Boy Meets Geek

by Archer, Arielle

  I sighed. No, there definitely wasn’t anything promising about a low level human who looked much the same as every other low level human. And he was making his way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I was the only elf in the room.

  It really was my fault for drawing the wrong type. I was something of an oddity. Most elf players tended to stay in elf zones. It was amazing how quickly the pseudo-racist undertones of a book series could translate into pseudo-racist undertones in an online role-playing game. Sometimes I thought the people who spouted nonsense about being superior to humans half believed their crap, even though it was probably a human on the other side of the computer doing the role-playing.

  At least I was pretty sure elves hadn’t discovered computers and video games. Not yet.

  That was one of the reasons I’d come to human lands. The Hokuten Order was ostensibly an elf guild with a few humans here and there. If I stayed where most of our official role-playing events were held, where my guild held the most influence, then I’d almost never make it to human zones.

  So in a way I was adventuring here in the hopes I might find somebody who surprised me, though so far I’d found nothing to disabuse me of the commonly held belief that the people who hung out at this particular inn in the human territories were nothing but a bunch of shallow idiots who were more interested in getting their rocks off with a little bit of two way erotica improv than in constructing a genuine storyline and getting into real role-playing.

  The human stepped up to the bar and turned to face me. He had a winning smile and I had to admit he was sort of cute in a rugged sort of way. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. I wasn’t one of those crazies who didn’t make a distinction between the character I role-played and reality. There were plenty of them out there, believe me.

  He leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost his balance. Immediately went flying and clattering to the floor sending several empty drinks that were waiting for the bartender to come and pick them up flying. I couldn’t help but giggle at this odd and pretty novel approach to an opening move.

  He stood and almost lost his footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with this one. I glanced to the sword by his side and wondered how he was able to use the thing without accidentally cutting his head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire.

  He finally managed to regain his footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. He just plopped down on a bar stool and took a deep breath.

  “Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” he muttered.

  In the game, in character, he was probably right. Only speaking from a strictly out of character perspective it was a wonderful way to make a first impression I pulled away from the keyboard and blinked. “Now that’s interesting…”

  “What’s that?” Samantha asked.

  “Oh nothing,” I said. “Get back to your raid. I’m sure they’re counting on you to click your mouse at just the right moment or whatever it is you do.”

  Samantha stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s a little more complicated than that, O mighty queen of the role-playing wordsmiths!”

  I stuck my tongue right back out at Samantha. Then I turned my attention back to the game and raised an eyebrow. Looked at this strange avatar before me. Stumbling and causing a mess like that was definitely novel. It was definitely something I’d not seen before. Usually this inn was filled with people role-playing for the first, and they were almost universally the type whose characters were secret gods or half dragon or some other nonsense.

  Which was pure poppycock. There were no dragons in Tales of Elassa. If there was one thing I hated more than people who used the game’s role-playing community as an excuse to do a little bit of one-handed two-person erotica improv, it was the people who brought in elements that were outside of the worlds established lore.

  That made me see red.

  So this mysterious person standing before me was refreshing. His character had a vulnerability. His character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of his enemies. No, he was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued once more. It was enough to make me want to know more about him. It was enough that he was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.

  He looked at me again and my breath caught. He had the most piercing blue eyes. Piercing blue eyes that were unlike anything I’d ever seen on a human before, though that might just be because I wasn’t looking rather than it not being a trait humans possessed. Obviously it was a trait humans possessed if he was looking at me with those gorgeous blinkers. I was getting scatterbrained. My thoughts were running away from me. I needed to get myself under control.

  “So what brings you to human lands? That’s a dangerous journey for a young elf such as yourself,” he said.

  I threw my head back and laughed, and yet secretly I was delighted. He called me a young. A common misconception, but it also meant that if he was reading my character sheet he wasn’t bringing it into the conversation. That was so refreshing. That was such a change from what I was used to.

  “I guarantee you I was probably fighting off scarier monsters than you could imagine before your great-grandfather even looked at your great-grandmother with a twinkle in his eye,” I said.

  A hundred years ago I would have been able to show off my age to a human by referencing their kings, but that wasn’t the case anymore. The humans hadn’t had a unified kingdom in at least half a century. Just another way that their world kept changing while mine stayed the same. Except for the Sundering, of course. That affected everybody. Still, there was far more potential for intrigue with a good human player. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so drawn to humans. It allowed for a richer role-playing experience than sitting around whining about how much it sucked to be immortal which is what your typical elf role-playing scenario boiled down to.

  Assuming you could find somebody good. I desperately hoped this gorgeous man in front of me was good.

  “My apologies lady elf,” he said. He seemed genuinely sincere. “But a pretty face on an old soul isn’t going to protect you from creatures with sharp teeth any more than my clumsiness would protect me.”

  My character blushed in game and out of the game I felt a flush rising to my cheeks. A surprising flush rising to my cheeks. What was wrong with me that this guy was able to get that sort of reaction out of me with just words on a screen?

  Focus. Get back in the game.

  I held up my fingers and allowed a flame to dance from finger to finger. He raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t react. Obviously this was a man who’d seen magic before. Or at least he’d heard of it. Either way he didn’t have the wide-eyed surprise that usually accompanied that display. A slight disappointment, but behind my keyboard I was secretly jubilant. I was so sick of people who thought that wide-eyed surprise was the only way to react to magic, as though anybody who lived in a world where magic was a commonplace thing would be surprised by the damn stuff.

  “Ah, I see,” he said. “A sorceress, I presume?”

  I winced at the human word.

  “If you want to reduce calling down the very forces that power this universe and bending it to my will “sorcery” then I suppose you could call me that,” I said.

