Dice Mage: A GameLit Adventure

by Andrew Beymer

  He hit Gwen with a guilty glance and then looked away. In his experience with Christine she was very good at picking out those guilty looks even if she had no idea what he was feeling guilty about. Though Gwen didn’t seem to notice in the least.

  “You saw it in a movie once,” she said, her voice flat.

  “Well yeah,” he said. “I mean it’s not like there was anything else I could do to take out a bunch of werewolves all at once.”

  “Don’t they usually use silver to kill werewolves?”

  “Maybe,” Mike said with a shrug. “Seems like an explosion did the job pretty well though. I don’t see any werewolves stepping out of that fire telling me I didn’t use the right material.”

  “Smartass,” Gwen said with a roll of her eyes.

  “A smartass who’s saved your life twice now,” he said with a wink.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, running her hand along his chest and grinning. “So what does the conquering hero want for saving the maiden fair?”

  He could think of a couple of things, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he was sticking around here. The last time he’d been distracted by what Gwen had on offer it’d allowed those werewolves to catch up to them.

  He didn’t intend to give them another chance to do that, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were more of the slavering monstrosities out there if there really was some game of the gods bullshit going on here tonight.

  “We can talk about that while we’re on our way away from here,” he said.

  “On our way?” Gwen asked. “You don’t plan on waiting around for the cops?”

  The answer to her question came in the form of several piercing howls that filled the night.

  It was enough to make Mike’s balls curl up and retreat into his body. That was never a pleasant sensation when it was caused by something innocuous like, say, jumping into cold water, but it was even more unpleasant when it was caused by a pack of armored werewolves that were no doubt moving in on them. He really didn’t want to be here when they figured out where their buddies were or what he’d done to them.

  More howls followed. Howling that sounded a hell of a lot closer than a moment ago. Like they were moving fast.

  That howl seemed to tell the world those wolves were on the prowl and oh, by the way, there were a couple of humans who would make for a nice snack. Sure Mike was editorializing just a little bit with his translation of the howls, it’s not like he spoke werewolf, but somehow he figured he was pretty close to the mark even though it’d been years since he took a foreign language. Even if that language had been Japanese. Not werewolf.

  Gwen’s eyes went as wide as saucers, pooling the small amount of light in the alley and reflecting the flames rising behind them.

  “That’s why we need to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Something tells me the cops aren’t going to do jack shit when they get here. Assuming they get here before we become a doggy treat.”

  Gwen looked at the recently demolished door that had led into Caffeine and Cookies once upon a time.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Something tells me I don’t want to be around when the owner shows up to see what happened to the place anyway.”

  “Assuming he can even get here,” Mike said, looking up.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “That weird shit is going on tonight, and I don’t know if that weird shit is going to be good for anyone on campus.”

  Mike took Gwen by the hand and pulled her out of the alley. He tried to ignore the dark shapes he saw when he turned to look down the street. He wanted to believe those dark shapes were shambling drunk college students who’d been busy pre-gaming for the first few hours of the night and now they were coming out to hit the bars, but he couldn’t shake the certain feeling that he was looking at more of those creatures coming to finish what the first group had started.

  Well they weren’t going to be around long enough for those things to finish what the first wave of furry bastards had started, damn it.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, though he couldn’t be sure if that was because of the gas explosion he’d just set off or if it was because shit was starting to go down around campus. If it was the former then he wanted to be away from here before the fuzz could have a chat with him, and if it was the latter then it meant shit was hitting the fan.

  He needed to get to game night, and fast. More to protect his friends than to save his character, though there was still a small part of him that worried about what horrors Doug might be visiting on his mage.

  He fished out his phone to look at the time, and realized his phone had been on the line with 911 for a while now. Through that whole thing with the planned explosion. And the conversation with toga goddess. And his brief but very intense celebration of still being alive with Gwen.

  Of course. Because he'd called them right before he went into that alley. Idiot. And of course they were going to try and trace his phone. That solved the mystery of where those sirens were coming from.

  Shit.

  He put the phone up to his ear. "Um hi. Hello?"

  "Sir. What the hell is going on?” the lady said, sounding a little frazzled which he figured wasn’t the norm for a 911 operator. “I swear if this is a prank call…"

  "Emergency?" he asked, trying to sound confused and slurring his speech just a little in the hopes the emergency people might think this was a drunk dial. Not likely considering the massive explosion that’d just gone off in the middle of the campus village to corroborate what the operator just heard on his end. "No. No emergency here. We’re fine. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?"

  “Look asshole, I don’t know what you were doing to scramble your signal, but we’ve triangulated your general location while you were busy with your combo porno horror movie one act and are sending squad cars to investigate. If you'll just…"

  Mike wasn't sure if they could continue tracking him even after he'd ended the call, but he certainly wasn't going to give them an active call to triangulate any longer. Even if it did sound like there was something else preventing them from tracking him down. So he hit the end button.

