Of Mondays and Dragons

Monday has become my favorite day of the week, right next to any day I have off from work. When I have off on a Monday, it is bliss. Like yesterday.
Mondays have earned this love in my heart the hard way: through my nerdiness. I've talked about it before, but every Monday night myself and seven other people cram ourselves around a tiny kitchen table, pull out a motley assortment of dice, some papers filled with notes and numbers, and we role play.
Today, I am going to ignore my normal job complaints at talk about something that I really have fun with: Dungeons&Dragons.

Last night started with a game of Uno. We were playing as Bob finished up writing some cards to prepare for the session and we were waiting for Dan and Lauren to get there. I won both games, and poor Ben got his ass kicked. We played stacking draws, which means that when you play a +2, if the next person has a +2 they can play it and it stacks onto the third player. Ben got two +4's put on him because of Patrick. It's okay, because then they went around with all of the +2's in the deck and Patrick had to pick up ten cards. It was fun, and loud. Lots of angry shouts and insults as we jerked each other over.

Around 8:30 Dan and Lauren arrived and we settled in to get started. A little background information on us and our characters.
Bob, the DM, has a character that he plays who employs everyone. Taelir AufAudur is a warlord with narcolepsy. He will fall asleep in the middle of a collapsing castle--trust me, we collapsed it on him. Taelir is in place, basically, to remind us that there is a point to our adventures and to make sure we don't get our butts handed to us too much.
I play a half-elf with a split personality. Due to bullying at a very young age about being a half-breed, Morrigan developed two separate personalities: a human cleric, and an elven warlock. They have no knowledge of each other at all, though the rest of the party have fun taunting her about something that the other personality would know and then telling her to "forget it" when she wondered what was going on. Clerrigan is a kind, caring, and compassionate healer dedicated to the service of her gods (she worships two). Warrigan is a wry, selfish sort of person who basically looks out for her own back and the paycheck she receives at the end of her adventures. But occasionally, she shows moments of startling clarity and understanding in the world around her.
Patrick is Sel'zanath, a dragonborn paladin. He is apathetic about everything except serving Bahamut, which he does quite well. He has a thing for throwing enemies into pits of acid, which is the reason Bob doesn't supply us with them any more. Sel'Zanath made it to where everyone met the hard way: he walked. A lot. And fought a lot. And managed to find a boat that would sail him around for a bit.... so he could fight sea monsters. He has no memory from before he became a dragonborn except for his name.
Matthias the human fighter is Dan's character. He's more drunk than a glass of water and smokes hallucinogenic herbs like a chimney. He has a thing for little women. He is an amateur Kwayboarder (lava-surfing). He is a smart-ass who is easily manipulated into doing very terrible things, like pouring some of the strongest alcohol in existence into a pool that is full of Sahuagin (toad-men). He is funny, and seems to have a particular distaste for Warrigan, though Clerrigan has saved his life many times. Matthias is a very open and pretty shallow person.
Caryn is a Tiefling rogue named Eris who is in it for herself. She is possessed by a demonic sort of thing she calls the "voice", which is easily appeased... as long as she climbs. The Voice wants her to be up as high as she can. And so, she is most often found sitting on Sel'zanath's head. She is ruthless and crazy and has moments where she is more clear than others. Those are usually when she is bartering for something, though. Like a life. But that's a story for later in the post. She can also breath under water, but no one really understands how.
Lauren plays a dwarf barbarian who's still a little confused about how a rag-tag bunch of people like us work together. Aries is constantly beating on Matthias who makes lewd remarks and advances on her, though she is pretty strong. She attacked a giant squid, picked it up by herself, and flipped it over. Yeah. She's pretty awesome.
Ben, Patrick's cousin, is a doppleganger warlord. His name is Kalen and we really... don't know much about him. We know he's a doppleganger, and we know he's a warlord. Other than that, we really can't figure out what's up with him. He's distrustful of those not immediately around him (aka, anyone not employed with him) and pretty ruthless.
Then we have a Githzerai psion, which is just totally ridiculous to try and explain. He's a big green goblin-like guy who uses tele-psychic powers named Xable. Xable Juxtapose. Don't ask us why, we don't know either. He's very disciplined, but also very easily influenced, as he isn't used to this plain of existence yet and he's not sure what is socially acceptable or not. This makes for great fun at his expense.

And that is our little inept group.

One of the things that you might not notice right away if you aren't really into D&D is that we have an alignment issue. Sel'zanath and Morrigan are Good. We worship our gods and do their bidding for the betterment of society, or else we get smited. Matthias, Aries, and Xable are neutral. They do whatever they feel like, though it is generall not entirely malicious in nature. Eris is what we call chaotic neutral. She likes to stir some shit and raise hell, and if some people are in her way while she's doing it, well... sucks to be them.

Last night, we discovered this issue was actually quite an important one.

One of our enemies, in a plea for mercy and to show he wouldn't harm us, finished off one of his comrades (who was dying anyway, but whatever). Sel'zanath, being the only one who could speak his language, began to question him. He translated for us, of course. Well, he and I decided to send Bill (the Sahuagin) off to the nearest village that was going to be attacked to warn them. Kalen was sneaking up behind him to attack.
He did.
I jumped in and used my powers to heal Bill, and to hurry him on up the rope out of the pit we were in. Kalen offered Eris 20 gold to use a shuriken and cut the rope. I told her not to, he wouldn't do us any harm. She turned to Clerrigan and said, "He's offering me twenty gold. What will you give me?"
C:"Nothing! I will not barter for another's life! Let him go, he is no danger."
K:"This will come back and kick us if we let him go. I don't trust him."
E:"Top his offer and I won't do it."
This is when Matthias offered her another five gold to just cut the rope. Bill would have fallen to his death at this point.
We continued to argue for another minute or so, when Bob announced that because we had waited so long, he had gotten away.
Sel'zanath and Morrigan were happy. No one else involved was.

This could get tricky later on. I think we have to fight a dragon next, too. They kick your ass real hard.