Master of the Dungeon: A Heroes and Harpies Fantasy

by Cara Vance

  Becca grabbed Trinity by the arm and pulled her a few paces back the way they’d come. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to spare us from ending up on his Facebook timeline.”

  “Seth’s not like that. He’s very discreet about his game sessions.”

  “That’s a real comfort.”

  Becca stared at her hard, her look a mix of annoyance, aggravation, and something else. Trinity wasn’t sure what, but she could have sworn she saw a note of desperation there too. Jeez, was Becca that hard up for her Friday night dork-fest?

  “You promised,” she said.

  “I know...”

  “No, you don’t. Seth doesn’t let just anyone into his games. He’s very exclusive.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he has folks beating down his door.”

  “The way his games go, yes, he does.”

  “Well then, he’s free to invite the next lusty wench to slay his fantasy dragons because I’m outta here.”

  “You’d really do that to me?” Becca asked, her voice cracking.

  “C’mon, Bec, you know...”

  “I spoke up for you. Told him you’d have an open mind, and you’re just going to embarrass me like this?”

  And with that, Trinity knew her fate for the evening was sealed. Becca was giving her the puppy dog eyes. She only pulled those out when something was really important to her. She knew Becca didn’t have a lot of other female friends on campus. Trinity could be a little self-absorbed when she wanted to be, but she wasn’t a horrible person. There was no doubt she’d end up feeling like a piece of shit for breaking her roommate’s fragile little heart.

  “Fine,” she replied at last. “But I swear, if he starts giggling every time he says ‘bone rider,’ then I am outta here.”

  THREE

  “I wasn’t sure if you had a chance to read up on the third edition rules or not, so I took the liberty of rolling you up a character just in case.”

  “Thanks,” Trinity replied with a healthy dose of sarcasm. “I’m still a holdover from the first edition. You know how it is.”

  “Really?” Seth asked, no trace in his voice that he was being anything other than serious. “Because I found the combat rules in first to be overly tedious. I mean, seriously, battles could take hours to finish because of the damned interrupt actions.”

  “I can’t believe they didn’t cap those in second edition,” Becca replied.

  “Tell me about it. You’d think they hired chimpanzees as game testers for these things.”

  Trinity said a silent prayer, asking for the strength to get her through this evening with her sanity intact. She and Becca were seated on uncomfortable folding chairs around a card table. Seth sat at the head, partially obstructed by a ridiculous cardboard screen that stood in front of him; its face was covered in numbers, rules, and poor drawings depicting adventurers that looked far more embarrassed than heroic.

  She felt way too crowded in the small dorm room - not helped by the scores of action figures and plastic models that stared down at them from the packed shelves hanging from the walls.

  God, I can’t imagine doing it in a place like this with all those plastic eyes staring at me.

  Hah, that was a good one. Like any fooling around, aside from maybe the one-handed variety, ever went on here. Trinity inwardly cringed at the thought of what a black light would reveal of this place.

  She couldn’t believe this was what she was reduced to. Goddamned Trevor and his Phi Omega whore. What the hell did that slut have that she didn’t? Hell, if anything, she’d sacrificed her own pleasure - often having to take care of herself while he slept - to make sure that asshole got his rocks off.

  That bitch can have him, she thought bitterly. I hope she keeps fresh batteries in her vibrator, because she’s gonna need them with that lazy fuck.

  “I thought a straight-up fighter would be too vanilla...”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you paying attention?” Becca scolded.

  “Of course,” Trinity lied. “I just got distracted by all the...neat stuff here.”

  “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” Seth asked. “I know the owner of the comic store downtown. That dude is seriously connected. Hooks me up with good deals all the time.”

  “Great to have friends in high places.”

  “Sure is. Anyway, as I was saying, I thought a fighter might be a little boring, so I rolled you up a barbarian.”

  “They have some cool fury powers,” Becca said, trying and failing to excite Trinity in the slightest.