  He looked at Gwen and grinned. "Boring conversation anyway."

  She rolled her eyes. "Okay Han."

  “Hey, you caught a Star Wars quote. That’s great!” Mike said.

  Another eye roll. “Everyone and their mother can quote Star Wars. That’s about as mainstream as you can get these days.”

  “Whatever,” he muttered, pining for the days when Star Wars had been a geeky pursuit left to people with less than stellar social skills even as the less socially inept part of his brain screamed at him that it was a good thing sci-fi was going mainstream and to stop being a gatekeeping neckbeard, even within the confines of his own mind, when there was a hot chick who was clearly interested.

  “So where are we going?” Gwen asked.

  “Back to my car,” Mike said. “It’s this way.”

  He pointed back towards the campus village. Back the way he’d come when he arrived here earlier with no idea that this was going to turn into the single most fucked up night of his existence. He also deliberately pointed in that direction because he didn’t want Gwen looking back and seeing those dark shapes that were staying back there in the darkness for some reason.

  He certainly knew they weren’t afraid of attacking a population center. Maybe there was something holding them back, and that thought was even more terrifying considering he knew there were higher powers at work on campus tonight.

  This was supposedly a game, and he didn’t want to run up against whatever boss creature was able to keep those werewolves in line. He also didn’t want Gwen seeing those shadows and doing something stupid like screaming and breaking the spell that was keeping them in the darkness.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

  “You managed to find parking?” she asked, and then she looked around. Seemed t
o realize just how dead it was.

  “That’s weird. Usually there are more drunk college kids around here by now…”

  Unfortunately her looking around also included looking behind them. She stopped in her tracks and Mike had to start dragging her along. Clearly she’d seen the shadows, and clearly she had a pretty good idea of exactly what those shadows were. Even more clearly, she didn’t seem to care for what she saw back there.

  Not that Mike could blame her. He didn’t care for it either, but that wasn’t going to stop him from moving. The last thing he needed was to freeze up. That was a prey response that he wasn’t going to fall victim to tonight. He wasn’t the prey. Not with those dice.

  He needed to keep his friends, and Gwen, from becoming the prey too.

  “Keep moving,” he said. “I guarantee you they can’t run faster than my car can go.”

  He might drive a car that was more about fuel economy than power, but he figured even if they could keep up with his car they wouldn’t be able to keep up for long, and the longer they hung back the more chance he and Gwen had to get away without the things catching up to them.

  As they walked into the main drag they discovered why there weren’t many people at the alley entrance. A bunch of college kids in various states of drunkenness were gathered around the flaming debris that had been Caffeine and Cookies.

  Gwen stared at the burning wreckage that’d been her place of employment until about fifteen minutes ago and shook her head.

  “Talk about some fucking fireworks,” she muttered.

  Mike chuckled and shook his head. She hit him with a sharp look, obviously she didn’t think this was an appropriate time for laughter but whatever. They needed to get going so he did just that.

  “Come on,” he said. “Car first. Talk later.”

  “I sure hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” Gwen said.

  “Me too,” Mike said, and from the look she gave him it wasn’t a very comforting thing to say. Even if it was the unfortunate truth.

  15

  Expeditious Retreat

  “Y’know you never did tell me what was so funny back there,” Gwen said.

  Mike was so busy staring in the rearview mirror looking for werewolves or other potential supernatural horrors that he almost didn’t notice that she’d been talking to him. It took her reaching out and giving him a smack on the shoulder to bring him back to the land of the living.

  Honestly he was a little surprised they were among the living at all considering everything that’d happened so far tonight.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “You were giggling back there,” she said. “Doesn’t seem like the sort of time for someone to be having a laugh. Unless you’re a nervous giggler. I get that sometimes. Makes it a real bitch to break up with guys.”

  Mike grunted. Honestly he was still having trouble processing everything. It’s not like having creatures stepping straight out of legend, or perhaps straight out of the pages of one of the game manuals they pored over on Friday nights for a good time, was the sort of thing that made him feel great about his position in reality. Learning that it was all part of some game being played by higher beings of some sort, higher in the sense that they had more power and not in the sense that they were nobler than anything, they seemed like the sort of dickish god that got a Shatner ass kicking in the old Star Trek, didn’t make it much better.

  “I was just thinking about how funny what you said about fireworks was in context,” he said, checking his side and rear view mirrors again to make sure there was nothing lurking back there that might jump on the back of his car and pull a Robert Patrick with one of those creepy black swords.

  “The thought of us getting skewered and eaten by armored werewolves is funny?” she said. “You must go to different comedy clubs than I do.”

  “I don’t really go to the comedy club in the village,” he said. “It’s mostly a bunch of guys who just turned twenty-one who think aping the comedy specials they caught on HBO when they were kids is funny. That even works if they get a crowd that didn’t get HBO back then.”

  “What makes you figure they’re aping HBO specials?” Gwen asked.

