Dungeons and Dics

This is the last part of the series. Thank you all who have stuck with this little writing experiment. I hope it had not been too confusing. As with all chapters in this series I make no effort at catching readers up. You would do best to start with Chapter One.

And as always, please remember that I am not aiming for deep truths here. I craft my stories to be plausibly ridiculous.

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Dungeons and Dicks: Chapter Four--A New DM. A New Game

"Ohhhh," I groaned, stretching mightily as I shambled through the door from the garage, more than two hours later than usual.

Tess looked up from the couch, where she had her legs tucked up underneath her and a new David Weber book in her hands. "I got your text that you'd be late tonight. I didn't realize you'd be this late," she said, with sympathy, not criticism.

I wordlessly turned to our little bar cart, and poured myself a finger of scotch. I waved the bottle at my wife inquiringly. She shook her head and nodded at the glass of wine mostly finished on the coffee table. I slugged the whole glass back (I hadn't chosen the expensive single malt), set the glass back down, and moved to collapse on the other end of the couch.

"We got the contract early this morning," I announced with less enthusiasm in my voice than there should have been.

Tess brightened. "Really? That's great! Which parts?" she asked enthusiastically.

"All of it," I groaned.

"All of it? Can you guys even handle that?" Tess asked.

"No, but we are going to anyway," I said wearily. "Get used to me coming home this late for the foreseeable future. And traveling in two or three day stretches every week or so."

"How long is the foreseeable future?"

"Six months... at best. Eight at the most. Any longer and we flunk the contract terms," I sighed. "At least my group won't have to deal with the post-startup support issues."

"Well, 'congratulations' again, I guess," Tess said, still supportive, but with waning enthusiasm.

"It really is good news. Amazing even," I smiled finally. "But it'll be exhausting. I'm gong to need a massage occasionally when I come home like this." My neck was killing me. That's where I always carry stress. Right now, it was groaning painfully under the weight of what I felt was coming.

She looked at me and smiled. "One naked massage, coming right up," she said, tugging her shirt off over her head, her generous boobs bouncing free into my view.

"Oh wow," I said, a stupid grin making a sudden appearance on my face. As she stood up and started pushing her shorts and panties down off her hips, I added, "I didn't need naked, and I didn't mean right now."

Tess straightened and cocked the hips of her naked body. "Are you sure?"

"Oh, please yes," I said. "I just meant that I wasn't asking."

In moments, I was naked too and my wife was straddling my ass, sliding her hands up and down my upper back smoothly. She had taken a massage course back in her college days, and I have heard a few tales of her 'homework'. Enough to know where she got her affinity for it. I really needed a clinical rubdown though, even if my hardening cock beneath me had other ideas.

"Thank you," I sighed. "This whole mess really will be worth it though," I murmured. "Between the commission and the bonus at the end of the year, we are maybe talking a fundamental change in our finances. Maybe something like a vacation home. Or a boat. Or whatever."

Tess's soft strokes kept up their mission of mercy, but I felt the slight pause. "You mean like that little condo in Breckenridge?"

"Mmmhmm."

"Naked massage every night, then!"

"This deal just keeps getting better and better."

She worked the muscles expertly, the only erotic elements that she threw in were an occasional, accidentally on purpose brush of my back with her nipples. Even my cock was starting to relax.

"I only have one real worry for us in our personal life," I said, relaxed enough for conversation now. "I put my foot down about being home on weekends," I said, "but I just don't see how I'm going to have the time to do the prep for D&D that I usually do."

"That sucks," Tess said, genuinely unhappy. "I'd hate to have to take a break."

"I'll bet you would," I murmured slyly.

"You either!" Tess laughed, lightly spanking my left glute. "So what is your master plan to fix it?" I always have a plan.

"Penny."

"Penny?"

"Yeah. She told me that she's DMed before. I intent to prevail on her sense of civic duty... and extreme horniness... to get her to take over and save the game."

"That's my man. You always have a plan," Tess cooed. "I have a plan, too."

"You do?"

"Yes," she said, rising up a bit and tickling my side enough to make me squirm so she could flip me over. My mostly hard cock found itself slipping along her neatly trimmed pussy. Tess reached down to it and pulled it upward. "Yes, I do," she said, sliding herself down onto me.

