Roll to Dodge! Reroll

You wake to the sound of a resounding THWACK! on your forehead. Half-feeling the spot of impact for bruising and half-patting the area around you to see what it was that hit you, you begin to realize that you're feeling soft grass underneath you. You take a look around - for some reason or another, you've awoken in the middle of a city park, one that you don't remember visiting for quite a while. There are several others around you, having apparently found themselves in the same predicament, but otherwise, it is eerily quiet for a bright and sunny afternoon - no children riding bikes, no dogs prancing about, no friends playing soccer or volleyball.

Eventually, your hand finds a particular piece of plastic: an icosahedron, the corners slightly rounded due to wear, each number labeled with a number in a bright color. There's also a note, written in crumpled paper in rushed handwriting, just underneath the object: "Time to play a game. It's up to you what you make of this power."

What could all of this be leading to...

Welcome to Roll to Dodge, a traditional forum game where you attempt to achieve victory over all other players using nothing but your luck, your cunning and your limitless imagination! Please view the basic rules below - though, if you've seen any amount of Roll to Dodge being played in the past, you likely won't need to refresh yourself.

Play is divided into turns, where each player submits an action for that turn. There is no limit to what you would like to do for your action. This is where Roll to Dodge shines, as a platform for all sorts of chaos, crazy concoctions and wanton nonsense. Take advantage of this to be or do whatever you'd like - the actual implementation of your actions, however, will be left to the fate of your dice.

Each player starts with a 20-sided dice. Whenever they take an action, their dice will be rolled. This is what determines whether the action succeeds or not, as well as what side-effects may occur. The higher the number, the better the results for the actor, with 11 or higher generally being the benchmark for the most basic of successes, and the roll of 20 (a critical success) giving the most prized results. This goes the other way as well; a roll of 1 (a critical failure) will lead to an especially poor result.

When you come under attack (say, by another player), you will also roll you dice to see if you can dodge the consequences of that attack. The higher you roll, the more lessened the effects you suffer.

By default, the current goal of the game is to eliminate all other players by setting their HP from 1000 to 0, while avoiding the same fate. May you be the last one standing!

"...This is real."
A slim and attractive man in his early 20's with unkempt black hair, pale white skin, and baggy cloud gray eyes examines his surroundings. He's wearing a black jacket with a white undershirt, black pants, and black and white sneakers. He holds up the 20-sided object to his eye as he pores over it. Pocketing it for now, he turns to the others and begins to smirk.
"I can't say I'm a gambler, but I'm up for a game. This'll be fun."

A young boy- not much older than twelve, but still petite for his age- rolled up to a seat on the grass... After shaking some loose bits out of his fluffy head of jet black hair, his eyes widened suddenly, realizing where he was... ah, crap, crap, crap!

As he stood up, he let out a sigh of acceptance- yes, he'd been caught dead in public in his pajamas. A soft pink hoodie, fuzzy white pants with adorable cartoon sheep bouncing all over them (that he might have borrowed from his older sister), and a worn-out t-shirt; a little too scruffy to keep wearing to school but also too comfy to just toss out... It had an album cover from his favorite singer on it, too, softened into lighter pastels by years and years of washing.

Mar Linewell's 'Sigh of the See You'... man, that album was his life three years back.

Oh well. If he wore it confidently enough, maybe nobody would be able to say anything... what was this pebble in his hand, anyway? Oh- cute... he always wanted pink dice. But only a d20..?

A woman with a fit, brutish frame moves her hand to block the sun from her eyes, makes a low, growling sound, and slowly sits up. Her face is lightly wrinkled in ways that suggest that she is older than she actually is, and small patches of green-brown scales splay themselves across her body like freckles. Her teeth are larger and more pointed than they probably ought to be, little spikes poking out even with her lips drawn tightly closed, and her hair, tangled mess that it is is long, curly,  and shaved on one side of her head. It's a rather nice brunette, except where the roots are coming in, where the shades are deeply uneven, flecks of green sprinkled in like a Pollock piece. It's a hairstyle that doesn't seem like it would go well with the hat she grabs from the ground next to her, a noir detective thing to match her dark trenchcoat. She puts it on anyway. Something like a wedding ring, with a gold band and black stone, sparkles from its appropriate place upon her finger as she adjusts its brim.

