by P. J. Frost
Gamer God
Warrior World Online | Book One
P.J. Frost
Copyright © 2021 by P.J. Frost
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For everyone out there who preferred the world inside the computer…
Gamer God
My name is Sid Coleo, and I hate my life.
I know people say that all the time. But I really, really, do.
See, I work in IT. More specifically, Technical Support.
And if that’s not reason enough for you—then you’ve never spent a day helping rude morons restart their computers day in and day out.
On top of that, I’m single, underpaid, in debt, and basically living the same crappy day over and over again.
The only times I feel truly alive are when I sit and play WarriorWorld. It's a wildly popular MMORPG in which I'm a wizard and my co-worker Coral is an elven huntress.
The game designers have just added a new update: A quest involving Erinye, the super-hot “Empress of the Furies.” Sounds fun, right?
Except suddenly, I'm trapped in the game for real as my character.
Now, with the help of Coral and Erinye, I have to find a way out of this digitally-rendered fantasy land without being slaughtered by weird beasts, dark sorcerers, and other players.
Which would be hard enough... if I weren't also falling in love with Erinye, despite the fact that she's just a collection of pixels and programming.
Ugh. This stuff never used to happen when I played Legend of Zelda….
‘Gamer God’ is the first book in the Brand New LitRPG/GameLit Adventure Series, Warrior World Online from Author P.J. Frost - This is the first book in the NerdsFTW Universe.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Thank You
About the Author
Chapter One
“Is it plugged in?”
“Yes.”
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose and wishing this weren't the tenth time I'd had this exchange that week. “Are you sure it's plugged in?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, are you absolutely sure?” I prodded.
“Yeah, I'm sure, alright?” Lisa From Accounting answered impatiently. (As far as I was concerned, “From Accounting” was her last name. If she had another one, I couldn't possibly have cared less.) “It just... won't turn on when I flip the switch. I keep flipping it, but nothing happens.”
Well, if you flip the power switch on something and it doesn't turn on, I thought, feeling a headache coming on, then flipping it a few more times isn't going to magically make it work, is it? Any more than mashing the call button on an elevator eight or nine times will make it show up faster. But God forbid I try to explain all this high-tech wizardry to you office drones, right? No, that's the kind of stuff they pay me the small bucks to handle.
“I even tried banging on the top of it a few times,” Lisa From Accounting added helpfully, “but that didn't help. At least, I don't think it did.”
“Okay,” I began, mustering the friendliest tone I could conjure up (hopefully without over-tipping the scales into the realm of obvious sarcasm). “First of all, banging on things? Doesn't make them work better.” As I said it, I imagined banging on the top of Lisa's head to see if it made her work better.
“It totally does,” she protested. “I've seen it lots of times!”
“No, you've seen Fonzie do it on reruns of Happy Days. That's not exactly the Scientific Method," I groaned. "Second – before I have to get up from my workstation and go all the way up to the tenth floor to check your computer myself – would you please just do me one small favor? Would you please take a couple of seconds to check and make one thousand percent sure that it's plugged in? Would you do that for me, Lisa?”
There were a few seconds of silence. Then she said, "Yeah, it's plugged in for sure. Now, will you come up here and fix it? I've got a lot of work to do."
Yeah, whereas I'm just sitting down here reading comic books and eating lollipops all the livelong day, I snarled inwardly. Poor Lisa From Accounting. No one knows your exquisite suffering.
“Fine, I'll be right up.” I hit the kill switch on the call (fervently wishing I could do the same to Lisa From Goddamn Accounting) and got up from my office chair.
My back and knees were in agony, and why not? I was in my thirties, I was out of shape, and I never got any exercise. My lifestyle gave new meaning to the word “sedentary.” I spent all day sitting at my desk as I coached the company's dimwitted employees through their technological woes... and then, when I got home, I spent all evening sitting in front of my computer.
Ah, but those few precious hours at the end of each day were what made my sad little life worth living.
Reflexively, I checked the time on my cell phone. Just a couple more hours, and I'd be freed from this depressing ant farm of a place. Then I could log into a whole other world and finally revert to my real self – the handsome and heroic version of me that no one at work knew.
Well, almost no one.
As I trudged past the reception area, Coral waved cheerfully and walked over, trying to keep pace with me. With her short legs and pear-shaped figure, it wasn't easy for her to match even my plodding pace. I slowed down a bit, allowing her to catch her breath. After all, she was the only co-worker I could stand to be around.
Coral tilted her moon-shaped face up toward me, giving me a big smile. She was dressed in her usual girlish nerd chic: A t-shirt with a ladybug pattern, a bright yellow sweater, purple leggings, Pokemon socks, and Converse sneakers.
Then again, I was hardly a fashion maven myself, in my ill-fitting corduroys and stained flannel shirt.
