Initiative. (Brotherly Love.)

Jeremy was late to an afternoon of Dungeons and Dragons, and he was half-tempted to blame the signs for Geno's Steaks flashing and pinging like a whole half-block of signs in Vegas, but that felt easy -- cast him into the mold of a distractible canary being buffeted by misappropriated cat toys -- and he wanted to stay focused if he wanted to make the most of the fact that he was going to be playing Dungeons and Dragons with porn stars.

When his friend Kyle invited him to the session, he first thought he was joking -- how many porn stars were there in Philly, for chrissakes? he'd asked -- but Kyle wasn't joking, and neither were the players when he arrived: roll up the stats, tell us the backstory of your character, and let's roll for initiative. His feeling out of place to the reality of their work didn't look like was going to come up -- the three women and three men who were there ended up talking more about astrophysics than anything work related -- but then Jeremy decided to raise his hand.