She plants her boots underneath her, stands up, stretches, and looks around, in motions that seem well-practiced, a manufactured appearance of calm. She runs a hand through her hair in a vain effort to comb apart some knots, nabs a pack of cigarettes from her pocket - Haymarket brand - puts one in her mouth, and lights it, with a lighter that looks like  a miniature deck of cards, so that when you open the lid the King of Hearts' head comes off. She takes a long, long, drag, and sighs it out. When she puts the lighter back in her pocket, she startles, and her hand comes back out with a deep red twenty-sided die pinched firmly between index and thumb. Her eyes narrow with studious contemplation. Her brow furrows. Her cigarette droops, slightly.

"What the fuck."

A middle-aged man pulls himself to his feet, wiping a rough, worn hand across his face to clear it of grass. Squinting at the strange die in his hand for a moment, followed by reading the note, Rahim looked up at the others, keenly observing them, before saying:

"What a complete waste of my time," with a sigh and a blank expression.

(...How irritating. I was planning on playing along with this little game anyways. It's not like I needed a push.)

Or so Reef thinks. Either way, the game had begun. Taking a moment to concentrate, he rolls the die in his hands and envisions a firearm, which he then attempts to bring into reality.

(I hope this is how this works...)

Rahim blinked up at the sky, then down at the scrap of paper. How curious... maybe these events would end up helping his cause, rather than obstructing it. Whatever force was behind this had to have some power, after all.

"Well then, I'll be off. Don't follow me," he winked with a smile, "unless you're looking for a knife in your gut, haha! Maybe see you later."

Humming to himself, the man tossed his die up and immediately caught it, examining the top face as he retrieved his trusty knife from his coat pocket. Well, first priority would be information. Thankfully, he was a quite persuasive person! A few level-headed threats with the real danger of violence would get him some good intel.

Klemence P. Kalamazoo rolled to his feet, glancing around at his surroundings. What do we have here? A generic city, a generic grassy area, some people who are probably about to murder me and loot my corpse, and a giant magical arena barrier? Ain't that grand.

Taking a closer look at said barrier, Klemence weighed his options. Clearly a deity or some such higher power had too much free time on their hands and decided to make a bunch of schmoes murder each other in a Highlander-esque battle royale. Not his scene. Not his scene at all, no siree.

It definitely wasn't his problem, either, though- besides getting out alive. Overthrowing a normal government that one time was a headache and a half; magically-empowered despots were firmly off-limits. Decision made, Klemence started backing away from the group towards the edge of the park.

"Well, you lot seem like real stand-up folk, but what with the threats and all I'm getting the feeling I should be somewhere that ain't here right about now, yeah?" Without another word, Klemence turned and sprinted off into the city- hopefully in the direction of some shops, or at least a map of the place.

Cutter flinched as the compulsion took hold, and her posture shifted, expression darkening. People... it depended, but some people tended to underestimate effects like this, to think that, if it wasn't outright mind control, or someone puppeteering your body around, that you could resist it more easily, logic your way around it, let strong feelings, like true, starcrossed love, or oathsworn hatred, snap you out of it. But except for fairly novice enchantments - which weren't uncommon, to be fair - this was not the case. A proper enchantment - and that word, proper, spoken in her head, was venomous, acidic - a proper enchantment twisted logic around until it was unrecognizable, self-contradictory, and still didn't break. It numbed emotions, or extinguished them, or directed them at the wrong things, and the strongest emotions would be more vulnerable, not less. She had seen enchantments compel men to give away their daughters to strangers, make urchins and vagabonds crave the taste of sand, make children love the monster which had devoured and replaced their mother.

