A group of friends streams their gaming on Wednesday nights. But not all the action is on the dining room table.

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Chapter 2 - The Ride Home

It was half-way to my car that Brian grabbed my shoulder and stopped me.

"Hmm?" I asked, turning and looking up at him.

"Keys."

"What?"

"Gimme the keys."

I scoffed and tried to turn away, but his hand held me in place. "Why?"

Brian frowned. "Because you're still upset, and you scare the hell out of me when you drive upset."

"I'm not--"

"Hold out your hands."

"You can't just... ugh." Giving in, I held my hands up, fighting unsuccessfully to quell the tremor I knew they would hold.

"See?"

"*Fine.*"

I fished my keys out of my messenger bag and handed them over to Brian, getting a shoulder-pat in thanks.

"Next week we're taking separate cars."

"Next week it's my gas we're burning."

"Maybe the week after that then," I decided, pausing only a moment when we reached my car to circle around to the passenger side while Brian hit the beeper to unlock the doors.

I settled in to the seat, the sound of Brian cursing as he adjusted the driver's seat and wheel making me feel at least a little better about the whole thing. Our almost foot of height difference meant it was always a struggle whenever we tried to drive each others' vehicles, though at least my car had electric adjustments for everything: I had to keep wooden blocks behind the seat of his truck for the rare times I'd drive it just so I could reach the pedals.

"Y'know, this car."

"Don't start this again, man."

Brian chuckled. "I'm just sayin', a more manly car might help cut down on people thinking you're a girl."

"How do you figure that?" I asked him while he continued to fiddle with the seat and mirrors. "'S not like driving a Viper or something is gonna suddenly make me five inches taller or spontaneously sprout a porn 'stache."

"No, but..."

"But?"

"It's a yellow Fiat 500, Leigh. Most guys wouldn't be caught dead owning one of these."

"You borrow it all the time."

"Well, yeah, but it's not *mine.* And if anyone asks I tell 'em it's my girlfriend's."

"You wish!"

"I do, just not for you," he tossed back, seemingly happy with his adjustments at last. "We stopping for burgers or something on the way back?"

"Up to you, I'm not starving."

"Burgers it is," he said, firing up the engine then revving it a couple times before putting the car in gear, just like he always did.

Without asking I turned on the satellite radio to one of the stations playing pop music and leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes and just Thinking.

The convention.

It wasn't the first convention we'd ever attended, or even the first time we'd done a panel, but it was the biggest, and the most complex.

We'd all started the whole tabletop streaming thing about four years ago. I was having pretty decent luck with streaming myself talking about tabletop games and playing video games, so thought hey, why not see if my friends wanted to give it a shot too? At the time it had just been the six of us, but when we'd decided to give the streaming a shot we brought Jonah in, both as an extra party member and as our tech to manage cameras and editing.

For the first couple of years, that's all things had been. We were small-time, but developing enough of a following to slowly increase production values, adding lighting and music and better mics.

Then we got the sponsorship, and everything changed.

We'd been running Faelands since the beginning, because it was the system Maria and I liked the most. When American Tabletop Games, the company who made Faelands, reached out to us and asked if we wanted an official partnership, we didn't think twice before jumping at the opportunity. Apparently some of the folks at the company were fans of the show, and especially of Maria's worldbuilding and game mastering, and wanted to help make our show more visible to help advertise the system.

And make our show more visible it did. Our viewership tripled in the first month of the sponsorship, and had hardly slowed in the last two years, getting another massive boost last year when we started a new campaign in the most recent version of the system. ATG had been so impressed with our performance, and the revenue we'd brought to them, that they were even in talks with Maria about releasing an official campaign setting based on her world.

Even with all that, though, our fame and performance were relative. We were in the top 10 most popular tabletop gaming groups, for sure, but Faelands as a system still struggled to compete with some of the bigger names in the industry like Wayfinder and Temples and Trolls, and likewise our viewership numbers, while impressive, still looked like small fries compared to a group like Critical Hit or Geek Stuff.

That was why this convention was so important. It would be our first showcase in front of an audience, and we'd been booked to basically headline the convention for two nights in a row! Austin was a long way from our home town of Bayonet, Louisiana, but ATG saw this as a big opportunity for both them and us, and were paying our expenses to go.

Maria was in charge of all the game-related business for our group. Sydney managed our socials. Deidre kept on top of incoming and outgoing art and merchandising... but I was the one responsible for public relations for the Wednesday Knights as a whole. Was it any wonder my nerves were shot?

I would like to say that it wasn't because of Jonah... but yeah, it was because of Jonah.

The rest of us, we'd been playing together for years. Hell, I'd been gaming with Maria since we were in middle school. When I'd gone to college and met my roommate Brian, I'd immediately set to work baiting the trap to get him into a game with us, and he brought along Aaron, a friend of his from high school. Sydney and her then-roommate Deidre answered an open call for players, and our group was set. By the time we were seniors and I convinced the rest of the group to give the streaming deal a shot we'd all been playing together for about four years at that point, and were friends not only in-game but out of game as well.