  He shrugged. “They’re all the same. A bunch of rich bros from the suburbs whose college is being paid for by mommy and daddy, and still the best thing they can think to do with their free ride is go down to the local comedy club and try to launch their stand up career.”

  There may or may not have been a little bit of self-annoyance at himself as he said that. He’d never gone so far as to go up and do an open mic night, but he had riffed on some George Carlin when he got in the drink at parties and he wasn’t sure if that made him better or worse than the jerks who got up there and ripped off better comedians.

  He’d ultimately decided to be sanctimonious about it rather than thinking about the chance he never took.

  “Huh. Never thought of it that way,” Gwen said. “But you’re still not telling me what you thought was so funny.”

  He glanced at her and found himself wondering what would happen if he pulled off to the side of the road for a repeat of what they’d done back in the bakery.

  The only thing that stopped him was that dalliance had given those things time to catch up to him. He didn’t want to get caught like that again. Not when there wasn’t a convenient nearby gas source to take them out and they could rip his car open like a tin can.

  So he kept moving. He figured those bastards probably couldn’t do the local limit of thirty miles per hour for long, and he was breaking a few local speed laws to keep the speedometer well above that local limit.

  “You mentioned fireworks,” he said. “That’s not what I was using, but the idea of using fireworks to fight off a werewolf in an alley was kind of funny.”

  She stared at him, clearly not comprehending.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she finally said when he looked at her.

  “Oh come on,” he said. “Those were two classics of the ‘80s werewolf genre wrapped up in one situation. A werewolf attacking someone in an alley is straight out of An American Werewolf in London, and a werewolf being chased off with fireworks is how Corey Haim scared off the bear monstrosity in the underrated Gary Busey classic Silver Bullet.”

  “Are those werewolf movies?” she asked. “I mean I guess the first one totally is since it’s in the title, and the second one sounds like it’s either a werewolf movie or a bad Coors advertisement.”

  “It’s totally a werewolf movie,” Mike said. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of either of those before!”

  “Excuse me for not being up on my classic ‘80s werewolf cinema,” she said. “Corey Haim was kind of cute in his prime though. God rest his soul.”

  Mike snorted. “You’re not really missing all that much. Add The Howling to your list and you have pretty much every good werewolf movie they made in that decade.”

  “Horror was never my genre of choice.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “What was your genre of choice? I seem to recall a few hints from creative writing…”

  “You shut your mouth Mike,” she growled.

  “Oh Torion! I want to love you, but the flames burning deep within my breast will char us both figuratively and literally when the magic gets the best of me and overwhelms us!” Mike said in a singsong falsetto.

  Gwen took a deep breath. She looked like she was trying very hard not to hurt Mike. Meanwhile he couldn’t help but grin at how obviously ticked off she was getting.

  “That was a story I wrote when I was a freshman and I don’t think it’s fair of you to hold that against me,” she said.

  “Sort of like the way Revala was holding herself against Torion in the decidedly NC-17 version you posted up on…”

  Gwen blushed. “How did you find out about that?”

  Now it was Mike’s turn to look embarrassed. He’d never actually admitted that he knew about her postings in the Original Conten
t portion of everyone’s favorite fanfiction site before. He realized now that it could paint him in a pretty creepy light that he never told her about it either.

  It was just that he was already so pumped with adrenaline and not thinking straight because of everything that’d happened tonight that he let it slip without really thinking about what he was letting slip.

  “I sort of saw you posting there once in class,” he said. “From there it was pretty easy to find your story in one of the OC sections when I searched for the character names.”

  There was another awkward pause. She glared at him with the kind of stare that was the embodiment of the phrase “if looks could kill.” It was the kind of stare that would’ve been useful against those werewolves.

  Finally she sniffed and turned to stare out the window with her arms crossed. Oh yeah. She was annoyed.

  “That stuff was pretty good, honestly,” he said.

  “It was a ripoff of an anime I loved when I was in high school coupled with a dash of high fantasy thrown in because I thought that made me deep and original,” she said. “I was eighteen and stupid and that thing was stupid too.”

  “Didn’t seem stupid to the thousands of people who were reading it at the time,” he said. “These days you could probably make a pretty penny if you threw it up on one of the self-publishing sites or something now that you’re so much older and wiser at twenty-one.”

  He turned and grinned at her. The corner of her lip quirked up in a slight smile. It was something. Maybe she wasn’t as pissed off as he’d thought. Maybe it was his natural magnetism. Maybe it was something to do with that mojo toga goddess had mentioned.

  Yeah, right.

  “Whatever,” she muttered. “I’m not going to do something like that. I’m going to get an agent and do it the right way.”

  “Just saying,” Mike said. “They say self-published is the new midlist these days.”

  “Well you can stop trying to help me,” she snapped.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, a little heat coming to his voice as well. “So I should’ve stopped helping you while you were being hunted down by Rover the werewolf back there? You seemed pretty thankful in the back of the bakery.”