Gamer Girl

by Mia Archer

  At least that seemed to be what was happening considering this was a game where someone became their avatar. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

  “Right this way,” she said.

  We stepped into a wider hallway with people walking to and fro. Most of them were women who were dressed in just as little as the women who’d confronted that troll and taken me captive, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  “You are so close,” the goddess whispered in my ear. “If you destroy her you can fulfill your destiny! You can fulfill my destiny! Don’t leave!”

  I stumbled. There was a strong urge hitting me to turn around and go to face down this Calixia bitch. There was also a strong desire to get the hell out of here so I wouldn’t have to worry about someone torturing me in the game or anything.

  “Is something wrong?” the blue-haired girl asked.

  “Jesana?” someone asked. “What are you doing out here? And why do you have the captive with you?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Something told me this was the part where things stopped working in my favor. Because of course things couldn’t continue to go well for me. That wasn’t the kind of experience I got to have in a game that had been kicking my ass six ways from Sunday ever since I first logged in.

  I turned and found myself facing down the blue skinned hottie I’d rescued. She looked at me and seemed genuinely sorry that she was doing this, but she also seemed determined. Like she wasn’t going to let the fact that she regretted doing this actually stop her from doing it.

  “Tori?” I asked.

  30

  Date With Destiny

  Tori hissed and leaned in closer.

  “Don’t refer to me by that name in here!” she growled. “I don’t need people knowing what my name is in the real world.”

  The timer at the bottom corner of my heads up display blinked a few times as the line indicating how much time was left disappeared. The girl, Jesana, blinked a couple of times and shook her head like she was trying to get rid of whatever fog had clouded her mind.

  “What the hell just happened?” she asked, looking around in confusion. “And why the hell are we in the grand hall? I was supposed to take you to…”

  “To Calixia,” I said. “I know. We’ll get there eventually, but right now I have some questions.”

  “If you think I’m going to answer your questions you have another thing coming,” Tori said.

  “Maybe I do have another thing coming,” I said. “But first the questions. Is Chelsey this Calixia bitch everyone is so terrified of around here? It'd be nice to have a concrete answer on that.”

  “You will take her and bathe her in fire!” the goddess screamed in my head. “You will teach her what it means to be my true champion and cleanse this world!”

  I stumbled again and shook my head.

  “Are you okay?” Tori asked.

  “Listen, if you don’t want me calling you by your name then you should probably tell me whatever the fuck it is you want to be called in here,” I said.

  “Toriana,” she said, looking down and muttering it so I almost didn’t hear her.

  “Excuse me, but what did you say your name was?” I asked.

  “Toriana,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Y’know for all that you’re trying to keep your secret identity a secret you’re sure doing a shitty job of it.”

  “Shut up,” she hissed. “What the hell are you doing out here, and how did you convince Jesana to bring you up here?”

  “You mean instead of to Chelsey?” I asked.

  She hissed again and leaned in so we were the only ones who’d be able to hear what she was saying.

  “I already told you that you shouldn’t be saying her name,” she said. “She’ll kill you if she finds out!”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Her and what army?”

  “Look around,” Tori said. “This whole place is her army. She has friends in very high places in the game and in the real world. Is that really the kind of person you want to take on?”

  “I’m not sure what I want to do,” I said, having a look around and seeing a “grand hall” that mostly seemed to be full of women wearing clothing that was every bit as skimpy as what Tori here was wearing.

  Which was a nice distraction, don’t get me wrong, but I found myself wondering exactly how the hell all these women were going to be anything approaching a threat to yours truly.

  “Look. I think you’re stuck in a shit situation with someone who’s pushing you around so I’m going to cut you some slack,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to act all terrified of the stupid bitch who’s got you so terrified in the first place.”

  “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?” Jesana asked.

  I felt something burning inside me. The same sort of feeling I got when I’d been using the goddess’s abilities. I figured that was why she’d been talking in my head. I looked down at my hands and they glowed with some sort of magic that didn’t look at all like the magic I’d been using so far.

  Tori looked at it and licked her lips. “What the hell is that?”

  And I knew in that moment that I could use this. I could reach out with this magic and make them mine. I could put both of them in my thrall using this goddess’s power, and I could make sure they got me the hell out of here.

  Only as I thought of doing that it also struck me that it was a monumentally bad plan. After all, even if I did manage to get the hell out of this place there was the problem of how the hell I was going to get away from Chelsey in the real world.

  She'd be able to track me down. She'd already shown she was able to do that. Both in the game world and in the real world. I could run, but she was going to find me eventually.

  I didn’t want the occasion of her finding me to be when she had some of her mooks kneecapping me in some quiet corner of the Academy because she wanted to get that screenshot.

