I looked back to the screen. “I don’t know…”
“I figured you’d be a little hesitant,” he said. “But hear me out. I was thinking we could meet at Elassa Con next week!”
I blinked. Elassa Con? The idea of going to the convention alone was enough to set my heart racing. The idea of going to the convention and also meeting Conlan at the same time set my pulse going so quickly that if a doctor were to examine me at that exact moment they probably would’ve diagnosed me with hypertension and put me on medication.
I fought down that quickening of my pulse though. There was no way this was going to happen. There was no way I was going to be able to make it to Elassa Con, no matter how exciting the prospect of going to one of the biggest conventions of the year and meeting my mysterious online “friend” at the same time might be.
“I really can’t afford that,” I said. “I’m kind of a poor college student. It’s not like people in an MFA program are really loaded with money…”
“What if I told you I could take care of your tickets?”
I laughed. A laugh that caused movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see Samantha turning, raising an eyebrow.
I turned back to the screen. “Sure! You just pay for plane tickets and a hotel room for me and my roommate so I can make sure I have someone with me in case you turn out to be an ax murderer and we’ll call it a deal!”
I figured that would be the end of it. That would be all it took for him to admit he was just joking around, though I didn’t think it was a very funny joke and it was making me seriously question his judgment. As much as I would’ve loved going to Elassa Con, as much as I would love to meet him assuming he was actually the guy he seemed to be, there wasn’t a chance he was going to foot the bill for all of that. Not for me and Samantha. No guy was that into me. In my limited experience no guy who played Tales of Elassa would be so loaded that he could blow that much money on what would amount to a first date, for that matter.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work out,” he said.
I smiled even as I fought down disappointment. I knew it. Then my eyes went wide as I read the next words that popped up in the chat window.
“If you can’t swing the plane tickets then I’ll probably also need to get both of you tickets to the convention,” he said. “How’s that sound?”
I blinked. “Okay, that’s enough. This isn’t funny anymore.”
“Who said I was joking?”
“Well obviously you have to be joking. You’re not going to pay for me and my roommate to fly out and go to that convention.”
“Why not?”
Why not indeed? It was a perfectly reasonable question on its face that was absolutely ridiculous when examined closely. Why would some random guy pay for a girl he just met to fly out to one of the biggest conventions in the country so he could meet her? Why would he pay the added cost for my roommate just in case he was an ax murderer? For that matter, probably the most important reason even though it was the reason I was least likely to admit to, why would he do all of this for me? I wasn’t anything special despite the way he gushed over me. Despite the way we’d gotten along. Despite our whirlwind online romance.
I knew I shouldn’t be listening to that quiet voice in the back of my head, and yet it was so insistent. It made so much sense in this case. If a guy was going to do all of this just to meet me then there had to be some catch. There had to be something wrong with the situation. Whether that was that he was a crazy murderer or something else I didn’t know, but I just couldn’t believe that this sort of thing was happening to me. This is the sort of thing that happened in a cheesy romance is, not in my life!
“I’m dead serious Maia,” he said. “All you have to do is say yes.”
“This isn’t a joke?” I asked.
“No joke. I want to see you. I want to fly you out to the convention. I think it would be the perfect time for us to meet. All you have to do is say yes.”
I still didn’t quite believe it. Only he seemed so certain. So sincere. If this was a joke he was certainly dedicated to it, but something told me that he wasn’t telling a lie even if I hardly believed it. And yet even as that ever present quiet voice of self doubt was whispering that this couldn’t possibly be true there was another part of me that was jumping for joy and desperately hoping this was true. I realized that I desperately wanted to meet him in person.
I hadn’t felt this way about a guy in a long time. It didn’t matter to me that our romance essentially took place on a computer screen. It felt real to me, and that’s all that mattered. Now all I needed was to meet him in person and see if it was real in the real world, as they said in-game.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Don’t think about it too long,” he said. “It gets more expensive to get you out here every minute you wait.”
I chuckled. “But you don’t even know where I live.”
“Doesn’t matter. This is Elassa Con. The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to get a ticket into Indianapolis. And it’s going to get really hard to find a place to stay.”
I rolled my eyes. He was laying it on pretty thick. I wasn’t sure what to think. Surely if this was a joke he would’ve given it up earlier. Surely he wouldn’t still be going along with it, unless this was part of some sick joke and he’d been playing me all along. Unless this was his endgame. I’d known some pretty terrible people in my time online, and this definitely wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d heard about someone doing to somebody else.
And yet there was a voice that was louder than my nagging self doubt for a change telling me this was the real deal. There was a voice that was dueling with my inner pessimist and telling me to go for it.
I really needed to talk this over with someone. And there was only one someone I could think of to talk over something like this.
