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The table was still with an uncomfortable silence as its occupants, mainly strangers to one another, tried to keep themselves busy by any means possible. The sporty cheetah in her track jacket and jeans at the top left of the table had gone back to checking the college soccer clubs page for updates on practice times for the next week, and the meek calico in the graphic tee and shorts in the bottom right had seemed to have kept his gaze busy with his character sheet as he kept his head down and read back over it to make sure the build and character details all lined up how he wanted. Two other chairs lay bare other than the one at the head of the table, with the top left's occupant missing, but still nearby.

Away from the table, a well dressed sheep in a sweater-vest and khakis seemed to take interest in the family pictures that hung over the fireplace one room over, observing them with crossed arms, as the flame flickered below him, reflected in the gold cross necklace around his neck. Though, if one was paying attention, they could see how his gaze seemed to shift back to look at the two at the table on occasion, and how his finger nervously scratched into the crook of his sleeve in thinly veiled discomfort.

. There had been brief eruptions of small talk here and there, but only the kind that died off once the inciting line of discussion had ended. No branching tangents, just an unwieldy scale back down to the stillness as the old-fashioned clock ticked away in the corner of the dining room they all sat in. Luckily interrupted as the sounds of footsteps drew all of their attention as a border collie came up from the downstairs floor, his head almost completely obscured by the stack of sourcebooks, papers, pens, dice, and a large bowl of popcorn all perched precariously in his grip.

He set it down with an audible 'thump' before he greeted the rest of the table, puffing slightly from the load. With one hand he casually shoved the popcorn next to the other bowls of chips and sodas in the middle of the table. "Hey guys! Sorry about being late, I was just reading back over everything before we got started."

The cheetah quickly shut off her phone, slipping it back into her jacket pocket. "It's cool, Emmet. Are we ready to start this thing?" She made some room as the sheep pulled out the chair next to her, and slid into the seat wordlessly, nodding up at the collie.

"Thanks Luke." Emmet rubbed the back of his head. "And we, ah, would Julia but..." He motioned a hand towards the last empty chair at the end of the table. "Still waiting on someone. I...think he sent me a text that he was on his way?"

"Well, do you know how long it'll be until-" The sound of a door slamming shut cut her off as footsteps clattered down the landing, and a fit looking bull rounded the corner.

"Oh! Eric, glad you could make it-"

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry for being late or whatever, I had a forecasting meeting with my supervisor for spring." Pulling out his chair, he almost elbowed Aster as the cat scooted out of the way, and he slapped his character sheet on the table. "Got my sheet right here and the stats n' whatever on it."

He looked around the downstairs den, almost unimpressed by the cozy atmosphere of it. "You said there was gonna be snacks?"

"I-yeah. We got some popcorn right here-" Emmet motioned towards the bowl. The bull reached out and grabbed a fistful, whipping out his phone in the meantime while Aster seemed to be doing his best to try and blend into the wall across the table.

Julia gave the canine a skeptical look, to which the best he could do was give an apologetic look. "We uh, needed a fourth and he said he'd played before..." Emmet said quietly. "If it's too much, I'll talk to him." He turned to the Aster, as the cat nervously adjusted his glasses. "Aster, do you still want to...?"

The cat nodded shyly. "I-I'm good to go..."

Emmet took a deep breath, before sitting down in the dm's seat. "Alright! So I know I've been pretty cagey about the campaign I wanted to run here, other than some sparse details about the setting for character building purposes, but I wanted to talk about what module system we're running with first." He reached under the table and dug out what looked like a shoddy oak box with a dragon carved on the face of it. It was definitely old, like it'd been sitting in someone's attic for a decade. The top seemed to be composed of darker wood to compliment the yellow carved highlight of the dragon curling around a glass orb at the center.

As Emmet cracked it open, everyone at the table could almost smell the dust that used to be inside, but as he turned the opening around to face them, the inside was shockingly pristine, with red felt covering lining the box walls. Inside were what looked like vintage sourcebooks and manuals, along with what looked like the character sheets he had sent scans of to all the players to fill out. There were even four individual dice vials, which figured considering how the Collie had told them to just bring the sheets and not worry about the dice.

Eric actually put his phone away to snort. "What, did you get that thing from the actual dark ages? That looks like an antique, man."

