amusedAnd then I realize that the ritual they need involves summoning a phoenix and killing it for its blood. And my heart leaps, and I'm like, "Holy shit ... PHIL!"
You've gotta understand. Phil is an NPC in the (waking-world) epic-tier D&D campaign I'm currently playing in. He's a celestial phoenix. The good gods gave him to us as a gift when we visited Celestia and complained about being forced to clean up after an evil trickster god. (By "clean up after," I mean fixing things like "moving two planets into the same orbit, setting up the impending doom of several billion people".) Phil is also, shall we say, mentally challenged ... but as long as we give him very specific tasks to apply his Massive Godlike Powers to, he can rock crazy cosmic shit with the rest of us.
So I start the ritual -- and then summon Derpy McCelestial in place of the standard, wimpy phoenix. Everyone blinks and double-takes, just long enough for me to point him at the evil. Phil flawlessly wipes the room with the demons, because he's just. super. broken. and the threats I'm facing are nowhere near his scale. Then I have him banish the demons from the entire rest of the station.
About this time I realize the whole thing is a LARP, and the DM is staring in shock at me because I just did a one-man nuke of every villain in the entire campaign at like level 2. I was meant to lose, in a big dramatic plot moment that would make me culpable for the impending catastrophe and justify the immense powers of the bad guys. Everyone else was meant to see all their friends get slaughtered around them, and become the lucky (or cowardly) survivors that managed to band together into a loose, hopeless resistance whose only option was to flee for distant space.
But all the notes for Phil are down on my old character sheet (I guess we were allowed to say we were friends with one NPC from our previous campaign, or something similar). I have all the supporting documentation. It's a clean loophole.
I walk out of the room into the newly demon-free station, from a room littered with bad-guy corpses, and all the other players are staring at me like I'm some sort of roleplaying god.