Game Night - Chapter 1

Game Night - Chapter 1

Copyright 2024 by Otto26

"4th Edition was the best version of the game."

"Then why are we playing 5th?"

"Because Kent bought the books and never admits he's wrong."

"That's a really weak argument and you know it. "

"It's not and you know it. 4th Edition's granularity allowed for an unparalleled playing experience. It was the pinnacle of the game's development. Which is why Kent has homebrewed the hell out of 5e."

"4e was just a rip-off of Pathfinder!"

"Pathfinder is the rip-off!"

Isla threw open the door to her room and tromped down the hallway to the living room.

"I am going to murder both of you in your sleep if you don't stop shouting," she announced.

Neil and Akash stopped glaring at each other from across the second-hand dining room table and turned to look at her with expressions of extremely mild guilt.

The doorbell rang and the door opened a moment later as Cooper stepped inside. His arms were full so he closed the door with his foot.

"Hey, guys," he said cheerfully. "Oh, hey, Isla. I didn't know you were going to be here tonight."

"I wasn't," she explained. "I was going to meet my study group at the library but they canceled because Laura has Covid."

"They canceled the whole group?" Neil asked with a puzzled look on his face.

Isla sighed. "Turns out Laura was seeing David *and* Patrick."

"Seeing?" Akash asked.

"Fucking," Neil explained to Akash. "At the same time?" he asked Isla.

"Oh, so she might have exposed them," Akash reasoned aloud.

"No. I mean, yes. But they didn't know she was seeing both of them and when they found out..."

"So she wasn't 'seeing' them at the same time." Neil nodded sadly.

"Yes, she was, but, ew! Gross, Neil!"

The short bearded man shrugged. "A guy can dream," he unrepentantly stated.

"So you'll need a new study group?" Cooper asked from the kitchen where he was pulling sodas, chips, and a fruit tray from paper bags.

"Probably. I was just going to study here but the nerds started arguing. Is the whole evening going to be this loud?"

The three men exchanged looks for a moment.

"Probably."

"Yeah."

"Definitely."

Isla sighed. "It's just a board game, guys. Can you keep it down?"

"Nope," Neil said dismissively.

"Probably not," Akash confessed.

"Why don't you play?" Cooper asked.

The other two looked back at him. With frowns on their face, Isla noticed.

"What? You don't want me to play?"

"It's not that," Akash began hurriedly.

"Kent will have kittens," Neil stated, jumping directly to the end of Akash's explanation.

"Why can't she sit in for a night?" Cooper reasoned with them. "She doesn't have study group tonight so she can sit in on the game and see what all the fun is about and have a ton of new things to mock you guys about for the next month."

Isla laughed and wondered if Cooper had an ulterior motive. He had seemed genuinely happy to see her when he'd entered the house. She hadn't encountered anyone interesting with an ulterior motive in a couple of months and Cooper was interesting. 'All work and no play,' she thought.

"You've just got the hots for Isla," Neil said. "Drag her back to your old room and get it out of your system."

Akash slapped Neil's arm as Isla and Cooper were about to yell at him. "Remember when you asked me to tell you when you were being socially inappropriate?"

"No."

"Because that's how socially inappropriate you are. And you are being socially inappropriate," the Indian man scolded him.

"It was just a joke," Neil protested. "And he does have the hots for her so it's accurate."

Isla felt a blush building on her skin and her fury at Neil grew.

"What do you do when you've been socially inappropriate?" Akash demanded.

Neil sighed. "Akash says I'm sorry and regret my inappropriate comments. Please forgive me and let me know how I can make amends," he recited.

Akash hit his arm again.

"Okay, now I want to try playing the game," Isla stated.

"What sold you?" Cooper asked.

"New material to mock Neil with," she replied. "What do I need?"

"You in, Akash?" Cooper asked.

"Yeah, I like the idea of Neil being mocked. I'll support this, but you have to tell Kent."

Cooper grimaced slightly.

"That bad?" Isla asked.

Cooper opened his mouth to reply and the doorbell rang. He held up a finger and trotted over to open it.

"That bad," Neil confirmed. "And you don't need anything but your sexy brain," he finished as Akash drew back his arm. "I said brain. I was always going to say brain. You can sit next to me," he told Isla and gestured to a chair.

