NaNoWriMo Day: Tuesday, November 1st, 2016
Title: AU 2-Table Talk-01
Words: 1887
"Oh my fucking god," Saylee groaned, sinking her head into her hands and spreading her fingers just enough to glare viciously at her d20, innocently sitting on the table and displaying a traitorous 2.
"At least it wasn't a nat 1 again," Silver sniggered. "What did you do to piss off the RNG this much?"
Steven's wince was deepening as he tapped at the keys of his calculator behind his divider. "What is that face?" Blue demanded, putting his hand over his character figure protectively, like it was in any danger on the opposite side of the map from the Explosion that a wild Graveler had rolled up-though if he rolled as consistently bad as Saylee, that might actually be a possibility.
"Just lay it on me," Saylee mumbled, covering her eyes again.
Steven sighed, carefully writing out his math and sliding it over to Saylee. Sitting on top of it was his own d20, showing-
"Natural 20?! Are you fucking kidding me?!" Silver shrieked, high-pitched enough that his hamsters started squeaking loudly in their travel cage. He spun around in his seat to mutter soothingly to them in between muttering invectives about Steven's rolling skills.
"Language, Silver," Red said absentmindedly.
"You didn't tell her off," Silver complained, pointing at Saylee.
"Family rules: when you're old enough to drink, you're old enough to swear all you like," Red said, glancing up from the character sheets he was working on. "Please tell me that's not Saylee's character dead too. The party hasn't even found my character's body yet."
"She's not in the blast radius, but Peggy, Chaz, Tobias and Mary are," Steven said apologetically. "Mary's furthest out, she only takes quarter-damage, Chaz and Tobias are a little closer so they take half-damage, but Peggy's right in the direct blast radius so…"
"Peggy's dead," Saylee groaned, scribbling HP notes on her character sheets and reluctantly moving her Pidgeot token from the board to what she called her graveyard and what Silver insisted on calling "the corpse pile". "I'm gonna have to make a sub-pile-sub-graveyard for Explosion and Selfdestruct deaths. That's the fifth this campaign!"
"Fourth on this map alone," Blue observed. "Do you want to try my dice? I'd offer to trade but yours are definitely cursed."
"I think we should just ban Explosion," Silver said, glowering at Steven.
The DM raised his hands defensively. "I just get the movesets out of the rulebook," he said. "If it makes you feel any better, that also damaged the Golem leader, and they're all unsettled. Their defenses are lowered. Do you want to keep attacking?"
"Not if they're all packing Explosion," Saylee said, rifling through her character sheets. "Toby has ridiculously high Charisma now. Can I roll diplomacy?"
"It's worth a shot," Steven encouraged her. "I mean, it can't be worse than-have I told you about the postgrad game I DM on Thursday nights? If you think you roll badly, you should see their Diplomacy rolls. They've split up into two factions who're both trying to summon different gods and they spend too much time feuding with each other to actually do it or follow any of the million goddamn plotlines I spent ages seeding all over that map. You guys want to join them next semester? The undergrad game doesn't seem to be picking up any new members. Might mix things up a little."
"If I get on the postgrad exchange course I'll probably in another country all next year," Red said apologetically.
"Have you decided where you want to go?" Steven asked him. Red just gave an exaggerated shrug.
"We'll come! We'll kick their asses," Silver cackled.
"You're not going to a club with postgrads that we don't know," Red interjected. "And anyway, you can't come over on Thursday nights, you'll miss school on Friday."
"Well, couldn't you just move the postgrad night to Fridays if you're not having an undergrad game?" Silver pleaded with Steven.
"Maybe, but I'd still need their permission and, y'know, agreement from the postgrads that they won't tell the student union that a non-student is attending the Games Club," Steven said.
"I'd really want to go to a couple of sessions with them to see what they're like before letting you come play," Saylee said, raising a hand to show her d20. "Now hush and pray for my soul while I roll."
"Are you sure you don't want to borrow mine?" Blue asked as Steven held out the box lid, presenting it in a ceremonial manner. Saylee just gave him a look and rolled.
"Oh wow," Steven gasped.
"Holy f-elt tip pens!" Silver yelped.
"What happened?" Red said, standing up and staring at the dice.
Saylee raised her hands. "Nat 20," she said, picking up her Togekiss token and kissing it. "Bless you, Toby, you most blessed of Pokemon."
"Tobias pleads to the goodness and desire for calm that he believes lies at the core of every living being's soul, and if that goodness wasn't there before then it sure as hell is now," Steven intones. "The leader Golem agrees that Chaz and his children have the right to a home and promise to respect their territory from now on. The whole gang leaves peacefully."
"I'm going to play the entire rest of the game just rolling Diplomacy through Toby," Saylee said.
"Your dice are militant pacifists that punish you for violence and reward you for peacefulness," Blue said in an affected tone of piety, raising his hands in mock-prayer. "Either that or the RNG listened to our pleas to finally have some fucking mercy on your soul."
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"So what're you doing for your next character anyway?" Silver asked as they walked back to the poky student flat that Saylee, Red, Blue and Daisy were splitting. He had his hamsters' travel cage in his arms with his own jacket thrown over it to keep them warm and Saylee's jacket around his shoulders.
"Dunno… I like that avatar character concept that Steven's working on," Red said with a shrug. "Maybe somebody a little mystical this time.. If I get on the postgrad exchange program next year it's not like I'll be here to play, anyway. I'll have plenty of time to figure out some concepts, maybe take some inspiration from the myths I'm studying."