I looked over my shoulder. It looked like Samantha was in the middle of a raid, but we had a roommate protocol for that. “Samantha, I’m calling an emergency meeting!”
11: Emergency Meeting
Samantha didn’t even hesitate which made me grin. Emergency meetings weren’t something we took lightly. Usually they were for big events like a breakup or something like that, but the deal was any time one of us called an emergency meeting we dropped everything immediately.
It looked like Samantha was in the middle of a raid. Probably something important at this time of night, but she typed something and then she was pulling her headphones down and coming over to me with a worried expression on her face.
She glanced at my screen but I’d minimize the game. I didn’t want her to see my conversation. I didn’t quite believe what was happening. I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to have this conversation with her.
“Living room,” I said.
Samantha nodded. “That’s fine.”
We walked the short distance to the living room and Samantha flopped down on the couch. I flopped down on the other side and sighed. Samantha raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, out with it.”
I opened my mouth tell her everything and then closed it. Opened it again, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her what had been going on over the past couple of weeks. I couldn’t quite bring myself to explain my situation to her.
“Is it really that bad?” Samantha asked.
I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea!”
“Jessica. I just ruined the entire night of raiding because you called an emergency meeting,” she said. “If you can’t tell me what it is then I’m going to go back and try to salvage the night.”
I looked down. Looked back up. Smiled a smile that must’ve looked pretty sickly from the worried expression that crossed her face.
“Would you want to go to Elassa Con next week?”
Samantha blinked. And she fell back rolling on the couch laughing.
“That’s good Jessica! But really, what’s going on?”
“I figured
you’d react that way,” I said. “But I think we really did just get an invitation to Elassa Con. All expenses paid.”
Samantha sat up and locked eyes with me. Her eyes moved back and forth searching for any sign that this was a joke.
“Bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what I said at first!”
And so I sucked it up and laid it all out for her. I told her how I’d met Conlan in the game. How we’d been talking with each other over the past couple of weeks. I went into almost everything, how great he was, though I left out the bit about what we’d gotten up to in our dungeon run the last time we met up. I even pulled up his picture on my tablet which was sitting on the coffee table. She looked him up and down with an appreciative whistle and raised an eyebrow.
“Well he’s definitely a hottie,” she said. “But the question is, is he really who he says he is or is he just a guy getting some jollies online? Or a girl getting some jollies online?”
“That’s exactly what I was wondering,” I said.
And it surprised me to realize that the only problem I had with this whole scenario was the question of whether or not he actually was who he said he was. There was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to meet him. There was never any doubt in my mind that I had to meet him. There was just a quiet terror that if I did meet him he’d turn out to not be as advertised. He’d be just another story of online dating gone wrong, albeit a story of online dating gone wrong featuring a guy who apparently had much deeper pockets than most people in those sorts of horror stories.
“You really like this guy, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Yeah. Is it that obvious?”
“You have that ridiculous look on your face that you get whenever you’re reading one of those cheesy romance books.”
“Hey! Those aren’t cheesy romance books! They’re cheesy fantasy books. Big difference,” I said.
“Is there a difference? Heaving magic? Heaving breasts? Same stories, different fixation.”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“But seriously,” Samantha said. “What do you have to lose? I haven’t seen you look like this about a guy in awhile, and if it turns out you don’t click what’s the worst that happened? You got free tickets to the hottest convention in the country!”
“I know…”
“And if you get there and it turns out that he’s just as awesome as you expected then that’s even more of a win!”
“I know,” I said with a sigh.
“So what’s the hesitation? Free tickets either way, just make sure you get round-trip tickets instead of a one-way ticket to the pit in his basement or whatever.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’re horrible Samantha!”
“Hey,” she said. “If I’m going to be going along with you then it’s my job to make sure you don’t wind up getting tossed in some creepy pit in a basement. Hell, it’s my job to make sure both of us don’t wind up in a pit in a basement somewhere.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re starting to sound like me and my worst-case scenario problem.”
“Whatever Jessica,” she said. “I really don’t see what the hesitation is. Either you get free tickets to the convention and a great guy or you get free tickets to the convention and it turns out that lover boy is a complete slob. Either way all I’m hearing is free tickets.”
“You mean all you’re hearing is that you get free tickets because you’re coming along as my chaperone?”
Samantha shrugged. “So what if that enters into the equation just a little bit? Can you blame me?”
“Selfish much?”
She fixed me with the most wide-eyed innocence she could muster, which wasn’t much. “What can I say? If I’m selfish and my selfishness helps your love life then I’m all for it!”
I rolled my eyes. “So we’re really doing this?”
Samantha nodded. “We’re really doing this!”
