The Poptart Manifesto

by Rick Gualtieri

  “We don’t like strangers here,” a burly farmer said to Magnus. “Especially ones that speak bold lies to our women.”

  “You had best leave now,” another threatened, “while you still have legs to walk with.”

  Magnus and Tyros exchanged a wry smile. Whores, ale, and now action. It was turning out to be a fun night indeed, thought Magnus as he cracked his knuckles.

  * * *

  The vendor area was closed, so Mike suggested we hop back in the car. The plan was to find a local bar to hopefully kill the brain cells holding the memories of the past few hours. A few blocks away, I pointed out a small place advertising happy hour. It looked promising, so we pulled in. Entering, we settled into a booth, ordered a few beers, and decompressed for a little while.

  A few drinks in, Mike steered the conversation away from the game. “Interesting place you chose. Something you want to tell me?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Look around.”

  I did so. As I make a quick visual scan of the place, I noticed that there weren’t a lot, in fact no, there weren’t any women around. I turned back to Mike, a questioning look on my face.

  “Look closer. You’ll get it,” he said with a smirk.

  Once again I did so and then it sank in. The clientele of the place were all males, and some of them were looking pretty friendly with each other at the bar.

  “I see what you mean. Sorry, man. I had no idea.”

  “Sure you didn’t.”

  “You want to get out of here?”

  At this Mike looked thoughtful. He held his drink up and said, “Ah screw it! I don’t care if it’s sodomize all newcomers night here, they have dollar Fosters on tap.”

  “This is a good point,” I conceded.

  “By the way, that guy over there is making eyes at you.”

  “Fuck you, dude.”

  “You might want to work on those pickup lines while you’re at it.”

  * * *

  The next several weeks were a blur for Magnus and Tyros after they left Everdeep. They had heard the surrounding hamlets were being plagued by werewolves. They combed the forests far and wide, led by the party of Elves they had hired to guide them. Along the way, they slew any hostile non-humans they came across. Many orcs, goblins, and ogres fell to their might. There were no shape-shifters to be found, though. Just as they were about to give up on their search, the ruse was dropped. Their guides thanked them for clearing out the forest. With all other monsters dead, there would be no competition. Horrified realization hit the exhausted adventurers as their guides began a hideous transformation.

  * * *

  We got up bright and early the following day. Our next game was set for nine AM and we didn’t want to be late. I was fairly certain that, following our last adventure, whatever the day had in store for us couldn’t be nearly as bad. Mike wasn’t so optimistic. He reckoned that since the last game was so full of useless detail, karma demanded that our next game be some sort of clusterfuck that the GM was just making up as he went along.

  Sometimes I think Mike should play the lottery more often.

  For starters, the game was a different edition then we were led to believe it would be. That didn’t matter, though, as the GM also didn’t have any characters for us like he was supposed to. Fortunately, we still had our guys from the night before and they only needed a few minor adjustments to fit in here. They weren’t great, but they’d suffice and at least we wouldn’t have to spend an hour or more creating them. Sadly, though, even that minor effort turned out to be a waste.

  I’ve been a gamer for a while. When you’re one, you typically settle in with a set group of people and play whenever you can. I was no different. However, no matter how much one likes the group they play with, sometimes you want a change of pace from both the people and the characters you see every week. It’s only natural. A convention, like the one we were at, was supposed to be a place where you could mingle with some new gamers and get a sense for other people’s playing style. Sure Mike and I were sticking together, but the rest of our usual gaming group was back at their respective homes. Had they all come, I can guarantee we wouldn’t have stuck together as that would have defeated the purpose.

  Apparently such thinking was either lost upon or too complex for the table we sat down at. There were five other players along with our GM and they were all friends who gamed together. Hell, they even all drove to the convention in the same car. I could have dealt with that, even though it made no sense to me. I mean, why drive all that way just to play with the exact same people they always play with and use the exact same characters they use every week? Maybe they thought they were such an awesome group that other people would want the privilege of sitting in on just one of their magical game sessions so as to despair at their own role playing shortcomings that were waiting back home.