"That's what skype is for," Silver insisted. "C'mon, you're only going to, like, Norway or something, right? That's no time difference, you could totally skype in!"
"Egypt's pretty tempting, actually," Red said thoughtfully. "Way warmer, too."
"Also no time difference, right?"
"Technically you're not supposed to be allowed to attend any of the clubs at our uni because you're not a student, so don't push it," Saylee warned him, ruffling his hair affectionately.
"...right, good luck," Blue said, hanging up the call he was on and shoving his phone back into his pocket as he jogged up to get back in step with the other three, slinging an arm over Saylee's shoulders. "Daisy said she left some lasagna in the oven to keep it warm, but if we leave it for too long it'll go dry and then there'll be nothing for it but to spend the rest of our lives repenting our sins, so how's about we dawdle a little faster?"
"I can't wait until she's done with night classes," Silver grumbled. "Is she ever around at all this semester?"
"Between her vet assistant job and doing all the coursework she needs for her PhD… no, and she also doesn't sleep, she is a being who exists entirely because of coffee and granola bars," Blue sighed. "She needs to chill and let the rest of us do some more cooking."
"She doesn't let any of us cook because I set fire to spaghetti, Red set fire to oven pizza and you nearly gassed us all when you turned the hob on and didn't light it," Saylee pointed out. "And then you noticed that you'd left it on and tried to light it. If I hadn't smelled gas and tackled you out of the kitchen…"
"I can make salad," Red suggested.
"I'm starting to think you'd manage to set fire to it anyway," Silver muttered. "She does know take-out food exists, right?"
"I did suggest that once, and she said we'd probably be healthier eating your hamsters' food," Blue said. "She also said anybody bringing take-out to the flat doesn't get back into the flat. We have to eat our Domino's pizza and fry-ups in hidden corners of campus while she's at work, secretively, fearful of her wrath."
"You said she's never in the flat," Silver pointed out.
"She would know," Blue insisted, wide-eyed with exaggerated fear. "She'd smell the grease in the air, or she'd sense a disturbance in the Force or something. Trust me, I've lived with her all my life, and she would know."
"She would," Red agreed, getting his keys out as they came up to their block of flats and all gave the requisite baleful look to the staircase before starting up to their fourth-floor flat.
"Every other flat here smells of pizza," Silver pointed out after a couple of floors. "Or weed."
"Ssssshhh," Saylee said. "We promised Mum we wouldn't let you get corrupted from the mere presence of Uni students."
Silver wrinkled his nose. "I already knew about weed," he said. "And swearing. And-"
"Go feed your hamsters," Red said, unlocking their door. "And wash your hands after you do. I'll get the lasagna out."
Saylee followed Silver into the glorified cubicle that passed for her bedroom. Like most student flats, already-small rooms had been subdivided into even smaller rooms to cram more bedrooms-and therefore more paying renters-into the space. When Silver stayed over for the weekend, he and his contraband hamsters stayed in Saylee's room. Saylee slung his weekend bag over the back of her desk chair while Silver dug out the hamsters' larger cage and started filling their food bowl before transferring them over.
"You know, after Mom and Ron find a place, you probably won't have to stay over here on the weekends anymore anyway," Saylee pointed out, taking Silver's jacket off of the hamsters' travel cage. "Mom's quitting one of her jobs. I mean, Ron's got two too, it's not like he's gonna be able to get a mining job again, but still, I bet they could arrange things so at least one of them's around on the weekends."
"Don't you and Red want me to hang out anymore?" Silver said, looking startled.
"Oh, no no no, that's not what I meant," Saylee said quickly, recognizing the look of fear in his eyes. "Silver, we love having you around, I just mean that it's a long train journey, and if you'd rather get more time to play with kids from school, spend some time with kids your own age instead of uni students…"
"The kids my own age are all assholes," Silver grumbled, dropping the bag of hamster food back into Saylee's desk drawer and slamming it closed. "I don't wanna hang out with them. I wanna hang out with you and Red."
"And you're welcome to as long as you like," Saylee said, giving him a hug.
He relaxed into it a second before shaking Saylee off, grumbling, "I'm not a baby, lemme go, I gotta move the hamsters."
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Day 1 wordcount achieved! I always forget quite how many words 1667 a day is, but I ended up going over anyway so it's all good XD So I finally have a second AU idea that I came up with as a result of playing Pathfinder for the first time this year and loving it, even if I keep rolling shit saves. I just imagined Saylee's string of Explosion deaths being the result of a string of nat 1s and what is basically a very nerdy university AU came from that XD Is this a recursive AU, since Pokemon is an RPG anyway…? I wanted to make dumb jokes about bad dice rolls and Steven being a DM whose ideas always go haywire and then I kept building from it. I think the postgame section is longer than the game section...
So, I have a few more ideas for scenes in this AU that'll turn up through this month. In this one, at this time, Saylee's a second-year undergrad doing a BA in Politics; Blue's a third-year undergrad doing Athletic Training (he's gonna be a professional trainer geddit); Red's in his Honours year studying Mythology and is hoping to do a postgrad; Steven, the DM, is a postgrad doing a PhD in Geology; Daisy is also a postgrad getting her PhD in veterinary medicine and she's making money and getting some of her course credits by working as a vet assistant; and Silver's a primary-school kid who stays with his big siblings on the weekends and brings his three hamsters with him :P
Anyway, good luck to everybody else doing NaNoWriMo! Let's do this! (In the NaNoWriMo spirit, this is entirely unedited, so if it's messy I apologize, but I won't go back and edit until the end of the month :P )