It is with a surprisingly light heart that I make the following, somewhat staggering announcement: The Sperberspeak team, the Millcreek Synod, was defeated at the rolldown death match last month, and I have lost the rights to the Parkland to the Planar Pentoidal Institute. Several factors, in hindsight, contributed to the loss; first, my teammate and former friend Gerald did not bring his best game to the event, and that’s putting it mildly. He spent most of the game looking at his phone, darting off unpredictably to count inventory for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, complaining incessantly about how long we were taking, and oh so tiresomely reiterating that he had to work early in the morning (930 to be exact, instead of ten, hours after the majority of the working people in this vast nation have already had to wake up, endure their miserable commutes, and begun their Sisyphysian labors for the day). His indifferently operated character perished under miserable conditions well before the midway point of the match, even before the Flounder’s sad superhero foolishly wandered into the mineshaft I’d cleverly camouflaged with the sissy camp, where I’d stationed my Spider Cult Nest. This should have ended the game, except for the second factor; Duane Papasideras, cheered on by his fiancée / life coach / Svengali, Eleni and an enormous contingent of the teeming Papasideras clan, executed, against any rational expectation, against reason itself, the game of his inexplicably continuing life, and aided by a nightlong lucky streak, eventually slew my character, Thomasina the Spider Queen, with a last flurry of improbable roll results.
I must admit that, at the moment Gerald’s character succumbed (and his body was actually devoured while Gerald indifferently counted the cheap, disturbingly sexualized Wonder Woman figurines that seem to compose the major portion of that pathetic store’s Christmas sale strategy), I experienced one of the most singularly unpleasant shocks of my life. A profound wave of nausea engulfed my being, and I was so overcome by existential panic, by an awful feeling of aloneness, surrounded by enemies and facing the abyss of artistic oblivion. It was the third darkest moment, emotionally, of my life, and the other two occurred many years ago, in my vulnerable youth, one during my brief scouting career, when the Flounder and Thomas Hilpert’s performed my Star Wars fan fiction in drag during an overnight hike, and of course the worst; Katerina Ek’s sexualized interpretation of my apprentice elf warrior character on the culminating night of her inexplicable campaign to destroy our original gaming group, the moment when she sat on my secret DM notes and meowed in the middle of my room treatment. These events occurred many years ago, but the emotional scars remain to trouble my sleep anon.
But careening back to the recent calamity we must go. To my credit, if the reader can indulge me, I rallied, calling upon the inner reserves built of years reading Churchill and Caesar’s war memoirs, and managed to slay my greater enemy before succumbing to the unfortuitous series of roll results that I would almost term an act of god for their singular and relentless one-sidedness. And I experienced a strange peace of mind, a philosophical calmness, almost spiritual in its mysterious intensity, after the last roll. I had lost everything, but like a castaway, awakening on the shores of a lonely island, I was alive, and filled with a sense of total freedom, accompanied by a surge of creative energy. I can write whatever I want now, I realized. I can let go of the Parkland, and venture forth, into the literary bush, pen in hand, eyes stern, but gleaming
Sperberspeak 