  If so, the feeling wasn’t mutual. The adventure was painfully vague. There were far more unfunny and/or juvenile inside jokes from the GM than there were details about what we were actually supposed to do. Something in a forest...I think.

  We sat through this for a few hours, all the while listening to the group of troglodytes around us cracking bad jokes with each other and ignoring our attempts to turn this into an actual game. Salvation finally came in the form of an ambush, and by ambush I mean the other players just randomly decided to attack the duo Mike and I were running. Considering the way the GM’s several chins were chortling, I assumed this was a preplanned thing. Wow, super clever! Bore some strangers half to death, then turn and kill their characters. Well I guess that’ll show us. I think in the end, though, we wound up having the last laugh anyway. I guess the group wasn’t expecting us to take our deaths so gleefully. They actually looked a little bummed that we weren’t all teary eyed at the demise of our characters. Sorry guys, but I tend to not get emotionally attached to characters that were handed to me by a social outcast the day before. Better luck next time! At that, we thanked them for the subpar game and happily walked away.

  * * *

  The beasts’ savage nature got the better of them. Even as Magnus and Tyros buckled beneath their vicious assault, the wolves turned on each other. In a bloodlust and unwilling to give up the kill, the creatures clawed and bit at each other in a play for dominance. It was a costly mistake. The heroes of the Greylands had been overwhelmed but not vanquished. Tyros still had his wits about him and more then enough power to open a portal. Before the wolves could react, he and Magnus slipped through the doorway of spiraling energy.

  They landed in the middle of a large crowd of people, unaware of their location but glad to be alive. The denizens of this place, apparently used to this kind of thing in the strange days they lived in, ignored the newly arrived duo. It soon, however, became evident why.

  As the duo oriented themselves, they looked around to gain their bearings. Stalwart warriors they were, accustomed to battling the very thralls of the nine Hells. Yet, what they saw froze the very blood in their veins. What they had assumed were people were only that in the barest sense of the word. All around them milled beings neither living nor dead: Pale creatures with blank eyes and no spark of whatever life they might once have lived.

  “By Thorin!” exclaimed Magnus.

  “Yes,” Tyros agreed. “We are in the Vale of the Unjudged. All who die and go unclaimed by the gods come here. We are amongst lost souls.”

  “The living, lost amongst the dead. How delicious!” A voice behind them boomed.

  “You!” screamed Magnus, unsheathing his blade.

  * * *

  Mike and I mulled over how bad luck tends to run in threes and thus decided that it would be in sanity’s best interest to skip the final game we were scheduled for. Fortunately, as today’s game had ended fairly early, that meant the vendor area was still open. So, with some time to kill and some money to spend, we headed over.

  If you’ve ever been to any convention like this; whether it be g
aming, Star Trek, or comic books, you know how these are. Vendors are crammed together like sardines, all trying to sell you their rare and valuable crap. In between the sellers, there are always a few minor celebrities including authors of various books or modules. All of them are usually overcharging for autographs and looking as if they would have gladly accepted death’s sweet embrace rather then be here. Scattered about are also the occasional booth babes. In conventions like these they’re usually professional cosplayers, pretty girls employed to show up dressed like some comic book character or another. I have to give them at least a little credit for their tolerance. They’re constantly beset on all sides to pose for photographs while standing next to sweaty, overweight guys looking for some proof to show their buddies back home that they actually managed to be near an attractive female without getting tazed.

  Anyway, sometimes you get lucky and find a decent buy. More often then not, though, you walk out with a severe case of buyer’s regret. In my case, I wound up with an overpriced lithograph of a black dragon. Yet another decoration for my apartment that was sure to cause my girlfriend’s opinion of me to drop another notch.

