For the first time in years, a green comet is expected to be visible from Earth. Amateur and professional astrologists, as well as the general population, are amped up for the once-in-a-life time event. Stores sell more telescopes in the weeks leading up to the viewing than they sell in a year. Restaurants and entertainment venues organize parties. Artists produce merchandise in record time.

Jongdae and his friends plan something smaller.

It’s originally Chanyeol’s idea. He found a game that sounded fun and ropes in Baekhyun, who co-owns his brain cell, and they convince Jongdae, who will try anything once. Most surprising is Kyungsoo; he just couldn’t make up an excuse fast enough.

“Are we actually gonna be able to see the comet tonight?” Chanyeol eagerly asks, propping the door to Baekhyun's apartment open with a foot. “Most times something like this happens, it’s overcast!”

Kyungsoo shrugs and shakes his head. He nudges their pile of shoes into a somewhat neater row where they're not as likely to trip over them. “News said so.” The news has said so before and disappointed a lot of people. The meteorologist evidently spins a board, chucks a dart at it, and reports what it hits as factual science.

“When it is supposed to be here?” Baekhyun opens the fridge and grabs an armful of bottled sodas. “Something specific like 9:21?”

“Something like that. I think we can just go out around a quarter past and see if the sky’s clear.”

“And what are we playing in the meantime?”

“It’s a co-op board game!” Jongdae laughs. They four playing cooperatively? If there was another team, maybe they’d work together. When it's just themselves, they try to sabotage one another given any opportunity.

Chanyeol digs out the game box, shaking to make his backpack let go and fall to the floor, and presents the cover to his friends. “This is just the core game. There are, like, six or seven expansions.”

“A horror game?” Only two of them are remotely brave, and it’s only Jongdae who somehow faces chainsaw-wielding serial killers in a haunted maze and befriends them.

“Mystery adventure horror!” At his friends less enthused response, he deflates a little and looks at the box. Two heroes are illustrated standing atop a steam engine, shooting machine guns and hand guns at reaching tentacles while the stand-in conductor watches from below. “I thought it looked fun…”

The board game is the sort of thing that more illustrative and card-based than rolling a die and following paths of blocks. As they investigate boxes and remove cards and pieces, they grow more confused and less enthused.

Jongdae claps a hand on his shoulder and smiles. “We’ll try anything once, but I hope you kept the receipt.”

“In order to win the game, investigators need to solve three mysteries. Each Ancient One has its own deck of mystery cards with a unique set of tasks that we, as the investigators, must resolve before the doom counter runs out.

“Each round has three parts,” he instructs, holding up three fingers. “The action phase—where each player takes actions for their character like moving spaces and gaining tickets for use on the train and boat routes, the encounter phase—where players draw encounter cards and react to problems they face in their location, and the mythos phase-where the monsters act.”

“And we’re supposed to fight them somehow?” Kyungsoo frowns at the cards laid in front of him, leaning over and tilting his head to read Baekhyun’s. Jongdae turns his cards to be seen easier.

“The dice are for combat and checks in order to gain something or prevent something. The numbers on your character cards are how many dice you roll. Otherwise, it’s all card based. Everything will be on the cards we draw. ”

Baekhyun hums as he paws through the box they're using as a bowl to randomly pick monsters from. Skeletons, ghosts, and ghouls are familiar, but some he looks at look like someone shook up the alphabet and poured out some letters. “So we need an imagination.”

“I believe in you, Baek.” Jongdae twists in his seat; Baekhyun kicks his chair and whines. “I’ll be the musician.” Baekhyun flips through the character cards and picks the spy because it sounds the coolest. Chanyeol claims the soldier, and Kyungsoo accepts Chanyeol’s suggestion of the martial artist.

“It suits you,” he comments, rubbing his neck and recalling painful memories.

“What bad guy are we going to fight?” Kyungsoo lays out the cards of their options. The only Lovecraftian monster any of them know is Cthulu, but its difficulty is high, and no one feels particularly confident.

“The rules suggest someone. Supposedly it’s ‘the most straightforward.’ Can’t even begin to try its name, though…”

“We don’t need to name it to kill it,” Baekhyun declares after squinting at the Ancient One’s name. “I'm gonna make balloon animals with its guts!”

Setting up the game and sorting about the cards takes up nearly half an hour. Chanyeol blames the rule book for not being clear as he divides the cards from their muddled pile and shoves them at his friends to shuffle and cut. They line up at the bottom of the board in front of Kyungsoo.

When they finally begin to play, they take turns consulting the quick help guide. Everyone can move up to two spaces a turn and then must do a different action, or a combination of another to actions, as long as they’re different. It’s slow going.

“How long is a game supposed to take?” Baekhyun lays on his arm, lifting the gate tokens and letting them fall back into a pile, like