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Die Siedler von Catan is my favorite table top game.
I just came back from the strangest game.
I was invited to a party by a friend of a friend, and it wasn't until I arrived there that I found out that my friend had something come up and wouldn't be able to make it. Though I was a bit hesitant, I didn't want to be rude to the friend of my friend, so I knew I had to stay at least for a polite length of time.
The reason I was hesitant was because this friend of a friend was... a bit... weird. Weird in the Hot Topic sense, where I was reminded of a slightly overweight vampire whenever I saw him. Weird in the poetic sense, where he would occasionally stop in the middle of a sentence, look towards the distance and say a few rhyming lines about the dark nature of the universe, and then go back to his original sentence sentence as if there had been no interruption.
I was hesitant. Nervous-sweat-level hesitation.
It was different from what I expected, since when I was lead into the living room there was only two other people there. I had been expecting an entire assembly of people, but there was only a young man and a young woman sitting on a red velvet couch.
The most obvious feature about the young man was not his pale face, long black hair, black eyeliner and mascara, black clothes or even the odd symbol tattooed in the center of his forehead, but the leash that he held. He had a leather leash attached to a leather collar around the girl's neck.
She had hair that had been bleached white, and it looked frail, limp and wispy as if it would soon start falling out. Her face might have been attractive, once, perhaps, but there was too much makeup, and a hollow expression that filled you at once with both pity and despair.
My eyes, the wandering little bastards that they are, followed her thin neck down to her substantial cleavage, and further down to her exposed midriff, and that's when I realised that she and the young man were wearing the exact same outfit. My eyes darted between the two of them, checking to see that the young man was even wearing the same knee-high boots, the same "why-did-you-even-bother-wearing-clothes," tight black spandex pants.
The friend of my friend introduced us immediately. "[My Name]," he said to me, "This is Plouton."
The man who called himself Plouton stood up, and extended a hand covered in rings and bracelets. "Mesmerizing," He said, and I took that as a form of greeting. I shook his hand, and his eyes widened the moment our flesh made contact, as if I had stung him. He held onto my hand though, and after an extremely uncomfortable four seconds, he said "You have a monumentous aura. I like you."
After letting go of my hand, he turned to my friend of a friend, and said "Sanguinatus, what shall we play today?"
Sanguinatus, whom I mistakenly thought was named Thomas, said that we should wait to see if anyone else arrived. We'd wait until he finished preparing refreshments and then we would start. He then went off to the kitchen, leaving me with the young man and woman.
I looked at the young woman, realizing that I hadn't been introduced to her, and was about to ask her name. Plouton cut me off, by asking me what I thought about infinity.
After a brief moment, I just said I try not to think about it.
He started to laugh. Not a laugh I had been expecting from his slightly higher than normal voice. It was a deep, harsh laugh, as if he were trying to cough up his lungs with each sudden blast. I was actually repulsed to watch him laugh like that, but when he finished, he didn't bother to acknowledge my look of revulsion but instead smiled. "Yes, the infinity of death is a harsh subject, the only true infinity there is. Oh, how we all try to not dwell upon the deepest infinity, that which tears the mind and damns the soul. I knew I liked you, yes I did."
I gave a weak smile. Hopefully, this was some weird joke, and he just liked to dress funny and pretend he was the creepiest person in the whole world, and that in a moment he would reveal that he's just a normal guy and I'd be able to spend the evening in a normal fashion.
He then asked me what I thought about love.
I pretended to think about the question, but instead I thought about how to avoid answering it. The simplest solution came into my head almost instantly, and I asked him what he thought about it.
Perhaps the greatest mistake of my life. He began a speech, one that may have been rehearsed, about his views on love. I just stared at him, humming the Power Rangers theme in my head, hoping that I could preserve some sense of my sanity.
"...love is not a creation, it is an existence, but not one that actually exists..."
"GO GO POWER RANGERS"
"...when death and darkness truly meet, then there and only there does true love really..."
"GO GO POWER RANGERS"
"...just how Descartes proved that something can't exist without thinking it does, love is unable to think, and thus cannot..."
"MIGHTY MORPHIN' POWER RAN-"
Thankfully, by the thousandth or so time that I repeated my mantra, Sanguinatus returned, carrying a tray with a pitcher of ice tea and two bowls of chips. Plouton, who mistook me reliving my childhood inside my head for enjoying his speech, apologized for having to cut it short, since he was now rather thirsty.
He yanked on the leash and without a word the girl stood up, poured a glass of ice tea, handed it to him, and sat back down.
"Do you Catan?" Plouton asked me.
"Cat-tahn?" I repeated, confused.
An instant later, Sanguinatus had taken the box containing Settlers of Catan off his shelf, showing it to me. Yes, I had played it once before, and told him so.
"Excellent. I think that there should be our chosen game for tonight. I always feel that it is best played with three people," Plouton said, reclining deep into the couch.
"Three? But there's four of us."
Plouton's eyes widened. "No. There is only three."
He stood up, yanking the leash as he did so, and the girl gave a small cry of surprise and pain. Dragging the girl behind him, he went into a different room, closed the door, and started shouting at her.
"HOW DARE YOU. HOW DARE YOU PRETEND TO BE HUMAN. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. I SWEAR I WILL KILL Y-"
"So, what color do you want to be?" Sanguinatus asked me, acting as if nothing was happening.
I stared at him. Plouton continued to scream at the girl, and the silence within the living room continued. Finally, after briefly glancing at the door, Sanguinatus whispered, "I know it's different, but it's just how they choose to express themselves. Just like you might hold a girl's hand, he chooses to hold a leash. It's not all that different, really."