"I found it at one of the thrift stores downtown!" Emmet said excitedly. "I figured it'd be classic or something, but I mean look at the books-" He took the monster manual and flipped to a page with a roaring chimera on it. The leaflets had the sort of smell like it'd just been unwrapped to be put on the shelf, practically like it was brand new. Try as he might, Eric couldn't see any damage to the pages either. In all honesty if he hadn't seen the box it'd come in, he'd believe it'd been printed yesterday. "It's called 'InterRealms Fantasy'. They just kinda found it shoved behind a lot of the board game stuff they had, and it wasn't really marked with a set price or anything, so I was able to get it at a good deal for how much is in here. Figured it'd be fun to try out!"

Aster raised his hand. "Um, you said it was supposed to be like an altered 5e right? I-I mean I'm good with running D6 or Pathfinder, I just might need to uh-uhm," He could feel the attention of the table turn to him, and his voice tapered off with the attention. "Change some stuff, heh..."

Julia seemed lost at that. "I...Would you still use the 20-sided, you know, dice for that stuff?" She shifted uncomfortably at the feeling of being lost in the conversation. Dungeons and Dragons was mainstream enough these days that she'd at least heard about the podcasts of tabletop sessions that were popular, but she barely knew anything else about how to play other than the tutorial video Emmet had provided her, or god forbid other systems with different rules.

"Nah, don't worry." Emmet assured her. "I mean, it's pretty much 5e with some differences with stat interactions and leveling. Figured it was somebody's homebrew stuff they were trying to get off the ground since I couldn't find anything online about it. Would make sense considering there's some-" He scrunched his face. "...Weird details about stats in the books and how they're supposed to affect the players. For the most part though, we should just be able to play it like a regular game fine."

He snapped his fingers. "Speaking of! Aster, I know you've done this before, but did the rest of you guys get through the videos I taught for how to play, how to make a character and stuff?"

Julia nodded. "I...think I did everything right?"

"I got the gist." Eric said, leaning back to cross his arms.

He nodded. "Nice! How 'bout you, Luke? Did you understand it?"

The sheeps face was stone as he moved his character sheet with a finger, and looked back up to him. "I believe I did, yes." He answered quietly.

"Good." He grabbed two sets of the dice containers that came with the old module he'd found for, setting them on their side and rolling the first pair down the table to it's farthest occupants. By all means, cracking open the hard plastic containers provided a standard set of dice. The usual four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, a duo of ten-sided and the classic 20-sided rolling die were all included, but each set was in a vibrant palette of colors. Most of the table took a minute to look at the dice they'd been provided while Emmet took the time to shuffle some papers and get ready behind the DM screen.

Julia's was a deep, almost translucent cyan with yellow streaks across the inside, almost like lightning. Dropping the first one in her hand, she almost dropped it, for a second thinking as soon as it touched her skin there had been almost a static shock from her hand to the dice, though she dismissed the notion with how ridiculous it sounded. Aster's was a fiery red like the end of a flame. As he closed his fist around the twenty-sided one, he swore he could nearly feel a sense of heat coming off it, like a miniature sun, though dismissed it. He could feel the plastic, so there was no way someone had been stupid enough to put some sort of heat source inside. Aster reasoned he had to just be getting warm in the temperature-controlled basement. Luke's was a deep black with streaks of purple that he almost swore he could see drifting ever so slowly across the face, but the sheep marked it up to just a trick of the light.

Eric was the one who broke them out of the rest of their observance of the new die, setting his back down without much observance of it. Eric's The die were light green with splotches of dark forest green dotting the different sides that almost drifted off from each face like the blobs of a lava lamp. It was neat to look at, but if he'd bothered turning it over more he would've seen how they shifted as each side left his vision."Alright cool." The bull said impatiently. "So can we finally get started here?"

Emmet smiled behind the screen. "If we're all ready, sure!" He pulled out the module's adventure book, thick and leatherbound in all its glory, turning to the start of the first adventure. "Our story starts like many do, in a tavern. Though this one almost hidden in the shadows of the mountains of Gerem..." The collie did his best to make the opening of the story cinematic for the people who had never played before, though not too long to bore them, opening on the group as they visited a small tavern for a quest to stop some bandits that had seemingly been posted all around the kingdom.