She had resolved those situations, as much as they could be resolved, some more easily than others, more completely. But there would always be scars left behind. If anything had driven her into her line of work, it was her own scars, of that selfsame nature. Scars that were itching, now, telling her to resist the compulsion, somehow, no matter what it said, no matter how difficult she knew it would be. It put her in a dark place.

She had... years' worth of experience, attempting to resist such a thing, forgetting that it was something she was supposed to resist, and then remembering again, or else coming to the same conclusion without remembering, exactly. She got out, in the end, but that had taken years of work, outside circumstances, and enough distance from her captor that it couldn't reach her for a few weeks. It was only in retrospect that she had been able to fit things together, untangle some knots, put everything into straight lines, remember things clearly. She was relieved to feel that she could still remember those years clearly, remember the feel of the way certain trains of thought endlessly diverted themselves, stopped before they started, the justifications that she made. So she could pull from experience, even if her judgement was clouded.

But that was the only good news, more or less. She could remember strategies, but none of them seemed useful to her in these circumstances. She couldn't find anybody who wasn't under the same compulsions to listen to, because as far as she knew everybody here was. She couldn't find a way to get far away from the enchanter, because as far as she could tell it was omnipresent in this place, which felt like a Domain, or a Realm. She could take apart a pen and stab herself in the thigh, or somewhere else, until she was blinded by pain, and she activated instincts that weren't at all conscious, but... that probably wouldn't work, any magician or sorcerer or whatever worth their salt would know to work at the instinctual level, too, and the only reason it had somewhat worked last time was that discovering the enchantment had weakened it, slightly, and that wasn't a factor when the compulsion wasn't kept secret in the first place.

Also, she didn't trust any logic that told her to self-mutilate. She wasn't sure if it was the enchantment, taking her in that direction when she tried to think through ways to subvert it, or just her mind making excuses to move in old patterns. Maybe it was both. In either case, it wasn't something she wanted to dwell on any further.

She thought about direct disobedience, attempting to throw her die away, give it to someone else, and dismissed it. This thing was powerful, whatever it was, and earning its ire without pausing for due consideration of that would be foolish.

She thought about it again, and again dismissed it. This game had the shape of a trial, with a reward at the end of it. Some of these people looked... unscrupulous. If someone like that won something big from a being or organization this powerful, they could commit terrible acts with it. If that something was something traditional, like a wish...

She thought about for a third time, and dismissed it all the same. If it was a wish, then she needed that wish.

She tried to think of counterarguments.

This could be a situation where the champion is simply the fattened calf, ripe for slaughter. A proverbial Hansel, fattened up by victory for the oven. It's not common, but you've heard of things like that, haven't you?

She had. But that was a reason to stay in the game, not to leave it and risk the wrath of an angry, what, archmage? God? Demon? If that was the case, then she could be the proverbial Gretel, feeding the champion only the skinniest morsels, that they might together burn the witch, or else she could ensure that the worst person possible becomes champion, that nothing of value is lost when they are devoured.

And if it is a wish? Since when have you been one to put faith in supernatural wish-granters? The whole shape of wishes is that they go terribly wrong.

Not the whole shape, especially not if you're careful. There was potential to strike a deal where you came out ahead, in the end, even if some parts went wrong. She was a private eye, and she'd studied the law enough to write up contracts, and to be careful about those contracts, when they were legally and magically binding. If there was a chance...

And what of everyone else? Are their causes unworthy? All of them? You're not even sure there is a wish, lying at the end of this, and the idea of it is still driving you to obey this thing. This isn't you; this is the compulsion. Think! Anything that kidnaps you and tells you to fight isn't doing it for your sake. Of course this deal doesn't seem so bad to you, you're under an enchantment. You're probably missing key information, information that would tell you to get the hell out of here no matter the cost. You could have been made to forget. It could be that you know these people, already, that you love them, that collecting everyone's dice in one place will summon an apocalypse. It could be that taking someone's die is monstrously evil, only you've forgotten that, the same as a man might forget that it's wrong to revel in the murder of children, under the right enchantment. You might look back on this with as much stark horror as you look back on the love you felt for that abomination. The only way out of this is to disobey, as flagrantly as possible.

