Note: For the duration of my time as writer in residence, I will be serializing a longish improvised story on Mondays, posting work by other writers in response to games on Wednesdays, and posting assorted sundries on Fridays.

Part I: Him What Died and Gave it Up

You tore your grandfather’s character sheet to shreds and dropped them on his coffin. The tooth-yellow paper was soft and mossy. It flaked and crumbled in your hands. Somebody shoveled dirt onto the grave. Later you looked for some scrap of the character sheet on your person. You cleaned beneath your nails and turned out all your new suit’s pockets. It was really gone. You should have kept a corner. You could have kept it in an amulet of natural armor. You could have kept it in the miniature treasure chest beneath your pillow. (The one with the very small key.) At the funeral, middle-aged women and older complimented you on your good looks. They said you were becoming a man. They said that you had bedroom eyes. They meant because the lashes were long. They touched your jaw. Their fingernails were cold as iron. You couldn’t believe they would talk about your eyes that way on the day of your grandfather’s funeral. What you didn’t know was that your grandfather had the same eyes when he was a young man, before they were fogged by age and drink and pain. What they were really saying, these middle aged women and older, was that you reminded them of him. But they also understood, as you did not, that a funeral could be a mildly erotic occasion. And it was not their fault that you had poured very nearly all your points into your charisma since level thirteen. It was not their fault you looked so fine and trim in a suit.

Your grandfather died in an implausible spasm of bad luck. He was crossing the street when it happened. A small airplane, a crop-duster, crash-landed on his head. He dropped his sword and shield. His unfashionable hi-tops and collapsed socks (their elastic stretched beyond the point of no return) stuck out from underneath the plane’s belly like a witch’s ruby slippers. But the legs did not curl. They were thin, white, and rigid. His knees were like albino apples. The crop-duster’s pilot, a drunk who had spent all his skill ranks on flying small aircraft in order to counteract the effects of his constant drinking, who would have been in fact an ace if not for said bad habit, was not injured in the fall. The plane itself lost its propeller and its tail. It was a rental, heavily insured, and so the owner made a small profit on your grandfather’s death. The first policeman to the scene had to stifle a laugh, and so did the second. (You don’t know this for a fact, but you have heard it second-hand, though people often lie to you and tell you things they think you want to hear, because you are so pretty.) Your grandfather’s bad fortune was a running gag in the village (Pittsburgh, PA, pop. 305,704), and so his ending doubled as a punch line.

The setup for the gag was this: he had, since dropping out of college at age twenty and character level nineteen, allocated all his points to the luck stat. This was not a well-regarded build. A character’s luck stat has only two directly observable effects: 1) a high luck number makes your body more resistant to poisons and plagues, and 2) it improves the quality of loot drops from even minor monsters. The former effect makes luck a practical choice for princes with jealous siblings, while the latter is more important for drifters and beggars. Given sufficient luck, a man can count on receiving five gold pieces (rather than the customary seven silver) for killing a sewer rat roughly 75% of the time. A blue bat will yield a pair fur-lined boots (cash value: ten gold pieces, enough for two healing potions or a ten-piece bucket of fried chicken) or an antidote herb. In short, a person might make an effective hourly wage of fifty gold pieces by lazily grinding rodents in a low-level dungeon, risking nothing and seeing none of the high-level content’s visual splendor. This would place them in the 65th percentile for income nationally if they worked full hours, but few who chose a luck-centric build chose to do. Instead they might dungeoneer for three or four hours a day, earn the equivalent of eight hours’ minimum wage, and then retire to a favorite tavern or inn for the working day’s remainder, downing pints of ale and sweet potato French fries on money they had barely earned. It was a shamefully effortless lifestyle, notorious for leaving its adherents dangerously under-leveled and incapable of participating in raids and endboss battles (and, admittedly, hellishly difficult to poison).

Your grandfather had earned a lifetime’s bread this way, hunting lowly slimes and dire guinea pigs with a bronze spear, a short bow, and a lightning-proof shield made of rubber. He mostly patrolled the downtown office tower, which had been reclaimed by nature in the wake of the Dragon of the Forest’s semi-cataclysmic New Year’s Eve visitation. The monsters therein were objectively incapable of threatening an adventurer level twenty-three or higher, but your grandfather said they would frighten him right up to the end. “I realize they can’t kill me,” he said. “But they don’t know that. And they never stop trying. And it’d hard not to feel something about it, knowing there’s a thinking creature somewhere wants you dead. To say nothing of looking one in the eye.” He touched his spear where it rested when he didn’t need it — in the umbrella stand, with his exotic umbrella collection. The spear grew very cold when he went a day and a night without using it, and so its cold became a comfort.

