Sandra: I’ll be home at 6:30. I can make dinner, or we can go out. I hope things are ok at work.
Priya: U ok? Sandra said you had a pretty bad night. Movies tonight?
Anya: Call me anytime. Have laptop, will travel.
Ree looked over her shoulder to check the cupcakes, then texted Anya: Can you come to the cafe?
Three minutes later, Anya: What’s up?
Ree: Tide-y Bowl of Emo.
Anya: Got it. On my way.
Ree distracted herself with more baking, despite the fact that there were no customers. The food she made today would still be good for Friday, which should be busier. Since Café Xombi didn’t believe in throwing out food if at all possible, anything left over after that would go home with the closer. Conveniently, Ree always made sure there were plenty of treats that she wouldn’t mind eating all weekend if need be.
Hearing the theremin-tune motion detector, Ree looked up to see Anya Rostova (Strength 7, Dexterity 12, Stamina 15, Will 15, IQ 16, and Charisma 15—Musician 5 / Geek 2 / Scholar 3 / Opera Diva 2), wrapped in trendy jeans, a jacket, and one of the fabulous brocade scarves that Ree frequently plotted to steal from her but never quite managed to. Anya was Russian in the way that movies in the ’80s said Russians always must be: thick black hair, sharp features, and an enviably curvy (if short at five-three) figure.
Ree coveted Anya’s curves sometimes, having inherited a fairly sticklike figure from her mother’s side of the family. Ree wore her hair long so she didn’t get mistaken for a boy. It mostly worked. Mostly.
Anya, on the other hand, managed to look amazing every single time Ree saw her, which was impressive and somewhat frustrating, since as a doctoral student, she made even less than a comic shop lackey. But Anya was a diva-in-training, and fabulous was part of that job description.
Ree’s own wardrobe consisted mostly of jeans, T-shirts, more jeans and T-shirts, a handful of skirts, her three “date outfits,” and a smattering of business-wear for her occasional bank-breaking trips down to L.A. to pitch producers or attend conferences to woo agents.
“Step one: Can I get a chai?” Anya asked.
Ree nodded and grabbed a mug off the top of the espresso machine. “Done. Step two?”
“Step two happens when you’re done here, but step one and a half can be where I tell you about how crazy my show is.”
Ree listened while on chai autopilot. Café Xombi used a chai concentrate, which made the drink comically easy to prepare. Since Anya had forsworn real dairy in her drinks, Ree started steaming some soy milk. Ree spoke up to be heard over the machine. “I do so love wallowing in the misfortune of others.”
Anya cracked a smile. “It’s one of your best qualities.”
“True story. Now spill.” Ree leaned over the counter, chin resting on one fist.
“So we’re doing Carmen, right?”
Ree nodded. Since she’d met Anya, Ree’s opera knowledge had gone from 0 to no more than +4, but even she knew Carmen.
“We’re doing it Steampunk-style, so the toreador is fighting a steam-bull, right?”
Ree nodded. “Perfectly reasonable.”
Anya continued. “And the director wants me to wear a corset so freaking tight, I can barely breathe. Then she yells at me when I can’t hold the notes.”
Ree raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t she know that corsets do that? And that’s it—a corset? Don’t you at least get a clockwork arm or something?”
Anya chuckled. “I get a fan. As Madame Wesselmann reminded us, ‘I performed the role of Papagena wearing a corset that brought my waist down to 18 inches—and we got rave reviews in Chicago.’ So I get to ‘suck it in.’ ”
Ree made a sour face while giving a thumbs-down, and Anya nodded.
“How was I supposed to know I should have been deforming my organs since I was twelve in order to properly function in my first operatic leading role?”
“That’s really the kind of information they should put in your grad packet, at least, right?” Ree mimed a neutral voice-over tone: “ ‘As a part of the University of Pearson vocal performance program, here are some tips on how to best abuse your internal organs. Remember, organ failure is temporary, but glory is eternal!’ ”
Anya laughed.
At that particular moment, as Ree was happily settling into Listen-and-Support mode, a clear key-shift away from her post-breakup funk, the door burst open, hitting the near wall before the door chime could finish. Through the door lurched a scruffy man in a dirty black trench coat that Ree could have sworn was smoking. The man grabbed the door and slammed it behind him, muttering something under his breath. He was around six feet tall and looked somewhere between forty and fifty-five. He had a couple days’ growth of beard and, oddly, several bruises on his face. The biggest bruise swelled one of his Capital-G-Green eyes nearly shut.
