"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter Ninety: Summer Jobs Are Fun (When You're With Friends)
(Suzie Do You Copy?)
***
Rowan hummed along to the loud music playing from the boombox as she put in the records that had just arrived in the vinyl record section of 'NEW ARRIVALS'. Behind her, at the counter, Eddie's tongue was sticking out as he wrote something down, brow creased in frustration before he looked up and asked, "Hey Graveswood, can I bounce something off you?"
"Sure," Rowan said as she finished putting the records in, heading over to the counter and leaning on it. "Let's hear it, Munson."
"Okay. So I've got this idea for a side quest for the Cult of Vecna campaign I'll do near the end of spring break," Eddie started and Rowan nodded—this wasn't the first time Eddie had bounced ideas for his campaigns off of her, especially during the summer, and while Rowan still felt clueless, she felt like she'd gotten an understanding of the game and it's logistics by now. Kinda. "I was thinking I'd have the Party talk to and befriend a NPC who is seemingly on their side and helping them stop a vampire problem in the village... but in reality, they're a Vecna cultist and one of Kas' thralls who lures them into a trap against Kas. What do you think?"
"It sounds pretty good. Definitely something that will twist the guys up. Why do you need my input?" Rowan asked as she hopped onto the counter, squeezing into the tight space between the register and where Eddie's beloved notebook for his campaigns was, planting her feet just inches from the notebook.
"I just need some help fine-tuning the character—and for someone who doesn't play D&D, you're scarily good at helping make good NPC mini-bosses," Eddie said.
"Well, thanks, but I can't take all the credit—I did grow up with you as my best friend, after all," Rowan replied, grinning. "Here, let me have a look at what you have."
Eddie surrendered the notebook, letting Rowan see what Eddie had already told her, along with the technical logistics of the character plus some notes and scratched out lines and rewritten lines about the character. It sounded good and Eddie had written the character's more villainous side pretty well and did a pretty good job for when the character was pretending to be good, but Rowan could already see that for the twist to work, the character needed to sound more trustworthy, like he really was on the side of good when in reality he was working for evil. Rowan smirked—the psychologist part of her brain was ticking away.
"Okay, I think I can fine-tune this," she said, hunching over it. "You just need to work on making the character sound like they're genuinely good, but have some elements where they're not good—and if I've learned anything from my psychology books, it's that manipulation, especially gaslighting, works best. Make the character do some things like, I don't know, accidentally lead the Party into a vampire den but then still save the day and claim it was an accident and manipulate them into thinking yes it was an accident, but it wasn't. Do that, make the character as manipulative as possible on the front they're actually good, and it would be great and make the twist even more shocking."
