by Mia Archer
“I’m sorry to cut this short,” she said. “But I’m afraid I have some work to attend to.”
“Certainly,” I said. “It was nice making your acquaintance…”
I trailed off and hoped the question was obvious. Of course I knew her character's name because it was hovering right over her head, but there were points of role-playing etiquette to be observed and I was going to observe them to a fault considering how bad I'd just screwed up. She grinned and shifted, her enticingly lithe body moved this way and that and I found myself swaying back and forth hypnotized by the sight. “My lady elf may call me Kaira, if it pleases you.”
I grinned. So maybe there was a little bit of hubris to this one. Kaira was the name of the great human queen who unified all their kingdoms in antiquity and who forged treaties with the elves and other races. Of course it was also ironically enough Kaira's alliance that ended war long enough for scholar mages to turn their focus from fighting and delve too deeply and too greedily into arcane arts probably best left alone, but I’m sure she wasn’t thinking about giving some crazy mages enough breathing room to shatter the world a thousand years after her reign when she consolidated political power in this world. In my experience humans didn’t tend to think beyond their lifetime, though her reign was still within living memory for my people.
I arched a curious eyebrow at this intriguing woman and she looked me up and down as I did so. Normally I didn’t go for this sort of scene, but there was something about this girl that was making me enjoy this thoroughly. Far more thoroughly than I’d enjoyed a role-playing scenario in quite some time. I blushed and told myself it had nothing to do with the way my hair was standing on edge all over my body, the way my nipples were straining out, with that impossible delicious feeling between my legs that she was somehow able to elicit with just a few words despite my never having a particularly strong interest in the fairer sex before now. At least not that I'd admitted to myself, though I was starting to wonder after this brief interaction.
Not that any of that mattered. This would probably be the only time I met this woman. Assuming she was even a woman and not one of the many men who masqueraded as women in the game for various reasons. So many role-playing interactions were so many ships passing in the night never to see one another again, so why should this one be any different? So I figured I'd just enjoy myself and forget about any underlying existential crises that could potentially arise from how this woman was making me feel.
“Interesting name,” I said. “Hubris?”
Kaira fixed me with that easy-going grin. A deliciously sexy grin that made me want to kiss every inch of her lips even though that was completely out of character both in character and out of character, if you catch my meaning. And suddenly there was none of the clumsiness about her. Suddenly she was every bit the cocky role-player coming here for the first time, only with her it was somehow different. With her I got the feeling she could back it up.
“Not hubris,” she said. “Just the truth. Or a version of the truth. And it’s a family name.”
Well that was an answer and not an answer at the same time. Not sure what I was expecting. Either way I needed to know more about this mysterious stranger. I needed to know if this was a one-time thing or something more.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
I bit back a curse as the words flew unbidden from my fingers to my keyboard and into the chat window. That wasn’t how this worked. If you liked role-playing with someone then you added them to your friend list. You kept an eye on their location and tried to engineer a “chance” meeting to avoid your one promising interaction fading into obscurity. After a couple good role-playing sessions you’d maybe start sending them out of character private messages. Maybe start working on a collaborative story. But at the beginning everything was supposed to feel organic. It was supposed to seem like you were stumbling into one another by accident even if it was nothing but.
At least those were the role-playing principles that my guild lived by. Those were role-playing principles I’d helped draft as the mistress of role-playing. And here I was throwing my own rules out the window because I was intrigued by a mysterious woman who wasn't even the gender I went for, who I didn’t know anything about, and who could very well be a dude for all I knew given the statistical breakdown of gender in this game!
And yet as I sat there at the keyboard, as I thought about this session, the mysterious object she held, and most of all her incredible skill with the written word, I realized I didn’t give a damn.
Fuck the rules. Some of them were stupid anyways.
She grinned one final time as she faded away. “Perhaps?”
3: Digital Sleuthing
I pulled back from my chair and concentrated on breathing. If I didn’t do that then I was worried I might actually forget to breathe. That I might pass out at my computer chair, and then that would worry Megan and pull her away from her raid which always made her cross.
I looked over my shoulder to Megan. Really looked at her in a way I hadn't before. At least I tried really looking at her in a way I hadn't before. I felt bad for using my roommate like that but she was the closest girl available.
Megan was pretty in a geeky sort of way. Behind those glasses was a pretty face with nice blue eyes. And I had to admit that she also looked pretty good in her tight fitting pajamas that were her usual uniform when she was raiding. I'd seen her in those outfits before and always thought she looked hot. I'd always thought objectively that she had a nice figure, but did that mean I was attracted to her? I mean it was one thing to look at someone and know objectively that they were attractive and another thing entirely to look at an objectively attractive person and be attracted to them.
Wasn't it? That chat session had me all sorts of confused.
