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 28 -- Mic'd Up

“Stappit!”

“Sorry!” I replied meekly, holding my hands up and away from myself as Ellie – our sound tech – came over and re-clipped my lapel mic again. “It’s pulling on the neckline of my dress and --”

“I don’ care if it’s pullin’ yer hair and callin’ you Rhonda, you leave that thing where it is!” She said exasperatedly. “Damn lace dress has all o’ two places I can clip the goddamn thing an’ we wanna hear youtalkin’, not yer cooch, so it has to go here.”

She tugged on the strip of reinforced material above my left breast, and I involuntarily shifted my neck to pull back when she did so, pulling the material out of her fingers and, in the process, unclipping the lapel mic yet again.

“Oh, fer the luvva… Venable! Hold her still, would ya?”

“Sure thing,” Brian said from behind me, making me jump when he placed his hands on my shoulders.

“Good,” Ellie said, then went back to fiddling with the lapel mic, only to swear and back off. “Little bastard. Hold ‘er there while I go get a safety pin from somewhere.”

“Will do,” Brian agreed, giving my shoulders a squeeze while Ellie stormed off, leaving my lapel mic hanging from its battery pack. I breathed a sigh of relief as she disappeared around the corner, wondering how Aunt Cici would react to someone jabbing safety pins through the lace dress and deciding I was willing to let Ellie take responsibility for that decision.

“Relax,” Brian cooed in my right ear, once again squeezing my shoulders. “Remember that time Sydney knocked over one of the boom mics and broke it ten minutes before filming? Ellie cussed up a storm but got a new one in place and configured fast enough we didn’t even have to delay the stream.”

“I know,” I said, rolling my shoulders a little and taking a deep breath. “She’s good at her job.”

“’S why you hired her.”

“No, I hired her ‘cause she’s high school friends with Deidre,” I chuckled. “It is why we kept her around, though.”

“See? You’re relaxing already.”

“I guess,” I admitted, leaning back into Brian’s hands, only for him to slide them up and across my shoulders, wrapping me in a hug from behind.

Sydney glanced over at us and gave me a huge grin and a thumbs-up, which I pretended not to see. I knew that Brian and I were acting a bit closer than friends, but at the moment, I was finding it hard to really care what people thought about it.

“Five minutes, folks,” said a stagehand, not one of ours but one provided by the con.

“She’ll be back,” Brian assured me again when I must have tensed a bit.

Even before I could say anything in response, I saw Ellie coming around the corner.

“Rhonda?” I asked when she got close enough, but only got the expected glare in response, so remained quiet as she put my mic in place again now she was armed.

Even without my mic issues, the air was tense for all of us. We’d spent an hour going over stage blocking earlier in the afternoon, covering where would be good places for us to walk to or interact if we wanted to get away from the table. Being on the stage, even with an empty auditorium, save for a few stagehands, had already been daunting enough, the cavernous, dark room feeling foreboding as we’d done our final stage setting and equipment tests.

We’d retreated to the backstage area when con-goers had begun wandering in to nab seats early, but even backstage, there had still been plenty to do, from costume touch-ups to makeup adjustments to things like Ellie’s never-ending battle with the lapel mics we’d bought and brought along but never tested with our costumes.

Even as we got settled in backstage, the action calming as the last nitpicky details got taken care of — or ignored — before the show, we could all hear the noise of the crowd amping up, a dull roar that kept building as more and more people filed in to fill the seats.

When I’d first seen the hall, I’d wondered how they ever expected us to fill such a large space. Now, judging from the noise I could hear, I couldn’t help but wonder if the space was big enough.

He must have felt the tension building in my shoulders again because Brian gave me another squeeze as we stood there. “Hey, we got this. It’s just like any other session: all we gotta do is roll some dice, stay in character, and have fun.”

“No sodas on the table,” Sydney said, frowning a bit. Being denied her mid-game caffeine had been a big damper on her excitement for the evening.

“We’ll live,” Aaron said, bumping her with one of his pauldrons.

“No chairs,” Deidre added, picking at a loose bit of paper sticking out of the hardbound sketchbook she was carrying in place of a holy book for her cleric.

“Sacrificed so we can move around the stage and act things out a bit,” Maria said, straightening her hood and fanning the sides of her cloak. Lightweight or not, it was eighty backstage, if it was anything. “And there are some folding chairs if we need ‘em.”

“No mid-game tacos,” I said, feeling Brian’s arms stiffen around me.

“Maybe we should reconsider--”

“Live in one!”

Brian whimpered, just loud enough for the rest of us to hear.

-==-

“Halt!”

My shoulders tensed, the conversation I was having with Sunny forgotten in an instant as we both turned our attention to where Adrian stood with his shield raised, eyes alert. I heard the soft sounds of metal on leather as my companions drew their weapons around me, and I grasped my own staff tightly, wringing my hands around the bindings to free them of sweat.

We had expected some kind of ambush even before we’d entered the narrow canyon and had prepared accordingly, donning armor and stowing what we could in our Bottomless Bags to keep our load light. With Adrian at our front and Burg taking rear guard, we were prepared for an assault from either direction, but even with our paladin’s warning, I couldn’t see any threat before us.

Then I smelled it, the sickening meaty stench of--

“Wretches!” Sunny called, half in alarm and half in glee, as the attack came not from ahead or behind but from the cliffs above us, the half-rotten corpses tumbling down the walls without regard for injury in their haste to capture us.

