10
1.5k 11 67
X
Reading Options
Font Size
A- 15px A+
Width
Reset
X
Table of Contents
Loading... please wait.

Paper plates with pizza crusts on them sat off to the side, as Fern's Mom sat thoughtfully at the table, with her fingers laced together.

Fern's eyes were wet, having just related what had happened earlier in the day.

It had been so hard. But he felt like if he'd held all this in, he'd be like a tank filled up with so much water that it was going to burst. He needed to get all this out.

"So you've told me what you're feeling Fern," Mom said. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know," he slumped down, resting his head on folded arms.

"You want me to get you some girl clothes? Ones you can just try out and see if you want to wear them more?"

Fern nodded.

"Do you want me to always refer to you as Fern now?" Mom said. "And... refer to you as a girl?"

"I... I haven't given much thought to it," Fern said truthfully.

"Well," Mom asked, "do you think that on the inside, deep down, that you're a girl?"

Fern felt her eyes welling up with tears. "Yes. I do."

She was a girl. That's what she really thought.

****

"The Mind Flayer cries out," Derek said with gusto, "saying 'you fools may have defeated me, but one day, you shall -'"

"I shoot im' in the mouth," Fern said.

"What?" Pat laughed.

"Do Mind Flayers even have mouths?" Rykker laughed as well.

Derek seemed dumbfounded. He'd obviously been expecting the bard to pull a stunt, not Fern, and particularly not in his dramatic speech.

"Um," Derek said, "roll for dexterity."

Fern began shaking her d20 in her hands, then let it loose.

It landed on 18.

"And," Fern smirked, "with my modifiers, that adds up to -"

"You loose a shaft from your bow," Derek cut her off, "and the arrow smacks right into his mouth. The force is so great, that it causes him to fly backward through the ancient library, crashing into a bookcase. In his final moments, he watches as the bookcase he crashes into creaks, and then falls down right on top of him."

Pat let out a long whistle.

"Suddenly," Derek said, "you see the sconces in the library blaze to life, as the curse is broken. The Mind Flayer is dead."

Pat leaned an elbow on the table. "But... are we sure? Perhaps we should spend five hours doing checks on all the books in the library just to make sure there aren't -"

"There are no secret passageways in the chamber," Derek said definitively, but with a visible smile on his face.

Fern thought back on a play session a few weeks back where they'd all been paranoid after not catching an assassin sent by the organization "the black cloak," and had since been checking everywhere for secrets.

The story that Derek had constructed obviously had taken a ton of work, but it had been some of the most fun she'd ever had with her friends.

But just as the romance between Tadon and Fern Nightshade had blossomed, so had the one between their real life counterparts.

Fern had gained confidence in who she was, and her friends had soon come to realize that not only was she just as fun as she was before, she seemed even more happy and involved.

Today, the comic shop was closed, and they were playing their game at her house.

She was wearing a cute pair of jeans with a yellow shirt. She'd been presenting as a girl for about a month now, and she started wondering how she'd gotten through life otherwise. She now sported a nice pair of jade earrings, and her and her mom had given some curl to her hair.

High school was nearing it's end for her and her friends, but to Fern Nightshade, she didn't tear up at goodbyes. Because every friend she knew was in the shadows of the ironwood trees, and her kin were in the shafts of moonbeams.

She looked into the eyes of Rykker. But one... one ran beside her, whacking any monsters that got a little too close.

Fern shook away her comforting, but distracting thoughts.

"Derek."

He looked up from behind his screen. "Hm?"

"May I do a perception check?"

She saw the ever so slight curl of his lips.

She counted out the numbers after rolling her die. "16."

"You're getting too good Fern," he said, "I'd've give it to you for ten. You hear the sound of boots coming up the stairs, and you hear the sound of Tils's voice. He and The Black Cloak have given up all pretense and subterfuge. They know the relics are near, and think that there's no one in their way."

"Roll initiative?" Rykker held his dice ready.

"No," Fern smiled. "We've got a lot of cover. Plus, they're going to be going up the stairs. So my plan is..."

===========

This little story was a fun one to write. Though I, again, feel like I'm starting to exhaust my more original options for a TG story (I'm not sending a character to a school for girls just yet ?) I do think that it was fun to explore how to write characters in a real world imagining a fantasy setting -

In other words, I'm basically doing writing inception here. ?

I'm not sure how the D&D elements have gone over with this - on one hand, I'm wondering if the jargon made this story a bit of a drag with those who haven't discovered one of the greatest games period, and on the other hand, I wonder if anyone who's a D&D nerd was wagging their head at mistakes -

I haven't played D&D since the start of the pandemic, so I'm a bit rusty.

As always, thanks for reading!

67