Don’t get the impression I minded this. I didn’t want to date Abraham. I never thought he wanted to date me. That night, I was happier sitting with Roan and Reggie than I would have been dragging Abraham onto the dance floor, or trying to figure out how to best look coupley with the boy anyone in our widest social circle would have expected me to be coupley with. But they’d be wrong. We’re a terrible match, outside of tabletop gaming and heights relative to average.
“He does,” Roan insists. Her voice shifts as she speaks, as she probably shifts on the couch or deeper into the corner of her bed. Maybe her sister came into the room. Roan’s sister, Flannery, is ten, but she and Henny never hit it off as friends. They’ve also got the twin boys, now twenty, and still living at home and sharing a room.
The Garnets are not the type to say good-bye. Case in point: Roan, my own little barnacle. You should be so lucky.
“You know Abey,” Roan goes on, using our cutesy, secret version of his name—the one he won’t let us say because he finds it emasculating. “He’s far too tough to let on. It would be just like him to make a gesture and not sign his name to it.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Wildflowers? Besides: ‘I think about you standing in the rain.’ What does that mean?”
“Hmm,” Roan says.
I don’t have to think about it: one boy likes me. One boy has recently been sent away, and one boy has spent time with me in the rain, probably thinking there was mutual flirting going on. Fry.
I can’t talk about this anymore, because I’m wondering if this will mean another confrontation with the little trumpeter, so I ask Roan to tell me what’s happening at the Garnet house, and even when you talk as fast as Roan, this will take awhile. I’ll let my mind wander, daydream about Roan’s little crowded house on the north edge of the city, filled with curly hair, laughter, and love.
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CHAPTER 23
LESH TUNGSTEN
My orc is a proud new member of Greg’s guild, and on Saturday night, I’m making an appearance and squinting at the green text scrolling at light speed up the little chat window in the corner of my display. Trying to follow guild chat is like trying to read the writing on a spinning fan blade, with the fan set to medium, and with no grate in front of it so sometimes the fan clips your nose. I catch little more than the occasional word, because much of it is in acronym—acronyms that so far have no meaning—and the rest of it is emoticons, misspelled insults, and censored curses.
“You can turn the censor thing off,” says Greg at my ear. I’d forgotten he was on the phone. I’m still grounded, but what’s his excuse for being online tonight?
“How?” I ask, but quickly add, “Never mind. I don’t care. I have no idea what anyone is talking about.”
I’m leaning too close to my monitor, which is likely never a problem for Greg. His display is probably twice as big as mine. The guild chat might even have its own little monitor, next to the main one. He has three, and hell if I’ve ever cared what the extra two did before. I just always figured they were for a triple-overhead porn experience. Or maybe that’s just what I decided I’d use them for.
I’m digressing.
I lean back from the monitor, deciding to ignore guild chat until I get past the basics of the game itself, but then Greg is laughing.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Just ganked an elf twice. I’m camping the corpse.”
“I don’t know the words that are coming out of your mouth,” I say, and he invites me to group. “Where are you?”
“Check your map,” he says, so I do, and there’s his insufferable yellow dot, halfway across the world. I hop a giant bird thing, then head downstairs for a can of pop while my toon makes the trek without me. Mom’s in the kitchen.
“Working on your homework up there, I hope?” she says.
“Yup,” I say. Clearly this is a lie. But as I’ve been grounded a solid week, I think I’m entitled to some rebellion where I can get it.
She smirks at me as the fridge closes with its thwack. I’ve got a can of Mountain Dew in each pocket of my jeans.
“I heard you on the phone,” she says.
“Just with Greg.”
Her smirk goes smirkier.
“What?” I say, stopping in the kitchen doorway, and kind of enjoying the growing cold in my pockets. “Does grounding include the phone? Because if so, you need to say that in the rules to begin with.”
“Just make sure you get your homework done,” she says. “Show your dad that your work isn’t suffering. Show your dad that your grades will be good this year.” She takes a step toward me—it’s enough to cover the entire kitchen—and puts a hand on my arm. “Show us both that you’re doing your work, and we can probably convince him to end this punishment sooner.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, heading for the stairs.
“And two cans of pop, Lesh?” she calls after me. “Really?”
My ugly orc has landed now, and Greg’s toon—an undead rogue (they can turn invisible, as we know; this strikes me as unfair)—is standing next to him, jumping up and down, spinning in circles, making fart sounds and slapping my avatar’s face.
“Having fun?” I say after slipping my phone back between my ear and shoulder.
“Loads of fun,” he says. “Where were you? Come kill this elf with me again.”
“Where?” I say as he mounts his giant wolf thing. I don’t have a giant wolf thing. I have to run everywhere on foot. I think this is why all the avatars are in such great shape in this game: constant marathoning will do that. Greg is as patient as he knows how to be in-game, and he rides his wolf around me in circles, sometimes darting off in front so I know where to go, until we reach the body of a dead elf.
She’s beautiful, of course, and she’s head-to-toe in drab brown leather armor. She’s probably a rogue or a hunter. It’s hard to tell the difference when they’re dead. I flick the mouse wheel to zoom in on her face. Her hair is cropped and dark blue, and across the bridge of her nose is a tattoo in the shape of two crossed daggers. A rogue, then.
