...and then everyone died.

We had a session of Tom's D+D demon-body-switching etc. campaign.

( game summary )

And that's where we had to stop. We didn't *exactly* finish the scenario, and didn't *exactly* end up with a TPK, but at the end of the day our chances for personal victory were pretty grim, although it was likely we'd be able to foil the enemy's plot by smashing the machine. Several people didn't want to play out the end two weeks from now (because it would be 'boring') (?) so we decided to summarize the ending and call it a game.

( The summary: )

Dave was angry that a player had been killed without doing anything 'stupid'. Um... high level D+D involves death spells -- not much the DM can do other than just not use them, really.

Eric was really angry that the enemy wizard chased us out of the tower when we were trying to run away. Oooookay. I didn't realize the ground outside was home base.

Eric was also really pissed that we'd been given misleading information about the machine, and had chosen to ignore the true hints, which left us in the position where to get a true win we needed to escape with the machine instead of just destroying it. So we were tricked into doing counterproductive things -- isn't that supposed to be a good thing? Eric's attitude towards plot and role playing (he seems to hate them both) annoys me sometimes.

Festival of... um... food, and belly dancers!

After the not *entirely* unsatisfying end of the game, and some noncommittal discussion about who'd be running what next (most likely idea looks like Eric running Star Wars), I headed to Redmond Town Center, because I'd heard from... someone... that she was going to be doing some belly dancing on stage there at a festival of lights. Now, I didn't remember who exactly had said that, but I remembered that while it wasn't someone I knew, it was someone I'd met and would recognize, and... why the hell not? I haven't been to a festival of lights in a while.

I got there early, and shopped for some scifi books in the Borders there -- picked up the Fall of Reach, some future-post-everything books of the sort I like, and a Pterry discworldy thing. Then wandered around to see the festival.

It wasn't really very festive. There were lots of people around, but the only things to do were (a) shop, (b) watch crappy music on widely scattered stages, (c) shop, (d) eat free samples of food from various displays, (e) get told that no, none of the booths were actually *selling* any of the food they were giving out samples of, because that would be against the rules, and (f) try to figure out which was stage 'B', since they weren't labelled.

There weren't any lights.

But I was in place for the belly dancing. It was kind of boring, as far as dancing goes -- okay, really really boring. They weren't very good, or very pretty, or even very skimpily dressed (although it was really cold out, so I can't fault them for the last part). There was some humor to be had from their insistence that we ululate instead of clapping, though, and one of the songs was in 9/8 time, which is cool. Not as cool as 7/8 or 5/4 (which are prime), but it really was 9/8 and not 3/4.

And it turned out the person I'd come to see was Marta, from work, a tester that's seen as something of a joke by the testers I eat lunch with -- she's one of their leads, and they seem to hate *all* their leads who aren't actually physically present at any given point in time. So, yeah, not someone I really know. Ahwell.