variety. “Spec-fucking-tacular!” I screamed, only now seeing my very, very bible-thumping neighbor get out of her car. Her expression could have frozen all of the Pacific Ocean.

After muscling the door open, covered in amazingly cold, and now sticky, goo, I jumped down and sent her a cheery smile and wave. “Aunt Flo came to town! Now I don’t have to stop for lube!!!” I informed her, gesturing to my crotch before taking off at a slow pace, nearly dancing—I look awkward even swaying, so this had to be comical—up the sidewalk to my walkway.

The door of my apartment swung open as I heard the motor glug, loudly, three times and then die. Poor thing wasn’t going anywhere else today.

I cursed my luck and pulled out the cell phone from my messenger bag—neon green with unhappily phrased stickers plastered all over it. Speed dial #3 rang twice before a familiar voice came across the less-than-perfect connection; I rarely pay attention to the weather but this usually meant a storm was headed in our direction.

“Jeremy?” My voice came out more frustrated than normal when the guy on the other end pulled his usual crap of answering his phone, but not saying anything. Damned irritating. While I waited, the phone was set to cradle between shoulder and ear so that I could have both hands free to strip off and dispose of my horribly stained shorts and undies.

Finally… finally I heard his voice. ”Nnngh.” Helpful.

“Look… can I get a ride? Princess Rust Bucket croaked and…” That was as far as I got when I heard a set of keys jingling in the background at the other end of the line.

“You ready, Les?” Jeremy, our group’s pervert-of-doom questioned in a voice that either meant he’d just finished rubbing one out or had just woken up; or both. I shuddered at the thought of the former and then nodded before my brain came to the realization that we weren’t—thank all things holy—on any sort of video phone; I was just now pulling my legs through the holes of a clean pair of shorts.

“Nearly. See ya in a few.” The last word had barely escaped my lips before I saw the light on my cell phone’s face flick to life, signaling the end of our call. “Ass,” I grumbled half-heartedly. I’d have called anyone else but I was on Jeremy’s way to the abandoned church that Quincy had decided upon for our next session.  Sure, I could have walked, but the humidity would have me stinking like a buffalo before I got two blocks; B.O. was Dave’s niche, not mine.

Our group was known in the Garden District for a little light B&E when we thought we’d found the perfect gaming spot; something that really added to the mood of our LARP (that’s ‘live action role playing’ for the uninitiated) or tabletop games. I couldn’t argue with our storyteller’s most recent choice, having driven by the red brick building on Louisiana Avenue more than a few times over the last couple of days. The place still had electricity, which meant air conditioning due to the fact that the last work crew had neglected, as of yesterday, to shut the system down. Since it was Saturday, I seriously doubted that any workers would have been by today.

The familiar squeaks of Jeremy’s Camry intruded, alerting me to his arrival. A mirror hung near the front door, which I passed without a glance; I knew what I would see in that reflective surface if I did happen to take a look: Dark coppery hair that grew to a point beyond my shoulders, and to my chagrin, had not quite reached mid-back. It was uncontrollable in weather like this, but them’s the breaks when you have not-quite-curly hair. Bright brown eyes with nearly invisible eyelashes would stare back at me, pale skin that you could only catch glimpses of between the multitudes of freckles that covered me from head to toe. Today I’d note a dark navy tank top and black military BDU’s that’d been cut into shorts, and a pair of black Chucks with black socks peeking out of the high-top ankle. Sadly, the flat-soled Chucks did nothing to add to my regrettable height of five foot seven inches. Nor did they add length to my too-many-years-of-soccer-and-tree-climbing-muscled legs. I wasn’t bad to look at but the sight wasn’t anything that would get me onto a magazine cover anytime soon.

I grabbed my new book and shoved it into the brightly-colored bag, locked up behind me, and damn-near sprinted through the heavy air to the passenger side of the little gray Toyota. I wasn’t even in the car before I offered to help him replace his serpentine belt; the belt that, even now, was giving me a headache with its unrepentant squeals and chirps. If memory served, our vehicles were the only two that were constantly dying, causing us to pester rides out of each other on a regular basis. If I believed in the Fates, I’d be cursing them right about now.

Instead, I shifted my gaze from rear end of slow-moving SUV and looked over at my chauffeur. “I might get fired when my manager gets back from vacation tomorrow.”

