Sometimes I write things

After the ruckus, Cassie and Dale drove Chip over to the emergency room, where he got one stitch and some band-aids. It’s getting late, time for Dale to take Cassie home. Chip, too, since he’s right there and he lives like two blocks from Cassie. Chip calls shotgun, but Cassie sits in the passenger seat anyway.

Dale’s car isn’t a four-door, so Cassie has to get up to let Chip out. In Chip’s front yard, just barely outside Dale’s hearing, Chip tries to talk to Cassie, maybe apologize.

“Was this a date?” he asks quietly. “Are you two dating? Did I ruin your date?” He’s all passive-aggressive.

Cassie pats Chip on the shoulder. “The date’s not over yet,” she tells him.

If you look real close you actually pinpoint the moment Chip’s heart breaks. He nods, bites his lip, and goes quietly into his house.

Cassie gets back in the car and Dale drives her home, the long way — to the city center and back.

“So, your Dad’s a pirate, huh?”

“Arr,” Cassie agrees.

“You’re… a lot of weird stuff happens to you,” Dale tells her. He’s smiling when he says it.

“Only lately,” Cassie says. “Up until this summer I was way normal… Do you think we’ll ever actually finish a real date?”

Dale leans over and kisses her. Cassie’s surprised, but not displeased.

Eventually they disengage. “There,” Dale says. “That’s how you finish a real date.”

“It’s better than a trip to the emergency room,” Cassie breathes.

Boom!

At that moment something blows up. The wall of the Muncie police department blows up. Bricks and mortar go flying everywhere — one of them hits Dale’s car windshield, creating a spiderweb of cracks. Somewhere in Muncie, an Owlbear runs through the night.

Alice is hardcore.

In the hotel room, Ferdinand, “Angelina,” Flip, and the Antipaladin (last seen in episode 1.2 Orcs or the flashback to Orcs back in segment one) are playing some card game/rpg hybrid. The cards are Tarot cards, but the game resembles Whist. Also some narrative is being generated by the play, across multiple eras and locales. One player is the Rosicrucians, another the Priory of Zion, and a third the Templars and the fourth Freemasonry — but which is which seems to change from trick to trick. Mostly this seems to be an excuse to show the Antipaladin doing elaborate card tricks with Tarot cards.

“Angelina” has scooted her chair very close to Ferdinand’s, and might — the camera’s movements never quite make it clear, but the suggestion is there, if not the implication — she might have one hand somewhere on him under the table. Ferdinand’s reaction to her obvious advances? Ambivalence.

“I’m kind of embarrassed to ask you this,” he says to her, “but what’s your name?”

“Angelina” studies her cards. “I believe… I am the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police,” she says.

“No, I mean, what’s your actual name?” Ferdinand asks her. “I only know that in the Vaempyre game you’re Angelina, but you’re not named Angelina, are you? I know Morgan is actually named Morgan, but…”

If “Angelina” were a puppy she’d be wagging her tail. As it is she nearly climbs into Ferdinand’s lap; apparently no one has ever shown enough interest in her to want to know her real name before. She whispers something into Ferdinand’s ear, which midway through gives way to nibbling and licking and public (public in front of Flip and the Antipaladin, anyway, who take no notice) displays of affection. Ferdinand doesn’t immediately return the attention, but he doesn’t push her away, either.

This is the tableau Andrew sees when he opens the hotel room door. Seeing all these people in the room in which he was planning on having a good long mope? It surprises and angers Andrew.

“Andrew, hey,” Ferdinand says. “Angelina” and the others barely glance up.

“What’s all this in aid of?” Andrew asks tightly.

“It’s a game about the secret history of…” Ferdinand waits for someone else to jump in, but no one does. “…Secret history.”

“An application of Mélange theory,” Flip explains.

“Where’s the Tower? Find the Tower,” the Antipaladin commands, and seemingly transmutes the Lightning-Struck Tower to vapor, then restores it from out his mouth.

Andrew growls ineffectually, then lies down on one of the beds and turns on the television, flipping channels until he finds something loud and boring. He turns the volume up until Flip gets pissy, and leaves, muttering about plebian passive-aggressive tactics and the Antioption principal.

“You want to get out of here?” “Angelina” whispers. Ferdinand apparently knows her real name now, but we in the audience still don’t.

Ferdinand mulls it over for all of a second before acquiescing. “Angelina” half-leads, half-pulls Ferdinand away and out the door.

Finally Andrew is alone. He turns down the television volume, pulls his shoes off, gets ready to lay in for a multihour staring-sadly-at-the-ceiling session, and suddenly (gah!) notices that the Antipaladin is still sitting in the corner.

“Cheer up,” the Antipaladin tells him. “Man said, we can’t go through life relying on idols. You prop ‘em up, they’ve got feet of clay. Never who you want them to be. Look at the Matrix sequels.”

Take my word for it: the way he says it, it sounds cool.

Out in the hallway, it turns out that “Angelina’s” hotel room is just a bit down the hall from Andrew’s. She stops rubbing up against Ferdinand only long enough to open the door, and starts to pull him inside.

“Ferdinand? I –”

Datur comes around a corner towards them, sees Ferdinand, starts talking, seeing “Angelina,” stops dead in her tracks. Freeze frame…

…then reverse at high-speed, backwards through the past FenCon scenes. Slow down again, and stop, at the Secret Door booth, when Ferdinand and Andrew ask each other where Oliver is, play that line back, then stop and rewind some more, all the way back to the group’s arrival at FenCon. Ferdinand gets in line to register, Andrew runs off to meet Mary Lukas’s train, Morgan has a list of Dark Conclave Vaempyre events — Oliver is suddenly alone among a teeming crowd of gamers. He looks around for support, sees none, and pulls a program from his backpack. He has a list of games he wants to get to, but he’s not entirely clear on where they are or how to get there.

“Excuse me? I’m looking for table A-14, for the Dungeon Majesty ‘Psion of Al-Gebra’ game, can you help me?” It’s not Oliver asking this, though that game is at the top of his list and starts in fifteen minutes. The cadaverous old man in the leisure suit, the one who was tailing the gothmobile, he looks down at Oliver. In his hands is a folded list of games (hand-copied the night before from Oliver’s list, after the kid went to bed) and a roll of event tickets.

Montage: Oliver and the old man gaming together all weekend. Oliver and Abe — the lich’s name is Abe — appear to have signed up for all the same games, and over the course of six different Dungeon Majesty sessions acquire a good working relationship and team skills. They eat together, since they have meal breaks at the same time, and eventually Oliver asks Abe whether his mother sent him and Abe admits to being a private detective hired by Alice. She didn’t really trust Andrew (or Ferdinand), after all.

CLOSING CREDITS.

NEXT TIME on DUNGEON MAJESTY:
* “I’m sorry about FenCon.” Andrew reads an email from Kestrel!
* Ferdinand follows Datur around with a camera!
* Cassie and her pro-Alvin signage give the stinkeye to Ferdinand and his pro-Ferdinand’s-mother signage!
* Alvin awaits election results!

I want a t-shirt. Actually, I want two. One should be black, with gold lettering. THE SECRET DOOR. Then, under that, the Secret Door logo: a big gold capital S with a horizontal line through its inversion center. And under that, in gold lettering, “It’s Not About Fun.”

The other one should be gray, with black lettering. The black from a black-and-white photo of Frances McDormand circa “Almost Famous,” and under that in black “alice is hardcore.”