April
I watched as Ash took out the deck of cards and began thumbing through them, creating six separate piles on the table. Ash was the coolest girl I'd ever met, and the prettiest, and even one of the nicest. Weird, but nice.
"To start, everyone is dealt the same hand with the same five cards, so come and get them," Ash said.
Frank was sitting closest, so he immediately reached out to snatch one. "Wow, these are heavy. What are they made out of? Stainless steel?" He tapped his hand of cards against the edge of the table, a dull thud of metal on wood.
"Made to last," Ash said.
"With how thin these are, bet you could use them as a throwing star," Ken added as he examined his own cards.
"Well, that's my first point of feedback then. If you're going to make a game product, it shouldn't also function as an improvised weapon. Though I do admit, I like the way these look and feel in my hand," Rayne said, looking them over now too.
"I don't get it." Haruka was holding one of the cards close up, turning it over in her hand. "There's more to it than this, right? There's not even any text on the cards?"
"And one for you too," Ash said as she took my hand and gently placed my own five cards into it. "Have a look."
"Th-thanks." I hoped no one noticed me blushing. I looked at the cards myself and immediately understood Haruka's confusion. Only five cards. One side was black with a simple gold trim, and the other side was almost identical, save that there was a different symbol at the center of each card depicted using the same gold trim.
A fist. A dog collar. A brain. A six-sided die. And a coin.
"So where's the rest of the equipment?" Frank asked.
"There isn't any," Ash answered.
"Oh... oh!" Frank raised his voice with excitement. "Is this an AR game we need to use our phones for?"
Ash shook her head, "Nope."
No one said anything else for an increasingly awkward silence, before Haruka finally said what we were all thinking. "This isn't another dumb Wiccan thing, is it?"
"Maybe."
"Ughhh...!" Frank slumped in his chair.
"Ash..." Rayne didn't sound angry, but only because she was disguising it as disappointment.
"So uh... anyone want to tell me what's going on?" Ken had just joined our group a few weeks ago, and really only to spend more time with me most likely.
"Ash is a practicing Wiccan, and even though we have stressed that this is a group for traditional games, she sometimes likes to... well..."
"Ouija boards. Tarot cards. Voodoo dolls. Middle school slumber party crap," Haruka listed them off.
"The ouija board was fun though." Ash smiled. "Remember how Frank started crying?"
"I wasn't crying!" Frank banged his hands on the table, then withered from the glare that earned him from Rayne. More quietly, he continued, "It was a panic attack. And it wasn't fun or funny."
I didn't think that had been much fun either. Laid back as she was, Ash took her occult hobbies seriously, and it seemed like every time she did, she only wanted to spook everyone as much as possible. The tarot card incident, I remembered Ash insisting over and over that I needed to start jogging at the park if I wanted to find true love. At the time I had been convinced that it was a roundabout way of calling me a fatass. But no. She and everyone else agreed it was just Ash being Ash.
