Last night, while we made dinner, Anne said, "I don’t speak geek, but I wanted to ask you . . . did you have fun at D&D?"
I stopped chopping onions and said, "Oh yeah! It was so awesome. It was a pretty classic hack and slash dungeon crawl that could have been straight out of The Keep on the Borderlands, and –"
She held up her hand. "Wait. Wait. Wait. You’re speaking geek."
"Sorry." I thought for a moment and added, "okay, there was one thing that happened that I think you can appreciate."
"Okay."
"Well, you know how gamers are really weird about our dice?"
She stirred a pot of rice on the stove, and covered it.
"Yes, like when you freaked out at Ryan for touching your ‘forbidden dice.’" She made little air quotes around the appropriate words.
"Exactly," I said. "So I played with some very experienced gamers. There were people in my party who have been playing longer than me, like back when it first came out."
She nodded, and pointed at the cutting board.
"What? Oh. Sorry." I went back to chopping onions.
"So we all brought our own dice, obviously."
"Obviously," she said.
"And at one point in our second encounter –" I finished chopping, and swept the onions into a dish with the knife. "Would you turn on that pan for me? So, an encounter is what we call it when we’re playing an adventure, and we deal with monsters or something like that."
"Mmmm," she said.
"Uh-oh, I’m losing her." I thought. "I’d better speed this up and get to the point."
I stabbed the top of a Tofu pouch and drained its water into the sink. I dumped the tofu block out into my hand, and set it on the cutting board. While I sliced it in half, I said, "Anyway, in our second encounter, I had to roll a d20 for something, and while I was shaking it, it hopped out over the top of my hand, rolled across the table to my left, and came to rest against this other guy’s stack of dice."
The pan warmed, and I dumped curry powder into the rapidly heating oil.
"It was like time stopped for a second, and the only thing any of us could see was my d20 resting against his d4 — that’s the one that looks like a pyramid."
"Oh, the one that’s so fun to step on," she said.
"I said I was sorry about that," I said. I stirred the curry around, and put my tofu into the pan. It sizzled, and a delicious cloud of curry-flavored steam billowed into the kitchen.
"So while the other end of the table continued resolving their combat, he looked at me and said, very seriously, ‘Uh, your dice are touching my dice.’"
"Oh no!" She said.
"Yeah, and he was totally serious."
"What did you do?" She started chopping tomatoes.
"I said, ‘Sorry, it hopped out of my hand while I was getting ready to make my listen check.’ I picked it up, careful to not touch his dice with my hand."
"Like Operation!" She said.
I laughed. "Exactly like Operation."
"Was he mad?" She said.
I flipped my tofu over. "I don’t think he was. It was more of a breach of etiquette than anything else. Can I have some of those tomatoes?"
She brought the cutting board over to me, and I pushed a few chunks into the simmering curry. It turned from bright yellow to a deep reddish brown.
"Goddamn, dude," Anne said, "that smells so good!"
I put on my best Teen Girl Squad Voice: "So good!"
"Uh, anyway," I said, "shortly after that happened, it was his turn to roll. He picked up his d20 — which I’m pretty sure was new in 1980 — and when he rolled it, it went right off the table, bounced off my thigh, and landed on the floor between us."
I turned my tofu one last time, and switched off the burner.
"I looked up at him and I said, ‘Dude. Your dice touched me.’" I laughed, "it was pretty funny."
"Why are you people so weird about your dice?" Anne said.
"That’s just how we roll," I said.
She looked at me. "Did you just . . ."
"Yes." I said. "Yes I did."
She suppressed a smile, and shook her head.
"Nolan!" She called over her shoulder," dinner is ready!"