The man leaned back against the door to keep it barred. Then he looked to Ree and asked, breathless, “Do you have any Grant Morrison Animal Man trades?”
Ree had seen some rushed customers before, but this guy was asking about a comic book the way a Western hero who’d just walked ten miles through the blazing sun asked for water.
Ree casually scanned the wall for the section with Morrison’s work and said, “Um . . . sure. I can get one for you, but they’re on your left, between Seven Soldiers of Victory and Batman & Robin.”
He turned to his left and pawed at the trades with gloved hands. His left glove was bloodied, several of its fingers torn and hanging off his hand.
“Is it less than twenty dollars?” he asked, fumbling with his wallet.
What the hell is up with this guy? Ree wondered. “19.95 . . .” she said.
The man pulled out a crumpled twenty and slapped it on the counter, leaving blood on the bill and the glass. “I don’t need a bag, thank you.”
He turned on his heel and pulled the door open, rushing out of the store while flipping through the book.
When the door was shut, Ree traded a WTF? look with Anya and said, “There’s my crazy for the day.”
“You get one of those a day?” Anya asked.
Ree shrugged. “Most of the customers are nice, but there are some weirdos. He at least was in a hurry.” The real winners are the ones who corner me to talk about their RPG characters for hours, don’t let me get a word in so as to actually participate in the conversation, and then leave without buying anything.
A minute later, once Anya had resumed ranting about the mad antics of her director, Ree heard a BOOM! from outside. Ree guessed from the echo that it came from the alley by the gallery, but mostly, she focused on the fact that there was a BOOM! at all in a neighborhood/age where/when one should not hear a BOOM!, especially one that sounded more like a bomb than a backfiring engine.
“The hell?” Anya asked.
“Watch the store for a sec?” Ree said more than asked, grabbing the crowbar from under the counter. Said crowbar had +2 N3wb Bane engraved on the back, one of Bryan’s many personal touches. She rolled back the comics shelf and strode out of the store, past the gallery, then into the alley, scanning the street as she went to look for shady people who looked capable of making a BOOM!
The usually boring alley was fifty feet deep, holding several Dumpsters and ending with a tall wooden fence that was the other side of a local church. There was no immediate evidence of a thing that would have gone BOOM!
Instead, Ree saw, halfway down the alley, a pile of colorful shredded paper that looked not quite like newspaper. She approached and looked over the pile and saw that it consisted of shredded snippets of a graphic novel. Several strips of comic page were plastered to the wall, with what looked like bloody prints on them. Ree walked over to the wall and saw from the slivers of art that they were pages from the book she’d just sold.
Ree tried to add up the situation and make it resemble
sense in her mind: So this guy comes in looking like he’s a Backstreet Boy in ’99 chased by crazed fans, buys a graphic novel in a crazed rush, and then runs out to shred the comic in an alley, does something to a wall, and somewhere in there, there’s a BOOM!
Ree shrugged. “Above my pay grade,” she said to the alley, and then walked back into Café Xombi.
“I’ve got nothing,” she said upon returning to her perch. She replaced the crowbar and leaned back against the rear counter. Anya raised an eyebrow, which Ree answered with a what can you do? shrug.
• • •
Anya stuck around for a couple of hours, long enough to help Ree settle back into a state of relative Zen. A few more customers came and went, mostly the awesome regulars who would buy drinks, stay to chat for a few minutes, then go on their way.
After they left, a couple of Yu-Gi-Oh!-loving teenage boys came in, bought one booster pack each, and then played several excited games, discussing school and the girls they had crushes on as if Ree couldn’t hear them.
The people-watching and overheard conversations were one of the best perks of working retail or food service. When you’re out doing your own thing, it’s easy to forget that the person in the uniform T-shirt or polo shirt is their own person.
While the Yu-Gi-tots played, some students swung by for coffee, talking about classes and midterms as they waited for Ree to make their macchiatos.
Just after five, Jeff the Lawyer came in for his comics (Batman, Astro City, and Morning Glories) and a recap of the week’s television (Fringe, Community, and The Walking Dead), but after the Animal Man guy, the day had reverted to normal.
Still, when business reached a lull, Ree occasionally replayed the BOOM! and the frantic customer’s visit in her mind.