She thumped her fist against her chest in our traditional greeting. “Hail, Sydnar, Sorcerer of Soggoth-Nur!”
I pounded my chest in return. “Hail, Quorull, Huntress of the Midnight Elves.”
“Are you going to be playing tonight?” she asked eagerly.
I rolled my eyes ruefully. “No, as a matter of fact, I'm going cliff diving in Barbados with Elon Musk and Zac Efron after work, and then I've got that orgy with the female Olympic gymnastics team.”
She giggled, her upturned nose wrinkling. She was cute in a frumpy way, and I appreciated her ability to remain perky in a work environment as soul-sucking as ours was. "Oh, Sid, you're so funny! Anyway, so you'll be online? Because I figured we could check out that new quest they just added. 'Valley of the Monsters!'"
I nodded. “Yeah, I've been excited to try that one. The graphics look awesome.”
Coral nudged me playfully, winking. “Especially the way they rendered the big bad, right? 'Erinye, Empress of the Furies?' Bet you're looking forward to a showdown with her!”
I knew what she was referring to. In the posters and ads for the “Valley of the Monsters” expansion, the mostly-exposed breasts of the green-skinned villainess were so conspicuously huge and pendulous that they resembled a pair of oiled watermelons. She was like one of the naked animated gir
ls who sweated and gasped as they were pounded by throbbing alien penises in those annoying pop-up ads from torrent sites – usually accompanied by blinking words like “DON'T LET YOUR GIRLFRIEND CATCH YOU PLAYING THIS!” or “TRY TO LAST FIVE MINUTES WITH THIS GAME!”
I had no doubt that Erinye's improbable endowments were meant to lure legions of horny gamers, and I was sure that such a sexist and cynical campaign would work. It usually seemed to.
Me, I didn't log into the game night after night to drool and fantasize.
I did it so I could escape. So I could shrug off my overweight body and mind-numbing day job and become something more. A warrior. A champion.
Maybe it wasn't much. Maybe it made me pathetic, a loser in the eyes of most people.
But it was all I had.
“I just hope You-Know-Who doesn't show up again,” I grumbled.
“I'm sure he won't,” she chirped. “I'm pretty positive he still hasn't finished the 'Quest for the Ten Righteous Rings.'”
"Yeah, but 'Monster Valley' is the newest quest," I reminded her. "They just released it a couple days ago. So he'll probably figure that switching over to it would bring him more Twitch viewers since that's all he seems to care about. And then he'll make an obnoxious pest of himself and ruin everything like he always does."
Coral took my hand, giving it a small, hopeful squeeze. "Hey. He'll be there tonight, or he won't, okay? Either way, we'll deal with it. We toppled the Wyrm King of Grathnul, didn't we? We drove off the Gray Goblin Tribe and infiltrated the lair of the Shadow Serpents! We can handle Donal and his ego."
I wished that I shared her confidence. But Donal had been my bitter nemesis for weeks... whereas he barely seemed to notice me at all. Wherever I was in the game, whatever I was trying to do, he always appeared and managed to ruin everything. This was my one sanctuary, the only place where I was whole and happy, and now I couldn't feel safe from being bullied there either.
I asked for so little from life, and I couldn't even get that, could I?
“So, who needs your IT help this time?” Coral asked. “Brenda From HR? Steve From Payroll? No, wait, hang on... you look even more miserable than usual today. Lisa From Accounting?”
“None other.”
“Well, cheer up!” she prodded. “At least you get to work with computers for a living. I'd kill to be able to do that instead of working in Office Services, keeping track of paper clips and manila folders.”
“Yeah, except I don't 'work with computers,' though, do I?” I answered. “I wanted to. It's why I paid so much to get this dumb degree in Computer Science from an online university, even though most of the stuff they taught, I'd already learned in middle school. It's why I fought so hard to get this job. Computers are like... magic to me, you know? All those bits and bytes, all that binary. It's like spells, runes, incantations that can build or conjure anything from thin air. My whole life, all I wanted was to learn all I could about that stuff so I could be a kind of sorcerer in real life, instead of settling for just being one in a stupid game.”
“Hey, the game is not 'stupid,'” Coral interjected sharply. “The game is life.”
“You're right, I'm sorry,” I corrected myself. “I didn't mean to blaspheme like that. I'm just frustrated, that's all. I've got all this knowledge and skill, and instead of putting it to any kind of good use, I'm stuck dealing with the most idiotic examples of human error nine hours a day.”
“I know,” she said sympathetically. “But just a couple more hours, and you'll be a kick-ass wizard again. So hang in there for me, okay?”
I gave her a tired smile and a nod. “Okay. Will do. See you online tonight.”