  “Y’know what?” I said. “I think it’s time for me to go and see the big boss after all.”

  “You… what?” Tori asked.

  I glanced around the room again. There were women all around the edge dressed in proper armor with proper weapons rather than the practically nothing that the obvious player characters were tooling around in.

  “Are those guards around the edge NPCs?” I asked.

  Tori followed my gaze across the grand hall. She looked more and more confused.

  “Well yes,” she said. “But why would they…”

  “Because I don’t want to feel bad about doing this,” I said.

  I was getting better and better at this every time I used it. I figured that meant it was time to see if I could target this ability I’d discovered. I tapped all the guards I could see, took a deep breath, and let loose with the energy that’d been threatening to break free as soon as I realized how fucked I was.

  The guards all wavered as the blast of energy hit them. They weren’t the only ones who stopped to look around either. No, there were plenty of players who were stopping to look and see what the hell was going on.

  Not that any of them mattered. No, I was a woman on a mission now.

  “Right,” I said, glancing at the bars to see how long I had. It seemed this ability worked longer on NPCs than it did on player characters, because I had a timer that was measured in minutes rather than in seconds. “If you could introduce me to this Calixia bitch then I think we have to finish something that I started when I cut off her hand in El’huinn.”

  “What are you…”

  Tori stared in surprise as the guards stepped through the crowd and formed a bubble around me. It felt kind of nice to have that kind of protection, for all that I wasn’t sure how long it would last when the shit hit the fan. I didn’t know anything about this ability, and not knowing could really fuck me over if I wasn’t careful.

  Still, this seemed like a time when I should maybe throw caution to the wind. Especially since I didn’t have m
uch time. If I was going to get to Calixia and kill her ass before she had a chance to send more of her mooks at me then I was going to have to do it sooner rather than later!

  “So we go this way?” I asked, turning to look down the end of the so-called grand hallway. “Towards the end that looks like a massive throne room or something?”

  “Um, well yes?” Tori said. “But what the hell are you doing here? You’re not supposed to do this!”

  “Yeah, well I’ve been doing what I was supposed to do since I started playing this game, and honestly I’m kind of sick of getting my ass handed to me because I keep doing what I’m supposed to do.”

  “But she’ll kill you!” Tori said.

  “Maybe she will,” I said. “But at least I’ll be confronting her head on instead of running and hiding. That’s got to be worth something. Nice to know our meeting was never anything but an excuse to off me though.”

  She stared at me like she was looking at an alien lifeform. I suppose that in a way someone from the surface talking to her like that would be like being confronted with alien life.

  Hell, from the point of view of someone born and raised in the elevator it was probably worse than running into an alien. At least aliens were something that very probably existed if some of the data astronomers had been getting from some of the star systems we were reaching towards were anything to go on, but someone from the surface standing up to someone from the elevator?

  That never happened. It was a good fucking thing for me that we just so happened to be logged into the digital equivalent of a fantasy world right now.

  “You need to stop!” someone said.

  A group of women who were very similar to the ones who’d taken me captive appeared. Some of them had weapons, and some of them were holding out their hands and letting little magical spells dance across their hands in a demonstration of exactly what they were going to do to me if I made the mistake of keeping on this course.

  It was too fucking bad for them that I was so over this shit.

  “No,” I said.

  The wave of magical energy responded to my command. I seemed to be getting better and better at this every time I used it. Though there was still the issue of the timer on the mind control spell, if that’s what it was, not running for very long. I had maybe five to ten seconds for each of them.

  Not to mention the part where I felt icky even doing something like this to them in the first place.

  “Could you all be dears and drop your weapons and stand right there?” I asked in my sweetest and most polite voice.

  The women all dropped their weapons. They stood there slack-jawed and ready to obey my every command. Unfortunately for them standing still was about the only command I intended to give them.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “You have no idea how helpful that is. Ladies?”

  I turned to the guards and motioned. A series of actions appeared on my screen that were apparently commands I could ask them to use. The one I was interested in was attack. I selected all the women who’d come to stand in my way and then hit the attack button.

  The battle was bloody, but short. I suppose that’s the best I could hope for. They all stood there and took it while my newly minted thralls did their thing, though it appeared that the mind control did break when someone was under attack.

  So the last thing they all saw before they were sent to the nearest respawn point was the guards who were supposed to be defending this particular bit of in-game real estate coming for them with swords drawn.

  Given all the shit I’d gotten from these bastards since I started in the game I figured it was the least they deserved. Bitches.

  “What are you doing?” Tori said, her voice almost a shriek at this point.

  I reached out and grabbed her. I was so pissed off at this point that I didn’t give a damn how pissed off she was that I was upsetting what she saw as the natural order of things in the world.

