A group of friends streams their gaming on Wednesday nights. But not all the action is on the dining room table.

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Chapter 1 - Now Streaming

"You successfully make camp for the night on the moors, the whispering spirits on the wind doing little to interrupt your rest. You rise the next morning and... Lunea?"

"Ugh," I groaned, already knowing what was coming. I picked up my twenty-sided die and rolled it, then winced. "Five."

"With your--"

"That's with my con bonus."

Maria hissed through her teeth and gave me an apologetic look. "You know what that means."

I did. I gave my best wretched groan as I turned from the table and mimed vomiting behind myself, only feeling slightly mollified by the sound of Jonah dry heaving from the other side of the table.

"Morning sickness again?" Brian asked me. Well, Burg asked Lunea, to be more accurate, as I felt him gently rub my back.

"Urg," I gurgled in response, giving another half-heave before turning around and theatrically wiping my mouth with my arm. He offered me my water bottle, and I gave him a thankful smile as I opened it and took a long swig.

"We should have left her in town," Jonah, IE "Black John," hissed, glaring at me. "She's a liability."

"Oh, shove off, you sourpuss," Sydney said in her Sunny voice, giving him a none-too-gentle shove of her own as she said it. "The girl's tough, and need I remind you if it weren't for her magic we'da never gotten ya out of that poison trap you failed to disarm last time?"

"Psht," he scoffed, turning his glare on her. "You're a dwarf, and *dwarves* are tough. She's a stinking half-breed. Their elven blood makes 'em weaker than wet paper dolls. First furback we come across so much as breathes on her we'll be down a party member and up a dead weight."

"What's that about elven blood?" Deidre asked from his other side, giving Jonah a look that said, none too subtly, just how much she wanted him to say something else in front of her own full-blood elf character.

"Yeah, but you're a cleric," he argued, "not some half-dressed enchantress slut who--"

"*John*," Maria said in her Voice of Command.

Jonah looked around at the rest of the table and finally read the room. "Whatever." He gave me one last withering look before turning an icy smile on Maria. "I'm gonna scout ahead a little bit, while everyone else gets things packed up."

"You do that," Maria agreed in a calm tone, though her eyes still held a steely edge. "And if nobody else has anything they want to take care of, I think we're all a little on edge, so we'll call it here for tonight."

The rest of us shook our heads.

"In that case," Maria said, turning her attention from us to the camera at the end of the table, "thank you all for joining us. Wednesday Knights will return with more adventures next Wednesday! There will be a live chat stream re-run on Friday, and don't forget to catch our new series Gnome Bowl this coming Monday, hosted by our own Aaron Verre! But for now, remember: we love you, be kind, and as always... keep adventuring."

The lights went down as the end of stream music played, and we all sat in silence for a few minutes, both to make sure the stream was off air and catch our breaths.

One of the assistants moved through the shadows to Maria's side, and after another moment, the lights came back up. "Alright, folks," Maria said, in the exasperated way that told us we were in trouble. "I'd hoped we'd get another half hour or so in tonight, try and get y'all to the next town, but here we are."

"Maybe if we'd made it there we coulda dropped the dead weight."

"Don't start on this again, man," I said, hanging my head in frustration.

"I'm just sayin' you fucked up and oughta just roll a new character," Jonah said, ignoring the fact that both Deidre and Sydney had stood up from their seats and were glaring down at him. "Maybe one with a dick this time."

"Hey hey hey," Aaron, the sixth player in our game, finally spoke up from where he'd sat silent to my right. "For real, enough of this. You've been ragging on Leigh about this for months, man. What the hell?"

"Fuckin' whatever," Jonah said, slamming his chair back and standing up. "I'm goin' out for a smoke. I'll catch up on the after-game notes later." He gave me one last nasty look before knocking Sydney with his shoulder and heading out the side door, our production staff giving him a wide berth like they usually did after sessions.

As soon as the door clicked closed behind him, the energy in the room relaxed considerably.

Maria cracked her neck. "Alright, now the drama queen's gone, down to business."

"Don't let him catch you calling him that," Sydney said, sitting down on the edge of the table and crossing her arms. "Even if it's the truth."

Deidre collapsed back into her own seat, tossing a wary glance toward the side door. "I swear he gets worse every session."

"Guys..." Maria started, then sighed. "Can we forget about Jonah for now? Aaron, you did great this session. It seems like you're finally figuring out how you want to handle Adrian's powers."

Aaron blushed at Maria's praise but nodded. "Yeah. I'm figuring out who he is, and how his relationship with Shanah works. When we get a chance, I think he'd like to pursue a higher rank in his order."

"That could open up some fun questlines for us, and improving the party's relationship with the Paladins of Shanah would be a good arc in our storyline," Maria agreed, giving him another encouraging smile. "On the other end of the spectrum, Brian? You seemed to struggle with Burg's druid abilities more this session than usual."

Brian groaned and leaned back in his chair, balancing it on its back feet in that way that always made me worry he would topple over, even if he never had. "Yeah, I'm not liking this class as much as I thought I would. The whole 'guardian of nature' thing is neat, but the restrictions are a real pain in the ass."

"Yeah, I warned you about that when we were planning this campaign. Do you want to work toward switching characters?"

