by Mia Archer
I wasn’t really big into computers. As long as I could load the game and go to some of my favorite zones and role-play that was enough for me. She was a power gamer in every sense of the word though, and apparently that necessitated the kind of computer that looked like it could gain sentience at any moment and try to wipe the human race from the face of the earth in a desperate act of self-preservation.
Not that I could complain too much about Megan’s obsession with having the biggest and the best. Her constant pursuit of the biggest and the best meant she was always upgrading my computer with the castoffs from whatever she’d just picked up. She was in grad school just like me, but the big difference was she had rich parents and a trust fund to help her with her costs while I was going to school on scholarships and student loans.
Not that I could complain much about Megan’s trust fund either. The only reason I got to live in this awesome and huge off campus house as cheap as I did was because she'd rather have a friend and roommate to hang out with and play video games with than live all alone in this giant rental her parents bought her.
“What’s wrong?” Megan asked.
“I was having a promising session with some new guy at the inn and then he comes out and asks for it,” I groused.
I didn’t have to tell her what “it” was. The main reason Megan was on a role-playing server rather than some other server was because I happened to play on this one. That and she said the “care bears” on this server wouldn’t know decent raiding if it bit them in their prose spewing butts which made it easier for her to dominate the endgame. I knew those words meant something when she strung them together like that but I had no idea what the meaning was.
She might as well be speaking a foreign language or some impenetrable code whenever she started going on about game mechanics. She seemed happy so I didn’t ever press. Her lectures on endgame content and theory could get pretty boring though. Probably as boring as when I started gushing about the importance of proper characterization and other stuff that made the role-playing experience go from mediocre to awesome, which was a rare enough experience even on a role-playing server.
Anyways, I’m getting away from what’s important. Nobody could play on this kind of server for any appreciable length of time and not know what “it” was. “It” was the thing that made these kinds of servers infamous, even though most people weren’t interested in that sort of thing.
There was role-playing. Building a story with other people. Developing a character. Coming up with pleasing prose and new ways to twist the language into pleasing forms within the confines of the clunky chat and emoting system the developers threw in as an afterthought in an early patch to placate an annoyed, small, but very vocal role-playing community.
And then there was “role-playing” where people got together with an avatar of the opposite sex, or the same sex depending on their preference, and went to a quiet corner of the zone or some private dungeon for some fun that amounted to little more than poorly written two player erotica improv.
Megan shrugged and grinned. “I don’t know what you expected, dressing yourself up in that ridiculous bikini outfit and going to a general role-playing area.”
I rolled my eyes. Maybe I was wearing the bikini armor, but I also had a sensible robe on over it. Or my character had a sensible robe on over it. Oftentimes I found the line between role-playing and reality blurring in my mind when I really got into the game and a session. The point I'm trying to make is that anybody looking at my character in the game would see the robe. They'd have to do a detailed inspect to see the chainmail bikini which was more a function of that being the only kind of decent armor for a character at the top level than any desire on my part to wear it.
Okay, so maybe I liked how my character looked wearing the bikinis. In private. Where no one else was looking. And certainly not for this asshole who was treating me as though it was a given I was going to go out there and rub my character against his until he got off and made a mess on his keyboard. The presumptuous prick.
“Is it too much to expect the people in the general role-playing population to have some integrity?”
Megan rolled her own eyes and laughed. “Amber, sometimes I think you wouldn’t be happy unless Kaitlyn Morgan herself walked through those inn doors and started having a one-on-one writing session with you.”
I giggled. “As if! Besides, Kaitlyn Morgan is probably way too busy actually writing books to ever get around to playing Tales of Elassa!”
“Isn’t she only supposed to be a few years older than us? She could totally be a gamer. Hell, you're the one always griping about how she won't write the next book in that series. Putting off work to play a game? That has an Elassa player written all over it.”