This didn’t seem to surprise him, but he somehow sensed that it was leading into more than that single statement. Jeremy took the bait, “Oh? What’d you do this time? Drop Pocket Rockets into some old bat’s drink, again?”

Pocket Rocket day at Smoothie King was fun—and managed to get me suspended for two weeks. “It wasn’t ‘some old lady’, it was the infuriating neighbor that I just scared the fear of God into. But that’s a whole different story.”

Jeremy allowed a faint nod, a huge grin passing over his face. “I’ll bet.” He paused, nose wrinkling up. “Did you get into your little sister’s perfume stash? Gah. You stink like bad fruit!” Now, he looked over at me and shuddered.

“That, sir, goes along with the aforementioned story about the neighbor.” Of course, now that he’d mentioned it, I’d be smelling strawberries all night. How is it that my sister, goddess of all the bathroom supplies of the world, didn’t have baby wipes? Then again, I’d not done laundry in two weeks—dirty washcloths, anyone? “So, Mrs. Stern came in today…” I trailed off, wondering if the name would ring any bells for him. When it did, and I didn’t have to re-explain that she’d been the tight-assed wench who always refused to tip me via the nice little ‘tip’ line on her credit card slip, I was thankful that I didn’t have to reiterate the ongoing feud.

“Well, she breezes in reeking of—I know, I know, I can’t really cast stones stinking like a two week old farmer’s market spread, but—well, it was like white flowers had shat all over her. Anyway, she ordered the most time-consuming drink known to man and had a line forming behind her before she’d managed to get the first syllable out. Took me nearly six minutes to hand-pick, crush, mottle, blend, pour, and serve this craggy bitch’s drink. Then she wanted it re-blended with protein powder…” I took a breath and narrowed my eyes at the Saturday night traffic ahead of us that was likely moving toward Magazine Street.

“My jaw dropped. Seriously. It’s never been one of my expressions, but I just couldn’t seem to help it! Instead of pouring it over her head like I wanted to, I asked if she was actually going to tip me this time. She nodded so I turned around, dumped protein powder into the blender along with her drink, and hit ‘frappe’.”

“I set her drink on the counter and rang it up on the register, swiped the card she handed me, and gave her the slips and a pen. She started digging around in her purse, produced a penny, and dropped it on the counter while she grabbed her drink with her other hand.” Jeremy had been looking out the windshield, but now I noticed that he’d pulled over and was looking me in the face, obvious anticipation causing his fingers to steeple and his eyebrows to mirror them.

         “You know how you can ‘snap’ a coin?” I demonstrated by grabbing a dime from his center console. My fingers poised like I was going to snap them for the sound, my other hand hand placing the dime at the inner edge of my fingers where my thumb met my middle finger. I snapped and the dime whizzed and vibrated through the air to leave a dent on his already scarred dashboard. “Like that?” I asked. He nodded, grumbling a little about his car’s new wound, but still seemed interested in my story, so I continued.

         “I grabbed the penny off the counter and snapped it at the back of her damn head! Err. I missed, though, and managed to hit the window—it cracked.” His face stayed expressionless for just about a half a second before he doubled over laughing at me. “I know!” My now-whiny voice exclaimed. “Old bat ran as fast as she could; the rest of the customers pretty much followed her lead,” I said over his guffaws.

         I sighed then couldn’t help but laugh right along with him. “Think he’ll fire me tomorrow?” In reply, he shook his head, unable to speak seeing as how he was winded at this point, and lighting up a cigarette. He pulled slowly away from the curb; we drove the rest of way in near-silence. It was only ‘near-silence’ because he’d randomly let out a snicker in my general direction.





We found a spot about a half a block from the church on Chestnut Street. Gah, it was going to be one of those days: my smoothie, instead of being in my stomach, was coating shorts, undies, and interior of my Jeep. Thankfully, it wasn’t that big of a deal; I noticed Quincy’s awkwardly moving form nudge the back door of the church open with a toe, arms full with a mid-sized ice chest. A quick look around told me that the otherwise ever-present security must be up to something more important since they were nowhere in view. Jeremy and I glanced at each other, gathered our things, took another cursory glance up and down the street, and made a dash to the door that our storyteller had just vanished through.