*

"Hello? Penny Davis speaking."

"Penny?" I said when she picked up. I had waited until lunch time to call her from work. "It's John."

"Hey John, what's up?"

I explained my situation, and how I hoped that she might take over. She mused at it over the line for a minute. I didn't feel happy with the delay.

"I actually think I want to do it. It would be fun to pull the strings for a while. Only six months, you say?" Penny asked.

"I hope to God," I said, letting a bit of the weight on my shoulders come through in my voice.

"I'm pretty busy too, but I think I can do it. Um, could we maybe change genres? I don't have any fantasy stuff to recycle in my old material, and I don't have time to set up from scratch without a couple of weeks head start."

"I wish I could give you that," I sighed. "I guess we can take a break for a few weeks."

"Fuck that!" Penny laughed. "I'm having way too much fun. Listen, I do have an old campaign still on my hard disk from years ago that could be tweaked pretty easily for our... particular... brand of role-playing. But it's a comic book RPG instead. Think everybody would be into that?"

"Try keeping at least some of us back, more like. Sounds interesting to me for sure," I said. It was certainly true, and not just because it was a weight off my shoulders. "Let's run it by everybody in the chat."

ME: Hey guys! I just got a huge opportunity/even huger timesuck at work and have to bow out of DMing for a while. Penny has offered to be the ringmaster on our circus for the next six months or so, but wants to do a comic book version. That means new rules, right, Penny?

GERI: I love it

PENNY: I can shoot everybody a PDF of the character creation stuff

ANNE: Congratulations on the work thing... I guess. I'm down for some new adventures

MARK: I look forward to your leering goons and perverted alien tentacle monsters, Penny.

CRAIG: I'm good to go.

TESS: You know I am, of course. I'm in favor of anything that leaves at least a few hours a week for me. I'm ready for a new character anyway.

MARTIN: I'm okay with it, except that I'm guessing I'll be making dinner more often during the week while she plots.

PENNY: I'll email everybody the rules. Mark, I don't have your email. Can you all give them an initial going over and text me any questions? And maybe have some ideas before our first night. But I want to do the actual character creation together, so we can learn more about the rules while doing that

She was already taking over from me. I actually felt a twinge of jealousy... smothered completely by my sigh of relief.

*

We did take one week off, but still got together at The Fish House to celebrate my Big Fucking Deal. It was just a nice dinner. It continued to amaze me, when we weren't LARPing, how easy it was just to act and think like normal people. Sure, I checked out Anne, Penny, and Geri (and Tess, of course) once or twice, but no more than I would have with any group as attractive as they. It was ditto for the rest of us.

I thought it made a nice reset, and resolved to suggest the odd night's off from time to time.

*

We decided to shift the rotation around a bit to meet the next week at Martin and Penny's, since she was taking the reins of our gaming. And we started in the mid-afternoon so we could all create new characters and still have time to play... and inevitably role-play...

Since everything was new and no one had any characters made up yet, no one did any cosplay that week. Seeing Geri at a gaming table once more without her chainmail bikini was a little disconcerting and I wondered if she'd find a way to incorporate the getup into her new character. The girl liked that bikini, looked great in that bikini, and liked how much everyone felt that she looked great in it. That night, everyone, including her, pretty much just wore casual clothes. The only thing I noticed as a common thread was that nothing looked terribly hard to take off.

We all arrived pretty promptly, eager to try a new story with new mechanics. I hadn't been a Player for almost four years, and was wondering how I'd handle it, to be honest. I considered creating a character who was a manipulative schemer, just so I could keep my hand in...

Penny set her campaign in the coastal city of Anchor Bay, where we would form our new Superteam. She decided to start us all at level three, to give us some more fun powers, and because most absolutely noob superheroes didn't join teams, and certainly didn't form them. We were all going to have to come up with about '12 issues' worth of backstory fairly soon, once the campaign got rolling.

I cooked up what in comics jargon would be called a Brick. He was fairly strong, a bit faster than a regular human, and had some fighting skills from his days as a Marine. His main power was that he was able to absorb and survive an enormous amount of damage.