She was sweating, now, shaking, heart beating fast, but her emotions remained level, uncompromising. She recognized it for the evidence of the compulsion at work that it was.

She still couldn't throw her die away.

Three strikes, you're out. You can't do this. You never could. You knew you couldn't, but it was important to test the boundary. You did fine. I forgive you. No - there's nothing to forgive.

A tension in her shoulders released, and she sagged, slightly, then procured a switchcomb from an inside pocket and ran it through her hair to get rid of the knots her hand couldn't.

Those guys are leaving. The compulsion isn't specific that you have to eliminate everyone right now. You can approach this with a strategy, delay, investigate. That's what you do. There's a flexibility, there. If you want to edge closer to disobedience, you can try to make allies. It's not forbidden, at least not explicitly, and getting a team will objectively make it easier to eliminate other die-holders.

She didn't trust anybody enough to make a team with them, though. She ran cold-blooded, not literally, but metaphorically, which was more important when you were as magical as she was. She wasn't the sort to reach out, offer vulnerability. There appeared to be a child, but appearances could be deceiving, and things that looked like children but weren't tended to be some of the scariest things there were, and she had seen a lot. She was more inclined to trust the more hostile ones, if anything; felt more honest, in a world where everybody was under the same orders.

Eliminate. A frightening word, in this context. Based on the following text, she assumed that taking other people's dice would count toward eliminating them, but that didn't mean that a more lethal approach couldn't be inferred, or that it would even be incorrect. It was a thought that spurred her to action, after spending too long recovering from the tearing open of old wounds, reliving old nightmares.

"I'm gonna head out," she said, pocketing her comb, taking another drag from her cigarette. "No hard feelings, yeah? I'm gonna try to keep things copacetic on my end, but none of you --" she glanced at the child "-- uh, chuckleheads better follow me, capisce? I'm liable to bite, and I don't think any'a yous' are gonna like the shape and size've my teeth."

She smiled, and it wasn't friendly. Her teeth were the sort of shape and size where you don't want them to bite you, unless you're unhealthily into that kind of thing.

She might have been friendly, but these circumstances were harrowing, to her, and she needed time to herself. She wanted to investigate, the limits of the compulsion, the rules of the game, and the layout of the city, and she wanted to make sure nobody died if she could help it. One more reason not to throw her die away, she guessed.

She pivoted on her heel and walked away, not slowly, but not quickly, either, doing her best to project confidence when she wasn't confident. She aimed for somewhere as far from where the others who'd left had gone as possible, maybe try to find the poorer parts of town, the areas with abandoned buildings, so she could set up a base.

You've got this. You're not going to lose yourself. Remember the kind of person you are. You're gruff, standoffish, but you're not malicious. Not even close. Kids are scared of you, some of the time, and adults too, or maybe just people in general... but that's because they don't know you. The people who do know you know that you're a good person. They know that you're a huge fucking softie, when it comes down to it. They know that when someone can't afford to hire you, and they've got enough of a sob story, you'll say they can pay you back later and then never mention it again. They know you rescue kittens from trees, that you're a snob about your deli meats even though you can't afford to be, that even though you're a terrible fucking gardener, you never stop trying. They know that you love bad jokes. They know that you wear a vest under your coat specifically so that you can call yourself an in-vest-igator. They know that you only pretend to like your coffee black, even though you'll absolutely never admit it.

And they know other things, too. They know that you don't like to be touched. They know that love scares you, not in the sense that you're afraid of commitment but in the sense that it genuinely frightens you to this day, and they know why. They know that you were never human, not really, and that you never will be. They love you anyway.

They know things about you that you didn't know until they told you - the way your nose wrinkles, when you think someone's lying. The way you hum in your sleep, old songs, songs you're not sure you've ever heard before. The way your eyes sparkle when you find something interesting, or the way everybody can tell that you're very pleased with yourself, whenever you're complimented, no matter how much you may try to hide it - except when it's about your singing, in which case you actually get annoyed.