The sun started to set, orange lights pouring in from the west-facing windows, and Ree closed up the shop. She set the still-good-tomorrow pastries and baked delectables in the fridge and boxed up the ones that were no longer fit to sell. She traded pastries for bagels with the folks at Sue’s Bagels, and cookies for veggies with Rachel at the co-op near her apartment.
Said apartment was affectionately known as “The Shithole” due to Ree’s deep belief that the ancient idea of giving your kids crappy names to protect them from evil spirits and SIDS was applicable to apartments as well. The Shithole was actually quite nice for its price. But thanks to its thoroughly unappealing name, no random spiteful gods of housing would come around and rob her and Sandra of an apartment that was affordable, cute, and large enough to have friends in without A) being run by a slumlord or B) residing in the “Good Luck Not Getting Shot by Drug Dealers” part of town.
However, The Shithole was a fifth-floor walk-up, which had nearly killed Ree and the handful of friends who had helped when they moved in two years ago. Now that Ree and Sandra’s stuff was safely ensconced on the fifth floor, Ree had no desire to move—ever, if possible—though she was willing to make a concession if Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Christina Hendricks asked her to run away with them.
Just inside the door was a pair of couches that formed the TV nook, one of Ree’s favorite spaces on Planet Earth. The nook’s walls were lined with overburdened plywood bookshelves and a pair of hard drives that contained her preposterously large movie and TV collection. Across from the TV nook was the dining area, with two card tables shoved together and a collection of metal folding chairs, three folded down and another three leaned against the wall.
The kitchen was mostly Sandra’s domain, since she’d spent a semester in culinary school before dropping out, just like she’d dropped out of nearly everything. Like Ree, Sandra was still on cruise control post-college (though in Sandra’s case, it was post-college-the-third-time and post-AmeriCorps-which-she-didn’t-even-finish-because-Thank-You-pneumonia). Currently, Sandra worked as a receptionist in a dental office and remained severely lacking in what Ree’s dad would call “life direction.” Ree had a life direction; it was just a seemingly impossible vector pointing to Hollywood.
Sandra wasn’t home, but the kitchen still somehow smelled like fresh bread. Ree put on some water for tea and walked through the living room to her bedroom. She took one step toward her bed and lobbed her bag to bounce off of it into the corner. Her bed was a mattress and box spring stuffed against two walls, with burgundy sheets, a black duvet, and a pair of pillows. She’d used a bed frame for a while pre-Shithole, but the “feeling like a grown-up” bonus hadn’t yet overtaken the “it’s an extra thing to move” negative.
Ree changed into sweats and returned to the living room, settling in until Sandra got home from the crosstown commute and they could make dinner or go out. Sandra’s boyfriend, Darren, would be by anytime, so Ree soaked up the solitude while it lasted. It was a different thing being home and alone instead of at work and alone. When she was at the café, there was always something theoretically to do; a customer could walk in any minute, and the coffee had to keep getting refreshed and the orders processed.
At home, she could just be. And so she was, splayed out on the couch with the TV on mostly for background noise. It was a Syfy original, and the horrible CGI monster looked like the redheaded stepchild of the baddies from Ernest Scared Stupid. She wrapped herself up in a blanket, and as she dozed off, her thoughts strayed to the crazy customer and his desperate, inexplicable Morrison kick.
d20s and Demons—Oh my!
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Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael R. Underwood
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First Pocket Star Books ebook edition July 2013
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Designed by Kyle Kabel
ISBN 978-1-4516-9814-5
Contents
1. Confirm & Deny
2. Like Cheers, but with Dice
3. Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk
4. Dining with the Stars
5. They Can Have Their Diamonds
6. Tinseltown Throwdown
7. Step One
8. A Typology of Random Encounters
9. Help Me, Ree Reyes, You’re My Only Hope
10. The Show Must Go On
11. Corner of Geneva and Talsorian
12. Nothing Good Happens after 2 AM
13. Nightmare on Douglas Street
14. 4-Top
15. Sunday in the Park with George (Lucas)
16. Hypothetical Kidnapping Is the Name of My Leverage Cover Band
17. Fifteen Minutes Are Up
18. Deep-Dish Plotting
19. Shout It All Out
20. Schrödinger’s Disappointment
21. Showdown at Sunset Boulevard
22. Salome Returns
Epilogue: Only If for a Night
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Geekomancy Excerpt
Celebromancy Page 31