“Both sides!” Dahlia yelled, even as I felt the frosty crackle of her protective magics flowing over me, knowing without being told that she had cast a spell over our party to help ward against the evil undead.

As the corpses gathered around us, moving in like a festering wave of malignant, hungry flesh, my companions brought their weapons to the ready, the last glimmers of daylight glinting off their steely blades and maces, even as the sun, already low in the sky, sunk even further beyond the edge of the canyon above us, enveloping us in shadow.

##

“Everyone, roll for initiative.”

It took me a moment to shake my head clear, my fingers aching as I loosened my grip on the staff I was holding at the ready, just like Lunea had been.

The table the convention had provided us with was a large half-circle conference table our stage crew had placed near the center-back of the stage, with us arranged in wings to either side of Maria. I was in the middle on the stage-left side, placed as usual between Aaron and Brian. I had walked around the table, acting out my roleplay, but it was only a few steps to get back to the table and grab my dice.

“Fifteen.”

“Seven.”

“Eighteen.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Eleven.”

“Leigh?”

“Four,” I whimpered, wishing – and not for the first time – I’d taken the feature to let me act faster during combat. The crowd seemed to agree as I heard a few pained sounds coming from the shadows beyond the edge of the stage.

“Oof,” Maria said, rolling a few of her own dice and wincing before giving me an apologetic look.

##

I screamed as the Wretch’s claws tore through the material of my robe, a spray of blood flying from the wound as I spun about to face my attacker. My skin crackled where the claws had rent it, assuring me that Dahlia’s magic was doing its work, preventing the necrotizing poison from affecting me.

The spell I had been planning to cast fizzled on my lips as I stared into the thing’s sunken, soulless eyes, glowing in the dark with the power of the necromantic magic that kept them alive.

The beast let out an unholy bellow and lunged again, but this time I caught its claws with my staff, bringing the heavy jewelled head around to bash the creature in the side of the temple. It fell to the ground, stunned, and I wasted no time as I recited the incantation for my Fire Pillar spell, engulfing the creature in a jet of fierce energy that helped to light the area around us.

There were more of them, so many more. My companions were making quick work of individual Wretches, but such creatures never came in small groups, and for every one we took down, three more seemed to fill its space.

Could we…?

I placed a hand protectively on my belly – my child – and grinned.

We could. And we would.

Seeing an opening between my friends, I pointed my staff and bellowed the words for another Fire Pillar spell, channeling some of the latent magic in the air around us to boost its power.

This one would take out more than just one lowly Wretch.

Many, many more.

##

I breathed heavily as I held my staff above my head and cried out. The answering cry from the crowd startled me, the reminder of who and where I was almost as much of a shock to my system as I imagined the pain from the Wretch's claws was to Lunea.

But I wasn't Lunea. I was Leigh, and I was standing on a stage, dressed as an elven sorceress and screaming at fake monsters while protecting my unborn child.

For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was having the best or worst time of my life.

##

The familiar tinkling of Maria's play bell pulled my eyes back toward where she still stood at the table. "We're gonna pause here for the mid-session break, folks. Normally we'd break for about fifteen minutes, but we're taking twenty due to the live nature of the show. I've been asked to remind everyone that both refreshments and merch are available out front. Thank you."

The stage lights dimmed as applause washed out from the audience, and I felt more than saw the curtain pull into place between us and the crowded room beyond. There was still enough light for me to see my fellow cast members, most of them out in the middle of the stage just like I was and breathing just as heavily.

"Mics off," one of the hands called from stage left, and I heard more than one of my friends let out a sigh of relief.

"That was . . . ." Aaron began, then huffed a bit and leaned on the table.

"Intense," Sunny said, dropping the head of her axe to the stage and leaning on the handle. "Acting stuff out's a lot more tiring than just roleplaying at the table."

"You coulda stayed at the table if ya wanted," Deidre reminded her, dropping into a seizen position I wished I could do in my own costume.

"And be shown up by her?" Sunny asked, pointing at me and grinning. "No way!"

I blushed. "Well, we have the whole stage, and we set it up so we could come out here…."

"Don't worry about it," Brian assured me, almost wrapping an arm around my shoulders before changing his mind and patting my back instead. "Did you hear how much more into it the crowd got when we started acting stuff out?"

"Not really," I admitted, blushing even more. "I was kinda getting a bit too focused?"

"We noticed," Maria said, laying her robe over the back of one of the unfolded chairs and running her fingers through her sweat-soaked hair. "I want to make a few changes to things after tonight's session to make the whole acting part easier."

"Sorry!"

"Don't be!" she said, wrapping me in a tight hug despite our sweatiness. "I'm loving it!"

Everyone else was nodding their agreement, so I shook my embarrassment off.

"Fifteen minutes," one of the hands called, probably the same one from earlier.

"Anyone got anything they need to do before the next part of the session?"

"Pee!" Sunny called, racing past us, her axe abandoned on the floor.

"Meditate," Deidre said, closing her eyes and rolling her neck and shoulders.

"Snack," Brian admitted, shrugging his shoulders. "You want anything?"

"A bucket of ice?"

"How about a cold water?"

"Deal," I agreed, unfolding another one of the chairs and dropping into it.

I leaned back as much as I could and stretched my shoulders, then pulled the pocket watch out of my belt pouch and checked the time.

Another hour and a half of playtime once the break was over, and that's assuming we didn't run over. There was nothing else planned for the auditorium, so it was fine if we did, but still.

And now I had to pee, too.

Whoo boy.

-==-

Notes:

Comments and kudos appreciated.