Valentine Duell
July 21, 2021 8:59 PM
Top Secret Plannings
by Valentine Duell
Co-written With: Evelyn Stones
It was a lovely day as Valentine took a seat across the gazebo's table from Evelyn and gave the older girl a bright smile. "Okay, time to call to order the first meeting of The Ness Party Planning Council. Roll call time." She glanced at the paper in front of her, "Council president, Evelyn," she looked up at her friend before continuing, "present." Val made a mark on her paper. "Council secretary, Valentine, present." She made another mark on her paper and shuffled her papers around a bit while Evelyn snickered to herself at her love of Val’s playfulness.
That task being completed Val looked at the new sheet of paper in front of her. “Okay, the first item on the agenda today is planning the party. After that we will be thinking of a new name for the council so that we can have a clever acronym name. TNPPC can probably be better.” Val gave Evelyn a playful grin.
“The NESS?” Evelyn suggested, starting with what she was a little embarrassed to have come up with on the spot, although being the president of something did throw her for a loop, especially considering how much work Val was doing on this. “The Now Everyone Says Salutations council?” Proud as she was for having come up with it, it made her more sad than she wanted to admit too. Puns were a good place to hide. She set her feelings and her interruptions aside to let her friend continue.
Valentine’s eyes widened a bit with Evelyn’s response, “That’s brilliant!” she cheered and promptly wrote it down on her paper. Her face sobered after she examined her newest note, “But it is a bit sad… isn’t it?” She was going to miss Ness and Evelyn once this year was over. Which is why she had to make this party as awesome and wonderful as possible!
"Very," Evelyn nodded somberly. It was, of course, bittersweet for her. She'd be going on to new things, seeing Heinrich, and she's still see Ness. She'd even hopefully get to see Gary and Parker after graduation. But she wouldn't see Val much for the foreseeable future. "So we gotta make this as un-sad as possible."
“Okay, here is what I have so far. Nothing is set into stone so feel free to critique, adjust and throw away anything that you don’t think will work.” Val said as she refocused on her notes and took a breath. “I don’t know if Ness will plan anything for the final session, and I certainly don’t want to interfere with that, so this will happen on the second to last session. I’ll make sure I’m scheduled for game mastering that night. Essentially this is a short quest through the school that will start at our normal table in the library and end up in the MARS sports room for the party.” She thought she had a plan for that, but was still trying to decide if the water room might work better. She was going to need to get some practice at trying to make the rooms look like she wanted them to look. “If all goes as planned, some of the gamers might know that there will be something a little different happening that night, but Ness will be nearly completely in the dark. You of course will know everything, but will get to pretend you don’t.” She gave Evelyn one of her wicked grins, “That way you can help them out if they get stuck along the way.” Evelyn nodded, keeping up so far.
The Council secretary handed the Council president another sheet of paper from the pile she was holding. “I’ll leave this on our normal game table before the club time starts so you all will find it. I’ll be in the MARS room finishing getting things ready and waiting for you all to bring the rest of the party stuff.” The paper read as follows:
Adventurers!
The need is dire and you must make haste!
All alone, one of your company awaits your rescue.
The path ahead is foggy and uncertain, see the
Great Oracle to set you upon your way!
After the message was a symbol of a winged heart in a circle. Val waited for Evelyn to finish reading the note. “It’s a first draft and can definitely use some tweaking I think. Can we make it a rhyme? Those are great and I’m terrible at them.” She gave Evelyn a hopeful look. “Anyway, it is obviously telling them to go talk to Aunt Giselle, but if they don’t figure that out before too long, you may have to hint at that to them.” She gave Evelyn a conspiratorial wink.
Evelyn considered for a moment. She wasn’t too great at logic puzzles necessarily, but puns and wordplay were a thing she was into and she certainly read enough lore and mythology to have a grasp of old style epic warnings. “Adventurers,” she began, reciting her suggestion slowly. “Go, make haste, there is dire need of you; all alone, one of your company awaits your rescue. The path ahead is foggy and unclear; see the Great Oracle for wisdom you must hear?” she ended with an uncertain grimace. “I’m not sure if that’s as easy to understand as yours honestly.” Finished with her braining, she gestured for Val to go on.
Valentine waved away Evelyn’s concern dismissively, “It doesn’t have to be all that clear, the murkier the better perhaps. Especially since someone will be there that knows the answer and can help guide them along. Still, it can’t hurt to play with it a bit more, we have some time.”
“I’ll talk to Aunt Giselle and I’m sure she’ll be wonderful at coming up with some nonsense to send them to their next task. That is where I’m a little uncertain as well though, so we’ll skip ahead a bit where you may need to throw some of your weight around.” Valentine pulled another sheet of paper from her pile and set it on the table between them. Written upon it was a list of party foods and decorations. “This is a preliminary list of some things we’ll want for a proper party, though if there is anything I missed, make sure to add it.. I thought as Head Student…” Val looked at Evelyn hopefully, “You could help get the prairie elves to get some of this together for us?” There was a bit of a pause as she clearly had more to add, which she did a moment later. “...and get one of them to wear a helmet and wield a fake spear to act as a guardian to the crates that this stuff will be in.”