  “Impressive,” he said.

  He dug into his pocket and pulled something out. I saw a flash of black and then the flames dancing on my fingers winked out. The tingling sensation that let me know I was drawing upon the magical forces that powered the universe disappeared at the same time. I blinked, looked at the object in his hand, and then my eyes widened in surprise. I hated that I reacted like that, but it was the only thing I could think to do in this situation. I did a quick inspect of his characte
r just to be certain.

  “Is that…”

  An Elassa shard,” he said. “It’s been passed down in my family, though I’ve never had occasion to show it off before. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to show it off to someone who would actually appreciate it.”

  The way he leaned against the barstool with a cocky smile on his face was only slightly ruined when he slipped in a puddle of something on the floor, no doubt left over from his spill a moment ago, and nearly sent the Elassa shard flying across the room. I cried out and held my hand out trying to catch it, but he did a surprisingly nimble dance and snatched it out of the air before it went flying too far. It appeared being constantly clumsy has given this strange man one hell of a set of reflexes.

  And a good thing too. If that really was what he said it was then it was more valuable than the combined wealth of the entire city. They were so rare in the books that kingdoms rose and fell based on possessing one. I didn’t even know they were in the game.

  “How did you get that?”

  He blinked, cutting those delicious blue eyes off from me for a moment. His perfect jaw line worked for a moment and he fixed me with an expression that told me he was wondering if I was entirely right in the head.

  “I told you,” he said slowly. “It’s been passed down in my family.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. How did you get that? I didn’t know Elassa shards were even in the game! At least I’ve never seen one before…”

  Of course that didn’t mean they weren’t in the game. It just meant that I hadn’t seen them in the game before. I wasn’t really a big fan of the higher level dungeons, and they were always releasing new toys to entice people to go through that particular treadmill over and over. It was entirely possible this was just some new bit of end game content I didn’t know about because I didn’t ever play end game content. It wouldn’t be the first time the developers took an all-powerful item from the books and reduced it to a trinket with a fun animation.

  Of course if that was the case then how did a lower-level player get his hands on one? He wasn’t even halfway to the level cap and he was walking around with something that shouldn’t exist. Color me intrigued.

  He shook his head and now he really was looking at me as though I’d grown a second head. Or as though I’d sprouted fangs like some of the bloodsucking creatures that totally weren’t vampires even though they sucked and blahed like a duck lurking along the paths to human lands after dark.

  “Game? What game are you speaking of? Are you quite all right my lady elf?”

  I pulled away from my keyboard and shook my head. Damn! Here I was complaining about people breaking character, complaining about people pulling in information they’d have no idea about, and I’d been so surprised by this strangely compelling man that I went and did it myself! I never did that. That never happened to me. What was going on here?

  And yet I couldn’t deny the way I was feeling talking with this man. There was something about his prose that went straight to my heart. There was something about his prose that went straight down to other areas. There was just something about him that was so compelling, so fascinating, so mysterious. And he was just some pixels on a screen!

  I put my hands back on my keyboard.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot myself for a moment.”

  He chuckled, a deep rich sound that rolled over my body and sent a bolt of pleasure running through me as it hit my ears. “All is forgiven my lady elf.”

  I sighed in contentment. There was something about the way that sounded. “My lady elf.” As though he was claiming me for his own. I blinked. What the hell was I thinking? Wanting a man to claim me for his own? Now that was entirely out of character both in game and out!

  “I’m sorry to cut this short,” he 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. He grinned and shifted, his rippling muscles moved this way and that and I found myself swaying back and forth hypnotized by the sight. “My lady elf may call me Conlan, if it pleases you.”

  I grinned. So maybe there was a little bit of hubris to this one. Conlan was the name of the great human king who unified all their kingdoms in antiquity and who forged treaties with the elves and other races. Of course it was also ironically enough Conlan’s alliance that ended war long enough for scholars to turn their focus from fighting and delve too deeply and too greedily into arcane arts probably best left alone, but I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about some crazy mages shattering the world a thousand years after his reign when he consolidated political power in this world. In my experience humans didn’t tend to think beyond their lifetime, though his reign was still within living memory for my people.

  I arched a curious eyebrow at this delicious man and he 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 man 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 he was somehow able to elicit with just a few words.

  “Interesting name,” I said. “Hubris?”

  Conlan fixed me with that easy-going grin. That deliciously sexy grin that made me want to run my lips across his face. That made me want to kiss every inch of his 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 him. Suddenly he was every bit the cocky role-player coming here for the first time, only with him it was somehow different. With him I got the feeling he could back it up.

  “Not hubris,” he 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.

  “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. 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 man who I didn’t know anything about!

  And yet as I sat there at the keyboard, as I thought about this session, the mysterious object he held, and most of all his incredible skill with the written word, I realized I didn’t give a damn.

  Fuck the rules. Some of them were stupid anyways.

  He grinned one final time as he faded away. “Perhaps?”

  3: Digital Sleuthing

  I pulled back from my chair and concentrated on just 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 Samantha and pull her away from her raid which always made her cross.

  I looked over my shoulder to Samantha. 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 Samantha, quick question.”

  Samantha
pulled her headphones down and laid them across her neck. Turned and smiled at me. “Shoot.”

  “Did they ever add Elassa shards as a high-level item or something?”

  Her face scrunched up. “Elassa shards?”

  I rolled my eyes. Samantha 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 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 magical 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.

  Samantha thought about that for a moment, tapping her finger against her lip. “Nope, nothing like that in the game.”

  Huh. That was interesting. Samantha 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. He pulled that out 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.