For each of them, the world seemed to melt away as it almost felt like descriptions of the world became tangible, his words sinking into the ether as the trees and brush of the forest around them rolling in like a mist over the comfy basement walls and the oak table in front of them. Almost in a trance, each almost had to blink from the ease of which they could imagine seeing the world through eyes of their characters they created, though not enough to feel like the world around them had changed, more like their imaginations had run wild, making a movie they could detach themselves enough to see the world around them in. Each did have their own misgivings that kept them from being completely immersed in the game, to all its enjoyment.

Julia was having fun with the roleplay and the surprising ease it came with to her with to at least act like she was as smart as the high intelligence, high constitution wizard she'd chosen to play as, but couldn't help but feel exposed when conversation led to her actual spells or the history of the valedictorian wizard of the vague magic academy she'd put down as part of her backstory. Not helping was trying to fudge how she succeeded on intelligence checks, as Emmet encouraged them to try and get into the heads of their characters with how they succeeded/failed certain actions. She buried the nervous tension as she snacked on the other bowl of chips at the table, since Eric had taken the popcorn bowl. Sure it wasn't great for her but snacking for one night wasn't some kind of death sentence anyway. I mean, this was one of the only nights she had off soccer or PT, so why not indulge a little?

As she munched on the chip bowl at the table while the others took their turn, Julia couldn't stop herself from wondering how she could play the character better. There were probably sourcebooks at the library for this kind of stuff right? She could at least get better at finicking up excuses with some examples of how other kinds of games magic systems worked too right? Unseen beneath her jacket, and as the idea of how to better fit her character entrenched itself, her toned figure beneath her clothing shifted, losing some of its definition as the bowl slowly drained.

The bull next to her had an alternate problem. Eric enjoyed the combat the most, and playing a paladin with one of the highest strength stats and constitution stats at least made it fun during combat when he could excel. On the other hand, he hated how slow the roleplay was, taking time away from killing shit so he could "win" the game. He signed up to kill dragons and shit, dammit! It was worse considering how he was badgered to actually interact with NPCs by Emmet as one of the characters in the group with the second highest charisma stat.

The bull huffed. He thought just having it high enough would just let him skip this shit. Why couldn't Emmet have just let him play the fuckin 'Whatever-of-Vengeance' paladin anyway? He'd been told the cat across from him was going to be the damage, and sure, when his turn came he knew what he was doing, but he didn't like the feeling of being shoved into the "tank" role just so some nerd could get a power fantasy. He reminded Eric of him before he'd been shoved around enough to put on some muscle and do some sports instead.

As he dug into the popcorn, and grabbed a soda from the table, his mind drifted back to the scheduling he'd done for his next semester. It must've been some sort of brainfart, but he couldn't recall whether the scheduling that had made him late to the session had been for his junior or senior year at the university. He rubbed his eyes, as a siege of heaviness set over them at the confusion. Fuck, he must've been so bored he was starting to fall asleep if he was getting his current college year confused. Whatever, this was just gonna be a one time thing anyway.

Aster shifted uncomfortably while Emmet spoke, every so often feeling the disgruntled stare of the bull across the table settle on him. Initially, the shy feline had been surprised at the module Emmet had picked for them all to play considering how closely it mirrored 5e's simplicity. Sure, he preferred 3.5e for better customization but he understood using five would be better since everyone else was a new player.

Moreso, he felt upset at himself from retracting from the chance to speak during the game. Aster had leaped with the chance to actually play with another group since his anxiety got in the way from actually looking for groups, but now he felt more paralyzed at the idea of speaking up and exposing himself to everyone else. He could squeak out a response if someone asked him something directly, but it was mostly Julia dragging the game along as Eric seemed totally disinterested in roleplay while Luke seemed more like he was playing himself more than the character. What if he said something stupid, or too nerdy? Eric certainly didn't seem like the type to let it go. There was a nervous energy that felt like it needed to be released as he fidgeted quietly in the chair, wanting to say or do something, but was fighting a losing battle with his own inhibitions.

