Sueth

ENTRY FOUR: The World's Worst D&D Party

     I woke up Saturday morning feeling relatively normal. The little sleep I had managed to scramble together after the previous day had contained no dreams, which came as a relief to me. Being told that your dreams might end up as completely accurate predictions of the future really makes you rethink all the weirdest ones you've had. A few select ones started to make sense, while other ones sadly remained too outlandish to hold any grand meaning. Disappointingly I tossed a recent dream I had involving a stray cat, who was kind enough to compliment my hair, in the latter mental pile.
     Donny was surprisingly already in the kitchen as I came down. The air smelled weird as I walked through the archway towards the refrigerator. Not TANK! weird, but weird.
     "What smells like battery acid?" I asked as I pulled an almost empty contained of milk out. Luckily I had enough wits to check the expiration date. There was no reason to even open it, so I opted for orange juice instead and tossed the milk into the sink to be emptied and tossed.
     "I'm running Red Bull through the coffee maker," he jittered, "did you actually manage to sleep last night?"
     I quickly turned on my heal to see the clear signs of a sleepless night on his face. His eyes were a worn red surrounded by lids almost as darkened as Valentine's.
     "You didn't sleep at all?" I asked, legitimately concerned.
     "We met three different supernatural creatures last night," he winced, "and sure two of the three were kinda cool, but seriously! Sue? It's not killing you? Demons are real. Ghouls are real. 'Something starting with a d' nymphs are real? That's not screwing with your head?"
     He wasn't wrong. I should have been locked in my room drawing runes on the walls in crayon after the night I had just had, but instead I was sitting in the kitchen pouring a glass of OJ.
     "What else do you think is real?" he took a sip of the horrendous concoction he had brewed.
     "That's a good question," I sat my mug next to his and set up another folding chair at the ping-pong table we had substituted for kitchen furniture.
     "Werewolves?" he asked.
     "Probably."
     "Swamp monsters?"
     "Maybe."
     "Frankenstein monsters?"
     "Well if that one is real then Mary Shelley has some explaining to do."
     We sat for a fairly long time in silence, letting the reality of the world set in. A few hours prior I had been walking around having conversations with a man who casually joked about things he had done two millenniums prior. Maybe adrenaline had held me together for most of it, but nothing was holding Donny together.
     "I looked up Ghouls last night," he hissed, "internet says they eat dead bodies." 
     "Well you can't believe everything-"
     "He lives next to a grave yard."
     "That could just be a-"
     "And he's always covered in dirt."
     "That's just dust dude," I tried to changed the conversation, "looking at what's in the mug, I'm guessing you're not going to start sleeping anytime soon. Want to go for a walk? Get some fresh air?" I offered.
     "I don't want to go outside," he gave a sigh, "monsters are outside."
     I sulked, knowing there wasn't much I could say to counteract this statement. There were monsters outside. It was just as accurate as him saying that the sun was outside, or parents who put backpack leashes on their kids were outside. It was now an official fact of life that we had to deal with.
     "I mean, if anything you're safer than most people out there," I tried reassuring him.
     "How so?"
     "You know about the monsters now, so that makes you safer than all the people who don't."
     "No, that makes me more paranoid than them."
     "Well, you still kinda smell a little bit like that body spray. Valentine said that makes you safer than the average person."
     Donny's eyes widened. His mug hit the table, spilling more than half of the dark syrupy content over the many preexisting stains on our tabletop.
     "Wait... no!" I shouted, but I was too late. His caffeine infused blood was already pumping, and his legs had already carried him out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I tried to keep up, but my body was not yet fully awake. By the time I reached his bedroom it was too late.