[kpfs] A Startling Postscript

[lumpley]

It's Friday, maybe, toward the end of the GenCon day.  I'm standing around the booth not being too useful, and this guy comes up to me.  He shakes my hand, says how happy he is to see me there again this year, and do I remember him?  He says I ran a puppies demo for him and his friend last year.

"Sure I remember you," I say.  "But you'll have to remind me what happened in the demo."

He starts to tell me and my mouth falls open.

"That was you?!  I've written about that demo!"

He looks at me out of the side of his eyes.  "That's unnerving," he says.  But he goes on to tell me at some length how much he and his friend enjoyed the demo, how much they've enjoyed playing kill puppies for satan since then(!), and how his friend really wanted to be there to shake my hand too but he's got a job now and he's gone back to school, so he couldn't make it, but he's here with other friends and if I'm going to be around tomorrow he'll bring 'em by to meet me.  And he shakes my hand again, and again, and he says he came to the con just on the off chance I'd be there, and I'm staring at him like, buh, with my jaw on the floor.

He goes away.  (He doesn't actually bring his friends back the next day, or else he does while I'm out of the booth.)

One of the demos I ran, though, we reached The Line.  I was running for these two guys who were friends.  We were all going oog and laughing and somebody did the next atrocious thing, and it got ... really interesting.

Neither of them wanted to be the first to admit that we'd crossed the line, so they kept escalating.  We were going oog more and more, and laughing less and less, and then way past the line, like I mean WAY past the line - they stopped talking.  They just sat there not looking at each other.

It was stupendously educational.  I saw those two guys right then more clearly than you usually see anybody.  And maybe you're right, Pete, maybe what they needed - and I hope they got it, somehow, because it sure wasn't there for them in a little puppies demo at the Forge booth at GenCon - but maybe what they needed was to reach down and forgive their characters and then take them out of play.

I guess they found it.

-Vincent