When Tony got home he went straight for his bookshelf in order to look up the rules for witches in Unearthed Arcana. But as he fingered through his books Unearthed Arcana appeared to be missing. Then he realized with growing alarm that, in fact, all of his Dungeons & Dragons books were missing.
"Mom!" he called, leaving his room and wandering down the hall to his parents' bedroom. "Mom?" he called again, pushing open the door.
Tony's parents were sitting up in bed, his father so exhausted he hadn't even changed out of his hospital scrubs. He was lying almost comatose, watching Johnny Carson. Tony's mother lay next to him, reading a Korean-language Bible.
"Mom," Tony repeated, "do you know what happened to my books?"
"Which books?" she replied.
"My game books."
"I threw them out."
"You what?!"
"You play that game too much. It's dangerous."
"It's not dangerous! It's not like I'm doing drugs or something –"
"And if I found drugs I'd throw them out, too!"
"Jesus Christ, take a chill pill!"
"Be respectful to your mother!" Tony's father suddenly interrupted.
Tony immediately backed off. "I'm sorry," he said. He turned back to his mom. "I'm sorry."
Tony's mother nodded with satisfaction. "Pastor Collins' sermon today was all about Dungeons & Dragons. Did you know it is an evil game?"
Tony rolled his eyes. "It's not evil."
"It is! Playing that game causes your mind to be cleaned!"
"Mind to be cleaned?" Tony repeated, confused. Then he realized what she meant and couldn't help but laugh. "You mean brainwashed?"
"This is no laughing matter!" she warned.
"I'm sorry Mom but actually it is. It's pathetic and hilarious."
"I put a new book on your shelf. Comic book. You like comic books. Read it, you'll see."
"Sure, Mom, I'll read it." Tony closed the door and headed down the hall. But instead of going back to his room he snuck outside to the garbage cans.
Sure enough, there were his AD&D rule books, stuffed in with the rest of the trash. Tony carefully retrieved them and headed back into his room where he hid the books under his mattress, where other kids hid their Playboys.
Then, curious, Tony picked up the comic book his mother had brought home from Church. It was titled Dark Dungeons. The art was surprisingly professional. It could almost be in a Spiderman comic. But the story wasn't about super-heroes. It was about teenagers playing Dungeons & Dragons. As Tony read the story, he couldn't help but laugh at some of the inaccuracies portrayed in the comic. Obviously, whoever had written it had never played Dungeons & Dragons. But then Tony stopped laughing because the inaccuracies became more disturbing than funny. The group's Dungeon Master was depicted as a cultish religious leader brainwashing the players into committing horrific crimes of murder and suicide, like a Dungeons & Dragons version of Charles Manson.
Unnerved, Tony was about to throw the comic in the trash, but he thought better of it. Deciding that his friends should know what was being said about their beloved game, Tony slipped the comic into his school backpack. He tried to go to bed. But he twisted and turned in his sheets, still disturbed by what he had read.
Unable to sleep, Tony sat up, reached for his Boris Vallejo calendar, and pulled it off the wall. He flipped it to February – a particularly erotic painting of a muscle-bound loin-cloth clad barbarian watching two nubile women wrestle on the floor in front of him. All three subjects of the painting were topless, though the women were posed in such a way that their nipples were blocked from view.
Tony reached under the sheets and began to masturbate.