Hogwarts School - Summer

[BM's Note:  We're going to pause here as all the test players get reacclimated to real and imaginary school.

We will resume shortly, and will do so as if in the same round.

Thanks, team!]

Tallulah stood, becoming far too animated for sitting down.  Sort of hovering over her end of the table, she began to act things out in earnest as the battle progressed.

“So the Trash Monster is next!”  The Gryffindor girl made wide, undulating gestures with her arms and gave a strange bellowing sort of sound.  “He’s going to hit you again, Hawk, but this time with a Trash Bash!  A giant fist of trash grows out of the Trash Monster, and swings down toward you!”  Tallulah made a fist, brought it down with a slam on the table in front of her, conveniently used that point of connection to roll her dice, and then shook her head.  “That’s a miss, for sure.  Hawk, with lightning-fast athletic reflexes--I guess?--steps out of the way of the giant stinky fist!”

As she listened to Ryan describe Hawk’s actions, the Beast Master’s hands stilled, but she still moved, swaying side to side.

“Hawk gives the Trash Monster the old Bap, Bap! with her Beater’s Bats--” Here, Tallulah mimed a right hit and then a left, but quickly corrected to a left hit followed by a right, and then rolled her dice twice.  “Way to go, Hawk! That’s two more hits!  So you strike hard, and each bat connects solidly, and you send a spray of trash--gross rotting pumpkins and leftover macaroni and cheese that looks like it’s growing a city of mold on it--to splatter against the wall.”  She rolled a few more dice, wiggling excitedly.  “That’s thirteen points of damage!

"Fantastic!  Oh, and can you get me a cupcake, too, Ry, either kind, please and thank you?" 

---

Round Seven


-The Trash Monster tries to bonk Hawk Knight on the head with a Trash Bash.
To Hit: 9 (1d20[5]+4)
No Hit: AC not met.


-Hawk Knight attacks the Trash Monster twice with her Beater’s Bats.
To Hit: 19 | 23 (1d20[15]+4) | (1d20[19]+4)
Both Hit: AC met.
Damage Total: 13 (1d6[5]+2) | (1d6[4]+2)



Dorian Fortnum V | Level 1 Quidditch Player-Chaser | HP 12/12 | AC 16

Morgana DiMarco | Level 1 Duelist | HP 6/6 | AC 12

Einstein Podolsky Rosen | Level 1 Duelist | HP 8/8 | AC 11
(Still has Unseen Servant active.)

Liz | Level 1 Herbologist | HP 10/10 | AC 14
(Still has Produce Flame active.)

Trash Monster | [Hidden Stats]

Hawk Knight | Level 1 Quidditch Player-Beater | HP 12/12 || AC 14

Coan Jawford | Level 1 Healer | HP 8/10 | AC 13

“All right, so Hawk, with her keen eyes,” Tallulah narrated for Ryan, hands becoming more and more animated.  “She carefully makes her way into the room, looking for trash to look through, and, oh man, is there some trash in this room!  You have just enough time to register that the far side of the room houses a giant trash pile before IT SPRINGS TO LIFE BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES AND A TRASH MONSTER LOOMS FROM THE DARKNESS BEFORE YOU!

Time to roll initiative!"

If she had seemed animated before, it was nothing compared to now.  Tallulah, obviously excited, stood and with rapid speed sorted through the piles of papers and rolls of parchment she had brought with her until she found a particular file (to call it a file was perhaps a little kind; it was was just a clutch of papers folded in together by a larger sheet of paper wrapped around it).

“Here, ok, help me clear off a spot, right in there center, yes, thank you,” she instructed as she unrolled and smoothed out a small map.  It was sectioned into one inch-by-one inch squares, and had been colored in to look like a flagstone floor one might find in the dungeons below the castle.  On top of this, toward what was considered the back of the room, she plunked down a paper cut out of a garbage can with a few bits of food trash falling out of it.  “I tried to draw a trash pile but it just looked like a bunch of squiggles, so just use your imagination, ok?”


“Oh, and I didn’t think to bring makers, we’ll just use popcorn pieces, ok, Ryan, Hawk can be your cool chess piece, good call on bringing that, anyway let me roll.”

Once for each player (and once for the Trash Monster), her dice clattered on the table. Each time, she made note of the numbers on her paper.

“Ok, it’s time to battle!”

---

Round Five

-Hawk Knight enters the room to search the trash.

The TRASH SPRING TO LIFE!
ROLL INITIATIVE!


