Page 34 of Dating and Dragons
Sanjiv holds up his tiny drill. “And we still need to negotiate my cut.”
But everyone is glancing around the table with excited smiles on their faces. More and more, they feel like friends instead of people I see for two hours a week when I pretend to be a dwarf.Realfriends who want to hang out before games, and talk about horrible first dates, and do silly crafts together. I couldn’t care less about whether we make any money.
Mark arrives a few minutes later and is both horrified and intrigued when we describe our new endeavor to him. “You’re drillingholesin dice?!” He picks up a twenty-sided die we didn’t get around to using today. He rolls it across the table, and it comes up as a 19. “Huh, actually, maybe you have something here. I might need to try this.”
The front door opens and shuts again. Logan strolls in and my heart hammers despite my best attempts to be nonchalant. I watch his face for signs that something has changed between us, but he appears just the same as he was during our last game. “Whoa, what’s going on in here?”
Kashvi holds up one of the bracelets to him. “We’re starting our own business.”
“That’s adventurous. But we should probably get set up downstairs, right?”
We look at the time on our phones—it’s close to twoalready. We were so caught up we completely lost track of time.
“I have a good feeling about today,” Mark tells us as we get settled around the game table. “I think my rolls are going to be excellent.” He pretends to shake the dice in his hands. “It’s all in the wrist.”
“Do you want to try one of my sets? I have a lot with me—no holes in these, I promise.” I hold up a few bags. After some debate, I decided on iridescent blue ones for today.
“No!” He holds his fingers in a cross in front of him like I’m offering a grenade instead of new dice. “That’s bad luck. I carefully choose all my dice.”
“But…” I look around, exasperated. Kashvi shrugs and Sanjiv shakes his head subtly.
“Don’t try to reason with him. Just accept it and be at peace,” Logan tells me. He catches my gaze for a second, but it’s hard to read him. Which Logan has come to play today? The annoying one from the last game or the one whispering to me in my grandma’s attic?
It doesn’t matter either way, I remind myself. Once the game starts, I need to focus on the campaign, not on a boy. When Sloane calls us to attention, I’m ready.
“Welcome back, everyone, to the latest livestream of our campaign,” Sloane says into the camera. “If you remember, the players got themselves into a bit of a situation last time when they distracted the ship’s crewmates so much that the boat crashed and they were thrown into the sea.”
“And we lost our weapons,” Kashvi adds sadly.
“Yes, very sad,” Sloane says, looking anything but sad about this turn of events. “Although you reached your firstexperience milestone and now are Level 2, so everyone has more hit points and a new ability. We pick up the game with all of you washed up on the beach. You each wake up, soaking wet and disoriented.”
“Did any of the crew members from the ship make it to shore?” Logan asks.
“Three washed up on the beach with you but they haven’t woken yet.”
We all glance around at each other.
“We need to get as far away from them as possible,” Sanjiv says, gesturing to Kashvi. “No way are we being captured again when we need to find our father.”
“But I want my weapons. They might have washed up as well,” Kashvi argues.
“I should come with you!” Mark says, using his high Rolo voice. “What if he’s my father as well?”
Kashvi and Sanjiv frown in unison. “Why…would we share a father?” Kashvi’s character asks. “We don’t know each other and we’re nothing alike. You’re…”
“A halfling. But from the looks of it, you’re a half orc and you’re a half elf. I’m a halfling—don’t you see? We might all share the same relations. We could be siblings!”
“That’d make you half siblings,” I reply as Nasria.
Logan cracks a smile. His attention flickers to me for a moment and then away. Either he’s trying very hard not to interact with me during the game, or it only feels that way because I’m too aware of him.
He clears his throat. “While this family reunion is very touching—”
“We’re not family, though—” Sanjiv argues.
“—I think we should decide on our next course of action. I agree with Lynx. I don’t think it’s wise to be here when the crew wakes up. We should search for the nearest town, get some food, and ask the locals what they might know about this ship and its owners.”
“But we have the upper hand right now,” I argue. “We should get information from the crew before we leave. I want to know why we were captured and put on the boat, and the crew will clearly know more than people living in a village.”