  “Yeah,” Seth agreed. “But she’s still only first level, so she can only do it once a day.”

  Do it once a day? Trinity mused. That’s still more than Trevor could ever handle.

  Seth handed a sheet of paper over to Trinity. “Here you go.”

  Resigning herself to her fate, she glanced down at it and started to read. Unfortunately, it all looked Greek to her, just not the cool fraternity type. “Not sure what I’m looking at here.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you the run down,” Seth said. “Your name is Sonya.”

  “Sonya?”

  “Yeah, kinda like Red Sonja.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, Marvel Comics.”

  “No.”

  “With Conan?”

  “The talk show host?”

  “Never mind,” he replied with a slight sigh. “Anyway, you’re a barbarian from the eastern Wolf Clan. Your favored weapon is the long sword and you’re clad in chain armor.”

  “Chain armor?”

  “Yeah, it’s a classic look for the character. Really fits into the fantasy realm idea of things.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Anyway, your primary attribute is strength, so that’s where I put the majority of your points, including your racial bonuses...”

  Seth continued to drone on about game stats, rapidly losing her interest. At last, he turned his attention to Becca to discuss something related to her character. Judging from the look on Becca’s face, he could have been telling her that he liked to sodomize sewer rats and she would have still given him her undivided attention.

  Trinity used the time to pull out her phone and check if anyone had sent her any texts...hoping to see one telling her an impromptu killer party had been set up that she needed to be at. No such luck. Email was a bust too. She was about to load up Facebook, when curiosity got the better of her and she opened up her web browser instead to Google Red Sonja.

  * * *

  “No fucking way!”

  “Excuse me?” Seth asked, pulling his attention away from Becca.

  “This?” Trinity held up her phone, which currently displayed on the screen several images of a red-haired warrior clad in a chainmail bikini. “This is what you based me off of?”

  “Yeah. It’s a classic look.”

  “She looks like a hooker holding a sword. Does she kill her enemies or just bend over and take it like a good girl?”

  Seth opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t keep a guilty grin off of his face.

  “I am so outta here,” Trinity said. She stood up and grabbed her jacket from the back of the folding chair she’d been sitting on.

  “Sit down, Trin,” Becca implored.

  “Are you kidding? I don’t want to give this clown something to jerk off to. Do you?”

  “You do realize I’m sitting right here?”

  Trinity ignored him and continued staring at her roommate. Becca shrugged, a blush rising to her face. “Seriously?”

  “No... I mean, of course not,” Becca replied hastily, “but Seth’s not like that.”

  “Oh? So what do you look like?”

  At that, Becca brightened, obviously excited to talk about her character. She opened her mouth, but then glanced toward Seth, a question in her eyes.

  He smiled at her and nodded. “It’s okay. I was going to have you both start out having already met on the road.”

  Trinity was about to comment on
this, outraged that somehow her friend felt the need to ask permission before speaking, but Becca interrupted her.

  “I’m playing Valeras the Devout. She’s a priestess of Istiara, the goddess of justice, mothers, and happy couplings.”

  “Happy couplings?”

  “...As such, I wear the robes of my order.”

  “How come you get a bathrobe, while I get metal lingerie?”

  “Well, if it helps, as is befitting my religion, there’s nothing beneath those robes. I simply wear them for modesty’s sake and to avoid offending non-believers, but the reality is my faith is all the armor I need.”

  Trinity felt as if she was going to gag. She had no idea about the other guys who normally played this stupid game, but she had a feeling their characters weren’t running around bare-assed. “Well, you and your naked goddess have fun.”

  “C’mon, Trinity, you promised.” Becca was once again fixing her with those doe eyes of hers, making her feel like shit. It reminded Trinity that while they got along great as roomies, they really didn’t do much together outside of that. The truth was, Trinity’s other friends all kind of considered Becca to be a nerd and often didn’t want her around. It was something that made Trinity feel guilty whenever she had to lie about where she was going.

