Shadows Out of Time

Her face, all of their faces, glowed in the light coming from the table I still didn’t understand. The gaming table was short and squatty, fluted, a goblet-shaped stump, but it glowed from within, eldritch colors swirling inside. I couldn’t look directly into it, given the hexagonal maps and pewter figures, the character sheets and snacks and random dice that covered the top, but something active, something almost alive was happening beneath. Lava lamps use wax and water, I thought, different densities to create the fluid flow. Wave motion machines use oil and water, different affinities, to create the tranquil rise and collapse we love to watch. Humans use…Fuck. Something about this room kept pushing me off-track, making me wander.

I hefted the little bag in my hand. Just the weight of God, I thought. Then, like before, Where the hell did that phrase come from? I’d been channeling Shakespeare references all night. But Dickinson? Maybe some graduate course back in—

“Daniel,” Mimi said, loud, terse, breaking me loose from my woolgathering. “Choose.”

They know my name.

Of course they know your nam.

The knowing scared me.

Gently, I pulled the strings on the pouch and looked inside. Seven dice, everything one needed for an RPG, from twentysided to four. But these were no more plastic than the bag was Naugahyde. I’d never felt leather like this. Too soft. I’d never seen dice like this. Too organic. I poured the seven polyhedral shapes out into my hand. Old they were, yellowed and worn. Like teeth.

I stared for a moment at the maps and other clutter which rested on the strange table. Someone, maybe the three sisters, maybe something else, had recently been playing Villains and Vigilantes. Whomever, they liked superhero stories, role playing, and pork rinds.

“It’s really very simple,” Mimi said.

“Okay, but I’ve never played this. Superhero 2044 and Champions, yes. But not…”

Eddie reached forward and swept everything on the table to the floor. Super saviors and dire dreadnaughts hit Formica. Caped crusaders bounced bravely beneath slowly floating spreadsheets of predetermined abilities. The latter eventually came to rest on top of the former. Polyhedral patterns of movement, evidence of a finely finessed fate behind everything, slid toward the curtain, coming to rest just behind several unstoppable dice that continued to dance, like they didn’t have anything else to do.

“This isn’t the game,” she said, indicating the clutter she’d just tossed to the floor. “The game is Tali.”

“Do you know the Eleusinian mysteries?” Mimi asked.

I couldn’t answer. I was too fascinated by what uncovering the tabletop had revealed. Was it indeed a toadstool? A grail? The stump of Yggdrasil? I would never know, but inside the base, right beneath the surface — perhaps deeper than any single soul could imagine — spun a perfect representation of the galaxy. One hundred billion stars stared back at me, lighting the three sisters, lighting me, lighting the room whose corners I could not see. All I was sure of was this table and these women, these dice and me. But the stars? They swarmed like swamp gas around a sunken corpse, like lightning bugs orbiting secret shallows, like neurons blinking on and off around an idea.

I couldn’t help but wonder…was this a retro toy, some sort of head shop simulacra they’d found on eBay, or was it something else? Might it be real? Was the galaxy actually in there, under the tabletop, beneath bones my Muses must be rolling every day?

“Choose,” Mimi said again.

“I…I don’t know the rules,” I said.

“High score. Subtract the difference. Three against one of course.” She shrugged, as if to say, sorry, that’s the way the quarks collide.

“Similar to Knucklebones or Fivestones. Not as confusing as Craps,” Melody said, her grin like Eddie’s earlier.

“So, I just pick one? Or several?”

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake,” Eddie said, “you have seven possibilities. Pick one and—”

“Unless he picks a d10,” Mimi said. “Then he has to roll two.”

“Yeah, right, but that’s…Daniel, tell me, you’ve played D&D, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve rolled against a Dungeon Master, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing. Except now you have three masters. So fucking choose.”