by A. J. Markam
“Probably because of the way you do it,” the blood elf teased. “She’s all, ‘I DON’T LIKE IT.’”
“Hardy har har,” the troll said, unamused.
After my experience, all of the others stuck with the treasure.
“Wise choice,” I said sardonically, wishing I’d done the same.
“See, man, you brought us the real wisdom,” the orc said. “Even if you couldn’t use it for yourself.”
That seemed a depressingly apt description of my life at the moment.
24
By the time we said goodbye to our group, the sun started to set. I was exhausted, as were Stig, Meera, and Blutus, so I decided to call it a day. We went into the city, I cashed in all my worm glands and treasure, and came up with 41 gold.
Not too shabby – although with all the slogging through sand-filled labyrinths I’d done, it felt like I should have earned about five times more. But I was content with the haul.
Meera got in a snit again about Blutus coming home with us, so I gave him and Stig a handful of silver each and told them to meet us at the dungeon tomorrow morning.
I overheard a snatch of conversation between the two demons as they walked away.
“Why don’t they want me to visit them?” Blutus asked Stig.
“You are not missing anything,” Stig said. “It is awkward to hear the humans doing the – ”
fwap-fwap-fwap
I sighed and turned away.
Meera looped her arms around my neck and gazed up into my eyes. “Would Master like dinner, followed by a nice, hot bath… and then punishing his bad little slut?” she whispered.
“Yeah… why don’t you go on home and get that started,” I told her.
She pouted. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll be along shortly.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to run an errand first.”
“Why can’t I come with y– ”
“MEERA, GO HOME and get dinner ready,” I snapped.
Her collar glowed, she did an about-face, and then walked off towards her high-rise.
Damn that collar made my life so much easier.
I was planning on going back to her place, but something had been nagging at me, and I had to take care of it first. And having an angel with me wasn’t going to make it any easier.
I made my way to the bridge and entered the Underneath. Then I systematically made a search of every bar, stopping to talk to every bartender and bouncer.
“Hey, have you seen a blue demon recently? Big head, skinny little body, talks like this?” I asked in a high-pitched voice.
But no one had seen Dorp.
I had a drink or two during my search, I’ll admit.
Okay, maybe more than two.
After a couple of hours I gave up and headed home. My conscience kept nagging at me, though, despite all the alcohol I’d consumed.
Soon something else began to nag at me: the feeling that I was being watched.
I looked back a couple of times, but didn’t see anyone else on the dimly lit street. I figured I was just buzzed and paranoid, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling.
When I was getting close to Meera’s, I passed through a particularly dark stretch between streetlamps. That’s when I darted into an alleyway and waited.
Sure enough, thirty seconds later a bunch of figures came scuttling along in the darkness. They’d stayed far enough back to keep me in sight the whole time, though they’d stuck to the shadows to avoid detection.
Demons. At least a dozen of them. Including a black, scaly one that looked like a certain children’s animated movie dragon.
The demon I’d saved Meera from.
He and the others must have followed me from the Underneath with the plan to find out where I was living. Maybe even ambush me.
Shit.
I was about five minutes’ walking distance from Meera’s building. What the hell was I supposed to do?
I could try taking them all on at once, even though it would be suicidal trying to fight them all by myself.
I supposed I could hit them with Doomsday repeatedly, then alternate Darkfire with Soul Suck to keep me alive as long as possible.
…or I could just use Invisibility and run away.
Discretion is the better part of valor, right?
I seriously considered it – but the street we were on was a straight shot to Meera’s. There was no way in hell I could run a quarter mile in 20 seconds, which was how long I would have until the spell ended. Then they would see me and follow me. If I did manage to make it to her building before they caught up with me, they would still know exactly where we lived.
An alternative was I could sneak down a side street and try to avoid them. That was a pretty good idea, but then I would be giving up my sole advantage of knowing exactly where they were. I might stumble into them again by accident as I tried to circle around to Meera’s.
Or… I could sneak past them in Invisible mode and spy on them.
In the end, that’s what I decided to do. It appealed more to my booze-addled, thrill-seeking brain.
Besides… fuck these assholes.
Just as they were about to reach my alleyway, I triggered Invisibility and snuck through their ranks.
“Where is he?” Toothy muttered to himself as I passed by just a few feet away.
“Why do you care so much about this human, Xathos?” asked one of the other demons, a frightening figure that looked like a skinned minotaur, all pulpy red skin and veins of fat.
Xathos, huh?
I preferred ‘Toothy.’
“He killed Strok and Ilis,” Toothy snarled. “Plus he’s Warlock scum.”
Another demon hidden in the shadows said, “But the imp stays with him without a collar. And I heard someone say he was the one who liberated Abaddon.”
I wanted to yell, Yeah! Doesn’t THAT get me any brownie points?!
“What do I care for the slaves of Abaddon?” Toothy sneered. “If they were real demons, they would have never been enslaved in the first place.”
Wow. What an asshole.
