Leaving Mundania Read Online Free Page A

didn’t belong. I had once visited a convicted murderer at Rikers Island while working on a story, but somehow this was scarier; I was about to embarrass myself.
    I nearly turned around in the hallway, but Molly pushed me on. We pressed the button for the elevator and waited.
    â€œWill other people be in costume down there?” I said.
    â€œMaybe,” Molly said.
    Great, I thought. We’ll be even more obvious. In the mirror beside the elevators, the ridiculous feathers on my hat were actually quaking.
    Downstairs, people who were largely not in costume milled around the convention floor, a square room on the second floor of the hotel. Tables outlined the perimeter of the room, spread with genre fiction, comic books, and material advertising various larps. Conference rooms branched off the main area, each one home to a different sort of game—painted miniature war gaming, video gaming, board games, and tabletop role-playing games, also called RPGs. Tabletop RPGs were one of larp’s forebears, and the most famous game of the genre is Dungeons & Dragons. Often called paper-and-pencil role-playing games, they tell a story using a complex set of rules, dice, and a lot of imagination.
    As Molly and I stepped onto the floor we ran into Rob’s mother, surrounded by a gaggle of her children and their friends. My shoulders tensed. One of the children gestured to me and told me I looked “hot.” With my esteem temporarily bolstered by that twelve-year-old girl, who I was sure had eminently adult taste in fashion, I left Molly to her conversation and went in search of the other Avatars.
    Unlike other larps at DEXCON, the Avatar System did not occur at a particular place and time. Vinny had originally conceived of it as a downtime activity between other games at the convention. Players roamed the halls in costume or lack thereof; if you wore your Avatar button and had your character card in your pocket, then you were “in-game.” By default, most of the weekend’s Avatar action would take place in the Con Suite, so I headed there first.
    I found Vinny’s fiancée, Avonelle, whom everyone called Avie, in the Con Suite. As the senior game master for the Avatar System, when plot needed to happen, Avie would direct it, describing the sceneryto the Avatars and playing any supporting roles—townspeople, baby dragons, deities of the Nexus—that the plot required. Otherwise, players were on their own.
    I pinned the neon pink button Avie gave me to my blouse, which let other players know that I was a newbie or noob, a zero-level character who couldn’t be harmed … for the moment. A visible button signified “that you’re open to role-play,” Avie told me. It sounded vaguely dirty. As soon as my character joined a house, an in-game faction of like-minded players, I would replace the pink button with a white one rimmed in black that bore the insignia of my house in its center.
    I spotted the Avatars by their strange dress and house buttons, walked up to them, and took a deep breath. “What’s going on over here?” I said, in a very un-hard-boiled way.
    One of the women had frizzy copper-red hair belied by its gray roots. She wore a tight leather vest that displayed her décolletage. Earlier in the day I had seen her sporting a pink pin, so I knew she was new. Since then, she had chosen a house—now she wore a button with a yellow cup on it, the symbol of House Galahad, the coterie of the noble and often tortured hero.
    Across the table, another woman wore a backcombed blonde wig with bangs and a black streak at one temple, a high-necked shirt, a vest, and a long green skirt. She carried the hooded skeleton of a small rat. The rat was supposed to carry a scythe, made of a stick attached to some aluminum foil, but the scythe kept falling apart, and she couldn’t keep the rat upright on the table. I understood that she played Susan, from Terry