Survival Of The Fittest

A cavalcade of mispronunciations and mondegreen later and the boulder was tumbling tumbling 'cross the table making a pitter patter sound like rain sliding down a steeped glass window until it rolled out and off and over onto the carpet ground.

Lucas did not speak.

Was he allowed to see the boulder? Was that part of the rules? Or was that just Beryl's job? Did Michael or Phillip or Ophelia get a glimpse of the boulder before it hit the ground? Were they excommunicated? Was excommunication a thing that could happen in this game? For all that he thought he knew Lucas knew only that he knew precisely nothing.

And still, he did not speak. Instead, he waited.

Waited with baited breath.

The boulder bounced, bounded, fell to the floor. Phillip's eyes traced its arc and descent, but he made no move to pick it up or signal anything to anyone else. He'd absolutely messed up the mantra but the others had too so that was okay. Chaos was in the spirit of the event. Now, all he had to do was wait, hanging rapt as the timer of the revelation of their fates approached.

The boulder would be fine, of course, wherever it had ended up. Dice were meant to be dropped, and it was sturdy. There was nowhere for it to really get lost, like maybe they'd have to drag some furniture around and disperse a nest of dust bunnies, but there weren't any open heating vents it could drop into or anything.

His face felt stiff, his eyes narrow from squinting at where the boulder had gone (he couldn't see the number and this was so exciting) and so he forced a big, wide, goofy smile onto his face.

It was up to Beryl to follow up and pronounce their destiny.

Beryl had apparently gone deaf or something because that definitely wasn't what Michael had said, but fuck it y'know whatever who cared. Also Michael was pretty sure some of Beryl's hair went in his mouth and that was ICKY and God he just really loved complaining about things.

Beryl was like 'BAM!' and rolled the die right off the table like a madwoman. Michael just sat there and waited for whoever to reveal what was actually, like, happening.

She was, maybe, pretty sure she hadn't intended to throw the dice right off the table. She could never be sure for sure, though.

That left her with the role of following up. Now, it was often the case that she did not pay much attention to the time tables. She could have checked on the Boulder tomorrow, or maybe tomorrow plus a hundred years. The thing was, those arbitrary periods of time really weren't much different. It was like... sometimes, a second passed in a second, sometimes it passed a hundred years later. Beryl, for example, deigned to draw out the moment with a lazy flicker of her eye towards her target. Lazier still her retrieval of the stupendously heavy rule book and tucking of it against her chest, lazier still her dragging her own flesh and bone out of the chair and probably further away from that point in space and time where her own brain orbited in the far Oort Cloud.

She stooped over, appraised the dice, the book. And time passed, and she checked again. Her thumb tapped on the page, and then again, and then it was a repetitive motion until it at some point wasn't.

A second passed. Or something similar enough? The clock read thirty seconds later, but the clock was just a clock, it couldn't quite tell her what amount of time had truly passed.

"Game's over."

Beryl giggled humorlessly and returned the book to the table with a tap dance and a prompt exiting of the kitchen. Wait, was that her hair sticking out of Micheal's mouth and looping like a crazy straw? Interesting artistic statement!

[Beryl Maehlona continued in Anemophily]

Game's over?

Lucas moseyed on over to where the die fell and stared at it intently.

...

Haha, yup. Those were the unmagical digits. Flight of the crow. Bad, bad karma, he guessed. Looking from head to assembled head, he determined that, yes, the game was probably right about that much. Maybe they'd be good for some other activity, but not this. The number said as much.

"Jeez," Lucas said, shrugging his shoulders, "guess that's that, right? Not the right time to play the game, or something."

He turned to Ophelia with a sheepish grin on his face. He couldn't help but feel more than a little guilty for what he did, dragging her all the way out here to someone's house, someone she didn't know, forcing her to sit down with other, stranger strangers, and then blue ballsing her at the end, for lack of a better term. If that was the ending the game was giving them, then it wasn't the right way to end their time together.

"So, what do you want to do now?" he asked her.

[Lucas Diaz continued in Sunflower Sutra.]

[+] Automatic Writing Exercise for Creative Writing Class - Lucas Diaz

Wind gusts swirling on the edge of a chasm not even looking at what they were doing, waiting for the windfall of whatever was to come, trumpets blaring, the call of judgement. Something beckons inwards, the pit, the obsession, the lack of wants or need or anything of the source wanting to be finished for finishing's sake, post orgasm glow, post orgasm shame, something nothing of them ever wanted or experienced, the shape of water pooling on salt flats rising in steam and floating above itself in bubbles, the shape of the universe reflected in the causality above, you gaze up and smile. You and your cronies, henchmen. Taunting the world, daring it to come and get you all and deposit you somewhere where you can do no harm. You close your eyes and wake up somewhere else. Somewhere nice, you ask for, and Paris it is. Everywhere is sinful, but Paris most so.