“Not to mention he kept you from getting the pigeon,” snickered another demon.
Pigeon?
I assumed they were talking about Meera.
Must be demon slang for angels.
My Invisibility was about to run out, so I darted down another alleyway as they crept past.
I hid there and listened as their murmurs died out. Then I waited until my three-minute cooldown expired, and triggered Invisibility again.
And so the mouse became the cat. Or, well, at least an invisible mouse.
I would run up the street until I saw the demons and hide just as the spell was running out. Then I would stay concealed until my cooldown was over and I could use Invisibility again.
It was sort of like a reverse game of Hide-And-Seek, and it was a bigger rush than anything I’d experienced since griefing the Four Douchebags.
It took me almost 15 minutes to get to Meera’s that way, but I finally reached her high-rise.
The demons had long since passed her building when I triggered my final Invisibility spell. I snuck past the unsuspecting doorman and entered the golden portal.
“Where have you been?!” Meera asked frantically when I walked into the penthouse. “I was worried sick!”
“Shhh,” I said, and quickly strode past her to the window. I cast All-Seeing Eye and sent it down to street level, thirty stories below.
The demons were several hundred feet further up the street, still looking for me in confusion and arguing amongst themselves.
“He must have gone in a building and we just didn’t see,” one said.
“No, he played a trick on us,” Toothy snarled. “I know it.”
They continued to bicker until the Eye ran out and I found myself standing by the window once again.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“What?” Meera asked fearfully.
“They’re demons,” she said, as though they were beneath contempt.
“But they know where I am!” I said, then added, “…roughly.”
“They can’t get in here.”
“You don’t have any locks on the door!” I exclaimed.
“I’m the only one who decides who can come through the portal. There’s no way they can enter without my permission, so stop worrying about them and come to dinner,” Meera said, then added slyly, “We’ll take a bath together afterwards… among other things.”
Dinner was nice. The bath was nicer.
And the sex was a pleasant diversion, even if I did have to fantasize about Alaria to come.
As Meera slept afterwards, I cast the All-Seeing Eye several times and checked out the dark street.
I didn’t see anything, but that made me feel only slightly better.
They were still out there in the shadows somewhere. Waiting.
It took me a long time to fall asleep.
25
There was one little bit of blowback from my adventure with the Four Douchebags that I wasn’t anticipating.
As I was lying in bed the next morning listening to Meera move around the kitchen, a flashing red computer window appeared in my field of vision.
LOG OUT IMMEDIATELY AND REPORT TO SUPERVISOR.
Uh-oh…
What the hell is THAT about?
As far as Meera was concerned, I was still asleep, so this was the perfect time. I logged out and woke up in the immersion unit in the Westek lab.
After a quick bathroom break and a couple of glasses of water to rehydrate, I made my way to my boss’s office.
I racked my brains the entire way there. What could be the problem? Was I spending too long in Exardus? Was I grinding the dungeons too much? Did he want me to move on? Was the kinky sex with Meera throwing up some kind of warning signs in the system?
I was getting over Alaria… sort of… so it couldn’t be my job performance, could it? Was he going to make me go see the damn therapist again?
I found John’s office, which had a floor-to-ceiling glass window with a great view of Westek’s tree-lined campus. His office was all modern furniture and clean lines with a desk devoid of anything but a sleek computer monitor.
I knocked lightly on the open door. As soon as John looked up and saw me, his face clouded over.
“Ian,” he said brusquely, and gestured to a chair on the opposite side of his desk. “Come in.”
I sat down nervously and forced a smile. “How’s it going?”
“Not good. I got forwarded a complaint from Support.” He paused and clicked his mouse, then scanned his monitor. “It seems four players complained about an incident in the Tomb of Tharos dungeon where a Warlock ‘pervert’ named Ian exposed his penis to them during an incident of fellatio with an NPC.”
Oh SHIT.
Those whiny little narc BITCHES –
“I can explain,” I said as my heart thudded in my chest.
“I’m sincerely hoping you can,” John said acidly.
“First off, it was simulated,” I said, lying through my teeth. “They didn’t see anything.”
“Really.” John turned back to his monitor and scanned the screen. “Because in the complaint, they said they saw – and I quote – ‘actual dong, although it was incredibly small.’”
John sighed heavily, like he couldn’t believe he was being reduced to reading complaints about ‘dong.’
“Well that just proves they’re lying,” I joked. “Have you seen my game avatar’s junk? Baby elephant trunk.”
John glared at me.
Okay, THAT bombed.
“That was a joke. And obviously in poor taste considering the circumstances,” I said quickly. “But seriously, these guys were complete assholes. Four of the most abusive players I’ve ever run across in years of playing OtherWorld.”
That was stretching it quite a bit. They were really just garden-variety assholes, nothing special. I’d just been drunk and angry, which had made them seem worse.
“Abusive in what way?” John asked.
“They…”
Totally ignored me?
Didn’t heal me?
Set me up to die?
