The Events Of The Last Few Days

Last week was not especially memorable. No, it was not. I mean, there were a few things, like...hmm, there was...ooh, the D&D game, that was good. But overall not much happened.

Oh, yeah, I found some apartments/houses with Apartment Hunters. But we - that is to say, myself, Mike, and Matt, who are going to be sharing this apartment/house - are still waffling on which one to take. We had our eye on one, called La Mancha, but I've been told by others that there is something of a major bug problem in those dwellings, so we'll have to see for ourselves.

But regardless. There are a few things I want to talk about in particular:

1. The D&D game
2. The game of Twilight Imperium on Saturday
3. The play I watched (and performed) on Sunday
4. My radio gig on Monday

The D&D game. I like the Eberron setting, if only because I get to be a cool mechanical/organic construct known as a "warforged." Not only that, I get to be a psion, so my character is technically known as a "psiforged." His name is 01. I can be healed by either cure wounds or repair damage spells, so that's neat. I don't sleep, I don't eat, I don't breathe, and as a roleplaying feature I decided that I would begin all of my sentences with the type of sentence it is. For instance...

"Query: You and what army, meatbag?"
"Assertion: Try it and I will personally crack you open like a boiled lobster."
"Inference: So that means...what...you're gay?"

It's a lot of fun, really it is. Especially since I bought that enormous bag of dice at Megacon. But now I know the pain of everyone borrowing my dice and not giving them back and mixing them up in other peoples' dice pools and unnnngh. It's a good thing I memorized how many I have of each type so as to avoid confusion over who owns what.

In this particular adventure, we got lost in the undercity of this one, er, place (I was a little unclear on the setting), and when I missed a step, I fell hurtling downwards on a very slippery slope, taking the cleric with me. We landed in knee-deep guano, which didn't affect me as I don't breathe and, ergo, don't have a sense of smell. We were then immediately grappled by some horrors, I don't know what. I blasted 'em with a cold spell (psionic evocation, whatever), but I unfortunately hit the cleric too, dropping him to negative HP and making his magic plate armor go to bits. (The DM later ruled that he could repair it.) So his player held a grudge against me for most of that session. It was helped by the fact that the druid, a new player, "just happened" to join the party when the cleric needed healing the most.

When we were all rejoined and somewhat healed, we discovered that the only way to advance would be to go through underwater tunnels. The druid wild-shaped into a dolphin, and most of the other characters clung to her. I just plodded along. They were all fussing about breathing or some such ridiculousness, but me, I didn't care. We had to fight an aboleth, which is a big psychic fish-thing, but we (and by "we" I mean "mostly me") damaged it enough to force it to retreat. I had to blow five Action Points, a sort of bribe-the-GM currency that's actually in the rulebook, to make the monster reroll his successful saving throw until he failed it.

Twilight Imperium, now, that was a game. There were only six of us playing this time:

Louis, whose race were basically space Nazis.
Victoria, who again started as the aggravating race that starts with a War Sun (Death Star analogue).
Mike, who was the University, but realized too late that that -1 to combat rolls makes a big damn difference.
Matt, who was...heck, I don't remember.
Danny, who was someone even more forgettable. (I tend to only pay attention to my side of the table. Whoops.)
And me. My race were space pirates. That is fun to do.

We divided the galaxy into two halves, and Victoria, Louis, and I all ended up on one half and the other three on the second. Us, the warmongering races, quickly made a temporary truce and banded together to crush the techie book-learners, a fact which they were quick to complain about. Bah, too bad. All this malarkey they gave us about "winning the game" and "getting victory points." I don't play Twilight Imperium to satisfy the byzantine requirements of getting victory points, I play it to amass a gigantic face-crushing space fleet and by God crush some face, am I right?

Louis ended up winning, but not before I scored a decisive victory against Danny (I obliterated half his fleet and only lost one Fighter) and nuked Louis's homeworld in a questionably intelligent backstab attempt. I still lost, but I had fun doing it.