I swiped my key card in the elevator and rode it up to the tenth floor. Lisa From Accounting's desk was all the way on the other side of the floor. I slowly made my way through the labyrinth of cubicles, picturing – not for the first time – a fearsome minotaur squatting in the center of it all, waiting to be discovered so that it could demand answers to its lethal riddles.
Maybe I have been playing the game too much after all, I thought wearily. The lines between fantasy and reality are starting to blur a bit.
If I didn't play the game, though, what would I do? What other activity could possibly be as fulfilling? What good were graphic novels and Netflix binges compared to being able to climb inside a fully immersive world of adventure night after night?
There had been plenty of other games before this one, of course. I'd dutifully played and mastered them since I was old enough to handle a joystick. Fighting games. First-person shooters. Supernatural noir mysteries. Zombie-killing chainsaw gore fests.
But never a game like this one.
Maybe it was the intricacy of the graphics, the inventive creatures, or the meticulous world-building. Whatever it was, no game had ever felt as real as this. The landscapes were so beautiful and haunting. The stakes always seemed so genuinely harrowing.
And best of all? It never ended.
The game had been launched a little over a year ago, and the borders of its fictional realms kept expanding constantly. There were always more kingdoms to explore and conquer – cities in the clouds, sunken undersea civilizations, mountaintop castles inhabited by dragons and necromancers. It never got boring or repetitive. It just kept getting bigger and more enthralling.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about it was that it was all completely free to play.
Oh, there were paid upgrade versions that came without advertising, certainly. But even those were only a couple bucks a month. The game's creator, a charismatic twentysomething programming wunderkind named Kolbe Tacker, could easily have made millions from it. It was the most popular MMORPG in internet history. So many people played it on a daily basis that the servers needed to host it were rumored to be impossibly gargantuan, just to ensure that it never crashed.
Which it never had, not once – a fact that only added to its lure and mystery.
In interviews, Tacker often mentioned that he wasn't even that into computer games. He bragged that he'd never actually played the game himself. He said that developing it in his head – building an entirely different universe – was enough for him because it allowed him to find his way to the big-picture concepts and outside-the-box innovations that fueled his more serious programming projects.
He was always extremely coy about what those “projects” were. My theory was that they probably had military applications, so he wasn't allowed to say anything about them. Coral joked that he was constructing a giant laser cannon on the dark side of the moon so he could hold the entire planet hostage like a Bond villain.
As I approached Lisa From Accounting's workspace, the idea of a death ray didn't sound so bad to me. Just a quick flash of green light, a loud "zap," and I'd never have to spend another minute in this damn office again.
“Hi Lisa,” I greeted her, trying not to sound like I had just been contemplating the relative joy of being fried to cinders. “So, it won't turn on, huh?”
“No!” she whined, reaching down and flicking the power button on the computer case a few times to demonstrate.
“Okay. Well, in a situation like this, there are a few different reasons why it might not be working.” I got down on my knees to inspect the case. “It could be the power switch itself. It could be something internal, like a bad power board or inverter. Or it could be a problem with the cord, like it's frayed...” I picked the unplugged cord off the floor with a sigh, holding it up for her. “Or, y'know, it's not plugged in.”
Lisa From Accounting blinked at it for a few seconds, her mouth a perfect red circle of surprise. “Oh. I thought it was plugged in.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Uh-huh. You do remember that I asked you to check and make sure it was plugged in before I came up here.”
“Yeah.”
“And you told me you had done that,” I reminded her.
“Yeah.”
“But you hadn't.”
She shrugged. “I mean,
I was sure it was plugged in, so I didn't want to waste time checking.”
I wanted to explode that she had taken the time to make me think she had checked it, which would have been the same as taking the time to actually check it... but I had already been written up a couple times for making those kinds of “observations” in situations like these, so it didn't seem worth it.
Instead, I dropped the cord back on the floor and started to get up. "All right. Well. The thing is that sometimes, these cords can come out of the sockets. Usually, it happens when the janitorial staff vacuums under the desks." Or when morons like you kick them without realizing it, I added mentally. "Now you know what the problem is, and you'll know to check for that next time, so...”
“Hang on,” she said, jerking her head toward the cord. “Aren't you going to plug it in?”
“You... you want me to...?” I couldn't believe my ears. Had she even thanked me for coming up all this way because of a mistake she'd made? Had she bothered to apologize? No, I was pretty sure she hadn't.
“You're already down there,” she snapped. “You're supposed to fix it, right? So stop giving me attitude and fix it!”
My shoulders slumped, and I crawled back under the desk. She had five different pairs of shoes lined up down there, and my face was inches away from them. The dark gray sweat-imprints from her feet had stained their insoles, and the earthy funk rising from them was like a mushroom farm, underlining my humiliation.
I plugged the cord into the outlet and wished I were jamming a fork into it instead so the current would put me out of my misery.
Chapter Two