I sighed. “You do realize, of course, that what’s probably going to happen is I agree to meet this guy and it’ll turn out he’s completely full of shit and we don’t get plane tickets or anything.”
Samantha shrugged. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “Okay, well it’s decided. I guess that means the emergency meeting is over!”
“That was quick,” Samantha said. “Mind if I go try to salvage raid night?”
“Sure thing,” I said. “Besides, I need to log back into the game myself.”
My fingers tingled as I logged back into the game and looked at my friends list. Sure enough he was still there. Apparently he’d been confident that I was going to make a decision pretty fast. I smiled. His name lit up and then my chat window started blinking.
“So?”
“We’re game if you are,” I said.
“We?”
“My roommate,” I said.
“Oh, right! Let me check something here real quick…”
I waited. I was definitely curious how this was going to work. How was he going to just pay for this? And then another thought occurred to me. In order to get a plane ticket you needed to provide identification, an address, that sort of thing. How was he going to pull this off? Because I wasn’t particularly comfortable giving him that information.
“Okay, all taken care of,” he said. “You should have email.”
“What?”
“Oh, and one more thing,” he said.
One more thing? As if all of this craziness wasn’t enough?
“Bring that costume. Can’t wait to see it! I’ll have one of my own ready to go.”
I blinked. My costume? Oh, right. Though I wasn’t sure that costume was first date appropriate…
“I have to get going, more work stuff, but check your email. Trust me.”
Only he wasn’t going to give me time to get out of that. Crap. I needed more information here.
“That’s it? What about how we’re going to meet once we get there?”
“Just keep your messenger up. I’ll take care of everything.” And he left with a smiley face. He was gone. I sat at my computer fuming for a minute. This was all very peculiar, and it was making me wonder if he’d gone crazy. If I wasn’t about to be the butt of an elaborate joke.
Curiosity burned though. I flipped out of the game client and fired up my email. I was expecting to see something from him, but nothing prepared me for what was actually waiting for me. An official communication from Elassa Corp. What the hell?
The subject line was an Elassa Con all-in-one VIP package. I clicked to open it. I gave it a once over, and then I gave it a second over. I double checked the email headers to make sure it wasn’t spoofed or anything, but everything look official and it wasn’t coming from some strange server in Nigeria or anything. Still, there was absolutely no way this could possibly be real.
“Samantha! Emergency meeting!”
Samantha let out a frustrated sigh, but once more she typed something and pulled her headphones down. It sounded like she’d been talking to somebody, but she dropped it as soon as I said the magic words.
“Most everybody logged off anyways,” she muttered. “What’s up?”
“Look at this email, does that say what I think it says?”
Samantha looked and as she did her eyes grew wider and wider. Apparently she was having just as difficult a time believing what had appeared in my inbox as I was.
“No way,” Samantha said.
“Way.”
“That says all expenses paid VIP trip to Elassa Con courtesy of Elassa Corp,” Samantha said. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get those? Forget expensive, this is invitation only shit right here! You don’t get this unless you have one hell of an in.”
“It has to be a mistake.”
“Well there’s a phone number down at the bottom. Call’em and find out what’s going on.”
So I called the number, but not before looking at the Elassa Corpo
ration website just to double check that the number was actually an Elassa Corp phone number. They definitely matched up. Either this was somebody who was going through an elaborate con, or it was somebody who didn’t expect me to actually call the number. So I dialed. After a few minutes on hold, after a few minutes talking with a very nice representative, I’d confirmed that yes, everything was absolutely one hundred percent true. I was now the recipient of an all-expenses-paid trip for two, VIP package, to the convention.
I put my phone down and I must’ve looked shell shocked.
“It’s real?” Samantha asked.
I nodded. “They confirmed everything. It’s all real. We just have to fill out our information and Elassa Corp gets everything squared away with the airlines and hotel.”
“Damn,” Samantha said. “Who is this guy? And how did you get so lucky?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m really looking forward to finding out more about this mystery guy.”
“Me too. Think he has a friend?”
12: Surprises
The Indianapolis Airport was a hell of a lot busier than I’d expected, though I guess that shouldn’t have been a surprise considering there was a major convention in town that was supposed to easily draw in a hundred thousand people if not more. There were a lot of Elassa fans throughout the country, all over the world, and they were all converging on this town in the middle of nowhere that happened to have a big convention center because of some sports game a few years back.
Though I guess it wasn’t entirely fair to call the place the middle of nowhere. The place was definitely a lot bigger than my hometown up in Wisconsin. It was even a hell of a lot bigger than the university town where I went to school. And from the looks of things at the airport pretty much everybody streaming through were people planning on going to the convention. There were a few people who were watching the people who were going to the convention with disbelief, but there weren’t many normals.
Boy Meets Geek Page 9