INITIATIVE ORDER

23 (1d20[20]+3 | Dorian Fortnum V | Level 1 Quidditch Player-Chaser | HP 12/12 | AC 16

22 (1d20[20+2) | Morgana DiMarco | Level 1 Duelist | HP 6/6 | AC 12

16 (1d20[15]+1) | Einstein Podolsky Rosen | Level 1 Duelist | HP 8/8 | AC 11
(Still has Unseen Servant active.)

15 (1d20[15]+0) | Liz | Level 1 Herbologist | HP 10/10 | AC 14
(Still has Produce Flame active.)

7 (1d20[11]-4) | Trash Monster | [Hidden Stats]

6 (1d20[6]+0) | Hawk Knight | Level 1 Quidditch Player-Beater | HP 12/12 || AC 14

3 (1d20[4]-1) | Coan Jawford | Level 1 Healer | HP 8/10 | AC 13

[BM’s Note:  Congratulations to Dorian and Effy for rolling the first NATURAL 20’S of the game!  That’s the opposite of a Natural 1.  Dor gets imaginary bonus points for rolling one of each so far.

So, the higher the initiative roll, the faster your character is in attacking--so the highest number goes first.  You don’t have to post in that order; it’s mostly for order of damage with/from the monster.  You can assume those of higher initiative went before your character, though.

Ok, this is how this will tentatively work:

1. Post the grid position where you would like your character to be on the battle map.  For ease of use this test game, let’s just assume you get your 30FT of movement the first (bottom of the image) line.  Each marked tile is 5FT of movement.  You can use some or all of your movement each turn. Your character will take up ONE SQUARE.

For RP purposes, you character will be moving their own popcorn token around the map.

2. Use your ACTION.  An action can be an attack, casting a spell, doing a skill check, whatever.

3. Use your BONUS ACTION, if you have one.  Bonus actions for now are mostly spells.

So for example, say Tallulah’s Betty Buttkiss has an initiative of 2, which puts her at the bottom of her group.  Tallulah would wait until the end of the group (IC only--like I said, you don’t need to post in order; we’ll feel it out and see how this works), and then do something like:

“So Betty Buttkiss runs in to the room, on the right side near-ish the wall (C7).”  Tallulah put on Betty’s voice.  “‘Ugh, you stink!’ she yells at the monster, and jabbing her wand toward it she’s gonna use you action to cast Magic Missile at the Trash Monster.  I don’t think she has any bonus actions--”  She scanned her character sheet, shook her head.  “--so she’s just gonna spit on the ground menacingly.”

Please ask me if you have literally any question at all on what you can do!]

Silence.

Tallulah felt sweat beginning to pool in unattractive beads on her upper lip like a wet mustache.

“Ha ha,” she said and didn’t laugh, suddenly feeling the bundle of nerves twist menacingly inside of her.  “And then what…..do you do?”

---

Round Three

-No Action.
[BM’s Note:  I really should have thought about Start of Term stuff when timing our test run!]

Oh, she thought, as if in slow motion and with a desperate fluttering of butterflies moving at top speed up her throat.  She actually had to do this...thing.  Six pair of eager eyes met hers around the table, and somehow, amid all the math and the rules and the imagining things up, she hadn’t fully realized this part of it.  Tallulah’s smile went a little rigid--a little more like a grimace--as she reached for a small, knit bag.  Untying the drawstring, she dumped out a clutch of strangely-shaped dice.

“Oh-kay, Hawk,” she said, swallowing back butterflies and shifting her gaze to Ryan.  “You scan the general area with eyes well trained from your time on the Quidditch Pitch.  Let’s roll a Perception Check.”  Tallulah picked up one of the dice--the largest, with the most sides--and rolled it on the table in front of her, did a quick bit of math by counting on her fingers.  “Ok, so, everything looks pretty normal, if unfamiliar, but as you glance over it, you notice the door’s handle looks a little weird.

“And then Coan comes closer to the door,” Tallulah said, shifting her attention to Ophelia and grinning (she appreciated the younger girl’s get-up very much).  “Coan, you carefully look at the knob, give it the sliiiightest of nudges like you were, I don’t know, carefully checking a patient or something, and--Perception, again--”  She rolled the same dice, counted on the same fingers. “--it does appear to be locked.”

Swigging her butterbeer again, she shifted.

