They were at Dice Dojo again.  As he walked in the door a woman was putting away “Shiny Dice”, the game he had looked at the week before.  He knew it was a sign.  He’d been receiving signs all day.  He sat down at the small table in the back that he usually used and saw “The Castles of Mad King Ludwig”, another one-player board game he could get for himself.  He wondered though because he’d purchased “Ravenloft” and used it once.  On the other hand, “Dungeon!” had been very important for him.

The room was pretty crowded.  Timers were running on the big screens.  He was trying to remember what had happened.  He felt very cozy, very sentimental for something.  He knew he was going to get what he wanted, though.  It was a clean, well-lighted place.

He knew there were inner temples somewhere, and he had to get back to them.  He knew that Kara, the angel from Mars, was appearing to him as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  And then there was a stream of strange images, some thoughts of the past, of times when he was perhaps lonely and his mother was in charge, and she and his father cut him off from the world or misled him about what feelings were.  It didn’t matter all those opportunities were lost now, like the opportunity to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television back in 1997.  Not that it matters … he kept feeling drawn to Joss Whedon.  Perhaps they would meet.

But there she was, sitting across the table from him, rolling the dice.

“I get very frustrated waiting for you,” she said.

“I want to be with you more than anything, but I can’t keep my mind straight.  I can’t even understand what it means to say I want to be with you.  There’s some terrible darkness in my mind.  But at least it’s getting better.”

There’s something that’s not worth saying, he thought, why does this have to be about some kind of secret trauma.

“But I am blazing!” she said, and she glowed with a candlelight orange light.  “They were real people, and I am really an angel.”  People were playing games all around.

“Things keep changing, I get distracted.  I don’t want to be, though.”

“So don’t be,” she said.  That same guy was lurking around so she kicked him.

“And then there’s that asshole, Ken.  I guess I got what I wanted from him, but now I am sensing these strange inner shapes.  And I fucked things up with Carla so bad.”

“No, you didn’t.  You’re just not supposed to be here.”  Something shifted inside of him and he felt himself moving away, going somewhere else.  There would be people there, he knew, people he wanted to talk to, as opposed to these rotten Nazi scum.  It would make me so happy if they went away forever, he thought.  I just couldn’t get over it.  Cocreation?  The hero’s journey?  How could America become such a dark, meaningless toilet of empty moneygrubbing?  What happened to all the promise of freedom?  Why with all this crap about choice spewing around the world am I sitting here in a Machiavellian hell of failure and manipulation?

“But-” he said.

“at-” she continued.

“least-” he struggled to finish.

“-we have something to alchemize,” she said.  “I am very different and I am doing this for you now.”