Adventurer Misadventures: The Starbucks Incident.
*A version of this story appeared on my previous blog, Adventurer Misadventures.
This is a short story about my long-running character, Aeniyah the Acanthus Mage, and how she learned the perils of chasing bad guys into public Starbucks bathrooms with an Obrimos Guardian of the Veil as your backup.
(FYI, it’s pronounced Uh-NAI-Yah.)
Aenaiyah is one of my chaotic sort of characters, being a British mage who sports short, spiked purple hair, and tosses around time magic. I DO have documented proof that I made up this character BEFORE I started watching Doctor Who, but I integrated a love for the Doctor into her personality later. Though she’s often the voice of reason in her cabal, that seems to be some combination of tragic accident and luck rather than a reflection of any smart decision making on her part.
This story begins with Aeniyah and her cabal-mate Argus tailing a suspected Seer of the Throne. Argus and Aenaiyah followed the woman into one of the ten bajillion Starbucks in New York City, and saw that she was going into the ladies’ room. Argus became invisible so he and Aenaiyah could follow the Seer into the bathroom. Except when they got into the bathroom, it was empty.
Argus became visible and used his magic to determine that the Seer had teleported away. Since they were now unable to follow their suspect, Aenaiyah sighed and said, “All right then. Why don’t you turn invisible again, I’ll open the door an’ we can both leave.”
“No, two people went into the bathroom, two people have to come out,” Argus replied.
This was a very “Guardian of the Veil” thing to say. The Guardians are basically the magic secret police, they’re supposed to make sure normal people don’t notice there’s all sort of weird stuff going on, and take down anyone who tries to reveal the existence of mages to the masses. If a person magically vanished (in this case, literally) from the bathroom it might cause some issues when Average Joe with his cup of Joe realizes something’s not right.
Of course, Aenaiyah realized there was another small problem with the situation.
“Wait, you can’t go out there! This is the ladies’!” she protested.
Argus shrugged, opened the door, and waltzed out of the bathroom—into a crowd of people standing by the door. Aenaiyah was utterly shocked by this. Then she noticed some of the people (including her cabal-mates) were clapping; others were staring at the two of them, scandalized.
This is when Aenaiyah connected the proverbial dots.
Argus, being an Obrimos (Forces/Prime mage), had control over sound. He’d altered the sounds of their conversation to make it appear that they had been having a VERY good time inside the bathroom. While Aenaiyah was usually all wordy bravado, this left her speechless. One little blue-haired granny shook her head in disapproval at Aenaiyah and loudly said “Slut!”
Before Aenaiyah could react—probably by punching Granny and losing some Wisdom—Granny shook her head again and continued with, “Slut . . . I’m a stupid slut. . . .”
This confused Aenaiyah more until she saw Damien, the Mastigos (Mind/Space Mage), waving at her with a smile on his face, indicating he had tweaked Granny’s brain.
Furiously embarrassed, Aenaiyah stormed out of Starbucks while swearing to set her feline familiar Noel (affectionately nicknamed “Death Kitty” by the GM) on Argus . . . or at least have the cat hack up hairballs in his shoes.
CAITLIN has been gaming for a decade--longer if you count her strictly PbP years and playing Baldur's Gate 2 before she knew what D&D was. She came to tabletop gaming backwards, starting from Jeff Hannes's dice-less, semi-LARP Dramatic Roleplaying Tournament, to being wooed by World of Darkness, to finally rolling a d20 with 3.5 and Pathfinder. She now plays a variety of tabletop RPGs, video, card, and board games, while still occasionally dropping all the rules to play in a free-form RPG.
Ah, Starbucks. It always seems to equal a bit of a detour in my games. In one supers campaign, the heroes were off to rescue their costume designer and they specifically stated they were stopping at Starbucks first. They informed me that they hadn’t had breakfast OR their coffee for the day, and they would pick up a drink for their soon-to-be-rescued costume designer as well. It was flabbergasting, but made a certain amount of sense in that mixed up little campaign setting.