And they know that you wouldn't let something like this get to you, because you know you know you're stronger than this. You're not a woman to be fucked with, and any dipshits who want to argue that point had better be ready to throw down, because you sure as hell are.

As she walks, she whistles. It's hideously out-of-tune.

You've got this, she thinks. You've got people back home who care about you, who you've got to get home to.

Suddenly, she stops.

"Ah, shit," she says.

"I should've said "See you later, alligators.""

Uuuuh, this was getting weird... at least two of the guys just went and ran off. S-should he go, too? Wasn't something wrong, though? He got a sickly feeling as he watched that old guy walk around the corner, tossing his dice up and down, like he wanted to snatch it out of the air or just- just make it go away... what was wrong with him? And there were more  people out there with dice that probably had it out for them?

Well, unless this city wasn't populated by normal, non-dicey people at all, there had to be some kind of... internet feed about this-- he just had to log in and... figure it all out from there! He'd feel more confident, and be able to talk with the chat, yeah, definitely a good start... get his head clear before, acting on all these weird impulses...

But where the heck would he log in from..? And would someone follow him before he could do anything?

That big toothed scaly lady was out, at least... which left him with the sourpuss-looking guy and one other... maybe getting out wouldn't be so bad. That was all he needed.

"Dang, you lot sure have some words to thinksay."
Wait, no, those aren't very good mouthwords...
"Boydiddlyhowdy, it's time for some diceygames!"

(...What an idiot.)
Reef takes a look at the die standing on the ground. Getting up close and personal to take it would be a bad idea given his weapon of choice. Of course, he gets the feeling that you can do just about anything in this game...

Reef gives off a wicked grin.
(Mind over matter, they say.)

Taiko: hello ( o-o)/ i'm new here


He saw the first crossed-out name. But while he pondered how friendly he should be, the young boy chanced a glance out the window, and found the top of the sky flash an ominous purple... When he looked back, two more names were crossed out.

A shiver crawled down his spine...




Taiko: hello ( o-o)/ i'm new here
Taiko: what's this?
Taiko: i dont remember signing up lol



In another window, which he set up to sit adjacent to the chatroom, he quickly booted up the search engine to look up- first of all- his location; then the latest news about his location, as far back as three months back. That'd do... whether it was on news sites, social media, or forums, he had to find at least one person out there complaining about weird stuff starting to happen... right? In fact, now might be a good time to check in with his stream chat!

He typed it into the address bar, the combination of keys rolling off his fingertips like water.

Code:


vtube.tv/idols/mbtko/profile


That was his second home- and his second life: the digital studio that turns him from a regular kid to a "Super-Cool Virtual Idol" ... The minute he turned on that webcam, its facial recognition software would translate his movements to his avatar.

Magical Boy T.KO, who usually hung out at the bottom right of the stream feed, was a young fellow dressed dapper-ly in a pastel-palleted tailcoat and pink bowtie, with a big TV for a head. Its screen, a cheerful electric blue, displayed a wide variety of super-cute emoticons as a translation of his own expressions.

He mostly streamed video games- but he was also a rising star on the side, with a small album of five songs in the electronic-bitpop-hip-hop style already out... digitally vocalized by a program he wrote himself! Heh heh.

"You know... I really shoulda seen this coming." Klemence tentatively poked at the wound on his forehead, grumbling to himself. "Stupid alley wildlife, always getting the drop on me. Little jerk's lucky I wasn't holding my knife."

Klemence rifled through his pockets.

"Sheeeeit, where is my knife? Or my phone? Aw for Chrissake, I coulda used GPS this whole time. Get it together, Klemence, get it together."

Rahim laughed as he took the hit, as if he didn't even feel the pain. "The Black Jack Crew? That's not a very good decision. They've been losing influence in this city for years. But I suppose it's because they sign on folks like you, isn't it? Big, strong men who can shut up people up, and fool others into thinking they're safe." He shook his head, "ridiculous. They're running a criminal organization like we're still in the 90's."