Isla sat down across the table from Neil as Cooper came into the room with a box which he set on the table. He was followed by a medium height man with unkempt brown hair. He was rotund but not obese and his beard was, at least, better than the patch work fuzz which tried to cover Neil's face. He caught sight of Isla sitting at the table and frowned.

"Kent, this is Isla. She's Neil and Akash's roommate. She's normally at her study group on game night but tonight she's going to sit in on the game so she can experience the fun and mock Neil," Cooper explained.

"No. I have to approve all new players and I don't," Kent stated.

"Oh, c'mon," Akash said.

"Yeah, just for a night," Neil said.

"She can be a rando we meet in the woods," Cooper reasoned.

Isla nearly gaped. 'Are those supposed to be cogent arguments?'

"She can't be a rando in the woods for a good reason I'm not going to share," Kent countered.

"Kent, if she doesn't sit at the table she's just going to sit in her room and listen to us all night anyway. Or walk through the hall to the bathroom or come to the kitchen to get a drink. Right when you're setting the scene with dramatic flair," Cooper pointed out.

Kent paused, weighing alternatives. "Okay. For one night. But I'm not introducing new characters to the story. So she'll have to play Nimfeach."

"Nimfeach?" Neil asked. "Oh, you mean..." his voice trailed off.

"Guys, can I talk to you for a minute?" Cooper said in the sort of level voice that screamed 'We need to talk right now' without actually screaming that phrase. He, Neil, and Akash retreated to the hallway and whispered.

"What are they whispering about?" Isla asked Kent. "Who's Nimfeach?"

The man was busy pulling books and smaller boxes out the larger box. He had a look of intense concentration plastered on his face which changed to annoyance when she interrupted him.

"Nimfeach is an NPC," he saw her blank expression and rolled his eyes. "A non-player character. NPC. She's their local guide to the forest they are currently adventuring in." When he'd finished with his minimal explanation he returned to his setting up, dismissing her.

"It all makes sense, now," Isla muttered. "Thanks, Kent."

The other three came out of the hallway with the expressions of men who had reached an agreement and took their seats at the table. Cooper sat next to her. Kent was at the head of the table. Akash was across from Cooper and Neil was across from Isla. They pulled out folders stuffed, to varying degrees, with paper and put dice on the table in front of them. Cooper set his on the table between them and said "You can share my set," to Isla.

She picked up one of the dice and counted the twelve sides. The other dice had a varying number of sides ranging from four to twenty. They were a dark green with gold paint picking out numbers instead of dots. They had a floral feeling to them. Neil dumped a Crown Royal bag onto the table, disgorging a vast assortment of mismatched dice of varying sizes. His hands corralled them into a small herd in front of him. Akash had two boxes which opened to reveal two matched sets of gleaming metallic dice in silver and gold. There was a faint scent of sandalwood in the air and he had a felt-lined, flat, wooden box that Isla quickly worked out was for rolling the dice in.

Kent had set up a free-standing barrier at the end of the table and was arranging things behind it. The barrier was dark wood, almost black, and covered in carvings that were difficult to see. Isla had the impression of naked bodies, not all of them strictly human, and saw Cooper grimacing as he saw her trying to get a better look at it.

The little man walked around the house, lighting a couple of incense sticks and lowering the lights. When he sat back down at the table he pushed a few buttons on the little laptop behind the screen and the room was filled with the sounds of a gentle breeze playing through trees and the calls of birds. She could smell the incense now, a light scent of pine and earth and the sort of ozone smell you got after fresh rain on a summer day; she was mildly impressed.

"Your character," Kent announced, handing her a small stack of papers.

She looked down at the numbers and letters that covered the page and her eye was drawn to a picture in the upper right corner which showed an extremely feminine woman with brilliant green hair, green fingernails and toenails and floral tattoos on her arms and legs. It was easy to tell she was female because she wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing.

"We left our heroes deep in the Foraoise gan Teorainn where they were searching for a cause for the attacks that have plagued the inhabitants of the baile of Dun Finiuin."

"Why is my character naked?" Isla demanded of Cooper in a whisper.

He looked over at her character sheet and paled.

"Uhm," he began, shooting Kent a dark look.

Isla looked over at Kent, trying to lift the sheet up and interrupt his measured, rhythmic introduction. But her arms felt leaden and her eyelids were closing; she couldn't lift her head. She saw the figures on Kent's screen slowly turning their faces to look at her and then blackness washed over her.