“She’s higher level than you,” says Greg at my ear. I realize he intends to wait for her to resurrect so he can kill her again. This must be camping. “You stand there in plain sight. I’ll stay hidden.”
“She’ll kill me,” I say. Hell, I’d kill me. You know it’s a problem when you’re rooting for your mortal enemy on the field of battle. I’m running the wrong avatar, but Greg doesn’t know I’m leading this double in-game life, in more ways than one.
Still, I obey. I stand right next to the corpse. I watch Greg fade into the shadows and prowl around us. His toon is maxed—level fifty, the highest the game goes (for now; everyone knows they’ll up the cap with the expansion, according to Greg)—so I figure this elf must be someplace in the middle: not as low as sad, ugly me, but not fully maxed. Otherwise, this wouldn’t be so easy for Greg.
“What am I waiting for?” I say, and as if on cue, the beautiful corpse begins to fade, and then vanishes. The elf has been resurrected, and she’s standing behind me.
The last place you want a rogue, by the way, is behind you.
I turn, but I’m far too slow—fat orcs being directed by unskilled noobs are bound to be slow—and she draws two blades, wraps them around my throat, and gives me a wicked slice. I can’t move, and my health has dropped to less than twenty percent.
“Help!” I shout into the phone. Greg is, predictably, laughing, but as he does, I watch the screen and he appears behind her. His misshapen, undead form is as hunched at the shoulders and middle back as Greg is at his console, but despite the awkward gait and poor posture, he makes quick work of our stunning enemy. She falls at my feet with a shriek of pain and then a sigh of relief in the face of eternity … until she rezzes again.
All Greg has to say is, “Nice. How long do you think we can keep this up?”
I switch phone shoulders. “Is there any reason to do this?”
“You can get some honor points,” he says, “but you’ll have to attack her next time. You can’t just stand there.”
“She’s, like, thirty levels higher than me,” I say.
“Doesn’t matter,” he explains. “I’ll do the killing. You’ll just get the honor points.”
This reminds me at once of my hunter and paladin friends, back in Svvetlana’s world. Somehow, though, their help—taking her through dungeons, from quest to quest, helping her get better gear, helping her find and defeat the toughest monsters and the wickedest bad guys—felt good. It felt righteous and honorable and giving, despite the paladin’s lewd comments and despite the hunter’s near obsession with Svvetlana’s pixelated backside.
In fact, I quite like Svvetlana’s pixelated backside too.
But this—this was just torture. It was senseless, sadistic, antisocial behavior.
“This is lame,” I finally say after the next cold-blooded murder. I wonder why this girl doesn’t just log off, come back later. Go have a snack, take a walk, whatever. Certainly this murderous d-bag I call Greg Deel wouldn’t stand here for that long, waiting for the resurrected elf to present herself for murder again.
Maybe she was enjoying it too.
“Don’t be a homo, Tung,” Greg says. “We’re not actually murdering a girl repeatedly. We’re messing with some faggoty noob who has no idea how to play his class. Any rogue should be able to rez, vanish, sprint the hell out of here without my killing him again.”
“Her.”
“Him,” he says. “This is not a girl. I promise. There are no girls on the internet.”
He’s righter than he knows, I think. Just the same, if Svvetlana is a girl—and she is—then I don’t see why this rogue elf can’t be a girl too, even if the human fleshy thing controlling her isn’t quite a hundred percent female.
“Well, whatever,” I say, putting on the most exasperated voice I can muster. “I gotta go. My mom’s on my ass about homework, and I’ve hardly done any all week.”
“Peace,” he says. And he’s gone from the phone, and I’m gone from his world. But an instant later, I’m back in fantasyland, though this time the scene is green and lush, and my toon is breathtaking, and there’s no green guild chat scrolling at breakneck speed up the little window in the bottom left corner of my screen.
There is, though, pink chat: whispers—private communiqués sent specifically to me, and by “me” I mean “Svvetlana.”
In spite of myself, in spite of the equipment in my pants, I smile. They’re happy to see me.
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CHAPTER 24
SVVETLANA
She wakes up at the inn. The fire is dying now, as is the light outside. But she feels rested, and she finds her robe on the floor beside the bed. She slips it on, then her sandals and slim metal crown. Her mace and talisman lean against the bare wood wall, near the door.
She stretches and collects them, runs a hand over the wood. “Hello, old tree,” she says in her voice like a stream. The wood seems to hum in response—a slow, forever type of hum.
“Svvet!” It’s a whisper, but a shout. The hunter Stebbins greets the refreshed priestess.
“Hi!” she says, and she is mindful of the brightness of her reply, and she wonders if it is bright enough, or too bright.
An instant later, the two have grouped, and they find each other in the wild. They are both level nineteen now, and both well geared with the spoils of many adventures in dungeons and the deepest, darkest caverns—holes of evil in the earth.
“Dewey and I are thinking about starting a guild,” Stebbins says. The two elves run south together, into a new region. To Svvetlana, it is entirely foreign, the first place she’s been where the opposite faction might attack.
