By Frampton Jones

Many of the people who wash ashore on our less than gentle coast bring odd customs with them. Whether we are bemused, or amused, we longstanding residents tend to leave them to get on with it. Dan was no exception in this regard. He shipwrecked here some years ago with a pocket full of peculiar dice and has ever since devoted himself to the collecting and making of such oddities.

Other folk who were not born here have told me that it is normal for dice to be evenly weighted and to merely show a number when they land, and that this sort of dice need not be banned in the way that traditional island dice are, and that Dan didn’t know any of these things.

It has long been the responsibility of the library to keep the Book of Summoning safely under lock and key. No one has ever felt confident about trying to destroy it, but every time someone tries to read it, predictably terrible things happen.

I now find myself wondering whether Lady Selina Arkham Kyle managed to extract the ominous tome from the library before falling to her death. Certainly, it is not there now.

Dan shows all the signs of having tried to make a version of Endbert Fhtagen Jones’s Dice of Absolute Power. The name should have been a giveaway that this would not be a risk-free undertaking. One of the oldest Mrs Jones – Commemorative Jones – remembers when Endbert was on the island and told me that the unspeakable portal to a place of unnameable horror that is apparent on Dan’s forehead, is a sure sign he was trying to make the dice.

Legend has it that the person who can both make and control the dice will have the power to walk between worlds. The dice has an irrational number of sides and to successfully make one is apparently to break the physical laws of existence. So on the whole, I think we must rejoice in his failure, even though he was a nice chap and we’re all going to miss his cookies.

At this time, the unspeakable portal to a place of unnameable horror does not seem to have expanded. Whether we will have to throw Dan into the sea when the tide is going out, remains to be seen.