Your grandfather had always maintained that he did not spend his points on luck purely as an investment in the associated carefree lifestyle. Rather, he explained, the luck was meant to speed the inevitable arrival of his big, unlikely break. “There’s something coming for me,” he often said. “Something massive.” He didn’t know what it would be. Fame, fortune, some unlikely drop — a destiny, a reason. “Perhaps I’ll be walking along with my spear angled just so,” he would say, “up into the air. And perhaps a king dragon, some ancient Russian lizard tyrant stretching his wings, will come gliding past. And perhaps my spear will, quite by accident, impale his magic ruby weak point, not because of my heroic strength but because of my heroic luck. And then perhaps he will die on the spot. And for a moment I will seem to have died, but then I will cut my way out of his back with the same spear, now radiant with the glow of the dragon’s life force, and bathed in steaming gore. And I will raise the spear unto the sun and the people of Pittsburgh will cheer for me — but more importantly, some hundred thousand Russian peasants halfway across the world will be free, and they will melt the dragon’s hoarded treasures to make themselves new armor, and they will drink potato vodka and play fiddle and sing, and celebrate their unexpected good fortune.” He stressed that this was only one of many possible scenarios wherein his high luck stat would prove essential, but it was the only such hypothetical he could ever describe with persuasive detail. Most of the people in the village (the several hundred thousand people, the shop owners and blacksmiths and millers and paralegals and Wal-Mart employees and television news reporters and actuarial mages and explorers and so on) concluded that your grandfather was really counting on the Russian dragon.

This is one reason your grandfather’s death by crop-duster struck the local police as so funny. The plane had fallen on him much as he had imagined the dragon doing, but his spear had lodged itself harmlessly in one of the wings and of course he never did emerge triumphant from the crop-duster’s back. The other reason your grandfather’s death was so funny was that it served as the culmination of a lifetime of misfortune. While your grandfather did benefit from his high luck in terms of loot drops and resistance to poison and plague, it seemed to help little else. His wife, your grandmother, had died giving birth to your father, who was born malformed, without a face or fingerprints. He had lost three subsequent homes in three neighborhoods to stray fireballs from three distinct wizard battles. He had been the very last man to withdraw his money in a sudden, unexpected bank run (and therefore never got the money). He had won a negative prize in the lottery due to a printing error, and the state had actually required him to pay up. (It was only ten GP, but the outrage of it ruined his temper for a year.) He had found a blessed long sword with six dice of holy damage and broken it the next day on the helmet of a Morty Mole. He had fallen through a manhole into the open mouth of a massive Lime Master Slime, which digested him very slightly, found that its stomach hadn’t the necessary acids to break his body down, and passed him out its gelatinous anus almost totally unharmed, but reeking of evil key lime pie for days. The luck stat was no help at all except in finding small piles of gold and fur-lined boots, and this made the other villagers comfortable and even smug in the rightness of their life decisions.

Your grandfather took their abuse with good humor. He learned to laugh at himself. He wooed the occasional young woman well enough to win her for a night of sweet, clumsy passion. (In fact he was well-like by women generally, none of whom had the reasons of competition or general manly arrogance to justify hostility toward him.) He found rare umbrellas in antique shops where most adventurers were searching desperately for neglected magic items. He always stayed dry when it rained.

By the time of the funeral, the joke of your grandfather’s end had gone flat, leaving only the fact of an old man crushed to death in a public street.

His mount — a plump and thickly muscled armored warhorse with lavender skin and a mane the bruised color of blueberry yogurt — lay down across the grave when it was all filled in, and waited there for death, and sung a mournful song. White glimmer and glitter rose from its body on a humming shaft of light.

Your father drew blue teardrops on his face, beneath the indentations where his eyes should be, with blue permanent marker. Your mother did her best to cry on his behalf.

You found a publicly funded tree to sit beneath and study your own character sheet. You had another level coming soon. You already knew how you would spend the points: charisma, always more charisma. When others asked you how you were allocating your growth, you always claimed to be spending equal amounts on dexterity, strength, constitution, intelligence, and, yes, a little on charisma. Because your charisma was so high they often believed you in spite of the obvious. The publicly funded tree bent eastward in the wind.

Your mother came to you. She said your name. She said, “It’s time to read the will.” She said, “The lawyer tells me you’re in it.”

You folded your sheet, taking care that your mother could not see its contents. You tucked it in your wallet. She reached for your hand, but you didn’t want to take it. She would only try to lead you as she did your sightless father. This in spite of the fact that, as far as she knew, your perception score was just fine.