  Mike and I were both pretty unimpressed by the selection as we made our way through the aisles. He decided, though, to look at the bright side. “Lot of crap here this year, but at least we haven’t run into that moron who GM’d us yesterday.”

  As I said, Mike needs to play the lottery. Just as he mentioned that, we rounded a corner and came almost face to face with the aforementioned moron. He was standing in line to get a photo with a woman dressed as one of the X-men. Crap!

  Either in a state of denial toward our obvious dislike of him, or living in a black hole of cluelessness so dense that nothing could escape, he saw us and smiled. Since eye-rolls apparently have no meaning amongst his people, he ignored ours and began happily chatting away about the great adventure the day before.

  * * *

  “Yes, it is I!” cried Devos, the former lord of the undead. “You sent me here to rot, but fate, it seems, still smiles upon Devos. You are delivered to me so that my vengeance might be wrought!”

  “Never!” screamed Magnus, once again plunging his blade into the creature.

  Devos just laughed at the attack. “You’ve already killed me, fool! You can neither hurt nor vanquish me here. However, as blood still pumps through your veins, sadly the same cannot be said of you.” With the sword still sticking from his chest, Devos spitefully backhanded Magnus away.

  “Simpleton!” *kick* “I told you” *smack* “I” *punch* “AM” *kick* “INVINCIBLE!”

  Magnus fell, then Devos turned to Tyros. In response, the mage began to chant an incantation to focus his power.

  “Did you not just listen, child?” sneered the vampire. “You cannot defeat me.”

  “Who said I was trying to defeat you?” answered Tyros. With that, he let fly a bolt of tremendous eldritch energy. Devos stood his ground and laughed, but Tyros had not been aiming for him. The blast hit the ground at Devos feet, opening up a fissure beneath him into which the vampire fell.

  He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Magnus regaining his feet and quickly opened another portal.

  “Quickly, friend Magnus! I do not know where this one leads, but it can’t be worse than here.”

  The heroes once again leapt forth into the beyond as Devos’s screams of rage followed them through the closing portal.

  * * *

  “We should get together sometime and hang!” his supreme dorkness was saying. “Let’s exchange numbers.”

  Before Mike could retort, I jumped in with language that I was sure our former, and hopefully never again, GM could understand.

  “Sounds great!” I said with mock enthusiasm. “We’ll be right back. Guy down the hall had only two Dungeon Crawl number sixty’s left and I want to get one.”

  “Issue sixty!” exclaimed our geeky non-friend in that weird inflection of his. “That’s a rare one! Better hurry. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be here for a while.”

  “I bet you will,” I muttered under my breath as I led Mike away, lest any of our other game mates be lurking about and likewise want to add us to their diminutive circle of friends.

  With that, we burst through the edge of the crowd. We took ten minutes to grab our things and check out. Then we made a run for the car. We just narrowly avoided being sucked back into the insanity after Mike spotted a cute babe dressed as Supergirl. I had to jump in front and admonish him. “No! Bad dog!”

  Fortunately logic (and fear that I’d rat him out to Colleen) won in the end and we headed out...back towards lands where perhaps we weren’t the coolest of persons, but we had friends and actual living breathing females waiting for us. I doubted many of our convention fellows could claim the same.

  We drove onwards, back towards the world of normalcy, all the while Mike questioning me again on what I thought the odds were of our girlfriends making out while we were gone.

  *sigh* Normalcy being a relative thing and all...

  * * *

  “Rise my friend,” said Tyros, standing over the still groggy form of Magnus.

  “Where are we?”

  “I know not. But we at least seem to be back in our own dimension.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Magnus replied, regaining his feet. “What say you? Shall we go forth and see what adventures await us?”

  “That is the best advice you’ve given all day,” laughed Tyros.

  With that, the two heroes once more strode forth to seek their fate.