***

"Fuck!" a deep voice screamed.

"Don't dance around like a little girl! Hit it!" an Indian accented voice ordered.

"What do you think I'm trying to do?" the deep voice demanded.

"Dance like a little girl?" the accented, and masculine, voice asked.

"Coming, Neil! Circle right so I can hit it from behind," a third voice, also masculine, called out.

"Other right!" the masculine and accented voices said at the same time.

"Fuck!" the deep voice boomed.

"There's more of them!" the accented voice yelled in warning.

Isla felt better than she had ever felt in her life. The bed she was laying in was incredibly comfortable and the sunshine warming parts of her skin made her feel like she was glowing. The air smelled clean and the world was wonderful. Except for... There was something wrong. Like a black fly buzzing in a distant corner of a room it niggled at the edge of her awareness. She opened her eyes to see what it was just as a five foot long centipede walked over her.

Isla screamed and tried to curl into a fetal position and flail at the insect with her arms simultaneously and managed to achieve neither goal. It scurried over and past her and she scooted backward, legs and arms moving her away from it until her back encountered a tree.

"Ow, shit!" the masculine voice said.

"I've got it, Cooper!" the deep voice declared. "Yeah! Eat my ax!"

Isla caught sight of two more of the giant bugs headed towards her and pushed backward, propelling herself into the tree. The sense of comfort and well being filled her again. She felt the heartbeat of the tree, glacially slow, pumping the lifeblood of sap through its veins. The sun on her leaves felt like she was being caressed with bubbles that were absorbed into her. She giggled and fell out the back of the tree.

"They're fleeing," the accented voice announced with a trace of puzzlement.

"Not this one," the masculine voice said.

Isla reached her hand out to the tree. The bark was solid and her hand patted it. There was a sense of welcome, almost invitation, from the plant. She remembered where she was and looked around the tree to confirm the bugs were gone.

She spotted a short man wearing metal armor, a conical, horned helmet, and with a face that was mostly beard. He was levering a double-bladed ax as tall as he was out of the corpse of one of the insects. A man with a mahogany complexion dressed in black silk and leather was slowly turning to scan the forest with a blade held in each hand. A third man in browns and greens was wiping ick off a long blade and sliding it into a scabbard at his waist.

"What the hell?" she demanded.

They turned to look at her and froze.

"What the hell?" she repeated, standing and walking towards them. "How is this possible? I didn't put on any VR glasses. What kind of game is this?"

"Thank you, Jesus or Kent," the short man muttered.

"This isn't what the game is usually like," the man in black protested. "I've never experienced this."

"I think we're actually in the game," the green man muttered. "Neil, you're Magnus Skalleknuser."

The short man looked at his hands and arms. "I am?" He reached up to his face with both hands and stroked the lush beard that covered the lower half. "Cool. And you're Gareth Truesword and you're Chako."

"Chaakoo," the dark man corrected him. "Get it right."

"Actually, I think I'm poisoned," the green man said and fell to his knees and then on his face.

"Shit! Cooper!" Neil yelled and rushed forward to take a knee next to his fallen friend.

"Roll him over," Akash ordered. They manhandled him onto his back and the bloody wound on his upper thigh was plain to see.

"We need to get a healing potion into him," Akash stated.

"That won't fix the poison," Neil protested.

"No, but it will keep him alive until we can get him a restoration," Akash rejoined, rummaging in a pouch at his belt and producing a small glass vial.

"We're a day away from the baile," Neil protested as Akash pressed the vial to Cooper's blue lips. He looked up at Isla, who was looking down at the scene in horror, and stood up and took her hands in his. "Hey, Isla. Pretty freaky start to the game, right? Except we're sort of actually in the game and Cooper's been poisoned and there are only two ways to keep him from dying. One of them is a day away at the edge of the forest and we won't make it and Cooper will die. The other is for you to give him a blowjob and suck the poison out."

"What?!" she snapped.

"Not a lot of time here, Isla. Your character is Nympho the healslut. You're a nymph that Cooper enslaved and you have the magic power to heal and the way you deal with poison is by sucking it out of our dicks. You've done it for all of us more than once and I need you to get started on Cooper before he dies because I don't know what happens to him if he does that while we're in the game," he blurted.

Isla stared at him.