He retrieved a second knife from his coat (he was glad he swiped it off that weird guy before he got hit in the head with a die), smiling as he turned to the growing crowd, momentarily ignoring the burly man. "Attention everyone! If the events of the last few minutes in the sky have worried you, I have news!"

"Something big is happening! Something much bigger than brutes, and certainly bigger than 9-to-5's like all of you." He held up a hand, revealing a 20-sided die tucked between his knife and his index finger. "Those dice mentioned in the sky? I happen to have one. I also happen to be the sort of man who would gladly kill anyone necessary for my own gains -- and I've done so, by the way, haha!" He laughed cheerfully. "I'm not cruel by any means, no, just efficient. And there are plenty of others far worse than me."

"The police can no longer keep you safe. The Black Jacks can no longer keep you safe. The Diamond Throats can no longer keep you safe. Something big is going to start soon, and regular people like you are going to be trampled underfoot. So..." he smirked, throwing one of the knives into the crowd of onlookers as he tossed his die into the air and caught it. "Consider this a chance to increase your odds of survival: anyone who attempts to kill this burly man may come with me, and avoid becoming a piece of collateral damage. Anyone who doesn't... well, we'll just find you later, anyway. Bonus points if you use that knife!"

Okay, a little bit drab, but that wasn't exactly the worst quality for a hideout to have. Dolly had personally seen much, much worse. The smells of some places...

Shaking her head, she gauges her options, wondering about what the best way to proceed might be. She was under compulsion, and she knew she was under compulsion. The good news was that "Eliminate all other dice holders" didn't feel like it had a time limit - although that might change, if whatever sorcerer ruled this place got bored enough. Would it be best to attempt to be entertaining, then? Did she need to question whether or not that impulse was compulsion-based? Hmm. If she tried to be entertaining without actually fighting anyone... would that work? Probably not - the stage seemed set for bloodsport, so that's what she had to assume the hypothetical "game master" was interested in. Still, as long as she seemed like she was at least gearing up for battle in interesting ways, she could probably get away with not fighting for a while.

Right. What did she know about the game master? They were powerful, obviously, maybe even obscenely so. That sort of power usually came part and parcel with immortality, although not always. Someone like her was ill-equipped to go around punching gods, so... but no, cowardice was no solution. She just needed to think. What else was there? The message, the note. The term "Eliminate." The phrase "Look sharp." The die itself. Entertainment was, as the very least, something they were pursuing, and possibly the main goal of this entire endeavor. Powerful things had a tendency to be capricious when bored. They wanted a game, they wanted a competition specifically, the word "Eliminate" could mean kill or just "defeat," probably specifically via obtaining their die, based on the warning, which felt like it was letting people make the choice - and if she were some sort of omnipotent monster with no regard for sentient life beyond entertainment value, she would select a variety of people who would make different choices to that moral dilemma, let the pious and the damned, so to speak, mark the finer points of their dogma in wounds on the face of the battlefield.

She hoped that she was one of the pious.

So. Right. She probably would have to save some lives. Gods, she hoped that nobody had killed anyone yet. She wouldn't even necessarily be inclined to blame them, at least not too much; the confirmed presence compulsory enchantments was typically considered exonerating. Usually, because people tried enchanting their allies to do things they were going to do anyway, so they could get off the hook for it.

It made her genuinely sick. Those cases had made it a lot harder for the vast majority of enchantment victims to prove their innocence. Prosecutors would argue that any pre-existing relationship with the enchanter in question meant that the enchantment was consensual, and that the victim should still be tried for whatever crimes they committed under the influence. Some enchanters, in turn, started meeting up with people they intended to victimize, building friendships or romantic relationships, being seen together in public. Even a few weeks might be enough for doubt to be cast on the victim's innocence.

Dolly herself had only known the Rat King for a few weeks, before...