  She might have been far more popular than her bespectacled friend, but she’d been raised better than that. Becca had more than once gone out of her way to help her, even if it was just to give her a shoulder to cry on when she needed it. Thus, Trinity knew the battle was lost before she’d even taken a single step toward the door.

  “Fine,” she said, sitting back down. “I’ll stick around and give this a shot, but no chainmail bikinis.”

  “But...”

  “I want to be covered up.” She glanced down at her character sheet again. “You said I’m a barbarian. Those are savage fighters, not strippers, right? I know at least that much.”

  Seth opened his mouth to say something, but Trinity cut him off. “What’s a normal...warrior wear in this game?”

  “That’s easy,” Becca replied. “Usually a first level fighter will wear a suit of leather or studded leather armor.”

  “Let’s just leave it at the leather, minus the studs,” Trinity said. Even that sounded a bit too kinky, but a full-on gimp suit was still better than the half-naked fantasy woman this Seth joker was trying to get her to be.

  FOUR

  Trinity spent the next half hour letting Seth bring her up to speed on the basic rules of the game. Despite his obvious enthusiasm, it wasn’t contagious and her mood didn’t improve much. Unfortunately for her, every time she considered bailing, she’d look up and see her roommate’s hopeful gaze.

  Ah, the injustices I tolerate for the sake of friendship.

  She didn’t understand a lot of what Seth was telling her. Most of it was either boring geek stuff about monsters roaming the lands or even more boring rules stuff with charts that looked more at home in an advanced statistics class. There was one small bright spot, though. She got the gist that nearly everything they’d be doing in the game would be decided by a roll of the dice.

  Trinity’s dad had shown her the basics of poker, blackjack, and craps before she’d left for college. In addition, she and a few other friends had made their way to Atlantic City for her birthday last year. The confusing rules aside, Trinity could understand the dice rolling part. Beyond that, though...

  * * *

  “The stars in the night sky shimmer above you, a testament that the gods have granted you favorable weather for the journey ahead. You set up camp, eat a modest meal of rations, and consider your next move as you sit around the fire - your bodies weary from miles of hard travel. What do you do next?”

  “Huh?” Trinity asked, shaking herself from a nice fantasy involving waterboarding Trevor while that whore’s panties were stuffed in his mouth.

  “We set up watch,” Becca stated. “I take the first one, keeping an eye out while saying my prayers to blessed Istiara.”

  “You’ll take a negative two penalty to the time you need to recharge your spells if you don’t devote yourself fully to them.”

  Becca nodded, then turned to Trinity. “You can take second watch.”

  “Watch?”

  “Yeah. We’re out in the wilderness. We have to keep an eye out for roving monsters.”

  “I sleep through the night.”

  “What? You can’t...”

  “Yes I can. Anything to make tomorrow come quicker and get us to where we’re going.” A note of impatience rang in her voice.

  Becca had started out the game begging Seth to get to “the good part,” as she called it, whatever that meant. Her pleading tone had struck Trinity as kind of pathetic. Jeez, her roommate really needed to get laid. Either way, though, Seth had refused, claiming that they needed to ease into the adventure.

  He’d started them off in some village, taking a break right after so he could order pizza from a local place. Becca had then spent the next hour boring the crap out of Trinity either by talking to the imaginary people who lived in this imaginary town, eating the imaginary food at the imaginary inn, or praying to the imaginary gods at the imaginary temple she found.

  Gah! Was that all this game was about? Trinity had assumed that she’d be spending the night fighting off dragons. As lame as that sounded, it was still a lot better than the reality of the situation. Why bother with crap like this when one could go out to the real town, with real people, and eat real food? It was all just so...mundane, Trinity thought disgustedly.

  “Are you sure?” Seth asked. “The road can be a dangerous place for unwary travelers.”

  “Yes,” Trinity spat. “As soon as Becca...”

  “Valeras,” Becca corrected.

  “Yes, as soon as Vagina, or whatever your name is, wakes me up, I wait for you to fall asleep and then crawl back into my sleeping bag.”

