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As anybody from the city will tell you, Houston was built on a swamp.
As anybody currently crammed in the Gaia High School gym will tell you, Houston is still a swamp and the day it is absorbed into the yielding, subtropical mire of the gulf will not come a moment too soon.
It’s five o’clock—an hour since campus cleared for the afternoon—which means the central A/C isn’t running, making space in front of the industrial fan prime real estate for the D&D group huddled inside. Gaia occupies one of the smaller districts in the Houstonian area and has a gym to match; its walls are a scrubbed red brick, plastic mats stacked up against the edges, and equipment stored in the adjourning closet. Against the juncture where the walls meet the ceilings, there are a few, narrow windows, but otherwise all the lighting is provided by rows of suspended florescent rods. Today, there’s next to no natural light, with the storm outside scraping its teeth against the panes of glass—even if their session was ending any time soon (it isn’t) they won’t be going anywhere until it ends.
At least they have a room to play in—before the coach let Latula borrow her spare keys once a week in exchange for helping out with the middle school basketball team, they had to meet on the playground, which was extremely embarrassing for a group of Cool Teens such as themselves. Unless it’s Latula and Mituna vaping like chimneys on said aforementioned playground, which they personally found tolerable and everybody else alive found absolutely objectively worse.
Roxy drums her fingers against the top of her DM screen, and clears her throat. “Alright kiddies, settle down, settle down. This is your captain speaking: the skies are clear, we’re in the last stretch of this biznatch, and we’re about to slamaroonie this m-fer in for a four-point triple layup like the crosswinds are our fieldhouse and everybody else is just living in it.”
“Go sports,” Dave agrees sagely.
“Right on, little man. Does everybody remember where we were?”
Everybody is sitting in a circle on the polished gym floor—Dave, Karkat, and Aradia, as the freshmen, are still clumped together on one side. The unspoken pecking order has slowly eroded over the course of the year, but everybody else in the group pretty much knows the three of them are all dating anyway. Mituna and Latula, who have been together all four years of high school and are graduating in a month, are situated on the other. Mituna’s legs are pretty much permanent residents of Latula’s lap, draped over her sideways. Roxy, as the dungeon master, gets the spot closest to the fan, as God intended. Overhead, the thunder continues to roll, and the humidity—even inside—makes it feel like they’re breathing in tepid lake water.
“Oh, sure I do,” Karkat says, dropping the heel of his hand against his own thigh with a muffled smack for emphasis, “Dave’s musky barbarian—”
“Oily barbarian,” Dave corrects. “He’s covered in oil, you know, because he’s a wrestler. Jesus, Vantas, this is elementary school sports, not even the kind of higher ed sports Roxy was flexing.”
“Dave’s oily barbarian blew his cover with a failed grapple check—”
“On account of the oil.”
“After three sessions of carefully cultivated royal political intrigue, Dave’s inexplicably oily fantasy Russian barbarian blew his cover by failing his nineteenth grapple check of the campaign because he has enough chipped beef packed between his ears to open an Anglo-American naval mess hall in the early twentieth century, is that better, Strider?”
“Hm, well! It was kind of your decision to charge your paladin into the throne room after him, I think,” interjects Aradia, stirring the pot with a placid and dimpled smile. She plays a bard in the college of valor, and she’d even convinced Roxy to let her homebrew a playable dwarven lich. “Which is why we’re opening this session with… a death saving throw, right, Roxy?”
“Oh yeah!” Mituna stirs into awareness, wrenched from whatever side-conversation he’d been having with Latula about Fortnite—the very conversation Roxy was unsuccessfully trying to wrangle into focus a few minutes ago. “Rest in piss, baby Vantas, sometimes life just really comes atcha with your pretties ‘round your ankles.” Extremely self-satisfied, he breaks off into that characteristic laugh of his, sucking in air in his nose and letting it leak out his grin in a string of messy giggles—not totally unlike his little brother’s equally awful snicker. Karkat makes a point of rolling his eyes.