It was possible. Though I didn't exactly gripe about Kaitlyn not writing the next book in the series. It was more that I griped to Megan about people griping about the next book taking a long time. Not that Megan probably noticed the subtle difference since she was usually listening with one ear and focusing on playing the game with most of her brain.
I really didn't know much about Kaitlyn Morgan other than a name and a picture on the dust jackets of the Elassa books. I’d never bothered to look up anything about the woman who wrote the books I loved so much that spawned the media empire that led to the game Megan loved so much. Which, now that I thought about it, was a little odd considering the impact her books had on my life. I was always happy to read the books and play the game, though lately I didn’t even get to read the books since the great Ms. Morgan seemed to be having trouble getting the next one out.
The Tales of Elassa books were the reason I got into creative writing. They were the reason I was getting my MFA in Creative Writing. And of course they were also the reason why I started playing Tales of Elassa, which, ironically enough, could very well also be the reason why I ended up flunking out of my MFA program if I didn’t start spending more time actually writing for class and less time writing new storylines for my character in the game.
We lived in a world with the Internet though. I could just look up Kaitlyn Morgan with a couple of clicks and find out all about her including whether or not she was into video games. It was weird considering the impact her books had on my life that up until now she’d mostly been a name on a page and those dust jacket pictures where she was smiling out at the world inspiring more than a little stab of jealousy in me because she was only a few years older than me and it was so unfair that she was a damn billionaire from her writing while I was still languishing in a creative writing program with no hope of getting published any time soon. Not that I'd submitted anything for publication, but that's not important. I made a mental note to look up more about her, but later. After I’d put this particular digital asshole in his place.
I made a lot of mental notes to do things later since I started playing Tales of Elassa seriously. A part of me worried about that, but that worry wasn’t strong enough to overcome the dopamine portions of my brain that shot out plenty of fun and relaxing chemicals as soon as I put my hands back onto the keyboard and was transported back into that addictive world.
My eyebrows lowered and my face darkened as a storm cloud passed across it. I was amazed that this asshole couldn’t see the danger he’d just ignited. I reached my hand back and smacked him with all the force I could muster, sending him flying across the tavern with a very surprised look on his face as magical energy crackled around him. Everyone else in the room who was busy off in their own little world continued to not pay attention to the altercation. A few heads looked up, casually interested, but most weren’t concerned with our business. Especially when one of us was using magic and the other looked like an undercover enforcer.
He picked himself up from the shattered table he landed on and stalked towards me, a storm cloud on his own face. “What’s the big idea you bitch?”
I stood and stared up at him, held out my hand and allowed a fireball to dance between my fingers. He
looked down and his eyes widened when he saw that. They widened even more when they heard what I had to say.
“If you’re going to god mode then I can do the same thing,” I said. “And if you’re going to treat a role-playing session with somebody as nothing more than an excuse to solicit them for a little fun then I’m going to break character! Now I suggest you get out of here before I report you to a game moderator and see what they think about your chat logs. You are aware that what you’re trying to do is against the rules, right? Very against the rules.”
The sort of role-playing that he was looking for was against the rules, to be sure, but it was also well known amongst the people who did that sort of role-playing that the game moderators never did anything about it unless they got a complaint. Of course once they got a complaint that could quickly lead to an account being temporarily suspended or permanently banned since a record of everything typed in the game was held back. I'm sure this guy was well aware just how much of a threat to his account that was. Even if he was pretty low level I knew there was a good chance he also kept his regular higher level character on the same account and he was putting all of that at risk by cruising an inn just outside the main city gates for a little two-person erotica.
He paused and looked at me and then to the rest of the room. More than a few people had turned towards us. I’m sure most of the people who were sitting in this room were sitting in here looking for the very same thing this guy was. Most of them were probably just as nervous as he was at the prospect of a game moderator being pulled into a fight. I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted noise. This is what I got for coming to a general role-playing area.