I called him The Wall. Then I was roundly mocked for the stupid name, and so I changed to calling him Jarhead instead. It was also stupid, but more hokey, so... yay.

Our other basic brick was Anne's Martienne, a real Martian refugee who wasn't nearly as indestructible as Jarhead, but had rage-based strength.

"So, sort of a cross between She-Hulk and the Martian Manhunter?" Penny asked as Anne plugged in her numbers.

"Yeah, pretty much," Anne admitted. "Kinda derivative, I know, but I've been busy this week and have not been inspired."

"Does she break the Fourth Wall like She-Hulk?" Geri asked.

"Fuck yeah!" Anne replied, suddenly enthusiastic. "That's a great idea. Suddenly I have inspiration."

Geri, of course, decided that her character, Korda, would be a barbarian warrior from the past, who had been preserved to the present day frozen in ice. Chainmail bikini: check.

Mark avoided both stereotype and type by refusing to play a martial artist, instead going with a wealthy inventor-type, who at this level did not have crazy big bucks, or super-powerful armor, just a multi-tool glove and utility belt. The Maker could make most any gadget he needed, given time and the contents of a kitchen junk drawer.

My wife went with invisibility powers that were semi-magically-based. The Whisp had faerie blood in her veins, and combined other stealth abilities with her invisibility. Her secret identity as a reporter was actually more famous than her superhero identity at this point in her career. Tess actually invested creation points into her reporter side to give the character investigation/detective abilities.

For a character limitation, and in the first nod to our own particular brand of role-playing, Tess chose to say that The Whisp could not make her clothes invisible, only her body...

Craig went flashy with The Flare, who flew and threw fire blasts around with gay abandon.

Martin, chose stretching powers, gained as a night watchman at a chemistry plant where he foiled a robbery and saved a co-worker's life--at the cost of being polymerized himself by the plant's equipment in the process.

"Someone had to go for stretching powers..." I observed drily.

"I'd say he has some pretty impressive stretching powers in real life already," Anne said with a completely straight face. We tended not to actually comment on each other's real life physical characteristics, our characters being what mattered there... But Martin was the exception. There was just no ignoring that... thing.

Craig chose to deliver her completely deserved chastisement himself, tickling her half to death.

Anne was quite ticklish. Noted for future use.

"We should do Presentations on each of our characters," Martin suggested as we finished up with creation. He had kind of fallen in love with our little ritual and was always eager to do it.

"Nope!" countered his wife. "It's not the right time. One, I'd rather you guys have the next week to work up your appearances and then re-work them. Besides, though you are all superheroes in the same city, you are all relatively junior and obscure, so how would you know each other enough for such a detailed description?" Penny had a good air of authority about her. She'd do fine.

"No, let's start with an explosion in Bayside Park, loud enough and with a big enough plume of smoke to be heard or seen or both from all your locations as your secret identities..." she began firmly. And we were off.

Learning a new RPG on the fly was challenging, but Penny knew her stuff well enough to keep it fun, give us guidance when needed, and otherwise engaging us all through our first fight, our decision that Anchor Bay needed its own local super group because the city's more famous, more powerful superheroes were often away saving the larger world, and finally our bringing down of our first criminal outfit. The game system was little clunky, but it did the job, and was pretty flexible, which was important to a group like us who cared more about the story than the mechanics.

Much later, Tess looked up from her sheet after she had finally moved up to level four (the last of our characters to get a new level), and looked at the clock. "Holy shit," she said, suddenly cross. "There's like, less than half an hour until quitting time!"

We all stared at each other in surprise and... dismay. There had been no LARPing at all. A fair amount of dirty jokes had been told. There had been leering. Tess had managed to have her character embarrassed when she had to go invisible very quickly and leave her clothes behind. But she hadn't acted that out, and there had been no LARPing of any kind otherwise.

Penny shrugged. "You guys passed on all the opportunities I put in tonight. After the third one, I just figured everybody was too busy concentrating on the game."

That got a laugh. "What opportunities are you talking about?" Mark asked. Penny told us, and we looked at each other. "Wow, we were focused," Mark said.

*

My phone buzzed with a text message the next morning. I ignored it because Tess was lazily getting in some practice with her amazing oral skills, and I was highly reluctant to interrupt her when she was 'in training'.