“Those are bold words from someone with perhaps the absolute worst character concept ever inflicted on Gary Gygax’s posthumous legacy.”
There is a veritable chorus of protests when Karkat goes in on Mituna’s bard, not exclusively but also not least of all from Latula. “Hey, dude, uncool. Jörg, is, like, the heart and soul of this team.” Latula, who produces her vape pen out of seemingly nowhere, blows a melon-scented cloud in the direction of the freshmen. She rolls the fighter-rogue dragonborn of the party, and she and Dave are the heaviest hitters in terms of sheer damage.
Jörg is another matter entirely.
Born out of one Korean-American man’s sheer desire to stop hearing dumbshit K-pop jokes for the rest of forever, Jörg is essentially G-pop (German pop) fully realized as a tiefling bard with an enchanted accordion. His less than traditional lederhosen are a soft pastel teal, and the accordion has geometric patterns up the side. According to Mituna—who emphasized that this is crucial for his characterization, somehow—he’s also got an undercut and has so much foundation on his face looks like it’s been smoothed over by the blur tool in photoshop. Jörg constantly refers to the infernal plane as ‘the old country.’
Roxy had initially been hesitant about letting both Aradia and Mituna roll bards, especially because both Dave and Latula were rolling fighters (which is why Latula dual classed as a concession), but she was immediately sold on the concept of Jörg, who quickly became a favorite in their weekly meetings.
“Can we please stop entertaining the delusion that Lalonde let him play what was clearly just 99 Luftballons chewed up and spat out by a synthwave audio processor for any reason other than the fact that she and Mituna are dating?”
Roxy pulled an expression of exaggerated offense, painted-pink lips parting in mock scandal. “Whoa whoa whoa hol’ up, hold up, I’m currently the most eligible cryptoqueen on the market, and even if I weren’t, I am an equal opportunity dungeon mistress.”
Latula takes another long drag of her vape, blowing an O this time. “We aren’t dating?” She and Mituna sound off in equal chorus as he reclaims the vape pen.
“Oof!” Aradia realizes about a quarter of a second too late that a noisily sympathetic exhale just added about twelve more layers of awkward and smacks a hand over her own mouth. Dave gives his girlfriend a teasing shoulder nudge and breathes out an equally awkward little ‘haha, nice.’ Karkat, for his part, looks like he’s waiting for that aforementioned gaping maw of Houston’s swamp to open and devour him whole. He opens his mouth either to apologize or to shove his foot firmly into his mouth, but is cut short by Roxy.
“Are we?”
“Isn’t that my swag?” Latula asks, leaning against Mituna as he passes the vape back. Roxy glances down at the EarthBound shirt in question as if just noticing it for the first time.
“Well yeah,” she concedes, “but I didn’t have nothing to change into last time we went swimming at your place! Totes different.”
“What about when you went on a date with me and ‘tula for our anniversary?” Mituna chimes in.
“Was that—ooh. Oh!” Roxy’s expression lights up. “I thought you just had a groupon for paintball or something?”
That breathy giggle of Mituna’s makes its reprise, and this time it harmonizes with Latula’s own laugh—though Latula sobers up the quickest, smile lingering for a moment before slowly yielding to another pocket of awkward silence. “Girl, that, uh, was kinda supposed to be a date.” Roxy Lalonde, the seventeen-year-old who Latula had personally seen build a PC from scratch is no airhead, and certainly no idiot. But Roxy Lalonde is looking pretty lost right about now.
“Oh.” Roxy’s mouth carefully forms the vowel, stretching it out. She glances around—to Latula, to Mituna, to the freshmen who are all strung together in a relationship of their own, and up to the narrow windows where the rain is still beating hard against the side of the gym. She thinks, for a moment. Then a moment longer. “I guess that kinda makes this a big ol’ six-person double date then, huh?” And she grins.
“—Does this at least prove my point about Jörg?”
“Aw, naw, 99 Luftballons just fucking slaps. Roll your death saving throw!”