The asshole faded away, no doubt logging out of the game rather than sticking around to risk more humiliation. Of course he was logging out of the game under the false assumption that if he wasn’t logged in then the moderators wouldn’t be able to do something about him. They could ban him just as easily if he was in game as if he was out. Not that I actually had any intention to report him. I was actually more mad at myself for losing control like that and breaking character in public chat. That was violating one of the biggest rules of being involved in the role-playing community.
I sat down at the bar and buried my head in my hands, despairing of ever finding somebody who was worth role-playing with in a public area like this. I needed to just logout for the night or send a private message to somebody on my list who was passably decent at writing who'd be a sure thing instead of hoping to find a nugget of gold amongst all the crap role-players to be found in the general population.
Only all the people I usually role-played storylines with were either offline or they were the kind of people who churned out the same repetitive crap every time. The last thing I wanted was to spend another night wasting time with someone like Cara who was always the mysterious elf princess who kept her identity hidden and then swears you to secrecy when she reveals who she truly is, or Mike who was always a stoic but goodhearted adventurer whose morals always overcame his desire for money by the end of whatever story we were working on.
Boring. Typical. Predictable. Not what I was looking for.
No, the game was starting to get stale. It was starting to get boring. I sighed at my keyboard and my character sighed in the game. It was starting to feel like there were no new worlds to conquer, no new scenarios to explore.
The door to the inn banged open. I looked over, but with nowhere near the hope I’d felt earlier when the asshole I'd just chased off walked in.
2: A More Mysterious Stranger
The human barbarian who walked through the door looked much the same as any other human barbarian in these parts. She wore a cloak that was tattered and torn in places, though she’d obviously taken care to repair it in other places. Perhaps she was just in from a long trip. Underneath the cloak she wore the once fine but now faded and threadbare clothes of a woman who had fallen on hard times.
As I looked her over I figured that no doubt she was a member of one noble family or another. They seemed to spring up constantly and fall just as quickly as they rose. Both because noble houses were a popular role-playing target for newbies who didn’t know what they were doing yet and because in the game lore there was the whole giant cataclysm that ripped the world asunder and sent humans scattering, nobles included.
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. She was pretty enough, to be sure, with striking green eyes that seemed to draw my attention long after everyone else in the room had gone back to whatever they were doing before she walked in. Green eyes that would've been striking if I was into that sort of thing on a girl, which I totally wasn't even though I found myself losing myself in that face once more for some reason and had to shake myself out of my strange mental funk. It didn't help that she was making her way directly towards me. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I was the only elf in the room and that tended to draw attention.
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 Elven 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. She had a winning smile and I had to admit she was stunning under that bedraggled first impression. If you were interested in humans, which I most certainly was not. Well, which my character most certainly was not. Or if you were into women, which I 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.
She leaned an elbow against the bar and immediately lost her 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 novel approach to an opening move.
She stood and almost lost her footing again. It appeared that clumsiness was a trait with this one. I glanced to the sword by her side and wondered how she was able to use the thing without accidentally cutting her head off. Then again that was a sentence that could apply to humans and just about any piece of technology more advanced than fire. Oftentimes it could apply to the fire as well.
She finally managed to regain her footing and didn’t even bother sketching a bow. She just plopped her lithe and inviting frame down on a bar stool and took a deep breath. I took a deep breath too. Lithe and inviting frame? Where the hell had that thought come from?
“Well that definitely wasn’t a good way to make a first impression,” she muttered.
In the game, in character, she 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?” Megan 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.”
Megan 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 Megan. 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 world's established lore.
That made me see red.
So this mysterious person standing before me with her striking green eyes that had that strange ability to hypnotize me was refreshing. Her character had a vulnerability. Her character wasn’t another stoic hero just returned from slaying thousands of her enemies. No, she was just a little clumsy. And that that was enough of a hook that I was intrigued. It was enough to make me want to know more about her. It was enough that she was already more promising than the first asshole I ran into and we hadn’t even started properly talking.
She looked at me again and my breath caught. This human really did have the most piercing green eyes. Piercing green 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 she 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.