“Liz,” she said, eyes finding Felicia’s.  “Yes, Perception--great voice, by the way--so Liz gives the air a good strong--” Tallulah mimed along.  “--sniff, really snorts up a nose full of that stink and--”  She rolled; she grinned.  “--because of your background, your are uniquely qualified to recognize the stink is sort of like compost.  Not good compost, either.  Really, really bad, gross, dirty old compost.

“While Liz is sniffing up a storm, Dorian the Fifth,” she said, looking at Dorian the Fourth and his rice crackers,  “is going to try and hide.  Looking around, you don’t see any like, hidey-holes or anything--it’s a hallway--but--” Tallulah paused, pursing her lips, shifting that pout from side to side quickly, thinking.  “I’ll allow a Stealth check at disadvantage.”  The same dice clacked over the table, twice this time.  On the first roll, Tallulah made a worried-looking face, but the second roll prompted her to make a full-on grimace, pressing the palm of her hand to her forehead.  “That’s a natural 1.  Dorian the Fifth sort of shoves back past the group--”  Tallulah’s arms worked through the air as she mimed awkwardly pushing through a crowd, her face screwing up in a nervous look while mumbling a few pardon mes and excuse mes.  “--and just kind of stands there looking uncomfortable.”

Patiently Tallulah waited through Icarus’s uhh, his umm, his ahh, agreeably (but cluelessly) she nodded in agreement to Einstein’s anosmia (she had absolutely no clue about the word, other than it sounded like the sort of word Icarus would use), and thoughtfully she pondered his query.

“Hmm, ok, Einstein-Po..oldsky?-Rosen,” she said after a few quick moments of thought, eyes focusing on Icarus. “To cast a spell, you have to be able to see where you’re casting it, and you can’t really see on the other side of the door, but what we’ll do is...ok so Einstein’s wand moves and he casts Unseen Servant right beside the door.  You can’t see him, Einstein, because he’s--you know--unseen and therefore invisible, but you can sort of feel that he’s there, pressing up right against the door, which seems to be solid.

“Einstein, you also have an unseen servant now for the next hour.  Oh, and mark off one of your first level spell slots.” Tallulah gave a nod--small but encouraging--to Icarus.  “You’re doing great.”

“Also, those of you closest to the door--Hawk and Coan, probably--suddenly feel a weird sort of sensation beside you, a little warm and windy, but see nothing.

“Both the door and the stink are still there.  What will the party do next?”

---

Round One

-Hawk Knight looks around the area with a Perception Check.
Rolled: 16 (1d20[13]+3)
The door’s handle looks a little weird.
[BM’s Note: When asking for Perception Checks, try to specify what you’re trying to perceive, ie, trying to see if anyone is watching, trying to look for secret doors, etc.  You rolled fairly high, though, so I’m still allowing some specific information.]

-Coan Jawford checks to see if the door is locked with a Perception Check.
Rolled: 12 (1d20[9]+3)
The door appears to be locked.

-Liz sniffs to see if the stench is familiar with a Perception Check.
Rolled: 18 (1d20[15]+3)
It smells similar to bad compost.

-Dorian Fortnum V tries to hide with a Stealth Check at Disadvantage.
Rolled: 7 (1d20[2]+5) OR 6 (1d20 [1]+5) - second roll taken.
Dorian pushes awkwardly to the back of the group.  He doesn’t appear to be hidden.
[BM’s Note: Sometimes, when an action would be particularly difficult to perform successfully, Disadvantage will be imposed.  When a roll is made with Disadvantage, it is made twice and the lower of the two rolls is taken.

Also--CONGRATULATIONS on the first NATURAL ONE of the game!  It’s a rite of passage. A roll of 1 means the action performed cannot succeed--even when you have a higher modifier like Dorian’s.  These are also termed as Critical Fail(ures) or Fumbles.]

-Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen casts Unseen Servant.
1 1st Level spell lot expended.
Einstein now has an unseen servant to do his bidding for a duration of 1 hour.
Unseen Servant | HP 1 | AC 10 | Can move up to 15FT and perform simple tasks when mentally commanded to do so with a bonus action (once per turn)
[BM’s Note:  When casting spells, the target must be within line of sight.]

i meant it when i said i would always send you cupcakes, so here’s two dozen, six of which are chocolate, six of which are coconut, six of which are lemoncurd, six of which are confetti which is really just vanilla with sprinkles mixed in (don’t worry, they’re not crunchy, i know you don’t like it when they’re too crunchy)

i also meant it when i--

With a huff, a fragile-looking hand indelicately snatched and crumbled yet another piece of paper, sending it in a high arch to miss the metal trash bin in the corner of her messy bedroom.  There, it joined with a clutch of other such rejects.

i’m s
i think
i’m glad we had those cupcake together, i really liked them, and i think they were some of the best cupcakes i have ever baked, would you like me to send the recipe along so you can try and make them on your own??  just don’t share them with
----------!!!!!!???????!!!!!!!!??????