  “You’re going to shut the fuck up,” I said. “Because I’m rescuing you as much as I’m rescuing everyone else that bitch is commanding, and it’s time you start getting used to the way things work.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, tears coming to her eyes. “She’s powerful in the game and in the real world. She’ll…”

  “She’ll do what she’ll do to me,” I said. “But I’m not putting up with this shit any longer. She might have all the power in the game and out, but I’m going to fucking kill her in the game. And if she decides to come at me and threaten my life in the real world then I’m going to kill her there too.”

  It was a boast that was more bravado than anything, but I figured it was a boast I could make good on. Maybe. If we were to the point where she was going to try and take everything from me then I didn’t have much of a problem taking everything from her.

  I kept right on walking. Though there was the little problem of the timer on all of my enthralled guards counting down towards zero. I figured that wouldn’t mean anything good when they finally reached zero.

  “Give me just a moment,” I said.

  I waited for the counter to run out and then hit them with a refresh. Again the spell went out and hit them, and again their eyes glowed with that strange magical energy. Only this time the timer was running even longer than the first time around.

  It would appear that the more I used this spell the longer its duration went. That was something else good to know. I still wasn’t entirely sure where the hell it came from, but at least I was getting better at using it!

  “There we go,” I said, nodding to Tori and Jesana. “So we just pop through this door here and we find Calixia?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Right,” I said. “Time for me to have my meeting with destiny, in that case.”

  I pushed open the doors and stepped inside to see what there was to see. I figured I was probably about to die in the game, but I was over caring about it. I was over letting these assholes push me around.

  31

  Calixia

  I stepped through the door with perhaps a touch more confidence than was strictly deserved under the circumstances. After all, I was entering into the lair of someone who could probably have me killed a thousand times over in the game world and in the real world without much in the way of consequences.

  Only there was that whole thing where I was beyond caring to balance it all out. So when I stepped into the room I marched right up to the woman walking towards me waving her hand with her eyes wide. Like she couldn’t believe I was actually impertinent enough to enter the room.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed, her eyes darting behind her even if she didn’t actually look behind her. “No one is allowed in here!”

  “Oh I’m so sorry,” I said. “You see it would appear that I have an appointment with Calixia, and I wouldn’t want to miss that because some low level flunkie suddenly decided to get in the way.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Clearly she didn’t like me talking about her like that. Her eyes moved to Tori and narrowed even further.

  “What are you doing here Toriana?” she asked. “I’d think that after everything that’s happened recently you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her.”

  “I sort of didn’t have a choice,” Tori said, her eyes darting to me and back. “She’s the one with the screenshot.”

  The woman’s eyes widened even more. She took a step back and pulled out a dagger, but before she could get any use out of it I made a little wave of my hands and my guards descended on her.

  I probably should’ve been disturbed by her screams considering there was an actual human behind those screams feeling the swords plunging into her, but I honestly couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck.

  No, all I cared about was I now had a route straight to Calixia. And there she was, right front and center in this place that looked like a cross between the wildest nightmares of an unholy amalgamation of Casanova, Sappho, and Christian Grey.

  Chelsey sto
od in all her bright red glory. Her tail lashed behind her in clear irritation, and it was difficult not to think of her as an oversized red demon cat for all that she looked a hell of a lot hotter than any cat I’d ever run across.

  I mean sure I was well aware of some people who were into the whole anthropomorphic cat thing, but I wasn’t one of them. People in those dark corners of the Internet could get their freak on and I wouldn’t judge, but that didn’t mean I was going to be into it.

  She’d also regrown the hand. I guess that’d happened when she respawned after the inn explosion. At least her dying in the inn explosion was my guess as to what’d given her hand back.

  Of course more interesting than all that was what was behind her. And I’m not talking about the way her behind looked in an outfit that was mostly leather strips covering all the XXX-rated stuff so that it was merely a very hard R rating.

  No, more interesting than all of that was the statue behind her. It glowed with a strange magical energy that reminded me of the magic I’d been using.

  Because of course it reminded me of the magic I’d been using. The statue was none other than a better maintained version of the statue I’d seen out in the middle of that forest.

  “What the fuck?” I breathed.

  “Is something wrong?” Jesana asked.

  “You bet your ass something is wrong!” Tori said, her eyes darting around like she was terrified of what we were doing here. “We shouldn’t be in here and we shouldn’t be pissing Chelsey off!”

  Her eyes went even wider and she put her hands over her mouth as she realized she’d just said a hell of a lot more than she probably should’ve. I imagined that what she just said went agains the whole vow of secrecy thing that everyone seemed to be living by in here.