At least when combat came around he felt like he actually did something. Once it had got to his turn it had almost been a rush as he quickly recited the actions he'd prepared in his mind during his shyness-fuelled paralysis. At least by playing a high strength barbarian, he could prove how useful he was as a damage dealer one it became his turn. Emmet described how his leonine barbarian leapt forward to rip down through the highwaymen with his greataxe, but he could barely hear it as his pulse pounded in his ears and Aster felt like he could almost see the action through the eyes of his warrior. As his turn ended though, that brief rush faded, and the cat was left painfully aware of how hard he was white-knuckling the table. To the amusement of Luke and Julia while Eric was busy on his phone, checking something.

"Sorry, e-heh." He chuckled nervously, sitting back again.

The smile that had wormed its way onto Luke's face as the cat had been possessed by a bout of confidence during his turn faded as it went to his next on the initiative order. He grit his teeth as he looked over the warlock spell list Emmet had been "so kind" to help him make.

He didn't even want to be here, for one. He'd only accepted being here because Emmet had been a longtime friend, bonding mainly through shared classes, and he needed people to play the stupid game. I mean, dungeons and dragons stuff wasn't his thing in the first place. The game was a borderline satanic, degenerate game played by liberals too weak to actually go out and do something with the lives the lord had given them, choosing to indulge in fantasy instead. If anyone from religious frat on campus actually saw him leave from this he'd never hear the end of it. God help him, he'd practically get thrown out!

He'd only made his character a female warlock because he'd just wanted to show how demonic it could be as a joke. Luke hadn't expected Emmet to agree to it! And he'd been so ...busy with classes he hadn't had the time to get back to the canine that he hadn't wanted to run a character like this in the first place! Luke would leave as soon as this was over and text Emmet he wouldn't be returning. This had been a mistake.

And yet, with how easy it felt to get drawn into the game, like the world was taking place before his eyes, he couldn't stop the tingling feeling of pleasure he got as he imagined him in his warlock's place. Darkly beautiful, heretically gothic. Long raven hair that curled down her back, that would shimmer in the moonlight, The soft curves from his/her body as she stretched the limits of a beautiful gown, wielding a tome with deadly grace...

Luke shook himself from the dream. No! None of that. Everyone dreamed of that kind of temptation, sure. Everyone imagined themselves as a beautiful woman from time to time! But that was just temptation. As a good, honest christian man he'd been given a...good body that was his gift from the lord. It was great. He loved it. He loved being a dude.

"Uh, Luke? It's your turn?"

The sheep looked up to Emmet staring up from the DM screen expectantly.

Right. The game.

He cleared his throat. "I want to attack the bandit standing by Aster?"

"Do you wanna use something from your spell list?" Emmet offered, nodding to the sheet.

Luke looked at it. Coming down off of the high of imagining himself as his warlock, it felt like using any of them would be heresy. "...No. I'll just...attack with my staff or something."

Hesitantly, Emmet let him make the role and the game continued into the night, though he couldn't stop his mind from wandering back to the image of how his warlock sorceress would look, no matter how many times he reminded himself of his secureness in his own body. He had to readjust his position in the chair a couple times, as his mass seemed to shift; his wait slimming down to provide a bare touch more of padding to his thighs, reducing some of his "manly" composition.

Eventually, the hours passed, and the game wrapped up as a sense of tiredness eventually found its way to every member of the party. With a clap of the module's story book shutting, the fog of the game lifted to leave them clearly back in the basement they'd all sat down in to begin with.

"...Alright, I know we've all got stuff to do tomorrow, so let's wrap it up here for tonight. How'd you guys like it?"

In a murmur of agreement, they all agreed that despite some rough patches it had been an alright time. Sure, they'd all had their own flaws, but it was nice to be immersed in the fantasy universe for a short while.

The Collie grinned. "Nice! So...would you guys want to get together next week to play again?"

There was a murmur of agreement that rolled around the room. Aster's was enthusiastic from the odd rush he had felt from embodying his barbarian, though Julia's was more distracted as her jacket felt just a little more snug on her, and Eric pondered if he'd been skipping core too much with the small layer of fat over his tight abs. Even Luke, despite wanting to say that he didn't think it was for him, couldn't stop his head from subconsciously nodding along with them. Sure it was a nerd-game, and kinda heretical, but Emmet HAD promised he'd talk to them if there were any issues. Maybe he could just get his character switched out for some kind of cleric? Something less...obviously wrong for him.

They all had issues to work out from the first session, but as they left the DM's house, there was an odd feeling in the cold night air as he let them keep the dice from the session, with the promise for them all to return.