“I don’t like this,” she says as a cold breeze moves in from the shore and brushes the back of her neck.
The hunter moves closer. He’d like to put an arm around her thinly clothed shoulders, she thinks.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Just keep moving. Soon we’ll train in riding, too, and then we’ll have mounts.”
“Okay,” Svvetlana says, but she can’t shake the feeling—she imagines an undead rogue is riding on wolf-back beside them right now, watching them, laughing to himself, juggling his enchanted daggers, ready to kill them both in one fell swoop. He’ll have the hunter bloody and dead in an instant, and his cat with him, and then he’ll kneel on Svvetlana’s chest, with his dirty blade against her long, white throat, and he’ll say, “Lol. Fag.”
“Let’s get inside,” she says, hurrying toward an elven building just off the path and stepping inside the wood-framed doorway. But Stebbins is in his own world, sending his pet in and out of the woods after small game. The hunter is kneeling over a fresh wolf corpse, carefully cutting away its hide, when from deeper in the woods flies a bolt of arcane fury. The hunter, with his skinning knife still in his hand, falls to the ground, quivering. His pet takes the second blast and collapses beside him, too dazed to join this fight and save his master.
“You got him!” comes a voice from the forest, and two orcs step into the clearing. They are both dark shamans, full of the elemental powers of earth and wind and fire. As the hunter comes to and climbs to his hands and knees, they both strike him again, knocking him back to the ground as they laugh in the guttural and half-witted way of their race. They’ll kill him.
Svvetlana takes a deep breath. She’s never faced these ugly, foul-smelling beasts from across the world before. They fight for the sake of fighting, and they thrive on the rush of blood and bone crashing against itself. They are more powerful than she and more willing and wanton in their violence. But if she does nothing, Stebbins will die.
The priestess closes her eyes and breathes in the dewy forest air. She encases herself in holy protection that, though temporary, will protect her completely, and then steps out of the elven building, her hands clasped before her chest. She focuses the light from within on the hunter and blasts holy power down from up on high. It cascades over him in a shimmering shower of light, like the stars themselves have rained down from the heavens for the sake of her friend. That is her power. That is her gift.
The hunter leaps to his feet, fully healed and protected by a holy force field of his own. Svvetlana quickly heals and protects the cat, too, and soon they’re both on their feet, fighting the two orc shamans—and winning. When one shaman falls dead, his death-wail as vulgar as his laugh, the other runs off.
Honor must not mean much to that despicable race, Svvetlana thinks as she hurries to the hunter’s side. “You’re all right?”
He nods. “They came out of nowhere,” he says, running his hand over his pet’s back, checking for wounds as he scans the tree line in case the orcs return in greater numbers. “We better get inside.”
Svvetlana, though, drops to one knee, grinning madly, still heady. “Did you see that, kitty?” she coos at the tiger, and it presses its forehead against her chin. “I was amazing, wasn’t I?”
“Absolutely,” Stebbins says, taking her elbow and pulling her to her feet. “But it’ll take more than amazing if they come back with friends. Inside, right?”
The two elves and the cat hurry into the elven building and find a bench and some water. “I suppose we’d better get used to it,” Stebbins says. “The player-versus-player aspect is about to get kicked into high gear. This entire zone is contested.”
Svvetlana sits cross-legged on the bench, her back against the wall, and accepts the hunter’s cat as it rubs against her knees. She stares at her wide-open palms-up hands, which glow and crackle, her holy spells still lingering on the skin. “We did a
ll right,” she says, barely there.
“I guess,” Stebbins says. “I’m still jumpy. I don’t like being ganked.” He pulls some meat from his pouch and tosses it to the cat. “We’ll be high level pretty soon, though. Then we’ll gank them.”
The priestess rolls her eyes. “Ganking,” she groans. “It’s not very noble.” Outside, a battle is raging. Orcs and the bull-people of the opposite faction are attacking this elven stronghold, launching flaming bolts from huge crossbows. “War. What is it good for?”
Svvetlana knows that the woman in charge here—she stands boldly on the balcony nearby, clad in heavy purple-and-green armor; she is the very model of elf pride and power—would like them to help. She will no doubt assign them their first quest in this dangerous new region. But Svvetlana is slow to approach her, to commit to this war fully. Her power to heal and to protect seem at odds with the battle raging across their world—yet it would be so valuable to her people.
“So will you sign our guild charter?” Stebbins says. He’d been speaking, Svvetlana realizes, for several minutes. Her mind had wandered. She thinks maybe it tends to do that.
“Do I become a member of the new guild?” she asks.
“Of course!” says the hunter as he stands. “That’s the whole point.”
“Just me, you, and Dewey?”
“Well, for now,” says Stebbins. “We’ll get more people, don’t wovrry.” He walks to the warrior woman nearby and speaks to her. She’s no doubt giving him instructions, telling him which orcs need killing, or what items need gathering. Stebbins will share these instructions with Svvetlana in a moment.
For now, she still rests, still leans against the living and breathing wood of the wall, and she lets herself smile, and she whispers to the cat next to her, licking its bloody paws, “We’ll get good people.”
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