The church—our church for tonight—was stripped down to almost nothing; the crews had gotten busy removing everything after the old church members had been taken away via police escort. It was almost sad that we were going to game in a place that hundreds of people had staged a sit-in protest to convince the church officials to keep the place open. But, that was the economy for you. Odd that the churches in the area had started closing before anything else was forced to. Well, maybe not…

I was snapped out of my thoughts when three other familiar voices crept into hearing range. Tabby was laughing quietly, politely, while Melissa’s higher-pitched giggles managed to redouble the headache caused by the Camry’s belts a few minutes ago. The amusement was surely caused by some strange story of Dave’s. Dave worked in a porn shop. This was not unusual for a city that was built on sex and booze, mind you, but our friend had been what many of us thought of as ‘an innocent’ before he’d had to start stocking shelves with vibrators and ‘pre-teen transgender Asian school girls’ magazines in order to supplement the financial aid and scholarships for college tuition.

Then again, as I pondered his six foot two inch slender frame, he’d always had the best fashion sense of the group; his dark, enviably curly hair was always styled just right; his skin always looked like he spent hours and hours doing home masks and the like, its pale coffee color the epitome of mixed-race—Jewish and black—perfection. Not that I thought Dave was hot, he looked unfinished to me, but I could appreciate what he might become.

Quincy looked up about the time that I did, his familiar face pinched in mild irritation as Melissa managed to crinkle an edge of the blanket that he spread over the surprisingly chilly floor. Instead of getting huffy over it, he turned his green-gray eyes toward the ice chest and started setting out everyone’s drink of choice. Our group had a relatively defined seating arrangement, and this helped our storyteller arrange the various cans without us being present on large, fleece-like quilt. An Italian soda, hold the cream, was produced from behind the ice chest. Quincy sipped on it for a couple seconds and raised a dark, thick eyebrow as he looked around and performed an unneeded headcount.

“Brady’s gonna be late. Again.” This from Tabby, our tall, dark-haired bookworm. Actually, her name is Tabitha. That’s not quite true, either. It’s Sylvan River Sage. Her parents were—are—hippies; Tabby chose ‘Tabitha’ when, upon reading her name on high school class rosters, teachers would inevitably make the ‘there will be no wearing of cloying perfumes in my class, especially things like patchouli’ comment while staring right at her. ‘Tabitha Sage’ sounds a little less hokey… err, hippy. Between her lanky form, well proportioned face, and dark blue eyes, Tabby could have gotten those magazine covers; she vastly preferred books, everything from Tolstoy to physics. “He’s staying late to talk to a parent of a kid that he allowed to ‘accidently’ get pummeled during one of his Aikido classes,” she offered to no on in particular before an unaccustomed smirk crossed her features,”If you ask me, the little shit had it coming.” Her dark tone was enough to have Dave blinking, Quincy near-snorting with held-back laughter, and Melissa staring abject horror.

Unfortunately, her Florence Nightingale-ness extends to people she’s never seen. Tender-hearted, that’s our Melissa. She’s about a month away from graduating from a nursing program offered by a local community college; the same one that I’d thought about going to in order to get my EMT certification. Even though she’s not the brightest or even close to the best looking of the group, she’s got the best heart. Seriously, in about twenty years, the resemblance between her and the Unsinkable Molly Brown—played by Kathy Bates in Titanic a bit over a decade ago—will be uncanny, both in body and mind. She looks like her and has the same stern mother-hen way about her. Melissa isn’t a small girl, truth be told, but she carries it well and compensates for her (lack of?) looks in other ways; most of those ‘ways’ directed at Quincy. Too bad our storyteller is quite oblivious when it comes to anything beyond the latest game creation meant to enrage us and make us think. He’s all about ‘team work’.

Jeremy took up his customary seat, directly across from Quincy, plucked his energy drink from where it sat, popped the top and took a healthy chug. Were I not used to it, bile would’ve risen in my throat at the liquid-sounding, guttural belch that followed. “Jeremy!” I exclaimed, eyeing him as I sat down with a space left between us for Brady. My perverted, uncouth friend shrugged and drained the rest of his can in a few swallows before motioning to Quincy for his inevitable bottle of water. My own bottle of juice looked horribly out of place amongst the caffeine-laden beverages of choice spread around. My shrug was the mirror of the one that my buddy had just given me as I turned my attention to the cranberry-flavored liquid in its glass bottle.

