“I am here, son. What is it you want to show me?” Lady Forrester asked Syron as she stepped gracefully into the library. She gave a momentary, confused look at a present Raylin, as well as a frustrated look at the warded cabinet Syron kept his paperwork in before returning her face to impassive. She had tried hard, the past month, to give him space and to work out her own emotional turmoil. As time went on, she believed more and more that she was no longer in a dream, and the truth hit her in every way it hurt. Her villages she was sworn to protect were going unprotected; her Wardens she swore to lead were going unled; her House she swore to hold high above all other Houses was rotting from her inactivity. The strain her lack of leadership had caused was irreversible in many cases, namely pertaining to the lives of her peasantry.

She found it difficult to reconcile what she had become, especially when she remembered how she got there. She may stand tall and proud on the outside, but inside, she could barely struggle to go on with the emotional burdens she had placed on herself. Even forgetting how she had failed her Dukedom and the Kingdom, she had given everything to recover her son. The son that, once upon a time, hated her with obvious vehemence. Her son, whom gave up ever using magic because of something she had done.

To him. Something I had done ‘to him’.

He now sat before her, once again physically identical to before his coma, and not at all the person he was before. The reasons he hated her before, he no longer cared about.

“Why stress over something I don’t even remember? No one said parenting was easy. I’m sure I deserved it.” He had told her without irony. He just shrugged off any and all responsibility she held towards wronging him on the grounds that he probably was worse to her, as if motherhood allowed such nonsense.

I chose him! He didn’t get a say in who his mother was, but I did. Now, here I am, begging myself to be the supportive, caring mother he deserves, and then rifling through his secrets and second guessing him. Why does he need a cipher? Is there really anyone here he needs to hide things from? Did he actually retain his memories, and this is all a ruse to get revenge on me? What are those tables of data? Why does he have so many floor plans drawn out? Why did he find and include in his ‘research’ material several bestiaries? The more suspicious he acts, the more I grow convinced that he does remember our checkered past. Is that fair to him? To suspect him of being a liar, when that was one of his greatest complaints about me?

“Okay, so as you’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been working on all this time… it’s this!” Syron, with a flourish, produced a large, flat board around a meter squared in dimensions. There were lines etched into the wood in even intervals crisscrossing the entire board. The Lady had known about his commissioning for a game board, though the specifics had seemed unimportant so she didn’t bother investigating further. It was just this plain etched board?

“The game is… well, it’s something that I’d like to pursue as a hobby. The time I’ve spent working on the system hasn’t really been enough, but I’ll have more time later; especially if anyone interested in my work pops up and wants to help. The idea is simple. I want to let people role-play as people fighting monsters and going on adventures. They do this using these!” Syron then produced a few sheets of paper written not in cipher, but still rather poorly for a twelve-year-old Lordling.

“A level 1 swordsman? What does plus two to agility and strength mean?” The Lady tried to understand the strange sheet in front of her, but without proper context or experience in role playing games from a previous life, all she could do was squint her eyes at the poorly drawn swordsman… woman… thing-man?

The explanations for how a tabletop role playing game worked went on for a long time. To the Lady’s credit, she did not get angry in frustration at her son, even if she did not think the idea had much merit. She simply sat at the library table alongside Marigold, Raylin for some reason, and Syron’s assigned Knight for the day, a woman by the name of Renee. They all paid rapt attention to his meandering, confusing ‘explanation’ and slowly got the gist of the ‘game’ he was proposing.

“So we all pretend to be the people you wrote down about here, and then go on imaginary adventures using random chance and a storyteller to inform us how we did?” Renee asked as she played with the small carved token in her hand. It looked like a coin, but it had a sword carved on one side and a skull carved on the other.

“In effect, yes. There are rules in place, but they aren’t the player’s problems. They would be mine. You just tell me what you want to do based on your own perceived notions of your character’s capabilities versus whatever situation you find yourself in, and then I have to tell you ‘how’ you succeed or fail.” Syron responded.

Patricia looked at Marigold in desperation, her face no longer impassive as she was overcome with confusion. Marigold was not doing much better. It was never that the concept of the game was too hard to understand, though her son’s explanations did leave a little to be desired… it was a question of why? Why had her son come up with this convoluted mess of a game that poorly simulated a mercenary’s work?

Raylin spoke up finally, having looked over her sheet titled “Vignar the Dwarf” for the better part of twenty minutes. Vignar is a thick man of short stature and strong arms wielding a hammer with the head the size of a baby. “If I’m understanding this right… I’m this ‘dwarf’ fellow… and I like smashing things with my hammer and getting pissed?”

“If by pissed you mean angry or drunk… yes.”

“Okay, I want to play! Where am I?” Raylin said happily as she placed her token of a hammer on the board. Syron slid it over to the corner of the board along with the three other tokens the other women were holding. A bow, a jeweled staff, and a sword adorned those tokens and they were placed in a diamond around an empty square.

