D20

-1-

"Damn dice, always out to get me," you grumble as you stomp down the sidewalk. Pulling the velvet bag out of your pocket, you shake it in irritation. "Couldn't you have, I dunno, NOT gotten me killed?"

It's Wednesday, and you'd just been... well, ejected... from your DnD group. Your 'Dungeon Master' had a strict rule that anybody who got killed in the game wasn't to come back. 

What you hadn't been expecting was the fact that you'd be shoved out the door the moment it happened.

It had been the tiniest mistake, making a move that your character didn't have the proper stats for, and you'd had to make a saving dice throw to see what happened.

It hadn't been good.

"I hadn't been that bad a player, had I? It's been a few months since we started..." You shake your head. "No, I was doing okay. But that fight... had been really unfair."

It dawns on you that all the other newbies to the group, like yourself, had been killed off slowly but surely over the course of the last month. But it's not like it had been on purpose...

Right?

Thinking back, details begin to surface that you'd overlooked. Each time a player was killed, it was in a battle specifically designed to put their specific character's worst stats into play. And almost every one of them had come down to a single dice throw.

Your temper flares. That fucking bastard of a DM had been planning this all from the beginning. Probably just so he could narrow down the party and not have to try so hard. Lazy son of a bitch.

You grip the dice in your hand tightly, trying to get a grip on yourself. It doesn't work.

"Fucking asshole! Give me a fucking break!"

You sling the bag off into the distance, panting in frustration. Those dice had been nothing but trouble to you since you'd gotten them at a secondhand store at the beginning of all this. Not a single roll had been a good critical, and in fact, most of them had been pretty bad.

However, they'd been kind of expensive, being metal and all.

Your eye twitches as you realize that a half-pound bag of sharp-edged metal dice flying through the air might be cause for concern. Your anger evaporates, and you hurry in the direction you tossed them, hoping nobody got hit.

To your great luck, nobody seemed to be anywhere nearby. The bag had come to rest in a heavily wooded copse of trees in the middle of the neighborhood. To your less than great luck, the bag had popped open and spilled its contents all over the ground. And the light was going as the sun settled determinedly below the horizon. 

Stooping down, you scoop the small metal objects into the bag, glancing around to make sure you don't miss any. A few glimmer dimly from beneath a nearby shrub, and you have to get down on your knees to reach under it. Those taken care of, you scan the darkening forest floor, checking once more. 

Off in the distance, in the center of a small clearing, you see one last die gleaming in a single beam of moonlight.

Weird. How did it get that far away?

You push through the undergrowth in the gloom, trying to avoid becoming turned around in the process. The trees seemed to be reaching out for you, raking at your clothes, as you make your way forward. You shake off the feeling; just your imagination.

Just as you're about to emerge from the ring of brambles around the clearing, your foot hooks on a raised root and you fall, crashing heavily to the hard-packed dirt. A sharp pain shoots up your leg, and you stifle a cry; you must have twisted your ankle. Typical.