"Blue," I said, picking a nice, happy color.
Plouton and the girl returned after a few minutes, and both of them had black lines down their cheeks, signs that tears had been shed. They sat down on the couch, and not by my choice (but by his choice of pants) I saw that he had an erection, and made no attempt at hiding it.
I was at the point where I just wanted the night to end, to end in a way that I wouldn't anger this sociopath and have him follow me home and gut me while I slept. I began to unpack the board pieces and place them on the coffee table, but Plouton asked me to stop.
"I have a better table," he said simply.
With a sharp yank of the leash, the girl stood up, and then taid down on the table. She remained there, her pale, flat belly exposed, and I simply stared down at her.
Sanguinatus began to arrange the board pieces. For those that don't know, Settlers of Catan uses hexagonal tiles (with 6 different kinds of land which each produce a different kind of resource [except for the desert, which produces nothing]) which are placed within a frame depicting water and boats. Made out of thin cardboard, it had a hard time staying in place on most tables, and this table was trying but failing to keep from trembling.
Sanguinatus quickly ran out of room, having started rather low on her abdomen, and Plouton casually lowered her pants, to a point where I felt the shame that she apparently didn't. She was perhaps a single centimeter away from being completely exposed. I opened my mouth to protest, but I realized that Plouton was now breathing rather hard, rather quickly. His eyes were wide, wide to the point where I was scanning the room to find something that I could bludgeon him with in order to protect myself.
The moment passed, and we each recieved our settlement and road pieces. We selected where to place our first two settlements, with slight difficulty coming from how our table was shivering. After recieving our first resource cards, we began to play.
Settlers of Catan is a game where you compete to build settlements and roads, obtain development cards, and turn settlements into cities. In order to do so, you need resource cards, which come in 5 different varieties, which need to be combined in specific ways. For example, Wood+Brick creates a road, and Sheep+Grain+Rock gets you a development card.
Resources are generated by having settlements placed in the intersections of land tiles. Each land tile has a number between 2-12, and on each turn the dice (2d6) are rolled, and whatever lands share that number produce a resource, and all settlements that surround that land get that resource.
Players are expected to trade and negotiate, using the resource cards to barter with the other players. It's a game that requires both cooperation and competition, trust and betrayal, and has a surprising amount of depth to its strategy.
I don't know why I told you all this, because none of that mattered.
Having settlements that gave me good access to wood and brick, I was building roads rapidly, to a degree where I managed to actually restrict Plouton to a small portion of the board, blocking him with my roads. This is something that's rather difficult to do, and not entirely a great idea, since the remaining player didn't waste his resources and now has a larger area to settle. Since Plouton had no room for new settlements, his only hope was to upgrade his settlements into cities and to get development cards. He was at a heavy disadvantage, since he would have fewer settlements to produce resources, but he could still win if he had excellent luck.
He did not have great luck. Slowly but surely, he got more and more upset, as every dice roll seemed to go against him. On a poor roll, he would place a hand on the girl's neck and squeeze her, choking her until I turned to look at him. Before I could say anything, he would let her go, leaving marks on her pale skin.
By the time I realized the game was purely between me and Sanguinatus, it was too late for me to remember that I was sitting across from a guy who worshipped death and would probably end up killing us all if he lost. Plouton steadily grew more and more violent as the game progressed, digging his fingers into different parts of the girl, slapping her, and even tracing thin lines of blood across her skin with a spiked ring. She didn't protest, and even more remarkably managed to keep the board from shifting too much.
I didn't know what to do. I felt like I should do something for the girl, but this was something that she wanted. I didn't know if I would be doing her a favor if I let Plouton win, preventing him from taking out his frustration on her, or whether she would actually be unhappy that she would miss out on a chance to be further mistreated.
Sanguinatus looked like he would be the winner of our game, as he had a far better board position. However, he didn't look particularly happy. The game was now just a distraction to focus on in order to ignore Plouton getting aroused as he kept abusing the girl.
As I tried to avoid looking at her, I didn't realize for quite some time that the girl was flushed. She was steadily losing control of her breathing, and the board became more and more messy as she herself was becoming more and more aroused.
We continued to play, until we were simply going through the motions. Sanguinatus had clearly won, and we were just waiting for him to obtain the 10 victory points to finish the game. I was making poor trades simply so he would get the resources he needed, but luck wasn't producing what we needed.
Finally, after what felt like years (though it had barely been an hour and a half), he finally managed to win the game. There was a brief murmur of congratulations, and then Plouton, unable to contain his frustration, spread apart the girl's legs and then slapped her as hard as he could on her inner thigh. Her abdomen spasmed upwards, sending the pieces everywhere.
As she began to gather the pieces up while Plouton and Sanguinatus organized them inside the box, I set the alarm on my phone to go off in three minutes before quickly replacing it back into my pocket.
Once the game was put away, Plouton turned to Sanguinatus and told him that he deserved a prize for winning. "You may have her for two nights," he told him, "you may do as you wish."
Just as Sanguinatus cheerfully accepted, my alarm went off, and I picked up my phone, stepped away from them, and started to hold a quiet pretend conversation. I then turned back to them, saying that I was really sorry, but that I had to leave.
Sanguinatus simply said that it was nice that I could come, but Plouton looked rather angry. He stood up, yanked on the leash to force her to stand, and then aimed a kick at the girl's leg, making her fall to the carpet. Then, as if he had done nothing of the sort, he walked over to me, extended his hand, and said that we simply must play again sometime.
I gave a false smile, and then left the house, leaving the strangest game I've ever played behind me.
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