As I looked at Megan I thought back to that chat session and it was as though something clicked. I was looking at her with new eyes. I didn't just know she was sexy. I thought she was sexy, if that makes any sense. I found myself staring at my roommate's lips and wondering what it would be like to run my own along their soft contours...
And I immediately shut down that line of thinking. For one this was Megan, my roommate, and that was an avenue I definitely didn't need to be traveling down any more than I'd allow myself to start fantasizing about a male roommate if I was in that sort of situation. Second, I was scared exactly what that line of thinking meant. Where it would lead. So I shut it down.
I needed something else to focus on. Like that Elassa Shard she'd been carrying. That was safe. That was something Megan could help me with. That was a distraction. I tore my eyes away from Megan to her screen and her raid. It looked like they were in a lull. I’d learned to read the patterns of those high-level raids even if they didn’t interest me at all, if for no other reason than so I could get a word in edgewise with my roommate.
“Hey Megan, quick question.”
Megan pulled her headphones down and laid them across her neck. Turned and smiled at me. That was a nice smile. I ignored that thought.
“Shoot,” she said.
“Did they add Elassa Shards as a high-level item or something?”
Her face scrunched up. “Elassa Shards?”
I rolled my eyes. Megan was so obsessed with Tales of Elassa that there were times I forgot she hadn’t ever bothered to read the book series that had taken the fantasy world by storm in the past five years and caused the game to be created in the first place. I ran into a lot of people like that. I even ran into people who were into the role-playing scene who hadn't cracked open the books and didn’t know anything about the world’s lore.
It was a point of mild personal shame that my own roommate hadn’t read the books despite trying time and again to get her to. Of course at the same time I’m sure it was a small point of personal shame for her that her roommate wasn’t a hardcore raider.
“They’re items from the books that negate all magical power. If anyone tries to throw a magica
l spell at someone carrying an Elassa Shard the spell disappears as though they’re in some sort of anti-magic bubble. And if you get near someone using magic then it stops them from casting whatever spell they were working on,” I explained.
Megan thought about that for a moment, tapping her finger against her lip. “Nope, nothing like that in the game.”
Huh. That was interesting. Megan knew everything about everything in game, and if she said an item wasn’t in the game then the item wasn’t in the game. And yet I couldn’t deny what I’d seen with my own two eyes. Kaira used that item and my character’s spell animation stopped immediately. As though I was being surrounded by some sort of anti-magic field. Although I suppose it was actually my character coming in contact with some ones and zeros that some clever programmer had put together to make the magic animation stop when that item got close to me. Whatever. I tried not to reduce the magic in game to its component programmable parts.
I’d even inspected her character. There was clearly an item equipped in her offhand labeled as an Elassa Shard. I wished I’d gotten a screenshot of the thing now, because I was starting to think I was going crazy. Or at the very least I was imagining things.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn sure,” Megan said. She leaned back in her chair. “Something like that would be a game breaking item. Being able to interrupt any magic spell? The implications for dungeon runs, for PVP, would be incredible! Anyone who has something like that would be like a god in game!”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure,” Megan said. “Look, I’ll try pulling it up in the Elassa Item Database.”
She alt tabbed out of the game and pulled up the item database. There was a plug-in that worked in game, but she never used it because she claimed it affected performance. That was all stuff that was beyond me though.
I stood and moved over to her computer. Watched as she clearly typed in Elassa. Plenty of things came up. There were a lot of items in the Tales of Elassa database that had Elassa in the name.
Megan narrowed it down. Elassa Shards. Zero results. She modified the search so she was just looking for shard. There weren’t nearly as many results as what had come up when she typed in the name of the game, but there were also no combinations of the name of the game and the word shard.
I blinked. Was I really going crazy? Had I hallucinated that item?
“Nothing like that in the game,” Megan said. “Like I said, anyone who had something like that would be a major game breaker. They’re either a developer having some fun or a hacker doing one hell of a cheat that’s going to get them caught eventually.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Why do you ask?”
I shook my head and blushed. The last thing I wanted right now was to explain my encounter with Kaira. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I might potentially be going insane thinking I saw items that didn’t exist. The last thing I wanted was to think my strange role-playing partner was actually some sort of cheater or hacker. Partly because something told me she wasn’t the type, and also because I didn’t want her to get banned from the game. I wanted to see her again.
Now there was an odd emotion. I wanted to see her again? She was just an avatar and some text on screen!
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Just some low-level role-player bragging about something I figured wasn’t true.”
Megan shrugged. “That’s what you get from people who think it’s more fun to spend time making up stories about the game than it is to actually play the game.”
I fixed her with a sour smile. That dig wasn’t lost on me, but I was too adult and too confused at the moment to give as good as I got. I went back to my computer and logged out of my own game.
“You’re logging out already?” Megan asked.
I jumped. I hadn’t realized she’d come up behind me.
“I have class early in the morning,” I said. “I figured I’d better turn in.”
