Destination: Thataway!

by Hawattie

TPK, reroll new characters.

I'd been on food duty while Ner' did all the actual work and set everything up. I spent a whole five minutes attempting to dial up a delivery service until I realized that not only did I not own a phone, I didn't even know how to use a phone. Luckily, Ner' had been charitable enough to open up a stable dimensional rift to a ridiculously overstuffed pantry stocked with every kind of junk food imaginable. Somehow, it'd even had several two liter bottles of Unique's Thunderbrew that I snagged and chugged.

"Is everything all set to go on your end, Ner'?" I asked for the seventh time, looking from the pile of snacks and drinks to the steadily growing cracks in the necromancer's force field. I'd also been on sentry duty, and let me say, watching my friends attempt to break through the barrier was rather funny. "Looks like they'll break through in about thirty seconds, we gotta move quick!"

"I'm just about finished," he called back curtly. Hundreds of skeletal maids had crawled out of the woodwork and repaired our battlefield in seconds. Ner' himself had only needed to provide the intellectual labor, the frantic scratching of his pencil was a hallmark of our work. "Have you ever tried filling out nearly a dozen of these at once? It's not very easy."

"Just trying to be helpful," I shot back. With a huge grin on my face I selected a large bag of chocolate covered pretzels from the mix for myself. I gleefully tore the bag open and shoved a hoofful of them into my mouth. "Fif'een se'unds lef!" I choked out around the pretzels I was gleefully masticating right as the sound of pencil lead breaking reached my ears. Ner' cursed in some foul demonic tongue. Or maybe it was German. I dunno.

"What did you say?" Ner' barked at me once.

I held up my hoof and pointed to the fact that I was chewing my food while my expression implied that it is impolite to talk with your mouth full and that I was not going to do so, despite the fact that I had just done so.

Ner's expression of baffled fury was priceless.

I pointedly swallowed my food. "What I said before was, "Fifteen seconds left!"," I calmly explained. "What I need to say right now is, "Five seconds left, is everything all set?"."

I really wish I had a camera to capture Ner's expression. Hell, I'd even go for an artist's rendition.

Ah, well. C'est la vie.

Thankfully, Ner' had the presence of mind to take up his position at the head of the table before my friends burst through his barrier.

~~~Meanwhile~~~

The Courier was rather pissed off. He was pissed that he had to fight another one of Ner's minions which refused to die. He was pissed that said minion had trashed his favorite AM rifle. He was pissed that it was the sorceress and not him who had eventually managed to beat the regenerating minion.

But most of all he was pissed at Ner'Ghalad's goddamn barrier.

"Why won't you fucking break already?!" he shouted, punctuating each word with a slug fired from his shotgun. Seeing that the damage his shotgun slugs were dealing to the barrier was repairing itself faster than it was dealt, the Courier pulled a hunting rifle from his back. Heedless of the fact that firing either a rifle or a shotgun one-handed was a surefire way to break your wrist, the Courier dual-wielded the weapons like a badass.

With a primal roar, he shot both guns until they ran dry.

The barrier was still standing, though tiny cracks spider-webbed throughout its surface. The Courier's hands and wrists were broken in numerous places. Not to be beaten, the Courier dropped both guns and sprinted towards the barrier. Several paces away he leaped and aimed a flying drop-kick at the epicenter of the cracks.

A sharp snap rang out and the Courier clutched at his broken ankles with his broken hands. He whimpered a bit and spat at the barrier in defiance.

The sorceress rolled her eyes and picked up the Courier's dropped guns in her magic. Her horn flashed and her eyes glowed with magic as she cast a simple diagnostic spell which would let her see how the guns worked. "Seems simple enough," she said to herself.

A second simple spell allowed her to replicate the weapon's spent ammunition and a third simple spell enchanted the bullets to discharge telekinetic force violently upon impact. With contemptuous ease she pointed both guns at the barrier and fired them together once.

The barrier shattered.

"These are fun!" the Sorceress giggled. With a smirk at the Courier, she blew the smoke from the barrels of both guns and then tossed them back to him.

~~~ ~~~

"Yo! What took you guys so long?" I called and waved at my friends, gathering their attention. "Come on, you're just in time!" I grabbed a seat and beckoned my friends over. Ner' passed me one of the sheets of paper he'd hurriedly written and I accepted it with a word of thanks.

My friends just gaped at me.

"Well don't just stand there!" I exclaimed. "Grab some snacks and grab your seats," I pointed to the pile of food I'd gathered earlier.

"Wait, what?"

I sighed and Ner' rolled his eyes as if he'd never heard a more idiotic question in his life. "We're playing Dungeons and Dragons," I explained. Ner' added a soft "duh," to the end of my sentence.

To their credit, my friends only hesitated a moment before cautiously joining us. I noticed that the Courier seemed especially suspicious and checked his seat thoroughly for some kind of trap before sitting down. He was just being paranoid though, I knew for a fact that Ner' wouldn't dare interrupt a good session of D&D.

Once everyone was seated, Ner' handed out the rest of the character sheets he'd been working on. "So!" Ner' began, "Do any of you not know the rules of Dungeons and Dragons?"

"Which edition?" Fphant asked.

Ner's response was to summon a player's handbook out of thin air a foot above the table. The book fell to the wooden surface with a loud bang. It's cover revealed that we were playing 3.5 edition.

The sorceress quickly snatched up the book and began reading it at lightning speed. She must've used magic to assist, because somehow she'd managed to read the whole thing in ten seconds flat. "Seems simple enough," she declared as she returned the book to its place in the middle of the table.

She then zapped us all with a magical spell and I discovered I suddenly had an encyclopedic knowledge of the D&D 3.5e player's handbook.

"That's quite the spell," Ner' remarked, turning to face the sorceress. "You must teach it to me some time." The two of them began chatting about complicated magic stuff that I didn't understand in the slightest.

Noticing that my bag of pretzels was empty I got up to grab a new snack. "Anyone want me to grab them something while I'm up?" I asked, selecting a bag of chocolates for myself.

And that's when the snack table exploded, knocking the sadly uneaten chocolates from my grip and flinging all of my carefully stacked snacks this way and thataway.

Author's Note:

This chapter is entirely canon. I'm being super cereal right now. Canon chapter is canon.
Happy April 1st.

Stay awesome. Try not to die.

Comments

[Legion222]

Based on the name, I was actually hoping for a joke chapter where everyone dies, then it's revealed they were all just nerds playing DnD all along and the chapter ends with them creating new characters and starting over. But this is actually better, so yeah.

Write on,
Legion