How long should he give it? Ten more minutes? That sounded fair. He would wait another ten minutes before officially declaring Monsters and Mythology Night a failure. Warren, the library’s director and Felix’s boss, might not be too pleased about that, but what else could Felix do if no one showed up?
Absently, he adjusted the stack of twelve giant hardcover books that sat next to him, aligning their corners just so.
The soft thumping of footsteps on the carpeted stairs made him sit up straight. He folded his hands on the table in front of him, just in time for someone to step into the doorway.
“Are you Felix?” the woman asked. She was of average height and build, with a generous curve of round hips. She wore black leggings with a high waist and a cut-off yellow T-shirt with a strange geometric shape on it: a hexagon filled with triangles, with the numeral “20” in the center. Her auburn hair was curled, the ends barely brushing the collar of her denim jacket.
“How did you know my name?” Felix blurted. Not his finest moment of customer service, but that question wasn’t one he’d anticipated.
The woman’s lips twitched up at the corners. She was wearing dark red lipstick that contrasted with her fair skin and complemented her hair. It was a pretty color on her. Perhaps a bit bolder than one might expect for a Tuesday night at a library, but he found he liked it.
“For one, Leni mentioned it,” she replied. “She says hi, by the way. But also, you are wearing a name tag.” She raised perfectly arched brows above her pale brown eyes, giving him a playful, teasing look. It made her look even prettier than the lipstick did. “Did you forget?”
“No,” he said, and that expression on her face encouraged him to tease her right back. “But if you can read my name tag from there, why did you ask?”
The woman laughed—a clipped, brazen “ha ha” that filled the room, echoed in Felix’s chest, and then was instantly gone.
“Fair enough,” she said with a shrug. “It seemed as good an opening as any. I’m Jo.”
“I’m still Felix. Hello.”
“Hi.” She glanced around the empty room. “So… I guess I’m the first one here?”
Felix could feel a blush creep up his neck. What the hell had come over him? He was here to host an event, not tease cute patrons. He sat up even taller.
“Yes, welcome,” he said, more reserved now. He gestured at the chairs around the large table. “Feel free to have a seat anywhere. We’ll begin shortly.”
Jo took the middle seat on one side of the table and removed a few things from her purse: a mechanical pencil, a small drawstring bag, and a piece of paper folded in quarters. She unfolded the paper and smoothed it out with a delicate touch. Trying not to stare at her, Felix grabbed the top book from the stack beside him. He opened it to the first chapter and skimmed over paragraphs of nonsense proper nouns and verbs that surely did not mean what the author seemed to think they meant.
“Um, sorry, are you using that setting?” Jo asked.
Felix looked up. “What setting?”
“The Marshlands.” She pointed at the book. Felix looked more closely at the front cover, which read, The Marshlands: A Monsters & Mythology Campaign Setting.
“My character is set up for the Sibylline Wastes, but it’s okay. I can make some changes,” she continued. “Or, actually, should I roll up a character in front of you? Some GMs are picky about that with players they don’t know. I used point buy, so you can check it if you want.”
Felix glanced at the creased paper she held out, an indecipherable mix of printed ink and handwritten notes and numbers. His stomach clenched as several curse words ran through his mind. Just like that, everything he’d been dreading about that night seemed to be coming to fruition.
“No, that’s fine,” he said carefully, keeping his expression neutral. “I don’t need to see it.”
She shrugged, picked up her pencil, and started erasing.
“We can do the other one you said.” Felix rotated the stack of books so he could see the spines. “You don’t have to change your… thing. Your paper. What was it you said?”
“The Sibylline Wastes?”
“Yes, that one.” He wrestled a book out from the bottom of the stack: An Adventurer’s Guide to The Sibylline Wastes. It was almost twice as thick as the Marshlands one.
Fuck.
Jo opened her mouth and inhaled. She paused, regarding Felix with narrowed eyes that twinkled with amusement. Felix’s attention snagged on those dark red lips, parted to reveal a pink tongue. Her next words came out as if she’d figured out a juicy secret. “You don’t know anything about Monsters and Mythology, do you?”
“I… know that it’s a game,” he said in a futile attempt to retain a shred of dignity.
“Mm-hmm. What kind of game?”
He glanced at the stack of books. “A game with a lot of rules.”
That crisp laugh of hers echoed against the low ceiling. “Okay, I’ll give you that one. And what’s this?” She angled her body toward him and pulled her jacket open, showing him the T-shirt underneath.
Felix was appalled to feel his face heat at the way her chest jutted forward. He hoped the fluorescents washed him out enough that she didn’t notice him blushing like a teenager. “A hexagon with a twenty inside it,” he said, his eyes darting back to her face.
“Hm.” Jo let her jacket fall closed and uncinched her drawstring bag. She dumped out a handful of sparkly red plastic shapes—a cube, a pyramid, a diamond, plus a few more he couldn’t readily name—and reached across the table to place one of them near him. Felix picked it up and examined it. White numbers were etched onto each triangle-shaped face.
“It’s a d20,” Jo explained. “A twenty-sided die that’s used for most of the rolls in MnM. The hexagon is how it’s represented in print, like you’re looking at it from above.”
Felix rolled the die between his thumb and forefinger until he found the “20.” The shape on Jo’s shirt suddenly made sense. He nodded. “I see.”
Then—because why the hell not?—he shook the die in his palm and rolled it on the table.
“Don’t!” Jo cried, lurching to her feet. She splayed herself over the table and tried to grab the die, but it was too far away for her reach. The d20 came to a stop. “What did you roll?” she groaned.
Felix managed to peel his gaze away from the woman lying prone on the table. “A three.”
“Damn it—you jinxed it.” She didn’t sound angry, but she plopped into her chair and held her hand out. He gave the d20 back. Cradling it in her palm, she looked down on it like it was a naughty puppy. “Are you going to be good, or do I have to put you in jail? You’re the only one I’ve got tonight, but there’s plenty more back home to replace you if you don’t behave.”
Felix blinked at her absurdity. Was she… talking to a die?