It was at that moment that I realized, Huh… maybe I overreacted a tiny bit…
Then I remembered one detail where they went waaaay over the line.
“They went around telling everybody I was into scat porn!” I said self-righteously.
John looked queasy. “…are you?”
“NO!!! It was blatant character assassination so nobody else would go into a dungeon with me!”
“Wait – was this before or after you exposed yourself?”
…damn.
“Allegedly exposed myself,” I said in the best lawyer’s voice I could fake. “And… no. It was after.”
John glared at me. “You provoked them first, so that doesn’t count. Anything else?”
I flailed about for whatever I could remember. “Well, for one, they used ‘retard’ repeatedly as an insult.”
‘Repeatedly’ wasn’t exactly true.
…okay, it wasn’t true at all.
In fact, I think I had used the word more than they did, but I wasn’t about to cop to that.
John narrowed his eyes. I could almost read his thoughts: These guys called you ‘retarded’ and that’s the most abusive thing you’ve encountered in years of playing OtherWorld? How big of an oversensitive snowflake ARE you?
“Plus they were homophobic, sexist, and racist,” I added.
Which was a lie.
Or… maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe they actually were homophobic and sexist and racist.
…and just hadn’t shown any real evidence of it while I was around them. Just general assholery.
To be honest, all my comments about them sucking dick and taking it up the ass were actually way more homophobic than anything they’d said.
But at this point I was throwing out any and all traits that Westek’s HR would clutch their pearls over. I mean, if it was a fireable offense in a major corporation, surely that meant it wasn’t acceptable in the game, right? You can’t give me sensitivity training and then say it doesn’t matter when other people do it.
Of course, there was the eensy, teensy little part about me making it all up, but – hey. Details. I was trying to keep my job here.
And those fuckers hadn’t had any problem lying to people and telling them I was into scat.
Was I proud of lying to my boss? No. Of course not. I was being a total dipshit.
But as far as those other four dipshits were concerned, I would lie and throw them under the bus all day long for one simple reason: they broke the unwritten code of gaming. If you engage in asshole behavior towards another player, don’t go crying to Mommy if the other guy out-assholes you. Take it like a man, or don’t be an asshole in the first place.
Or track the other guy down in an endless vendetta of PvP and ganking.
But don’t go narcing people out, you whiny little bitches.
John crossed his arms. “I’m not hearing anything that justifies exposing yourself OR performing a sex act in front of them, simulated or not.”
“John, you’ve gotta believe me – those guys are liars and assholes. They were abusive. They repeatedly tried to kill me. They – ”
“That’s the GAME, Ian,” John interrupted angrily. “The whole point of PvP is killing other players.”
“Not in a dungeon. The whole point of a dungeon is to work together in a team, not fuck each other over, which they were doing to me repeatedly. And even if killing me was the point, don’t I have a right to fight back?” I said, becoming angry myself. “You don’t expect me to just lay down and die every time some idiot tries to backstab me, do you? I’m supposed to be playing the game like an actual player, and that’s not what an actual player would do.�
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“No, but what I don’t expect is for you to participate in obscene behavior – AND expose a highly classified part of the company’s impending next-gen expansion, I might add.”
“Which part are you most upset about?” I asked coldly. “Exposing my junk, or exposing the upgrade?”
John looked shocked – and then absolutely furious.
Oh shit. Shouldn’t have said that.
“Ian,” he said, his voice becoming chillingly quiet, “you are skating on thin ice here. I was initially cutting you a lot of slack because of what happened your first week on the job, but you have now burned through all your residual goodwill.”
I wanted to say, Oh, you mean that part where you almost turned me into a fucking vegetable in a coma stuck inside your videogame? but I wisely bit my tongue.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I… I got a little carried away.”
“Yeah, it seems you’ve gotten ‘carried away’ a lot lately. The drunken behavior in the game, now this – and why are you grinding a dungeon, anyway?” he asked in irritation.
“I got into debt to a mob boss to fix the Revenge, and now I’m in trouble.” I decided to try getting on John’s good side with a little Teach me, o wise leader flattery. “Any advice?”
He wasn’t falling for it.
“Yeah. Get yourself out of debt.”
Jerk.
I smiled wryly. “Easier said than done. I was thinking of just buying somebody’s extra gold in the real world and – ”
“No,” John interrupted. “You don’t get to buy your way out of every problem. You got yourself into it, you dig yourself out of it like any other player. We pay you to test the game, not cheat your way out.”
ASSHOLE.
“Okay,” I said coldly, and didn’t say anything more.
John looked at me in silence for a few seconds. Seeing that that particular branch of our conversation was now a dead end, he launched into the endgame.
“While you are on the clock, you are a representative of this company. Your behavior reflects on Westek. You are not some civilian who pays a fee every month and can act however he wants. There are standards to this job, and we expect you to uphold them.”
I wanted to lash out with some comment like Yeah, I really like your standards where NPCs will do anal, but I wisely bit my tongue again.