‘You’re standing in a long, high valley made of sheer rock on each side. It’s eerily quiet. As you walk along the wind carries the scent of death. Ahead of you there two paths, one that winds up high along the sides of the cliff, and the other that carries on through the canyon.’
‘What does the high path look like?’
Frankie looked down at his notes. ‘Narrow and dangerous.’
‘Fuck that. I know you and your traps. I’ll get to the highest point and be killed by falling rocks or something. I’ll take the low road.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay. You begin to make your way through the canyon on the low road. All of a sudden there is a cracking sound… A huge rubble and a crash as heavy rocks fall down behind you, blocking the path! There’s no way to go back now, only onwards.’
‘Funny how that happens a lot around here, doesn’t it?’
‘Uncanny.'
I opened my next can. McEwen’s Export. No wonder the guy in the logo was laughing. ‘Couldn’t you do any better than this? I thought your Dad was all about his beers?’
‘He is, but he’d miss the good ones. Sometimes he pays up to ten quid a can for the craft stuff. The Export has been in there for years. Probably best check the date on it.’
I peered underneath. The sell-by stamp was so blurred it was unreadable. Pickings were slim. It would be fine. An Empty a Frank’s was so rare I shouldn’t complain. He lived in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere called Coxley Cottage, still a constant source of great amusement even after all these years. His folks were the shooting and fox-hunting type and away for the weekend. Stags heads and taxidermy populated the house, making it more than just a bit creepy. His big sister had taken off in her boyfriend’s car, final words of ‘there’s potato waffles in the freezer’ drifting back on the wind. I’d suggesting throwing some kind of wild party, but Frank reminded me that we didn’t know anyone.
‘There’s something in the canyon ahead. Something tall like a stick with something on top. The sun’s going down so it’s getting dark so you can’t quite see what it is. Do you want to use a lamp spell?’
‘No, I’ll light a torch.’ I’d need my casting points if this turned out to be a trap, which it always did.
‘Slowly you approach the mysterious object… Your torchlight flickers and you see that it’s a long spear with one end dug in the ground. The other glistens with congealed blood splattered over a human face, crushed flat so it looks like grisly, lollipop road crossing sign. With hair.’
The McEwen’s Export got better the more opened it got. ‘Use the torch to look around,’ I said. ‘Wave it at anything that slithers.’
‘You see some footprints in the grey dust. Huge, big cat footprints.’
‘Okay…’ I said aloud without thinking. ‘Are they a Balok’s footprints, by any chance?’
Frankie leaned back. ‘You’ll have to make an animal tracking roll to find out.’
‘Fuck off. Seriously?’
‘Them’s the rules. You need an eight. Ah shit, nae luck... You can’t tell what kind of creature made them.’
I started feeling tense. Baloks were an eight-foot mash of lion and pissed-off body builder. An unexpected encounter with one had bitten the head off my previous character, which I was still sore about weeks later. I wanted revenge. ‘Ignore the head on the spike and keep going, following the footprints.’
‘You hear the murmur of voices in the distance. What do you want to do?’
‘Creep up in the shadows. Keep out of sight and check out what’s going on.’
‘Make a stealth roll. Four plus, an easy one.’ I did so, checking the time and messages on my phone. Nothing. ‘Well done. You manage to conceal yourself behind some boulders, seeing two very rough looking men sitting at a camp fire, eyeing each other very carefully.’
‘Are they armed?’
‘One is biting from a morsel skewered on the end of a pointed, rusty dagger. You can’t see the other’s hands. They both wear three-cornered hats like highwaymen.’
‘So what are they saying?’
Frank put on his weird piraty voice. He loved doing the voices but he only really had three that he’d vary in stress depending on the situation: pirate, noble knight of the realm and anal-retentive super villain. ‘I don’t care what you say. There’s no way it can be both alive and dead.
‘The other one tries to explain again. The cat that eats the poison is dead, but the one that eats the food lives. They both exist at the same time until you open the door. There’s two cats.
‘The first one shakes his head. It has to be one or the other. There is always only ever one cat. It’s the laws of physics. It’s conceited for a being to believe that something exists purely because it’s in their thoughts.
‘His friend raises a finger… Ah, but if a tree falls in a forest with no one inside..?
‘Don’t start with your forest shit again. Of course it makes a noise…’
I just watched. I reckon Frankie would have kept chatting away with himself all night if I hadn’t interrupted. ‘Enough of this shit. Kill highwaymen.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Aye, stab the one with the knife first. In the eye.’
Frank looked unimpressed. ‘You’re a good twenty feet away. That’s going to be a difficult roll. Fifteen or higher.’
I gulped at my can of Export. ‘Give me the fucking dice.’
Frankie passed the golf ball-like twenty sided die but looked sad. ‘Don’t you ever wish there was a way we could do all this for real?’
Saturday night. Where the excitement never stops.
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Further information:
A short thing I wrote for fun. It was originally in one of the opening chapters to Boxhead but I took it out and put it aside if it was ever needed again. As a teenager I'd play role play games all the time with my mates: Twilight 2000, Cyberpunk, the Star Wars extended universe, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons which I hated because it was just walking around killing people. Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020 got me really into writing because I started constructing the most elaborate stories within the game, most of which never got played because a new Amiga game would come out that week or whatever. A huge open world game called Cyberpunk 2077 has just been released set in that universe so it must have been on my mind. I spent a lot of Saturday nights on my own writing those adventures, making up characters; too young to get in anywhere and feeling stuck. It felt like there was a world out there that was beyond reach.