From the first moment I met him Jonah was a bit surly, and more of a power gamer than the rest of us, but he was also very enthusiastic about the idea of working on the show, so we had all agreed to give him a shot. He had proven himself invaluable, managing the cameras during streams and handling edits afterward for posting to WooTube, and even if there were obvious differences in his play style from the rest of us, we'd felt sure that over time we'd all be able to work those differences out and find a way to play that worked for everyone.

For a while, it had worked. Maria adjusted her game to have a bit more mechanical focus and offer more challenging mechanical play for Jonah, but kept the strong focus on character play that the rest of us loved, and the world that responded to our actions like, well, like a believable place. Jonah didn't always like the restrictions he'd get on what he could do -- most often along the lines of us not letting him kill or brutalize NPCs we wanted to work with -- but he kept himself in check.

The bigger we got, though, and the more complex our production, the less that seemed to work for him. He was still technically head of our production staff, but we had a full-on tech team now, not just a couple cameras on tripods, and the more technical work was pulled out of his direct control the more control he seemed to want to enforce on the actual game. It wasn't long after we had started the current campaign that we'd been forced to decide as a group to more or less strip his title back to being a figurehead only position, due to too many times our WooTube edits had turned into The Jonah Show, cutting out character and story development aspects of the game if they weren't related to his character and being more combat clip shows than anything else.

Then I got pregnant.

It wasn't anything we'd planned, and the roleplay between me and Brian had been incredibly embarrassing for both of us. That said, it just... fit. Of all the party members they were the closest two in age, and a few lucky and unlucky rolls early on meant Burg proved his mettle protecting Lunea quickly. We'd had inter-party romances before -- heck, the last campaign had ended with Sydney and Deidre's characters getting married -- but the little romance plot between Lunea and Burg took on a mind of its own quicker than any of us anticipated, and after about five months of play we finally agreed during a drunk chat stream that our characters had, indeed, "done the deed" at some point, which naturally inspired Maria to pop the question about whether we wanted to roll to see just how lucky we'd been.

Never agree to making story-critical rolls while drunk.

We all regretted our decision the next morning, and even had a discussion about proclaiming the rolls non-canon... but we couldn't. The news was out, and it was everywhere, and despite being part of a silly drunk stream and not a regular gameplay stream, it got us trending harder than anything else before.

Unless we wanted to risk the wrath of hundreds of thousands of fans, new and old, Lunea was staying pregnant.

It had been a marketing bonanza since. Almost weekly Sydney fed into the buzz, with fake "baby updates" from her Dwarf barbarian's point of view. She prided herself on Sunny almost always coming top of the polls for character popularity, but was also having fun spurring on a friendly rivalry between Sunny and Lunea, using the baby as bait. Deidre had likewise used it as a jumping off point for a few community art competitions, that had returned a lot of artwork both adorable and disturbing, and even Aaron had been leveraging it during his fantasy sports streams, taking fantasy bets from viewers on what the baby would grow up to be.

Meanwhile, Brian had been playing the Proud Father to Be role to the hilt every stream, and me? I got to learn what it took to be a mommy.

Even sitting in the car, away from the actual game, I found myself unconsciously using the same arm gestures I'd adopted as Lunea, cradling the imaginary bump that held my child. With a roll of my eyes I forced myself to move my arms away from my belly and to my sides, hoping Brian hadn't noticed.

My baby had taken over marketing for our entire show, and everyone was all in on making the most of it... except for Jonah.

"If any character gets to fuck the half-breed it's John, he has the highest charisma."

Yes. He actually said that during a crew meeting.

As far as Jonah was concerned, the baby was a menace and a distraction. Even before my pregnancy he was annoyed at Maria's plot for the game, which focused around a political intrigue storyline built off my character being the heiress to a kingdom in peril, looking for allies to help re-take her throne. While the plot was there, the story really wasn't about my character, but about the people around her, our other players' characters, and how we all would work together to reach our goal, but he didn't want that. He was convinced that as the best player at the table -- his words -- he should be the center of the action, and the center of the story.

And things had deteriorated from there.

Things were at a point where I was sure the rest of us were on the same page. Jonah was burning his bridges in a spectacular fashion, and there was no way we could keep him in the group... but we didn't want to kick him, either. He'd been an important part of founding the show, and he had his own portion of the fanbase who loved his character and more technical play focus.

All of us were hoping he'd chill enough to at least make it to the end of the campaign. Personally, I just hoped he could manage until after the convention.

Just two and a half more weeks. Inevitably another crisis and stress-storm would come after, but for now, just make it past the convention.

Please.

My musings were interrupted by the smell of food, and I opened my eyes just in time for Brian to drop a warm bag in my lap.

"Junior burger?"

"And onion rings," he confirmed, handing me a coke as well.

"Mmmmm."

"Hey, gotta take care of my baby mama, right?"

"Fuck off."

"Love you too."

-==-

NOTES:

If you like this chapter, and don't want to wait a week to check the next one, well, it's over on the BCTS Patreon! In addition to Wednesday Knights, there's all kinds of other great tales there, both free (like mine!) and even more if you want to drop a buck or two in the site coffers!