Rose holds up a blobby little depiction of a human figure with flat feet to let it stand upright. "One of these things."

"Okay. Run me through the details of the rules real quickly?"

Rose does. She's surprisingly patient.

"- okay, I think I'm ready to play a game."

"Then let's play."

Audrey draws and places her first tile, and puts a meeple on a road. "There we go."

"So I was wondering," says Rose as she draws and places her tile. "Why did you call me, anyway?"

Audrey places a tile. "... basically because I wanted to play a board game but Hannah was busy. You were the only other person I knew that it wouldn't be weird to be friends with."

"The escorts'll play board games with you if you need a partner, you know. They're not just here for sex." Draw, place.

"I kind of have a hangup about people who get paid to be nice to me." Draw, place.

"What, like store clerks? And the people you get your coffee from when you go to a cafe?" Place. And a meeple.

"I mean, they're not supposed to actually like you." Draw, place.

"But you use their services anyway. I know an escort here who's basically a professional dungeon master. And before you ask, yes, both kinds, but she reserves scenes to people she knows from playing in her campaigns." Place.

"That... seems like an alright way to be."

"Yeah. Are you placing that, or?"

"No, I think I'll put it over here. There, your turn."

Place. Meeple. "The escorts here who do sex anytime are generally people who are very down for whatever in general anyway. Basically the only difference between them and us is that they get to stay here forever and get paid for it." 

"Sounds like a pretty good job, actually." Place. Meeple.

"Yeah, but to be Staff you have to walk through a Door of Night and I'm just not ready for that trust fall." Place. Meeple.

"A Door of Night?" Place.

"The Bowers has these doors and if you walk through one you'll find yourself - transformed. Made into the thing you want to be, in your heart of hearts, put in the position that best suits you. They scare the willies out of me." She places another piece.

"Wow. Sounds like some pretty hardcore magic." She places a tile and gets one of her meeples back.

"Yeah, they say the Doors are from Sunaira Herself. I heard that someone who walked through one got turned into a bird permanently, and another someone got sent to a land of marauding fuckbeasts. Apparently both were quite happy with their decisions, but with the level of mental modification Sunaira can do..." She places another tile.

"Not hard to just fix that. Yeesh. You're right, those things are freaky." Place.

"They're called the third level of the Bowers after the Rosethorn Hotel and the Blackberry Gardens, but personally I think I'm comfortable with two." Draw, place.