An angry flight of the same right hand found a pencil--colored red, always red--flying across this unfortunate page, abusing it with angry pockmarks where lead pounded out and broke, with dangling and useless exclamation points, with even less useful question marks before this one, too, was crushed and thrown without even the good grace to make its mark.

Leaning back in her cushioned desk chair, Tallulah Sloe closed her eyes.  It had been hours ago, by then, that she had finished her work in the kitchen, and yet still it was here that she sat, cramped in the corner of her bedroom, facing a wall--in both the literal sense, for she had not had the good sense to situate her desk beneath one of the bedrooms many windows, and metaphorically, to which the small army of paper balls by her waste basket could attest.

Again, Tallulah groaned.  Metaphorically had been a word she learned from the recipient of the letter she could not write.

Effy Vane sunk even into the words of her, and yet she couldn’t put enough of them down on a page to have something half decent to send.

Defiant, a double box of cupcakes sat at the corner of her desk--packaged carefully and numbering in the two dozen she had written out and rejected.  The cupcakes, at least, had something going for them.  They were tried and true recipes, and all of them were decorated in Red, White, and Blue.  It was the Fourth of July, after all, and while it wouldn’t mean anything to Effy, it meant something to Tallulah to share a bite of the holiday with the other girl, no matter how far away from her she was now.  She gave a rueful glare to the package, the sparkling sprinkles shimmering almost mockingly through the cellophane window.  Nothing stood between them and their intended other than one measly letter and, of course, an ocean.

Some time passed, and Tallulah stopped trying, for she had never been one for words; that was her very good friend’s job, after all.  At long last, she settled on simply addressing a tag in red pencil and in looping print:

Effy Vane
Very Important Camp Counselor
Camp Loki
Far Away, Across the Ocean

With a disappointed shake of her head--for herself, for once--she affixed the tag with a sloppily-snipped piece of spellotape and left her room, off in search of some firecrackers or sparklers or anything to keep her hands and mind full.

"SPRITE? AS IF!" Tallulah exclaimed.  She made the Whatever sign with her fingers--you know how you do, when you make two L shapes, and the join them at the thumbs, and then twist them really cool-like and smooth and you totally didn't have to practice in the mirror for hours that would be so not rad--well she did that, the Whatever sign, and rolled her eyes not unlike the wheels of her inline skates rolled beneath her.

Fresh off a mad rail grind, Tallulah came to a stop after whizzing by Tiberius.  She brushed aside her wallet chain, and from the deep pockets of her cargo shorts, she pulled out a bright green can with red writing on it, and then wiped off the condensation on her plaid shirt.

"I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A SURGE GIRL!"  To prove this, she cracked open that lukewarm, slightly shaken can of thick, syrupy soda and guzzled it down, then crushed it in her hands like she was as strong as Hulk Hogan.  She shook out her hair or would have if it weren't dirty and shoved in a beanie but she lived that grunge life and if Eddie Vedder didn't care about clean hair well then neither did she.

"SURGE  WILL NEVER DIE," she shouted--a rallying cry.

Something strange had happened--Tallulah knew it, though she didn’t know the words to put on top of it.  Instead she felt it, as she felt all things, in the body of herself.  Something settled in the core of her, but it wasn’t heavy or sinking in her stomach like she sometimes felt when she was caught doing something she wasn’t meant to do, and it wasn’t turbulent and stormy in her head, like she had felt for the large majority of the year, keeping her so far away.  No, it was something else entirely--more a lack of weight than the presence of it, and it swelled at first behind her ribs.  From there it pushed down, lightening her legs, and and then out, giving weightlessness to her arms, and then finally up, resonating emptily in her head.

Something strange happened, and it was serious, too, and for a moment Tallulah’s smile faded because she realized the solemnity of the moment, her lips thin and slack and falling into an open line.  Through these she took a breath, or tried to; it felt too shallow, like her lungs wanted to same sort of hollow, floating feeling that ran through the rest of her.  Once, twice, three times she blinked, all three times at Effy--her Very Good Friend, whose eyes were green and whose house was green and whom sometimes made her think that feeling green might not be so bad if she got to feel green with Effy--and she felt like there was something she should be doing, something serious and strange, but as with the feeling she did not have the words for this either.