Well, she hadn't - strictly speaking - existed before the beginning of those weeks, anyway. She sort of had, but her memories of life as a gator were strange to her, now. The absence of internal narration, complex emotion. She hadn't thought about anything, then. She could try to apply labels to those memories she still had,but it would feel wrong, somehow. She hadn't existed in a world with language beyond thrashing tails and snapping jaws.

When she was made human, she had all of the intelligence of a human woman of her approximate age, which was some sort of compromise between her place in a gator's lifespan and her age in human years. But she hadn't been given any of the knowledge. Her brain had been a plastic thing, then; it had taken a few days for her to understand English well enough to speak it, as opposed to the months it might have taken otherwise. But she was only exposed to certain things. Even as fast a learner as she was, a certain degree of naivety was inevitable. And, depending on the Rat King to take care of her, to supply the magical power that kept her human, it had been easy for her to fear disappointing him.

It was a naivety and a dependency and a fear that he had taken advantage of. In the end, he'd gotten her consent, her name signed on a legally binding document. He never even had to lie, except by omission. She had known that by marriage she would be sworn to his service, until she chose to leave; she hadn't realized that she wouldn't be allowed the ability to want to leave, the power to so much as muster up a little discontent with her situation.

Years upon years of that quiet, inexpressible, distant horror, unfeelable and yet impossible not to feel, known and yet unknowable, visible only in the paths her mind wasn't ]allowed to take, in the loops of circular logic her frantic anxiety would take again and again, until it wore a groove in the surface of her consciousness, like a dog chasing its own tail, a skipping record.

Never again. But she wouldn't give any two-bit monstrosity the satisfaction of her suicide, either.

She shook herself out of her daze and focused up. She had some investigating to do. The die - was it magic? Presumably it was at least tracked to ensure that the game master would know when someone else had taken it, although they might also just track everything with some sort of localized omniscience. Still, a die was an odd choice for a sort of... capture-the-flag type game, if you could call it that. If it were her, she might use tokens, or badges, or... flags. The die certainly said something for the entity's personality - a gambler? And... if she rolled it, what would happen? If it was magical, it might be dangerous to experiment, especially with something this volatile - imagine what might happen if she rolled a one.

(She was familiar enough with tabletop games that she understood the general direction you wanted a twenty-sided die landing on, at least.)

On the other hand, rolling high numbers might give the other players an overwhelming advantage, if it worked like that. If the die-god wanted people to roll the die, it would choose people who would do so, and some of those people would be dangerous. And if she was locked in a fight for her life with someone, could she really afford not to have any idea what they did?

The safest thing would be to watch someone else roll their die, hypothetically, but getting near other players was dangerous anyway. No. Information was power, and she was an in-vest-igator, dammit.

"No time for words, I'm boutta die and it's past the deadline!"

"Oh, fuck you."
Reef isn't really in the mood to think right now.

"Hmmm, new emails... fanfic update, fanfic update, wishlist item on sale, sketchy URL from an unknown sender... nope, nothing important. Oh well." Klemence deleted the fresh emails in his inbox, far too metaphorically streetwise to click on an unknown hyperlink.

"Now then, transportation! I could steal a car... nah, I don't know anyone nearby who'd have that kinda thing coming to 'em. Can't buy anything, either, too far away and I don't have nearly enough money on hand."

"...aw to heck with it." Klemence bent down to ensure his shoelaces were tied tightly enough...

>Klemence: Run as fast as you can to the shopping district. Like, really fast. Sonic the Hedgehog fast. ...maybe not Sonic the Hedgehog fast. Maybe more Knuckles the Echidna fast. Like around 0.5 Sonics, maybe? How much faster is Sonic, compared to Knuckles? You know what never mind.

They really needed a better way to handle all the traffic they were getting these days. Bet it was another server crash... Shame he was one of the idols, and not one of the web developers! Someday, maybe...

...should he say what kind of computer he's on, though..? Hm...

Taiko: it was just in my bookmarks all of a sudden ( o-o)\
Taiko: have you been doing ok?
Taiko: things have been getting a little scary around here lately and I'm not really sure whats going on (ono )
Taiko: like the purple pulsey things in the sky?? bruh