“Now, you’ll have to forgive me for this part. I haven’t had much time to practice, and I’m still getting the hang of it.” Syron said as he stared intently at the board.

“Holy mother of the gods!” Renee exclaimed as she pushed away from the table suddenly. Ghosts were rising from the tokens in the shapes of the characters described by their sheets. Slowly, details of the characters started to form and take shape. The ghosts first became opaque. Then they started to take on different colors and had sharper definition. The corner of the board they were standing in was lighting up with details of what appeared to be a forest, but the remainder of the board was shrouded in a dense, black fog. The four characters stood around a tree with a ribbon tied around it. Syron focused on the tree, shaking the leaves of the tree awkwardly as though they were being blown by wind but failing to make it look natural. The thin, triangular eared elven woman from the bow token subtly looked at her three companions and picked her nose when they weren’t looking at her. This earned a giggle from Raylin, so Syron had her dwarf turn and see the act. The dwarf then pointed exaggeratedly and started laughing at the elf.

The Lady Forrester looked down at her sword token and the plain man dressed in leather armor. He was standing unnaturally still until Syron made him look up into his mother’s face and wave with a big grin.

“Hi mom!” The little swordsman illusion opened his mouth to speak and Syron’s voice came out, though it was muffled like it was being heard through a metal pipe. Patricia smiled down at the little illusionary man, then beamed at her son who was starting to sweat from the exertion.

“Mari’s … erm… avatar was it? Yeah, Mari’s mini-girl isn’t doing anything? What does she do?” Raylin asked, getting her face closer to the tiny healer woman and staring. The other three illusions went still in relaxed poses while Syron made the healer turn and offer a noble’s curtsey to Raylin.

“I am Patty Woodsman. The greatest healer whom has ever lived.” The healer said with complete sincerity and without any grace. The Head Chef broke into a raucous laughter, slapping the table in merriment and forcing all four characters to vanish. Syron grunted and all four came back, though there were some slight variations in the coloring of hair, skin tone, and hair.

Taking a little extra time to solidify his illusions in place, Syron used a deeper, more dramatic voice for the first line to ever be uttered in the game “Roll for priority.” He gestured to a six-sided die that sat in front of each person and conjured a copy of the goblinoid from the training session. The goblinoid was the illusion he had spent the most time working on, and it came into being instantly from the fog surrounding the ribboned tree. It raised its arm holding a rusted hatchet and let out a low volume roar. Syron rolled a die and got a three. “After including its agility modifier, the goblin has a priority of two. Please roll to see who goes first. That’s what I meant by ‘priority’.”

Raylin ended up winning with a five, and had her dwarf close the distance and swing his hammer. She rolled for attack and rolled low, causing the dwarf to dramatically miss and cartoonishly spin like a top before falling down. He got back up, brandished his weapon, and went still again.

The Lady went second, having her swordsman ignore the goblin and had him ask the healer to dance. Marigold promptly agreed to give up her turn to dance with the Lady’s swordsman, and they started waltzing around the tree.

“Roll for… well I haven’t figured out skills yet, so let’s go with agility again.” The swordsman’s roll was deemed arbitrarily sufficient, but the healer rolled a one so she tripped on a tree root, exaggeratedly prat falling. She stood up, scowling and rubbing her bum before going still with the swordsman.

The goblin danced from one leg to the other and secretly rolled for attack. It was a three, but Syron went ahead and said it hit despite the dwarf’s armor values. He didn’t really have health points lined up yet, so instead just had the goblin and dwarf swing wildly at each other. The dwarf came away from the exchange with a dent in his armor around his torso with a little blood seeping out of the dent.

Finally, Renee had rolled a pair of sixes for attack and ‘damage’. The goblin, dwarf, and elf all started moving around, the goblin parrying a blow from the dwarf before lunging with its teeth at the dwarf’s neck. The elf knocked an arrow and put it into the goblin’s head, having it ragdoll out into the fog.

Raylin excitedly said she wanted to check if it was dead or not, so she had her dwarf walk into the fog. As she got closer to it, the fog started to clear away in a circle around the dwarf. A few steps later she came across the goblin’s corpse stuck head first to another tree with a different colored ribbon tied around it.

“Young Master, I do not think that is a very realistic representation of what shooting a goblin in the head with an arrow would be like.” Marigold said, her voice painfully crisp and somewhat discouraging.

“No, but it was farking amazing!” Raylin responded excitedly, pulling her token off the board and holding it in front of her face.

“You’ll smash the next one, little guy. I’m rooting for you!” Raylin told the Dwarf. He pulled a mug full of frothy ale out from behind his back and saluted her, taking a huge drink before turning red in the face and falling off his token onto the playfield.

“Young Master! We have to play this for real sometime!” She turned to face him, her eyes full of glee.

The illusions all disappeared at once as Syron’s head hit the table.