Quincy came to attention, for no reason that I could readily discern. ”We’re going to get some preliminary stuff out of the way. No doubt Brady will have ten different specialty items to run by me, so we may as well get through what we can of character generation.” With that, he pulled the usual pristine pack of character sheets from their sleeve and passed them around to those present, dropping an extra set on our missing member’s spot. I knew he’d say it eventually, but I’m impatient and had to ask. “System?” The character sheets were never a help since we’d all had a hand in designing them to be able to encompass nearly every one of our favorite tabletop systems. I’d have only been tipped off if he’d have handed out the sheets that our spells would go onto but since we wouldn’t be at that point of character generation for a while, I’d had to ask.

Eyes trained on the ST, it took all of my willpower to not tap my fingers on the jar of juice while he seemed to hesitate—was he trying to get on my nerves or was this repayment for me already getting onto his? It didn’t matter for longer, though, as we heard the sounds of our missing link’s muscle car jolting into a spot that sounded like it was actually in the church’s parking lot it was so close.

Ire forgotten on a sigh, our ST smiled with a quick twitch of his lips. “You got your new book?” Dumb question, really, since he could see it poking out of my still open bag. “New edition, D&D. Roll ‘em up and do what you can for character generation. Jeremy is as familiar with it as I am; ask him before me if you’re not sure on something.” The last was directed at me since I’d missed the last new ed. D&D campaign because of an emergency appendectomy. “I’m going to go make sure Brady didn’t actually park in the lot here.”

Everyone brought out their dice—we all had our own, somewhat superstitious about anyone’s fingers but our own touching them—and got to work as instructed. My few questions, after rolling out my main stats and assigning them according to the burly, strength-laden dwarf that I would play, were mainly about equipment and how lenient Quincy was in regard to magical items and point distribution for extra feats when they’d toyed with this system a couple of months back; I’d spent part of my slow morning at work studying my new toy… uh, book.

Dave, who’d apparently talked to Quincy about what we’d be playing, had his character sheet setup neatly piled next to him, and had started thumbing through one of his many ordering catalogs for the shop he worked at, looked up with a brief shrug, “It’s no different than asking for more cyber in Cyber Punk, Les. S’long as it’s appropriate for your character and you have a good back story, he’s usually all for it.”  That said, he looked back down and turned the glossy, colorful pages toward me. “We’ve had a good run on the remote-controlled Butterflies, but I can’t remember which color went the fastest… I think it was glitter blue. Pick another color for me to mix things up a little?”

Cursorily, my eyes drifted away from the weapon list in my book—the war axe was mighty tempting--and to what he was trying to show me. “Fuck, man, I dunno. Umm.” A shrug went along with the latter before, “Safety cone orange? That ought to throw off the housewives a little.”

Tabby and Melissa leaned over for an eyeful.

Melissa’s round face turned more shades of red than the various hues offered on the page adjacent to the Butterflies. Poor girl couldn’t even say anything and I had to wonder what was going through her head. Then I was sure that I knew: Her head tilted just a tiny bit when she heard Quincy and Brady coming through the door, and her color managed to darken even further; which I wasn’t sure was possible with the exception of someone getting strangled or having a heart attack. Is she really turning purple???

“Breathe,” I told her, really making an attempt to keep the mirth out of my voice. I failed, but it wasn’t for lack of trying!

         Paying little attention to Melissa’s hyper-color skin, Tabby narrowed her largish eyes and actually thought about the choices for a couple of seconds. “Orange, yes; I hear that it’s an ‘in color’ this season. Perhaps that translates to toys, as well.” Leave it to Tabby to know that sort of shit. I never keep up with trends or fads. Nor did she, really, but she had a soft spot for all things fashion and Hollywood. Very unlike our Florence Nightingale’s quasi goth wear, Tabby tended toward comfortable, timeless clothes. She’s one of those girls that always seem just as ready for a walk around the bookstore as she is for a fancy lunch. Just change the shoes and shuffle the hair around into an artful poof, and she would be all set to go head-on with any WASP in New York City.

         “Orange it is!” Dave announced to the room as Quincy and Brady settled themselves on the blanket.

With Dave’s last words ringing in my ears, I allowed myself to get reabsorbed in character generation; I debated on what I wanted my dwarf to look like, what I wanted him to carry, and which feats—special abilities—I wanted him to have. This train of thought led me back to my earlier question to Dave about our ST and his potential for leniency with character generation on this particular campaign.

Quincy had always been our storyteller, our game master; I should have been able to come up with that answer on my own. Seriously, I’m not one for pity parties, but I was starting to feel out of sorts. Four years, nearly, and I’d only missed three gaming sessions. Of course, they’d been subsequent to one another… Maybe that was it. Maybe.