  The Strange and Wonderful Tale of My Umbrella

  There are all sorts of stories to be told in this world. There are world-spanning epics of near unimaginable proportions. There are love stories of such emotion that they can break even the most iron of hearts. There are crime dramas that teach us that good will always triumph over evil. Just for the record, this story isn’t any of those. In fact, if you were to try to tell this tale after someone else had just gotten finished with one of the above tales of grandeur, you’d probably be beaten to a pulp. Truth be told, you’d probably deserve it too. However, for every visionary narrative that lights a fire somewhere in our soul, there are thousands more which barely register a meh in our collective selves. This is one such story. The story of how, one fateful day, I came to possess my umbrella.

  I remember the time well. It was a few days after Thanksgiving. My family was still too bloated with holiday turkey to raise any of their many chins in protest of my leaving. Thus, I had managed to tear myself away and make my way back to my humble one-bedroom apartment in one of Hoboken’s lesser neighborhoods. You know the kind: not quite as upscale as those with their four-thousand dollar a month studio apartments full of yuppie-scum, yet not quite so low class as to be able to close one’s eyes and throw a rock with a good chance of hitting a crack-whore. In short, it’s one of those rare in-between places that neither world had yet been able to lay claim to; that still houses a few normal people of modest means just trying to go about their life.

  The next day, I roused myself fairly early in order to head into Manhattan for a job interview. While the thought of working in Manhattan causes every cell in my body to cringe, it’s but a short train ride away and pretty much the best option for your typical non car-owning Hobokenite.

  “But wait!” you may be saying. “That’s not entirely true. One could always work in Jersey City.” To which I answer, yes one could. One could also take up the hobby of letting parasitic worms lay eggs under their skin. However, since I am of the opinion to do neither, the less said about Jersey City the better. The final option, of course, would be to just go buy a car and seek employment wherever one may desire. However, to that idea I counter that there are only two kinds of people in Hoboken with cars: idiots, and those with enough sense to realize that the second you buy a car in Hoboken you really should use that car to pack up your stuff and move someplace else...that someplace else preferably being anyplace where you might act
ually have a chance of parking that car.

  Now where was I before you so rudely interrupted my train of thought? Oh yes, my job interview. Getting there was, amazingly enough, not a problem. As for the interview itself, it went well. Not so well that they dropped to their knees and begged me to name my price, but well enough to give me the delusion that they might actually call me back. If there was one downside to the whole experience that perhaps kept it from being a great interview, it was that the person interviewing me was a dead ringer for Star Trek: Voyager’s Robert Picardo.

  Hopeless geek that I am, it is really hard to concentrate when you keep expecting the next thing out of the interviewer’s mouth to be, “Please state the nature of the medical emergency.” It gets even worse when a little part of you is disappointed when they don’t say it. Speaking of Voyager, I was never really a fan of that show. Personally, I think they should have ended the series at...err what’s that? Oh right, my umbrella! Silly me. But if you want to chat Star Trek later, when I’m finished, just let me know...

  Following my interview with the holographic doctor, I left to begin the arduous task of braving NYC’s subway system to where I could catch the PATH train back to New Jersey. Upon leaving the building, and nearly forgetting my coat in the process...which is completely off topic again as nearly forgetting a coat is not even remotely the same as actually forgetting it...I proceeded to make my way to the 59th and Lexington subway station to catch the R train to Penn station. Why is the street and destination important? No idea really, but I guess if you ever wish to retrace the steps of my epic journey then you can do so. I would be quite flattered to hear someone tell me that they followed in my footsteps and relived all of the emotional highs and lows I had experienced that fateful day. No, eh? Well maybe another time then.

  So, I made it to the platform just as a train was pulling in - as close to an action scene as this story is going to get I’m afraid. As the doors opened, I waited for the outward rush of people and then pushed my way inside. Grabbing hold of one of the handholds near the door, I wondered what new and exotic germs I was inviting onto my person in doing so. At that point the doors chimed and began to close. It was then that IT happened. Are you still paying attention? Good, because we’re finally getting to the true hero of this story: my umbrella. However, it wasn’t quite mine as of yet.