When it buzzed a second time, Tess looked up. "Get it. It might be work. Don't worry, I'll just keep on keeping on." With that I felt her lips wrap around my happy, happy cock once more.

I stretched over and could just reach my phone.

It was Penny, not work.

PENNY: Morning!

PENNY: I hope you are up.

ME: Yes. You could say that. What can I do for you?

Tess kept working away, not even pausing when I told her who it was. I guessed I was having text conversations with other women during blowjobs now... All facets of my life were better than they had been in the historical past, before the LARP.

PENNY: I'm worried I screwed up last night

ME: Bullshit. That was great fun. We all enjoyed ourselves.

PENNY: Dickhead, I'm talking about the sex. You make it all seem flow naturally, and I didn't make it happen at all

ME: Don't worry. It will happen.

ME: I do have some pointers...

PENNY: [Praying Hands Emoji]

ME: Concentrate on set pieces, not incidental events.

PENNY: I feel awkward pairing people up. Seems dictatorial

ME: If the story calls for it, go for it anyway. But ideally, I try to just set up one person, and let the others find their own way into it.

ME: Beyond that, be ready for us to come up with our own ways to get into it, and contribute as you can when we do.

PENNY: Thanks. That hopefully will be enough to get me going.

I lay down the phone and gasped as Tess increased her efforts in response. It was good to be me.

I grabbed the phone again.

ME: Don't forget to set yourself up too!

PENNY: Very good advice. [Halo Emoji]

When I put my phone back down, Tess smiled up at me as she dragged her tongue up my cock, applying exactly the right pressure. Before she could suck me back into her mouth, I lunged upward and pushed her over onto her back, diving down myself. She had been studying so hard on her skills, she deserved a reward. Also, with Craig's reputation, I felt I needed some extra practice of my own.

*

Penny watched intently as we moved our miniatures around the table, talking out our fight with the little, blue, alien douchebags. We described attacks, or in my own character's case, invitations to be attacked instead of a more vulnerable teammate. She countered with descriptions of the aliens' pain-in-the-ass actions, and especially the dangerous antics of their giant yellow pig-dog, Chompticus™, which were the only reasons we hadn't routed the aliens already.

Geri moved Korda's figure over near the Martienne's to help with the pig-dog-thing. Apparently, that was what Penny had been waiting for. I saw her smile flash for just a moment before disappearing again. I'm more real-life observant than the rest of us, so I was more alert right off the bat. Man, did that turn out to be valuable...

"Suddenly, the aliens seem to have had enough," Penny says excitedly. "Most of them begin to fly back toward their ship, using their little jet packs. A beam shoots out from a large iris that suddenly opens on the hull, reaching out to the pig-dog in particular. You all feel a rush as everything near the beam is tugged toward it, even the air in the vicinity. It is focused on the beast, though, which is apparently valuable enough to be the priority retrieval. It is lifted up and hurled back into the ship. The other aliens just fly in close to the beam and are sucked in as well. The beam begins to wink out as the rush of air seems to grow stronger at the end."

She looked down at the map, picking up the monster's figure and examining the figures on the board as if evaluating. "Korda," she muttered, rolling a die behind her screen where we could not see. "Uh huh..." Then she added, "and Martienne" Another die was rolled. Penny shook her head as if surprised.

"Wow.

Both

Korda and Martienne are caught in the penumbra of the beam and hurtle after the aliens like tossed rag dolls. The beam winks out as they pass into the depths of the alien ship!" There was an excited and confused babble as everyone tired to react at once.

Penny ignored everyone, especially Geri and Anne, and said, "The iris begins to shut swiftly."

"Jarhead leaps into it after them," I snapped before anyone else. My preparedness might pay off...

"I run and dive through the entrance, shooting out an InstaBrace™ from my glove to try to block its closure," shouted Mark, a solid beat after my quick reaction.

At almost the same moment, Craig shouted, "I dive quickly, using gravity to accelerate to Ultra-Flame Speed™!" I'm not kidding, you could hear the capitalization and trademarks. It was a schtick we were all embracing.

Martin was the most out of practice at reacting, and paused. "I don't even move, just stretch both arms out to grab their ankles before they are even pulled all the way in!"