Instead, she laughed.

In the room--their room, for it had been only theirs from that first night forward--in the South Tower, Tallulah Sloe laughed, her once-serious mouth cracking into an over-wide smile, all too-many of her teeth on display.  She laughed, and her shoulder shook with it, and her sides shook with it, and her hands shook with it; the one that held Effy’s clung tighter still, the one at her side dropping to pat against her own thigh and then rising to pat against the sides of both their held hands and then rising again to pat against the other girl’s cheek.  Tallulah laughed, and it was not strange or serious because she was not strange or serious (her hand threaded through Effy’s hair, wrapping around to settle into the slight scoop of her neck), then laughed because she was perhaps strange and Effy was perhaps serious (her head tipped forward, laughing all the way until her forehead rested against her friend’s) and missed entirely that it was this--exactly this--that made her laugh in the first place (her eyelids floated, weightless, closed).

Something strange and serious happened, and it was red, too, and because Tallulah Sloe did not have the words for it, she pressed her lips to the lips of Euphemia Vane.

Brown eyes went wide as his straw-like fingers carefully pried open the newsprint, wider still when she saw that the frame was upside down--it had to have been her fault, she hadn’t even thought of such a mistake happening, didn’t even note which way the comic had been facing when she had wrapped it and was foolish not to have, not to have made sure she handed it over right-way-up; they didn’t relax either even as the blonde boy smiled, though some place in the middle of her recognized it as rare and to be remembered for later.  Now, however, she felt suddenly cold and a sort of sweaty that had nothing to do with her fast pace on the way here.

Ig always made her feel good, like he was her big brother or secret boyfriend or some kind of moody angel looking after her from afar or from near-by when she could wrangle away some of his time.  But now--now, as she stood, her eyes still wide and looking up, her mouth gone a little slack from lack of movement, her breaths still coming fast--now she felt a little bit like a Very Important Piece of her had come out of her chest and was simply hovering there between them, small and glowing and vulnerable, and like Ignatius’s next words could cause it to collapse.

They did not.

“You can put it with your other ones,” she said, for over the years she had inundated the boy with a small forest’s worth of papers.  Despite the dry sound of her voice, she did not doubt for a second that he had kept every last one of them.  One, in particular, struck her.  “With your first one, maybe, the one I gave you on that first day, when you were eating pancakes, back when I was eleven.”

As her words had drawn to a close, they had taken on a flat sound not unlike the pancakes that Ig Mallory had eaten on the day in question and her voice, for once, quieted to a whisper.

“You can put them both wherever you’re going to go,” her small voice said, and the small, glowing, vulnerable part of her cracked, and in a slow rush so did Tallulah, still-wide eyes going wet first in the middle and then trickling out of the outer corners.  Her shoulders did not shake.

“Where I can’t be there for you.”

“There you are.”

She said it like she was carrying on a conversation from earlier (she wasn’t) or like they had plans to meet (they didn’t), calling it in her loud voice from the stone arch-type cut-out (she didn’t know the word for it, but felt like ‘stone arch-type cut-out’ was good enough) as she rounded the corner into the courtyard, feet clacking fast and loud against the flagstone.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

This, at least, was true--no caveats required, no parenthetical thoughts to herself as she stomped forward.  Beneath her feet, the remainder of the pooled rain scattered, cutting a wide berth for the red Wellingtons that should have muffled her steps but did not.  They felt more rushed than usual, those steps, and that said something because the girl was consistently a blur of motion or a feeling of needing to be all places at once.  She wasn’t sure why, but it felt important that she be quick, like something of weight waited for her.  Against her back pounded her school bag and across her face was plastered a frenzied sort of grimace-smile--the same she often used for the current target of her attention.

Even through the colorless haze that had washed out the year, Tallulah Sloe could always find Ignatius Mallory.

“It’s like you’re hiding from me,” she scolded him as she came to a breathy rest beside him, one hand clutching a stitch in her side, the other reaching out to clutch the boy’s arm.  The bones beneath his skin felt as prominent as the first time she had laid hands on him and it soothed her.  After a few heavy breaths, she released her side and his arm, pressed her sweaty bangs to the side, and straightened herself.

“I got you a present,” she blustered, and then added, as an afterthought, “if now is a good time.”