The play. Ah, the play. You may remember that I posted said play several weeks ago. I showed it to my teacher and he liked it so much that he had me put it on stage at the Acrosstown Theater after his An Evening with Harold Pinter. This was fun, but nerve-wracking. With about a million minor edits made, I distributed copies to my fellow actors, rehearsed the lines a few more times, got it all straight in my head, took a deep breath, and then went and threw up in the bathroom. But I felt much better afterwards.

The actual execution of the play...well. We had just finished the initial scenes, where I (I played Kevin, naturally) declared that Joe (played by Mallory, we play fast and loose with gender roles at the Acrosstown) could stay as long as he liked...then, we hit a snag. One or both of us got tangled up in the dialogue, and we ended up accidentally transitioning into the scene near the end, about the masturbation joke. I managed to improv us back to where we were supposed to be, through use of the fact that people can think really, really fast in a crisis.

Mallory's line was "You're not making any sense," but this was not immediately clear on account of I had just done a few lines of improv to get us back on track. Her eyes implored me to come up with something. So I came up with:

"I know what you're thinking..." I waggled my eyebrows conspiratorially. "You're thinking that I'm not making any sense, aren't you?" Pause for dramatic effect. "Well, I understand everything I'm saying." Which was my next line. We got back after that. Hoo boy, I can't believe I actually had the stones to pull that off.

We proceeded along fine - naked terror had hotwired my brain into perfect delivery - but still the hole in the script loomed. We could not, could not, repeat a scene, especially a scene that had dramatic weight to it (at least, as much as I could possibly instill). So both of us managed to sort of hop over the pit that had been created, and got fine on track for the ending.

It turned out surprisingly well. My teacher came up on stage to congratulate me (he knew what I had done, he was reading the script) and told me that I had managed to get people to laugh during my improv bits. So that's something. And when I spoke to my old roommate, Victor, he said that he had no idea that we had deviated from the script and were basically ad-libbing. Good news all around, then.

Then we get to my radio gig last night. I went on the air again from 2-3 a.m. This time, I was ready. I was prepared. I did not have a nervous breakdown like I practically did last time. (Possibly, my nerves were still shot from Sunday night, and needed to cool down before they could overheat again.) I went on-air three times, and each time I was cool, confident, and unafraid.

So I strolled into the office today and showed Mr. Guscott my tape. He popped it in and had a listen.

"Your recordings aren't here," he said. "This is all old stuff."

In horror, I seized upon it and listened myself. Indeed so - my perfect recordings from last night were gone.

"Did...something happen?" I stammered.

"Let's find out," Harry said. We went to the studio and popped in the tape.

DISC READ ERROR, it said.

"Odd," said Harry. "We'll try a new one." He went back to his office, unwrapped a fresh tape, and popped it in.

DISC READ ERROR

"I think you broke it," Harry said. He was smiling, and he immediately afterward reassured me that he was joking, but for just a split second a bolt of terror arced down my spine and earthed itself in my soul.

So, no record. I'll try it again on Wednesday night, I suppose. Deep, deep, deep sigh. But this time I'm even more prepared.

The Luke-Approved YouTube Link of the Day is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlSbTLzfKiA It's the Scorponok sequence from the 2007 Transformers movie. Out of all the really awesome scenes in the movie, and there were many, this one stands out as being completely jawsome.

REPLIES.

Jake: I know it did. It was awesome. And, er, I think I have a picture. I'm going to put up an album...one of these days.

Vic: I'm working on it, I'm working on it. And no, I have not yet found your blog. Email me the link or somethin'.

Mike: Good comic.

Steve: The first and second are still the best. The fourth is just kind of weird.

Dad: I figured as much. Boa was hostile that last day, I didn't like it. It felt like it was betraying my trust. And, er, thanks.

Mom: Yes, well, my bones took a pounding once or twice. I tried to ski one of those slightly off-slope through-the-trees paths, only to discover why you cannot do this. I taped all but the last 20 seconds or so of the play, at least, Victoria did with my camera. That thing devours batteries, by the way.

I don't think I can deconstruct the sequels as easily as I did the prequels. The sequels were actually mostly well-written, which gives me trouble. And, well, I'm working things out with girls...I guess.

(Jake's phone number is our area code, 792-6527.)

Bye.