Post-Apocalypse Gaming Shop

It's after the apocalypse in some way or another. We all live in a big dark warehouse right by a river. Perhaps in a river. It may be an island. There are evil creatures that boil up out of manholes in the basement of this big warehouse, and we have to kill them a lot. The river takes their bodies away. Sometimes they're zombies; sometimes they're just some kind of orc/troll/kobold thing. Sometimes they're evil clowns, lean and wiry, their polka dot suits hanging off their bony frames.

We live in the office of the warehouse -- it's more like a regular house, like the nucleus of this big cell. Sometimes we think about just barricading the basement doors, or going down there and filling up the manholes. There are six or eight manholes, though, and it would be hard to fend all the evil creatures off long enough to fill one in. It's possible, though, and each time we did it, it would make things that much easier. Some of us were considering prefabricating a plug that could be dropped in easily, then expanded.

There's stuff in our warehouse. Most of it is important stuff -- food, first aid, a few weapons. Some of us went out right after the apocalypse happened and brought it here. We're running low on medical supplies and on ammunition, though.

Ranged weapons are our only advantage over the evil clowns. Hand to hand, they'd slaughter us. Luckily, they have a primitive awe of our boom-sticks, as it were. We need more ammunition, and sundry supplies.

Across the river is another warehouse, but this one's divided into little U-Stor cubicles. We remember there being several filled with useful stuff, but it's going to be hard to get there. There aren't enough of us to send a big group across the river, and still defend the original warehouse. We don't know if there are evil creatures across the river as well, but we're playing it safe.

I think there are about ten of us.

We decide to all go across the river, taking all the firearms and accessories with us, in case we have to fight our way back in. There is a drawbridge to go across the river, and we lower it. Already we can hear the clowns running around in the warehouse.

That's another thing. They can't get out of the warehouse. Somehow, they can't work the outer doors. If all our stuff weren't in the warehouse, and if the weather were better (it's cold and very rainy), we could just build huts outside it and be okay.

We enter the U-Stor building across the river, and it's a flea market. It looks like the standard flea market you find in U-Stor-It communities. There's no sign of it being post-apocalyptic. The sellers are still old men ranging from cranky to avuncular, the merchandise is either old stuff or "as seen on TV" stuff that looks like it's been on the shelves for a couple of years. We wander around.

On the second story, we find the stuff we need. A couple of the guys go over, with our money (everyone still takes US money, oddly enough) and start haggling over the supplies. I wander off with a friend, who is either my sister or my pal Sean. It varies. I find a little gaming store in one corner. A grizzly fat guy, who looks like a human version of the fellow from The Android's Dungeon on The Simpsons, runs it. He seems rather cheerful.

I look around, and decide there really isn't anything I need -- I've never collected comic books seriously, and it's not like we have free time to play RPGs, what with the evil clown zombies from the sewers and all. In one of the glass cases, though, there's something I've been looking for.

It's the 7-sided dice made by Gamescience, a company that was TOO concerned with accuracy and stuff in the late '80s. They made extremely accurate dice (something to do with lasers) as well as oddly sided ones. The standard dice you find for gaming are 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20. There are also d30s, and d100s (which take forever to roll), and the occasional d3 (a d6 marked 1-3 twice). Gamescience made d7s, d18s, d26s, as well as their own d100s that supposedly worked much better. In real life, I was bidding on an eBay auction of two d7s (I didn't get 'em). I like dice.

I ask the Android's Dungeon guy how much the dice cost. Then I realize I have no money. I think for a while, and ask if he wants some of my blood. I guess that's something people like in a post-apocalyptic society, because he beams and says, "Sure!" I pull out a pocketknife and make a neat hole in my antecubital with the church key, and he takes out a bucket he has behind the counter. As I spurt blood into the bucket, I notice that these d7s aren't the standard kind, white with black pips. These have Disney characters on them. I start wondering whether I really want them now, and what else I could get for my blood.