Megan looked at me long and hard. “Are you sure you’re okay? You've had class every other day this entire semester and you’ve never gone to bed before 2 o’clock. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Well I need some sleep now,” I said as I got up and made my way towards my room.
To be perfectly honest I needed some time away from the game. I needed some time to think. I needed some time to process what had just happened and why I’d thrown every rule I had about meeting people in game out the window. I certainly needed time to think about this strange new attraction I was feeling towards other women. More than anything I needed time to think through why I couldn’t stop thinking about somebody that I only knew as a few words and a game avatar on screen.
I felt like I was going crazy, and it had absolutely nothing to do with an item that seemed to not exist.
4: Creative Writing
“Magic? Really?”
I blinked. I wanted to reach across the table and smack that smarmy look off of that bitch's face. I don’t know why I expected anything different from a critique from the great literary master Carrie Arnold, at least she was a great literary master in her own mind, but there it was.
“Do you have a problem with magic?” I asked.
“I have a problem with genre fiction,” Carrie said. “You’re getting an MFA in creative writing. Why are you wasting your time with this garbage?”
I balled up a piece of notebook paper in my hand and concentrated on crushing that rather than reaching out and trying to crush Carrie. Not for the first time I cursed the day she’d ever sat at the same table as me.
“I don’t know, I thought it was okay and that stuff seems to be really popular right now,” Devon said, though the way he hesitated, glanced down at the short story I’d presented for a critique, told me he was thinking the same things but he was too polite to say them out loud. It wasn’t exactly the best defense in the world.
“Just because something sells well doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile,” Carrie said. “And besides, we’re here to expand our writing ability. We’re here to learn new things about the craft. We’re not here to write about witches and wizards fighting goblins or whatever the hell this is about. It's not like you're going to be the next Kaitlyn Morgan or anything.”
I rolled my eyes. I was surprised this crazy bitch even knew who Kaitlyn Morgan was. I suppose it just went to show how deeply the Elassa series had insinuated itself in pop culture that someone who "hated" genre fiction knew about the series.
I couldn't believe Carrie was talking like this! Wizards fighting goblins? There wasn't a single mention of wizards or goblins in the piece I presented for critique! She hadn’t even bothered to read the damn thing! And to think I’d wasted valuable time I could’ve spent playing Tales of Elassa a couple of nights ago reading the crap she’d vomited out about some girl who dumped her a couple of years ago. I’m sure she thought it was all very literary and mysterious, but the only thing I could think the entire time I read those twenty pages of crap was boo-hoo, baby’s still upset that one of her girlfriends threw her to the curb and she hadn't gotten over it yet.
But I wasn’t going to be violent. I wasn’t going to rise to what she was trying to start here. I was going to be the better person.
“Do you actually have any constructive criticism?”
“Yeah, stop writing this fantasy crap,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. There wasn’t a chance I was going to stop writing this “fantasy crap” as she called it. For one it was my favorite kind of book. For two I was spending so much time playing Tales of Elassa these days that I’d started taking some of the role-playing scenarios I’d worked up and changed some of the names, reworked some of the settings, and presented them to my class as original works rather than stuff that was based on a videogame I happened to be spending way more time than was strictly healthy playing.
Genre fiction was already a four letter word in this class. Carrie wasn't alone in that opinion.
They’d have kittens if they realized the stuff they were reading was fan fiction as well as genre fiction. Of course I still thought it was damn good even if it did start its life as role-playing scenarios for a video game.
“What’s your problem with this anyways? It seems like this goes a lot deeper than not liking what I wrote,” I said.
“You’re right,” Carrie said. “It does! I have to see this crap on TV, I have to see this stuff taking up space on bookstore shelves while real writing by real writers…”
She punctuated that sentence by smacking her own short story on the table in front of her. As though that emotionally stunted drivel was somehow real writing or something. Who wanted to read about leftover angst from a girl who was a couple of years out from the scarring life event that still seemed to dominate her writing? Not me, thank you very much. Give me the swords and the wizards and the goblins any day of the week.
“Real writing like this barely even gets a shelf at the bookstore. The public doesn’t even know what’s best for it! It’s ridiculous that crap like this sells so well and literary stuff barely gets a mention!”
“Well if they had a Nobel Prize in whining about literature then you’d certainly win it…” I muttered.
“What the hell was that?”
“What seems to be the problem here?”
Like a guardian angel professor Timms stepped in. She was an older woman with auburn hair that definitely looked like it came off of the shelf at Target or Walmart. Probably Walmart considering what the average college professor, even one with tenure, pulled these days. Not that I was judging or anything. I actually really liked her most of the time. She had a way of cutting through bullshit that only an older battle scarred prof who’d been through more than a few dances with undergrads could. Like right now as she stared down at us over her glasses.
She didn’t look happy.
“Carrie here seems to have a problem with genre fiction,” I said. “Such a big problem she can’t even follow the critique guidelines.”