A nice cafe by the dirty water river. Two men walk down the steps to kick their feet in the waters of the Seine and accidentally trip over themselves, falling headfirst down the stone steps and their blood pooling in the water below. You look upon your reflection, ye mighty, and hope. Looking no more you close your eyes again and wind up somewhere else on the other side of the world, this time caught in a snowstorm, every place you visit familiar but none of it ringing true, obscured by a thin thick grainy layer of static and ice that makes you wonder what global temperature shift are we responsible for this time you wonder. You childhood home where you took your first girlfriend. You never took your first girlfriend here. The roof is torn off of the top of the house. You grew up in a desert in Maine. The mayor tried to pave over your house but you stood in front of it and calmly reminded him that you did not have any life insurance. Nothing to collect on, no signs of life. No record of your very existence.

Blink once more and find yourself in a convention center, standing in front of a video screen in a crowd of thousands watching as the invention that will end it all is revealed. A cure to death. Free sample?

Awaken and find yourself in your bed, reach for the nearest thing to hold, and hold onto it. Clutch it. Feel every aspect of it, every divot, every rough edge and sharp point and rounded corner, and know it truthfully. Picture it in your mind in full technicolor detail and weave of it a picture that nothing can come close to in size, scope, or versatility. Put yourself in its shoes for pete's sake don't die. Confuse and lose anyone you found close to you and focus on the meditation of the object. Discourse on it. Feel it override every thought you ever had. Make it burst through the windows, the doors, the cabinets in your work desk, the light fixtures, floor and ceiling, suffocate in it, think on it, and make its waves recede. Inhale it. Breathe an atmosphere of it. You chose a combination lock. Black number panel going up to thirty with white tick marks on the front and a silver metallic body. Code label improperly peeled off on the back leaving vaguely pink smudge, dull with dust.

Close your eyes once more and feel weightless as you drift away from Earth, for all intents and purposes frozen in a block of ice, due to wake up in seventy thousand years and promptly fall back asleep again, and wonder how the hell you got here.

Blink once more and realize that you are no longer moving.

Welcome.

Following Beryl's pronouncement, Phillip had to restrain himself to keep from shooting out of the seat like he was in an ejector seat and James Bond had just pulled the lever. It was, well, not what he wanted to hear. At all. She was the gender-neutral-terminology Table Master, but that didn't make her immune to mistakes. This was a mistake, right?

He couldn't quite convince himself, but he did have to check.

So Phillip stood up real casual and followed Lucas over and took a look. Just to be sure.

Well, damn.

"I've got some pizza," he said. "We could put on a movie or something. I think I've got It on DVD somewhere around here."

The 1990 version, obtained for a buck fifty from a thrift store, but that didn't necessarily need to be spelled out, did it? It was a classic either way, and Phillip was pretty sure they'd have a good time if they gave it a chance.

.......what the fuck? What actually just happened? Beryl just like.... she left. Just 'whooph' out the door. This was probably the part when the clown cult got their knives out.

Okay, well bye Beryl. Michael'd been planning to ask if she could give him a ride home but nope that wasn't gonna happen. Fuck you. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF EVEN COMING HERE? Michael was incredibly disappointed in himself for actually agreeing to go do something with Beryl.

"So........" Michael muttered, bewildered. "Uh..... I'm confused."

Phillip and Lucas were huddled together, staring at the die. They probably hadn't heard him.

Michael slowly stood up.

"....Is everyone leaving? I'll just... I'll just go, I guess. Uh... okay..."

He snuck out the door.

((Michael continued somewhere else maybe?????????????????))

Yeah, so what happened was this: the die came up thirteen.

Thirteen was bad news, bad vibes, as had been established when someone—Phillip had already totally forgotten who—had thrown it during the selection process for the Table Master. Had he actually mentioned that to anyone else? He was pretty sure he hadn't, but it was some kind of universal social norm or something anyways. But the thing was, if you got a thirteen on the Boulder that was fate telling you it was not the right time to play Morton's List and Phillip thought that was pretty bullshit after getting everyone together for this but not bullshit enough to spit in the face of fate like that, definitely not with another thirteen having popped up tonight and Beryl already out the door.

He looked around to say something else and, whoops, Michael was making his escape as well. Well, that was that, then. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Again.

Goddammit.

((Phillip Olivares continued elsewhere))