"Sorry," he apologized and reached up to grab her by her green hair and pull her down and forward. She stumbled to her knees and he pulled her head down to the recumbent Cooper's crotch. She saw Akash's hands pulling down a pair of off-white, linen underwear to reveal a thatch of blond pubic hair and a comically large, but still flaccid, penis.

"Hey!" she protested, trying to reach Neil's hand but having to use both hands to avoid falling face first into Cooper's crotch.

"We are our characters, Isla," Akash said in his comically exaggerated accent. "We have their skills. Neil knew how to use his ax, I knew how to throw my knives. You know how to do this. Just... get out the way of your character. Let your mind go fuzzy."

"Fuck you, Akash! You suck the poison out of him. I'm not playing your pervy game anymore! I want to leave the table!" she screamed.

Neil pushed her face down until it made contact with Cooper's penis and she flinched at the smell. Smell? No, it was something else. When she pushed back against Neil's hand she saw black lines on Cooper's body. Except... It was as though she was looking through his clothing. The lines were radiating out from his thigh, like weak tendrils of plant roots. One of them, a really big line, seemed to go directly to his chest. To his heart. As she had that thought she saw/sensed the panicked pulsing of his heart spreading the poison through more of his body. And it was already starting to weaken. She saw it all and while her brain marveled at the sight, her body acted.

Isla took Cooper's soft flesh entirely into her mouth and her hand reached forward to cradle his heavy balls. She could feel her breasts hanging beneath her chest as she moved her tongue on him and then her mouth. He was starting to harden, but slowly, too slowly. Her hand slid between his legs, fingertip searching for, then finding his anus. She pressed inside, finger burying in him and then curling back to stroke his prostate. Neil had released his hold on her hair and Cooper's cock nearly sprang erect under her manipulations and she couldn't take all of him into her mouth. She used her free hand and her knees to readjust her position and then relaxed and lowered her face until her nose hit his pubis, buried in the pale thatch of pubic hair and the top of his cock in her throat. She bobbed back up, and then down, establishing a quick rhythm and continuously moving her finger tip inside him. She sucked on him and the poison seemed to flow towards his cock. Again she sucked, and again, and the poison became a dark blot between his legs, in his balls, and she bobbed down quickly and painfully knocked her nose against his flesh and swallowed.

The poison flowed out of him with the cum, squirting down her throat and into her mouth as she moved on him, sucking hard because it seemed to pull the poison from him. When she saw no more of the darkness within him she pulled her mouth away and kneeled upright, gasping for air.

"I wish I'd been poisoned," Neil whispered to, he thought, himself.

Isla raised a hand to her mouth, wiping the cum away from her lips and chin and then her breasts. Her naked breasts. She looked down

"Why am I naked?" she yelled. Then she bent over and threw up, emptying the contents of her stomach onto the ground between Cooper's legs.

"Yeah, you shouldn't swallow poison," Akash pointed out, gathering her hair in a hand and holding it above the splash of the vomit.

"Nympho?" Cooper muttered, struggling into a semi-upright position and looking at the top of her head.

"Isla," she corrected him and then a foul burp erupted from within her. "But tell me more about 'Nympho'," she ordered.

"Shit," Cooper swore and lay back to just breathe.

"I'll tell you," Neil volunteered.

"Good. But give me some clothing, first. Give me your cloak, Akash," she ordered.

The man released her hair and stood up. "Not going to work," he told her as he swept the cloak off his shoulder and onto her shoulders. "Don't throw it in the vomit," he added.

Isla wrapped the black silk around her and stood up, backing away from the vomit, and Cooper's spread legs, and his flaccid but still intriguingly large cock.

"Go," she ordered Neil.

"Thinking about it, I already kind of," he began.

"Do. It. Again," Isla ground out.

"Right. Kind of stressful the first time. A little rushed. Okay, so my character is Magnus Skalleknuser, skullcrusher, and I'm a dwarf fighter." He gestured to himself, trying to get her to take in the clothing, the armor, and the physical differences. "Your character is named Nimfeach and I think it literally means nymph."

"It does," Cooper groaned.

"Cooper here enslaved you with some cunning magic and you are the healslut for our party of adventurers. All your magic is sex-based. Which is why we call you Nympho. That and it's easier to pronounce than that Irish stuff."

"Gaelic," Akash corrected him.

"Whatever," Neil brushed the correction aside.

"Irish Gaelic," Kent groaned. No one paid him any attention.