Evelyn raised both eyebrows, surprised, although she couldn’t help the grin that blossomed on her face. She probably would have paid her weight in galleons to see Val pose this same question to Heinrich as the oldest, highest ranking DnD student at the time. Oh to see his face at the very thought . . . “I’ll give it a shot,” Evelyn promised. “In the name of a paladin that I can’t wait to tell about it,” she added with a grin.
Val couldn’t help but let out a little nervous giggle. She held herself back from asking how that paladin was doing, now was the time for parties and planning. “I was thinking they would need to present the password and this,” Val dug out an object about the size of her fist from the bag beside her, “in order to get the guardian to give them the supplies.” The object was a not-so-great transfiguration of what had probably been a rock into the winged heart symbol from the note. Val turned a little red as the older girl looked at the object, “I was also maybe hoping that you could do a better job making this look right.”
Evelyn was much less confident she could help with that task but she accepted the object and nodded, willing to try that as well . . . when she didn’t have an audience.
“Anyway, once they’ve satisfied the guardian, they will have the crates with the party supplies in them. Not that they know that is what is in them.” She added with a wink. “They’ll be marked with this same symbol, and labeled simply, ‘To: Ares’.” Valentine grinned triumphantly. “That should tell them where to take them. Ares, Greek god of war, known by the Romans as… Mars.” Val giggled again and Evelyn couldn’t help looking impressed. It was a connection that Evelyn could appreciate; there weren’t a lot of people as interested in ancient gods and goddess as she was. Valentine blushed slightly at Evelyn’s look of approval, “When you’ve got an aunt that spent a lot of time in Greece…” she shrugged and moved on.
“I don’t know if we need another clue to get them to the water room specifically. There are only four options once they get there and it’s not hard to check which is right.The main thing I’m not sure about is how long to make this, which gets back to some of that middle uncertain bit with Aunt Giselle.” Val pondered her options again for a moment. “In short, should this,” she picked up the heart symbol, “be something else they need to find, or should it just be with the letter on the library table? I was thinking about hiding it around the Pitch somewhere and having Aunt Giselle send them there first to get it before giving them the password and sending them to the Cascade Hall to confront the guardian for the supplies. But that may take too long.”
“You could label it with ‘To: Ares’ with a background of a water droplet or something?” Evelyn suggested, addressing Val’s queries in order. “I think shorter in this case might be good, especially since we’ll have a lot of time spent just walking around. Means we get more time to party and less time for Ness to figure out what’s going on,” she added with a gleam in her eye; they were both well aware both of just how long their particular party could spend wasting time on long walks between important places in a session and how smart Ness was.
Valentine nodded along with Evelyn’s comments and scribbled a few notes down. “Yeah, shorter sounds good.” She agreed, “I’ll leave the thingy with the letter and maybe Aunt Giselle will need to see it as ‘proof’ that she should reveal any information to them.” She thought for a moment, “That means it’ll just be a trip from the library to Aunt Giselle’s office, to the Cascade Hall, and then up to MARS.” Val nodded to herself, “Short and simple, yeah you are right, that is the best.”
“The MARS room itself I want to see if I can get set up to look like a good medieval great feasting hall. Get a long wooden table down the middle of a stone built room with some tapestries… and a nice big throne for Ness to sit upon. I was thinking the sports room might work well, if we can convince it to do a jousting field just outside the main hall maybe. The water room could maybe work as well if we’ve got a moat nearby… or maybe some fountains?” She looked unsure at the older girl. “We may need to see what we can do in there for our second meeting.”
Evelyn nodded thoughtfully once again now that the idea of it being the water room wasn’t the only option. “A moat sounds fantastic and I think we can play with some fun ‘Loch Ness’ puns if we don’t push it hard enough to get us both turned into sea creatures ourselves,” she suggested with a mischievous grin. “That being said, throne also sounds good. I can work on making a crown if you want. I bet jousting field would totally work with the sports room though if we wanna go that route. What about a dungeon? Crown Ness dungeon monarch as a new take on DM?”
“Ooooo….” Val’s eyes nearly glittered at the thought, “Absolutely! We definitely need a crown for Ness!” She considered Evelyn’s other suggestion. “A dungeon would be neat, but I’m not sure if we could convince any of the rooms to do that without a good reason. Maybe the water room again if there was an underground lake nearby?” She asked full of uncertainty. Val wasn’t really sure how far the rooms could stretch from their designed purposes. “Hey, could we convince the music room to give us a throne room/feasting hall if it had some sort of magical minstrels in a corner playing good bardic music?” Val tapped her papers back into order, “So that’s kind of what I was thinking, overall what do you think?”
A pause followed as Evelyn considered all the information they’d gone over. It was a lot and she wanted to make sure she thought of every piece long enough to give a properly honest answer. When she did, it was with a massive grin. “Val, I think this is incredible. You’ve thought this through so well and I think it’s going to be amazing. Ness and I are both so lucky to have you as a friend and it’s been a true honor getting to game with you.”
The secretary waited patiently and just a bit nervously as the president considered the scheme in its entirety. Did Evelyn think it would actually work? The smile that showed on the older girl’s face flooded Val with relief. “I hope it comes close to amazing, you and Ness both deserve it and more for everything you’ve done.” Her face fell slightly and it shifted into something of a knowing grimace, “The best laid plans of the GM fall apart at the first sign of the players though.” She smiled again, “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
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Valentine Duell
Top Secret Plannings
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Evelyn Stones