On A Roll

Heavily inspired by the Adventure Zone, and conversations on Tumblr. Sorry, everyone. 

Elliot paused to take a sip of water from his glass, and then set it aside, wiping his lips. "-where was I?"

"Well, 'Hitch'-" Ruby shot him a momentary glare, apparently not happy that he had woven her house manager into the insane narrative that he had so far created. "- 'Hitch', our half-orc friend with a crossbow- he just showed us into a throneroom or something inside one of the spheres in this weird moon base."

"The Bureau of Balance," Clancy corrected, tapping his pad of paper. He had been taking meticulous notes, which probably would have been helpful for him and his paladin character, Leitrum, if Elliot looked like he actually knew what he was doing.

"Yeah, that, whatever," Ruby said.

"Should we be doing anything, or-?" Red wondered.

"No, hang on, I've got this. Okay." Elliot cleared his throat. "So, you walk down the carpeted runway to the, uh, throne portion of the throneroom, and you end up standing on sort of the edge of the a dais that the throne is sitting upon. And sitting upon the throne, upon the dais is a human woman in her, maybe early fifties. She's got dark skin, white hair, and super blue eyes. And she's got a pretty otherworldly quality to her in all honesty, you might think she's an elf of sorts, if it weren't so clear she was human."

"Is she an elf?" Del interrupted.

Elliot rolled his eyes. "No, I just said she isn't, keep up-"

"But could she be?" Del rolled a dice. "I'm doing a perception check to check if the woman's an elf or not. Aaand-" She frowned downwards at the result, and then stuck her tongue out, clearly annoyed. "That's a one."

"You trip over your shoelaces, fall face-first onto the floor, and black out instantly," said Elliot. "Okay, what else? She's dressed in plain white robes, sorta ornate like? She's also holding a long white oak staff. And I feel like it's worth mentioning, she's not an elf. This lady is completely human."

Out of the corner of her eyes, Ruby saw Clancy scribble 'probably an elf' onto his notepad.

"And she looks at you," Elliot said, "and she says- wait, hang on, I gotta figure out a voice for her..."

"Welcome, the five of you, to the Bureau of Balance," said the woman in white, studying the party of adventurers with an inscrutable look in her eyes. "It's a..." She hesitated briefly, picking her words. "... an absolutely pleasure to have you here with us. I've heard a lot of things about your performance from Hitch."

Scarlett stared at the woman with faint suspicion. For some reason, she could have sworn that she knew her, but... "...thanks, I think."

"All good things, I hope," said Leitrum, fiddling nervously with the hem of his cloak.

"Of course they're good things!" said Del, whose creator hadn't actually picked a separate name for the character that she was playing. "We completely blitzed that last level, or did you not notice all of that totally cool sword fighting I did?"

"To be fair," said May, the Halfling cleric and healer, in her characteristically soft, near-unhearable tone, "we did end up decimating the entire town in the process."

"Nobody got hurt, right?" said Del, with a roll of her eyes.

"Apart from an entire town's worth of NPCs," Adaira reminded her.

"Well, yeah, but- details?"

"But they are important details," the woman in white pointed out. "And speaking of the decimation of the small town of Twinford- I'm going to need you to hand over the gauntlet that caused all of the destruction in the first place, so we can destroy it promptly and completely."