  “You sleep on a bedroll.”

  “What?”

  “You have a bedroll,” Seth pointed out. “Sleeping bags haven’t been invented yet.”

  “Whatever. Anything that gets us closer to something actually happening.”

  Seth let out a long breath. It was clear that he was finally starting to lose his temper. That was just fine with Trinity. It was her hope that he’d realize she didn’t fit in and maybe call the game early. Hell, if that happened, maybe she could still talk Becca into a walk to town, where they could pick up a few bottles of wine and salvage what remained of the evening. The closest liquor store to campus was notorious for not ID’ing, especially if the patrons were cute and showing a little cleavage. Trinity was most certainly not above using her assets to her advantage in such a case.

  “Fine; you want something to happen, you got it.”

  “Seth...”

  “Sorry, Valeras,” he replied. “You’re asleep. You both are and are thus caught unprepared when awoken by the thunderous sound of horses nearly on top of you. You open your eyes to find yourselves surrounded by dark figures.”

  “What are they?”

  “Your campfire has died down from Sonya’s neglect,” he continued. “It’s too hard to make them out, but from the sound of steel being drawn from sheaths, you can guess they’re not friendly.”

  “I cast Ball of Light,” Becca immediately replied, surprising Trinity with her tone. Seemingly gone was her mousy roommate, and in her eyes, she saw determination instead.

  “Roll initiative.”

  “No surprise round?”

  Seth smiled at Becca and replied, “Despite your lack of preparedness, the figures have not immediately fallen upon you. It’s possible they’re not hostile...”

  “Oh good.”

  “...or they don’t see you as a threat. Either way, you both have a few moments to react.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.” Becca picked up one of the numerous dice in front of her and rolled it. “I got an eleven.”

  “Sonya?” Seth asked impatiently.
/>
  “What?”

  “Roll initiative.”

  “Oh, you mean the dice. Fine.” She grabbed one and...

  “The twenty-sided die,” Becca corrected, pointing it out.

  “Sorry,” Trinity replied, picking up the one her friend had indicated and giving it a half-hearted drop on the table. “Seventeen.”

  “What’s your modifier?” Seth asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, give me that,” Becca said, sounding exasperated. She grabbed the paper from in front of Trinity and gave it a quick read. “It’s this number.” She pointed to it and handed the sheet back.

  “Sorry, I forgot. It’s a three.”

  “Twenty. Impressive. You both get to go before them. Sonya, you’re up.”

  “Um, what do I do?”

  The look on Seth’s face at her question was one of smug superiority. Apparently, he’d found the one area where he had the advantage over her and was determined to milk it.

  Whatever, she thought. At the end of the day, I still have a social life.

  “Pick up your sword,” Becca said. “But don’t do anything. Just ready an action until we know who they are.”

  “Yeah, what she said.”

  “Fine,” Seth replied, the smirk still on his face. “Valeras? Are you casting?” At a nod from her, he continued. “The holy light of Istiara washes over the camp, illuminating it. For a moment, the intruders raise their arms over their faces as if to shield themselves from her divine power, but then, upon seeing no harm come to them, they step forward, chuckling. In the brilliance of the light, you see that you’ve been surrounded by four orcs. Roll a wisdom check.”

  Becca once more grabbed the twenty-sided die and gave it a throw. “Twenty-two with my bonus.”

  “You immediately recognize the tribal tattoos that adorn them as belonging to the clan of Tevor Rottencrotch.”

  “Who?” Trinity asked.

  “Don’t you remember?” Becca asked her. “Those people back in town told us about him. That’s the orc chieftain who’s been raiding their lands and kidnapping their women. These are his men, the ones we’re supposed to be looking for.”

  “Yes,” Seth replied. “But it would seem they have found you first. You rapidly conclude that their initial hesitation was arrogance at assuming that two women, alone on the road, were no threat. They say something to each other in their native tongue, chuckle, and advance upon you with weapons drawn.”