Brian looked pensive for a moment, then shook his head. "Not on your life. I like Burg a lot, it's just the class restrictions that are rubbing me the wrong way. Besides, no way am I gonna abandon my baby mama like that," he said, giving me a wide grin.

"Hmmm." Maria tapped her lips with her pen a few times, then took some notes. "I'll message you some ideas later. Work on a class change story arc of some kind, perhaps?"

"That'd be cool, yeah," Brian nodded, his eyes brightening at the idea of getting to change his character up.

"Cool. And speaking of your baby mama..." Maria gave me a long look.

I grunted. "I'm not making a different character."

"I wasn't gonna ask you to."

"No way," Sydney chimed in. "Lunea's one of our viewers' favorite characters. Not only would it hurt our views, but it'd mean we'd have to re-work a lot of our party's reasons for adventuring."

"Jonah can get fucked by a freight train," Deidre chimed in with her usual nuance as she casually doodled a penis on the cover of the character sheet he had left behind.

Maria sighed again. "Really, guys, just... Deedee, put the pen down, you know that just pisses him off. I'm tired of Jonah's bullshit too, but...."

"But?"

"But he's one of us."

Silence.

"Anyway, what I was gonna say is that I'm liking the way you're developing Lunea as a character, and a lot of the acting you're bringing into your play. We've gotten a lot of comments from moms who follow our show about how they appreciate seeing you protect your baby bump and the humor you've brought into presenting the challenges of being a pregnant adventurer."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "That's great to hear. It's a difficult topic to research, so I've been worried I wasn't doing a good job of it."

"You're doing great!"

"I've loved it!"

"You sure you aren't really pregnant?"

I glared at Brian for that one.

"Hey, don't look at me like that. You're the one who bought that mustard flavored ice cream that's in the fridge."

"I didn't know it was mustard flavored!"

"It says Grey Pupon right on the carton."

"I thought that was a tea or something!"

I stared daggers at Brian, while he just grinned back in the same way he did every time he teased me, which was far too often in my opinion.

"One thing's for sure, you two definitely act like a couple," Sydney said with an amused grin of her own.

"We do not!" Brian and I said at the same time, definitely not helping.

"Alright already! Jeezus," Maria said, then crossed herself. "Just keep up the good work. I've been doing research of my own, and we're about sixteen weeks in, so by estimation you're definitely showing at this point, but I think I'm gonna go ahead and drop the DC and frequency on the nausea checks since we're well into your second trimester now."

"Oh thank god!"

Maria chuckled. "You say that now, but just wait 'til the third trimester. Penalties on Dex and Con checks 'cause of side effects of the pregnancy, and I've got something special I'm trying to plan us toward for the birth."

"There's a lot of talk in the forums about that," Sydney said. "Lots of speculation on if the baby's gonna be human or half-elf, a boy or a girl, and more."

"All good questions. Some I've already got answers to," Maria said, her eyes sparkling. "And none I'm answering just yet."

"When we get to town Dahlia wants to buy some yarn and knitting needles so she can start making clothes for the baby during our downtimes."

"I didn't know you'd specced points into that kind of thing."

"I didn't," Deidre said, a wicked glean in her eyes.

Great.

"I did," Aaron said, blushing when we all turned our attention to him. "Remember, my character background is I was a tailor's apprentice before I received my call to serve?"

"I don't know that tailoring and knitting qualify as the same skill set," Maria countered, " but I'll check."

Aaron shrugged. "If I can, I'll help her with the clothes."

"Thanks!"

Sydney hissed through her teeth as she scanned her phone. "There's already some talk in the forums about Jonah's blow-up earlier."

"They're calling that a blow-up? That was hardly anything. Remember how he acted last series, when we killed the demon he was trying to convince Maria to let him bind to his warlock's will? That was a blow-up."

We all laughed at that.

"We'll deal with Jonah when we gotta," Maria said solemnly. "But for now, his character fills an important role in the party, so until we figure out what we want to do about that... let's talk about the upcoming convention instead."

"They've confirmed Samoa Joe is gonna be there!" Deidre squealed, bouncing in her chair excitedly. "He's supposed to do a panel on the live-action version of Battle Droid Phoenix."

"Ugh. Another live-action movie based on an anime. Those are always terrible."

"Well, I'm excited for it."

"More importantly, we should talk about our show at the con, right?" Maria said, using her mom-voice. "We're just over two weeks out, so if anyone has issues with being there the full weekend, now's pretty much the last time to air them."

I shook my head, as did everyone else at the table. We'd all been excited for the convention ever since we'd been invited to hold a two-night event, and I didn't think there was anything short of Armageddon itself that would keep us from being there.

"Good. I've reached out to Aunt Cici about our costumes, and she should be getting back to us next week to finalize fittings on everything."

"Cool!"

"Hell yeah!"

"Hmmm. Unless anyone has anything else they wanna talk about, I think that's probably it for tonight."

None of the rest of us seemed to have anything else to add, so like most Wednesday nights we said our goodbyes and headed out to our cars, another week's adventuring done.

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NOTES:

All feedback is appreciated, and I hope you fall in love with these characters just like I have.