It was a dark and stormy night.  Pigeons were chirping in the wind, and used car salesman spoke in bad French accents.  Three friends were crowded around a table, obviously suffering from too little sleep and too much sugar.  Then one friend made a  terrible mistake.  He insulted the favorite fantasy character of the other.

    "Bal is not a wuss!" yelled Mike.  "He may wear a pink cape, but he can still kick ass!"
    "Yeah right," said Dwain, "any one of my characters could wipe the floor with him."
    "You're both stupid.  My characters are always superior," said Josh.

    "Oh yeah?"
    "Yeah!"
    "Well," said Mike, rolling up his sleeves, "let's find out!  We shall pit our best characters against each other.  The owner of the character that wins will be declared the best writer in history!"
    "But how does a character win?" asked Josh, "I mean, the first person to write could just kill off the other 2 characters."
    "Ah, but a player can only win when all three characters agree on a victor," replied Mike.
    "Well," said Dwain, "let's get this party started!
                                        And so it began . . . .

    Balanthalus' pink cape fluttered in the wind.  He was unaware how he came to this dark alley in the middle of Krynn. He was unaware how he knew the name of this strange world he had just appeared in.  He sniffed the night air.  Something was wrong.  Two figures were advancing on him from opposite sides of the alley.  He did not know who they were, but he had an unexplainable feeling that they were his enemies.  He reached into his bag of tricks . . .
    The figures were still too far away to see, but he could see a brooch holding both of their cloaks on at the neck.  There was a "D" and a "J."  He looked down, and was startled to see an "M" holding his own cape.  He tried to shake the uneasy feeling off as he pulled the chaos fiddle out of his bag of tricks.  He struck two quick and discordant notes, causing reality to distort.  Chaos spilled through, causing two hobbit-sized minions of chaos to emerge from a pocket of non-space.  One spontaneously grew to the size of a brown bear, growing large fangs in the process, and launched itself at the one with the "D" brooch.  The other sprouted nine spiked tentacles and faced the other figure.
     Balanthalus decided that the minions would not be enough to kill his adversaries, and did not want to be cornered between two deadly foes in an alley.  He replaced the fiddle in the bag, and made an acrobatic leap.  He grabbed onto a clothesline about 13 feet in the air, then flipped like a trapeeze artist onto the rooftop 12 feet higher.  He stopped briefly to see the figure with the "D" make the first move. Somehow he realized that he knew this figure's name was . . .
 

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