On your way to spend the Summer with your Dad in Kansas City, your old family friend Jason Gucinski gives you his own old copy of the D&D Red Box. Yours, now.
This is it. You've been in the room a while but you came in from the side. Now, you have THE KEY THAT OPENS THE FRONT DOOR.
It's Summer 1989! You're 14! You got D&D! WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO? HEAVY METAL, LIKE ALL THE OTHER D&D GUYS, RIGHT?!
WRONG.
Nossir -- you're Doc Rotwang! (except you haven't seen Metropolis yet and have no idea who that is, and won't be called that for another 10 years, but there are anyway), and you're not on the same wavelength as your peers. No! Not at all, man, you are outside, for better or for worse.
You're on your own.
You're not very socially adept; your Inner Fonz lies deep inside, under layers of culture shock and (probably) second-hand PTSD from the whole Mexico thing. You're working on it, though, but you're doing so from within your idiosyncratic bubble filled with fantasies of hope and lack thereof, your dreams of being a storyteller on a literally cinematic scale, the forlorn expanses of your loneliness --
-- amplified by the rush of hormones common to all your age.
So...maybe you're not that different, after all, here in 1989, with D&D Red Box in your hand...?
...naw, screw that. The hell you aren't.
